The Templar throne t-3

by Paul Christopher

  "The best way to guarantee that they find nothing is to stop them looking," the cardinal said. "Besides that, if what you told me earlier is true, then this man Holliday has been entrusted with the true secret of the Templars-the numbers for their bank accounts. A bonus, although the money rightfully belongs to the Church, anyway."

  "If we do this thing we can't have this coming back on us," warned Brennan.

  "I understand that," Cardinal Spada said and nodded. "Hire outside help if you wish." The man in the scarlet skullcap stared across the desk. "Holliday is important, but remember who the woman is, as well."

  "They're in Prague. I know just the people."

  "Then get on with it," said Spada.

  It was a dismissal.

  Brennan left Spada's office and went down two flights of marble stairs to his own, much smaller office on the second floor. It was a plain square room with bare wooden floors, a metal desk, some black metal filing cabinets and a plain cross on the wall.

  The only other decoration was a photograph of his long-dead sister Mary, a Magdalene nun, standing in front of St. Finnbar's in Cork City, smiling into the camera, squinting in the sunlight. The picture was from the late sixties, faded to sepia.

  She'd worked as a supervisor of the indentured girls at the Magdalene Laundry on Blarney Street, above the North Mall and the River Lee with its famous swans. She'd so loved to feed the swans. She'd imagined they were the souls and spirits of ugly girls come back to the world as something beautiful. She'd died of some terrible respiratory sickness a year after the photo was taken, coughing her lungs out and praying to a heedless god.

  The priest sat down at his desk, flipped through his old-fashioned Rolodex and came up with a number with a 420 prefix. He dialed and almost immediately the Vatican switchboard broke into the call. He gave the male operator the number, and then a name. There was a pause and then the double tone of the call ringing through in Prague. The phone rang three times and then was answered.

  "Prosim?" The voice was a slightly phlegmy baritone.

  "Pan Pesek? Antonin Pesek?"

  "I am Pesek," said the voice. "Who are you?"

  "This is Romulus," said Brennan, staring blankly at the photograph of his sister as he ordered the killing. "I have a job for you."

  The Convent of St. Agnes of Bohemia is located on Milosrdnych Street in the Josefov, or Jewish Quarter, of Prague, the eleventh-century center of the original city that had grown on the banks of the Vltava River a thousand years before. The convent, now part of the National Gallery of Prague, was a collection of meticulously refurbished fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Gothic buildings centered around the old vaulted cloisters that now contain one of the finest collections of Baroque and Renaissance art in the world.

  Holliday and Sister Meg got off the Metro at the Namesti Republiky stop and climbed up into the sunlight. The square was crowded with tourists and local shoppers, and there was a festive feeling in the air. People were eating cotton candy and popcorn as they strolled along, talking and laughing. Uniformed cops walked in pairs, doing as much window-shopping as the people around them. There was a line out the door at McDonald's.

  Holliday and the nun walked north up Avenue Revolucni, a wide thoroughfare noisy with rumbling street-cars and lined with shops of all kinds, interspersed with ATMs every hundred yards or so just to make sure you had lots of Czech crowns in your pocket.

  They turned west a block short of the river and took a shortcut through a government building parking lot to Rasnovka Alley, a narrow cobbled lane that led them down to the main entrance to the old convent. They paid their hundred and fifty koruna, roughly six dollars, and went into the thousand-year-old building.

  The cloisters that made up the gallery were almost empty, and except for an old man dozing on a bench and a young couple more interested in each other's anatomy than the paintings on the wall, Holliday and Sister Meg had the place to themselves.

  "I came for the archives, not the art," said Holliday. "Shouldn't we be next door at the monastery?"

  "There's something here I wanted to show you," said the nun, eager excitement in her voice. "Something I remembered last night." After their escape from their bald pursuer Holliday was willing to indulge her. The paintings, the religious statuary and the extraordinary carved wooden altarpieces were certainly worth looking at, even if they had nothing to do with their objective.

  They went up a narrow set of steps to the upper floor of the cloisters and down a long arched hall. Meg led Holliday to a large gilt-framed painting hanging on the plain, off-white plaster wall.

