The Templars' Last Secret

by Martin Walker

  Three men climbed out of the cab of the sensor machine and various sensors were placed. The motor was started and something that looked like a giant hammer slammed down hard onto the ground, sending out echoes through the earth that reverberated through the soles of Bruno’s shoes and sent Balzac leaping nervously into his arms. The chief technician remained in his cab with a laptop, monitoring the geophone sensors and the seismic map they began to draw of the surrounding ground.

  “Is that it?” Bruno asked Horst after introducing Amélie. “A big slam on the ground and they record the echoes?”

  “I’m no expert, but there’s a lot more to it, which is why they’ll be working here all week,” Horst said. “This is just building up an initial picture.”

  He explained that the technicians, on loan from the oil industry, also had something called a Vibroseis, a big plate that could be laid on the ground and then set to vibrate at various frequencies to get a more detailed picture. The Vibroseis was used in delicate areas where dynamite was too destructive. At the same time the technicians would be adjusting the location of the geophones. Then they would deploy the GPR system, ground-penetrating radar. Depending on the nature of the earth and rock and the levels of groundwater, its range could penetrate as far as fifteen meters down.

  “What are you hoping to find?” Amélie asked.

  “New caves, possibly graves or even hidden passages to get in and out from the château. We also want to track the watercourses.”

  “What makes you think there are more caves to be found?”

  “Informed instinct.” Horst smiled at her, an appreciative twinkle in his eye that went oddly with his white hair and beard. “You have to remember that the ground level here is much higher these days, with all the silt that’s been washed down by the river. It was four, maybe seven, meters lower in medieval times. But in prehistoric times it would have been as much as twenty meters lower, so I suspect there are more cave openings that are simply below today’s ground level. And given what we have already found here, this was evidently a major center of prehistoric society, a real crossroads.”

  “What did you find here already?” Amélie asked. “I’m sorry, I don’t know much about all this prehistory.”

  Horst explained about the Venus of Laussel, the cave of Cap Blanc, the life-size horse’s head and various other engravings in the caves beneath the fortress. Prehistoric peoples had lived here at different times over thousands of years, he explained, so much so that the habitation must have been almost constant.

  “As well as being a natural crossroads for man, I suspect that this valley was a natural migration route for the reindeer on which they lived,” he added. “That’s why we think there’s a lot more to be found.”

  The chaos on the path to the parking lot having been sorted out, people were drifting back to the temporary fence. Sergeant Jules had moved it to allow access to the steps up to the château, and the count was smiling as Jean-Philippe sold entrance tickets and guidebooks to the crowds thronging to get in.

  “What did you make of the graffiti on the castle wall?” Bruno asked.

  Horst shrugged. “The Middle Ages are not my period. I assume something to do with Crusaders or the Templars. You could always ask my medievalist friend Dumesnil who wrote a book on the Templars. In fact, he should be here by now, since he’s an authority on Commarque and wanted to see this new technology at work. But you saw the issue of Archéologie with my article on the Venus figurines? In the back, in the news roundup, there was a photo of some Crusader castle in Israel that had been treated the same way, the same neon-orange paint.”

  “I’ll look it up,” said Bruno, thinking that if the dead woman had indeed been Israeli, there could be a connection. “Was it the same four letters or was it more?”

  “I don’t recall. I’ve got some copies at the museum, so I can look it up when I get back.”

  “Don’t bother,” said Amélie, pulling out her phone. “Did you say it was called Archéologie? And which month? It’s bound to be online.”

  Bruno and Horst looked at each other a little shamefaced, each realizing that they had not yet grown into this age of instant communication and instant research where Amélie was so evidently at home.

  “What the hell…” Amélie’s fingers were plucking fruitlessly at the screen of her phone. “Don’t say there’s no signal. I can’t believe it. How do you manage?”

  This time the glance that Horst and Bruno exchanged was a little smug. For them to be out of Internet contact seemed quite normal.

