Treasure Templari Read online

  She leaned forward, reached for an accordion file folder sitting in the middle of the conference room table, and removed a color photograph of a painting. The artwork depicted a handful of medieval noblemen sitting on horseback. “This is one of the panels from the Ghent Altarpiece,” she explained. From the article she had sent him, Cam knew that the piece was comprised of 12 panels, some of which were also painted on their backside for display when the hinged panels swung closed. Completed in the early 1400s by the brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck, it was one of the first paintings to master the use of oil-based paints by mixing pigments with linseed oil, which led to enriched vibrancy. One observer compared the enhancement to the advent of color television. “It’s called the Just Judges painting. Take a look.”

  “This is the one Hitler thought was a map to the Holy Grail?” Cam asked.

  Shelby nodded. “This is actually a copy, painted from a photograph. The original was stolen in 1934 and never recovered. As I said, Hitler was convinced it led to the Holy Grail. He didn’t want to refer to the Holy Grail publicly, so he called it the Treasure Templari.” She smiled. “You know, because things always sound more important when you say them in Latin.”

  He studied the painting more closely. Was there something in the landscape that hinted at a hidden location for the Holy Grail? Or something in the identity of the men portrayed? If so, the clues were lost on Cam. “I hope you’re not showing this to me because you think I can figure it out.”

  She smiled. “No. People have been trying to decipher it for almost a century. The van Eyck brothers were known to embed clues and mysteries in their artwork. They loved word plays and games and riddles. In one painting, there’s a mirror—if you look with a magnifying glass, Jan van Eyck’s face is staring out of the mirror back at you. And on the frame of the Ghent Altarpiece is a short poem in which Jan teases Hubert about who is the better painter.” She paused. “But nobody’s been able to figure out the Grail mystery.” She looked up with wide eyes. “At least not that we know of.”

  “Including Hitler.”

  “That’s actually one of the mysteries. As I said, this one panel was stolen in 1934. Some people think Hitler was behind the heist, but then the local guy double-crossed him and kept the painting for himself. Later, during the war, the Nazis took the rest of the panels. But Hitler never got his hands on the Just Judges. There’s a story about how Hitler sent one of his senior officers to Belgium to try to find it and, when he couldn’t, he was so afraid of what Hitler would do that he committed suicide.”

  Cam listened, waiting for her to get to the point. He loved history, especially these kinds of historical mysteries, but he still had no idea why she had reached out.

  Shelby had turned and was staring at a lone sailboat crisscrossing the Charles. “Bruce is a big sailor. He likes to say that some people are like the land, rational and grounded and steady. Others are like the sea, turbulent and emotional. A few, the really successful ones, are like sailboats, coupling the power of the sea with some of the stability of the land. Those are the people who do great things.”

  “I can see that,” Cam replied. “Sort of like left brain and right brain. Combining intellect and creativity.”

  She nodded and turned back to him. “Anyway, as you might have predicted, the reason I reached out to you is that Bruce, through his connections in the art world, has found the Just Judges panel.” She held his eyes. “He wants to do a great thing. He wants you to help him find the Holy Grail.”

  Amanda kissed Cam as he entered, lingering for a moment as she breathed him in. She was tempted to lead him directly to the couch, but Astarte would be home any minute, and the last thing a fourteen-year-old girl wanted to walk in on was her parents snogging on the sofa. “How was your meeting?”

  He described Shelby’s odd request as they took a seat at the kitchen table. “And she wants to meet you.”

  “That’s quite a double date, searching for the Holy Grail. Couldn’t we just do dinner?”

  He grinned. “Yeah, I know. From the sounds of things even dinner might be a stretch. This guy Bruce is pretty antisocial.”

  “So how did he come upon the painting?”

  “Shelby wouldn’t say. My sense is that he runs in some sketchy circles. One of the big things in art thefts is for the crooks to ransom the works back to the insurance companies for ten or twenty cents on the dollar. It’s a good deal for the insurers, and there’s usually an unwritten understanding that the police will drop the case, so it works out for the thieves also.”