  A man in armor stood on the left, a veiled woman on his left wearing a cowl on her head, throwing her face into shadow, a long black gown obscuring her figure. The man was wearing a full-length chain mail hauberk that came down to his ankles. He had a long sword sheathed at his waist and an overshirt with the familiar Saint-Clair engrailed cross coat of arms, while his shield bore the red Maltese cross of the Templar order.

  The knight was holding what appeared to be a wooden engrailed cross in his free hand. Behind the two figures was a heraldic portrayal of a winged gold lion with a sword held in its right front paw and standing on a rippling blue field of water. In one corner, like the illustration from an ancient tarot card, six monks in their white habits prayed as they stood around a well. In the opposite corner of the painting was a stamped symbol of a heart with a cross in it.

  Sister Meg read the description of the painting on a small plinth next to it. "The Blessed Juliana With Her Protector, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1427." She stared up at the near life-sized figure of the woman in the painting. "She always appeared veiled so men wouldn't be distracted by her great beauty," said Sister Meg, awe clear in her voice. She turned to Holliday. "Does her protector remind you of anyone?"

  "It's Jean de Saint-Clair," said Holliday. "And that's a Jacob's Quadrant in his hand. The navigation instrument I told you about."

  "Do you know the significance of the lion with the sword?" Sister Meg asked. "I couldn't figure it out, or the six monks around the well." She shrugged. "I even ran it through Google. There are lots of lions with swords but none that quite match up. The closest was the old imperial crest of Persia."

  "I don't know about the well and the monks but a golden lion with a sword standing on water is the coat of arms of Venice," said Holliday. "It's also a quadrant on the coat of arms on the Zeno family crest, the ship-builders who leased the Templars most of their fleet during the Crusades. According to this I'd say your Juliana and Jean de Saint-Clair went to Venice together, probably to rent a ship."

  8

  They found a little terrace restaurant on the other side of the Jewish Quarter and sat at a shaded table out of the direct sunlight. The restaurant was called U Vltavy, probably because it was only a block from the river. They had an odd menu-part Mexican, part Austrian and part Czech. Sister Meg had gazpacho and some sort of pork dish with freshly ground horseradish, while Holliday settled on beef stroganoff with rice and some of the same horseradish. They ate in silence for a while, enjoying the summer warmth and watching the tourists go past.

  For some reason he didn't quite understand, Holliday had always enjoyed Prague more than any other city in Europe, east or west, even during the Soviet era. The locals had a sense of humor and seemed innately curious about everyone and everything. They'd use any excuse to engage tourists in friendly conversation, and a favorite game on the subways was to trade language-a few words of Czech in exchange for a few words in English. There was even a television channel that showed nothing but English movies with Czech subtitles as a language teaching aid.

  Perhaps it had something to do with a few thousand years of being the western end of the Silk Road. With a few rare exceptions the city had been remarkably tolerant and welcoming to people of all races. It came as no surprise to Holliday that the Czechs were the first to rise up against the Soviet regime in 1989.

  Thinking about that year always brought a
smile to his face. After seventy-odd years of Soviet hegemony and the Iron Curtain, it had all turned out to be smoke and mirrors. The vaunted power of the Soviet army with its thousands of tanks turned out to be invested in so many inert chunks of rusting, immobile steel, silent for want of enough gasoline to run them a hundred feet, let alone a thousand miles into the heart of NATO territory.

  The guidance systems in half their intercontinental ballistic missiles were years out of date, the people of Moscow were running out of toilet paper and the armed forces hadn't been paid in a year. It was all a lie, and the United States' supposedly all-knowing intelligence community hadn't seen it coming. Not even close. It was just as much a crock as the Russians'. Apparently you certainly could fool all of the people all of the time.

  "What are you smiling about?" Sister Meg asked, patting her lips with her napkin, her face pleasantly flushed by the fresh horseradish. His smile broadened; maybe that old paranoid story was true; maybe we never really did land astronauts on the moon; it was all a story cooked up on a back lot somewhere by Richard Nixon and his cronies.

