Late in the spring, working at the archives, he'd stumbled onto the story of Jean de Saint- Clair and his dimly recorded voyage into the unknown. Holliday had traced the tale to Rosslyn in the Midlothians, seat of the Saint-Clair family for more than five hundred years, and from there he'd found his way to France. Then Prague, now Venice, and once again he found himself involved with a mystery, and by the looks of it, a dangerous one.
He finished brushing his teeth, put on a fresh shirt and then headed down to the hotel restaurant. He spotted Sister Meg at a table on the far side of the room and joined her. As promised there was a silver carafe of coffee on the table and a large tulip glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. He took a long slug of the juice, poured himself a cup of coffee and sat back in his chair.
"Sorry," he said. "I guess I'm getting too old for leaping off tour boats and catching night trains to Venice. I was truly pooped."
"I was getting a little worried," said Meg. A waiter approached, gave a little bow and offered them enormous menus. There were about ten different egg dishes available. Holliday chose asparagi Florentine and Meg settled for cantaloupe and yogurt.
The food arrived and they began to eat. The muted conversations of a few other hotel guests served as a vague, comfortable backdrop, like the bubbling of a passing stream, punctuated by occasional and discreet laugher; it was Venice, after all, not Sioux Falls, Iowa.
"So what were you up to while I snoozed?" Holliday asked as he wolfed down the delicious meal.
"Scouting the territory," said Sister Meg, carving a slice of melon into bite-sized pieces. "I found the archives. It took most of the day; this city is not big on signs."
Holliday smiled faintly. He and Amy had spent most of their time in Venice getting lost. He never did get a real sense of the city; the narrow, badly numbered streets and winding canals made that almost impossible.
"Is it far?" he asked.
"Miles if you're walking. About a ten- minute ride in one of those vaporetto motorboat taxis. There's a canal that takes you within fifty feet of the front door."
"Did you check it out?"
She nodded. "It's open to the public during regular business hours. There are miles of stacks. It used to be a convent attached to the cathedral next door. It's all computerized apparently, and if what we're looking for isn't available in the original you can probably access it on microfilm. Everyone I talked to there spoke English."
"Sounds good." He'd cleaned his plate, mopping up the last of the bechamel sauce with half an English muffin from the basket in front of them on the table. Sister Meg clearly didn't approve. Holliday poured himself a second cup of coffee and sat back in his chair, sighing with approval.
"Tit for tat, Colonel. Tell me about this Zeno family we're digging for."
Holliday gave the nun a magnanimous smile. "Not until you stop calling me Colonel. It's Doc, or John, or Holliday, or even hey you, but not Colonel. Not anymore. I'm retired."
"All right… Doc."
"Much better."
"The Zeno family?"
"Ah, yes, the mysterious Zenos. Mention of them usually refers to the Zeno brothers' map of the world, which they supposedly concocted in the late thirteen hundreds. The family was part of Venetian aristocracy and had the transportation franchise for bringing Christian knights to the Crusades. They basically leased ships to the Templars, who then provided captains and crew. There's some question of their origins; I suspect they were Greek or Turkish from the name. It means 'stranger' or 'foreigner.' It's where the term 'xenophobia' comes from. There's always been some question about the vanishing of the Templar fleet, but there's no mystery-the ships simply went back to the Zeno family."
"What about this map?"
"A lot of people think it's a fake, although why anyone would fake a map in the fourteenth century is beyond me. It's not as though they were trying to convince a king or a queen to send out an expedition like Columbus and Queen Isabella."
"Do you think it's fake?"
"Yes, but not for the reason most people do. The accepted view among historians is that the map is a preposterous hoax. I think it was a hoax that was concocted by later Templars to cover up rumors of the real Atlantic voyage made by Jean de Saint-Clair-John Sinclair, the knight in the tomb in the chapel where you and I met. Pure obfuscation. You start an argument among historians about the validity and provenance of the map and you stop right there and don't dig any deeper. It's sleight of hand, covering up one thing with another.
"A map like that is exactly what you'd get if you were using an old-fashioned Jacob's Cross, the navigation instrument I told you about: a series of sightings showing foreshortened distances based on time spent at sea and no relative sizes of land masses-latitude without longitude."
"I always get them mixed up, like stalactites and stalagmites."
"Latitude are lines that go up and down; longitude goes left to right."
"So the map is real?"
"One like it. The biggest flaw most people give as proof that the Zeno map is a fake is the fact that the place names are wrong and some of the islands simply don't exist. I think the names were changed on the Zeno map and a few islands were drawn in to make the map look like a phony."
"Sort of like a double blind," Sister Meg said, nodding.
"Exactly. Cover up the truth with a well-articulated lie. What's that old proverb about the devil? 'The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing people that he didn't exist'?"
"So where does that leave us?"
"The Zeno family was in business as ship brokers for a hundred years before the Crusades and a long time afterward. They kept meticulous books, which will be in the financial and business fonds of the State Archives. We do a little grunt work and find out if they leased a ship to a knight named Jean de Saint-Clair between 1307 and 1314."
10
The State Archives of Venice are located in an old convent appended to the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari at the end of the Rio di San Paulo Canal, itself a right-angled intersection of the Rio di Maddonetta, which runs off the Grand Canal. The archives, a thousand years and ninety miles of shelving's worth, have been there for the better part of two hundred years, having been consolidated within the abandoned convent shortly after Napoleon's sudden departure in 1814. The convent was formed from two very large cloisters around a central courtyard, which had been subdivided into dozens of individual rooms and small research "studies."
Holliday and Sister Meg took a vaporetto water taxi from a small dock on the Grand Canal almost directly in front of the hotel. The vaporetti in the movies are always portrayed as classic wooden speedboats from the twenties and thirties, but the reality is a little different. Most of the water taxis were simple open dinghies or lifeboats equipped with fifty- or seventy-five-horsepower outboard engines clamped to the transom. There were larger "water buses" that followed specific routes around the city, but none of them went even close to the archives.
They sat in the center of the boat while their driver, wearing a Guns N' Roses T-shirt and smoking a reeking pipe, cruised southwest down the Grand Canal to the Palazzo Maddonetta, where they swung right onto the much narrower Maddonetta Canal. They turned west again onto the sludgy and very narrow brown water of the Rio di San Paulo, toward the Campanile, or tower, of the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, known by the locals simply as Frari. They arrived at the set of wide stone steps that served as a dock, the huge brick basilica only fifty feet or so away.
Holliday gave the boatman a ten-euro note.
"Aspettare mi?" said the boatman.
"No, grazie," said Holliday, shaking his head. The vaporetto driver nodded, pulled a paperback out of his pocket and settled back in his seat, reading and puffing on his pipe. The title of the book was La Giovane Holden by J. D. Salinger. It took Holliday a second but then he got it; the book was the Italian edition of The Catcher in the Rye. Trust the Italians to change the title. They probably called Moby-Dick Una Balena Bianca to make it sound like one of their own.