The Templar Cross t-2

by Paul Christopher

  There was a second buzz from the intercom, and then a heavy clicking sound Holliday could hear from halfway down the block. The door opened and the couple from the blue Audi disappeared inside the store. A moment later the light came on behind the shutters over the front windows.

  Japrisot took a small notebook and a gold-plated automatic pencil from his sagging suit coat pocket and climbed out of the Citroen. He walked down the street and wrote down the license number of the Audi. Thirty seconds later he slipped back into the car.

  "AHX 37 45," he said. "Czech. I think 'A' is for Prague."

  "What do the Czechs have to do with any of this?" Rafi asked.

  Japrisot turned in his seat.

  "Maybe nothing, maybe everything." The policeman shrugged. "Prague was once the European end of the old Silk Road. It is still a central point for smugglers. You can find anything you want in Prague from beautiful Russian girls to heroin from Bangkok. Why not stolen artifacts?" He held up a finger. "Moment." He dug a cell phone out of his jacket pocket and let out a burst of rapid-fire French. He snapped the cell phone closed and returned it to his pocket. "Now we wait again."

  No more than two minutes later the lights in the store went off. Almost immediately the woman from the Audi stepped out and stood by the door, wiping her hands on a tissue. She looked up and down the street, then turned and spoke through the open doorway behind her. The man with the Vandyke stepped out, carefully closing the door behind him, then stripped off the latex gloves and slipped them back into his pocket. He stood for a moment, then reached into his other pocket and brought out a flat gold cigarette case. He took out a cigarette, put the case away, then pulled something from his lapel and began delicately poking at the filter.

  "What the hell is he doing?" Holliday asked.

  "I know precisement what he is doing," said Japrisot with a grimace. "He is putting pinholes in the paper of the cigarette. It is something longtime smokers do to convince themselves they are being healthy."

  "That's crazy," said Rafi from the backseat.

  "Bien sur," replied Japrisot. "Of course. Smoking is for crazy people, yes?"

  They watched as the bearded man brought out a heavy-looking gold lighter and lit his cigarette. Then the couple walked back up the street to the Audi and got in. The engine started, the headlights came on and they drove off. They turned right on rue Louis Blanc and went up the hill.

  "They were in there for less than three minutes," said Rafi. "I timed it."

  "Not very long," said Holliday. "What kind of business can you do in three minutes?"

  "Bad business," said Japrisot. He stared out the window at the darkened storefront. He slapped the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. "Je suis une connard! Nique ma mere!" He swore under his breath. "Something is wrong."

  The Frenchman sat for a moment, his features grim.

  "M-e-r-d-e," he breathed, drawing out the word. Finally he reached across the console, popped open the glove compartment and took out an ancient and enormous Manhurin-73 revolver with a wooden crosshatched "blackjack" grip and a huge five-inch barrel.

  "Big gun," commented Holliday, impressed. The revolver was chambered for.357 rounds. It was the French version of the weapon used by Dirty Harry.

  "Yes," said Japrisot. "And it makes very big holes in people, which is why I like it." The grizzled policeman looked at Holliday severely. "Stay in the car, please." He got out of the Peugeot and approached Valador's shop, the heavy pistol held at his side.

  "We going to stay in the car?" Rafi asked.

  "Mais non," said Holliday. "Not a chance."

  They got out of the vehicle, keeping their eyes on Japrisot. The policeman turned and saw them. He scowled, gesturing them back, then turned to the door once again and raised the revolver. He spread his fingertips on the door and pushed gently. It opened slightly. He toed it with his foot and it opened wider. Japrisot took a hesitant step forward, arm raised and elbow locked, the long barrel of the big pistol leading the way.

  Holliday and Rafi held their breath as Japrisot stepped inside the store. A few moments later the lights went on and a few moments after that Japrisot appeared in the doorway, the revolver by his side again. With his free hand the cop waved them forward.

