“Then they will soon be here,” said the monk.

He turned to the watcher and told him to return to his post. Crane appeared on the verge of stopping him, but Hall held him back, and the monk was allowed to pass.

“You want to tell us what you’re doing?” Hall asked.

“Better that you do not know. Please, leave us.”

There was a howl of rage and disappointment from the laborers, and the great stone fell back into place. One of the men sank to his knees in frustration.

“You trying to hide that stuff?”

There was a pause before the answer came.

“Yes,” said the monk, and Hall knew that he was not telling the entire truth. He briefly wondered what kind of monk told lies in a church, and figured that the answer was a desperate one.

“You won’t move that with just two men,” said Hall. “We can help. Right?”

He looked to Crane, but the private’s eyes were fixed on the treasure that lay upon the floor. Hall slapped Crane’s arm hard.

“I said we can help them. You okay with that?”

Crane nodded. “Sure, sure.”

He shrugged off his uniform jacket, placed his gun on the floor, and he and Hall joined the men at the stone. Now that he was up close, Hall could see that they were tonsured. They looked to their leader, waiting for him to respond to the Americans’ offer.

“Bien,” he said, at last. “Vite.”

With four men now working instead of two, the stone began to lift more easily, but it was still immensely heavy. Twice it slipped back down into its resting place, until a last, great effort forced it up sufficiently far for it to be pushed back onto the floor. Hall rested his hands on his knees and stared into the hole they had created.

A silver hexagonal box, perhaps six inches in circumference and sealed with wax, lay in the dirt. It was plain and unadorned, apart from a simple cross carved into the top. The old monk knelt and carefully reached in to retrieve it. He had just lifted it out when the alarm was raised by the sentinel at the door.

“Shit!” said Hall. “Trouble.”

Already, the old monk was pushing the cache of gold into the hole and urging his fellows to replace the stone as best they could, but they were exhausted and making slow progress.

“Please,” said the monk. “Help them.”

But Hall and Crane were making for the door. Carefully, they joined the lookout at the top of the steps.

Men, perhaps a dozen or more in total, were advancing along the road in the moonlight, their helmets shining. Behind them came the half-track, with more men following it. The two Americans took one look at each other and melted into the darkness.

The King stood on the top rung of the ladder and pulled the cord. The attic swam into light, illumination not quite reaching the farthest corners. His wife had told him again and again that they needed to install a window in the roof, or at least put in a stronger lightbulb, but Hall had never really made either a priority. They didn’t come up here much anyway, and he was no longer entirely sure what most of these boxes and old suitcases contained. Cleaning it up was a chore that he was too old for so he had resigned himself, not with any great difficulty, to the fact that it would be up to his children to sort through this junk when he and Jan were dead and gone.

There was one box that he did know where to find. It was on a shelf with a collection of wartime memorabilia that was now merely accumulating dust but which, at one point, he had considered displaying. No, that wasn’t quite true. Like most soldiers, he had taken souvenirs from the enemy-nothing macabre, nothing like the ears that some of those poor demented bastards in Vietnam had collected-but uniform hats, a Luger pistol, even a ceremonial sword that he had found in the scorched remains of a bunker on Omaha. He had picked them up without a second thought. After all, if he didn’t take them, then someone else would, and they were no use to their previous owners. In fact, when he entered that bunker he could smell the officer who was once probably the proud owner of the sword, as his charred body was still smoking in one corner. Not a good way to go, trapped in a cement bunker with liquid fire pouring through the gun slit. Not a good way to go at all. But once he returned home, his desire to be reminded of his wartime service diminished greatly, and any thoughts of display were banished, like the trophies themselves, to a dark, unused place.

Hall climbed farther into the attic, keeping his head slightly bowed to prevent any painful knocks against the ceiling, and threaded his way through boxes and rolled up rugs until he reached the shelf. The sword was still there, wrapped in brown paper and clear plastic, but he left it as it was. Behind it was a locked box. He had always kept it secured, in part because it contained the Luger, and he didn’t want his kids, when they were younger, to discover it and start playing with it like it was a toy. The key was kept in a nearby jar of rusty nails, just to further discourage idle hands. He poured the nails onto the floor until the key became visible, then used it to open the box. There was a trunk filled with old hardcover books nearby, and he sat down upon it, resting the box upon his knee. It felt heavier than he remembered, but then it had been a long time since he had opened it, and he was older now. He wondered idly if bad memories and old sins accumulated weight, the burden of them steadily growing greater as the years went by. This box was foul memories given shape, sins endowed with bulk and form. It seemed almost to drag his head down to it, as though it were suspended from a chain around his neck.

He opened it and slowly began placing the contents on the floor beside his feet: the Luger first, then the dagger. It was silver and black, and emblazoned with a death’s-head emblem. The blade, when withdrawn, showed spots of rust below the hilt and along the blade, but otherwise the steel was largely intact. He had greased it and wrapped it before storing it away, and his precautions had paid off. The plastic peeled away easily, and in the dim light the grease gave to the blade a glistening, organic quality, as though he had just removed a layer of skin and exposed the interior of a living thing.

He laid the knife beside the Luger and removed the third item. A lot of soldiers returned from the war with Iron Crosses taken from the enemy, mostly standard types but some, like the one Hall now held in his hand, adorned with an oak-leaf cluster. The officer from whom it was taken must have done something pretty special, Hall thought. He must have been trusted greatly to be sent to Narbonne, in the face of the advancing enemy, in order to seek out the monastery of Fontfroide and retrieve whatever was secured there.

Only two things remained in the box. The first was a gold cross, four inches in height and decorated with rubies and sapphires. Hall had retained it, against his better judgment, because it was so beautiful, and perhaps also because it symbolized his own faith, stored away in shame after what he had done. Now, as the time of his death inevitably approached, he realized that he had not misplaced that faith entirely. The cross had always been there, locked away in the attic with the discarded fragments of his own life and those of his wife and children. True, some were useless, and some were better forgotten, but there were items of value here too, things that should not have been set aside so readily.

He brushed his fingertips across the centerpiece of the ornament: a ruby as big as the ball of his thumb. I kept it because it was precious, he told himself. I kept it because it was beautiful, and because, somewhere in my heart and my soul, I still believed. I believed in its strength, and its purity, and its goodness. I believed in what it represented. It was always the second-to-last item in the box, always, for that way it rested upon the vellum fragment at the bottom, anchoring it in place, rendering its contents somehow less awful. Larry Crane never understood. Larry Crane never believed in anything. But I did. I was raised in the faith, and I will die in the faith. What I did at Fontfroide was a terrible thing, and I will be punished for it when I die, yet the moment that I touched the fragment I knew it was a link to something far viler. Those Germans did not risk their lives for gold and jewels. To them, they were just trinkets and ornaments. No, they came for that piece of vellum, and if one good thing came out of that night, it was the fact that they did not get it. It will not be enough to save me from damnation, though. No, Larry Crane and I will burn together for what we did that night.