  “I’d imagine even ten cents can be a big number with some of these paintings.”

  Cam nodded. “Anyway, apparently Bruce serves as the intermediary on these deals. For a percentage, of course. And he also helps insurance companies advise museums how to improve their security systems.”

  “Sounds like a good gig. He gets paid to thwart the thieves, then gets paid again when they succeed.”

  “I wonder who pays him if he finds the Holy Grail.”

  Amanda lifted her chin. “That’s easy. The Church.”

  “You’re assuming the Holy Grail is something they would want.”

  “Actually, they’d pay double if it was something they didn’t, something that undermined their version of Christianity.” The Da Vinci Code book, for example, had theorized that the Holy Grail was the physical bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Obviously, the Church would not want that legend to be proven correct.

  “Good point. And one that begs the question: How do we look for something when we don’t know what it is? Hitler referred to it as the Treasure Templari, but that’s not much of a clue.”

  Amanda and Cam had been studying the medieval Knights Templar for the better part of a decade, and one of the most famous legends of the Templars held that they had discovered the Holy Grail while in Jerusalem. Amanda and Cam were therefore familiar with the various theories of what the Holy Grail might actually be. Most religious historians believed it to be the chalice which held the blood of Jesus. Others thought it was something more esoteric, such as ancient knowledge, or gnosis, which would allow its initiates to find fulfillment and spiritual enrichment. Still others suspected it to be objects known as the so-called Arma Christi, or instruments of Christ’s Passion, including the Crown of Thorns (recently rescued from the fire at Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral), the True Cross and the Spear of Destiny, which would bestow supernatural powers upon their owner. And then, of course, there was the whole Mary Magdalene and Jesus bloodline thing. Amanda shrugged. “Could be a cup, could be a cross, could be a spear, could be a vial of blood, could be a book or scroll or piece of parchment.”

  “Well, I can tell you what Hitler thought. He thought it was the Arma Christi. He wanted the magic powers.”

  “He was nothing if not single-minded. What does Bruce think it is?”

  Cam turned his palms up. “He has no idea. That’s why he needs our help.”

  Norman Plansky’s stomach clenched as he watched the mailman step from his truck, bypass the mailbox on the county highway, and slog his way up the muddy drive toward the construction trailer Norman had called home for the past year-and-a-half. Norman knew that an in-hand delivery almost always meant certified mail. And certified mail almost always meant bad news.

  He thought about jogging out in his underwear, his hairy white belly jiggling as he ran, maybe even with a lampshade on his head and waving a fly swatter, yelling, “Run, run, the British are coming!” He laughed aloud at the image in his mind. But he also knew it was the type of thing only he found funny. He and a few boys still in elementary school.