  “We manage, mademoiselle,” Horst said. “But this is la France profonde, the very heart of the countryside. And I may be German, but I’ve become very attached to this place and its ways.”

  “And even more attached to the womenfolk,” said Bruno. “Amélie met Clothilde at the museum yesterday.” He turned to Amélie. “This is the man she’s marrying after one of the longest courtships in history.”

  “Not my fault,” said Horst. “I’d have married Clothilde the first week I met her, given the chance.”

  At that point, a fair-haired young man who had been descending on foot from the parking lot waved and approached them. He was dressed in what the French called the English style—heavy brogue shoes, neatly pressed trousers of burgundy corduroy with a matching tie over a checked shirt and a beautifully cut jacket of heavy tweed. And he was smoking a pipe, which he removed to greet Horst and shake his hand. As Horst introduced him as Dumesnil, Bruno noticed the lines around the man’s eyes. He was older than Bruno expected, perhaps in his fifties.

  “Sorry to be late, Professor Vogelstern,” Dumesnil said. “I was delayed by some confusion at the parking lot up the hill.”

  “The confusion was all down here just a few minutes ago. Sightseers were brought out by the newspaper story on the Templars,” Horst said.

  “Newspaper story?” Dumesnil replied, looking blank.

  Horst explained, and Dumesnil’s face broke into a boyish grin. “They may not be altogether wrong. I’ve long thought Commarque may still hold some secrets, and frankly, my dear Horst, it’s our turn. You archaeologists have unearthed some wonderful finds here but not much for us medievalists.” He seemed to jump as the echo-sounder began pounding the ground again. “Maybe they’ll find something in my period this time.”

  Dumesnil turned to greet the count, who was walking across to join them, hand outstretched to be shaken, and announcing, “I see you’ve met Bruno, our local policeman. He used to be a sergeant in the army and you can tell him what you told me about where the word comes from.”

  “ ‘Sergeant’ was the name Richard Lionheart gave to his personal bodyguard of twenty men-at-arms in the twelfth century—sergeants-at-arms,” Dumesnil said. “It comes originally from the Latin word for servant.”

  Bruno nodded politely. “Thank you, I didn’t know that, but I’d really like to pick your brain a bit about the Templars. A woman fell to her death here yesterday in the early hours, and the count told us about earlier incursions by Templar enthusiasts looking for lost treasure. Is there anything in that?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think anyone really knows. The Templars became a very wealthy order when they started doing more trading and banking than fighting. Whether they buried their gold as many of these enthusiasts seem to believe is a mystery. Being bankers, they probably preferred to have their money working and so they lent a great deal of it to the French crown.”

  “So what remains of the fabled treasure?”

  “Some believe it is the Holy Grail and others say it is the Ark of the Covenant or the original tools of the masons who built Solomon’s Temple. You should know that the Templars’ full title was the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. But most people assume it also includes the gold and jewels they managed to hide from the French king.”

  “Do you believe this treasure exists?”

  “No, I don’t, but I’m prepared to admit that it’s possible.
The Templars invented modern banking, organizing financial transfers between Europe and the Holy Land. If you volunteered to go on Crusade, you could give money to the Templars in France or Germany and be given a credit note that you could cash with the Templars in Jerusalem—but only after the Templars took their fee. They also ran a form of shipping insurance and financed trading caravans along the Silk Roads to China and the Indian Ocean. Over two centuries, they amassed a great fortune, but how much of it remains today is another question. They spent most of their money building castles that were then lost to the Saracens.”

  “So even though you doubt the treasure exists, you think it’s possible that modern-day Templar enthusiasts might be looking for it here at Commarque?”

  “Oh, we know they’re looking, here in France, in Spain, in Scotland, even in Cyprus and the Middle East. And they certainly have been right here. Over the years their metal detectors must have gone over every inch of ground. Not that it stops such people. As somebody once said, when people cease to believe in God, the problem is not that they believe in nothing, it’s that they are prepared to believe in absolutely anything.”

  The ground seemed to lurch beneath their feet as the great metal plate pounded again. Horst laughed as he staggered, just managing to keep his balance.

