Templar Throne

by Paul Christopher

  “You’re not much of a patriot, are you?” Sister Meg responded.

  “ ‘The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders,’ ” quoted Holliday. “That is the easy part. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” He glanced at the nun seated across from him. “Sound like a familiar policy? A bit of Fox News?”

  “Who said it?” Sister Meg sighed.

  “Hermann Göring,” answered Holliday. “Commander of Hitler’s Luftwaffe.”

  “Maybe we should stick to medieval history,” suggested the nun.

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Holliday.

  They drove on in silence.

  They followed the Autoroute east, bypassing Pilsen, where Pilsner beer had been invented, and reached the outskirts of Prague an hour later. It hadn’t changed much since Holliday had been there last—it still looked like a poster for Stalin-era architecture, block after dreary block of concrete high- rise slabs filled with hundreds of tiny apartments. Looking carefully you could see the differences, though—there was no laundry drying on the balconies now and the cars in the parking lots were mostly Japanese instead of the ubiquitous twenty-horsepower East German Trabants or the locally manufactured Skodas with their infamously faulty brakes. Funny how bad Soviet cars had been, Holliday thought. They’d made excellent tanks and machine guns during World War Two.

  “Presumably you’ll want to go to the convent,” said Holliday as he navigated his way through the unfamiliar cloverleafs and the equally unfamiliar blue and white signage.

  “No,” answered Sister Meg quietly. “The only accommodation is at the monastery next door. The convent has been entirely converted into a museum now.”

  “All right, the monastery then.”

  “I’ve only been doing research here. The Convent of St. Agnes isn’t my Mother House. This is the high season for the monks. They make most of their income from renting out the cells in the monastery to young travelers. I have my own source of private income. I was renting a room in Andel, but they are tearing the building down to put up another condominium. I’m really quite homeless.”

  “Don’t worry, I know just the place,” said Holliday.

  He guided the big Volkswagen off the D5 and onto the narrower E50, coming into the city from the south-east. They drove into another clutch of function- before-beauty apartment blocks. He turned off on Slavinskeho Street. The fuselage and tail section of an old Tupolev airliner in Czech Airlines red-orange livery stood pancaked and wheels-up in a vacant lot beside a long windowless building.

  “Good Lord,” said Sister Meg, staring. “What on earth is that doing there?”

  “It’s a prop,” explained Holliday. “The Barrandov Film Studios are down the way about half a mile. I think the building there is a special effects lab.” Holliday turned onto Geologika Street and pulled into a parking lot beside a three-story barracks-style building with a curved glass extension along the front that looked like a greenhouse. On the other side of the street was a row of apartment blocks.

  There was a familiar Best Western sign on the scruffy lawn in front of the glass extension that read HOTEL SMARAGD.

  “Smaragd means Emerald,” explained Holliday. “When they built all those high-rises across the street during the Soviet era the hotel was a barracks for the foreign workers they brought in. After the Soviet Union collapsed a couple of brothers bought the building for next to nothing and turned it into a budget hotel. They didn’t have much money to work with and the only paint they could get was an awful government green; that’s the reason for the name. Everything’s white now. It’s not the Ritz but it’s comfortable and it’s cheap.”

  “It looks fine,” Sister Meg said. They climbed out of the car, got their bags from the trunk and went into the small, low-ceilinged lobby of the hotel. An open archway on the right led into the curved glass extension—the hotel restaurant and bar. On the left was an enclosed counter with something like a sitting room behind it. A balding man in a T-shirt was leaning on the counter reading a newspaper. At the rear of the lobby a wide staircase led to the second floor. There was a scattering of seventies Swedish Modern armchairs beside the reception counter and a rack of postcards. A fat man in a bad suit came into the hotel and sat down in one of the armchairs and opened up a copy of Czekhiya Sevodnya. His head looked like a shiny cue ball.