  "Things never work out the way people think," answered Holliday. "Reality gets in the way or something comes flying in from left field and upsets the applecart."

  "Nice mixed metaphor," the nun said and smiled.

  "There's an old Jewish saying-Man plans, God laughs."

  "You're talking about the painting?" Sister Meg said.

  "It changes everything. It proves that Saint-Clair really did have the Quadrant and Lucas Cranach thought it was important."

  "There's nothing in the archives about the Blessed Juliana going to Venice; not a mention."

  "Someone knew," said Holliday. "Cranach must have known or he wouldn't have painted them like that two hundred years after the fact."

  "But how?" Sister Meg asked.

  "It's not hard to figure out. Dig deeply enough into history and you can always find the degrees of separation between people. Cranach was a painter with a number of important patrons, including kings. Royalty during the Renaissance was a tight little group. Contemporaries boasted about their patronage. Cranach could have easily known a Venetian painter. Some of his early work looks a lot like Domenico Ghirlandaio, for instance. Maybe they shared stories looking for subject matter." Holliday shrugged. "Maybe one of Ghirlandaio's patrons was a member of the Zeno family. They were rich enough."

  "So now you're an art expert?"

  "Not really, but paintings were the Middle Ages equivalent of news footage or photographs. A lot of information about battles and tactics can be found on the walls of major art galleries."

  "Do you have an answer for everything?"

  Holliday sighed and put down his fork, his appetite gone.

  "Only to snotty questions from arrogant nuns." He stared at her across the table. "You've been riding me since we met," he said. "Why? What did I do to you?"

  "You've been patronizing me from the beginning," she answered.

  "If that's true I certainly didn't do it on purpose," said Holliday.

  "That doesn't make it any better."

  "I've been teaching eighteen-year-old wet-behind-the-ears cadets for the last few years. Maybe that's why I seem patronizing. Before that I was ordering soldiers around."

  "I'm not a cadet or a soldier and I'm not wet behind the ears or eighteen either."

  Something caught Holliday's eye and he glanced over her shoulder.

  "Don't look now but Cue Ball is back."

  Sister Meg froze. She stared at Holliday, eyes wide.

  "You're joking," she said coldly. "If this is a joke then all bets are off. We go our separate ways."

  "No joke. He's leaning on a lamppost at the end of the block reading that stupid newspaper of his." Holliday shook his head. "He's going to get skin cancer on that chrome dome if he stays out in the sun without a hat the way he does."

  "How did he find us?"

  "He must have figured we'd head for the convent. He had to be waiting for us to come out and then followed us here."

  "What should we do?"

  "Why don't you decide," said Holliday. "I wouldn't want to sound patronizing or anything." He sat back in his chair and waited.

  "Maybe we shouldn't do anything," she said. "He knows we'll eventually go back to the hotel."

  "What if we don't?"

  "Pardon."

  "You have your passport on you?" Holliday asked.

  "Always." She nodded, patting the plain canvas bag in her lap.

  "Me too," said Holliday. "Anything you'll miss back at the hotel?"

  "Just some clothes, a few toiletries. What are you suggesting?"

  "Hang on," said Holliday. He took out his BlackBerry and thumbed the keys.

  "What are you doing?" Sister Meg asked.

  Holliday looked down at the little screen.

  "There's a train to Vienna with connections to Venice leaving Praha hlavni nadrazi at five o'clock this afternoon. It gets into Venice at eight tomorrow morning. If we can give Cue Ball the slip until then we should be okay."

  "We have to get out of here first."

  Holliday casually twisted around in his chair.

  "That's Listopadu Street up ahead, which means the Starenova Synagogue is a couple of blocks south of us," he muttered, trying to orient himself. "That means the restaurant has to back onto the top end of the Jewish Cemetery."

  "So?"

  "That's our way out."

  Holliday dug into his wallet, pulled out a fifty-koruna note-coincidentally the one with a picture of Agnes of Bohemia on it-then dropped it on the table to cover their bill. He took out another koruna, this one an orange-brown two-hundred-crown note, worth about fifty dollars American. He stuck his wallet back into his pocket.

