The Templar Throne

10

The State Archives of Venice are located in an old convent appended to the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari at the end of the Rio di San Paulo Canal, itself a right-angled intersection of the Rio di Maddonetta, which runs off the Grand Canal. The archives, a thousand years and ninety miles of shelving's worth, have been there for the better part of two hundred years, having been consolidated within the abandoned convent shortly after Napoleon's sudden departure in 1814. The convent was formed from two very large cloisters around a central courtyard, which had been subdivided into dozens of individual rooms and small research "studies."

Holliday and Sister Meg took a vaporetto water taxi from a small dock on the Grand Canal almost directly in front of the hotel. The vaporetti in the movies are always portrayed as classic wooden speedboats from the twenties and thirties, but the reality is a little different. Most of the water taxis were simple open dinghies or lifeboats equipped with fifty- or seventy-five-horsepower outboard engines clamped to the transom. There were larger "water buses" that followed specific routes around the city, but none of them went even close to the archives.

They sat in the center of the boat while their driver, wearing a Guns N' Roses T-shirt and smoking a reeking pipe, cruised southwest down the Grand Canal to the Palazzo Maddonetta, where they swung right onto the much narrower Maddonetta Canal. They turned west again onto the sludgy and very narrow brown water of the Rio di San Paulo, toward the Campanile, or tower, of the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, known by the locals simply as Frari. They arrived at the set of wide stone steps that served as a dock, the huge brick basilica only fifty feet or so away.

Holliday gave the boatman a ten-euro note.

"Aspettare mi?" said the boatman.

"No, grazie," said Holliday, shaking his head. The vaporetto driver nodded, pulled a paperback out of his pocket and settled back in his seat, reading and puffing on his pipe. The title of the book was La Giovane Holden by J. D. Salinger. It took Holliday a second but then he got it; the book was the Italian edition of The Catcher in the Rye. Trust the Italians to change the title. They probably called Moby-Dick Una Balena Bianca to make it sound like one of their own.

They crossed the campo and turned down a narrow side street on the right, then walked a hundred feet or so to the plain entranceway of a large, heavily stained and slightly down-at-the-heels-looking Romanesque four-story building. The inner tympanum of the simple pediment capping the roofline was inscribed with the words "Archivo Di Stato," deeply carved in classic Roman letters three feet high.

"This must be the place," said Holliday.

They opened the simple wooden door and stepped inside. There was a small glass-enclosed foyer with a uniformed and armed guard on the other side. Holliday noticed that he had a heavy-looking Beretta 93R automatic pistol poking out of the holster on his highly polished Sam Browne belt. It was the same weapon carried by Italian antiterrorist forces and could empty its twenty-round magazine in under a second; essentially it was a pistol-sized machine gun. The guard looked as though he was about twenty- five years old and extremely fit. He also had a permanent look of suspicion on his face. Apparently the Venetians valued their history.

They waited for a few seconds and then the glass door swung open. They stepped out and the guard beckoned them forward through an archway that Holliday presumed was a metal detector. They stepped through the arch.

"Do you speak English?" Sister Meg asked.

"Some, yes." The guard nodded, but he turned and pointed to a poster-sized sign on the wall behind him, written in English: