The Templars' Last Secret

by Martin Walker

  Bruno’s phone began to play the first notes of “La Marseillaise,” and he pulled onto the side of the road to answer. It was the man from the Templars’ society, saying he did not recognize the woman and knew of no new reports about treasure at Commarque, but he’d circulate the photo among his fellow members.

  “Do the letters I-F-T-I mean anything to you, some sort of Templar lore perhaps? I ask because the woman seemed to be trying to paint a word with these letters on the château wall.”

  “On the wall of Commarque? That’s sacrilege; I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with a member like that. But no, it means nothing to me. Again, I can ask around.”

  “And you think some Templar treasure might be at Commarque?”

  “Who knows? Commarque is one of three thousand sites in France with Templar connections, but it was never a commanderie, or local administrative center. There are five or six in the département of the Dordogne. But if they wanted to hide treasure from the king, they probably would not have used a commanderie.”

  “So they might have used a lesser site, like Commarque?”

  “Possibly, but the king’s searches were pretty thorough. He put a lot of resources into crushing the Templars, and he did it quickly. He sent out secret orders to all the bailiffs and seneschals across France for a single devastating strike to be carried out a month later. More than five thousand Templars were arrested in a single night, Friday, October the thirteenth, 1307. No French state could mount that kind of operation again until World War Two. Even Napoléon couldn’t have done it. Just imagine the numbers of troops or police required, the cells to hold them, keeping the secret while the orders were transmitted around the country on horseback.”

  Bruno raised his eyebrows. He could imagine the scale of such an operation and would never have dreamed a medieval monarchy could have mounted something so efficient.

  “Five thousand trained knights, all arrested at once. Did they go quietly?” he asked.

  “No, the fighting knights were in Spain and Cyprus, facing the Saracens. In France, they were mainly old men, but even so, it was quite an operation. It shows the king’s desperation to get their treasure.”

  “But he didn’t get it?”

  “He got their land and their castles and manors, which was good enough. And he’d already forced the Templars to make him some huge loans. But he never found the treasure.”

  “And you think it’s still to be found?” Bruno asked.

  “I think it was smuggled out across the sea, perhaps to Scotland because of the Masonic connections, perhaps even to Nova Scotia. There are various theories. I’m less interested in Commarque because there is so much archaeological work being done there. If there’s anything to find, they’ll find it, so the place has really dropped off our radar screen. But you say this woman fell to her death as she was climbing the wall of the donjon? That seems unlikely to me. The donjon has been rebuilt, restored, thoroughly searched. If there’s any treasure to be found, it will be in those caves underneath the rock.”

  Bruno had his phone on speaker so Amélie could hear. When he ended the call, he said to her, “Imagine, five thousand men all across France, arrested on a single night. It wouldn’t be easy to do that today.”

  “Just as well, when you think about it. Remember, it’s the justice ministry I work for, not the Ministry of the Interior. I don’t think I’d much like to work for a ministry that could do that.” She showed him the screen of her phone.

  “While you were talking, I was running a multilanguage search for those letters, I-F-T-I. The only hits I got were in Arabic, mainly names, unless the T could have been an R, and in that case it’s ‘Ifriqiya,’ the old name for North Africa. And if the final letter was unfinished and the extra stroke was making it into an A we could get iftar, the meal Muslims eat after the Ramadan fast. I don’t think anyone would want to paint that on a castle wall. There’s another one, iftikhar. It means ‘proud.’ ”

  A very faint idea began to form and almost as quickly it went, too elusive to stay. He recognized these subterranean mental stirrings. Sometimes Bruno thought of them as hunches, and sometimes as an idea coming from a part of his brain that was not entirely his—a part formed of curiosity, experience and intuition—that kept churning, calculating and making hypotheses that would suddenly erupt as a breakthrough. He knew the components of this latest puzzle—an ancient château and an Arabic name, Crusaders and Templars, a modern woman falling or perhaps being pushed to her death—and at some point and in some mysterious way they would fall into a pattern that made sense to him.

