"Such a pretty young woman," sighed the middle-aged man.
"Her new husband thinks so," Holliday said with a smile. "Speaking of which, how's your wife and kids?"
"Pauline is well, thank you. Fortunately for me her dental practice keeps me in the style to which my little hellions and I have grown accustomed. The twins of course must also have the latest running shoes. La vie est tres cher, mon ami. Life is very expensive, yes? Soon it will be makeup and matching Mercedeses." Bernheim flicked an invisible bit of fluff off the lapel of his very expensive Brioni suit.
The creme caramel arrived and the museum director stared at it reverently for a moment, as though it was a great work of art, which, to Bernheim, it probably was. Holliday ignored the dessert and tried the coffee. As with everything else at Malakoff's it was excellent. At least with the ban on smoking in Paris restaurants he didn't have to endure Bernheim's Boyards.
"So," said the nautical expert. "What brings you to Paris and my humble little museum?" He took another bite of the creme caramel and briefly closed his eyes to savor the flavor.
"Have you ever heard of a place called La Couvertoirade?" Holliday asked.
Bernheim nodded.
"A fortified town in the Dordogne. Built by the Templars, I believe."
"That's right," Holliday said and nodded. "A while back an archaeologist, a monk named Brother Charles-Etienne Brasseur, discovered a cache of documents from there relating to the Templar expedition to Egypt." Holliday paused, trying to remember it all. "The texts were written by a Cistercian monk named Roland de Hainaut. Hainaut was secretary to Guillaume de Sonnac, the grand master who led the Templars at the Siege of Damietta in 1249."
"Of course. The Seventh Crusade," said Bernheim. "They couldn't get upriver because of the Nile flooding, so they sat around for six months and had their way with the Egyptian women."
"They also played at being tourists," added Holliday. "Guillaume de Sonnac's personal ship as grand master was a caravel called the Sanctus Johannes chartered out of Genoa from a ship owner named Peter Rubeus. De Sonnac provided his own captain, a fellow Frenchman named Jean de St. Clair."
"A common enough name in France, I'm afraid," said Bernheim. "Rather like John Smith in America." He smiled. "A name used to sign hotel registers with."
"Well, while this particular St. Clair was in Damietta he traveled a little way to Rosetta, where the famous stone was found a few hundred years later by Napoleon's archaeologists."
"And stolen by the British, I might add," snorted Bernheim.
"Take it up with the Queen," said Holliday. "Anyway, while St. Clair was on his little visit to Rosetta along with de Sonnac's secretary, they stumbled on some old Coptic documents in a monastery there. The documents described something they referred to as an Organum Sanctum."
"An Instrument of God," translated Bernheim. "It generally refers to a person. Moses was an instrument of God, for instance."
"Not this time," said Holliday. He opened the floppy, old-fashioned briefcase on his lap and took out two ten-inch-long strips of wood. One of the strips was slightly thicker than the other and had a square hole halfway down its length. The narrower of the two pieces was clearly meant to fit into the hole, forming a cross. Both strips were notched at regular intervals.
"A Jacob's Staff," Bernheim said with a nod as Holliday passed them over. "A sixteenth-century navigational instrument."
"Except the documents were discovered by St. Clair and de Sonnac's secretary two hundred years before that," said Holliday. "Stranger still, the documents described the device from which that model was made as being even older-from the time of the pharaohs, in fact."
"Ridiculous," scoffed Bernheim.
"I found the original of the device you hold in your hand in the mummified hand of the pharaoh Djoser's vizier. The mummy was entombed at least twenty-five hundred years before the birth of Christ and four thousand years before Jean de St. Clair was in Rosetta. The original is now in the safekeeping of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The copy you're holding is an exact duplicate made by their model department."
"There can be no mistake about the age?"
"Spectroscopic analysis is accurate with a margin of error less than ten percent for African juniper. There's no doubt about it, Maurice; the instrument is forty-five hundred years old."
"Merde," breathed the man, his creme caramel forgotten. "You know what this does to the basic paradigm of modern nautical history?"
"Destroys it," answered Holliday flatly.
"This device would be as much a secret weapon as the atomic bomb," said Bernheim. "A seafaring nation which had it would have an incredible advantage over a nation which lacked it."
"At least for the two hundred years or so between St. Clair's discovery and the Jacob's Quadrant being invented in the fifteen hundreds," said Holliday.
"Columbus goes out the window."
"And it almost certainly means that those fairy tales about the Templars going to America are true. Or could be," said Holliday.
"St. Clair, Sinclair," mused Bernheim. He ran his thumb along the notches along the sides of the two strips of wood, then fitted the two pieces together. He held up the cruciform instrument. "Have you ever seen the ancient coat of arms of the St. Clairs?" Bernheim asked.
"No," answered Holliday.
"La Croix Engraal," said Bernheim. "An 'engrailed' cross."
"Which means?" Holliday asked.
"In heraldic terms Engraal means protected by the Holy Grail, the Grail being indicated by what in that silly Da Vinci book was referred to as the V of the sacred feminine. But what if, on the St. Clair crest, the Engraal notches on the cross referred to something else? Something much more practical." Bernheim ran his thumbnail along the notches in the wood.
"The gradation indentations on a Jacob's Quadrant," said Holliday, grinning. "The simplest explanation is most often the truth. Occam's razor."
"C'est ca," said Bernheim happily. "The mystery is solved."
"Not until I find out more about this Jean de St. Clair, whoever he was."
Bernheim had gone back to his creme caramel. He put down his spoon and wiped his lips with a napkin. He shrugged.
"Historically the Sinclairs of Scotland came from a little place known as Saint-Clair-sur-Epte. The Epte River once served as the border between Normandy and Ile de France; that is, between the English possessions and the rest of the country. It is also the river diverted by Claude Monet to create his famous water-lily pond."
"What on earth does any of this have to do with maritime history?" Holliday laughed, impressed by Bernheim's fund of knowledge on such an obscure subject.
"Your interest, your expertise is in medieval warfare, correct?"
"I'd like to think so."
"Mine is ships and the sea. Before ships there must be wood, before wood there must be trees. Have you ever heard of the Beaulieu River in England?"
"No."
"Then you've never heard of the village of Buckler's Hard."
"Not a name I'm familiar with," Holliday said with a smile.
"Anyone involved in French maritime history would be," said Bernheim. "HMS Euryalus, HMS Swiftsure and HMS Agamemnon were all built there, ships which were key during the Battle of Trafalgar in which the British defeated the French fleet in 1805. It was wood from the surrounding New Forest which built Nelson's entire fleet."
"You're saying the Epte River had the same function?"
"Since the time of the Vikings," Bernheim said, nodding. He scraped the last of the creme caramel from the sides of his dish. He smacked his lips and sighed. "If the St. Clair you seek was a seaman he almost certainly came from Saint-Clair-sur-Epte." He stared mournfully down at his empty dish and sighed again. "There is an old abbey nearby, the Abbaye de Tiron. Speak with the librarian there, Brother Morvan. Pierre Morvan. Perhaps he will be able to help you." He glanced over at Holliday's untouched creme caramel. "Not hungry?" Bernheim inquired hopefully.