The Sword of the Templars t-1

by Paul Christopher

  Taking the cabdriver’s advice they booked into Staunton’s, a trio of elegant Georgian town houses that had been turned into a hotel overlooking the large, lush, iron-fenced rectangle of St. Stephen’s Green. It was just past ten o’clock. They locked the door to their room, flopped down onto the twin beds, still fully dressed, and were both asleep in seconds.

  When Holliday woke up the following morning Peggy’s bed was empty. Twenty minutes later she was back carrying a green and gold Dunnes Stores bag and two large paper cups full of Seattle’s Best Coffee. She went into the adjoining bathroom to unpack the toiletries while Holliday gratefully slurped at the coffee.

  “There’s a big shopping center on the far side of the park,” she called out. “We should go there later and stock up.”

  “Good idea,” said Holliday. Everything they’d brought with them had been in the trunk of the rental car parked in Carr-Harris’s yard. All they had now were their passports and their wallets.

  Peggy popped her head around the bathroom door.

  “I’m going to have a quick shower. Why don’t you go down and order us breakfast?”

  “All right,” said Holliday. She went back into the bathroom and shut the door. A few seconds later he heard the hiss of the shower. He finished his coffee, then left the room, locking the door behind him. He went down the elegant winding staircase to the main floor, then threaded his way through several connecting corridors to the dining area.

  The room was smallish and relentlessly red. Red walls, red carpet, and red leather upholstered chairs. Several curtained windows looked out onto the roaring morning traffic heading around the park.

  It was almost eleven, and the room was empty except for an elderly priest in the far corner reading The Catholic Weekly and drinking coffee. Holliday seated himself at a table beside one of the windows, his joints still aching from the previous day and a night spent on a too-soft mattress.

  A waitress appeared idiotically overdressed in the Irish interpretation of a French maid’s uniform, complete with a frilly apron and a frilly little hat to match. Her nametag read NADINE. She had a long, rodent-like face and graying hair bizarrely done up in overtight, African-style cornrows that acted like a Botox injection, viciously pulling up the skin of her forehead and painfully arching heavy, dark eyebrows that ran together over the bridge of her long nose. She appeared to be in her late fifties and looked extremely bored. She had a thermos jug of coffee in her hand that she was holding like a weapon.

  “Are you still serving breakfast?” Holliday asked.

  “Full Irish or Continental,” she answered. “There’s no grapefruit this morning,” she warned. Her vaguely sinister Dublin drawl made the question of the grapefruit sound like a bomb threat.

  “Full Irish,” said Holliday. “Two, please. My cousin will be down in a few minutes.”

  “Your cousin, is it?” the woman said skeptically.

  “That’s right,” said Holliday

  “American, are you?” Nadine said.

  “That’s right,” said Holliday, trying to keep a polite smile on his face; it wasn’t easy. He’d had drill sergeants who were more polite.

  “Thought so,” grunted the waitress. She turned on her heel and left the room, pausing to refill the priest’s cup of coffee. She’d never offered the coffee to Holliday.

  Peggy appeared a few minutes later, her dark hair tousled and wet from the shower. She saw Holliday, veered between several tables, and sat down across from him.

  “I’m famished,” she said. “You realize the last time we ate was on the plane?”

  “I ordered for us,” said Holliday. “The waitress didn’t give us much choice, so it’s full Irish for both of us.”

  “In England that would be egg and chips,” said Peggy.

  “I think full Irish is a little more extreme,” said Holliday.

  The waitress appeared a few minutes later, an enormous plate in each hand. She set them down in front of Holliday and Peggy.

  “Holy crap,” murmured Peggy, looking down at the plate. On it were two fried eggs, sunny-side up, swimming in iridescent grease, their undersides a burnt-crisp web of charred whites, the yolks staring wetly up at her like deep orange eyes.

  Beside the eggs there was a lump of baked beans in the shape of an ice cream scoop, two wrinkled rashers of pale pink bacon, a raft of link sausages, a small crop of fried mushrooms next to a dissolving slice of fried tomato, a mountainous pile of fried potatoes, and two fried circular objects each the size of a silver dollar, one black, one white.

