Sword of the Templars

by Paul Christopher

  “Deputy gauleiter, district boss?” Holliday supplied.

  “Ja, as you say, boss of the district, the town here.”

  “And you?” Peggy asked.

  “I played the violin.” Drabeck shrugged, pouring another glass of Steinhäger. He drank, then wiped his lips with the back of his thumb. “What could I do? My eyesight was poor, I could not shoot, or kill, or anything like that, so Kellerman made me his Putzer.”

  “Putzer?” Peggy said.

  “Der Hausdiener,” said the old man, struggling.

  “Orderly, I think,” said Holliday. “An aide-de-camp.”

  “Ja,” said Drabeck. “His servant. I polished his boots and ran his bath, just so, ja? I went with him everywhere, polishing his verdammte Stiefel. Russia, Stalin grad, Italy, Normandy, always polishing the boots.”

  “The Berghof?” Holliday asked. Was that the connection with the sword?

  “Ja, sure, there, too, a few times. There I am having the privilege to pick up the Hundkacke of Blondi, Hitler’s dog, from the rugs and fetch die Nutte Eva’s little cakes from the town. And polish the boots.”

  “And then?” Peggy said.

  Drabeck poured more Steinhäger.

  “You know Dachau?” Drabeck asked.

  “The concentration camp?” Holliday said.

  “Ja, das Konzentrationslager,” nodded the old man. “They had a camp here for the workers at Dornier and Maybach. Making Raketen, ja?”

  “V2 rockets,” supplied Holliday.

  “Vergeltungswaffe Zwei, ja,” nodded Drabeck. “They had to have people to work. Italians and Poles mostly. Juden, of course. Jews. My father took women from the camp and . . . used them.” The old man paused, looking down into his empty glass. His hand was on the clay bottle, but he made no move to pour from it. He looked up and stared Holliday in the eye. “When the war was over and the Americans released the prisoners, some came to the town looking for my father. He was hiding at Schloss Kellerman. You know it?”

  “We were there this morning,” said Holliday.

  “They found him in the old ruins. They brought him back here to the town square and hung him from a lamppost with dem Kabel, the electrical wire. He kicked and jerked for five minutes, and his face turned black. His tongue was like a fat sausage sticking from his mouth. I was his son. They made me watch.”

  “Holy crap,” whispered Peggy.

  “Ja,” agreed Drabeck. “It was unpleasant for me.”

  “By then Lutz Kellerman had disappeared?” Holliday asked.

  “Natürlich,” grunted the old man. “No more boots for Rudy.” He poured himself another glass of Steinhäger. His forehead and cheeks were shiny with sweat. He belched quietly, and a hiss of gin fumes laced with horseradish and hot mustard spread across the table.

  “And Axel?” Holliday said.

  “Switzerland,” said Drabeck. “A refugee, with his mother and his older sister. He was young, three, four maybe.”

  “When did they come back?”

  “Nineteen forty-six. Things were bad here then. No work for anyone. Everyone was Geld brauchen, penniless; the Kellermans were in Geld schwimmen: they had money. Lots of it. They went into business. Die Zugmaschinen. Tractors. People loved the Kellermans again.” He drank more Steinhäger. “Dem Geld verfallen sein,” he said philosophically and sighed.

  “And you?”

  The old man laughed and belched again. Behind the bar the waitress looked up at the sound.

  “Frau Kellerman hired me to polish her boots,” said Drabeck. “Forty years I work for the family and then one day, phhft! Rudy is no good any more. Too old. Too much drink. Forty years, no pension. Nothing; der Kotzbrocken.”

  “When we were there today we saw no evidence that Lutz Kellerman had ever existed. There was no mention of him at the museum, no pictures, nothing.”

  Drabeck laughed again.

  “Keineswegs!” he snorted. “Of course not! Hitler was a bad dream for Germany, a nightmare they would sooner forget; a nightmare I would forget if it was possible.” Drabeck poured more Steinhäger and drank it.

  His nose was running now, and he wiped it on the sleeve of his jacket. His eyes were wet and filled with tears.

  “Friedrichshafen made the Hindenburg only. Zeppelins, not death Raketen. Boys who yodel and play the alpenhorn. Girls who make Apfelstrudel and fat babies. It is a different world now; there is no room in history for Konzentrationslager or men like Obergruppenführer Lutz Kellerman.”

  “Surely the son has not forgotten his father,” said Holliday.

  “No,” Drabeck said. “He remembers him well enough. He hides it.”

  “Hides what?” Peggy said.

