The Templar Prophecy

by Mario Reading

  He lay still and endeavoured to work out just how badly he was injured. It would be pointless to rear up in search of his pistol only to find that his limbs were not functioning correctly – or that he wasn’t able to see what he was looking for. The madwoman flying the Storch would hit him again with her metal lunchbox. And this he could not tolerate.

  He needed the bitch alive, unfortunately, as he had not the remotest idea how to fly a plane by himself. Plus she was his now. He intended to take her at his leisure and inflict the maximum possible humiliation on her in the greatest possible time span. He might even fuck her on top of her dead husband’s body. There. That would be something to see, now, wouldn’t it?

  The only thing Eberhard could not fathom about his condition was why he kept on hearing voices. Was he hallucinating? He began to probe around himself for the pistol. Slowly. Steadily. His fingers acting as feelers. It was an impossibility that the woman could have struggled across from the front seat whilst the Storch was still in motion and retrieved the weapon herself. The cabin was not designed for that sort of in-flight movement. Once the pilot was strapped into the bucket seat, that was the end of it – they were in there for the duration.

  Eberhard muttered under his breath as he searched for the weapon on the cabin floor, but the muttering was lost in the Storch’s engine clatter.

  At one point during his fingertip search, Eberhard glanced up at Hartelius’s dead body. The colonel’s cadaver loomed over him like the Hindenburg Zeppelin. A bullseye, straight through the neck. Eberhard had participated in the execution of hundreds of men as part of an SS Einsatzgruppe in Russia, and he knew exactly how it needed to be done. The last thing you wanted was for your victim to come back at you when they had nothing left to lose. So if they weren’t completely dead, you wanted them at the very least quadriplegic. So that your assistant could give them the coup de grâce without any slithering around on the victim’s part.

  Eberhard’s hand closed gently around the barrel of the Luger. He allowed his fingers to palpate it, as though he were measuring the firmness of his own penis.

  Power. Weapons gave you power. All his life Eberhard had sought to exercise power over others, just as his father had exercised power over him. That was the only way you could keep the bastards off. The only way you could stop the nightmares from returning to haunt you. He remembered his victims tumbling into the waiting slit trench like an endless rank of dominoes. He remembered the buzz it gave him. The total sense of control. It had been the highlight of his life. The meaning of his life.

  Eberhard jerked to his knees and wrenched himself upwards, using the back of the pilot’s seat for leverage. What he saw when he straightened up stopped him dead.

  Inge von Hartelius threw the Storch into a nosedive.

  Eberhard was thrown backwards, the Luger skittering from his hand.

  Incensed by her idiocy, and as good as blind, Eberhard lunged forward, using gravity as his aid. He got his hands round Inge’s neck. He was screaming incoherently, no longer rational.

  Inge tried to force his hands away from her throat, but Eberhard both outweighed and outmatched her. She kicked wildly at the rudder-control pedals in an attempt to gain some traction, but she was unable to break Eberhard’s hold.

  The Storch continued its nosedive.

  Fifty feet from the ground, Inge managed to grab the joystick and wrench it backwards, forcing the plane into a vertical stall. It banked sideways, and then began to helicopter down, turning onto its side at the very last moment and ploughing into a field of corn.

  Inge and Eberhard were catapulted through the windscreen. Inge was decapitated by the final turn of the propeller; Eberhard was speared through the chest by the port-side wing strut, which had shattered on landing.

  Two and a half hours later, when a group of American GIs located the burnt-out wreckage, all they found alive was a six-year-old boy with a badly broken arm and three shattered ribs. He was clutching a battered leather suitcase and a set of Max and Moritz marionettes to his chest. The boy kept repeating that his name was Johannes von Hartelius, and that his mother and father were on the plane.

  When one of the GIs made as if to lead the boy away, the boy refused to let go of either the suitcase or the marionettes. He kept on repeating his name – Johannes von Hartelius – just as his mother had told him he must do if he ever became separated from her.

  The GI shook his head and let the boy keep the suitcase and the puppets. What the hell? He had seen the bodies in and around the wreckage. The boy’s escape, with so little obvious injury, was nothing short of a miracle. His parents and their mystery companion were no longer recognizable as human beings – the three of them had been fried when the overload tanks blew. All that remained to show that they had once been alive was a shattered wristwatch and a barely functioning Luger, shy one bullet, that had somehow been thrown clear. The rest was ashes.

  ‘Johannes von Hartelius, Johannes von Hartelius,’ cried the boy.

