The Sword of the Templars (17 page)

Peggy stepped forward, looked into the front seat at the mess, and then got into the back. Keeping the big automatic trained on Kellerman, Holliday got behind the wheel and switched on the ignition.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Peggy weakly. “Please get me out of here.”

Holliday spun the wheel, making a U-turn and heading them back toward Friedrichshafen. He stepped down on the gas. In the rearview mirror the tall figure of Axel Kellerman receded and then was swallowed up by the darkness.

“We lost the pictures,” said Holliday.

“No, we didn’t,” said Peggy from the backseat. She poked her hand into the back pocket of her jeans. She pulled out a slim piece of plastic a little bigger than a piece of Juicy Fruit gum and held it up for Holliday to see. The word “Sony” was imprinted on the side.

“What’s that?” Holliday asked.

“A flash memory stick,” she answered. “I downloaded the pictures while we were still in Kellerman’s Batcave. We’ve got them all. Like I said, Doc, welcome to the digital age.”

“How are you doing?” Holliday asked. It was shortly after the lunch-hour rush, and they were sitting in an outdoor café just off the Piazza del Gesů Nuovo in the coastal city of Naples, Italy. Peggy was drinking from a green bottle of ice-cold Nastro Azzuro, and Holliday was on his second cappuccino. The crusty remains of an excellent margherita pizza lay between them on a serving platter. It was hot, bright sunlight shining down out of a brilliant blue sky. Traffic roared loudly around the square. Two days had passed since their gruesome adventure in Friedrichshafen.

“How am I?” Peggy said. “I’m still trying to figure out how we got from there to here.”

“By train.” Holliday smiled.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said.

“I know,” he said quietly. He glanced out across the piazza. In the center of the slightly tilted cobble-stone square loomed the soaring, ornate, rococo Guglia dell’Immacolata obelisk, erected by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century to commemorate the Immaculate Conception and to consecrate their new basilica, after which the piazza was named.

The piazza was the historic center of the old city by the sea, but its importance had faded long ago, and now, instead of praying priests and monks from holy orders, the streets were lined with bars and clubs and by-the-slice pizza shops, the sidewalks thronged with tourists, the roadway jammed with trucks and cars and rushing scooters, their sewing machine engines whining like enraged mosquitoes as they threaded their way dangerously in and out of the rushing traffic that circled endlessly around the enormous spire. It was a long way from the lonely roadside in the Bavarian Alps.

After leaving Kellerman in the darkness, they’d driven back toward the Schloss, retrieving their rental from where they’d parked it on the far side of the bluff that held the castle ruins. There they abandoned the Mercedes with Drabeck’s body in the trunk.

Holliday drove them into Friedrichshafen, just managing to catch the 10:40 ferry, the last one of the day. They reached the Swiss side of the lake forty-five minutes later and arrived in Zurich two hours after that. Peggy found a twenty-four hour Internet café where they accessed the memory stick and printed out the diary photographs in ninety-four double-page entries.

They checked the sheets one by one, looking for a familiar word or name. They found what they were looking for in the entry for Monday, September 27, 1943: the word “Naples” and a name—Amedeo Maiuri, the Italian archaeologist who’d originally discovered the sword during his excavations in Pompeii, a few miles south of the city in the shadow of Vesuvius, the towering volcano that loomed over the Neapolitan landscape.

It was enough for Holliday. They boarded the morning high-speed train to Milan, and then took the slower overnight train to Florence, once the home of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and, much later, Salvatore Fer ragamo, shoemaker to the stars. In Florence they took the requisite pages from Lutz Kellerman’s wartime diary to the people at the local Berlitz office and had them translated. Translations done, they continued on to Naples.

Peggy nursed her beer and stared blankly out at the whirling traffic and the chattering crowds on the sidewalks. Her time in Friedrichshafen had taken its toll. She looked worn, tired, and depressed. Holliday wasn’t surprised; he wasn’t faring much better. Since the beginning of their pell-mell escapade he’d seen five men die and had been directly responsible for the violent deaths of three of them. Whether they deserved it or not was irrelevant; he’d been the one who’d snuffed out their lives. Their blood was on his hands, and the responsibility for that weighed heavily on him.

“Do you want to quit?” Holliday said.

