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he found out?”
    “Like what?” Holliday said. “It’s an old sword, just like you said. It was clearly owned by a wealthy man, probably a knight or even a lord.”
    “What’s the country of origin?” Peggy asked.
    “There’s no way to tell. It’s not like a painting, it has no provenance, and I doubt if there’s anything in the record to tell us how it got into Hitler’s hands. It’s undoubtedly some kind of plunder, looted by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg , the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories. Either that or Hermann Göring’s people. They had a thing for going after Masonic relics; it played into the whole Aryan thing.”
    “The Masons had swords?” Peggy asked.
    “No, but the Templars did; the Templar mythology and the Masons’ started getting mixed up in the early 1800s.”
    “So it could be a Templar sword then.”
    “Sure.”
    “How can you tell?”
    “You can’t.”
    “I thought you said the really good swordsmiths left their signatures on their swords.”
    “That’s right. Their chop. They engraved it or embossed it.”
    “But this sword doesn’t have one.”
    “You’d have to take off the wire wrapped around the tang to find out.”
    “So?”
    Holliday looked at the sword. The leather wrapping that had once covered the wire was virtually nonexistent, and it looked as though the wire was already loose.
    “Any good archaeologist would scream blue murder,” he muttered.
    “Indiana Jones has left the building,” urged Peggy. “Do it.”
    “Foolish youth is right,” he said, but he began to carefully unwrap the wire. By the time he reached the second level down he knew that the wire was gold; the top layer had been stained by the disintegration of the leather covering.
    It was a single length made up of at least a dozen shorter pieces welded together. He also realized that someone had done this before now—the wire was too loosely wound to have maintained its integrity for a millennium. It took him the better part of half an hour, but he finally removed the last of it.
    “What is that?” Peggy said as the tang was revealed.
    “A chop,” said Holliday. “Two of them, as a matter of fact.” One was in the shape of a bee, stamped into the steel. The second was delicately engraved: two knights in armor riding a single horse, the official symbol of the Knights Templar. Below the symbol were the letters D.L.N.M.
    “The two knights on the horse is the symbol of the Templar Order. I don’t know about the bee.”
    “The initials there,” said Peggy, pointing to the four letters. “The initials of the guy who made it?”
    “I doubt it.”
    Holliday flipped the blade over.
    “Amazing.”
    Stamped into the steel were the words: ALBERIC IN PELERIN FECIT.
    “You’re the scholar, Doc. What does it mean?”
    “ ‘Alberic made this in Pelerin.’ ”
    “What’s a Pelerin and who is Alberic?”
    “Pelerin was a crusader castle in the Holy Land, what we know as Israel now. It was the only castle that was never taken by the Mameluk sultans. Alberic was a dwarf, supposedly a creature who made magical swords. The Hitler connection is a little clearer now.”
    “You really do know everything, don’t you?”
    “I told you, I read a lot.”
    “A mythical dwarf who made magical swords. This isn’t The Lord of the Rings , Doc, this is real.”
    “Tell that to Adolf. Alberic was the mythical dwarf who guarded the treasure of the Nibelungen in Wag ner’s opera, Hitler’s favorite.”
    “Okay. It’s a Templar sword made by a mythical dwarf that wound up being owned by an opera-loving German megalomaniac dictator mass murderer. Where does that get us?”
    “He wasn’t German actually,” corrected Holliday. “Hitler was Austrian.”
    “I repeat, where does that get us?”
    Holliday didn’t answer. He picked up the spiraled length of wire and examined it closely, running the edge of his thumb along its length. He smiled.
    “Canada,” he