  “What are those?” Peggy asked, indicating the coin-shaped objects on the plate.

  “Black pudding and white pudding, miss,” explained the waitress.

  “What’s black pudding?” Peggy asked.

  “Pig’s blood and oatmeal, miss,” said the waitress. She pronounced the word “blood” as “blud.”

  “And white pudding?” Peggy said.

  “Pork meat and suet,” said the woman in the maid’s outfit. “They used to use sheep’s brains, but they’re too afraid of the scrapie since mad cow. Best part of twenty years past,” she added, as though the lack of scrapie-infected sheep’s brains was somehow a terrible culinary loss.

  “Ah,” said Peggy.

  “Will that be all?” asked the waitress, turning to Holliday. He nodded. The waitress turned and left the room.

  “I’ve lost my appetite,” said Peggy, looking down at the plate.

  “When I ate with Uncle Henry he used to scold me if I didn’t eat everything on my plate. ‘Think about the starving children in China,’ he’d say.”

  “With me it was the starving kids in Africa,” Peggy answered. She started to eat, carefully avoiding the black and white puddings. The waitress reappeared with a vintage toast rack filled with half a dozen thick-cut slices and a plate of butter.

  “I wonder what the rate of heart attacks is in Ireland,” said Peggy. She picked up a slice of toast and used it to mop up a sea of leaking egg yoke. Holliday didn’t answer, concentrating on his own breakfast for a little while. As he ate he found himself thinking about the firefight at Carr-Harris’s the day before, the old professor, his arms spread wide as he died, the man with the Russian submachine gun in the narrow hall, the bark of the Mauser.

  Almost twenty-four hours ago now. Soon someone would come by the old man’s house, the mailman or the milkman or a neighbor, and everything would begin to come crashing down on their heads. Two dead bodies in the house, their rental left behind in the yard. They’d left a trail of bread crumbs a blind man could follow, let alone the police. Except for fleeing, they’d done nothing illegal, but if they fell into the bureaucratic horror show that was bound to surround Carr-Harris’s death it would take days if not weeks to escape.

  “This is getting out of hand,” he said finally.

  “The breakfast?” Peggy said.

  “No. What we’re doing. Tracking down an old sword that Hitler might or might not have owned is a long way from murdering people. We’re way out of our depth here,” said Holliday.

  Peggy put down her fork. She turned her head and looked out through the filmy sheer curtains. A bright yellow double-decker open tour bus rumbled by, its side panels covered in manic advertising slogans, the seats on the upper decks crammed with stunned-looking tourists in bright clothing trying to cram Dublin into a day trip.

  “I think it’s too late to back out now,” the young woman said finally. “You said it yourself: those guys shooting at us yesterday must have followed us to Carr-Harris’s place. They knew exactly what they were doing.” She paused. “I don’t think people who are willing to kill to get what they want are going to back down. Even if we did bail out and head for the hills, I think they’d just track us down and try it again. We have to keep going.”

  “I can’t put your life in danger,” said Holliday. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Do I detect a note of sexism here?” Peggy said. “A bit of patronizing from my overprotecti
ve cousin?”

  “Maybe,” he admitted. “It’s hard enough in the kind of situation we were in yesterday without…” He let it dangle, afraid of putting his foot in his mouth. Peggy did it for him.

  “Without a woman along?” she said, finishing the unspoken sentiment.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you were going to,” grinned Peggy. “Admit it.”

  “Never,” said Holliday, grinning back.

  “Believe me, Doc, the people who were shooting at us yesterday aren’t sexist; they’ll kill anyone who gets in their way or has something they want.”

  “Who are they?” Holliday asked. “Some kind of neo-Nazi group? I thought that kind of idiocy went out with the whole skinhead thing.”

  “Old Nazis never die,” said Peggy, picking up her fork again and prodding a sausage on her plate. “They just change their names.” She put the fork down again and pushed the plate away from her slightly. “There’s lots of them around. The British Nationalist Party, Combat 18, the BNP’s armed division, the Nationalist Party of Canada, Aryan Nations back home. France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, even Germany.”

