Читать книгу All That Glitters - Martine Desjardins - Страница 9

III

THE OTHER DAY, when I told my pretty bluebird that I was drawn to disaster, I had not lied. Nor had I told the whole truth.

I have always been the kind of person who walks the streets with an eye on the pavement, on the lookout for a stray penny. My gaze is drawn to the bottoms of ditches; I shake the bushes and turn over stones in hopes of finding an object worthy of adding to my collection. Without going so far as to rob graves, or steal from the dead, I find it impossible to pass a cemetery without wondering how many wedding bands and how many gold watches have, for sentimental reasons, accompanied their owners to the depths of their tombs.

I take no particular pleasure in watching a house burn. But once the blaze has been controlled, I delight in strolling through the still-smouldering debris, in which I never fail to find a stickpin or a piece of silver spared by the flames. As a result of scouring the ground beneath my feet, I’ve learned to detect, as if by instinct, the presence of things buried there, without so much as having to bend over. There are times when I feel I know secrets of which the man in the street is completely unaware.

Some might call me a vulture, but I do nothing more than appropriate what others have been unable to keep. Gold that has become separated from its owner falls by rights to he who first claims it. Such is the immutable law.

As far back as I can remember, I have always been obsessed by the notion that, one day, I will come across a fortune slumbering in a hiding place that no man has ever suspected. As a boy, I wolfed down stories of treasure hunts—The Gold Bug, King Solomon’s Mines, The Count of Monte-Cristo, Treasure Island, The Musgrave Ritual, The Man Who Would Be King. But nothing captured my imagination quite like the innumerable tales of the hidden gold of the Knights Templar. I dreamed not so much of inheriting their riches as of succeeding where so many others had failed.

Anyone can call himself a treasure hunter. But not every man can style himself the inventor of a treasure. So extraordinary is the calling that he who achieves it would warrant having his name enshrined in the pantheon of the great discoverers. It is an ambition I have never foresworn.

Clearly, High Bluff was hardly the most propitious of places to pursue such an enterprise, and so, up until the present, I had been obliged to settle for modest discoveries indeed. Flanders was a different matter entirely. Since time immemorial, the Low Countries have served as an invasion route. War has displaced entire populations that have left behind, buried beneath the earth, whatever they could not carry with them. It is hardly surprising that so many legends of hidden treasure hovered over those lands. Among them, more than a few, attested to by numerous sources, told of the gold of the Templars. For a dedicated treasure seeker, could there be any greater temptation?

Therein hangs the tale of why I hastened to the recruiting office in Winnipeg as soon as I learned that Germany had invaded Belgium last August 4. I would not have missed the war for an empire.