“Thanks for coming to see me, Bruno,” Yacov replied. “We are friends, but I’m not talking about this.” He had then turned his face away and, although Bruno waited, he said not another word.
“We’re doing the opening of the scout camp next month,” Bruno told him after a long silence. “The doctors say you should be able to attend by then. And the Muslim scouts are coming this time.”
“Good,” said Yacov, closing his eyes. “I’ll look forward to seeing you there, Bruno.”
Bruno had gone to the room next door where Louise, the policewoman of Les Eyzies, was recovering well from two shots in her right lung. She faced six months of rehabilitation, but the doctors said she should then have a good prospect of returning to her job. Bruno suspected she’d retire, take her pension and then find a less perilous profession.
And now standing under the great overhang of the cliff at Commarque, Bruno was giving a blow-by-blow account of the opening over the phone to Auguste Dumesnil. He was still convalescing but eager to learn what secrets the cave contained.
“Horst and Clothilde are looking at the walls and taking photos of the engravings, but I can’t see them yet from where I am,” Bruno told him. “I don’t see any paintings. The count is studying the tomb, just touching the lid with one finger, not trying to move it yet.”
The opening of the tomb would be the crucial moment for which the TV channel had agreed to finance the whole operation. But permission had come only after much haggling with the Ministry of Culture for its approval to open the cave, and a great deal of research. Much of it had been done by Dumesnil from his hospital bed, with legwork by Horst and Clothilde. Then in Paris some crucial political strings had been pulled, first by Isabelle and the brigadier and then by the minister of justice, Amélie’s friend, and the cultural bureaucracy had grumpily agreed.
Isabelle, back in Paris, had found the librarians who could track Leah’s earlier research at the national archive in Paris. Leah had been looking for any traces of a Crusader named Gérard de Commarque, an ancestor of the count, and for another known only as Velos. She had apparently found very little and expressed her frustration to the archivists. But she did establish that Gérard and Velos had been French Crusaders who had been appointed constables of Beit She’an when it was briefly a royal domain. When it was later granted to Adam de Bessan of the powerful Béthune family, Gérard and Velos had joined the Templars.
Leah had also asked for directions to the Chapel of St. Martin, built in the Vézère Valley by King Henry II of England in penance for the murder of Archbishop Thomas à Becket in his cathedral of Canterbury in A.D. 1170. Becket’s assassins were four knights who interpreted the king’s angry outburst “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” as an order for his execution. After murdering Becket they traveled to Jerusalem and joined the Templar Knights. Tradition says their tombs are located by the entrance to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Intrigued by her research, Isabelle had taken the early morning flight to Bergerac to attend the opening. She stood apart from the others, on the small bridge that spanned the stream trickling down to the River Beune, gazing up at the soaring stones of the fortress tower. Bruno had not seen her since those last moments of the fight above the museum when she’d come up with the medics after the commando team had given the all clear and she’d held his hand as his head wound had been dressed. After the medic had cleaned the blood from his face and flushed his eyes, her face had been the first thing Bruno had seen. Once assured by the medics that Bruno was in no danger, she had left to return to the command center and begin drafting her report. He would never forget that she had been there.
Leah’s instincts had been sound in coming to Commarque. For when the top of the tomb with its sculpture of a recumbent Knight Templar was levered aside, it was not entirely empty. Inside lay a skeleton, crushed almost into dust by the weight of chain mail and rusted armor. Heaviest of all was the great iron sword whose handle contained a small ingot of gold, which almost entirely covered a sliver of ancient wood.
Engraved into the crosspiece of the sword were the words in Latin: ECCE VERA ET SANCTA CRUX, “Behold the true and holy cross.”
“A piece of the holy cross,” breathed the TV producer beside Bruno in what sounded like reverence. Bruno had learned from the count that the Crusaders had bought from the cunning merchants of Jerusalem enough supposed pieces of the true cross of the Crucifixion to build a galleon, and enough of the nails supposedly hammered into it to build a modern ironclad.
From the intact skull, it was evident that the body had been bareheaded when it was buried. Behind the skull stood an ornate helmet, tall and topped with a dome and almost complete. Only the visor had fallen and crumbled away. Through the gap where the visor had been, something glinted.
“I can’t get the camera in low enough,” said the cameraman, and the producer brought in the flexible lens that had been used to look inside the cave when it was still sealed.
“Jesus Christ,” said the cameraman. “It’s a bowl on a stand, maybe a cup. And I think it might be gold. A golden chalice.”
“Could this be the Holy Grail?” said the producer.
“Mon Dieu,” said Amélie, crossing herself.
