Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

They reached the top of the stairs and went through an archway into another small foyer. Sunlight poured through another arched window. A young man in a white shirt and wire-framed spectacles was tapping furiously at a computer keyboard. Behind him were four computer workstations, each one with its own partitioned carrel. It was like being back in the library at Georgetown, thought Holliday.

Holliday and Meg stepped up to the desk but the young man kept typing, ignoring them.

"Mi scusi," said Holliday. "But can you help us?"

Irritated, the young man looked up briefly, then gestured to his right.

"La Stazione a sinistra," he said.

"Grazie," said Holliday.

The young man went back to his typing.

"He's not very polite," said Meg as they walked over to the carrel on the far right.

"Ah, well," sighed Holliday. "They can't all be pretty girls."

Meg glared at him but said nothing; glaring seemed to be her most common expression, like a grade school teacher whose class is in a constant uproar.

"Did you ever teach grade school?" Holliday asked.

"For a short time, as a novice," answered the nun. "Why do you ask?"

Aha!

"Just curious," answered Holliday mildly, sitting down on a hard plastic chair in front of a Zucchetti brand computer. He followed the instructions given to him by the multilingual information lady downstairs, chose the little Union Jack flag for his preferred language and began navigating through the system.

"Find anything?" Sister Meg asked after a few moments.

"I'm afraid so," Holliday said.

"What?"

"Zeno Nautica-financial records: 1156-1605. Fifteen thousand pages, a hundred and fifty-seven ledgers."

"Maybe they break it down ledger by ledger, or year by year," suggested Sister Meg.

"So I should try 1307 to 1314?"

"Makes sense, don't you think?"

"Let's give it a shot," said Holliday.

He typed in the appropriate dates and waited. A moment later he had his answer.

"What does it say?" Sister Meg asked.

"One thousand and eight pages and fourteen ledgers. Busy people, these Zenos." Holliday sighed. "It would take forever."

"We know they came back in 1314, or at least the Blessed Juliana did. Wouldn't there be a notation when they brought back the ship?"

"I knew there was a reason for having you here," said Holliday, smiling.

"I'm not taking the bait," said Meg disdainfully. "So just get on with it."

Holliday typed in the date.

"One hundred and sixty-four pages, one ledger. Available in facsimile."

There was a pen on a chain and a pad of scratch paper at the workstation. Holliday jotted down the fond number for the ledger and took it to the young man at the desk, who was still typing furiously. He looked up at Holliday, pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose and scowled.

"Cosa c'e?" said the young man petulantly. What do you want?

"I want you to do your job instead of sitting there on your fanny writing romantic poetry to your girlfriend, or maybe it's your boyfriend. Pal," snapped Holliday, using his best West Point bracing tone. He dropped the slip of paper onto the boy's keyboard.

"Diciannove euro," muttered the young man without looking Holliday in the eye. Holliday brought out his wallet and dropped a twenty-euro note on the desk. "No denaro," said the young man, sweeping up the money with one hand and putting it into his drawer.

"Keep it," said Holliday.

The young man ostentatiously locked the drawer, picked up the slip of paper and went through a closed door at the other side of the room. Holliday went back to Sister Meg and the workstation.

"Now what?" Meg said.

"We wait," answered Holliday.

"Where the hell is he?" Holliday said, looking at his watch. The sour-faced young man at the desk had been gone for forty- five minutes. "This place is big, but it's not that big."

"Maybe he's having a nap somewhere," said Sister Meg, standing at the window and looking down into the courtyard below.

"More likely a smoke in some stairwell," grunted Holliday. Stairwells were always the cadet favorites at the Point. He frowned a little, surprised at himself. He missed teaching a lot more than he thought he would. West Point had been his first real home in a lot of years, and now it was gone and he was a wanderer again, plagued by an incurable and inevitable restlessness.

"Maybe you should go and look for him," said Sister Meg. "Give him a demerit point or whatever it is you do at West Point."

"You sound like you're on his side," said Holliday.

"You were awfully mean to him."

"I told him what he needed to hear."

"He's very young."

"He won't be any different fifty years from now. He resents the job he has to do too much to do it well. He thinks he's better than the work. You can bet your last dollar he thinks his boss has it in for him and is preventing him from getting a promotion. Nothing is ever his fault. I've heard it all a million times." Holliday shook his head. "He's probably a budding movie director or a novelist just waiting for his big break."

The door at the end of the room opened and the boy reappeared, lugging an enormous cardboard slipcase. He carried the heavy box over to the workstation and dropped it heavily on the table.

"Mi dispiace, Signor," apologized the archive attendant, his cold, unpleasant expression at odds with the words coming out of his mouth.

Holliday shrugged. "Per me va bene," he answered. He handed the young man another slip of paper, this one with the number of the next fond in the series on it. Then he took out his wallet and gave the archive attendant another twenty-euro note.

"Mi dispiace," said Holliday. "Realmente." His expression was a model of sincerity.

The young man looked at the twenty-euro note, looked at Holliday, and looked as though he was about to say something and then thought better of it. Holliday might seem like a grizzled old man in the boy's eyes, but he was a grizzled old man who stood six-two in his bare feet and could still do an easy hundred one-armed push-ups without breaking a sweat. Not to mention the slightly intimidating patch over his ruined eye. The kid wisely kept his mouth shut. He turned on his heel and went back through the door on the far side of the room.

"What was that all about?" Sister Meg asked. "He looked furious."

"I sent him back to get the next ledger in the series," explained Holliday. "The one for 1315."

"That was cruel!" said the nun angrily. "You're just punishing him!"

"It has nothing to do with punishment!" Holliday barked, annoyed. "After the little twerp went off the first time it occurred to me that they'd probably been using the Julian Calendar back then. The Gregorian Calendar was instituted in Venice sometime during the sixteenth century. The dates would have been way off by the year 1315-Christmas would be sometime in February. If your Blessed Juliana or whatever her name was didn't get back until late in the year it might be in the ledger as 1315, not 1314. The answer may well lie in the next ledger, not this one. We really do need to see it."

The nun looked at him, still angry, but said nothing. She rejoined Holliday at the workstation as he pulled the facsimile ledger out of its slipcase. Unlike a regular accountant's ledger, each entry was written in longhand across the entire page, beginning with the number for the transaction and the date of the entry, followed by the name of the person making the entry, then the name of the person the entry was about, then the name and destination of the ship involved and finally the amount paid and the expected date of return.

The name of the entrant, the lessor, the ship and the dates were all underlined. Each entry was effectively a longer or shorter paragraph according to the complexity of the transaction. An odd way of doing things, but efficient enough. Scattered through the entries were notations on separate lines for the return of ships and the final disposition of payments. The last notation on the final page of the facsimile was one of these. The handwriting was archaic and the Italian was obscure, but Holliday's command of Latin made it comprehensible. It read: