The Sword of the Templars (5 page)

“What the hell is
that
?” Peggy asked, horrified.

“It’s the
Standarte des Führers und Obersten Befehlshabers der Wehrmacht
,” said Holliday, wrapping his tongue around the German. “Adolf Hitler’s personal standard. His battle flag.” He paused. “Let’s see what ‘treasure’ is hidden underneath it.” Peggy tentatively unwrapped the silk covering.

“Amazing,” she whispered.

“A sword,” said Holliday, looking at the object nestled in the secret compartment. “A crusader’s sword.”

5

The sword was three feet long with a simple cross guard and a flat, circular pommel. The hilt looked as though it had been covered in some sort of ancient varnished leather, now almost completely rotted away by time to show the wire wrapping underneath. The blade was roughly thirty inches long, double-edged with a shallow fuller, the so-called blood channel running down the center and gently ridged from the center.

“Crusader’s sword?” Peggy said. “It doesn’t look like much to me.”

“It was called an arming sword, or a short sword,” said Holliday. “It was the equivalent of a Wild West six-shooter—a working weapon for everyday use. Cops carry pistols, knights carried these. It must be the one Broadbent mentioned.”

“I thought swords were fancier.”

Holliday bent down and picked up the weapon, World War II standard and all. There was a small label on the flag:
“Kuhn & Hupnau—München.”
He turned and brought the sword back to Uncle Henry’s desk, laying it carefully down with both hands. It looked almost obscenely beautiful in its ghastly silk nest. A gleaming device meant only for killing. A thousand years old and as deadly now as it had ever been.

“It’s a rich man’s sword, fancy or not,” he said, examining it closely under the light.

“How can you tell?” Peggy asked.

“It’s Damascus steel,” he answered.

“What’s that?”

“See the watery texture in the blade?” Holliday said, pointing out the rippling patterns that ran through the metal, like oiled moiré silk. “Damascus steel was made with a special kind of iron imported from India and later from Persia. Only a few of the greatest swordsmiths knew how to use it. They were almost a secret society. During the forging the metal was folded over again and again, sometimes fifty or a hundred times like a Japanese katana. The end result was a blade so strong and sharp it could cut through any kind of armor or chainmail. Use it the right way and you could literally cut a man in half if you knew what you were doing. They say it was strong enough to cut through solid rock.”

“The Sword in the Stone?”

“That’s probably the origin of the story.”

“Damascus is the capital of Syria. How would a crusader get hold of a sword made by the other guys?”

Holliday laughed. “Don’t kid yourself. There was as much trading with the enemy back then as there is today. War has always been about money. Standard Oil of New Jersey was refueling Nazi submarines in the Atlantic right up until Pearl Harbor.” He shook his head. “The real question is how Uncle Henry got the sword and why he was keeping it a secret.”

“Maybe we should ask someone.”

“Who?” Holliday asked. “It’s not as though he had a lot of friends. Ones that are still alive anyway.”

“How about the university?” Peggy suggested. “Maybe somebody there.”

“He was a professor emeritus. He didn’t lecture anymore. I think he was thesis advisor to a few grad students, but that’s about it.”

“Still . . .” Peggy said.

Holliday glanced at his watch. It was five o’clock. Probably too late for anyone at the school. He stared at the sword. He knew well enough that an artifact of such good quality and condition would normally have pride of place in the collection of any museum. It was a collector’s dream. In the hands of an expert there was even a good chance that the actual swordsmith could be identified; most smiths had a private “chop” or hallmark that they stamped somewhere on their work. Why had Henry decided to keep it hidden from prying eyes? Curiosity got the better of him.

“We can give it a shot.” Leaving the sword where it was, they left the house, Holliday carefully locking the front door behind them.

“Your ride or mine?” Peggy asked. She had a Hertz rental from Niagara Falls while Holliday was using a Crown Victoria tan sedan from the West Point Motor Pool. It had the suspension of a tank, no radio, and no cup holders.

“Yours,” said Holliday.

The SUNY main campus was less than a mile north of the Hart Street house. The grounds were pleasant, treed, and mostly modern, a lot of the buildings bearing the unmistakable mark of the architect I. M. Pei, the Chinese-American designer who seemed to favor flat, featureless cubes and rectangles that often looked like three-dimensional studies in geometry rather than buildings. Someone had once called it “fortress architecture.” To Holliday it seemed more like simple random shapes made from a child’s wooden blocks.

