Few people would have described Sandy and Larry Crane as happy individuals. Even Larry’s fellow VFW members, upon whom time was inexorably taking its toll and who now boasted a rapidly dwindling platoon of World War II survivors among their number, tended at best to tolerate Larry and his wife when they occasionally attended a veterans’ social event. Mark Hall, the only other member of their little band who was still alive, often told his wife that in the aftermath of D-day it was really just a question of who was going to kill Larry first: the Germans or his own side. Larry Crane could peel an orange in his pocket and open a candy bar with so little noise as to suggest that his time might have been better served in a special operations unit, except that Larry was a born coward and therefore of little use to his own unit, never mind to an elite group of hardened soldiers forced to operate behind enemy lines in desperate conditions. Hell, Mark Hall could have sworn that he’d seen Larry crouching behind better men during combat in the hope that they would take a bullet before he did.
And sure enough, that was what happened. Larry Crane might have been a cheap sonofabitch, and yellow as a buttercup’s ass to boot, but he was also lucky. In the midst of carnage, the only blood he ever got on him was other men’s. Hall might not have admitted it to anyone later, might even have been reluctant to admit it to himself, but as the war wore on he found himself sticking close to Larry Crane in the hope that some of that luck might rub off on him. He guessed that it had, because he’d lived when others had died.
It wasn’t all good luck, though. He’d paid a price by becoming Larry Crane’s creature, bound to him by the shared knowledge of what they had done in the Cistercian monastery at Fontfroide. Mark Hall didn’t talk about that with his wife, no sir. Mark Hall didn’t talk about that with anyone except his God, and then only in the ultimate secret confessional of his own mind. He hadn’t set foot in church since that day, had even managed to convince their only daughter to have her wedding outdoors by offering her the most expensive hotel in Savannah as a venue. His wife assumed that he’d suffered some crisis of faith over what he’d endured during the war, and he let her believe that, supporting her assumptions by making occasional dark references to “the things I saw over in Europe.” He supposed that there was even a little kernel of truth hidden beneath the shell of the lie, because he had seen some terrible things, and done some terrible things too.
God, they were only children when they went off to fight, virgins, and virgin children had no call to be holding guns and firing them at other children. When he looked at his grandchildren, and saw how cosseted and naive they were despite the pretence of knowingness that they maintained, he found it impossible to visualize them as he had once been. He recalled sitting on the bus to Camp Wolters, his momma’s tears still drying on his cheek, listening while the driver told the Negroes to sit at the back because the front seats were for the white folks, didn’t matter that they were all headed for the same conflict and that bullets were blind to race. The blacks didn’t object, although he could see the resentment simmering in a couple of them, and their fists tightened as some of the other recruits joined in, wisecracking at them as they walked to their seats. They knew better than to respond. One word from them, and the whole situation would have exploded, and Texas was tough back then. Any one of those Negroes raised a hand to a white man, and they wouldn’t have to worry about the Germans or the Japanese, because their own side would take care of them before they had time to break in their boots, and nobody would ever be called to answer for what befell them.
Later, he heard that some of those black men, the ones who could read and write, were told to sign up for Officer Candidates School, on account of the fact that the army was organizing a division of black soldiers, the Ninety-second, to be known as the Buffalo Division after the black soldiers who fought in the Indian wars. He was with Larry Crane by then, the two of them sitting in some god-awful rain-drenched field in England when someone told them about it, and Crane started off bitching about how the niggers were getting the breaks while he was still a grunt. The invasion was imminent, and soon some of those black soldiers found their way to England too, which made Crane bitch even more. It didn’t matter to him that their officers weren’t allowed to enter headquarters by the front door like the white officers, or that the black troops had crossed the Atlantic without any escort because they weren’t considered as valuable to the war effort. No, all Larry Crane saw was uppity Negroes, even after the beach at Omaha was secured, their unit smoking cigarettes on the walls of a captured German emplacement, and they looked down to see the black soldiers walking with sacks along the sand, filling them with the body parts of the men who had died, reduced to the level of collectors of human garbage. No, even then Larry Crane saw fit to complain, calling them cowards who weren’t fit to touch the remains of better men, although it was the army that dictated that they weren’t fit to fight, not then, not until men like General Davis pushed for the integration of black GIs into infantry combat units in the winter of 1944, and the Buffalo Division began fighting its way through Italy. Hall had few problems with Negro soldiers. He didn’t want to bunk with them, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to drink from the same bottle, but it seemed to him that they could take a bullet as well as the next man, and as long as they kept their guns pointed in the right direction he was happy to wear the same uniform as they. By comparison with Larry Crane, this made Mark Hall a bastion of liberalism, but Hall had sufficient self-knowledge to recognize that by making only a cursory effort to contradict Crane or tell him to keep his damn mouth shut he was culpable too. Time and time again, Hall tried to put distance between himself and Larry Crane, but he grew to realize that Larry was a survivor, and an uneasy bond developed between the two men until the events at Fontfroide occurred, and that bond became something deeper, something unspeakable.
And so Mark Hall maintained a pretence of friendship with Larry Crane, sharing a drink with him when there was no way to avoid doing otherwise, even inviting him to that goddamned ruinous wedding, though his wife had made it clear that she didn’t want either Larry or his slovenly wife sullying her daughter’s special day with their presence, and sulked for a week when he informed her that he was paying for the whole fucking day and if she had a problem with his friends, then maybe she should have put more money into her bank account so that she could have paid for the entire wedding herself. Yeah, he’d told her all right. He was a big guy, a great guy, swearing at his wife to cover his own shame and guilt.
Hall figured that he had something on Larry Crane too: after all, they had both been there together, and both were complicit in what had occurred. He’d allowed Larry to dispose of some of what they had found, then had accepted his share of the money gratefully. The cash had enabled Hall to buy a piece of a used car dealership, and he built upon that initial investment to make himself the auto king of northeast Georgia. That was how he was depicted in his newspaper ads and in the TV commercials: he was the Auto King, the Number One Ruler on Prices. Nobody Beats the Auto King. Nobody Can Steal His Crown When It Comes to Value.
It was an empire built on good management, low overheads, and a little blood. Just a little. In the context of all the blood spilled during the war, it was hardly more than a spot. He and Larry never spoke about what happened after that day, and Hall hoped that he would never have to speak of it again until the day he died.
Which, curiously, was kind of what happened, in the end.
∗ ∗ ∗
Sandy Crane sat on a stool by the kitchen window, watching her husband wrestle a garden hose like he was Tarzan trying to subdue a snake. Bored, she puffed on her menthol cigarette and tipped some of the ash into the sink. Her husband always hated it when she did that. He said it made the sink reek of old mints. Sandy thought the sink stank pretty bad already, and a dab of ash wasn’t going to make a whole lot of difference. If he didn’t have the smell of her cigarettes to whine about, she had no doubt that he would find something else. At least she got a little pleasure out of smoking, which went some way toward helping her to put up with her husband’s shit, and it wasn’t like those fucking cheap cartons that Larry bought for himself smelled any better.
Larry was squatting now, trying to untangle the hose, and failing. It was his own fault. She had told him often enough that if he rolled it up properly instead of throwing it half-assed into the garage, then he wouldn’t have these problems, but then Larry wasn’t one to take advice from anyone, least of all his wife. In a way, he spent his life trying to get out of messes that he created for himself, and she spent her life telling him that she’d told him so.