  The GI pretended to cuff him round the ear. ‘From now on, son, you speak English. We’re through with this Johannes von Hartelius shit. I got a new name for you.’ The GI hesitated. ‘James. Not Johannes. James. James Hart. Now how about that? That’s close enough, isn’t it? That’s not so hard to remember?’ The GI pointed to his chest. ‘My name is Abe. Abe Mann. A good American name, see? None of this foreign garbage I been telling you about.’

  THIRTEEN

  Calle de Chipilapa, Antigua, Guatemala

  19 JULY 2012

  James Hart’s house was surrounded on all sides by churches. San Pedro. Santa Clara. San Francisco. La Concepción. The house itself sat back a little from the road, as if it had broken ranks from the other houses and decided to go its own way. John Hart approached it through an untended garden, under an unruly trellis of dog roses, tiger flowers and Heliconias.

  Hart had flown in that morning via Miami to Guatemala City, and then taken the forty-minute cab ride on to Antigua. The difference between the two places was stark. Guatemala City was modern, grimy and lovelorn, whilst colonial Antigua seemed a throwback to a gentler, more idealistic age of faith, calm and spirituality. Hart could see why his father had chosen it. But why, in that case, had he felt the need to change his name to the quasi-iconoclastic Roger Pope? In a city which was home to the most frenzied Holy Week celebrations in all the Americas? And in a house surrounded by churches? It just didn’t make sense.

  No one answered the door when Hart knocked. And there was no possible way round the house. Hart retreated a few paces and stared up at the frontage, trying to discern signs of life through the partially shuttered windows. He had telephoned ahead a number of times, but on each occasion he had been met by an engaged tone. Was this some gigantic con trick, he wondered? His father’s idea of a practical joke? You don’t see your son for thirty-six years, and then you call him out of the blue and invite him out on a wild goose chase to the other side of the world whilst you leave for a holiday in Europe, from where you summoned him in the first place? A post-Freudian variation on the game of vice versa, perhaps?

  Hart stepped out into the street. The house on the right had been turned into a Casa de Huespedes for tourists – he could see people taking coffee in the morning room and preparing for their day’s sightseeing. The house on the left was still a private dwelling, however. He knocked on the door. An old woman answered. Before he had time to utter a word she pointed her fist at him and burst out laughing.

  ‘Ah. El hijo del Señor Pope.’

  Hart summoned up his best schoolboy Spanish. ‘Yes. I am Señor Pope’s son. Is it so obvious?’

  ‘Oh, yes. There is no mistaking. He is expecting you.’

  ‘Could you please speak slower?’

  ‘He is expecting your visit. He knows you are coming.’

  ‘He asked me to come, yes. But he is not answering his door.’

  ‘But I have seen him.’ The old woman thought for a moment. ‘Yesterday. He was with a friend. A close fr
iend. They entered the house arm-in-arm. This was in the morning. Since then, no sign.’

  ‘I’ll try once again then, shall I? He may be having a siesta.’

  ‘This is possible. He is an elderly man. Though not nearly so old as I. I shall come with you, Señor Pope, if you will allow. There is a spare key. I know where it is hidden.’

  Hart accompanied the old woman back to his father’s house. When they reached the front door she stretched out her hands and shrugged. They were paralysed with arthritis. Hart inclined his head. He knocked five times. They waited. There was no answer.

  ‘The spare key is here.’ The old woman pointed downwards, using her hand and arm in concert, as if they were fused. ‘My daughter cleans for Señor Pope once a week. She also does his laundry and cooks when he has guests. But most of the time he…’ She stopped, looking forlorn.

  ‘He what?’

  ‘The key is under the stone, Señor. See? I cannot pick it. Please raise it yourself.’

  Hart lifted the stone and retrieved the key. ‘Are you sure he won’t mind me entering the house without his permission?’

  ‘You are his son. Why should he mind?’

  ‘I am his son. Yes. But we have never spoken to one another.’

  ‘I am sorry?’

  ‘We don’t know each other, Señora. My father left home when I was three years old. I celebrated my thirty-ninth birthday three months ago. I am thirty-nine years old, Señora.’ Hart thumped his chest like a child. He was astonished to find himself on the verge of tears. ‘This is the first occasion he has been in contact with me in all that time.’

  ‘Dios mio. And still you came?’