The History Department was located in Thompson Hall, a squat firebrick rectangle with a jutting wing at each end. Holliday and Peggy began navigating a series of windowless, dimly lit corridors.

“I remember studying places like this in Sociology,” muttered Peggy as they trailed down yet another bleak hallway. “They were meant to be riot proof. Narrow stairwells, bad lighting, slow elevators.” She snorted. “Who riots in universities these days? They’re all business students now. No more sex, no more drugs, and no more rock and roll. Just beer and football.”

“Don’t kid yourself.” Holliday grinned. “There’s still a lot of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, even at West Point.”

“Be still my heart,” gasped Peggy in mock horror. “You mean the Army of One smokes pot?”

“That’s the least of it,” replied Holliday. “Think of all the places the Army sends its soldiers: Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan; drug paradises, each and every one.”

“You’re too cynical.”

“Heroin use in America increased by almost two hundred percent during Vietnam,” said Holliday. “Of course I’m cynical.”

They found the Medieval Studies Department on the third floor. The offices stood around a central reception area guarded by a secretary. The nameplate on the secretary’s desk identified her as Ms. Caroline Branch. The name was apt; she was thin as a twig. She appeared to be in her late fifties or early sixties. Once upon a time she’d probably been quite beautiful, even model pretty, but the years had taken their toll. The high cheekbones now stood out like ax blades, her neck was thinning, the wrinkling hidden behind a col orful scarf, the small breasts impossibly symmetrical in a padded bra. Her hairstyle was a flipped-under look from the seventies, streaks of gray overtaking what once might have been chestnut but which was now merely brown.

Her hands had long, elegant fingers, unadorned, and a few gnarled raised veins, and a few more age spots. There were no bangles on her wrists. She looked as though she’d been a secretary forever. Holliday introduced himself and Peggy. Ms. Branch seemed unimpressed; there wasn’t even a token expression of sympathy at Uncle Henry’s passing. Holliday could smell the faint, sour scent of tobacco in the woman’s hair and some kind of sweet alcohol on her breath. A secret smoker and a sherry drunk, perhaps.

“We were wondering if we could get into Professor Granger’s office,” said Holliday.

“We’d like to get some of his personal things,” added Peggy.

“It’s very late,” the secretary complained. She gave an obvious glance at the large-faced men’s-style watch on her right wrist. “I was just about to leave.”

“We won’t be very long,” said Holliday.

“We could lock up if you wanted us to,” offered Peggy.

Ms. Branch looked insulted.

“I couldn’t allow that, I’m afraid,” she said.

“How long were you the professor’s secretary?” Holliday said.

“Administrative assistant,” she corrected curtly.

“Administrative assistant,” repeated Holliday.

“I’ve been with the university for forty-three years. I came here directly from the Albany Academy,” said Ms. Branch primly.

Forty-three years. Late sixties, early seventies, which fit the hairstyle. The Albany Academy was almost as old as West Point, a place to keep the daughters of New York State’s rich and powerful until it was safe to let them out on their own. She’d turned to stone here, petrified like an insect in amber. Odd that the woman had come to work at SUNY rather than take classes; there was more to Ms. Branch than met the eye.

“You were with Grandpa Henry all that time?” Peggy asked.

“I wasn’t
with
your grandfather, Miss Blackstock. I worked for him.” There wasn’t the slightest deference in her voice; after forty-three years she probably had more dirt on more people than anyone else in the university. She didn’t need job security—she had gossip instead. Holliday smiled to himself. Good intelligence could take you anywhere.

“Could we get into the office?” Holliday pressed gently. Ms. Branch gave him a long, steady look.

“If you must,” she said, relenting. She opened the center drawer in her desk, took out a ring of keys, and stood up. Holliday and Peggy followed her to a closed office door on the far side of the room. A small plastic sign read simply: DR. HENRY GRANGER. Ms. Branch unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped aside.

“We’ll be quick,” promised Peggy.

“Please,” said Ms. Branch. Did she have cats to feed? Was it laundry day? Holliday offered her a diplomatic smile as he passed.

