“Be still my heart,” gasped Peggy in mock horror. “You mean the Army of One smokes pot?”
“That’s the least of it,” replied Holliday. “Think of all the places the Army sends its soldiers: Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan; drug paradises, each and every one.”
“You’re too cynical.”
“Heroin use in America increased by almost two hundred percent during Vietnam,” said Holliday. “Of course I’m cynical.”
They found the Medieval Studies Department on the third floor. The offices stood around a central reception area guarded by a secretary. The nameplate on the secretary’s desk identified her as Ms. Caroline Branch. The name was apt; she was thin as a twig. She appeared to be in her late fifties or early sixties. Once upon a time she’d probably been quite beautiful, even model pretty, but the years had taken their toll. The high cheekbones now stood out like ax blades, her neck was thinning, the wrinkling hidden behind a col orful scarf, the small breasts impossibly symmetrical in a padded bra. Her hairstyle was a flipped-under look from the seventies, streaks of gray overtaking what once might have been chestnut but which was now merely brown.
Her hands had long, elegant fingers, unadorned, and a few gnarled raised veins, and a few more age spots. There were no bangles on her wrists. She looked as though she’d been a secretary forever. Holliday introduced himself and Peggy. Ms. Branch seemed unimpressed; there wasn’t even a token expression of sympathy at Uncle Henry’s passing. Holliday could smell the faint, sour scent of tobacco in the woman’s hair and some kind of sweet alcohol on her breath. A secret smoker and a sherry drunk, perhaps.
“We were wondering if we could get into Professor Granger’s office,” said Holliday.
“We’d like to get some of his personal things,” added Peggy.
“It’s very late,” the secretary complained. She gave an obvious glance at the large-faced men’s-style watch on her right wrist. “I was just about to leave.”
“We won’t be very long,” said Holliday.
“We could lock up if you wanted us to,” offered Peggy.
Ms. Branch looked insulted.
“I couldn’t allow that, I’m afraid,” she said.
“How long were you the professor’s secretary?” Holliday said.
“Administrative assistant,” she corrected curtly.
“Administrative assistant,” repeated Holliday.
“I’ve been with the university for forty-three years. I came here directly from the Albany Academy,” said Ms. Branch primly.
Forty-three years. Late sixties, early seventies, which fit the hairstyle. The Albany Academy was almost as old as West Point, a place to keep the daughters of New York State’s rich and powerful until it was safe to let them out on their own. She’d turned to stone here, petrified like an insect in amber. Odd that the woman had come to work at SUNY rather than take classes; there was more to Ms. Branch than met the eye.
“You were with Grandpa Henry all that time?” Peggy asked.
“I wasn’t with your grandfather, Miss Blackstock. I worked for him.” There wasn’t the slightest deference in her voice; after forty-three years she probably had more dirt on more people than anyone else in the university. She didn’t need job security-she had gossip instead. Holliday smiled to himself. Good intelligence could take you anywhere.
“Could we get into the office?” Holliday pressed gently. Ms. Branch gave him a long, steady look.
“If you must,” she said, relenting. She opened the center drawer in her desk, took out a ring of keys, and stood up. Holliday and Peggy followed her to a closed office door on the far side of the room. A small plastic sign read simply: DR. HENRY GRANGER. Ms. Branch unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped aside.
“We’ll be quick,” promised Peggy.
“Please,” said Ms. Branch. Did she have cats to feed? Was it laundry day? Holliday offered her a diplomatic smile as he passed.
They stepped into the office. It was large and airy, one wall lined with pale oak bookcases, another with framed photographs, and a third with a cluttered bulletin board. Surprisingly the fourth wall had a window.
The office looked out across the SUNY ring road to Maytum Hall, one of the I. M. Pei buildings, the geometry in this case being a concrete semicircle with narrow glass slits at regular intervals. To Holliday it looked like an outsized version of one of the concrete bunkers Rommel had erected on the Normandy beachhead.
The ground between Thompson Hall and the concrete semicircle consisted of neatly manicured lawn, the occasional curving path, and trees planted here and there in case the symmetry became too overpowering.
Peggy checked out the trophy wall of pictures, and Holliday sat down behind the modern desk. It even had a computer terminal. He tried to boot it up, but it was password protected. He opened the center drawer and found an address book, which he began to flip through.
“Weird picture,” murmured Peggy, leaning into the wall for a closer look.
“Weird how?” Holliday asked, still flipping through the old address book.
“It’s a photograph of three guys, with Grandpa Henry at one end in civilian clothes and the other two guys in uniform. Army, I think. British. From the background I’d say it was taken somewhere in North Africa. Cairo maybe. Could be Alexandria.”
“So? What’s weird about that? Henry was a medieval scholar. He’s traveled all over the world.”
“The inscription says: ‘Derek Carr-Harris, Leonard Guise, Donald Mitchie, April 1941.’ Then the word ‘Postmaster’ with a capital P.”
Holliday flipped through the address book. There was a U.K. listing for a D. Carr-Harris but nothing for Guise or Mitchie.
“Interesting. Postmaster sounds like it might have been a code name. But we weren’t at war in April ’41. What’s Henry doing hanging around in Egypt with a couple of Brits in uniform eight months before Pearl Harbor? He started off in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS wasn’t even organized until 1942-June or July.”
“ ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ as Alice said down the rabbit hole,” Peggy murmured, looking at the next picture on the wall. “Here’s another one with Carr-Harris and Grandpa Henry in it. Neither one of them is in uniform.”
“What is it?” Holliday asked, continuing to rummage through the drawer. He found Uncle Henry’s passport and checked the dates. It was still valid. There were four stamps on the last page: one going into Canada at Niagara Falls, an entry stamp from Heathrow Airport in London two days later, and another entry stamp into Frankfurt dated a week after that. The last stamp showed his reentry into the U.S. three weeks following his entry into Germany. All the stamps were from three months ago.
“They’re standing in this huge room with a gigantic open window you could fly an airplane through. There are mountains in the background,” said Peggy, describing the photograph.
“Is there an inscription?”
“Yes. It says ‘Berghof 1945.’ ”
“You’re kidding me!” Holliday stood and went to the wall of photographs. He gazed over Peggy’s shoulder and looked at the picture. Uncle Henry and Carr-Harris were little more than silhouettes, insignificant against the grotesquely out-of-scale room they were standing in. It really was enormous. The snowy peaks of the Salzburg Alps were clearly etched in the distance.
“Remind me where Berghof is again?” Peggy asked.
“Not where, what,” explained Holliday. “The Berghof was Adolf Hitler’s name for the summer house in Bavaria that Broadbent mentioned. The Fьhrer was trying to be a man of the people. It means ‘Mountain Farm.’ ”
“Which explains the flag the sword was wrapped up in,” said Peggy. “But what was Grandpa doing there with that Englishman? What was he doing there at all?” She paused. “I thought the lawyer said his father was with Grandpa when he found the sword.”
Holliday nodded. “So did I.”
“So where is he?”
“A lot of questions about Henry today and not enough answers.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Ask more questions,” said Holliday.
6