  Chapter 8

  Bruno seldom paid much attention to the thirty-five-hour workweek he was supposed to respect, but wondered whether that might also be an item Amélie would be monitoring. He shrugged. The ministry could hardly complain if he worked longer hours of his own free will. There was something he needed to check, but perhaps she was watching her own hours.

  “Are you prepared for one more job today?”

  She checked her watch. “As long as I’m back at the hotel by seven. That gives us a couple of hours. I’m having dinner with some of the local Socialists tonight. I want to see if I can get them to launch a youth group. It’s depressing how few of the local parties have one.”

  “Is that how you got interested in politics?”

  “No, it began with my parents, who talked politics all the time. My mother’s on the left and my dad’s more of a Green. Later, when I was at school, there were the riots in the cities when kids burned all those cars. Then came the recession and it all became more serious, and now it’s what I want to do.”

  Bruno drove out of St. Denis past Hubert’s wine cave heading for Le Buisson where he could take the road that led to the Dordogne Valley. Making a mental note to introduce Amélie to the local wines, he turned off to the left to what he thought of as the suburb of St. Denis, homes built in the 1950s and 1960s, now extended with new tracts of housing meant for the growing numbers of retirees from northern and eastern France who preferred the kinder climate of the Périgord. Most of them were priced at around a hundred thousand euros, small houses with two bedrooms, a single bathroom and a garden large enough for a lawn, a vegetable patch and a terrace for outdoor meals. They looked as though they belonged in Provence rather than the Périgord, with walls of white stucco and roofs of semicircular tiles. Bruno stopped at one such structure at the corner of two roads. It was larger than the others, with more garden and a third bedroom in the upper story of the small tower that anchored the two wings of the house.

  When the door opened, he was embraced by Dilla, the wife of Momu, the math teacher at the local collège. They were good friends, and he was fond of them both, and of Dilla’s couscous and their annual méchoui feast, when they roasted a whole lamb for their friends. They were firmly irreligious, drank wine and spirits and always attended the town’s rugby games to watch their son Karim, the team’s star forward. His infant children helped to compensate for the loss of their adopted son, Sami, an autistic boy whose death they blamed on jihadists. Bruno introduced Amélie, and then Dilla bent down to greet Balzac as Momu emerged from the living room to embrace him in turn. From behind Momu came the sound of baroque music.

  After a brief exchange, Bruno showed them a printout of the photo he’d taken of the letters. “The final letter could just be an accident, scrawled when the woman who painted it fell to her death. Mean anything to you?”

  “Was this the unknown woman who died at Commarque?” Dilla asked. “It was just on the radio news, but there was nothing about any writing. It’s so sad, at such a lovely place. I’ll never visit it again without thinking of her.”

  “It was a fortress,” Amélie said flatly. “A whole lot more people were probably killed there over the centuries.”

  “Yes, of course,” Dilla replied, giving Amélie a sideways glance before leading them into the sitting room where Momu turned down the music and offered them a drink. Amélie asked for tea, and Br
uno said that would be fine for him. Beside Momu’s armchair was a pile of his pupils’ homework and a glass of what looked like scotch. The room bore not a single trace of his Algerian heritage, and the bookcase seemed filled with books in French. A copy of the latest Le Monde Diplomatique lay on a coffee table.

  “Why paint an Arabic word in roman letters?” Momu asked, studying the photo. He read them aloud and shrugged. “It could be iftin, which means ‘light,’ or iftinan, which means ‘enchantment.’ It could be a name, Iftikhar, not very common in the Arab world, but you find it in Sudan and in Pakistan and maybe Persia. There’s a Pakistani poet, Iftikhar Arif.”

  “Does the name mean anything?”

  “ ‘That which creates pride or a sense of worthiness,’ so you could translate it as ‘honor’ or ‘glory.’ Nichan Iftikhar was the Order of Glory in the Ottoman Empire, a bit like our Légion d’Honneur.”

