Paul Christopher - The Sword of the Templars

They went back to the White Inn and ordered breakfast. Holliday had Eggbeaters and dry toast. Peggy had blueberry waffles topped with whipped cream, bacon, and home fries. They both drank coffee.

Holliday watched her eat, awed by the young woman’s capacity for food.

“You never gain an ounce, do you?”

“Nope,” she answered, putting a piece of bacon slice atop a square of syrup-soaked waffle.

“I hate you,” said Holliday fondly.

“I’m your niece,” answered Peggy blithely, popping the food into her mouth and chewing happily. “You’re not allowed to hate me; it’s against the rules.”

“You’re actually my second cousin once removed. They have different rules for that.”

“Only in the Ozarks,” said Peggy. She scooped up some home fries.

“I once had an insurance actuary tell me that there’s a freight train and a level crossing out there for all of us. One way or the other, it’s just a matter of time,” said Holliday. “Maybe you’d better ease off on the cholesterol.”

“I can’t,” said Peggy. “I’m foolish youth, remember? I have a reputation to protect.”

“You have whipped cream on your upper lip.”

She wiped it off with her napkin.

“What do we do about Broadbent?”

“Right now?” Holliday said. “Nothing. He’s right. We don’t have any proof that he was involved with the fire.”

“What about the guy you chased?”

“Fredonia’s police force has one investigative sergeant. I’m not holding out a lot of hope.”

“So we let it drop?”

“No, we do what I said. We find out why Broadbent wants a thousand-year-old sword so badly.”

After breakfast they went up to Holliday’s room and retrieved the sword, which he’d hidden under the mattress of his bed. He laid it out on the table beneath the window.

“Okay,” said Peggy. “It’s an old sword wrapped up in an old flag. Other than the fact that Grandpa found it in Adolf’s living room, what significance could it have?”

“Let’s begin at the beginning,” said Holliday, staring down at the sword. “Uncle Henry’s had the sword for more than half a century-why all the sudden interest now?”

“Something he found out?”

“Like what?” Holliday said. “It’s an old sword, just like you said. It was clearly owned by a wealthy man, probably a knight or even a lord.”

“What’s the country of origin?” Peggy asked.

“There’s no way to tell. It’s not like a painting, it has no provenance, and I doubt if there’s anything in the record to tell us how it got into Hitler’s hands. It’s undoubtedly some kind of plunder, looted by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories. Either that or Hermann Gцring’s people. They had a thing for going after Masonic relics; it played into the whole Aryan thing.”

“The Masons had swords?” Peggy asked.

“No, but the Templars did; the Templar mythology and the Masons’ started getting mixed up in the early 1800s.”

“So it could be a Templar sword then.”

“Sure.”

“How can you tell?”

“You can’t.”

“I thought you said the really good swordsmiths left their signatures on their swords.”

“That’s right. Their chop. They engraved it or embossed it.”

“But this sword doesn’t have one.”

“You’d have to take off the wire wrapped around the tang to find out.”

“So?”

Holliday looked at the sword. The leather wrapping that had once covered the wire was virtually nonexistent, and it looked as though the wire was already loose.

“Any good archaeologist would scream blue murder,” he muttered.

“Indiana Jones has left the building,” urged Peggy. “Do it.”

“Foolish youth is right,” he said, but he began to carefully unwrap the wire. By the time he reached the second level down he knew that the wire was gold; the top layer had been stained by the disintegration of the leather covering.

It was a single length made up of at least a dozen shorter pieces welded together. He also realized that someone had done this before now-the wire was too loosely wound to have maintained its integrity for a millennium. It took him the better part of half an hour, but he finally removed the last of it.

“What is that?” Peggy said as the tang was revealed.

“A chop,” said Holliday. “Two of them, as a matter of fact.” One was in the shape of a bee, stamped into the steel. The second was delicately engraved: two knights in armor riding a single horse, the official symbol of the Knights Templar. Below the symbol were the letters D.L.N.M.

“The two knights on the horse is the symbol of the Templar Order. I don’t know about the bee.”

“The initials there,” said Peggy, pointing to the four letters. “The initials of the guy who made it?”

“I doubt it.”

Holliday flipped the blade over.

“Amazing.”

Stamped into the steel were the words: ALBERIC IN PELERIN FECIT.

“You’re the scholar, Doc. What does it mean?”

“ ‘Alberic made this in Pelerin.’ ”

“What’s a Pelerin and who is Alberic?”

“Pelerin was a crusader castle in the Holy Land, what we know as Israel now. It was the only castle that was never taken by the Mameluk sultans. Alberic was a dwarf, supposedly a creature who made magical swords. The Hitler connection is a little clearer now.”

“You really do know everything, don’t you?”

“I told you, I read a lot.”

“A mythical dwarf who made magical swords. This isn’t The Lord of the Rings, Doc, this is real.”

“Tell that to Adolf. Alberic was the mythical dwarf who guarded the treasure of the Nibelungen in Wag ner’s opera, Hitler’s favorite.”

“Okay. It’s a Templar sword made by a mythical dwarf that wound up being owned by an opera-loving German megalomaniac dictator mass murderer. Where does that get us?”

“He wasn’t German actually,” corrected Holliday. “Hitler was Austrian.”

“I repeat, where does that get us?”

Holliday didn’t answer. He picked up the spiraled length of wire and examined it closely, running the edge of his thumb along its length. He smiled.

“Canada,” he said. “That’s where it gets us.”

Driving Peggy’s rental, they crossed the border at Niagara Falls and turned northeast, roughly following the shore of Lake Ontario under cloudless summer skies, reaching the city of Toronto ninety minutes later. Neither Peggy nor Holliday had ever been there, and both were surprised at the city’s size. In fact Toronto was the fifth-largest metropolitan area in North America, with a population of something over six million, spread out along twenty-nine miles of Lake Ontario and occupying 229 square miles of territory that had once belonged to the Algonquin Indians.

To Peggy Blackstock and Doc Holliday it looked like a cleaner version of Chicago, with a modern subway system rather than the antiquated El train. There was an enormous, soaring concrete structure on the waterfront that reminded Holliday of the Seattle Space Needle on steroids and a domed stadium that Peggy thought looked like a gigantic vanilla cupcake. They booked into the Park Hyatt two blocks from the center of the city, the intersection of Bloor and Yonge where east became west and uptown became down.

The hotel was directly across Bloor Street from the pseudo-Norman pile of the Royal Ontario Museum, complete with turrets and a grand columned entrance that made it look more like a courthouse than a place of learning. Recently some museum committee in its infinite wisdom had decided that the building needed to be modernized, and an architect had been hired. The result was a giant glass and steel, sharply pointed crystalline extension that looked like some science-fiction starship that had fallen to earth and fused itself to the old building.