The Last Secret Of The Temple (32 page)

BOOK: The Last Secret Of The Temple
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He gave her an impressed nod. 'It's a lot more than most people know, I can assure you.'

There was a momentary silence, the two of them staring at each other, then, with a cock of his head, Topping went through into the kitchen again and fetched himself another beer.

'You're sure you don't want one?' he called.

'Go on then.'

He opened two bottles and, after coming back in, handed one to her and sat down opposite, stretching out his legs – long, pale, honed – so that his bare feet were within an inch or so of her chair.

'The treasure of the Cathars has long been the subject of speculation,' he said, picking up the thread of his narrative, 'some of it academic, most just wild fantasy. All sorts of ideas have been floated as to what exactly it was, everything from sacks of gold to Gathar religious texts to the Holy Grail. The fact is, as with the whole Secret of Castelombres thing, the sources just aren't clear.'

He took a swig of his beer.

'We know about the treasure from a series of depositions given to the Inquisition by survivors of the siege of Montségur. When the castle fell to the Catholic crusaders in March 1244, about two hundred of the defenders refused to renounce their beliefs and were burnt to death. The rest were allowed to go free on condition they provided a full confession to the Inquisition interrogators. Twenty-two of these confession depositions have survived – over four hundred pages' worth – of which four mention the story of the mysterious smuggled treasure.'

Layla half raised her bottle to take a sip, but then lowered it again and instead scribbled a note of what Topping had just said.

'Then, last December, I turned up what seems to be part of a twenty-third Montségur survivor deposition. One that also mentions the treasure of the Cathars, but with some rather interesting extra details.'

He seemed outwardly relaxed as he said this, slumped in his chair with his beer bottle dangling from his hand. Despite this, Layla could tell from the brightness of his eyes and the slight speeding up in his delivery that he was as excited by the story as she was.

'The deposition had been bound, presumably by accident, into a register of much later documents,' he continued. 'It recorded the interrogation of a Montségur survivor named Berenger d'Ussat by an inquisitor called Guillaume Lepetit – William the Small, or Little Willy as I prefer to call him. In it, this Berenger describes how, some time around Christmas 1243, three months before Montségur fell to the Catholic besiegers, four Cathar leaders' – he referred to his notes – 'Amiel Aicart, Petari Laurent, Pierre Sabatier and a man named Hugon, managed to escape from the castle under cover of night carrying away some sort of important treasure. In itself that isn't particularly earth-shattering – the other four "treasure" depositions all say exactly the same thing. What comes next, however,
is
fascinating, because when William, the interrogator, pushes Berenger for more information about this mysterious treasure, he says' – he glanced down at his notes again – ' "Credo id Castelombrium unde venerit relatum esse et ibi sepultum esse ne quis invenire posset." Which in translation means: "I believe it was returned to Castelombres, from where it came, and was buried there so no-one could find it."'

Layla's jaw dropped. 'They were the same thing! The Montségur treasure and the Secret of Castelombres!'

Topping sat up in his chair and took a swig of his beer, 'Well, admittedly it's just one piece of testimony,' he said, 'wholly uncorroborated. It's more than possible that Berenger was just trying to confuse his inquisitors, give them false leads. All the same, it's an intriguing notion. And not perhaps entirely unsurprising. Castelombres, after all, is fewer than ten kilometres as the crow flies from Montségur, so it's fair to assume there was some sort of interaction between the two castles. Also, the Cathars were renowned for their friendship with the Jews, so again it's probably fair to assume that in the face of a violently anti-semitic Catholic invading force the defenders of Montségur would have offered sanctuary to whatever secret or treasure was lodged at Castelombres. Whether the Lords of Castelombres themselves actually adopted the Cathar creed . . .' He shrugged. 'I doubt we'll ever know, although given their involvement with the Jews and the fact that their castle was destroyed by the crusaders it's a fair bet that they did. To be honest, it's neither here nor there. The important thing is that there do seem to be reasonably solid grounds for speculating that what have until now appeared to be two wholly separate mysteries are in fact one and the same.'