  “Could it be any other word?”

  “Not that I can think of offhand. But if you like, I’ll call a friend who’s more of a literary scholar than I am.”

  Dilla came with a tray holding the tiny glasses for the tea and an old fat-bottomed silver teapot with a high neck and spout that she had inherited from her family. The room suddenly filled with the scent of mint, and Momu stood up to pour the heavily sweetened tea into the glasses from a great height, evidently proud of his skill. Bruno knew that custom required that he drink three glasses. Balzac nibbled contentedly at the biscuit Dilla had brought for him.

  “Is it always this sweet?” Amélie asked, after emptying her glass.

  “Always,” said Dilla, solemnly. Amélie looked abashed.

  Bruno thought he’d better change the subject. “This is the woman who fell to her death.” He handed each of them a printout of the photo he’d taken.

  “The poor woman,” Momu murmured as he studied the face. Then he looked up. “She doesn’t look Arabic or Pakistani. I’d have said she’s European.”

  “She probably wasn’t alone. Somebody took away the paint can and probably also the rope that we think they were using for the climb. I can leave you the printouts. It may help your literary friend.”

  Bruno finished his third glass of tea, thanked Dilla and rose. “My love to the grandchildren,” he said as he left.

  Bruno dropped his companion at the hotel, telling her he’d be patrolling the town market by eight the following morning. She bid Balzac goodbye with a kiss on his head, shook Bruno’s hand, wished him a good evening and thanked him for an interesting day. He picked up a bottle of Château de la Jaubertie white wine at the cave before heading for Pamela’s riding school and the ritual of the weekly dinner with his friends. It was the turn of Fabiola and her partner, Gilles, to cook, so Bruno’s responsibility was wine and getting some water from the spring on Pamela’s land.

  But first there were the horses to be exercised, and he looked forward to all of it, the perfect way to end a working day. There was the apple to be given to Hector, the struggle to pull on his riding boots and stamp them down to fit. There was the welcoming scent of horses and fresh straw, the heft of the saddle in his arms and the regular game of Hector blowing out his stomach as Bruno tried to secure the saddle strap. Bruno would knee him gently in the belly to remind his horse that he knew this trick and then tighten the strap.

  The stables were empty when he arrived. He was a little late, but Hector was waiting for him, and there was a note on Hector’s door in Pamela’s handwriting to say they had taken the ridge trail to Audrix. Bruno gave Hector his treat and lingered, enjoying the warm breath on the palm of his hand. He leaned his head forward to rest it against Hector’s neck. Bruno stepped back and saw Hector lean down to nuzzle the dog he’d known since Balzac was a puppy. Bruno wondered whether Hector thought of the basset hound as a miniature horse and Balzac thought of the horse as a gigantic dog. No matter, the two animals were friends, evidently happy to see each other.

  When Bruno put on the bridle, he noticed somebody had used saddle soap on the leather. That would have been Félix, transformed by Pamela’s good sense and the experience of horses from a sullen young delinquent into a helpful and enthusiastic stableboy and a promising horseman.

  With no other horses to slow him down, Hector could barely restrain himself until they were out of the paddock, heading past the house and up the ridge. Miranda, Pamela’s partner in running the riding school, gave him a wave from the kitchen window as he passed, and then Hector was powering his way up the modest slope and onto the open ground ahead. Within moments he had gone from a canter to a steady run, not quite a gallop but a pace he could keep up for hours.

  At the entrance to the bridle trail through the woods, Bruno slowed the horse and then turned him, waiting for Balzac to catch up. They trotted on, the three of them together, past a place where Bruno remembered seeing a nest of cèpe mushrooms the previous fall. Then the trees thinned, and he could see the small tower of Audrix church in the distance and a group of horses with their riders even farther off, maybe two kilometers ahead. He gave Hector his rein, and with other horses in sight Hector stretched into a gallop and Bruno narrowed his eyes against the wind.