Peggy turned to him, startled. “What?”

“Do you want to quit?” he repeated. “We can stop right now, you know. Get on a plane and be back home in time for breakfast tomorrow.”

She frowned and took a little sip of beer. She put the bottle down, picking at the paper label with her thumbnail.

“I’m not like you,” said Peggy finally. “I’m not a soldier. I see bad things in a viewfinder, not for real.”

“Believe me, kiddo, I don’t feel any different than you do,” responded Holliday.

“I want the bad stuff to be over,” she said. “Is it?”

Holliday shrugged.

“There’s an old saying that dates back to the Bourbon kings—‘
Vedi Napoli e poi muori
.’ ‘See Naples and die.’ ” He paused and shrugged again. “Bad stuff begets bad stuff, battles breed more battles, and one war leads to the next. There’s no guarantee that it’s all going to be clear sailing from here on out.”

“What about Kellerman?”

“What about him?” Holliday replied.

“Is he going to quit now?”

“He knows what’s in his father’s diary. He’s connected. It wouldn’t be hard for him to track us down.” Holliday shook his head. “No, he won’t quit.”

“Then neither should we.”

They drove the bright red Fiat 500 rental inland from the Bay of Naples, skirting the brooding base of a sleeping Mount Vesuvius then headed into the rolling countryside beyond. All around them were neat vineyards and stands of walnut trees, hazelnut trees, apricots, and centuries-old groves of olives. The entire area was supposedly controlled by the Camorra, a homegrown Neapolitan version of the Mafia, but there was no sign of it here.

It was hard to imagine such a pastoral and beautiful landscape as a war zone, but on the ninth of September, 1943, the Allies landed on the beaches of Salerno, fifty miles south, and by the middle of the month they were pressing inland and up the coast to Naples while the German Army under Albert Kesselring slowly withdrew to the north.

According to his diary, on September 28 Lutz Kellerman, leading a small company of crack soldiers from the 1st SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, arrived in the town of Nola, approximately thirty kilometers northeast of Naples. They were equipped with a number of half-track armored personnel carriers mounted with heavy machine guns, some
Kettenrad
tracked motorcycles, half a dozen Panzer IV tanks, and a Kübelwagen command car for Kellerman. Their official mission was to harass the enemy wherever possible, gather intelligence and forage for supplies, sending out three man “
brandschatzen
” pillage and burn patrols into the countryside. Kellerman, however, had his own agenda.

Having met with Amedeo Maiuri at a private rendezvous at the archaeologist’s villa in the suburbs of Naples two days before, Kellerman left the bulk of his men to secure and pacify the town while he and a handpicked platoon of men went to the place Maiuri had discussed with him at their meeting.

The location in question was a large, seventeenth-century Palladian palazzo on a hilltop just outside the tiny village of San Paolo Bel Sito a mile or so to the south. The Villa Montesano, as it was called, had a long and illustrious heritage going back to the Cistercian Order of the Knights of Calatrava, who were closely allied with their Cistercian brothers, the Templars.

The villa, built more like an abbey than a private home, had been passed down through a number of families over the centuries and was now owned by Signora Luisa Santamaria Nicolini, widow of Henry Contieri, whose uncle Nicola had been Archbishop of Gaeta. The ties with the Church and the Templars were clear, but more importantly, the entire Naples Archives were now being stored for safekeeping in the villa; 866 cases in all, containing more than thirty thousand precious volumes and fifty thousand parchment documents dating back to the twelfth century and the time of the Crusades.

According to Amedeo Maiuri, among those documents were the Angevin Templar Archive and a volume once possessed by the famous Templar navigator Roger de Flor, the near-mythical seaman knight who was said to have somehow spirited the Templar treasure out of the Holy Land and hidden it for safekeeping.

Maiuri had once seen the book and read the Latin inscription on its cover that said the words within the volume could only be understood by the man who owned the True Sword of Pelerin. The book was a copy of
De laudibus novae militiae
, the letter written by Bernard of Clairvaux to Hugues de Payens, first Grand Master of the Templars and Prior of Jerusalem.

