The Knights of the Cornerstone (6 page)

Calvin nodded. “So you were saying about these Templars?”

“I was saying that that’s what they were
not
The Templars were put down centuries ago, although I guess you could say they were down but not out, since remnants of what they had are still—what do you want to call it?—
alive
in the world, maybe. De Charney’s crowd had
pretensions
along those lines, because of his illustrious lineage. But you can’t make book on your ancestors’ deeds.”

“Why didn’t they just start their own organization? Call themselves the Crusaders or the Wildebeests or something?”

His uncle looked at his plate for a moment, pushing his food around with his fork, and then said, “That wasn’t what they had in mind, you see—some kind of
service
organization, like the Moose or the Elks. They wanted to step into something that’s been around a little longer, something a little higher octane and with a deeper connection to things. Partly it was greed, but that wasn’t all of it. Anyway, long story short, they arranged for the murder of a preacher from out in Redlands named John Nazarite, who wasn’t doing anyone any harm and a few people a certain amount
of good. He used to have big tent revivals out along the Mojave River, and every Easter he’d baptize people at a natural spring out there near Desert Center. The rite, or the murder, or whatever you want to call it, involved de Charney’s niece, a girl named Paige Whitney, who was a dancer in one of his casinos. You’re right about the John the Baptist connection, too. De Charney was rumored to be having an affair with his brother’s wife, who was Paige Whitney’s mother. I don’t know whether de Charney contrived all this baloney by setting it up, or whether he fell into it by chance, realized the biblical parallels, and it put ideas in his head. Ultimately, though, there was a lot of claptrap and mumbo jumbo—a cult ceremony, like I said—a re-creation, and at least one dead man.

“They never did find the head, and nobody got prosecuted for the crime, because old de Charney had enough money to make it all disappear. The Fourteen Carats sensationalized it in that book you’ve got there, although it had a little bitty print run, and the whole story looked like malarkey to most people. It was just too far-fetched to interest the authorities, but it turned out to be a mistake that Fourteen Carats printed it, because it put them on the wrong side of some powerful people.”

“What about Bob Postum?”

“Not much, except he was one of de Charney’s crowd. He was young then, and gambled a little. Made a small name for himself in Henderson and Vegas. He started calling himself Baldwin, after the old Christian king of Jerusalem back in the day, which must have irritated de Charney. That’s what I meant by his pedigree: it’s a lie in more ways than one, although if a man believes a lie long enough he forgets that it’s a lie. He married Paige Whitney a few years later, which put him in the inner circle, but something went
bad there, and for a long time the man kept to himself. Then a couple of years back he came out of retirement, you might say, as if he’d been biding his time until de Charney was on his last legs. Even so, until today I wouldn’t have pegged Bob Postum as a major player. I would have said he was mostly bluff, which is probably just exactly what he wanted us to think. But that’s why we set out that bait, like I said—chum the waters a little, see what comes up out of the depths. Sometimes you get a rock cod, and sometimes you get a sea serpent.”

There was the rumble of thunder, and then the sound of rain, quickly growing heavy, and the two men sat in silence, listening. After a couple of minutes Aunt Nettie came inside carrying her half-empty plate, her face and hair wet with rainwater. Although she was moving slowly and probably painfully, there was a look of intense joy on her face, as if she had been waiting out there all this time for the sky to open up. “My land!” she said, setting the plate on the counter. Then she passed out of the kitchen without another word, heading toward her bedroom at the back of the house.

“She likes the weather,” Uncle Lymon said, “more than just about anything.” He continued to gaze in the direction that she had taken. There was sadness and worry in his face, and again it came into Calvin’s mind that the old man loved his wife with a weight that had decades behind it. The realization made him regret what he himself had missed out on. Yesterday he would have bet money that a man couldn’t feel honest regret for the loss of something he had never gained in the first place, but that’s just what he felt at this moment. He was struck with the certainty that he had been marking time, watching the world through the
front window of his house just as his aunt watched it from her chair on the river.