  “That looked like fun,” said Gilles as Bruno joined them. He was riding Victoria, Pamela’s elderly mare. Fabiola was on a well-mannered Selle Français that had come with the riding school, and Félix was riding the Andalusian. Pamela was on Primrose, the horse she had originally wanted to buy before deciding to make an offer for the whole riding school. Three more horses and a pony, all unsaddled, were on leading reins, just along for the exercise.

  “It was glorious,” Bruno replied, beaming with the pleasure of seeing his friends and the thrill of the ride. They trotted on, past Audrix and back by the shorter route, Pamela leading and Bruno bringing up the rear. It was a position Hector hated if his master was riding fast, but at this gentle pace, he seemed content to enjoy the outing. They came over the top of the ridge and stopped, still stunned despite its familiarity by the magnificence of the view. The whole of the double valley opened up below them, the oxbow curves of the River Vézère flowing into the Dordogne. The houses of the village of Limeuil seemed almost to be clambering up the steep slope to the latest of the many fortresses that had squatted on this hilltop for centuries, watching over the confluence of the two rivers and the trade and revenues they had brought.

  Pamela turned her horse’s head, and they rode on down the slope to come to the rear entrance of the riding school. Gilles and Fabiola left the horses still saddled and headed for the kitchen to start the meal going. Pamela gave Bruno a hug when they dismounted, holding him just a second too long as women seemed to do with former lovers, perhaps to remind him of what he was missing despite it being she who’d ended the affair.

  Together with Félix they unsaddled the horses, brushed them down, hung the saddles and bridles in the tack room and then sluiced off in the stable sink. Balzac stood waiting for his dinner before curling up in the corner of Hector’s stall. Félix filled his bowl from the sack of dog biscuits that Bruno made at home. He’d brought a large stock to the riding school.

  The others were already gathered in the vast kitchen of the old manor house, and Bruno felt a warm glow of affection for them all and a sense of comfort at the ritual they had established of riding and then dining together each Monday evening. The baron was slicing cucumbers for the salad at the work surface by the sink. Gilles was cutting bread into cubes as Fabiola grated the cheese for her fondue. From upstairs came the sound of laughter and splashing as the children of Miranda and Florence, who taught science at the collège, enjoyed their bathtime together. Pamela began to prepare the cheese board. Miranda’s father, Jack Crimson, was opening wine, and Bruno added his bottle to the collection.

  “Come on, we’ll get the water,” Bruno told Félix, and the two of them set off up the hill with the big plastic bidons to the spring that burbled from a knot of rocks.

  The trip to the spring had become another part of the Monday evenin
g ritual. It had started when Pamela and Miranda first bought the riding school, moved into the big house and began to renovate the gîtes for rental. Bruno, the baron, Gilles and Fabiola would bring casseroles and stews to help the two overworked women. Then Florence, science teacher at the local collège, had joined them, bringing her infant twins to play with Miranda’s children and help them learn French.

  From the baron in his seventies, Jack Crimson in his sixties, down to the children and now the teenage Félix, they covered most of the age groups. Bruno had one day been struck by the thought that this group of friends had become the nearest he had ever known to a family. He enjoyed the presence of the children, freshly scented from the bath, eating together at their end of the long kitchen table and then being carried sleepily to bed. The mix of languages the friends spoke together had done wonders for Bruno’s English and for Miranda’s French, and the children seemed to have developed a Franglish patois of their own.

  “Here’s another new one for you to try,” said Jack, handing Bruno a glass of white wine when he returned with the water. “Domaine de l’Ancienne Cure at Colombier. I went there today.”

  Bruno grinned at the Englishman, retired after a career in British intelligence, who now spent one afternoon each week visiting a different vineyard in the Bergerac region. With some nine hundred winegrowers to call on, he claimed it was a useful incentive to live another twenty years. Bruno knew Christian Roche, the winemaker at l’Ancienne Cure, as well as his wines, but pretended he didn’t, since Jack so obviously enjoyed thinking he was educating Bruno.