Speaking of half-assed, the cleft of Larry’s buttocks was clearly visible above the waistband of his pants. She could hardly bear to see him naked now. It pained her, the way everything about him sagged: his buttocks, his belly, his little shriveled organ, now practically hairless like his little shriveled head. Not that she was any bargain herself, but she was younger than her husband and knew how to make the best of what she had and how to hide her deficiencies. A number of men had learned, just a little too late, how deficient Sandy Crane was once her clothes hit the floor, but they’d screwed her anyway. A lesser woman wouldn’t have known whom to despise more: the men or herself. Sandy Crane didn’t worry too much about it and, as in most other areas of her life, settled for despising everyone but herself equally.
She had met Larry when he was already in his fifties, and she was twenty years his junior. He hadn’t been much to look at, even then, but he was in a pretty good position financially. He owned a bar and restaurant in Atlanta, but he sold out when the “faggots” started making the area their own. That was her Larry: dumber than a busload of tongueless morons, so prejudiced that he was incapable of seeing that the gays who were moving into the neigborhood were infinitely classier and wealthier than his existing clientele. He sold the business for maybe a quarter of what it was now worth, and he had seethed over it ever since. If anything, it had made him even more of a sexist, racist bigot than he ever was before, which was saying something, because Larry Crane was already only a couple of holes in a pillowcase away from putting burning crosses in people’s backyards.
Sometimes she wondered why she bothered staying with Larry at all, but the thought was quickly followed by the realization that snatched moments in motel rooms or in other women’s bedrooms were unlikely to be translated into long-term relationships with a sound financial underpinning. At least with Larry she had a house, and a car, and a moderately comfortable lifestyle. His demands were few, and growing fewer now that his sex drive had deserted him entirely. Anyway, he was so coiled up with piss and fury at the world that it was only a matter of time before he had a stroke or a heart attack. That garden hose might yet do her a favor, if she could learn to keep her mouth shut for long enough.
She finished her cigarette, lit another from its dying embers, then tossed the butt in the waste disposal. The newspaper lay on the table, waiting for Larry to return from his labors so that he could have something else to complain about for the rest of the day. She picked it up and flipped through it, conscious that this simple act would be enough to get her husband pissed. He liked to be the first to read the newspaper. He hated the smell of perfume and menthol upon its pages, and raged at the way she wrinkled and tore it as she read, but if she didn’t look at it now, then it would be old news by the time she got to it; old news, what’s more, with Larry’s toilet stink upon it, since her husband seemed to concentrate best when he was sitting on the can, forcing his aged body to perform another racked, dry evacuation.
There was nothing in the newspaper. There never was. Sandy didn’t know quite what she expected to find in there every time she opened it. She just knew that she was always disappointed when she was done. She turned her attention to the mail. She opened all of it, even the letters addressed to her husband. He always bitched and moaned when she did that, but most of the time he ended up passing them on to her to deal with anyway. He just liked to pretend that he still had some say in the matter. This morning, though, Sandy wasn’t in the humor for his bullshit, so she just ripped into what was there in the hope that it might provide her with a little amusement. Most of it was trash, although she laid aside the coupon offers, just in case. There were bills, and offers of bum credit cards, and invitations to subscribe to magazines that would never be read. There was also one official-looking manila envelope. She opened it and read the letter within, then reread it to be sure she’d picked up all of the details. Attached to the letter were two color photocopies of pages from the catalog of an auction house in Boston.
“Holy shit,” said Sandy. “Sweet holy shit.”
Some ash fell onto the page from her cigarette. She brushed it off quickly. Larry’s reading glasses lay on the shelf beside his vitamins and his angina medication. Sandy picked them up and gave them a quick clean with a kitchen towel. Her husband couldn’t read for shit without his glasses.
Larry was still struggling with the hose when her shadow fell across him. He looked up at her.
“Get out of the light, dammit,” he said, then saw what she had done to his newspaper, which, in her distracted state, she had tucked untidily under her arm.
“The hell have you done with the paper?” he said. “It ain’t fit for nothin but the bottom of a birdcage now you been at it.”
“Forget the damn newspaper,” she said. “Read this.”
She handed the letter to him.
He stood, puffing a little and tugging his pants up over his meager paunch.
“I can’t read without my glasses.”
She produced his glasses and watched impatiently while he examined the lenses and wiped them on the filthy edge of his shirt before putting them on.
“What is this?” he asked. “What’s so important you had to turn my newspaper into an asswipe to bring it to me?”
Her finger pointed to the piece in question.
And for the first time in over a decade, Larry and Sandy Crane enjoyed a moment of shared pleasure.
∗ ∗ ∗
Larry Crane had been keeping things from his wife. It had always been his way. Early in their relationship, for example, Larry hadn’t bothered to mention the times that he’d cheated on her, for obvious reasons, and thereafter tended to apply to most of his dealings with Sandy the maxim that a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. But one of Larry’s few remaining vices, the horses, had gotten a little out of hand, and he currently owed money to the kind of people who didn’t take a long view on such matters. They had informed him of their position just two days before, when Larry made a big payment significant enough to allow him to hold on to all ten of his digits for another couple of weeks. It was now at the point where his house was the only asset he could readily turn to cash because even disposing of the car wouldn’t cover what he owed, and he didn’t see how Sandy would approve of his selling their home and moving them into a doghouse in order to pay his gambling debts.
He could try turning to Mark Hall, of course, but that was a reservoir that had well and truly tapped out a couple of years back, and only absolute desperation would take him back to it again. In any case, Larry would be playing a dangerous game if he used the blackmail card on Old King Hall, because Hall might just call his bluff, and Larry Crane had no desire to see out the remainder of his life in a jail cell. He figured Hall knew this. Old Hallie might be a lot of things, but stupid was not one of them.
And so Larry Crane had been wrestling with the garden hose, wondering if there might not be a way to turn Sandy to some use by strangling her with it, dumping the body, and claiming the insurance, when the lady in question cast her shadow upon him. Larry knew then that he had about as much chance of successfully killing his wife as he had of looking after the Playboy Mansion on the days when Hugh Hefner was feeling a little under the weather. She was big and strong, and mean with it. If he even tried to lay a hand on her, she’d break him like he was a swizzle stick in one of her cheap cocktails.
But as he read and reread the letter, it quickly became apparent to him that he might not have to resort to such desperate measures after all. Larry had seen something like the item described in the photocopies, but he had never suspected that it might be worth money, and now here was a story informing him that it could bring in tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more. That “could” was an important caveat, though. What was being sought was not actually in the possession of Larry Crane. Instead, it rested in the ownership of one Marcus E. Hall, the Auto King.
