“The ancestor of Balthazar, the man I met. Good work.” Perlmutter smiled. “That's only the start. Martinez says flatly that Aguirrez had the sword and the horn of Roland and that he would pursue him, and I quote, 'to the ends of the earth,' to retrieve these objects.”

Austin let out a low whistle. “That establishes that the Roland relics were real and puts them directly in the hands of the Aguirrez family.”

“It would seem to verify the rumors that Diego was in possession of the sword and horn.”

Perlmutter passed over a folder. “This is a copy of a manuscript from the Venice State Archives. It was found at the naval museum in a file having to do with war galleys.”

Austin read the title on the first page. “An Exoneration of a Man of the Sea.” The publication date on the frontispiece was 1520. The preamble described the work as, An account by Richard Blackthorns an unwilling mercenary in the service of the Spanish Inquisition, a hum- ble sailor who has always stood in defence of His Majesty's name, in which he proves infamies that have been brought against him to be untrue and warns any and all never to trust the murdering Spaniards.

He glanced up at Perlmutter. “Blackthorne is surely a master of the never-ending sentence, but what does he have to do with Roland and the long-dead Aguirrez?”

“Everything, m'lad. frything.” He looked into the bottom of his coffee cup. “While you're up, old boy, would you fetch me a re- fill? I'm feeling peaked after the rigors of travel. Get one for your- self.”

Austin had no intention of getting up, but he rose from his chair and went for the refills. He knew that Perlmutter functioned best when he was eating or drinking.

Perlmutter sipped his coffee and ran his hand over the manuscript as if he were reading it with his fingers. “You can study this at your leisure, but I'll give you a quick summary now. Apparently, Black- thorne fell afoul of rumors that he had willingly served the hated Spaniard, and he wanted to set the record straight.” “That came across loud and clear in the preamble.” “Blackthorne was worried about the stain on his name. He was born of a respectable merchant family in Sussex. He went to sea as a youth and worked his way up from cabin boy to master of a merchant vessel plying the Mediterranean. He was captured by Barbary pi- rates and forced to become a rower on an Algerian galley. The gal- ley was shipwrecked, and he was rescued by the Genoese, who turned him over to the Spanish.”