Crux Christi…
“It’s an anagram,” Bonenmayr murmured. “H. Turris. CCXI is Crux Christi,” he said. “They have just moved the letters around…Those damned Templars and their riddles! But now, enough of this.” He pointed at the memorial stone. “Now smash this plaque.”
15
THE MUFFLED VOICES behind the door became louder and louder, then suddenly fell silent. Simon held his breath. He was sure he’d heard the Steingaden abbot. Had the secret passageway perhaps led them to St. John’s Chapel? But they must have gone much farther than that…The medicus had lost all sense of direction. Placing his finger to his lips, he motioned to the two women to keep silent. After a while they could hear the sound of pickaxes. Someone on the other side of the door seemed to be pounding away at stone.
Carefully, Simon pressed down on the rusty door handle. The tarnished portal opened a crack, unexpectedly, and then jammed. Peering through the crack, Simon couldn’t make out more than a few shapeless pieces of rubble that blocked his view. He pressed against the low wooden door with his shoulder, and it opened, squeaking, bit by bit. The pounding on the other side continued, and now Simon could clearly hear the abbot’s voice.
“Faster, faster! There’s an opening behind it, you asses! Hurry up!”
Suddenly, a loud crash sounded somewhere up above. Something big and heavy must have fallen over in the room above them. For a moment, Augustin Bonenmayr fell silent, but then he continued, even louder: “I don’t care if the world is coming to an end up there! That must not stop us! Keep going!”
Finally, the crack was wide enough that Simon and the two women could slip through. Not far from the door, he spotted a tall, rotten shelf they could hide behind. But looking closer, he stopped short. The shelves were piled high with masks with crooked noses, dusty wigs, fake beards, and moth-eaten clothing. Beside the shelf, he saw a strange apparatus, something he’d never seen before: Standing upright on a small wagon was a barrel with a little handle sticking out of the side. The barrel itself was wrapped in a bolt of fabric. Simon rubbed his eyes. What place had they stumbled into? This couldn’t possibly be St. John’s Chapel, could it?
Carefully, the medicus peered out from beyond the shelving. He saw a huge subterranean dome. Through a tiny opening in the middle of the ceiling, a rope descended to a block of wood on the ground. In one corner Simon recognized one of the two monks from the library. He was hacking on a grave slab with a pickaxe, and next to him, Augustin Bonenmayr was frantically pushing rubble off to the side. When a large-enough hole opened up, the abbot pulled back his white robe and crept inside.
“Give me the torch-quickly!” The monk handed Bonenmayr the torch, and moments later, a shout came from behind the gravestone. “Holy Mother of Jesus, we’ve found it! We’ve really found it!”
The Steingaden abbot began to cackle hysterically, and Brother Lothar, curious, crawled in after him. Once the monk disappeared into the hole, Simon gave the women a sign and they all tiptoed over to the opening. One inch at a time, Simon moved closer to the edge.
Finally, he worked up the courage and looked inside.
Holding his dagger between his teeth, Brother Nathanael pulled himself out of the trapdoor and onto the stage, only to realize he had left his torch down below. The auditorium was as dark as a dungeon! Brother Johannes had a lantern with him, but it had disappeared along with the monk himself.
“Brother Johannes!” Nathanael called out. “Are you here somewhere?” His voice echoed through the drafty building, but there was no answer.
Nathanael remembered seeing candleholders earlier in niches along the stage. Blindly, he groped toward the niches, until his hand grasped a bronze candelabra. With frozen fingers, he reached under his robe for the little box of matches he always carried with him and lit the five candles. After a few moments, he could just make out the stage and the seats in the auditorium. Brother Johannes was nowhere to be seen.
With the candelabra in hand, Nathanael crossed the stage, stopping in front of a heap of crumpled curtain material. He was just about to go down the steps into the orchestra pit when something on the floor caught the light. Stooping down with the candelabra, he saw a little puddle spilling out from under the heap.
It was blood.
“What the devil…?”
When Nathanael pushed the material aside, he saw Brother Johannes’s badly beaten face peering out from under the heap like a discarded doll. He was moaning softly. Blood ran from his nose and from a wound at the back of his head, where a large lump had already formed. Nathanael glanced at the wound before giving the monk an angry kick in the side. Brother Johannes would have a headache for a few days, but he would survive. It was most important now to find out who was out to get them.
“Please stand up and tell me who-”
At this instant he heard a whooshing sound so soft that an untrained ear wouldn’t have even noticed it. But Nathanael hadn’t survived a half-dozen murderers’ attacks in the Spanish provinces just to meet his end in a theater in the peaceful little Priests’ Corner. He lunged forward just before the heavy stage curtain came tumbling down from the ceiling. It crashed onto the stage, burying the candles, candelabra, and the head of Brother Johannes, whose moans stopped abruptly.
Nathanael jumped up and scanned the ceiling. His eyes wandered along the balconies and up the stairs leading to the loft, while he played nervously with the dagger in his hand.
“Come out, whoever you are!” he called out. “You cowardly dog! Fight like a man!”
Out of the corner of his eye, the monk saw a little flame blaze up. Nathanael cursed. The candles he’d dropped had set fire to the curtain!
He was about to stamp out the flames when he heard the rattle of a winch unwinding. Turning around, he saw a giant of a man gliding calmly down from the ceiling. He held onto a rope with one hand and, in the other brandished a short but heavy wood cudgel.
“No one calls me a cowardly dog,” the hangman growled. “Especially you. The three of you overpowered me in the dark once, but for you, I don’t need the cover of darkness. I’ll finish you off just like this, you shady, black-robed ruffian.”
Jakob Kuisl jumped over the burning curtain. The flames cast a flickering light across the stage as the hangman raised his cudgel and approached the monk, ready for a fight.
Simon moved along the wall cautiously until he was able to peer into the opening behind the smashed gravestone. With low ceilings, the space behind it was only a few paces wide and deep and expelled a musty odor. In the torchlight, the abbot and his helper knelt before a simple stone altar with a wooden cross atop it. At about shoulder height, it looked very old and weathered; rusty nails just barely held the crooked and bent cross together, and in a few places, it appeared to have been charred. Nevertheless, Augustin Bonenmayr bowed his head as if the Holy Mother in person were standing before him. After a while he stopped praying, took the relic carefully from the wall, and kissed it.
“The Cross of Christ!” he whispered. “Our Savior once touched this wood. See for yourself…” He pointed to a place on one of the crossbeams.
Brother Lothar bowed down reverently to get a better look.
“Here, see the hole!” the abbot said. “His hand must have been nailed to this very spot!”
“Your Eminence…” Brother Lothar whispered so softly that Simon could barely understand him. “The cross…I always thought it was much larger…”
“You fool!” said Augustin Bonenmayr, slapping his helper on the head. “This is only part of the True Cross. The rest was destroyed! It was the Templars’ duty to take the cross of Christ into every battle during the Crusades and to protect it. But at the Battle of Hattin, they failed. The cross fell into the hands of infidels and was almost completely destroyed. The cross bearer was an ancestor of this miserable fellow Friedrich Wildgraf.” The abbot gripped the weathered relic. “He was able to rescue just part of it. Since then, the cross has been considered lost without a trace. But now it has come to light again, here in Steingaden. Who could have imagined!” Bonenmayr stroked the two rotten crossbeams like a long-lost lover.