  “If there is anything to be found, these seismic surveys and the ground-penetrating radar will find it,” he said.

  “What about you, Monsieur Dumesnil?” Bruno asked. “Do you believe there is something to be found?”

  “I certainly hope so. What is significant is what we have not found here. There are many prehistoric remains, which medieval people must have seen and pondered. But they left us no similar remains except for the château itself—only paper records of charters and endless lawsuits between families. Why should that be? I suspect that if anything new turns up, it’s more likely to belong to my period than to Horst’s cavemen.”

  Chapter 11

  Bruno stopped at the Maison de la Presse to scan the back pages of Archéologie for the account of the graffiti daubed on the ruined Crusader fortress and to make a note of the details. Once in his office, he searched the Internet for its name and found a news story in the English-language version of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. A slogan had been painted in Hebrew a month earlier at a place in the Galilee called Beit She’an. The paper’s translation was “The Testament of Iftikhar is a forgery.”

  “ ‘Iftikhar’—that fits with the letters at Commarque,” he said to Amélie, but her fingers were already flying over the keyboard of her phone.

  “ ‘Iftikhar ad-Daula, the Muslim governor of Jerusalem in the year 1099 when he surrendered the citadel of the city to the First Crusade in return for free passage for himself, his family and his guards,’ ” she said, reading aloud from a website she had found. “There’s some controversy about it, since the Crusaders slaughtered just about everybody else in the city, Arabs, Jews and even Christians. So why would they let him go?”

  “Interesting question,” said Bruno. “But what is this testament?”

  “Iftikhar supposedly wrote some statement as part of the deal to let him and his family go, declaring that Jerusalem was of no religious significance to Islam and therefore he and his troops could abandon it with a clear conscience.”

  “I thought the whole point about Jerusalem was that it was sacred to all three religions, to Jews, Christians and Muslims,” said Bruno.

  “Me too. But now it seems there’s a whole controversy with Islamic scholars claiming that the Jews had nothing to do with Jerusalem and that the place was always inhabited by Arabs called Jebusites or Canaanites and that Solomon’s Temple was built elsewhere. Jewish scholars are counterclaiming that the Arabs fabricated the claim that Muhammad in a dream visited Jerusalem at the place where the al-Aqsa Mosque now stands. And this Testament of Iftikhar is supposed to prove it.”

  Bruno felt his head spinning. “What has all this got to do with Commarque?”

  “I have no idea, except that it now seems that the dead woman was Israeli. And we know Commarque had a Templar connection. This supposed Testament of Iftikhar, which had long since disappeared, had been in their keeping. The Templars’ headquarters were on the Temple Mount, on which now stands the al-Aqsa Mosque. That’s the golden dome you always see on TV news reports about Jerusalem.”

  “I think we’d better let J-J sort all this out,” Bruno said and reached for his phone, which began ringing the moment before he touched it. A familiar voice was demanding, “Have you heard the news about the Muslims?”

  “Bonjour, Yacov,” said Bruno. “No, I haven’t. What news?”

  Yacov Kaufman was a Paris-based lawyer, grandson of the elderly lady who was paying for the new scout camp, as well as for a museum of the Périgord Resistance in World War II and the sanctuary the region had provided for Jewish children. Bruno and Yacov had become friends when Bruno helped trace the family and the farm where Yacov’s grandmother Maya had been sheltered.

  “The Muslim scouts have backed out, they’re withdrawing from the opening ceremony,” Yacov said angrily. “They won’t send any of their scouts for the opening week. They claim they just found out the camp is being financed by Israeli money.”

  “Are all the Protestants and Catholics still coming?”

  “Yes, but the whole point was to make it an ecumenical camp,” Yacov said.

  As they spoke, Bruno quickly scrolled through that day’s accumulated e-mails on his desktop computer. Mostly they contained negative replies from hotels, campsites and gîte owners in response to his queries about any rentals in the names of Leah Wolinsky or Leah Ben-Ari. Suddenly he paused, spotting the e-mail from the Jewish scouts that told him of the Muslim scouts’ decision.

