Steve Berry - The Templar legacy

"We will begin with the altar."

A curious look came to Rousset's face.

"The people's focus is there," Sauniere said.

"As you say, Abbe."

He liked the respect his older parishioners showed him, though he was only thirty-eight. Over the past five years he'd come to like Rennes. He was near home, with plenty of opportunities to study Scriptures and perfect his Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He also enjoyed trekking in the mountains, fishing, and hunting. But the time had come to do something constructive.

He approached the altar.

The top was white marble pitted by water that had rained down for centuries from the porous ceiling. The slab was supported by two ornate columns, their exteriors adorned with Visigoth crosses and Greek letters.

"We shall replace the top and the pillars," he declared.

"How, Abbe?" Rousset asked. "There is no way we can lift that."

He pointed to where Babou stood. "Use the sledgehammer. There is no need for delicacy."

Babou brought the heavy tool over and surveyed his task. Then, with a great heave, Babou hoisted the hammer and crashed it down onto the center of the altar. The thick top cracked, but the stone did not give way.

"It's solid," Babou said.

"Again," Sauniere said with a flourish.

Another blow and the limestone shattered, the two halves collapsing into each other between the still standing pillars.

"Finish," he said.

The two pieces were quickly busted into many.

He bent down. "Let's haul all this away."

"We'll get it, Abbe," Babou said, setting the sledgehammer aside. "You pile it for us."

The two men lifted large chunks and headed for the door.

"Take it around to the cemetery and stack it. We should have use for it there," he called out to them.

As they left, he noticed that both pillars had survived the demolition. With a swipe he cleared dust and debris away from the crown of one. On the other a piece of limestone still lay, and, when he tossed the chunk into the pile, he noticed beneath, in the crown of the pillar, a shallow mortise hole. The space was no bigger than the palm of his hand, surely designed to hold the top's locking pin, but inside the cavity he caught sight of a glimmer.

He bent close and carefully blew away the dust.

Yes, something was there.

A glass vial.

Not much longer than his index finger and only slightly wider, the top sealed with crimson wax. He looked close and saw that the vessel contained a rolled piece of paper. He wondered how long it had been there. He was not aware of any recent work done to the altar, so it must have been secreted there a long time ago.

He freed the object from its hiding place.

"That vial started everything," Stephanie said.

Malone nodded. "I read Lars's books, too. But I thought Sauniere was supposed to have found three parchments in that pillar with some sort of coded messages."

She shook her head. "That's all part of the myth others added to the story. This, Lars and I did talk about. Most of the fallacies were started in the fifties by a Rennes innkeeper who wanted to generate business. One lie built on another. Lars never accepted that those parchments were real. Their supposed text was printed in countless books, but no one has ever seen them."

"Then why did he write about them?"

"To sell books. I know it bothered him, but he did it anyway. He always said that whatever wealth Sauniere found could be traced to 1891 and whatever was inside that glass vial. But he was the only one who believed that." She pointed off to another of the stone buildings. "That's the presbytery where Sauniere lived. It's a museum about him now. The pillar with the small niche is in there for all to see."

They passed the crowded kiosks and kept to the rough-paved street.

"The Church of Mary Magdalene," she said, pointing at a Romanesque building. "Once the chapel for the local counts. Now, for a few euros, you can see the great creation of Abbe Sauniere."

"You don't approve?"

She shrugged. "I never did. That was the problem."

Off to their right he saw a tumbled-down chateau, its mud-colored outer walls baked by the sun. "That's the Hautpouls estate," she said. "It was lost during the Revolution to the government and has been a mess ever since."

They rounded the far end of the church and passed beneath a stone gateway that bore what looked like a skull and crossbones. He recalled from the book he'd read last night that the symbol appeared on many Templar gravestones.

The earth beyond the entrance was littered with pebbles. He knew what the French called the space. Enclos paroissiaux. Parish close. And the enclosure seemed typical-one side bounded by a low wall, the other nestled close to a church, its entrance a triumphal arch. The cemetery hosted a profusion of table tombs, headstones, and memorials. Floral tributes topped some of the graves, and many were adorned, in the French tradition, with photographs of the deceased.

Stephanie walked to one of the monuments that displayed neither flowers nor images, and Malone let her go alone. He knew that Lars Nelle had been so liked by the locals that they'd granted him the privilege of being buried in their cherished churchyard.

The headstone was simple and noted only the name, dates, and an epitaph of HUSBAND, FATHER, SCHOLAR.

He eased up beside her.

"They never once wavered in burying him here," she muttered.

He knew what she meant. In sacred ground.

"The mayor at the time said there was no conclusive evidence he killed himself. He and Lars were close, and he wanted his friend buried here."

"It's the perfect place," he said.

She was hurting, he knew, but to recognize her pain would be viewed as an invasion of her privacy.

"I made a lot of mistakes with Lars," she said. "And most of them eventually cost me with Mark."

"Marriage is tough." His own failed through selfishness, too. "So is parenthood."

"I always thought Lars's passion silly. I was a government lawyer doing important things. He was searching for the impossible."

"So why are you here?"

Her gaze stayed on the grave. "I've come to realize that I owe him."

"Or do you owe yourself."

She turned away from the grave. "Perhaps I do owe us both," she said.

He let it drop.

Stephanie pointed to a far corner. "Sauniere's mistress is buried there."

Malone knew about the mistress from Lars's books. She was sixteen years Sauniere's junior, a mere eighteen when she quit her job as a hatmaker and became the abbe's housekeeper. She stayed by his side for thirty-one years, until his death in 1917. Everything Sauniere acquired was eventually placed in her name, including all of his land and bank accounts, which subsequently made it impossible for anyone, including the Church, to claim them. She continued to live in Rennes, dressing in somber clothes and behaving as strangely as when her lover was alive, until her death in 1953.

"She was an odd one," Stephanie said. "She made a statement, long after Sauniere died, about how with what he left behind you could feed all of Rennes for a hundred years, but she lived in poverty till the day she died."

"Any one ever learn why?"

"Her only statement was, I cannot touch it. "

"Thought you didn't know much about all this."

"I didn't, until last week. The books and journal were informative. Lars spent a lot of time interviewing locals."

"Sounds like that would have been double or triple hearsay."

"For Sauniere, that's true. He's been dead a long time. But his mistress lived till the fifties, so there were many still around in the seventies and eighties who knew her. She sold the Villa Bethanie in 1946 to a man named Noel Corbu. He was the one who converted it into a hotel-the innkeeper I mentioned who made up much of the false information about Rennes. The mistress promised to tell Sauniere's great secret to Corbu, but at the end of her life she suffered a stroke and was unable to communicate."