He stood up to help his uncle clear the plates. The kitchen curtains moved now, catching a breath of air with the smell of the river and rain on it.

“There’s your ghost,” Uncle Lymon said, “blowing in from Arizona.”

A
fter supper, Calvin found himself restless and at loose ends in the quiet house. He could hear water dripping from the eaves and the muted sound of the television from down the hall in his aunt’s bedroom. He stared out the window for a time, watching the lightning flickering in the east, and then he aimlessly began to look over his uncle’s books, which filled dozens of broad cedar shelves book-ended with cylinders of what appeared to be solid silver, stamped on top with the Knight’s cross. He hefted one of the cylinders, which must have weighed several pounds. How many were in the room? Forty? He had heard of people putting their money into gold and hiding it under the floorboards, but silver had to be a ponderous way to squirrel away wealth.

He found that he was drawn in by the hundreds of arcane volumes, mostly on historical subjects, some of the books so apparently ancient that he didn’t dare touch them. Uncle
Lymon had invested heavily in histories of the Crusades, the Grail, the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers, and other holy orders and movements and legends. Many of the most ancient books had titles in Latin or French.
De Antichristo
was easy enough to translate, and the same was the case with the
Histoire de la Papesse Jeanne
, written by a Frenchman named Lenfant. The contents, however, which the titles made sound so promising, were unreadable, French and Latin both being Greek to him, as was Greek.

He found books on the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the Assassins, the Mormons, and an array of books on Masonic lore. He took down
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry
, which looked to be full of mysteries, and sat down to read it. But he was quickly bogged down in a mathematical account of the marvels of the number nine, which apparently could be broken up in a heap of different ways and then multiplied and re-added and cooked at a high heat with parsley and butter and still taste just like the number nine. It was evidently the great mystery number of the universe, but he couldn’t fathom what the mystery portended. That was the problem with secret societies, he thought—the secrets too often led down the garden path, finally revealing a view of a birdbath or a head on a plate.

He returned the books to the shelves and then, out of curiosity, he opened the doors of a low cabinet beneath them, expecting to see more books, or manuscripts, maybe—something worth keeping free of dust. What he saw were two cardboard boxes, identical to the two he was familiar with. Both of them had the usual Hosmer address, and both of them were taped shut. He picked one of them up, and then the other. They were either empty or contained—what? Another veil? If there were four of the
boxes, he wondered, why not six? Why not eight? Veils crisscrossing the country in the trunks of automobiles, flying out from Iowa in biplanes or floating down rivers in baskets like Moses among the bulrushes. A man like Bob Postum wouldn’t be able to tell an artifact from a doodad under the circumstances. It seemed like a fancy way to throw him off the track of poor Aunt Iris’s veil.

He became aware that the rain had stopped, and he returned the boxes to the cabinet and stepped to the window. The dark river flowed past in a terrible hurry, bound for the ocean, with its own manifold mysteries. He went into the kitchen, found a grape soda in the refrigerator, and took it outside into the warm night, pulling off his shoes and socks and sitting down in his aunt’s chair, letting the river water swirl the unfathomables out of him, right out through the ends of his toes.

It was a moonless night, pleasantly warm, and the stars shone where the clouds had retreated back into the east. He could see the Temple out on its island, illuminated by parking lot lights, and he imagined himself a Knight, sitting on a stool out there in the old building, drinking twenty-five-cent beers and talking with the Brethren. Last time he had visited he had gone over there a couple of times. The Knights all seemed to answer to Whitey and Red and Woody and other adjective names. Immediately he had become Cal instead of Calvin and had fallen into a conversation about the virtues of fishing for striped bass below the dam in low water and about the sad fate of the two-stroke outboard motor, neither one of which subjects he knew anything about, although he wished he knew more. Out here in the desert those kinds of things seemed fundamental, although fundamental to what, he couldn’t say, because he was an out-of-towner.