∗ ∗ ∗
While the face of the Auto King remained that of Mark Hall, the old man had become little more than a figurehead. His sons, Craig and Mark Jr., had taken over the day-to-day running of the family business almost a decade ago. Jeanie, his daughter, had a 20 percent share in the company, based on the fact that it was Craig and Mark who did all the donkey work while Jeanie just had to sit back and wait for the check to clear. Jeanie didn’t see it that way, though, and had been raising quiet hell over it for the past five years. The King saw the hand of her husband, Richard, at work. Dick, as his sons liked to call him both to his face and behind his back, and always with a little added venom, was a lawyer, and if there was one species of rodent that would use the excuse of money to gnaw its way into a family’s heart and consume all the goodness inside, it was a lawyer. The King suspected that as soon as he was dead, Dick would start producing pieces of paper in court and demanding a bigger share of the business backdated to the time when the Virgin Mary herself was in mourning. The King’s own legal people had declared everything to be watertight and above reproach, but that was just more lawyers telling their client what they thought he wanted to hear. There would be days in court after he died, of that the King had no doubt, and his beloved dealership, and equally beloved family, would be torn apart as a result.
The King was standing outside the office of the main lot on Route 17, sipping coffee from a big cup emblazoned with a gold crown. He still liked to put in a couple of days each month, and the other salesmen didn’t object because any money he earned in commission was put back into a communal pot. At the end of every month, one salesman’s name was drawn from a hat over beers in Artie’s Shack, and all of the money went to him, or to her, for two women now worked on the King’s lots, and they sold a bunch of cars to the kind of men who had wires running straight from their dicks to their wallets. The winner paid for beers and food, and so everyone was happy.
It was four in the afternoon, dead time, and since it was a weekday in the middle of the month, the King didn’t expect it to pick up much before closing. While they might get a few walk-ins once the office workers finished up, the only thing most of them would have in their pockets would be their hands.
Then, right at the end of the lot, he saw a man leaning into the windshield of a 2001 Volvo V70 Turbo Wagon, 2.4 auto, leather interior, AM/FM/cassette/CD player, sunroof, forty-five thousand miles. Thing had been driven like it was made of eggshells, so there wasn’t a scratch on the paintwork. The King’s boys had it tagged at twenty thousand, with plenty of room for maneuver. The guy was wearing a sun visor and dark glasses, but the King couldn’t tell much else about him other than that he looked a little old and beat-up. The King’s eyesight wasn’t so good these days, but once he got his marks in focus he could tell more about them in thirty seconds than most psychologists could learn in a year of sessions.
The King put his cup down on the windowsill, straightened his tie, slipped the keys to the Volvo from the lockup box, and headed out into the lot. Someone asked him if he needed any help. There was a burst of laughter. The King knew what they were doing: looking out for him while pretending that they weren’t.
“Guy is older than I am,” he said. “I’m only worried that he don’t die before I get him to sign the papers.”
There was more laughter. The King could see that the old man at the Volvo had opened the driver’s door and slipped into the seat. That was a good sign. Getting them into the damn car was the hardest part, and once they were test-driving, then guilt started to kick in. The salesman, a nice guy, was taking time out of his busy schedule to go for a ride with them. He knew a little about sport, maybe liked the same music once he’d taken a flip through the dial and found something that made the mark smile. After he’d gone to all that trouble, well, what could a decent human being do but listen to what the man had to say about this beautiful automobile? And hey, it was hot out there, right, so better to do it in the cool of the office with a cold can of soda in one hand, huh? What do you mean, talk to your wife first? She’s gonna love this car: it’s safe, it’s clean, it’s got solid resale value. You walk out of this lot without signing, and it won’t be here once you’re done having a conversation with the little lady that you didn’t need to have to begin with, because she’s going to tell you what I’m telling you: it’s a steal. You get her hopes up and bring her down here only to find out that this baby is gone, and you’re going to be in a worse position than you were before you started. Talk to the bank? We got a finance package right here that’s better than any bank. Nah, they’re just numbers: you’re never gonna end up paying back that much. . . .
The King reached the Volvo, leaned down, and looked in through the driver’s window.
“Well, how you doin to—”
The pitch died on his lips. Larry Crane grinned up at him, all yellow teeth, unwashed hair, and dirt-encrusted wrinkles.
“Why, I’m doin fine, King, just fine.”
“You lookin at buyin a car there, Larry?”
“I’m lookin, King, that’s for sure, but I ain’t buyin yet. Bet you could do me a favor, though, we bein old war buddies and all.”
“I can cut you a deal, sure,” said the King.
“Yeah,” said Larry. “Bet you could cut me one, and I could cut you one right back.”
He lifted one mangy buttock from the seat and broke wind loudly. The King nodded, even the false warmth he had managed to generate now fading rapidly.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Uh-huh. You ain’t here to buy no car, Larry. What do you want?”
Larry Crane leaned over and opened the passenger door.
“Sit in with me, King,” he said. “You can roll the windows down, the smell gets too much for you. I got a proposition to make.”
The King didn’t take the seat.
“You ain’t gettin no money from me, Larry. I told you that before. We’re all done on that score.”
“I ain’t askin for money. Sit in, boy. Ain’t gonna cost you nothin to listen.”
The King exhaled a wheezy breath. He looked over at the office, wishing he’d never left his coffee, then lowered himself into the Volvo.
“You got the keys for this piece of shit?” asked Larry.
“I got ’em.”
“Then let’s you and me go for a ride. We got some talkin to do.”
France, 1944
The French Cistercians were used to hiding secrets. From 1164 to 1166, the monastery at Pontigny, in Burgundy, gave shelter to Thomas Becket, the English prelate exiled for opposing Henry II, until he decided to return to his diocese and was murdered for his troubles. Loc-Dieu, at Martiel in the Midi-Pyrenees, provided a refuge for the Mona Lisa during World War II, its combination of a fortress’s high walls and the grandeur of a country manor rendering it most appropriate for such a lady’s enforced retreat. It is true that other monasteries farther afield held treasures of their own: the Cistercians of Dulce Cor, or “Sweetheart,” at Loch Kindar in Scotland, were entrusted with the embalmed heart of John, Lord Balliol, in 1269, and of his wife, the Lady Devorgilla, who followed him to the grave two decades later; and Zlata Koruna in the Czech Republic held a spine reputed to have come from the crown of thorns placed upon the head of Christ, purchased from King Louis himself by Premysl Otakar II. Yet these were relics known to be retained, and while they were guarded by the monks there were few concerns by the twentieth century that an awareness of their presence might lead to the monasteries themselves being targeted.
No, it was those artifacts retained in silence, hidden behind cellar walls or within great altars, that placed at risk the monasteries and their inhabitants. The knowledge of their presence was passed on from abbot to abbot, so that few knew what lay beneath the library at Salem in Germany, or under the ornate church paving at Byland in Yorkshire’s North Riding.
Or in Fontfroide.
There had been monks at Fontfroide since 1093, although the first formal community, probably made up of former hermits from the Benedictine order, was established in 1118. The abbey of Fontfroide itself appeared in 1148 or 1149 and quickly became a frontline fortress in the fight against heresy. When Pope Innocent III moved against the Manicheans, his legates were two monks from Fontfroide, one of whom, Pierre de Castelnau, was subsequently assassinated. A former abbot of Fontfroide led the bloody crusade against the Albigensians, and the monastery aligned itself staunchly against the Catharist forces of Montsegur and Queribus otherwise tolerated by the liberals of Aragon. It was perhaps no surprise that Fontfroide should eventually seize the greatest of prizes, and so the abbey was finally rewarded for its steadfastness when its former abbot, Jacques Fournier, became Pope Benedict XII.