  With a forced smile, and fully dressed, Norman signed the card. (He was tempted to sign ‘Norm the Nebish,’ which was what the kids had called him in school and was still the way he thought of himself. But this was another of those things only he would find funny.) The return address on the envelope confirmed his fears: Catskill Hudson Bank. His lender. With a shaky hand he tore open the letter. H
e didn’t understand all the legalese, but he got the gist; they had been sending him letters like this for months. The court had signed off, and now the bank was foreclosing. He owed six-and-a-half million dollars, and counting. He had done the arithmetic a few weeks ago. Two thousand bucks per day. Eighty dollars an hour. Ninety-three cents every minute. It was like being locked inside a gridlocked taxi, just watching the meter tick, day after day after day. Grandpa had run the Levana Resort, named after the Hebrew word for moon, for almost sixty years. And Norman had lost it in less than two.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before flopping into the trailer’s only chair, his cat Squidward (named after the grumpy neighbor on the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants) scampering off just before Norman added to the disaster of a day by crushing his pet. It was over, then. Two years of work, and pretty much all of his inheritance—the money, the resort, even his grandfather’s Andy Warhol painting of Jacqueline Kennedy which Norman had been forced to auction off when he ran out of cash. At age 36, still single and burnt out from his job as guidance counselor, Norman and Squidward had moved from Long Island to the Catskills, cashed in his IRA, and pushed all his chips into the middle of the table. He had spent every summer helping Grandpa, so he knew the business. In many ways running a resort was like being a guidance counselor—convincing every single guest that he or she was important and valued, even as others around them (be they coworkers or kids in the cafeteria) treated them like garbage. And the Catskills were becoming trendy again—the New York Times recently compared it in popularity to the upscale Hamptons. But renovating the grand old resort had sucked up cash like some kind of cosmic black hole. Even so, he would have made it. Over-budget and way past deadline, but he would have finished. Would have been able to open for business, maybe dig his way out of debt. But then the bulldozer unearthed the burial items. Funerary objects, they were officially called—weapons and tools and jewelry. He still remembered the day: May 13, his birthday. Almost five months ago. Some gift. That was the last day the equipment ran. The find had shut down the project. Or at least slowed it to a glacial crawl. A month to get an archeological team out to investigate. Then the rains came, delaying things. Then a preliminary finding—a Native American burial ground. Then another delay to allow the local tribes to visit the property for a prayer ceremony. But still no official testing done, because the bank refused to release construction funds to pay for it. What was that old expression about justice delayed being justice denied? That’s what had happened here: Delaying the project had effectively denied him any chance at completion. The bank insisted on its interest being paid, the sand steadily, infuriatingly, sifting through the hourglass like a Chinese water torture. All the while, the contracting team was prevented from continuing its work.

  Norman shook his head. What were the odds? A Native American burial ground smack in the middle of the only portion of the resort land far enough from the river to site the septic system. He pictured the sign at the front desk: “Enjoy your stay at Levana, but please don’t use the toilets.”

  Feeling like he didn’t have the strength even to get out of his chair, he looked out the trailer’s lone window, down the slope toward the Neversink River, over what had turned out to be an ancient burial site. Just his luck. As a boy, he was the one kid in the neighborhood who never could seem to find an arrowhead. Now he had unearthed enough Indian artifacts to open a freaking museum.

  Amanda believed in family dinners, so she and Cam did whatever they could to juggle things to accommodate Astarte’s schedule. She had a softball practice at the batting cage at seven, so Cam had thrown on a sweatshirt and was grilling chicken and zucchini on the deck while Astarte wrote an essay at the kitchen table.

  “You want me to set the table, Mum?”

  “No. Finish your homework, honey.” Between honors classes and sports and other extracurriculars, the girl barely had time to sleep. Amanda had been the opposite, an underachiever. She spent her teenage years lurking around London’s music scene, her single mom barely aware of her daughter’s lifestyle. If it weren’t for gymnastics, she probably would have dropped out and, well, who knows?

  Amanda watched Astarte’s fingers dance across her laptop. She had made a point of teaching Astarte to type, a skill which most kids didn’t learn anymore—many poked at the keyboard with index fingers only. Suddenly Astarte looked up. “I heard you and Dad talking about some painting?”

  “Yes.” Amanda explained the Just Judges mystery. “Hitler thought it was a map to the Holy Grail.”

  “So you guys are going to go looking for it?” she asked flatly.

  “Maybe looking, maybe just helping other people look.”

  She shifted uneasily. “What I don’t get is why you and Dad don’t, you know, actually do something.”

  Amanda tried not to get defensive. She and Cam had made a name for themselves with their Templar research; plus he had a law practice and she worked part time as a museum curator. If anything, they did too much. “What do you mean, do something?”

  “Well, I get that history is important. But it’s, like, over. It’s behind us. It’s just that the world’s all screwed up now. And you guys are always looking at the past.”