They stepped into the office. It was large and airy, one wall lined with pale oak bookcases, another with framed photographs, and a third with a cluttered bulletin board. Surprisingly the fourth wall had a window.

The office looked out across the SUNY ring road to Maytum Hall, one of the I. M. Pei buildings, the geometry in this case being a concrete semicircle with narrow glass slits at regular intervals. To Holliday it looked like an outsized version of one of the concrete bunkers Rommel had erected on the Normandy beachhead.

The ground between Thompson Hall and the concrete semicircle consisted of neatly manicured lawn, the occasional curving path, and trees planted here and there in case the symmetry became too overpowering.

Peggy checked out the trophy wall of pictures, and Holliday sat down behind the modern desk. It even had a computer terminal. He tried to boot it up, but it was password protected. He opened the center drawer and found an address book, which he began to flip through.

“Weird picture,” murmured Peggy, leaning into the wall for a closer look.

“Weird how?” Holliday asked, still flipping through the old address book.

“It’s a photograph of three guys, with Grandpa Henry at one end in civilian clothes and the other two guys in uniform. Army, I think. British. From the background I’d say it was taken somewhere in North Africa. Cairo maybe. Could be Alexandria.”

“So? What’s weird about that? Henry was a medieval scholar. He’s traveled all over the world.”

“The inscription says: ‘Derek Carr-Harris, Leonard Guise, Donald Mitchie, April 1941.’ Then the word ‘Postmaster’ with a capital P.”

Holliday flipped through the address book. There was a U.K. listing for a D. Carr-Harris but nothing for Guise or Mitchie.

“Interesting. Postmaster sounds like it might have been a code name. But we weren’t at war in April ’41. What’s Henry doing hanging around in Egypt with a couple of Brits in uniform eight months before Pearl Harbor? He started off in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS wasn’t even organized until 1942—June or July.”

“ ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ as Alice said down the rabbit hole,” Peggy murmured, looking at the next picture on the wall. “Here’s another one with Carr-Harris and Grandpa Henry in it. Neither one of them is in uniform.”

“What is it?” Holliday asked, continuing to rummage through the drawer. He found Uncle Henry’s passport and checked the dates. It was still valid. There were four stamps on the last page: one going into Canada at Niagara Falls, an entry stamp from Heathrow Airport in London two days later, and another entry stamp into Frankfurt dated a week after that. The last stamp showed his reentry into the U.S. three weeks following his entry into Germany. All the stamps were from three months ago.

“They’re standing in this huge room with a gigantic open window you could fly an airplane through. There are mountains in the background,” said Peggy, describing the photograph.

“Is there an inscription?”

“Yes. It says ‘Berghof 1945.’ ”

“You’re kidding me!” Holliday stood and went to the wall of photographs. He gazed over Peggy’s shoulder and looked at the picture. Uncle Henry and Carr-Harris were little more than silhouettes, insignificant against the grotesquely out-of-scale room they were standing in. It really was enormous. The snowy peaks of the Salzburg Alps were clearly etched in the distance.

“Remind me where Berghof is again?” Peggy asked.

“Not where, what,” explained Holliday. “The Berghof was Adolf Hitler’s name for the summer house in Bavaria that Broadbent mentioned. The Führer was trying to be a man of the people. It means ‘Mountain Farm.’ ”

“Which explains the flag the sword was wrapped up in,” said Peggy. “But what was Grandpa doing there with that Englishman? What was he doing there at all?” She paused. “I thought the lawyer said his father was with Grandpa when he found the sword.”

Holliday nodded. “So did I.”

“So where is he?”

“A lot of questions about Henry today and not enough answers.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Ask more questions,” said Holliday.

Holliday stepped out of the office. Ms. Branch, the secretary, was sitting at her desk. A large purse stood waiting beside her computer screen, now shrouded with a plastic cover. She was reading a pale green hardcover book. It looked very old; Holliday couldn’t see the title. Ms. Branch looked up, closing the volume, her index finger inserted to keep her place.

Holliday saw the cover. There was a picture of a beautiful young woman with long auburn hair inset into the fabric. The title was stamped beneath it in faded gold:
Anne of Green Gables
by L. M. Montgomery. Surprise, surprise; it seemed there was still a romantic little girl hidden inside the secretary’s arid soul. The book looked as though it might have come straight off Uncle Henry’s shelf of children’s books.