“What? What?” cried Dumesnil over the phone.
“I can’t see yet,” said Bruno, exchanging glances with the count, who gave a massive shrug and rolled his eyes.
Bruno lifted his gaze to Horst and Clothilde, knowing they were even more aware than he of the large number of fake relics. They had turned their backs on the tomb and were staring in wonder and delight, hand in hand, at the prehistoric engraving of a giant mammoth with enormous tusks carved into the rock of the cave. Clothilde turned and beckoned her friends to join them. The count led the way, Amélie still clinging to his arm. Bruno began to follow and was suddenly aware of Isabelle at his side and taking his hand, her eyes on the great mammoth ahead.
“May I stay for lunch?” she asked. “At your place.”
Acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction, and all the characters and situations are inventions, except that some owe a little more to reality than others. My friend the count, Hubert de Commarque, showed me around his wondrous ruined château of Commarque and sparked something in my imagination that led to this novel. The magnificent castle was built by the French upon the rock that contains the prehistoric caves and engravings. It was entrusted to the Templars when Gérard de Commarque went on Crusade and was briefly captured by the English in the Hundred Years’ War, embracing in one place and building much of the region’s fabled past. I hope that many readers will feel inspired to visit this amazing place, rich in tens of thousands of years of history, and share my admiration for the heroic efforts the count has made to bring it back to life. If the Holy Grail were to exist, it could have few more imposing resting places. I warmly recommend the short films of this most noble of ruined castles that may be found on the website http://www.commarque.com/#!filmjp/c1qjf.
One of the indulgences an author can enjoy is to revive old characters from previous books. My first novel about the region, The Caves of Périgord, introduced two fictional archaeologists, the German professor Horst Vogelstern and Clothilde Daumier, a French curator from the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies. I have resuscitated them in previous books, but their two friends and colleagues in that adventure, the American art historian Lydia Dean and the English officer Jack Manners, have lain dormant until now. It has been a pleasure to bring them back to literary life.
I have also enjoyed making the link between Les Eyzies, the home of the Cro-Magnon people, and the excellent museum by the River Düssel in Germany, where the first bones of Neanderthal man were identified after being unearthed in 1868. I am indebted to Sara Willwerth and friends at Buchhandlung Weber in Erkrath-Hochdahl who showed me around the museum and the historic valley named for a seventeenth-century German pastor, Joachim Neander.
Almost all that is written in thi
s novel about the genetics of prehistoric people, about the Venus figurines and the marvelous cave of Lascaux is as true as modern research can establish. The Testament of Iftikhar from the fall of Jerusalem to the First Crusade in 1099 is an old and disputed legend, whose veracity may not match the explosive political potential of such a document in today’s Middle East. Anyone interested in pursuing this vexed argument between Jewish and Arab scholars over the history of Jerusalem might start with Daniel Pipes’s seminal essay “The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem,” published in the Middle East Quarterly, September 2001.
I am grateful to the staff of the Musée National de Préhistoire in Les Eyzies for the many interesting and informative hours spent attending their lectures and, among the exhibits, watching their videos of modern artisans making flint tools, bone harpoons and prehistoric paints and brushes. They deserve better than the carnage I have inflicted upon their terraces in this novel, but I suspect they might enjoy the image of a modern terrorist laid low by a Cro-Magnon spear.
As always, this novel owes a great deal to my friends and neighbors in the Périgord, to the warmth of their welcome, the quality of their food and wines and their generosity in introducing me and my family to the splendid way of life they have inherited from their ancestors and maintained to this day. It is a privilege to live among them, to eat and drink with them and hear their stories and to share something of their profound sense of the history they inhabit.
My wife, Julia, coauthor of the Bruno cookbook, and our daughters, Kate and Fanny, are always the first readers of my drafts and my helpful and supportive critics, and Kate is the custodian of the website brunochiefofpolice.com. Jane and Caroline Wood in Britain, Jonathan Segal in New York and Anna von Planta in Zurich do wonders with my raw manuscripts, and I am most grateful to them all. And our dear basset hound, Benson, is now very old and too lame for walks, but remains a great comfort and companion, sleeping beneath the desk and warming my feet as I write.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Walker served as foreign correspondent for The Guardian in Africa, the Soviet Union, the United States and Europe and was the editor of United Press International. He is a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson Center and directed the Global Policy Council, both in Washington, D.C. He now lives mainly in the Périgord region of France, where he writes, chairs the jury of the Prix Ragueneau cooking prize and is a chevalier of the Confrérie du Pâté de Périgueux. This is his tenth novel featuring Bruno, chief of police.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
The Templars' Last Secret Page 29