  “What about the Russians?” Holliday suggested, remembering the Bizon submachine gun.

  “There used to be a bunch called Pamyat back in the early nineties, and there’s been an upsurge of Russian neo-Nazis in Israel,” said Peggy. “The Russian National Socialist Party is an offshoot of Pamyat. They released a video a while back showing somebody being beheaded in a forest.”

  “You can’t be serious,” said Holliday.

  “Dead serious,” said Peggy. She shrugged. “They run a newspaper called Pravoye Soprotivleniye or Right Resistance with a circulation of at least a hundred thousand. The paper used to be called The Stormtrooper.”

  “Are they big enough to have organized the attack on Carr-Harris?”

  “Almost certainly,” answered Peggy. “The neos these days are very computer savvy; they’ve even got an electronic clearinghouse on the Internet called ‘Blood and Honour’ and their own version of Wikipe dia called ‘Metapedia.’ Spooky stuff.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about it,” said Holliday.

  “I did the pix on a series of articles for Vanity Fair last year,” she answered.

  “So what do we do now?”

  Peggy glanced down at the various remnants of fried food congealing on her plate.

  “Buy the Irish version of a roll of Tums and figure out our next step.”

  “Carefully,” said Holliday.

  “Very carefully,” agreed Peggy.

  12

  Doc Holliday and Peggy Blackstock stood on the upper deck of the small car ferry and peered out across the broad lake as they neared the German side of the water. Here the lake was called the Bodensee; on the Swiss side it was called Lake Constance.

  They were within a mile or so of the dock at Friedrichshafen, but there was nothing to be seen ahead except a gray wall of fog, the horizon stolen and the sun invisible. Every few seconds the ferry’s foghorn would moan, the sound repeated back to them out of the featureless gloom like the unrequited mating calls of vanished sea creatures. Barely visible, the inky waters of the ancient alpine lake broke thickly against the sides of the ferry.

  “The Twilight Zone,” said Peggy, the sound of her voice flattened by the heavy mist. There were other people nearby on the deck, but they were as invisible as everything else, no more than shadows appearing and disappearing as they went by. When people spoke it was in murmurs and low whispers, like children afraid of the dark unknown.

  Six days had passed since the firefight at L’Espoir and the murder of Carr-Harris. They’d stayed in Dublin for most of that time, waiting to see what the fallout would be from the death of the old Oxford professor at his country home.

  There seemed to have been no consequences at all; it was as though the whole thing had never happened. Nothing in any of the newspapers that Holliday looked through and nothing on the radio or television. No hue and cry, no be-on-the-lookout-for-these-fugitives, no policeman hammering on their hotel room door, no ringing of the telephone. Nothing.

  In the end the only conclusion that Holliday and Peggy could make of it all was that their opponents, whoever they were, had carefully cleaned up after themselves either to keep the police off their tails or to ensure that they would find the two Americans before the authorities. One way or another they were only buying themselves a little bit of time; eventually the crime would be discovered.

  Peggy and Holliday hadn’t been idle during their brief hiatus in Dublin. Peggy had spent some time re-outfitting themselves from stores at the St. Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre while Holliday followed the few frail leads they had, researching the names Carr-Harris had mentioned at an Internet cafй at the foot of bustling Grafton Street, a crowded pedestrian mall that ran between the corner of St. Stephen’s Green and the entrance to Trinity College on Nassau Street.

  Holliday concentrated on tracking down the three names involved with Carr-Harris’s Postmaster escapade off the coast of West Africa during the early days of the war: Edmund Kiss, Hans Reinerth, and the Italian, Amedeo Maiuri.

  Several things quickly became apparent, linking the men above and beyond the letter Uncle Henry had discovered on the captured ocean liner: all three men were somehow involved with archaeology, and all three men were deeply involved in mysticism, Kiss and Reinerth with the Nordic roots of the German race and culture, Amedeo Maiuri with the essence of the Ancient Roman military ethic.