Fontfroide was wealthy to boot, its prosperity based upon the twenty-five farmsteads that it owned and its grazing herds of over twenty thousand cattle, but gradually the monks grew fewer and fewer, and during the French Revolution Fontfroide was turned into a hospice by the city of Narbonne. In a way, this was Fontfroide’s salvation, for it led to the preservation of the abbey when so many others fell into ruin, and a Cistercian community flourished once again at the abbey from 1858 until 1901, when the state put Fontfroide up for sale, and it was bought and preserved by a pair of French art lovers from the Languedoc.
But in all that time, even during periods when no monks graced its cloisters, Fontfroide remained under the close scrutiny of the Cistercians. They were there when it was a hospice, taking care of the sick and injured in the guise of laymen, and they returned to its environs when the wealthy benefactors, Gustave Fayet and his wife, Madeleine d’Andoque, purchased it to prevent it from being shipped, brick by brick, to the United States. There is a little church that lies less than a mile from Fontfroide, a far humbler offering to God than its great neighbor. It is called, in English, the Vigil Church, and from there the Cistercians kept watch over Fontfroide and its secrets. For almost five hundred years, its treasures remained undisturbed, until World War II entered its final phase, the Germans began to retreat, and the American soldiers came to Fontfroide.
∗ ∗ ∗
“No,” said the King. “Uh-uh. I got one of those letters too, and I threw it in the trash.”
Mark Hall knew that times had changed, even if Larry Crane didn’t. In those months after the war the world was still in chaos, and a man could get away with a great deal once he took even a little care about it. It wasn’t like that now. He had kept a watchful eye on the newspapers, and had followed the case of the Meadors with particular interest and concern. Joe Tom Meador, while serving with the U.S. Army during World War II, had stolen manuscripts and reliquaries from a cave outside Quedlinburg in central Germany, where the city’s cathedral had placed them for safekeeping during the conflict. Joe Tom mailed the treasures to his mother in May 1945, and once he returned home he took to showing them to women in return for sexual favors. Joe Tom died in 1980, and his brother Jack and sister Jane decided to sell the treasures, making a futile effort to disguise their origins along the way. The haul was valued at about $200 million, but the Meadors got only $3 million, minus legal fees, from the German government. Furthermore, by selling the items they attracted the interest of the U.S. Attorney for eastern Texas, Carol Johnson, who initiated an international investigation in 1990. Six years later, a grand jury indicted Jack, Jane, and their lawyer, John Torigan, on charges of illegally conspiring to sell stolen treasures, charges that carried with them a penalty of ten years in prison and fines of up to $250,000. That they got away with paying $135,000 to the IRS was beside the point for Mark Hall. It was clear to him that the smart thing would be to take to the grave the knowledge of what he and Larry had done in France during the war, but now here was dumb and greedy Larry Crane about to draw them into a whole world of potential hurt. Hall was already troubled by the appearance of the letter. It meant that someone was making connections, and drawing conclusions from them. If they stayed quiet and refused to take the bait, then maybe Hall would be able to go to his grave without spending his children’s inheritance on legal fees.
They were parked in the driveway outside the King’s house. His wife was away visiting Jeanie, so theirs was the only car present. Larry laid a shaky hand on the King’s arm. The King tried to shake it off, but Larry responded by turning the resting hand into a claw and gripping the King tightly.
“Just let’s take a look at it, is all I’m sayin. We just need to compare it with the picture, make sure it’s the same thing we’re talking about. These people are offering a whole lot of money.”
“I got money.”
For the first time, Larry Crane’s temper frayed.
“Well I sure as fuck don’t,” he shouted. “I got shit, King, and I’m in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble can an old goat like you get into?”
“You know I always liked to gamble.”
“Ah, Jesus. I knew you was the kind of fool thought he was smarter than other fools, but the only folks who should bet on horses are those who can afford to lose. Last I heard, you weren’t exactly high on that list.”
Crane took the insult, absorbing the blow. He wanted to lash out at the King, to beat his head against the pine-fresh dashboard of this Scandinavian piece of shit, but doing that wouldn’t get him any closer to the money.
“Maybe,” he said, and for a few moments Crane allowed his self-hatred, so long buried beneath his hatred of others, to shine through. “I never had your smarts, that’s for sure. I married bad, and I made bad decisions in business. I ain’t got no kids, and could be that’s for the best. I’d’ve screwed them up too. I figure, all told, I got a lot of what I deserved, and then some.”
He released his grip on the King’s arm.
“But these men, they’re gonna hurt me, King. They’ll take my house, if they can get it. Hell, it’s the only thing I have left that’s worth anything, but they’ll cause me pain along with it, and I can’t handle no pain like that. All I’m askin is that you take a look at that thing you got to see if it’s a match. Could be we can cut a deal with the folks that are lookin for it. It just takes a phone call. We can do this quiet, and no one will ever know. Please, King. Do this for me, and you’ll never have to see me again. I know you don’t like me bein around, and your wife, she’d see me burnin in the fires of hell and she wouldn’t waste her sweat to cool me down, but that don’t bother me none. I just want to hear what this guy has got to say, but I can’t do that unless I know that we have what he’s lookin for. I got my part here.”
He removed a greasy brown envelope from a plastic grocery bag that lay on the backseat. Inside was a small silver box, very old and very battered.
“I never paid it much mind, until now,” he explained.
Even seeing it there, in the driveway of his own house, gave the King the creeps. He didn’t know why they had taken it to begin with, except that some voice in his head had told him it was strange, maybe even valuable, the first time he’d laid eyes on it. He liked to think he’d have known that, even if those men had not died trying to keep it for themselves.
But that was in the aftermath, when his blood was still hot; his blood, and the blood of others.
“I don’t know,” said the King.
“Get it,” whispered Larry. “Let’s put them together, just so we can see.”
The King sat in silence, unmoving. He stared at his nice house, his neatly kept lawn, the window of the bedroom he shared with his wife. If I could undo just one element of my life, he thought, if I could take back just one action, it would be that one. All that has followed, all the happiness and joy, has been blighted by it. For all the pleasure I have enjoyed in life, for all of the wealth that I have amassed and all the kudos I have gained, I have never known one day of peace.
The King opened the car door and walked slowly to his house.
Private Larry Crane and Corporal Mark E. Hall were in real trouble.
Their platoon had been on patrol in the Languedoc, part of a joint effort with the British and Canadians to secure the southwest and flush out isolated Germans while the main U.S. force continued its eastward advance, and had wandered into a trap on the outskirts of Narbonne: Germans in brown-and-green camouflage uniforms, backed up by a half-track with a heavy machine gun. The uniforms had thrown the Americans. Because of equipment shortages, some units were still using an experimental two-piece camouflage uniform, the M1942, which resembled the clothing routinely worn by the Waffen SS in Normandy. Hall and Crane had already been involved in an incident earlier in the campaign, when their unit opened fire on a quartet of riflemen from the Second Armored Division of the Forty-first who had become cut off during bitter fighting with the Second SS Panzer Division near Saint Denis-le -Gast. Two of the riflemen were shot before they had a chance to identify themselves, and one of them had died of his wounds. Lieutenant Henry had fired the fatal shot himself, and Mark Hall sometimes wondered if that was why he allowed the troops advancing out of the darkness crucial moments of grace before ordering his own men to open fire. By then, it was too late. Hall had never before seen troops move with the speed and precision of those Germans. One minute they were in front of the Americans, the next they were dispersed among the trees on both sides of the road, quickly and calmly surrounding their enemies prior to annihilating them. The two soldiers buried themselves in a ditch as gunfire exploded around them and the trees and bushes were turned to splinters that shot through the air like arrows and embedded themselves in skin and clothing.