Layla still hadn't drunk any of her beer. She raised the bottle now and took a swift gulp, struggling to process everything she'd just heard, to tie it into what she already knew: William de Relincourt finds some object beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; he sends it to his sister Esclarmonde at Castelombres; Castelombres becomes the focus of some Jewish mystery cult; the object is transferred to Montségur for safekeeping during the upheavals of the Cathar Crusade; when Montségur falls it is returned to Castelombres and buried. It all seemed to fit together. Yet, fascinating as it was, it ultimately didn't move her any further forward. There was still so much she didn't know, so many questions to answer. What was this mysterious thing? Why was it so important to the Jews? What was its relevance to al-Mulatham? And what had happened to it?

'The report of your talk said something about Nazi archaeologists,' she said, taking another sip, bringing up her left foot and tucking it under her right knee. 'How do they come into it?'

Topping smiled. 'I was wondering when you'd get round to that. In many ways it's the most curious part of the whole story.'

He got to his feet and wandered over to the window, gazing down into the court below. Aside from the muffled thud of music from an adjoining room, everything was completely silent.

'Inquisition transcripts are a pretty obscure topic of study,' he said after a brief pause. 'Not many people are interested in them. Some of the registers in the Bibliothèque Nationale haven't been looked at for years, decades even. I once came across one that hadn't been opened since the middle of the nineteenth century.'

She tapped her pen on her knee, wondering where he was going with this.

'According to the Bibliothèque records,' he continued, turning back to her, 'the last time anyone looked at the register in which I found the Berenger d'Ussat transcript was at the beginning of September 1943, during the German occupation of Paris, when it was examined by a Nazi scholar named Dieter Hoth.'

The name seemed to spark a faint connection somewhere deep in Layla's mind. She was so overloaded with information that she couldn't immediately think why.

'Go on.'

'Well, initially I thought this Hoth – who incidentally I'd never heard of, which was strange given how narrow the field is – must have missed the Berenger transcript altogether because there's no record of him ever publishing anything about it. Anyway, just for the hell of it I checked him with a contact of mine down in Toulouse, a Nazi specialist, and guess what? Less than a week after looking at the register this same Dieter Hoth turns up down in the depths of Languedoc, staying in the modern village of Castelombres, this time accompanied by a unit of SS stormtroopers. And what do you think they were all doing down there?'

Layla shook her head. Topping took a swig of his beer and leant back against the windowsill, smiling wryly.

'Excavating.'

She gawped. 'You're serious?'

'That's what I was told.'

'And? Did they find anything?'

Again he gave a wry smile. 'Apparently so, although exactly what I can't tell you. Like I said, Nazi archaeologists aren't really my area of expertise.'

He stared down at her, then, pushing himself away from the windowsill, went through into the kitchen and began rummaging in a cupboard. Layla sat back and sipped her beer, her mind whirring. There was so much to follow up here, so many avenues to explore.

'Who's this friend of yours?' she asked after a moment. 'The one in Toulouse.'

'I wouldn't call him a friend as such,' replied Topping, 'more a passing acquaintance. I met him a couple of years ago, when I was on sabbatical at Toulouse University. Runs an antiques shop near the St Sernin. Odd man. Eccentric. Knows everything there is to know about the Nazis, though. Name of Jean-Michel Dupont.'

As with Dieter Hoth, this seemed to ring a vague bell somewhere deep inside Layla's head. She closed her eyes, trying to pin it down. Dieter Hoth, Jean-Michel Dupont; Dieter Hoth, Jean-Michel Dupont. How did she know these people?

And then, suddenly, it came to her. Of course! From the web the other night. The article about Nazi archaeologists, with the footnote containing the unidentified initials DH. Her eyes snapped open and, after scrabbling through her notes, she pulled out the print-out she had made at the time:

November 13, 1938 Thule Soc. Dinner, Wewelsburg. Spirits high after events of 9-10, with WvS making joke about the 'shattering of Jewish hopes'. DH said they'd be more than shattered if the Relincourt thing came off, after which long discussion on Cathars etc. Pheasant, champagne, cognac. Apologies from FK and WJ.

'My God,' Layla whispered. 'He knew. De Relincourt, Castelombres, Montségur. He made the connection.'

'What was that?' said Topping.

She ignored the question.

'This Dieter Hoth. What happened to him?'

Topping came back into the room, munching on an apple.

'Died at the end of the war, apparently. Got his head blown off by a Russian artillery shell. No more than he deserved, by all accounts.'

