“What’s that all about?” Peggy asked.
“The first part of it is supposed to be the Latin inscription on King Arthur ’s grave in Avalon. It’s the last sentence in the T. H. White book.”
“What about the rest of it?”
“Some kind of riddle.”
“Who for?”
“Me presumably,” said Holliday. “It was my favorite book. He knew that eventually I’d come back for it.” He paused, then added softly: “After he died.”
“Any idea what it means?”
Holliday whispered the riddle to himself again, then stepped back from the bookcase, looking at the collection of children’s stories as a whole. “The storied years: all these books. Your childhood and mine.”
“Treasure down below?” Peggy queried.
“There’s nothing down below,” said Holliday. “Just more books.”
“Down in the basement, under the floorboards?”
“I never saw Henry hammer a nail in his life, let alone tear up floorboards,” snorted Holliday. “Not his style.”
Holliday stared at the bookcases. They had obviously been custom made, fitted into the house as it was being built, which predated Uncle Henry’s occupation by decades. They were like a row of narrow Gothic arches, the kind of exotic cabinetry the late Victorians were so fond of, especially in a town like Fredonia which was full of houses like Henry’s. Each bookcase had eight shelves, floor to ceiling except for the points of the arches and the ornately scrolled kick plates at the bottom.
Holliday looked down at the riddle again. “Thus it is for you to seek and thus it is for me to know.”
Peggy saw it first.
“The kick plate,” she said, dropping down on her hands and knees. She ran her fingers along the four-inch-high strip of wood, pressing lightly every few inches. At the center of the kick plate the pressure resulted in an audible clicking sound and the wood jumped forward an inch or so on some kind of spring mechanism.
“A secret drawer,” said Holliday.
“Grandpa Henry’s stash?” Peggy said, smiling up at Holliday.
“Open it,” he said.
She did. The drawer was the same depth as the bookcase, about eight inches, running from one side to the other. It was lined with very old and very worn satin that might have been purple a hundred years ago but which was now faded to a pale eggplant shade. There was a single object in the drawer. It was wrapped in a red, gold, black, and white silk pennant that was as unmistakable as the dagger in the desk.
“What the hell is that?” Peggy asked, horrified.
“It’s the Standarte des Fьhrers und Obersten Befehlshabers der Wehrmacht,” said Holliday, wrapping his tongue around the German. “Adolf Hitler’s personal standard. His battle flag.” He paused. “Let’s see what ‘treasure’ is hidden underneath it.” Peggy tentatively unwrapped the silk covering.
“Amazing,” she whispered.
“A sword,” said Holliday, looking at the object nestled in the secret compartment. “A crusader’s sword.”
5
The sword was three feet long with a simple cross guard and a flat, circular pommel. The hilt looked as though it had been covered in some sort of ancient varnished leather, now almost completely rotted away by time to show the wire wrapping underneath. The blade was roughly thirty inches long, double-edged with a shallow fuller, the so-called blood channel running down the center and gently ridged from the center.
“Crusader’s sword?” Peggy said. “It doesn’t look like much to me.”
“It was called an arming sword, or a short sword,” said Holliday. “It was the equivalent of a Wild West six-shooter-a working weapon for everyday use. Cops carry pistols, knights carried these. It must be the one Broadbent mentioned.”
“I thought swords were fancier.”
Holliday bent down and picked up the weapon, World War II standard and all. There was a small label on the flag: “Kuhn amp; Hupnau-Mьnchen.” He turned and brought the sword back to Uncle Henry’s desk, laying it carefully down with both hands. It looked almost obscenely beautiful in its ghastly silk nest. A gleaming device meant only for killing. A thousand years old and as deadly now as it had ever been.
“It’s a rich man’s sword, fancy or not,” he said, examining it closely under the light.
“How can you tell?” Peggy asked.
“It’s Damascus steel,” he answered.
“What’s that?”
“See the watery texture in the blade?” Holliday said, pointing out the rippling patterns that ran through the metal, like oiled moirй silk. “Damascus steel was made with a special kind of iron imported from India and later from Persia. Only a few of the greatest swordsmiths knew how to use it. They were almost a secret society. During the forging the metal was folded over again and again, sometimes fifty or a hundred times like a Japanese katana. The end result was a blade so strong and sharp it could cut through any kind of armor or chainmail. Use it the right way and you could literally cut a man in half if you knew what you were doing. They say it was strong enough to cut through solid rock.”
“The Sword in the Stone?”
“That’s probably the origin of the story.”
“Damascus is the capital of Syria. How would a crusader get hold of a sword made by the other guys?”
Holliday laughed. “Don’t kid yourself. There was as much trading with the enemy back then as there is today. War has always been about money. Standard Oil of New Jersey was refueling Nazi submarines in the Atlantic right up until Pearl Harbor.” He shook his head. “The real question is how Uncle Henry got the sword and why he was keeping it a secret.”
“Maybe we should ask someone.”
“Who?” Holliday asked. “It’s not as though he had a lot of friends. Ones that are still alive anyway.”
“How about the university?” Peggy suggested. “Maybe somebody there.”
“He was a professor emeritus. He didn’t lecture anymore. I think he was thesis advisor to a few grad students, but that’s about it.”
“Still…” Peggy said.
Holliday glanced at his watch. It was five o’clock. Probably too late for anyone at the school. He stared at the sword. He knew well enough that an artifact of such good quality and condition would normally have pride of place in the collection of any museum. It was a collector’s dream. In the hands of an expert there was even a good chance that the actual swordsmith could be identified; most smiths had a private “chop” or hallmark that they stamped somewhere on their work. Why had Henry decided to keep it hidden from prying eyes? Curiosity got the better of him.
“We can give it a shot.” Leaving the sword where it was, they left the house, Holliday carefully locking the front door behind them.
“Your ride or mine?” Peggy asked. She had a Hertz rental from Niagara Falls while Holliday was using a Crown Victoria tan sedan from the West Point Motor Pool. It had the suspension of a tank, no radio, and no cup holders.
“Yours,” said Holliday.
The SUNY main campus was less than a mile north of the Hart Street house. The grounds were pleasant, treed, and mostly modern, a lot of the buildings bearing the unmistakable mark of the architect I. M. Pei, the Chinese-American designer who seemed to favor flat, featureless cubes and rectangles that often looked like three-dimensional studies in geometry rather than buildings. Someone had once called it “fortress architecture.” To Holliday it seemed more like simple random shapes made from a child’s wooden blocks.
The History Department was located in Thompson Hall, a squat firebrick rectangle with a jutting wing at each end. Holliday and Peggy began navigating a series of windowless, dimly lit corridors.
“I remember studying places like this in Sociology,” muttered Peggy as they trailed down yet another bleak hallway. “They were meant to be riot proof. Narrow stairwells, bad lighting, slow elevators.” She snorted. “Who riots in universities these days? They’re all business students now. No more sex, no more drugs, and no more rock and roll. Just beer and football.”
“Don’t kid yourself.” Holliday grinned. “There’s still a lot of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, even at West Point.”