“Germans,” said Crane, a little unnecessarily, his face buried in the dirt. “There ain’t supposed to be no Germans left here. What the hell are they doing in Narbonne?”
Killing us, thought Hall, that’s what they’re doing, but Crane was right: the Germans were in retreat from the region, but these soldiers were clearly advancing. Hall was bleeding from the face and scalp as the fusillade continued around them. Their comrades were being torn apart. Already only a handful were left alive, and Hall could see the German soldiers closing in on the survivors to finish them off, twin lightning flashes now gradually being revealed as the need for duplicity was eliminated. Hall could see that the half-track was American, a captured M15 mounted with a single thirty-seven-millimeter gun. This was no ordinary bunch of Germans. These men had a purpose.
He heard Crane whimpering. The other man was so close to him that Hall could smell his breath as Crane cowered against him in the hope that Hall’s body would provide some cover. Hall knew what he was doing, and pushed the younger man hard.
“Get the fuck away from me,” he said.
“We got to stick together,” pleaded Crane. The sounds of gunfire were becoming less frequent now, and those that they heard were single bursts from German machine guns. Hall knew they were finishing off the wounded.
He started to crawl through the undergrowth. Seconds later, Crane followed.
∗ ∗ ∗
Many miles and many years away from the events of that day, Larry Crane sat in an air-conditioned Volvo rubbing his fingers on the cross carved into the box. He tried to remember what the paper that it once contained had looked like. He recalled taking a look at the writing on the fragment, but it was unreadable to him, and he had rejected the fragment as worthless. Although he did not know it, the words were Latin, and largely inconsequential. The real substance lay elsewhere, in a set of tiny letters and digits carefully drawn into the top right-hand corner of the vellum, but both the King and Larry Crane had been distracted by the illustration upon the page. It looked like a design for something, a statue of some kind, but neither man had ever understood why anyone would want to make a statue like this, using what looked like pieces of bone and dried skin scavenged from both humans and animals.
But somebody wanted it, and if Larry Crane was right, they were prepared to pay handsomely for the pleasure.
The two soldiers were wandering aimlessly, desperately trying to find shelter from the strange, unseasonable cold that was settling in, and from the Germans who were now presumably combing the area for any survivors to ensure that their presence was not communicated to superior forces. This was no last-ditch assault, no futile German attempt to force back the Allied tide like the actions of some Teutonic King Canute. The SS men must have parachuted in, maybe capturing the half-track along the way, and Hall’s belief that they had some seriously dark purpose for doing so was reinforced by what he had witnessed as he and Crane retreated: men in civilian clothing emerging from cover, shadowing the half-track and apparently directing the efforts of the soldiers. It made no sense to Hall, no sense at all. He could only hope that the path he and Crane were taking would lead them as far away as possible from the Germans’ prize.
They made for higher ground, and at last found themselves in what appeared to be an uninhabited region of the Corbière Hills. There were no houses, and no livestock. Hall figured that any animals that had once grazed had been killed for food by the Nazis.
It started to rain. Hall’s feet were damp. The top brass had taken the view that the new buckled combat boots recently issued to soldiers would suffice for winter once treated with dubbin, but Hall now had conclusive evidence, if further evidence were needed, that even in the wet grass this was not the case. The boots neither repelled water nor retained warmth, and as the two men trudged through the damp undergrowth Hall’s toes began to hurt so badly that his eyes watered. In addition, problems with the supply chain meant that he and Crane were clad only in wool trousers and Ike jackets. Between them, they had four frag grenades, Crane’s M1 (with a spare “immediate use” clip carried on his bandolier sling, for reasons Hall couldn’t quite figure out since Crane had barely managed to fire off a couple of rounds during the ambush), and Hall’s Browning Automatic Rifle. He had nine of his 13x20-round mags left, including the one in the gun, and Crane, as his designated assistant, had two more belts, giving them twenty-five mags in total. They also had four K-rations, two each of Spam and sausage. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either, not if those Germans found their trail.
“You got any idea where we are?” asked Crane.
“Nope,” said Hall. Of all the men he had to end up with after a goddamned massacre, it would have to be Larry Crane. The guy was unkillable. Hall felt like a pincushion, what with all the splinters that had entered him, and Crane didn’t have a scratch on his body. Still, it was like they said: somebody was looking out for Crane, and by staying close by, a little of that protection had rubbed off on Hall as well. It was a reason to be thankful, he supposed. At least he was alive.
“It’s cold,” said Crane. “And wet.”
“You think I haven’t noticed?”
“You gonna just keep walking until you fall down?”
“I’m gonna keep walking until—”
He stopped. They were on the top of a small rise. To their right, white rocks shone in the moonlight. Farther on, a complex of buildings was silhouetted against the night sky. Hall could make out what looked like a pair of steeples, and great dark windows set into the walls.
“What is it?”
“It’s a church, maybe a monastery.”
“You think there are monks there?”
“Not if they have any sense.”
Crane squatted on the ground, supporting himself with his rifle.
“What do you reckon?”
“We go down, take a look around. Get up.”
He yanked at Crane, smearing blood on the other man’s uniform. He felt stabs of pain run through his hand as some of the splinters were driven farther into his flesh.
“Hey, you got blood on me,” said Crane.
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” said Hall. “Real sorry.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Sandy Crane was talking to her sister on the phone. She liked her sister’s husband. He was a good-looking man. He wore nice clothes and smelled good. He also had money, and wasn’t afraid to spread it around so that his wife could look her best at the golf club, or at the charity dinners that they seemed to attend every second week and about which her sister never tired of telling her. Well, Sandy would show her a thing or two once Larry got his hands on that money. Barely eight hours had elapsed since she opened the letter, but already Sandy had their windfall spent ten times over.
“Yeah,” she said. “Larry looks like he might be coming into a little money. One of his investments paid off, and now we’re just waiting for the check to be cut.”
She paused to listen to her sister’s false congratulations.
“Uh-huh,” said Sandy. “Well maybe we might just come along with you to the club sometime, see about getting us one of those memberships too.”
Sandy couldn’t see her sister proposing the Cranes for membership in her swanky club for fear of being run out of the gates with the dogs at her heels, but it was fun to yank her chain some. She just hoped that, for once, Larry wouldn’t find a way to screw things up.
∗ ∗ ∗
Hall and Crane were a stone’s throw away from the outer wall when they saw shadows cast by moving lights.
“Down!” whispered Hall.
The two soldiers hugged the wall and listened. They heard voices.
“French,” said Crane. “They’re speaking French.”
He risked a glance over the wall, then rejoined Hall.
“Three men,” he said. “No weapons that I can see.”