  They booked in, taking a double room, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The rooms were oddly laid out, reflecting their barracks origins. Each double room had a small tiled foyer with a shared bathroom against the outside wall and a door leading into a bedroom to each side. The rooms were square, utilitarian, and equipped with twin beds, one lamp, one child-size desk with a telephone and a television. Nothing had changed since Holliday’s last stay; there were two channels in English, British Sky News and CNN. Everything else was in Czech or German.

  Holliday dropped off his bag, washed his hands and then went across the room to Sister Meg’s room. She’d changed into a man’s white shirt, jeans and sneakers, but still wore the obviously religious head covering. Apparently there was no middle ground for Sister Meg; a nun was a nun was a nun.

  “Settled in?” Holliday asked. He gave her his best smile, feeling a little guilty for baiting her in the car the way he had.

  “As well as can be expected.” She glanced around the bleak little room. “Not much in the way of ambience, is there?”

  “It has a certain ascetic je ne sais quoi,” answered Holliday in a la-de-dah voice.

  The nun laughed, which seemed to be a step in the right direction.

  “I thought we could go down to the restaurant and have something to eat. The last time we did was in that awful place on the Autobahn.”

  “Nordsee?” Sister Meg said. She made a face.

  “You should have known better than to order curried prawns and fries in the middle of Germany,” Holliday said with a grin.

  “Is the food any better here?”

  “They do a good goulash and their veal cutlets and dumplings are good.”

  “As long as the chef hasn’t changed.”

  “He’s one of the brothers who owns the hotel,” said Holliday.

  They went downstairs to the restaurant, a long narrow room looking out onto the scrappy lawn with tables on the right and a bar on the left. A man in an apron sat on a stool behind the bar reading a newspaper. There were only two other people in the dining room, a gray-haired man with a Vandyke beard drinking Bacardi and Coke and a lean and quite handsome middle-aged man who was vaguely familiar, drinking a long- necked Staropramen beer. The familiar-looking man spoke only English and the older man with the beard spoke accented English, but ordered in Czech.

  “E.T.,” Holliday said finally.

  “E.T.?”

  “The Extra-Terrestrial. He was in the movie, the guy at the back of the room. One of the kids. Tyler, I think. He’s been in all sorts of things since.”

  “The dark-haired one or the man sitting with him?”

  “The dark-haired one.”

  “That’s quite a memory you have,” commented Sister Meg.

  “C. Thomas Howell,” said Holliday, getting it at last.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “That’s because you aren’t a film buff.”

  “I assure you, nuns watch movies,” the woman answered curtly.

  “Nun movies?”

  “There’s such a classification?”

  “Sure,” Holliday said and nodded. “The Nun’s Story, Sister Faustina, Agnes of God, Song of Bernadette, The Singing Nun, Lilies of the Field, Two Mules for Sister Sarah, The Bells of St. Mary’s, Dead Man Walking. I could go on.”

  “Please don’t,” said Sister Meg. A young waiter appeared and they ordered. Meg asked for the goulash and Holliday chose the breaded veal with French fries.

  “I had a Czech friend who once told
me the only two words I need to be able to speak in Czech: hranolky and pivo. French fries and beer. At least that way you wouldn’t starve to death or die of thirst.”

  “So what’s next?” Sister Meg asked.

  “After dinner?” Holliday replied. “After dinner we go outside for a nice walk in the evening air and see if there’s a green late-model BMW in the parking lot with Austrian license plate MD 337 CA.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you remember a man who came into the hotel after us when we checked in? He sat down and started to read the paper.”

  Sister Meg thought for a moment and nodded. “Vaguely. He had a shaved head. He was fat.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What about him?”

  “He was in the Nordsee restaurant outside of Nuremberg. He had fish and chips and a Coke. Twice. Once in the restaurant as well as a take-out order.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Maybe it’s just a coincidence?”

  “Somehow I don’t think so.”