  Kiss and Reinerth had both become SS officers during World War II, and Maiuri had held equivalent rank in the Fascist Black Brigades. Maiuri had been one of the founding members of the School of Fascist Mysticism in Milan and both Reinerth and Kiss had been high-ranking and important members of the “Study society for primordial intellectual science ‘German Ancestral Heritage,’ ” commonly referred to as the Ahnenerbe, the fundamental source and rationalization for Hitler’s race laws and the annihilation of the Jews.

  All three men survived the war and escaped serious prosecution. Kiss faded from view without a ripple, while Reinerth had been intimately involved with the creation of a museum of Stone Age culture still thriving today and located not far from where they were right now on the Bodensee. But eventually he, too, slipped into obscurity. Maiuri, his reputation carefully sanitized soon after Italy’s capitulation in 1943, continued in his previous occupation as director of the archaeological dig at Pompeii until his death in 1960.

  Digging even deeper as he ricocheted across the Internet from one linking Web site to another, Holliday eventually found the common thread that bound all three: they had all been members of a secret society formed by a man named Jцrg Lanz von Liebenfels, a former Cistercian monk. The name of the society, organized in 1907 in Burg Werfenstein, Austria, was “The Order of the New Templars.” Originally adopting a right-facing red swastika as its symbol, the Order used the same icon later adopted by the officially recognized Ahnenerbe: a sword, its blade enclosed by a loop of gold and surrounded by a band of runic letters; exactly the same design Holliday had seen on the wrist of the dead man in Carr-Harris’s hallway.

  Seeing the image on the screen brought him up short. Was it possible that some arcane bit of old folklore still existed? More likely that the symbol was being used again for some other twisted purpose.

  The Order of the New Templars apparently went underground after the war but reemerged in Vienna during the fifties with an ex-SS officer named Rudolf Mund as Prior of the Order. Mund spent almost twenty years trying to resurrect his version of the organization but failed. Nazism was a forgotten enterprise; Communism had replaced it as the world’s enemy.

  Digging deeper still, Holliday followed the faint trail left by Mund, eventually connecting him to another SS officer, the man who had in fact been Mund’s superior during the war, SS-Gruppenfьhrer General Lutz Kellerman. Kellerman had also been a member of the Order of the New Templars as well as being a close fri
end of Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and the Gestapo who was in turn the sponsor of both Edmund Kiss and Hans Reinerth. Wheels within wheels.

  Kellerman vanished after 1945, presumably escaping through the Vatican “ratlines” and with the help of the near-mythical ODESSA, the Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehцrigen, the Organization of Former SS Officers.

  Kellerman’s family enshrined his memory and rose to some wealth and notoriety as exporters of farm machinery to Brazil and Argentina. For years there had been rumors that the SS officer had escaped to South America with a fortune in looted gold and jewelry, but no one had ever found any hard evidence.

  Kellerman’s son, Axel, had tried unsuccessfully to purchase himself a career in postwar German politics, but even the ultra-right-wing Republikaner party refused to endorse him. Axel Kellerman, now in his fifties and using the name “von Kellerman,” ran the family enterprises from the ancestral castle estate just outside of Friedrichshafen.

  Friedrichshafen was a small city of roughly sixty thousand, its main industries being the revitalized Zeppelin works and Friedrichshafen AG, a manufacturer of transmissions for farm machinery and heavy equipment. On the surface the town appeared to be a bright, modern tourist-oriented location far from the bustling industrial centers of Munich, Stuttgart, and the Rhine-Ruhr industrial area, but the city by the lake had a much darker past.

  During the war the Zeppelin works manufactured components for the V2 rocket with labor provided by slaves from a satellite of Dachau concentration camp located on the outskirts of the town. Most of the old city center had been completely destroyed during the Operation Bellicose bombing raid of June 20, 1943.

  “Do you really think this man Kellerman is going to have any useful information?” Peggy asked as they stood together on the upper deck of the ferry. “And more importantly, if he does have any information is he going to give it to us?”

  Holliday shrugged. His brain was getting tired, stumbling over names, dates, events, possibilities. History for him was usually clear, a set of absolutes, set in stone. Now it was something different, vague and without a coherent order. He’d spent a lifetime in the military, where goals were achieved by direct action; there was nothing direct at all about the problem of Uncle Henry’s sword.