  Bruno shook his head in frustration, thinking that only in France did they have four separate Boy Scouts—for the Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims. The formal opening was to be the following weekend, the spring holiday for schools.

  “Why not invite some German scouts instead? It makes for a good symbol of European reconciliation.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” said Yacov. “I’ll make some calls. But I also want to know if it’s convenient for me to come down this weekend, just so I can reassure Maya that everything is in order. Then I’ll come back to Paris, meet her at the airport when she flies in next week and bring her down for the opening.”

  “I’m going to be a bit tied up with a wedding for some friends of mine on Saturday, but you’re always welcome, Yacov, and so is your grandma. I can’t put you up, I’m afraid. Several of the wedding guests are staying at my place.”

  “That’s no problem, I don’t need babysitting. Who’s getting married?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve met them, Clothilde Daumier from the museum in Les Eyzies is marrying Horst, a German archaeologist. They’ve been a couple for years and years, but they’re finally tying the knot.”

  “I don’t think I’ve met them. I’ll try not to get in your way. Is Pamela still renting out her gîtes?”

  “She is, but she’s moved, taken over a nearby riding school. I’ll ask if she has a place free, but I think she may be full with wedding guests. If so, I’ll book you into a hotel. How many nights?”

  Yacov said he’d stay just two nights, Friday and Saturday, confirmed the date, offered to buy Bruno and the mayor lunch on Friday and hung up.

  “Who was that?” Amélie asked. “It sounded rather official, but he has a lovely voice.”

  “That was a lawyer friend from Paris, Yacov, you’ll like him,” Bruno began. He was about to tell her of the scouts’ project but almost immediately the desktop phone rang again.

  “Bonjour, Bruno, Jack Crimson here. About that daubed slogan you showed me last night. One of my old colleagues rang me back to say he thinks it’s connected to similar graffiti painted recently on a castle in Israel.”

  “About the Testament of Iftikhar,” said Bruno.

  “You know about that? I’m
impressed. But it seems there are some tricky political and diplomatic issues attached to all this, and I thought I should tip off our friend the brigadier that there may be more to this young woman than meets the eye. Unless, that is, you’ve already done so.”

  “No, we’ve just come across this connection,” said Bruno. “And it’s all thanks to a colleague from the justice ministry with a smartphone that she plays like a maestro. She’s even come up with a name, or rather two, for our dead woman. She’s an Israeli named Leah Ben-Ari, and she seems also to be a Frenchwoman named Leah Wolinsky. They may be one and the same. And she has a Palestinian boyfriend called al-Husayni. J-J is working on it. If you want to call the brigadier, go ahead. He’ll probably take it more seriously from you.”

  The brigadier was a senior official in the interior ministry. Bruno had come under his command before and turned down an offer to join the brigadier’s team in Paris on a permanent basis. Jack Crimson and the brigadier had worked together in the past, were on first-name terms and maintained friendly relations. Whenever both of them became involved in something, Bruno was aware that matters had reached far beyond his pay grade. The brigadier always observed the courtesies, asking the mayor of St. Denis for Bruno to be temporarily assigned to his staff at the ministry, but with a subtle threat to trigger Bruno’s transfer from reserve status in the French army to active duty.

  “Who is the brigadier?” Amélie asked. Bruno gave a suitably cautious explanation.

  “Sounds like intelligence,” she said, grinning at him. “This is getting to be fun.”

  “This is getting to the point where a country policeman like me bows out and lets the big boys take over.”

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  Bruno gave her a stern look. “What do you mean by that?”

  Amélie shrugged. “I already told you I wanted to follow you around on this job. There’s some other intriguing stories told at the ministry about some of the cases you’ve been involved in—some rich American you broke out of jail, a shoot-out in a cave, that mysterious business with the young jihadist who made bombs in Afghanistan, the autistic one…” She paused. “Would he have had something to do with that friend of yours we met yesterday, Momu?”