After ten minutes his feet were numb and the bottle was empty. He picked up his shoes and socks and walked gingerly along the bank, then up onto a stone path that led back around to the carport, where he leaned against the hood of the Dodge and put his shoes and socks back on. The rain seemed to have abdicated entirely, so he set out walking, up the driveway and out onto the street that led down to the edge of the trailer park. The dark grounds were mostly empty of people now, the trailers lighted, the windows flickering with the shifting images of television screens. Two rangy-looking dogs appeared from behind a trailer, spotted him, and came across to say hello, but they quickly lost interest and wandered off.

Without having made any conscious decision to do so, he found himself walking in the direction of the river again, down toward the bridge that spanned the fifty feet of moving water between New Cyprus and the Temple Bar. His feet seemed to compel him forward, despite the fact that the Temple itself was off-limits to anyone but the Elders tonight. But the Temple wasn’t his destination, really. He had no intention of knocking on any doors or of crashing the party. He would simply walk out to the island and back again, just to air himself out.

When he was out beyond the last of the trailers, he was faintly surprised at the quality of the darkness—a darkness virtually unknown in the suburbs. Overhead, though, the sky was awash with stars, bright enough for a space traveler to read by, and it was a marvel to him how little of that light actually reached the earth. He set his sights on the pools of illumination in the Temple parking lot and walked up onto the bridge. Away to his right, muddy rainwater washed down the gully from the Dead Mountains and swirled out into the river.

The windows of the Temple had slatted shutters drawn across them, and the interior light shone through in bands. It came to him that he could easily peer unseen through a gap in the shutters and have an eyeful of the secret doings of the Knights—the Elders giving each other the wiggly-fish handshake, maybe. He stopped suddenly and crouched down behind the railing. Someone
was
peering in through the shutters, back toward the rear of the building. There wasn’t much light coming through, and because the man was hunched over, it was impossible to make anything out for certain except that he was heavyset and had either blond or gray hair. He held something up to the window, almost undoubtedly a camera.

Bob Postum
, Calvin thought. He moved forward warily, crouching along, but almost as soon as he started out, the man turned sharply and looked in his direction. Calvin ducked again, and when he peeked over the railing a moment later, the man was scuttling away toward the river, disappearing into the willows before Calvin could get a good look at him. More boldly now Calvin hurried across the bridge and into the lot, crossing to the edge of the building and looking hard into the darkness along the water, where the willows shifted in the night wind. The Temple was built of heavy rectangular stones, evidently cut in the quarry in the hills. The back wall of the structure buried itself into the natural rock of the island, which mounded up in a castle-like pile to a height of fifteen feet or so. In the darkness it was difficult to see where the cut stone left off and the rock started, because natural rock and cut stone tumbled away on both sides, overgrown by willow.

He climbed partway up the hill of stone, crouching behind immense blocks and keeping his head low until he could see over the willows down to the river below. He
heard an odd noise now, a muted clunk and then a scraping noise somewhere dead ahead—the sound of oars in oarlocks. The river below ran black and swift and reflected a world of dancing stars. Thirty feet out his man was rowing a boat hard toward the far shore, making three times as much leeway as forward movement in the strong current, but drawing away quickly. He rowed backward, facing forward in the boat, so that Calvin could only see his back. It clearly wasn’t Postum. This man had shorter hair. He wore a white T-shirt with a dark blotch on the back, what might have been a face or a logo of some sort, and he rowed the boat like an amateur, jerking the oars out of the river when he was halfway through a stroke and flinging water in every direction. In a few moments he was a mere shadow disappearing quickly downriver.

Calvin headed back down toward the Temple, hearing talk and laughter from within. He had to admit that the day had moved from curious to ominous: first the mystery of the Aunt Iris veil, then the theft and the second veil, and then Bob Postum needlessly pretending to be Fred Woolsworth, apparently having quit pretending to be King Baldwin, perhaps because of a murder that was half a century old. Calvin was evidently a pawn, entirely in the dark here—literally and figuratively. And of course there was the levitating toilet seat—another variety of mystery—and his uncle’s unconvincing talk about air currents off the river.