  The interior of the shop looked more like something out of a Dickens novel. There were antiques and collectibles piled everywhere in no kind of order: wooden filing cabinets, a thirties-style leather couch, a sunburst mirror from the fifties, armoires, religious paintings, eighteenth-century gas lamps, a Louis Sixteenth Bergere confessional chair, chandeliers, figurines, an old-fashioned Bakelite wall phone between two plaster columns, lamps, picture frames, a giant clock face, granite garden lions, a pair of Pallisandre armchairs, a dozen faux wax fruit clusters in bell jars, three holy water fonts, seven ornately framed copies of Edgar Degas's Two Dancers in Blue, a giant stuffed peacock staring into a long cheval glass beveled mirror in a tilting stand and a Minnie Mouse ventriloquist's dummy laid over the leather saddle of a battered and faded carousel horse. Ten of the fifty-kilo fish boxes were piled up in front of the merry-go-round figure. There was no sign of Felix Valador.

  Japrisot was standing in the middle of it all, the big pistol stuffed haphazardly into the sagging pocket of his jacket. He had a handkerchief in one hand and a bemused look on his face.

  "Good grief," said Rafi, looking around at the array of exotic clutter.

  "Where is he?" Holliday asked, looking at Japrisot's expression.

  The policeman eased his bulky figure down the central aisle of the little shop and stopped in front of a tall, dark oak armoire with carved bird and floral patterns on the doors. The triple-barrel hinges and the long, turned handles were brass. There was a single sunburst spot of blood on the floor in front of the armoire like a tiny crimson marker. Japrisot used the handkerchief on the door handles and pulled the doors open.

  "Voila," said the policeman.

  Valador was crouched inside the armoire, knees drawn up under his chin, head bent forward and twisted to one side, one hand under his buttocks, the other between his upraised knees. One eye was wide open and the other half closed in a grotesque parody of a wink. Bizarrely, an obviously fake ruby the size of a robin's egg was neatly balanced in the dead man's earlobe.

  Holliday squatted and took a closer look.

  "I don't see any wound," he said.

  "Strangled?" Rafi suggested calmly. As an archaeologist he'd seen hundreds of dead bodies in his time, but generally not so fresh as Valador's. The eyeballs were only just beginning to glaze and shrink in their sockets. "And what's with the plastic ruby?"

  "There's no sign of a struggle," answered Japrisot. "And there wasn't time. Strangulation is a very slow way of murdering someone." The policeman grimaced. "Also, his face would have become purple and his tongue would be sticking out." The Frenchman shook his head. "It was quick and it was a surprise."

  The blaring first chords of ABBA's "Mama Mia!" boomed out. It was the ring tone of Japrisot's cell phone. He dragged the cell out of his pocket and held it to his ear.

  "Oui?"

  He listened, staring down at Valador's corpse and plucking a fleck of cigarette tobacco from his fleshy lower lip.

  "D'accord," he said after a few moments.

  He closed the cell phone and slipped it back into his pocket. He cleared his throat.

  "According to my people the couple in the Audi are Antonin Pesek and his Canadian-born wife, Daniella Kay. They live on Geologika Street in the Barrandov district of Prague. They are contract killers. Assassins. They work regularly all over Europe. The Peseks, en famille, have worked for everyone from the East German Stasi to the Albanian Sigurimi. Monsieur Pesek's weapon of choice is a short-barreled CZ-75 automatic pistol. His wife prefers ornamental plastic hatpins. They go right past the metal detectors at airports. Apparently she is quite the artist. In her file it uses the phrase 'surgically precise.' "

  Japrisot crouched down on his haunches beside Holliday and, sti
ll using the handkerchief, he gripped the ruby in Valador's ear between his thumb and forefinger. He tugged. The ruby slid out along with six inches or so of clear Lucite plastic. The hatpin made a slight grating sound as it was withdrawn from Valador's head, like someone chewing on a mouthful of sand. He held it up to the light. It was lightly greased with brain matter. A trickle of pink, watery blood drained out of Valador's ear.

  "Surgically precise, indeed," murmured Japrisot, squinting at the needle-like murder weapon. "Into the middle ear and then through the temporal bone to the brain via the internal auditory nerve canal." The policeman nodded thoughtfully to himself. "It would take a great deal of skill."

  "You sound as though you know your anatomy," commented Holliday.

  Japrisot lifted his shoulders and sighed.

  "I spent three years in medical school. My father, God rest his soul, was an otologist." The policeman shook his head sadly. "Unfortunately it was not to be. I could not face a lifetime of oozing pus and wax. Japrisot Pere was very disappointed, I am afraid."