  Astarte was certainly flexing her teenage mind. She, like many of her generation, was unhappy with the current political climate and impatient for change. Amanda was tempted to throw out one of those clichés about the ignorant being doomed to repeat the mistakes of history. But Astarte deserved a better answer. She was, after all, correct that it was a screwed-up world. “I guess the simple answer is because history teaches us lessons. I mentioned Hitler before. Well, I’m guessing people in Europe in the 1930s never would have believed what he was capable of. Hopefully, next time … well, hopefully there won’t be a next time.”

  Astarte exhaled. “I get that. But I’m talking about all your Templar research, not Hitler. I mean, does it really matter if the Templars came to America or not?”

  Fair question. And in the eyes of a teenager, especially one as socially aware as Astarte, their Templar research must seem totally disconnected to the problems of today. “I think it does. I’ll give you an example, again using Hitler. There are lots of white supremacists out there now, here and in Europe. And they’re gaining power. Many of them idolize the Templars—they were white, European, male, Christian. Just like the white supremacists. But our research indicates the Templars were pretty liberal for their day. They believed in women playing important roles in society, for example. And they brought back many ideas from their travels which led to individual rights and the Renaissance. And they befriended the Muslims and Jews in the Middle East.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “Well, if the white supremacists idolize the Templars, maybe the Templar values will rub off on them. Maybe they will be less hateful of women and minorities and more respectful of individual rights.” She paused to judge Astarte’s reaction. The girl was only partly swayed. “But it all starts with knowledge. If Dad and I didn’t do the research to find out what the Templars believed, there’d be no way to use those beliefs to influence others.”

  Astarte turned back to her laptop. “Okay, I guess.”

  Amanda exhaled and swallowed a retort. She didn’t want to sound preachy, and sometimes a grudging “okay” was the most you were going to get from an angst-filled teenager. But she was beginning to learn that few things stung more than your child being disappointed in you.

  Shelby checked her hair, touched up her lipstick, grabbed a bottle of wine from the fridge, and opened the front door of her condo unit in the Harbor Towers complex overlooking Boston Harbor. She turned left down the hallway, past three other apartments, and knocked softly on the fourth door.

  “Come in. It’s open.”

  She pushed through, and Bruce strolled out of the kitchen to greet her, handsome as always in a form-fitting white sweater that accentuated his olive skin, broad shoulders and large, dark eyes. He leaned down to kiss her, his colog
ne both familiar to her and yet somehow hinting at mystery. She felt her pulse quicken. If he weren’t so damn attractive, her life would be a lot easier.

  “I made chicken marsala. Hope that’s okay.”

  She held up the wine. “I brought white. So perfect.”

  He chuckled. “Since neither of us eats beef, it was a pretty safe bet.”

  She grinned. “Those are my favorite kinds.” Which was true, for the most part. She was conventional, careful and rational, like most lawyers. Except when it came to Bruce. There was nothing conventional about their relationship, including that they were in a decades-long monogamous relationship but still chose to keep separate apartments. Down the hall from each other, no less. Yet it somehow worked for them.

  Bruce’s unit, of course, featured panoramic views of the ocean. The adult Bruce was the grownup version of a boy who had turned to sailing when everything else in his life was a nightmare. A lonely, scared boy in a grown-up’s body, he still clung to the ocean like a life buoy. Shelby’s unit faced the city skyline. That pretty much summarized their personalities.

  He poured the wine and turned the chicken. “I spoke to Cameron Thorne yesterday,” she said. She and Bruce hadn’t seen each other in a couple of days, which was typical for them. Her friends laughed at her: “Wait, you guys have dates and hold hands at dinner? Doesn’t that make it hard to text?”

  Bruce switched to a mock Hollywood voice. “Is he ready to join me on a Grail quest?”

  She perched on a bar stool next to the stove. The playful, fun-loving side of Bruce was something only she saw. To the rest of the world, he was a calculating, humorless businessman. “I think so. But you have to promise to be nice to him. He’s an old friend, and a good heart.”

  A flicker of annoyance passed across Bruce’s face. “When am I not nice to people?”

  “How about, almost always?”