The men were moving to the soldiers’ left. Hall and Crane followed them from behind the wall, eventually making their way to the front of the main chapel, where a single door stood open. Above it was a tympanum carved with three bas-reliefs, including a brilliantly rendered crucifixion at the center, but the wall was dominated by a stained-glass oculus and two windows, the traditional reference to the Trinity. Although they were not to know it, the door they were watching was rarely opened for any reason. In the past, it had been unlocked only to receive the remains of the viscounts of Navarre or other benefactors of the abbey to be buried at Fontfroide.
There were noises coming from inside the chapel. Hall and Crane could hear stones being moved and grunts of effort from the men within. A figure passed through the darkness to their right, keeping watch on the road that led to the monastery. His back was to the soldiers. Silently, Hall closed in on him, sliding his bayonet from his belt. When he was close enough, he slapped his hand over the man’s mouth and placed the tip of the knife to his neck.
“Not a move, not a sound,” he said. “Comprenez?”
The man nodded. Hall could see a white robe beneath the man’s tattered greatcoat.
“You’re a monk?” he whispered.
Again, the man nodded.
“How many inside? Use your fingers.”
The monk lifted three fingers.
“They monks too?”
Nod.
“Okay, we’re going inside, you and me.”
Crane joined him.
“Monks,” said Hall. He saw Crane breathe out deeply with relief and felt a little of the same relief himself.
“We don’t take any chances, though,” said Hall. “You cover me.”
He forced the monk down the flight of four stone steps that led to the church door. As they drew closer they could see the lights flickering within. Hall stopped at the entrance and glanced inside.
There was gold on the stone floor: chalices, coins, even swords and daggers that gleamed with gemstones set into their hilts and scabbards. As the monk had said, three men were laboring in the cold surroundings, their breath rising in great clouds, their bodies steaming with sweat. Two were naked from the waist up, forcing a pair of crowbars into the gap between floor and stone. The third, older than the others, stood beside them, urging them on. He had sandals on his feet, almost obscured by his white robes. He called a name, and when no response came he moved toward the door.
Hall stepped into the chapel. He released his grip on the monk and pushed him gently ahead of him. Crane appeared beside him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “We’re Americans.”
The expression on the old monk’s face didn’t indicate that he thought this was okay at all, and Hall realized that the cleric was just as concerned about the Allies as he was about any other potential threat.
“No,” he said, “you should not be here. You must go. Go!”
He spoke English with only the barest hint of an accent. Behind him, the monks, who had briefly paused in their efforts to shift the stone, now redoubled them.
“I don’t think so,” said Hall. “We’re in trouble. Germans. We lost a lot of guys.”
“Germans?” said the monk. “Where?”
“Near Narbonne,” said Hall. “SS.”
“Then they will soon be here,” said the monk.
He turned to the watcher and told him to return to his post. Crane appeared on the verge of stopping him, but Hall held him back, and the monk was allowed to pass.
“You want to tell us what you’re doing?” Hall asked.
“Better that you do not know. Please, leave us.”
There was a howl of rage and disappointment from the laborers, and the great stone fell back into place. One of the men sank to his knees in frustration.
“You trying to hide that stuff?”
There was a pause before the answer came.
“Yes,” said the monk, and Hall knew that he was not telling the entire truth. He briefly wondered what kind of monk told lies in a church, and figured that the answer was a desperate one.
“You won’t move that with just two men,” said Hall. “We can help. Right?”
He looked to Crane, but the private’s eyes were fixed on the treasure that lay upon the floor. Hall slapped Crane’s arm hard.
“I said we can help them. You okay with that?”
Crane nodded. “Sure, sure.”
He shrugged off his uniform jacket, placed his gun on the floor, and he and Hall joined the men at the stone. Now that he was up close, Hall could see that they were tonsured. They looked to their leader, waiting for him to respond to the Americans’ offer.
“Bien,” he said, at last. “Vite.”
With four men now working instead of two, the stone began to lift more easily, but it was still immensely heavy. Twice it slipped back down into its resting place, until a last, great effort forced it up sufficiently far for it to be pushed back onto the floor. Hall rested his hands on his knees and stared into the hole they had created.
A silver hexagonal box, perhaps six inches in circumference and sealed with wax, lay in the dirt. It was plain and unadorned, apart from a simple cross carved into the top. The old monk knelt and carefully reached in to retrieve it. He had just lifted it out when the alarm was raised by the sentinel at the door.
“Shit!” said Hall. “Trouble.”
Already, the old monk was pushing the cache of gold into the hole and urging his fellows to replace the stone as best they could, but they were exhausted and making slow progress.
“Please,” said the monk. “Help them.”
But Hall and Crane were making for the door. Carefully, they joined the lookout at the top of the steps.
Men, perhaps a dozen or more in total, were advancing along the road in the moonlight, their helmets shining. Behind them came the half-track, with more men following it. The two Americans took one look at each other and melted into the darkness.
∗ ∗ ∗
The King stood on the top rung of the ladder and pulled the cord. The attic swam into light, illumination not quite reaching the farthest corners. His wife had told him again and again that they needed to install a window in the roof, or at least put in a stronger lightbulb, but Hall had never really made either a priority. They didn’t come up here much anyway, and he was no longer entirely sure what most of these boxes and old suitcases contained. Cleaning it up was a chore that he was too old for so he had resigned himself, not with any great difficulty, to the fact that it would be up to his children to sort through this junk when he and Jan were dead and gone.
There was one box that he did know where to find. It was on a shelf with a collection of wartime memorabilia that was now merely accumulating dust but which, at one point, he had considered displaying. No, that wasn’t quite true. Like most soldiers, he had taken souvenirs from the enemy—nothing macabre, nothing like the ears that some of those poor demented bastards in Vietnam had collected—but uniform hats, a Luger pistol, even a ceremonial sword that he had found in the scorched remains of a bunker on Omaha. He had picked them up without a second thought. After all, if he didn’t take them, then someone else would, and they were no use to their previous owners. In fact, when he entered that bunker he could smell the officer who was once probably the proud owner of the sword, as his charred body was still smoking in one corner. Not a good way to go, trapped in a cement bunker with liquid fire pouring through the gun slit. Not a good way to go at all. But once he returned home, his desire to be reminded of his wartime service diminished greatly, and any thoughts of display were banished, like the trophies themselves, to a dark, unused place.
Hall climbed farther into the attic, keeping his head slightly bowed to prevent any painful knocks against the ceiling, and threaded his way through boxes and rolled up rugs until he reached the shelf. The sword was still there, wrapped in brown paper and clear plastic, but he left it as it was. Behind it was a locked box. He had always kept it secured, in part because it contained the Luger, and he didn’t want his kids, when they were younger, to discover it and start playing with it like it was a toy. The key was kept in a nearby jar of rusty nails, just to further discourage idle hands. He poured the nails onto the floor until the key became visible, then used it to open the box. There was a trunk filled with old hardcover books nearby, and he sat down upon it, resting the box upon his knee. It felt heavier than he remembered, but then it had been a long time since he had opened it, and he was older now. He wondered idly if bad memories and old sins accumulated weight, the burden of them steadily growing greater as the years went by. This box was foul memories given shape, sins endowed with bulk and form. It seemed almost to drag his head down to it, as though it were suspended from a chain around his neck.
