Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

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:

"No problem," Holliday said and smiled, wondering what precautions they'd taken against people bringing in the hundred and one brands of ceramic fountain pen knives, key ring knives, credit card knives and assorted plastic box cutters being manufactured and which were impervious to magnetometers and even X-rays. Presumably the sign and its warning were to prevent the theft of valuable documents from the archives, but without any trouble Holliday could think of a dozen ways to sneak things out of the building.

Another sign on the wall read Informazioni with an arrow pointing down a short hallway. They followed the sign to a pleasant-looking woman dressed in a blazer and skirt combination that made her look like an airline stewardess. She was sitting behind a desk with a placard like the sign on the wall, Informazioni, this time repeated in several languages, including a single large question mark.

The stewardess flashed a smile as though she was terribly happy to see them.

"May I help you?"

The English was perfect, with a flat mid- Atlantic accent, probably learned in a Swiss finishing school or a Berlitz course.

"We're looking for information about the Zeno family," said Holliday, trying to match the young woman's smile. "They were ship brokers in Venice in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, perhaps even later."

The young woman consulted a computer monitor on her right and tapped at the keyboard for a few seconds.

"Third floor reference," she said. "You'll find several workstations in the front room at the top of the stairs. When a workstation becomes available you may begin your search. Identify the language you would like to use then type 'Nautical, Business, Genealogy' into the search box. It will ask for the family name. The resulting fond number will give you the location of the fond in question and tell you if the documents are available either as original works, facsimiles or have been transferred to microfiche. One of our researchers will be happy to bring the material to you at your workstation. There is a nominal fee for this service. We accept most major credit cards or cash. We do not accept personal checks."

"How nominal is the fee?" Sister Meg asked.

"Twenty-five dollars American, or nineteen euro for each request."

"How many languages can you do your little speech in?" Holliday asked.

"Nine," said the young woman, clearly pleased to have been asked. "English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian and Japanese. Presently I am working on Mandarin. I have a facility."

"You certainly do," said Holliday. "Where do we go to find the way to the third floor?"

"There is a stairway at the end of the hall. There are no elevators, I'm afraid."

The hallway was old, plaster over stone, the wide pine floors worn and scarred by time. Holliday and Sister Meg walked toward the stairway.

"Do you always flirt like that?" Meg asked, a note of censure in her voice. Holliday wondered when the red-haired nun had last laughed at a joke.

"Always," answered Holliday. "It's fundamental to my philosophy of life."

"You have a philosophy of life?"

"Absolutely," he said and nodded. "Whenever possible say something nice to the person who's helping you. What's wrong with that?"

"But only if it's a pretty girl helping you."

"I like looking at pretty women." He shrugged. "What's wrong with that? You can't have something against pretty women since you're one yourself."

"You're insufferable," snapped Sister Meg, her face reddening. She was even prettier when she blushed.

Holliday smiled.

They reached the end of the hall and began to trudge up the narrow flight of stairs. Like the floors the steps were worn, especially in the center. At each landing there was an arched narrow window that looked out onto a courtyard in the cloister below. There was obviously access from the main floor because there were people sitting on benches, smoking, eating, drinking coffee or simply sitting on the scattered benches and looking at the plantings in the flower beds as they soaked up the dappled sunshine filtered through the trees.