  "I'm going to get up and go into the restaurant. Cue Ball will think I'm going to the bathroom. Count to sixty, then get up and do the same. At a dead run it'll take him a couple of minutes to get down here. Got it?"

  "Of course," snapped the nun irritably.

  Holliday stood and disappeared into the restaurant. Sister Meg waited as long as she could, then followed him inside. He was waiting at the rear of the dining room, standing beside a young dark-haired waiter in a long apron.

  "Sledujte mne, prosim," said the young man, motioning with one hand. Follow me, please. He led them through a pair of swing doors, into the kitchen and through another door that led to a narrow courtyard. At the back of the cigarette-butt-littered space was a low stone wall that looked very old. It was made of small stones mortared together and topped with curved, half-pipe terra-cotta tiles to facilitate drainage. Holliday boosted himself up onto the wall and the young man cupped his hands into a stirrup for Sister Meg. A few seconds later she was on top of the wall with Holliday.

  "Dekuji," said Holliday, thanking the waiter.

  "Za malo." The waiter shrugged. No big thing. He lit a cigarette and stood watching as Holliday and the red-haired nun jumped down on the far side of the wall.

  The Josefov cemetery is the oldest existing Jewish burial ground in Europe, dating back to 1439 and used up until 1787. It is small as cemeteries go, taking up less than an acre made up of the courtyards of a long, L-shaped block, but more than a hundred thousand people are buried there, some in spots twelve coffins deep, the headstones only marking the people buried in the top layer.

  With most of the stones less than a foot apart, there is almost no space for grass to grow. The roots of the big overarching shade trees have moved the worn and almost indecipherable headstones every which way and there is a ruined, abandoned sense to the place that is far from true. Countless visitors flock to the cemetery each year, paying their ten crowns and their respects to the dead. Rabbi Low, the creator of the forerunner of Frankenstein's monster, the golem from Vlatava mud, is buried here, as are other Jewish notables.

  Dropping down into the cemetery, Holliday and Sister Meg found themselves hemmed in by headstones and had to pick their way slowly and carefully between the mark
ers until they reached one of the main paving-stone pathways that wound around the property.

  The pathway was crowded, mainly with tourists, some of them carrying cameras, some reading the old Hebrew inscriptions. The only thing they had in common was the fact that none of their heads were bare. For a few moments as they threaded their way through the crowds, Holliday wasn't sure why everyone seemed to be glaring at him. Then he remembered that it was considered disrespectful to enter a Jewish cemetery without some kind of head covering.

  Less than a minute later they reached the exit, an old gatehouse, and bullied their way out onto a narrow street lined with souvenir carts selling postcards, paper hats and little plastic golems. The whole thing was so crass Holliday almost expected one of the carts to be selling Rabbi Low action figures.

  "Now what?" Sister Meg said. It was hot and a thin line of sweat had formed on her forehead where her headpiece was tight.

  "I've got an idea," answered Holliday. He took a quick look around to make sure that Cue Ball wasn't anywhere in sight, then turned down Stroka Street, heading for the river. They reached the open plaza of Jan Palach Square and crossed to the statue of Antonin Dvorjak. Jan Palach Square had once been known as Namesti Krasnoarmejcu, or Square of the Red Army Soldiers, but had changed after a twenty-year-old student named Jan Palach covered himself with gasoline and set himself alight to protest the Soviet occupation in 1969.

  Skirting the statue, they went down a few steps to the park that ran beside the river. Directly in front of them, in the shadow of the Manesuv Most, or Lesser Town Bridge, was a large floating dock with an outdoor cafe and several tour boats tied up.

  A boat with a Staropramen beer ad on the side named Vltava Kralovna, Vlatava Queen, was loading passengers. Holliday and Sister Meg joined the lineup. Holliday paid thirty dollars for each of them and they went aboard. The boat was not much more than a barge with rows of seats and a fiberglass canopy. A few minutes later they cast off and headed downriver. Holliday had kept his eyes on the gangplank and there'd been no sign of Cue Ball. It looked as though they'd lost him for the second time.