The Templar Throne (9 page)

He’d spent part of his time in England but most of it half freezing to death in Edinburgh, rummaging through the Scottish National Archives. He’d rented a room in an old stone house on nearby Cowgate Street, run by a certain Mrs. McSeveney, although there was no sign that a Mr. McSeveney had ever lived there or existed at all. Mrs. McSeveney had a son named Tommy, unfortunately stricken with cerebral palsy and confined to the little house.

In the evenings Mrs. McSeveney smoked unfiltered Players cigarettes, drank gin and watched reruns of
Rab C. Nesbitt
, an odd, dark, Scottish sitcom about an unemployed man who did his best to stay that way. Holliday often read to Tommy aloud, usually classic stories like
Treasure Island
and
The Count of Monte Cristo
. Tommy could barely speak, but by the gleam in his eyes and the tug of a smile on his face Holliday knew he was hanging on every word.

Late in the spring, working at the archives, he’d stumbled onto the story of Jean de Saint- Clair and his dimly recorded voyage into the unknown. Holliday had traced the tale to Rosslyn in the Midlothians, seat of the Saint-Clair family for more than five hundred years, and from there he’d found his way to France. Then Prague, now Venice, and once again he found himself involved with a mystery, and by the looks of it, a dangerous one.

He finished brushing his teeth, put on a fresh shirt and then headed down to the hotel restaurant. He spotted Sister Meg at a table on the far side of the room and joined her. As promised there was a silver carafe of coffee on the table and a large tulip glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. He took a long slug of the juice, poured himself a cup of coffee and sat back in his chair.

“Sorry,” he said. “I guess I’m getting too old for leaping off tour boats and catching night trains to Venice. I was truly pooped.”

“I
was
getting a little worried,” said Meg. A waiter approached, gave a little bow and offered them enormous menus. There were about ten different egg dishes available. Holliday chose
asparagi Florentine
and Meg settled for cantaloupe and yogurt.

The food arrived and they began to eat. The muted conversations of a few other hotel guests served as a vague, comfortable backdrop, like the bubbling of a passing stream, punctuated by occasional and discreet laugher; it was Venice, after all, not Sioux Falls, Iowa.

“So what were you up to while I snoozed?” Holliday asked as he wolfed down the delicious meal.

“Scouting the territory,” said Sister Meg, carving a slice of melon into bite-sized pieces. “I found the archives. It took most of the day; this city is not big on signs.”

Holliday smiled faintly. He and Amy had spent most of their time in Venice getting lost. He never did get a real sense of the city; the narrow, badly numbered streets and winding canals made that almost impossible.

“Is it far?” he asked.

“Miles if you’re walking. About a ten- minute ride in one of those vaporetto motorboat taxis. There’s a canal that takes you within fifty feet of the front door.”

“Did you check it out?”

She nodded. “It’s open to the public during regular business hours. There are miles of stacks. It used to be a convent attached to the cathedral next door. It’s all computerized apparently, and if what we’re looking for isn’t available in the original you can probably access it on microfilm. Everyone I talked to there spoke English.”

“Sounds good.” He’d cleaned his plate, mopping up the last of the béchamel sauce with half an English muffin from the basket in front of them on the table. Sister Meg clearly didn’t approve. Holliday poured himself a second cup of coffee and sat back in his chair, sighing with approval.

“Tit for tat, Colonel. Tell me about this Zeno family we’re digging for.”

Holliday gave the nun a magnanimous smile. “Not until you stop calling me Colonel. It’s Doc, or John, or Holliday, or even hey you, but not Colonel. Not anymore. I’m retired.”

“All right . . . Doc.”

“Much better.”

“The Zeno family?”

“Ah, yes, the mysterious Zenos. Mention of them usually refers to the Zeno brothers’ map of the world, which they supposedly concocted in the late thirteen hundreds. The family was part of Venetian aristocracy and had the transportation franchise for bringing Christian knights to the Crusades. They basically leased ships to the Templars, who then provided captains and crew. There’s some question of their origins; I suspect they were Greek or Turkish from the name. It means ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner.’ It’s where the term ‘xenophobia’ comes from. There’s always been some question about the vanishing of the Templar fleet, but there’s no mystery—the ships simply went back to the Zeno family.”

“What about this map?”

“A lot of people think it’s a fake, although why anyone would fake a map in the fourteenth century is beyond me. It’s not as though they were trying to convince a king or a queen to send out an expedition like Columbus and Queen Isabella.”

“Do you think it’s fake?”

“Yes, but not for the reason most people do. The accepted view among historians is that the map is a preposterous hoax. I think it was a hoax that was concocted by later Templars to cover up rumors of the real Atlantic voyage made by Jean de Saint-Clair—John Sinclair, the knight in the tomb in the chapel where you and I met. Pure obfuscation. You start an argument among historians about the validity and provenance of the map and you stop right there and don’t dig any deeper. It’s sleight of hand, covering up one thing with another.

“A map like that is exactly what you’d get if you were using an old-fashioned Jacob’s Cross, the navigation instrument I told you about: a series of sightings showing foreshortened distances based on time spent at sea and no relative sizes of land masses—latitude without longitude.”

“I always get them mixed up, like stalactites and stalagmites.”

“Latitude are lines that go up and down; longitude goes left to right.”

“So the map is real?”

“One like it. The biggest flaw most people give as proof that the Zeno map is a fake is the fact that the place names are wrong and some of the islands simply don’t exist. I think the names were changed on the Zeno map and a few islands were drawn in to make the map
look
like a phony.”

“Sort of like a double blind,” Sister Meg said, nodding.

“Exactly. Cover up the truth with a well-articulated lie. What’s that old proverb about the devil? ‘The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing people that he didn’t exist’?”

“So where does that leave us?”

“The Zeno family was in business as ship brokers for a hundred years before the Crusades and a long time afterward. They kept meticulous books, which will be in the financial and business fonds of the State Archives. We do a little grunt work and find out if they leased a ship to a knight named Jean de Saint-Clair between 1307 and 1314.”

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.”