The Sword of the Templars (6 page)

“Yes?” Ms. Branch said.

“According to his passport my uncle traveled to Canada a few months ago.”

“That’s right, in March.”

She didn’t even have to consult a day book. Interesting.

“Do you know where he went?”

“Toronto.”

“Do you know why?”

“Yes,” said Ms. Branch. “He went to see a colleague at the Centre for Medieval Studies. The University of Toronto. Dr. Braintree.”

“And then he went on to England and Frankfurt?”

“Yes.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Certainly,” said Ms. Branch, her tone crisp. “The Master’s Lunch.”

“The Master’s Lunch?”

“Balliol College, Oxford. They have a lunch for the senior Old Members every two or three years.”

“He went to England to have lunch?” Holliday asked.

“He had a great many friends at Oxford,” said Ms. Branch.

“Any in particular?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Icy.

“What about Frankfurt?”

“Are you asking me if I know why the professor went to Germany?”

“Yes.”

“I have no idea,” said Ms. Branch. She stiffened in her ergonomically designed chair. “And I’m not sure I like being interrogated.”

“I’m sorry,” said Holliday. “I didn’t mean it to sound that way.”

“I’m afraid it did.”

Holliday paused. Something was nibbling at his subconscious. More than a year ago Henry had been diagnosed with early-stage macular degeneration: his eyes were failing. He’d voluntarily stopped driving. He tried to visualize his uncle riding the Greyhound. Somehow it didn’t compute.

“How did he get to Toronto?”

“I drove him to Buffalo,” said Ms. Branch. “He caught the afternoon train.”

A little bit of color flushed her cheeks. Her eyelashes fluttered slightly. She clutched the book in her lap like a drowning sailor. She looked almost demure—Bambi caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. Years peeled away in an instant. Suddenly, Holliday got it. Curtains parted, the fog lifted, the veil dropped from before his eyes, and all was revealed.

Of course.

The old copy of
Anne of Green Gables
probably
had
come from Uncle Henry’s shelves. They were lovers, or had been once upon a time.

It seemed strange now—and maybe high on Peggy’s
ee-uw
scale—but not so strange if you went back forty-three years to young Caroline Branch’s arrival in Fredonia, hormones freshly released from the all-girl confines of the Albany Academy.

Holliday did the math: the mid-sixties, the Playboy Philosophy, the Summer of Love, and all that malar key; she would have been nineteen or twenty and fresh as a daisy. Uncle Henry would have been in his forties, very much the pipe-smoking debonair professor, maybe even a little bit of distinguished gray at the temples. Hugh Hefner with an education.

Teacher and student for as long as it lasted and maybe longer than that. It wouldn’t be the first time in academia that a professor had bedded a coed. Henry had never married and, according to the nameplate on her desk, neither had Ms. Branch. Maybe it really was an old-fashioned love story. He stared at the secretary with fresh eyes.

“Do you have any other questions?” Ms. Branch asked stiffly, perhaps reading his mind a little.

“Not right now.”

“It really is getting quite late,” she prompted baldly.

“We won’t be much longer.”

Holliday turned on his heel and went back into the office, shutting the door behind him. Peggy was sitting in front of Henry’s computer, trying passwords.

“Try Caroline,” said Holliday, keeping his voice low.

“What?” Peggy asked, brow wrinkling.

“The password. Try Caroline.”

“But . . .”

“Later. Just try it.”

Peggy gave him a look, but she typed the name into the slot and hit return.

“Nothing,” she said. She sounded almost relieved.

“Try Caroline Branch, all one word,” he instructed. She typed. She stared at the screen.

“I’ll be damned,” she whispered. “It worked.”

“I think they were lovers back in the day,” explained Holliday quietly.

Peggy snorted. “Grandpa, you old dog!”

“What kind of files do you see?”

“The usual stuff. Looks like a lot of old lectures in his ‘My Documents’ files. One called ‘Letters,’ another labeled ‘Expenses.’ ‘Graduate students.’ ‘Tutorials.’ Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing about a sword anyway.” She glanced up at Holliday. “Presumably that’s what we’re looking for.”

“Is there an e-mail account?”

“Grandpa Henry using e-mail? Come on, now.”

“Grandpa Henry having a love affair with Ms. Branch?” Holliday grinned.