  “His father’s things, Gegenstände mit Nostalgiewert—I don’t know the word in English for this.”

  Nostalgiewert. Nostalgia?

  “Memorabilia?”

  Drabeck shrugged.

  “Egal welche,” he grunted. Whatever.

  “Medals, uniforms, that kind of thing,” prompted Holliday.

  “Ja, sure,” answered Drabeck. His eyes were shifting, and he was beginning to look uncomfortable. Talking about himself and the past was fine; talking about the master’s secrets was something else.

  “So he has a shrine to his father somewhere?” Peggy said, pushing. Drabeck looked down into his empty glass, his lips pursing.

  “Ja,” he said slowly.

  Holliday caught Peggy’s eye. He made a little gesture with his thumb and forefinger, rubbing them back and forth. She nodded and dug into her bag. She pulled out a pale green hundred euro note.

  She folded it in half and slid it across the table, nudging Drabeck’s glass. There was a second of hesitation, and then the old man’s fingers delicately pulled the bill toward the edge of the table and it disappeared into his pocket.

  “Where?” Holliday said flatly.

  There was another second’s hesitation. Drabeck licked his lips, and then he spoke.

  “He has a place . . .” the old man began.

  14

  “We should have brought a gun,” said Peggy. They were lying on the edge of the bluff that stood over Schloss Kellerman on the broad, sweeping meadow below. It was dusk, and the first security lights were coming on around the complex of buildings. Through his newly purchased binoculars Holliday could see the distinctive pink glow of high pressure mercury vapor lamps; in full dark the Schloss would be lit up as brightly as a Hollywood premiere.

  “Guns are stupid,” said Holliday, putting down the binoculars. “You wind up getting shot.”

  “Funny sentiment coming from an old soldier.”

  “Old soldiers don’t get to be old by overestimating the value of firepower,” answered Holliday. “Don’t carry a gun unless you’re willing to kill someone with it, which I am not willing to do at the moment.”

  Peggy frowned.

  “I’m not one of your first-year students at the Point, Doc. I don’t need a lecture. I just thought it might be nice to have some backup if this guy Kellerman was responsible for murdering Professor Carr-Harris and burning down Grandpa’s house.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” said Holliday.

  “It’s a pretty good assumption. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  “Assumptions without evidence are the kind of things that start wars,” said Holliday. “I repeat, guns are stupid.”

  “You’re lecturing again, Doc.”

  “Comes with the territory.”

  He scanned the grounds of the Schloss again. Nothing was moving. An hour ago a van had pulled up with the evening shift of guards. Eight armed, uniformed men, all tall, fit, young, and definitely Aryan. Axel Kellerman was clearly not an equal opportunity employer. The van had picked up the eight men from the earlier shift and driven off.

  Twenty minutes later a tall, dark-haired man in an expensive suit, wearing a green Tyrolean hat complete with boar’s brush decoration, had climbed into a big, black Mercedes sedan and driven off toward Friedrichshafen. It could have been Axel Kellerman, but it was hard to tell for sure. The parking lot of the Schloss was empty.

  Holliday swung
the glasses to the left. At the far end of the bluff, two hundred yards away and partially screened by a stand of pine trees, the ruins of the old castle rose in the gathering darkness like an ancient megalith. The promontory was barred by the original curtain wall, or what was left of it: a twelve-foot-high mound of crumbling stone and rubble.

  Behind the wall, standing like an immense broken tooth, were the remains of the keep, the stone fortress that had once stood in the center of the castle, protected by a moat and drawbridge, the last line of defense for the old Count Kellerman-Pinzgau.

  Peggy took a shiny camera the size of a cigarette pack out of her bag and took a few quick exposures of the ruins.

  “What are you doing?” Holliday asked.

  “Taking establishing shots.”

  “We’re snooping, not making a documentary.”

  “Snooping, documentary, what do I care? I’m taking pictures, that’s what I do, Doc.”

  She aimed the camera at Holliday and clicked off a shot.

  “No flash,” he said. “Nothing will come out,” he said.

  “Don’t be silly,” answered Peggy. “This thing will take pictures by starlight. Welcome to the digital age, old man.”

  Holliday picked up the binoculars again and turned them toward the Schloss. Still no movement. The only sound was the light, warm wind sifting through the surrounding trees.

  “All right,” he said quietly. “It’s all clear. Keep low so your silhouette doesn’t break the horizon; we wouldn’t want some guard on a smoke break seeing you. Head for the barbican.”

  “The what?”

  “The gatehouse in the wall, that big square thing.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Go.”