He opened it and slowly began placing the contents on the floor beside his feet: the Luger first, then the dagger. It was silver and black, and emblazoned with a death’s-head emblem. The blade, when withdrawn, showed spots of rust below the hilt and along the blade, but otherwise the steel was largely intact. He had greased it and wrapped it before storing it away, and his precautions had paid off. The plastic peeled away easily, and in the dim light the grease gave to the blade a glistening, organic quality, as though he had just removed a layer of skin and exposed the interior of a living thing.
He laid the knife beside the Luger and removed the third item. A lot of soldiers returned from the war with Iron Crosses taken from the enemy, mostly standard types but some, like the one Hall now held in his hand, adorned with an oak-leaf cluster. The officer from whom it was taken must have done something pretty special, Hall thought. He must have been trusted greatly to be sent to Narbonne, in the face of the advancing enemy, in order to seek out the monastery of Fontfroide and retrieve whatever was secured there.
Only two things remained in the box. The first was a gold cross, four inches in height and decorated with rubies and sapphires. Hall had retained it, against his better judgment, because it was so beautiful, and perhaps also because it symbolized his own faith, stored away in shame after what he had done. Now, as the time of his death inevitably approached, he realized that he had not misplaced that faith entirely. The cross had always been there, locked away in the attic with the discarded fragments of his own life and those of his wife and children. True, some were useless, and some were better forgotten, but there were items of value here too, things that should not have been set aside so readily.
He brushed his fingertips across the centerpiece of the ornament: a ruby as big as the ball of his thumb. I kept it because it was precious, he told himself. I kept it because it was beautiful, and because, somewhere in my heart and my soul, I still believed. I believed in its strength, and its purity, and its goodness. I believed in what it represented. It was always the second-to-last item in the box, always, for that way it rested upon the vellum fragment at the bottom, anchoring it in place, rendering its contents somehow less awful. Larry Crane never understood. Larry Crane never believed in anything. But I did. I was raised in the faith, and I will die in the faith. What I did at Fontfroide was a terrible thing, and I will be punished for it when I die, yet the moment that I touched the fragment I knew it was a link to something far viler. Those Germans did not risk their lives for gold and jewels. To them, they were just trinkets and ornaments. No, they came for that piece of vellum, and if one good thing came out of that night, it was the fact that they did not get it. It will not be enough to save me from damnation, though. No, Larry Crane and I will burn together for what we did that night.
∗ ∗ ∗
The SS men poured down the steps like channels of filthy, muddy water and pooled together in the little courtyard that lay before the church door, creating a kind of honor guard for the four civilians who stepped from the half-track to join them. From the shadows where he lay, Hall saw the old monk try to bar their way. He was pushed into the arms of the waiting soldiers and thrown against the wall. Hall heard him speak to the senior officer, the one with the dagger on his belt and the medal at his neck, who had accompanied the men in civilian clothes. The monk held out a bejeweled gold cross, offering it to the soldier. Hall couldn’t understand German, but it was clear the monk was trying to convince the officer that there was more where that came from, if he wanted it. The officer said something curt in reply, then he and the civilians entered the church. Hall heard some shouting, and a short burst of gunfire. A voice was raised and Hall discerned some words that he did understand: an order to cease fire. He wasn’t sure how long that would last. Once the Germans got whatever they had come for, they would leave nobody alive to talk about it.
Hall began working his way backward, moving through the darkness and into the woods, until he was facing the half-track. Its passenger door was open, and there was a soldier sitting at the wheel, watching what was taking place in the courtyard. Hall unsheathed his bayonet and crawled to the very edge of the road. When he was certain that he was out of sight of the other soldiers, he padded across the dirt and pulled himself into the half-track’s cab, staying low all the time. The German sensed him at the last minute, because he turned and seemed about to shout a warning, but Hall’s left hand shot up and caught him under the chin, forcing his mouth closed with a snap while the blade entered below the soldier’s sternum and pierced his heart. The German trembled against the bayonet, then grew still. Hall used the blade to anchor him to his seat before slipping out of the cab and into the back of the half-track. He had a clear view of the soldiers on the right of the steps, and of most of the courtyard, but there were at least three hidden by the wall to the left. He looked to his right and saw Crane peering at him from a copse of bushes. For once, thought Hall, just once, do the right thing, Larry. He signaled with his fingers, indicating to Crane that he should go around the back of the vehicle and through the trees so that he could take out the Germans hidden from Hall.
There was a pause before Crane nodded and started to move.
∗ ∗ ∗
Larry Crane was trying to light a cigarette, but the damn cigarette lighter had been removed from the Volvo so that smokers would not be encouraged to spoil its imitation new car scent with tobacco smoke. He searched his pockets once again, but his own lighter wasn’t there. He had probably left it at home in his hurry to confront his old buddy the Auto King with the prospect of easy wealth. Now that he thought of it, the unlit cigarette in his mouth tasted a little musty, which led him to suspect that he’d left both cigarettes and lighter in the house and what was now in his mouth was a relic of an old pack that had somehow escaped his notice. He had taken the first jacket he could lay a hand on, and it wasn’t one that he usually wore. It had leather patches on the elbows, for a start, which made him look like some kind of New York Jew professor, and the sleeves were too long. It caused him to feel older and smaller than he was, and he didn’t need that. What he did need was a nicotine boost, and he’d bet a dime that the King hadn’t locked the door to his house after he went inside. Larry figured there would be matches in the kitchen. At worst, he could light up from the stove. Wouldn’t be the first time, although he’d tried it once when he had a couple under his belt and had just about singed his eyebrows off. The right one still grew sort of rangy as a result.
Fuckin Auto King in his nice house with his fat wife, his slick sons, and that whiny daughter of his, looked like she could do with some feeding up and some holding down under a real man. The King didn’t need any more money than he had already, and now he was making his old army buddy squirm on the hook while he thought about whether or not to take the bait. Well, he’d take the bait, whether it sat comfortably with him or not. Larry Crane wasn’t about to let his fingers get broken just because the Auto King was having scruples after the fact. Hell, the old bastard wouldn’t even have a business if it hadn’t been for Larry. They’d have left that monastery poor as when they found it, and Hall’s old age would have been spent scrounging nickels and clipping coupons, not as a respected pillar of the Georgia business community, living in a goddamned mansion in a nice neighborhood. You think they’d still respect you if they found out how you came by the money to buy into that first lot, huh? You bet your ass they wouldn’t. They’d hang you out to dry, you and your bitch wife and all your miserable brood.
Larry was getting nicely stoked up now. It had been a while since he’d let the old blood run free, and it felt good. He wasn’t going to take no shit from the Auto King, not this time, not ever again.
The cigarette moist with poisonous spit, Larry Crane strode into the King’s house to light up.
∗ ∗ ∗
The officer emerged from the church, flanked by the men in civilian clothing. One of them was carrying the silver box in his hands, while the others had packed the gold into a pair of sacks. Behind them came one of the monks whom Hall and Crane had helped with the shifting of the stone, his arms held behind his back by two SS soldiers. He was forced against the wall to join the abbot and the sentinel. Three monks: that meant one was already dead, and it looked like the rest were about to follow him. The abbot started to make one final plea, but the officer turned his back on him and directed three soldiers to take up position as a makeshift firing squad.