He took another bite of his apple and leant against the door of the kitchen.

'Don't fancy something to eat, do you? I know a very nice little Greek taverna down on Trumpington Street.'

She looked up, distracted.

'Are you hitting on me, Professor Topping?'

He smiled.

'Absolutely.'

J
ERUSALEM

Har-Zion wound the leather straps of the
tefillah
anticlockwise around the bicep of his left arm and down around his gloved fingers, ensuring that the box with the holy passages in it was positioned exactly adjacent to his heart. By rights, the bicep and hand should have been bare – that is what the Torah prescribed. With his ravaged flesh, however, he did not feel comfortable exposing himself, and had managed to gain a rabbinic dispensation permitting him to keep the relevant portions of his body covered.

He finished winding the seven loops and attached the second
tefillah
to his forehead, centring the scripture box midway between his eyes; then, with a nod at Avi as if to say 'wait for me', he heaved a prayer shawl over his shoulders and started forward across the floodlit esplanade towards the HaKotel Ha-Ma'aravi, the Western Wall, last vestige of the ancient Temple, holiest site in the Jewish world.

It had been a while since he was last down here, over a week. He would have liked to come more often, every day if possible, but what with all his various commitments there simply wasn't the time. Tonight, however, he had made the time. There were some things it wasn't safe to delegate.

He approached the Wall and positioned himself at its far left-hand end, gazing up at the twenty-metre-high patchwork of giant stone blocks rearing overhead, like some intricate gaming board, every nook and cranny of its lower courses jammed with a dandruff of folded paper notes on which were scribbled the prayers and supplications of previous visitors. By day this area would be crowded, with tourists in makeshift cardboard
yarmulkes,
Haredi Jews in their black coats and hats, boys performing their bar mitzvah ceremonies. Now, aside from himself and a lone Hasidic worshipper away to his right bowing back and forth in prayer like a pecking raven, the Wall was completely deserted. He cast a quick glance around, then placed a palm against the pock-marked stone, lowered his head and began to recite the
shema.

'Like a story come to life.' That's how his brother Benjamin had described the Wall when the two of them had first come here all those years ago. 'Like something out of a book or a song.' The image had stayed with Har-Zion, elaborating and embellishing itself over time so that now, as he stood beneath the towering matrix of cream-yellow stone, he felt himself in the presence not of something dead and inanimate, an ossified relic of some long-forgotten world, but rather of something vibrant and alive and relevant. A voice. That's how he thought of it. A deep, sonorous voice singing to him from out of the void: of things that had once been – kings and prophets, the Ark and the Menorah, Moses and David and Solomon and Ezra – but also, more importantly, of things that were yet to come: God's people gathered together once again, the Temple rebuilt, the Holy Lamp recast and filled with light. The Wailing Wall some called it, those who came here to weep, pull their hair and fixate upon the centuries of exile and loss. Not Har-Zion. For him it was a Singing Wall, a place not of pain and remembrance but of hope and joy and expectation; a tangible, touchable reminder that God was with them, that they were not abandoned, that they were His chosen people, precious above all others. That they would endure, just as the Wall had endured, whatever man and nature might throw at them.

He continued reciting, the words of the prayer swooping and swirling within the soft musical hum of his voice, before eventually coming to the end and falling silent. At the same moment a figure, tall, broad-shouldered, came up beside him, positioning himself in a deep pool of shadow at the Wall's far-left extremity so that his face was lost in darkness. The solitary Hasid had by now departed, so the two of them were completely alone.

'You're late,' said Har-Zion, his voice so low as to be barely audible.

The man edged himself deeper into the shadows, mumbling an apology.

Har-Zion delved into his pocket and produced a small, folded sheet of paper which he slipped into the gap between two masonry blocks.

'All the details are there. The boy's name, contact address. Just follow the instructions. It will be—'

There was a sound of approaching footsteps and a young soldier came up to the Wall, stopping a few metres to their right. Har-Zion flicked his finger at his companion to indicate that their conversation, such as it had been, was at an end. He leant forward and kissed the wall, turned and, without a backward glance, walked back across the esplanade towards his bodyguard Avi.

Five minutes later, when the young soldier had finished his prayers and moved away, the man crept a hand up the wall, pulled the folded sheet of paper from the crack and slipped it into his trouser pocket.

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