  She went. Thirty seconds later he followed, running hard, crouching low.

  They reached the old gatehouse in the wall, then paused. The courtyard beyond was dark and empty. Nothing moved. In the far distance Holliday could hear the moaning rumble of a passing train.

  “Maybe Drabeck was feeding us a load of bull,” said Peggy. “Maybe this is all a waste of time.”

  “Nervous?” Holliday asked.

  “I’m feeling just a wee bit criminal.”

  “Barely that,” said Holliday. “Trespassing maybe.”

  “So far.”

  “So far.”

  They waited for a moment more, catching their breath.

  “Now what?” Peggy asked, bent low, panting, hands on knees.

  “More running,” said Holliday. “The second barbican in front of the moat. From there we cross the bridge into the keep.”

  “You first this time,” said Peggy. “Age before beauty.”

  “You wish,” said Holliday. He eased himself forward for a few feet and looked out into the courtyard. A few yards away he could see a regular outline of stonework that was all that remained of the original Great Hall, the lord of the manor’s residence in peacetime. A little beyond that was a circular pile of stones that had probably once been the castle well, and beyond that, thirty feet on a side and rising eighty feet or more into the night sky, was the keep.

  The rest of the courtyard was rubble weeds and tall grass. No evidence of guards or even casual visitors. No litter, no cigarette butts or pop cans on the ground. Kellerman ran a tight ship. Holliday took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then sprinted across the courtyard, not pausing until he’d reached the shadowed safety of the keep’s gatehouse. He waited, watching as Peggy followed, cloth bag over her shoulder, long legs pumping, bringing her across the courtyard a few seconds later.

  “Okay,” she said. “Now what?”

  Holliday glanced upward. He could see the pattern of holes drilled in the stone roof of the gateway. “Murder holes” used for pouring boiling oil down on the besieging enemy.

  Beyond that was the narrow earth bridge that crossed the moat. In centuries past the bridge would have been wood and the moat would have been filled with water or sharp stakes, the medieval version of tank traps meant to slow the work of approaching siege engines or sappers intent on undermining the walls.

  Holliday suddenly found himself wondering who had been here before him. Places like this were history. They were steeped in it, bathed in its blood, and eventually ruined and forgotten by it. What armored knights on horseback had come through this gateway, what princes and what kings?

  “Having a history moment, are we?” Peggy said, grinning at him in the gloom.

  “Oh, shut up,” he said fondly, grinning back. “You know me too well. Come on.”

  They ran across the narrow earth bridge, the moat no more than a shallow curving ditch on either side of them, thick with grass and weeds. They reached the arched entrance to the keep and stepped inside. Castles had their individual characteristics, but their architecture was as predictable as Big Macs from Nashville to Novgorod. He’d taken a class of seniors to Russia on a goodwill tour the summer before and he’d actually eaten a burger in Novgorod, so he knew what he was talking about.

  Inevitably the keep would have had five levels rising from ground level. Stores, an administrative level, the keep’s version of the Great Hall, a residential level, and an armorers’ level. Above that would be the tile-covered wooden roof and an open fighting platform for archers. There would be garderobes—medieval toilets—jutting out at every level and emptying down into the moat.

  Below ground level were the cells used for prisoners and below that the keep’s well and the cistern used for filling the moat and as a catchment for rain, giving the keep a secondary supply of water for cooking and cleaning. All in all a very effective and self-contained environment for a castle under siege, its curtain wall already breached. All of this would have been connected by a series of stone stairways built between the inner and outer walls of the keep. If Drabeck had been telling them the truth, their destination would be one of those old stairways that led down to the dungeons and the water supply.

  Holliday peered into the gloom. There was the darker shadow of a doorway on the right. He pointed.

  “There.” He touched Peggy’s elbow, and they pelted across the open paving stones that had once been the foundation of the keep. They reached the doorway. Inside the small arch and to the left there was a narrow stone stairway leading downward. The steps were worn by centuries of use. Few princes and even fewer kings had used these steps. This was a stairway for servants and jailers.

  Holliday took a small Maglite from the pocket of his jacket. He went down two steps and turned it on. The steps were no more than a foot wide and very steep.

  “Careful,” he said, looking back over his shoulder. “Take it slow.”

  He went down the steps, holding the light high, the palm of his free hand against the stone wall for balance as he descended. Peggy followed cautiously. At the bottom of the steps there was a small vaulted vestibule and a formidable iron door. The door had four immense strap hinges on the left, secured with thumb-sized rivets, and an old-fashioned ward lock on the right with a latch above it. Peggy tried the door.