Once again, according to the diary, Lutz Kellerman had gone to the villa, met with Signora Nicolini, the owner, and also with the resident director of the displaced Archives, a man named Antonio Capograssi. On being questioned by Kellerman, even under the threat of burning the villa and the contents of the Archives, neither the woman nor Capograssi admitted anything.

Capograssi insisted that no such book was in the Archives, and to prove it he showed the entire inventory to Kellerman. There was no mention of Roger de Flor or any copy of
De laudibus novae militiae
. Not satisfied, Kellerman began to pry open crates, helped by his men, including a young Rudy Drabeck.

After several hours they had found absolutely nothing. In the diary Kellerman mentioned that while they tore open crates they could hear the sounds of artillery in the distance. Allied artillery, coming up and inland from Salerno, on the way to Rome and eventually, as the SS general confided to his diary, to certain victory. Italy had fallen, the Reich would soon follow; it was only a matter of time. Finally, frustrated with the sound of artillery growing with every passing hour, he gave the order to his men: “
Alles einaschern
”—“Burn it all.”

Which is exactly what they proceeded to do. The members of his platoon piled paper, straw, and gunpowder in the four corners of each room, and then set it alight. Within minutes the Archives was enveloped in flames. In less than an hour the entire villa was an inferno. By the following morning the Villa Montesano was a smoking ruin, never to be occupied again, and Lutz Kellerman was gone.

Following the map directions they’d been given by the rental company in Naples, Holliday drove the little red car to the outskirts of the town of Nola, then turned onto the via Castel Cicala and headed into the open countryside again. They went around a high, circular hill crowned with the ruins of an ancient castle and into a small wooded and steep-sided valley. They turned onto an even narrower road then rose up out of the valley on the winding strada Comunale Nola-Visciano, then slowed.

“It should be somewhere on the left,” said Holliday, peering through the windshield. “Two big pillars on either side of a long driveway.”

“If Lutz Kellerman burned the Archives, why are we bothering with this place anyway?” Peggy asked.

“Because it’s the only thing we have to go on right now,” said Holliday. “Quit being a wet blanket.”

“I’m trying to be a realist, Doc.” She punched him affectionately on the shoulder. “Someone’s got to hold my romantically inclined uncle in check.”

Holliday caught something on the edge of his peripheral vision and slowed the car even more.

“There,” he said, spotting what he’d been looking for: two crumbling, turret-like pillars guarding the entrance to an overgrown, rutted driveway, both sides of the road guarded by groves of ancient, twisted olive trees. He turned the car, and they bounced down the driveway, the tall weeds in the center of the ruts brushing against the bottom of the chassis. Loose stones clattered against the side panels. A hundred yards farther on, they reached the weed-clotted remains of what had once been the Villa Montesano.

They parked the Fiat and wandered through the scattered stones of the once-proud estate. Even in ruins it was impressive. The palazzo had been oriented to the east, looking down the wooded hillside. From the crest of the hill, the view swept out over the town a few miles away and farther to the city and the Bay of Naples, a sublime azure dream melding with the bright blue sky in the distance.

Once there had been a lavish terraced garden below a series of columned balconies where now there were only weeds, broken stone, and heavy undergrowth. The floors of the palazzo, once a rich display of mosaic, lay shattered and stained by over sixty years of exposure to the elements. Room after room lay roofless and open to the sun and rain, their frescoed walls faded and blotted with mold.

Roof beams rotted on the ground like scattered bones. Wrens made nests in the lintels of empty windows. A gold and brown, delicately checkered Marsh Fritillary butterfly drank nectar from the purple trumpets of a Dragonmouth nettle in the shelter of a doorway. Somewhere a cicada sang its droning, high-pitched song. There was no wind at all; the air was perfectly still. A frozen country landscape painted by Canaletto.

Behind the ruins on the plateau of the hill there were the remains of several outbuildings, the abandoned ornamental gardens, long forgotten, overgrown, and choked with weeds. The only building that looked intact and at all maintained was a small gardener’s potting shed at the edge of the neglected flowerbeds. At the far side of the estate there was a screening stand of walnut trees. Beyond that, in the middle distance, were more verdant hills, and then the first rugged mountains of the Apennines.

Holliday stood in the middle of what once had been the oratory, or chapel, of the villa. The walls were no more than a few stones high, and part of the charred floor had sagged and tipped into the cellar below.