“Point taken,” said Peggy. “I’ll check.” She tapped a few keys. “You’re right. There’s a Hotmail account: [email protected].”

“What’s the last message he sent?”

“It’s to [email protected],” said Peggy. “Sent a week ago.”

“What’s the subject line?”

“It’s a thank-you for a reply from the 123 person. The subject line for the original message is ‘QUERY.’ ”

“What does it say?”

“It says: ‘Dear Henry, as I suggested to you on your visit it looks like you have some early combination of a Book/Masonic-Pigpen/Elian problem going on, but without the key I’m afraid it’s probably indecipherable. There’s no mention of it anywhere in the literature that I can find. There’s a fellow in Jerusalem named Raffi Wanounou who knows a lot about crusader castles; maybe he can point you in the right direction. He works at the Institute. Sorry I can’t be more help. It was nice seeing you in March. Hope things went well with Donald. Keep in touch.’ It’s signed Steven Braintree.” Peggy made a face. “There’s such a name as Braintree?”

“It’s part of Metropolitan Boston. John Quincy Adams was born there,” said Holliday. “Apparently this particular Braintree is a professor at the University of Toronto.”

“What’s all this ‘Book/Masonic-Pigpen/Elian’ stuff?” Peggy frowned. “It’s all gobbledygook.”

“I think he’s talking about codes,” answered Holliday. “You ever read a book called
The Key to Rebecca
by Ken Follett? They did a TV movie of it back in the eighties with Cliff Robertson.”

“Not my era.”

“It was about a code based on a Daphne du Maurier novel called
Rebecca
.”

“Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. 1940. Alfred Hitchcock.”

“The forties
is
your era?”

“Absolutely.” She grinned. “All that noir stuff. Great lighting, everybody smoking cigarettes.”

“I thought you quit.”

“I did. Sort of.”

Holliday sighed. Peggy was going off on one of her tangents. He headed her off at the pass.

“
Anyway
, the book was used as the key for the code. I think that’s what the e-mail means when Braintree refers to ‘book.’ Pigpen is sometimes called the Masonic Code, which sort of fits in with the sword. I have no idea what ‘Elian’ refers to.”

“Did Grandpa have some particular interest in codes?”

“Not that I knew of,” said Holliday, shaking his head.

They spent another few minutes browsing through Uncle Henry’s files without success, then gave it up, retreating under the barrages of psychic artillery coming through the closed door from Ms. Branch’s direction. They drove back to the Hart Street house and spent the next two hours going through Uncle Henry’s study and anywhere else they could think of, looking for anything else that might shed some light on the sword wrapped in the flag and Henry’s reasons for hiding it away so carefully, including a close look at the file of correspondence in the old man’s desk. The only thing they came up with of any interest at all was Henry’s invitation to the Balliol College Old Master’s Lunch with an obscure message scrawled on the back:

Oxford 4:20 Abingdon Express-40

bus/Reading train/Reading toward

Carmarthen change Newport toward Arrive

Trains Wales—Holyhead to Leominster. Will

pick up. No cabs. L’Espoir, Lyonshall, Kingston,

Herts. 44-1567-240-363

“Directions from Oxford to Leominster, in Her efordshire,” said Peggy, pronouncing it “Lemster.” “I know it’s pronounced that way because a Welshman once corrected me.”

“There’s a place in Massachusetts with the same name,” said Holliday, “They pronounce it ‘Lemon-Stir, ’ home of Foster Grant sunglasses and the original plastic pink flamingo.”

“Your brain must be a very strange place,” said Peggy, laughing.

“In my business your head tends to get clogged with a lot of irrelevancies. Take horses. Did you know Adolf Hitler had a thoroughbred named Nordlicht, or North Light, and that it died on a plantation in Louisiana in 1968? Or that George Armstrong Custer was riding a horse named Victory at the Little Big Horn, not Co manche for instance? Or the fact that Teddy Roosevelt was the only one of his Rough Riders at San Juan Hill who had a horse at all?”

“And I’ll bet you know its name,” said Peggy.

“Of course.” Holliday grinned. “It was called Little Texas. By the time they got to San Juan Hill the horse was exhausted, so Roosevelt had to dismount and lead the charge on foot.” He laughed. “Although I think it probably had more to do with public relations; didn’t look good in the papers to be the only one in the saddle.”