  6

  The following morning they came down to the lobby and Holliday bought all-day transit tickets from the sleepy desk clerk. They went into the restaurant, ate breakfast, then left through the back exit by the bathroom rather than the way they’d come in through the lobby. They found themselves on Slavinskeho Street, the far side treed with scrubby cedars, the near side laid out in allotment gardens behind the hotel, each with its own little shed.

  “What about the car?” Sister Meg asked.

  “We’re taking the bus instead,” answered Holliday. “Make it a little harder for our bald friend.” He checked the schedule beneath the protective plastic covering on the bus stop post and then looked at his watch. There was one due in less than five minutes. While they waited he looked back down the street, back toward the hotel.

  “I still think you’re being paranoid,” said the nun. “Just because you saw the same man on the Autobahn doesn’t prove anything. Why on earth would anyone want to follow us?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I’ve made a few enemies in my time.”

  “This is just silly. We’re not in a James Bond movie,” snorted Sister Meg.

  “Do you always argue this much?” Holliday asked. The woman was like everyone’s idea of a younger, smarter sister—a Lisa Simpson from hell.

  The red and white bus appeared a few minutes later, pulling up so that they could get on through the middle set of doors. In Prague, Holliday knew, the front doors were only used as an exit. When the doors hissed open they stepped up, slipped their tickets into the time stamper, then waited for them to be spit out again. Holliday walked to the very rear of the bus and sat down as they moved off. Sister Meg dropped down beside him with a sigh.

  “This really is idiotic,” she muttered.

  “Really?” Holliday asked. “If you check behind us you’ll see a green late-model BMW with Austrian license plate MD 337 CA, am I right?”

  Sister Meg turned her head to look. She paled.

  “Dear God,” she whispered.

  “Told you,” said Holliday.

  The bus went down Slavinskeho Street, the gray-blue Art Deco bulk of the Barrandov Studios main building and the soundstages directly ahead of them. At the traffic circle they swung to the left past the guard kiosk and the barrier, then eased onto Filmarska Street, then Barrandovska. The houses on the left were set on large lots in an urban pine forest, most looking as though they dated from the 1930s, all looking expensive.

  To the right the lots hung at the edge of the famous Barrandov cliffs, and in between the houses they could look to the northeast across the Vltava River, snaking through the smoggy haze far below. As they swung left and began to move down the steep hill, the houses on the cliff side became enormous stone and stucco mansions. Once upon a time they’d been built for executives of the enormous film studios, Prague’s version of Beverly Hills.

  “The whole area including the film studios was developed in the twenties and thirties by the Havel family for local bigwigs. During the war the Nazis took over and those big houses were the summer residences for all the party bigwigs, including Hitler. Then it was KGB bigwigs for a while, and now it’s capitalist bigwigs again.”

  Sister Meg wasn’t paying any attention.

  “Who is that man?” Meg asked, her voice tense and almost accusatory.

  “The bald fellow? He looks like a cop,” said Holliday. “At a guess, I’d say he was contract help.”

  “What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

  “He’s not official. Some organization has hired itself a local pair of eyes. He’s been following us across Germany. He was probably in France before that. He’s probably following one of us or the other, not both.”

  “Because of a knight who died almost a thousand years ago? Ridiculous.”

  “I agree, but he’s on our tail nevertheless.”

  “It has to be you. Something from your military past.”

  “I had some trouble with a neo-Nazi group a while back; almost two years ago now. It could be them, or what’s left of them.”

  “There! You see? I knew it!” Sister Meg said triumphantly.

  “On the other hand, it could also be the Vatican Secret Service.”

  “The Vatican doesn’t have a secret service,” said the nun, promptly and with conviction. “I should know.”

  “The Vatican certainly does have a secret service, and I do know, Sister. It’s called Sodalitium Pianum. The friends of Pius X, the Pope it was named for. In France it’s called La Sapinière. It’s been around since the beginning of the last century. It’s a covert arm of the Vatican secretary of state’s office.”