Hall got behind the thirty-seven-millimeter and saw that Crane was at last in place. He counted twelve Germans in his sights. That would leave just a handful more for Crane to deal with, assuming everything went without a hitch. Hall drew a deep breath, placed his hands on the big machine gun, and pulled the trigger.
The burst of noise was deafening in the silence of the night, and the power of the gun shook him as he fired. Centuries-old masonry fragmented as the bullets tore into the monastery, pockmarking the façade of the church and shattering part of the lintel above the door, although by the time they hit the wall they’d passed through half a dozen German soldiers, ripping them apart like they were made of paper. He glimpsed the muzzle flare from Crane’s gun, but he couldn’t hear its report. His ears were ringing, and his eyes were full of dark marionettes in uniform, dancing to the beat of the music he was creating. He watched the side of the officer’s head disappear and saw one of the civilians bucking against the wall, dead but still jerking with each shot that hit him. He raked the courtyard and steps until he was certain that everyone in his sights was dead, then stopped firing. He was drenched in sweat and rain, and his legs felt weak.
He climbed down as Crane advanced from the bushes, and the two soldiers looked upon their work. The courtyard and steps ran red, and fragments of tissue and bone seemed to sprout from the cracks like night blooms. One of the monks at the wall was dead, killed perhaps by a ricochet, guessed Hall, or a burst of gunfire from a dying German. The sacks of church ornaments lay upon the ground, some of their contents lying scattered beside them. Nearby rested the silver box. While Hall watched, the senior cleric reached for it. Hall could now see that he was bleeding from the face, injured by fragments of flying stone. The other monk, the sentinel, was already trying to replace the gold in the sacks. Neither said a word to the Americans.
“Hey,” said Crane.
Hall looked at him.
“That’s our gold,” said Crane.
“What do you mean, ‘our gold’?”
Crane gestured at the sacks with the muzzle of his gun.
“We saved their lives, right? We deserve some reward.”
He pointed his gun at the monk.
“Leave it,” said Crane.
The monk didn’t even pause.
“Arret!” said Crane, then added, just in case: “Arret! Français, oui? Arret!
By then the monk had refilled the sacks and was lifting one with each hand, preparing to take them away. Crane sent a burst of gunfire across his path. The monk stopped suddenly, waited for a second or two, then continued on his way.
The next shots took him in the back. He stumbled, the sacks falling to the ground once again, then found purchase against the wall of the church. He remained like that, propping himself up, until his knees buckled, and he crumpled in a heap by the door.
“The hell are you doing?” said Hall. “You killed him! You killed a monk.”
“It’s ours,” said Crane. “It’s our future. I didn’t survive this long to go back home poor, and I don’t believe you want to go back to working on no farm.”
The old monk was staring blankly at the body in the doorway.
“You know what you got to do,” said Crane.
“We can walk away,” said Hall.
“No. You don’t think he’ll tell someone what we done? He’ll remember us. We’ll be shot as looters, as murderers.”
No, you’ll be shot, thought Hall. I’m a hero. I killed SS men and saved treasure. I’ll get—what? A commendation? A medal? Maybe not even that. There was nothing heroic about what I did. I turned a big gun on a bunch of Nazis. They didn’t even get a shot off in response. He stared into Larry Crane’s eyes and knew that no German had killed the monk with the chest wound. Even then, Larry had his plan in place.
“You kill him,” said Crane.
“Or?”
The muzzle of Crane’s gun hung in the air, midway between Hall and the monk. The message was clear.
“We’re in this together,” said Crane, “or we’re not in this at all.”
Later, Hall would argue to himself that he would have died had he not colluded with Crane, but deep inside he knew that it wasn’t true. He could have fought back, even then. He could have tried reasoning and waited for his chance to make a move, but he didn’t. In part, it was because he knew from past efforts that Larry Crane wasn’t a man to be reasoned with, but there was more to his decision than that. Hall wanted more than a commendation or a medal. He wanted comfort, a start in life. Crane was right: he didn’t want to return home as dirt poor as he was when he left. There was no turning back, not since Crane had killed one, and probably two, unarmed men. It was time to choose, and in that instant Hall realized that maybe he and Larry Crane had been meant to find each other, and that they weren’t so different after all. From the corner of his eye he registered the last of the monks make a move toward the church door, and he turned his BAR upon him. Hall stopped counting after five shots. When the muzzle flare had died, and the spots had disappeared from in front of his eyes, he saw the cross lying inches from the old man’s outstretched fingers, droplets of blood scattered like jewels around it.
They carried the sacks and the box almost to Narbonne, and buried them in the woods behind the ruins of a farmhouse. Two hours later a convoy of green trucks entered the village, and they rejoined their comrades and fought their way across Europe, with varying degrees of valor, until the time came to be shipped home. Both elected to stay in Europe for a time, and returned to Narbonne in a jeep that was surplus to requirements, or became surplus as soon as they paid a suitable bribe. Hall made contact with people in the antique business, who were acting in turn as middlemen for some of the less scrupulous collectors of art and relics, already picking their way through the bones of Europe’s postwar culture. None of them seemed very much interested in the silver box or its contents. The vellum document was unpleasant at best, and even if worth anything, would be difficult to dispose of to anyone but a very specialized collector. And so Crane and Hall had divided that item into two halves, with Crane taking the primitive silver box and Hall retaining the document fragment. Crane had tried to sell the box once, but had been offered next to nothing for it, so he decided to hold on to it as a souvenir. After all, he kind of liked the memories that went with it.
∗ ∗ ∗
Larry Crane found some long matches in a drawer, and lit his cigarette. He was watching the empty birdbath in the backyard when he heard the sound of footsteps descending the stairs.
“In here,” he called.
Hall came into the kitchen.
“I don’t remember inviting you inside,” he said.
“Needed a light for my smoke,” said Crane. “You got that paper?”
“No,” said Hall.
“You listen here,” said Crane, then stopped as Hall stepped toward him. Now the two old men were face-to-face, Crane with his back against the sink, Hall before him.
“No,” said Hall. “You listen. I’m sick of you. You’ve been like a bad debt my whole life, a bad debt that I can never pay off. It ends here, today.”
Crane blew a stream of smoke into Hall’s face.
“You’re forgettin somethin, boy. I know what you did back there outside that church. I saw you do it. I go down, and I’ll take you with me, you mark me.”
He leaned in close to Hall. His breath smelled foul as he spoke: “It’s over when I say it’s over.”
Crane’s eyes suddenly bulged in their sockets. His mouth opened in a great oval of shock, the last of the cigarette smoke shooting forth through the gap, accompanied by a spray of spittle that struck Hall on the side of the face. Hall’s left hand extended in a familiar movement, closing Crane’s mouth, while his right forced the blade of the SS dagger up under Crane’s breastbone.
Hall knew what he was doing. After all, he’d done it before. Larry Crane’s body sagged against him, and he smelled the old man’s innards as he lost control of himself.
“Say it, Larry,” whispered Hall. “Say it’s over now.”
∗ ∗ ∗
There was blood, but less than Hall had expected. It didn’t take him long to clean it up. He drove the Volvo around the back of his house, then wrapped Crane’s body in plastic sheeting from the garage, left over from the last round of renovations on the house. When he was certain that Crane was wrapped up tight, he placed him, with a little trouble, in the trunk of the car, then went for a ride into the swamps.