  He stood up, grunting with the effort. He turned and gently laid the ruby- ended stick-pin down on a convenient stack of Blue Willow polychrome dinner plates. The dinnerware was stacked up on a dusty chunk of architectural marble that had once been part of a fluted column on an old building.

  "C'est ca," said Japrisot. "Now we shall see what this is all about." He went down the crowded aisle to the pile of fish boxes. Holliday and Rafi followed. The cop looked at the boxes for a moment, made a little grunting sound in the back of his throat and used one of his meaty hands to pry the close-fitting lid off the top of the box.

  "Viens m'enculer!" Japrisot whispered, his eyes widening.

  "What is it?" Holliday said, stepping closer and looking over the policeman's shoulder. He stared, gaping.

  Carefully fitted into custom-made Styrofoam slots was a row of five gold bars, each one approximately five inches long and two inches wide. Japrisot reached into the box and pried one of the bars out of its nest. It looked about half an inch thick. Holliday reached into the box and took another one out. It was heavy in his hands, almost unnaturally so, and it had an odd, greasy feel to it that was unaccountably repellant.

  The bar was rudely made, the edges rounded and the surface slightly pitted. "1 KILO" was stamped into the upper quadrant, the letters E.T. in the middle and an instantly recognizable impression in the lower end of the bar: the palm tree and swastika insignia of the German Afrika Korps of the Third Reich. There was no serial number or any other coding on the bar.

  "Fifty kilos a box, ten boxes, five hundred kilos," said Japrisot quietly.

  "One thousand one hundred and three pounds," murmured Rafi. "A little more than half a ton."

  "Dear God," whispered Holliday, "what have we stumbled onto?"

  "Clearly our Czech friends Pesek and his wife didn't know, either," said Japrisot. He put the bar back in its niche. "If they'd known what was in the boxes they wouldn't have been so quick to leave."

  "At eight hundred an ounce that's about thirteen million dollars," calculated Rafi.

  "Motive for any number of murders," said Japrisot.

  "It's got the Afrika Korps Palmenstempel," said Holliday. "I doubt that the E.T. means extraterrestrial."

  "Walter Rauff again," said Japrisot. "E.T. would be the Einsatzkommando Tunis, his unit."

  Holliday stared at the buttery slab of bullion, horribly aware of its origins. He put it back into the fish box, a chill running down his spine. Suddenly he felt as though he was going to be sick. Rafi stepped forward and took a close-up shot of the gold with his cell phone. Japrisot did not look pleased.

  "I am about to call in my people from Marseille. By helicopter it will take them no more than thirty-five minutes from the time I call. I have done the service required by my relationship with my friend M. Ducos. That obligation has been attended to. Unless you wish to become involved with a great deal of French police bureaucracy I suggest that you leave here immediately. Comprenez?"

  "Of course," Holliday said and nodded. "One question."

  "One only."

  "Was Valador's boat capable of making the North African coast?"

  "Certainement. Tunis is five hundred miles from Marseille. A boat such as his could make the trip in thirty hours or perhaps less in good weather. The ferry gets you there overnight."

  "Thank you," said Holliday. "You've helped us a lot. Please extend my thanks to Monsieur Ducos as well."

  "C'est rien," said Japrisot. It's nothing. "Now leave."

  They did so, walking quickly down the hill from the corner.

  "Now I see what must have happened," said Rafi. "Peggy and her expedition must have tripped over a cache of old Nazi gold lost in the desert somewhere. That's why no one's asking for ransom."

  "The Vichy French and the Germans controlled most of North Africa for the first three years of the war," said Holliday, "and the Italians even before that."

  "What's your point?" Rafi asked.

  "If Rauff collected all that gold from North African Jews, you would have thought he'd have sent it back to Germany. So what was it doing out in the desert?"

  They reached the bottom of the hill and flagged a silver Mercedes taxi cruising the harbor front, trolling for business from the restaurants overlooking the water. Twenty minutes later they'd booked themselves into a garish pink suite overlooking the crescent of beach in front of the Royal Casino Hotel in Mandelieu-la-Napoule.