  “That sounds like some sort of stupid urban myth,” scoffed the red-haired nun.

  “Whatever the case, that guy in the BMW is no myth; he’s real enough, isn’t he?”

  The nun didn’t answer, crossing her arms in front of her, spots of color blooming on her cheeks.

  The bus continued down the hill to the main four-lane expressway at the bottom. On the left, carved into the yellowish rock of the rugged cliff side, Holliday could see the man-made niche that had served as a guard booth during the war. Back in those days access to the big houses on the Barrandov hill had been restricted to the very few and there had been a barrier here. It was one of the few places in the city that still showed physical evidence of the Nazi occupation between 1939 and 1945.

  The bus swung left and slipped onto the broad multilaned highway, threading through a couple of ramps and cloverleafs until they came out on Strakonicka Street. To the right Holliday could see intermittent views of the river, and to the left were railway yards, graffiti-covered rail and subway cars lined up waiting to be shunted in one direction or the other. Here and there they passed dark stucco buildings with either blue curtains or red.

  “I always wondered what those places with the colored drapes were,” said Sister Meg as the bus rolled past yet another red-curtained building. “They always seem so dark.” A red neon sign in the front yard read PANSKYKLUB.

  “A pansky club is a brothel,” explained Holliday. “A pani club is a brothel for women. Red for men, blue for women.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Prostitution isn’t legal here, but it’s not illegal, either. They’ve even got a brothel called Big Sister that’s online, like a reality show.”

  “That’s disgusting,” said Sister Meg.

  “That’s free-market capitalism.” Holliday shrugged and glanced over his shoulder. The BMW was still on their tail about three cars behind. Meg followed his look.

  “What are we going to do about him?” she asked.

  “We’ll get off at the Smichov terminal and get onto the Metro. He’ll have to park his car. Maybe we can lose him if we get lucky and catch a train right off.”

  The bus turned left down a side street and then right onto a wider roadway set with streetcar tracks. They passed a war
surplus outlet in an old brick warehouse, a banner advertising genuine KGB fur hats strung across the grimy front entrance. They finally pulled up under a fiberglass canopy.

  They climbed off the bus and dodged across several sets of streetcar tracks, cutting through the streams of sleepy-looking late commuters. There was no sign of the BMW or the bald man. They went through the glass doors, then down a wide set of steps to a Stalin-era platform, the letters of the station formed out of sheet steel and bolted to the concrete slab wall. There were two choices, the 1 side of the platform and the 2. The trains arriving on the left side of the platform went to the last station at Slicin, and the ones on the right went to Cerny Most.

  “Which way?” Meg asked.

  “Two,” said Holliday. “Cerny Most.”

  A train pulled in on the Cerny Most side of the platform and whined to a pneumatic stop. The trains were silver-sided with red doors, and like subways around the world the cars were slathered with graffiti of varying quality.

  Holliday looked back up the stairs as the doors hissed open.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  “Pardon?” Sister Meg said, a little shocked.

  “Our large bald friend,” said Holliday.

  Puffing hard, the man from the BMW was charging down the stairs to the platform.

  Holliday and the nun stepped into the car. Holliday leaned out until there was a bonging chime and a mellow, almost sedated female voice spoke over the public address system.

  “Ukoncete nastup a vystup dvere se zaviraji.” Finish embarking and disembarking, doors are closing. Holliday ducked his head back into the car. The doors slid shut against their rubber bumpers and the train droned into motion.

  “Did he get on?” Sister Meg asked, gripping the bar beside him.

  “The car behind us.”

  “Now what do we do?”

  Holliday glanced up at the schematic system map above the doors. Four stops to the junction point of the A and B lines at the big Mustek station on the other side of the river. About eight minutes. The station they really wanted was one station farther on at Namesti Republiky.

  “We’ll do a Charnier,” said Holliday.