The Last Templar

Chapter 49

Tess had lost track of time, but, from the accumulation of coffee cups on her desk and the amount of caffeine rushing through her veins, she knew it must have been many hours since she had logged onto her computer at the Manoukian Institute.

The office was empty. Outside, the pigeons and sparrows were long gone, and the garden was bathed in darkness. Another long, frustrating night beckoned.

The last couple of days were a blur. She had stayed at Columbia University's Butler Library until she'd been virtually kicked out of there when they had closed at eleven. She'd made it home sometime shortly after midnight with a stack of books in tow and had worked her way through them, finally succumbing to sleep as the sun was making its appearance outside her bedroom window, only to be cruelly jolted back to consciousness ninety minutes later by her alarm clock/radio.

Now, bleary-eyed and at her desk, she was still trawling through a small mountain of books, some she'd brought in with her, others from the Institute's vast collection. Occasionally, something would jump out at her and she would excitedly fire off Internet searches, blessing Google for the

hours it was saving her and cursing the search engine whenever it failed to deliver the goods.

So far, the cursing was winning hands down.

She turned away from her desk, glancing out her window, rubbing her tired eyes. The shadows in the garden blended confusingly into each other. She found she couldn't focus properly; her eyes were rebelling. She didn't mind. She could use the break. She couldn't remember the last time she'd read as much in such a short period. And one word was seared into her retinas, even though she had yet to find any reference to it.

Fonsalis.

Staring out into the night, her eyes were drawn to the big willow tree looming over the garden. It sat there, its wispy boughs swaying in the slight evening breeze, silhouetted against hints of streetlights that bounced off the towering brick party wall behind it.

She looked at the empty bench underneath the tree. It looked so out of place, here in the heart of the city, so quiet and idyllic. She wanted to step outside, curl up onto it, and sleep for days.

And that's when an image flashed across her mind.

A confusing one.

She thought of the brass plaque mounted on a small post by the base of the willow tree. A plaque she had read a hundred times.

The tree had been imported with great fanfare over fifty years ago by the Institute's Armenian benefactor. He'd had it shipped over from his ancestral village in memory of his father who, along with two hundred other Armenian intellectuals and community leaders, had been murdered in the first days of the genocide of 1915. The Turkish Interior Minister had, at the time, bragged that he would give the Armenian people "such a staggering blow that they will not be able to get on their feet for fifty years." His words had proved to be tragically prophetic; the nation of Armenia suffered one tragedy after another, a dark era from which it is only just starting to emerge.

The tree had been, appropriately, chosen for its tearful symbolism. Weeping willows were commonly found in burial grounds stretching from Europe to China. The association dated back to the Old Testament, in which the tree's boughs were said to have drooped from the weight of harps hung there by the exiled people of Israel. Arabian storytellers, much later, described how two angels had appeared before David, after

he had married Bathsheba, and convinced him of his sin.

Racked with grief, David was said to have thrown himself to the ground and lain there, weeping bitter tears of penitence for forty days and forty nights, during which time he was deemed to have wept "as many tears as the whole human race would shed on account of their sins, from then on until the Day of Judgment." The two streams of tears were said to have flowed out into the garden, where, with time, two trees then sprang up: the frankincense tree, constantly distilling tears of sorrow, and the weeping willow, its boughs drooping with grief.

Tess's mind raced to the writing on the brass plaque. She could visualize the inscription on it. She remembered that it described the tree as belonging to the broader genus known as Vitisalix.

She also remembered that the plaque further mentioned the more specific taxonomic classification for the weeping willow.

Salix Babylonica.

It was staring her in the face.