“That is correct, according to this,” Nina answered. “But the old scribes keeping the secret…”
“Old scribes,” Agatha observed, “must be the priests who kept records in Alexandria. The Library of Alexandria!”
“But the Library of Alexandria had already been burned down in Bumfuck, B.C., wasn’t it?” Sam asked. Purdue had to laugh at the journalist’s choice of words.
“It was reportedly burned down by Caesar when he set fire to his fleet of ships, as far as I know,” Purdue agreed.
“Okay, but even so, this document was apparently written on papyrus that the graphologist told us was ancient. Maybe not everything was destroyed. Maybe that is what it means that they kept it from God’s serpents — the Christian authorities!” Nina exclaimed.
“That’s all fair and well, Nina, but what does that have to do with a legionnaire from the 1800s? How does he fit in here?” Agatha wondered. “He wrote this, to what end?”
“The legend is that an old soldier told of the day when he saw invaluable treasures from the Old World with his own eyes, correct?” Sam interrupted. “We’re thinking gold and silver when we should be thinking books, information, and the hieroglyphs in the poem. The entrails of Serapis must be the innards of the temple, right?”
“Sam, you are a fucking genius!” Nina shrieked. “That’s it! Naturally, watching his entrails dragged across the desert and sank… buried… under Ahmed’s foot. The old soldier spoke of the farm owned by an Egyptian where he saw the treasure. This shit was buried under the Egyptian’s feet in Algeria!”
“Excellent! So the old French soldier told us what it was and where he saw it. It doesn’t tell us where his journal is,” Purdue reminded everyone. They had gotten so caught up in the riddle that they lost track of the actual document they were after.
“No worries. That is Nina’s part. The German written by the younger soldier he gave the journal to,” Agatha said, renewing their hope. “We needed to know what it was, this treasure — records from the Library of Alexandria. Now, we need to know how to find them, after we locate the journal for my client, of course.”
Nina took her time with the longer section of the French-German poem.
“This one is very tricky. Lots of code words. I suspect it will be more trouble to un-fuck than the first one,” she remarked as she underlined some words. “There are a lot of words missing here.”
“Yes, I saw that. Looks like this photograph got wet or damaged in the passing years, because a lot of the surface is grated away. Hopefully the original page has not suffered the same amount of injury. But just give us the words that are still there, dear,” Agatha prompted.
“Now just remember, this one was written long after the previous,” Nina said to herself to remind her of the context in which she was to translate it. “Roundabout the first years of the century, so… roundabout nineteen something. We need to call up those names of enlisted men, Agatha.”
When she finally had the German words translated, she sat back with a deep scowl haunting her brow.
“Let’s hear it,” Purdue said.
Nina read slowly, “It is very confusing. He clearly did not want anyone to find this during his lifetime. By the early 1900s the younger legionnaire must have been past his middle age, methinks. I have just dotted the parts where the words are missing.”
New to the people
Not to the soil for 680 twelves
Still growing, the God pointer holds the two trinities
And the clapping Angels shelter the… of Ernaux
… to the very…… hold it
…… unseen… Heinrich I
“The rest is a whole line missing,” Nina sighed, tossing her pen aside in defeat. “The last piece is a signature from a guy called ‘Wener,’ according to Rachel Clarke.”
Sam was chewing on a sweet roll. He lurched over Nina’s shoulder and with his full mouth he said, “Not ‘Wener.’ It’s ‘Werner,’ clear as day.”
Nina angled her face upward to narrow her eyes at his patronizing tone, but Sam only smiled as he did when he knew he was the smart beyond a fault, “And it’s ‘Klaus.’ Klaus Werner, 1935.”
Nina and Agatha stared at Sam in utter astonishment.
“See?” he said, pointing at the far bottom of the photograph. “1935. Did you ladies think it was a page number? ’Cause otherwise this man’s journal is thicker than the Bible and he must have had a very long and eventful life.”
Purdue could hold it no more. From his place at the hearth where he leaned against the frame with a glass of wine, he roared with laughter. Sam chuckled heartily with him, but made his way quickly away from Nina’s reach, just in case. Even Agatha smiled, “I’d be upturned by his arrogance too, had it not been for his saving us a lot of extra work, wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Gould?”
“Aye, for once he did not fuck it up,” Nina teased, and blessed Sam with a smile.
Chapter 18
“New to the people, not to the soil. So this was a new place when Klaus Werner returned to Germany in 1935, or whenever he came back. Sam is checking the legionnaires’ names for the years 1900 to 1935,” Nina told Agatha.
“But is there any way we’ll see where he lived?” Agatha asked, leaning on her elbows, face cupped in her palms like a nine-year-old girl.
“I have a Werner that entered the country in 1914!” Sam exclaimed. “He is the closest Werner we have to those dates. The others are 1901, 1905, and 1948.”
“It could still be one of the previous ones, Sam. Check them all. What does this one from 1914 say?” Purdue asked, leaning on Sam’s chair to study the information on the laptop.
“Many places were new then. Jesus, the Eiffel Tower was young back then. It was the Industrial Revolution. Everything was newly built. What is 680 twelves?” Nina grunted. “My head hurts.”
“Twelves must be years,” Purdue chipped in. “I mean, it is referring to new and old, therefore age of existence. But what is 680 years?”
“The age of the place he is talking about, of course,” Agatha slurred through her clenched teeth, refusing to remove her jaw from the comfort of her hands.
“Okay, so the place is 680 years old. Still growing? I’m at a loss. It cannot possibly be alive,” Nina sighed hard.
“Maybe the population is growing?” Sam offered. “Look, it says ‘God pointer’ holding ‘two trinities’ and that is obviously a church. That is a no-brainer.”
“Do you know how many churches Germany has, Sam?” Nina sneered. It was clear that she was very tired and very impatient with it all. The fact that something else was pressing her for time, the impending demise of her Russian friends, was slowly gaining on her.
“You are correct, Sam. It is a no-brainer that we are seeking a church, but the answer to which one lies, I’m certain of it, in the ‘two trinities.’ In every church there is a trinity, but rarely would there be another set of three,” Agatha replied. She had to concede that she too, had mulled her brain to the edge on the poem’s arcane points.
Purdue suddenly leaned over Sam and indicated on the screen, something under the 1914 Werner. “Got him!”
“Where?” Nina, Agatha, and Sam exclaimed in unison, grateful for the breakthrough.
“Cologne, ladies and gentleman. Our man lived in Cologne. There, Sam,” he underlined the sentence with his finger nail, “where it says, ‘Klaus Werner, city planner under the administration of Konrad Adenauer, mayor of Cologne (1917 to 1933).’”
“That means he wrote this poem after the dismissal of Adenauer,” Nina said, perked up. It was good hearing something familiar she knew from German history. “In 1933 the Nazi Party won the local elections in Cologne. Of course! The Gothic church there was turned into a monument for the fresh new German Empire shortly afterward. But I think Herr Werner was a tad off with his calculation of the church’s age, give or take a few years.”