“That’s enough history,” said Peggy, holding up her hands in defeat. “Let’s go eat.”

“Gary’s Diner again?” Holliday said.

“Let’s try something more upscale,” suggested Peggy.

Upscale in Fredonia, New York, meant the White Inn, an outsized mid-nineteenth century clapboard farmhouse with an overdone columned portico and a wrought iron fence that made it look like an imitation of its namesake in Washington, D.C. According to Peggy they served a mean chocolate martini in the lounge and great prime rib in the dining room. Holliday let Peggy have the prime rib while he ordered the baby spinach and shrimp.

“You sure you don’t want the prime rib?” Peggy asked. “That thing on your plate looks like an appetizer.”

Holliday looked at the immense slab of meat Peggy was happily carving her way through. It looked like enough to feed a small army and came complete with a giant baked potato swimming in butter and sour cream, butter beans, and a side salad besides. She popped a forkful of meat into her mouth, then tore up a dinner roll and used it to swab up a small puddle of au jus that was wending its way dangerously close to the baked potato and its sour cream and dripping butter pat summit.

Holliday speared a shrimp.

“You’re young. I’m old. Gotta watch my figure.”

“I’m like a hummingbird,” said Peggy, scooping up some baked potato. “I have to eat my own weight every day or I fade away.” She ate some butter beans. “And you’re not old, Doc, you’re distinguished.”

Holliday looked at her fondly. In jeans and a T-shirt Peggy could probably pass for a freshman at the university. He, on the other hand, had salt-and-pepper hair that was now considerably more salt than pepper, used reading glasses, wore Dr. Scholl’s in his shoes, and occasionally felt twinges of arthritis in his joints. She was still climbing uphill in the morning of her life, and he was sliding slowly down in the early evening; a world of difference.

“Easy for you to say,” he said wistfully.
Who was it who said that youth was wasted on the young?

“George Bernard Shaw,” he said.

“Huh?” Peggy asked.

“Nothing,” said Holliday.

Peggy sliced off another chunk from the slab on her plate.

“Speaking of old, what are we supposed to make of Grandpa Henry and the secretary?”

“He wasn’t always old.”

“He didn’t mention her in the will.”

“I’m not surprised. Wills are public documents, and discretion is clearly important to her,” he shrugged. “Besides, he may have already given her his bequest.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was reading a copy of
Anne of Green Gables
when we came into the office.”

“So?”

“It was a first edition.”

“You think Grandpa gave it to her?”

“Probably,” he nodded. “You still have that BlackBerry machine?”

“I’ll have you know it’s called a personal digital assistant,” said Peggy airily, swabbing a piece of prime rib in a generous blob of horseradish. “Or sometimes ‘CrackBerry’ for its addictive qualities.”

“You have it with you?”

“Always,” nodded Peggy. She put down her fork, rummaged around in the old denim messenger bag she used as a purse, and eventually pulled out the flat little rectangle of black plastic.

“See if you can find out what a first edition of
Anne of Green Gables
is worth.”

Peggy tapped away briefly, using thumbs instead of fingers. The device reminded Holliday of the all-knowing featureless black slabs in the epic space movie
2001
. Except, he thought, 2001 the year was long gone, the slab fit into one hand, and this time
we
are the monkeys.

Peggy’s eyes widened.

“Twelve thousand five hundred dollars,” she said, awed.

“What did I tell you?” said Holliday. He ate another shrimp. “The Anne book probably isn’t the only thing he gave her.”

“That sounds like the punch line to a Marx Brothers joke.”

“I’m serious.”

“He must have cared for her,” she said. “I wonder why he never made it formal.”

“Maybe she didn’t want to get married. Maybe he liked the status quo.” Holliday shrugged. “We’ll probably never know. Children never really know their parents; that goes double for nephews and grandfathers.”

“So what do we do now? About the sword and all that, I mean?”

“I’m not sure. The sword belongs in a museum, I know that much. Or we can sell it if you want. It’ll be worth more than the
Anne of Green Gables
, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t need the money.”

“Neither do I,” said Holliday.

“Why don’t we donate it to a museum in Grandpa’s name?” Peggy suggested.

“Good idea,” agreed Holliday.

“And the house?”

“Selling it, you mean?”