  "I guess the next stop is Tunisia," said Holliday, crouching in front of the minibar and getting out the fixings for a stiff drink. Both the sight of Felix Valador's grisly corpse in the cupboard and the nasty feel of the Holocaust gold in his hands had shaken him badly.

  "Not necessarily," said Rafi, sitting on the edge of one of the beds and flicking through the channels on the big flat-screen TV. He dug into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He tossed it to Holliday. "Check out the shots I took."

  Holliday put the phone in picture mode and scrolled through the photos. There were two or three general views of the antique store interior, one of Valador, dead in the armoire, the phony ruby in his ear, three pictures of the gold bar and two more of the old Bakelite wall phone between the Grecian columns. The first of the two was a wide shot of the phone's relative position between the columns and the last shot was a close-up of the phone itself.

  "What do you see?" Rafi asked.

  "A bad picture of an old dial telephone."

  "What's on the wall above the phone?"

  Holliday squinted, then zoomed in.

  "A number." He read it off. "0112032087582."

  "Zero-one-one is the international dialing prefix. The next two digits are a country code and the single digit after that is the city code."

  "What country? What city?"

  "Let's find out," said Rafi. He went to the phone on the night table between the beds and dialed the concierge in the lobby. Holliday mixed his Jack and soda. "Parlez-vous anglais?" Rafi asked. There was a pause. "Great. I wonder if you could tell me what telephone country code is twenty… two-zero, yes. And the city code three. Trois, oui, yes. Merci bien." He hung up the telephone.

  "Well?" Holliday asked, sipping the drink.

  "Alexandria," said Rafi.

  "Virginia?" Holliday asked, not entirely surprised. Alexandria, Virginia, wasn't too far from MacLean and Langley, home of the CIA. It figured that they'd be involved.

  "No," said Rafi. "Egypt."

  7

  They flew out of the Nice- Cote d'Azur Airport the following morning on a rattletrap Boeing 737 in faded blue Royal Air Maroc livery. The aircraft was ancient, some of the ceiling panels held up with duct tape. Rafi's seat table kept collapsing, almost spilling a suspicious-smelling breakfast of something yellow in his lap, and throughout the trip small children ran up and down the aisle screaming at the top of their tiny lungs. There was no drink service and the toilets were overflowing after the first hour. Holliday was sure he smelled cigarette s
moke coming from behind the ill-fitting cockpit door.

  Their journey was a convoluted one, going first to Paris-Orly and then to Casablanca, where they waited to be refueled for three hours. From Casablanca they hopped north again to Tangier, then east to Oran in Algeria for a brief stop before flying on to Algiers.

  In Algiers there was another unexplained lay-over on the tarmac, where they were served a lunch of flatbread and something called tagine, which was generally brown and looked like it might have begun life as a stew. It tasted of mutton and cardamom and had a large dollop of runny yogurt on top. By this point in the journey Holliday began to understand that he was no longer in Kansas anymore, or anywhere else in the regular world. It was beginning to feel like an episode of The Twilight Zone. Beside him Rafi didn't seem to mind at all. Holliday presumed it took a Mediterranean mind to appreciate the nuances of travel in North Africa.

  After an eternity staring out the grimy window of the plane at the barren expanse of Houari Boumedienne Airport and the burnt-out, skeletal and overgrown remains of an Air Afrique 737 from a crash decades old, they took off once again, landing in Tunis for what the pilot referred to as a "Mechanicals techniques problem." With the mechanicals techniques apparently fixed the plane took off two and a half hours later, ceiling panels drooping, toilets reeking and overflowing and the central aisle awash in garbage and small children.

  Three hours after that the old plane dropped through the dense brown fog of fumes over Cairo. A long frustrating hour and a folded fifty-dollar bill got them through customs and immigration into the cat-litter atmosphere of the ancient city. Another forty minutes in a taxi got them to the ornate palace of the nineteenth-century Ramses Railway Station.

  Half an hour after that, utterly exhausted, they squeezed on board the early-morning train to Alexandria. They rolled out of the dreary broken suburbs of a Soviet-era Cairo into the ghostly mists of the Nile Delta marshes and finally arrived at the great arc of the city by the sea, which the English expatriate novelist Lawrence Durrell had once described as the White Metropolis-Alexandria.