  Hart could see the pistol pointing at his head in the square at Homs. He could hear the click of the trigger as it fell on an empty chamber. Twice this had happened. Twice someone had tried to kill him and failed. What else did he have to do with his life but afford his errant father the courtesy of a hearing? For what other purpose had God decided to spare him? He didn’t have a wife. His mother was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. And the woman who had aborted his child, and whose life he had just saved, was more interested in where her next scoop was coming from than in maintaining any sort of a relationship with a washed-out photojournalist with a death wish.

  ‘Yes. Still I came.’

  Hart turned the key in the lock and entered the building. The stench was overwhelming. It made his eyes smart and his gorge clench in panic. It was an odour he was entirely familiar with. The odour of death and decomposition.

  Hart crooked his forearm across his mouth. ‘Señora. Please wait outside.’

  The old lady crossed herself. But still she came on in.

  Hart’s ears were hissing with tension. It felt as if his head was being stuffed full of cotton wool and chloroform. He threw open the door to the first room and looked inside.

  The old lady swept past him and down the corridor. She knew exactly where she was going. The pervasive stench didn’t seem to bother her at all. ‘Come, Señor Pope. Come with me. This is your father’s room. This is where he will be. This is where he always comes.’

  She led Hart towards the far end of the house. She stepped back from a door and bade him enter, almost formally, as if she was already familiar with what might lie on the other side. But her eyes belied her certainty.

  Hart hesitated. He felt like a drunken man on the lip of a precipice. One false step and he would pitch forward into boundless space and be lost for eternity.

  He turned the handle of the door and allowed it to swing open ahead of him. He was sweating, and his heart was pulsing inside his chest. The room was in intense gloom. Hart tried the light switch. Nothing. He could hear the buzzing of a thousand angry flies in the darkness.

  Hart clamped a handkerchief to his nose. He felt his way towards the solitary crack of light that was revealing itself via an interior shutter. The room had no access at all to the outside world. The interior shutter simply opened into another, marginally more enlightened, room. Hart tripped the latch and threw the slats aside.

  The old woman let out a stifled groan and began to pray.

  Hart turned round.

  His father was nailed to the wall, stark naked, in the style of the crucifixion.

  FOURTEEN

  It took Hart a little less than twenty-four hours to arrange for the funeral and secure the release of his father’s body from the authorities. The local police made a desultory search of the premises, and the chief faithfully promised Hart that they would hunt down his father’s killers and bring them to justice, but that, if Hart were to ask his personal opinion, he would have to tell him that he believed the killers had come in from outside the country and had returned home the same way. They were probably Mexican. Or maybe from Honduras. Or possibly even El Salvador. Guatemalan criminals, in his experience, did not use the symbol of the crucifixion when they conducted their killings, as this would show a lack of proper respect.

  When Hart asked him why, if the killing had been conducted by criminals, nothing was missing from the house – a fact attested to by the old lady’s daughter, Eva, who regularly cleaned there – the chief suggested that Señor Pope may have been involved in drug-trafficking activities into the USA, and that this was an honour killing. That the assassins were not after plunder but revenge.

  ‘Have you any proof of that?’ said Hart.

  ‘It is a supposition only. But if true, it will lead to the requisition of Señor Pope’s house by the authorities and a fire sale of all its contents.’ The chief flashed Hart a grin from beneath his Zapata moustache. It was a sad comment on life, the grin seemed to be saying, but everyone – even luminaries such as he – must at some point acknowledge existential reality. ‘Is this a direction in which you wish to go, Señor Pope?’

  Hart steeled himself for the formality of the lie he knew that he must utter. ‘Absolutely not. I agree with you about the fact that my father was undoubtedly killed by outside elements. That is self-evident. I am sure the police department will do its utmost to find the killer and secure a conviction. Thank you, Chief. Thank you for your courtesy in this matter. It is much appreciated.’

  Hart and the chief of police shook hands. Hart left the building.

  Hart had been dealing with corrupt officials and unprincipled servants of the state for most of his working life, and he knew when he was facing a brick wall. The best thing to do on these occasions was to make a graceful retreat without drawing too much attention to oneself in the process.

  He was in a country he neither knew nor understood. A country in which the murder rate, at forty-six per hundred thousand, was twice as high as Mexico’s. A country in which nearly half the children – most of whom spoke only Mayan and benefited, if that was the word, from less than four years of schooling – were chronically undernourished, and via which 350 tonnes of cocaine passed through to the US every year. A country in which the Zetas, Gulf and Sinaloa drug cartels were taking a significant interest. A wide-open country in which crimes went unpunished and in which heads were turned in whatever direction was the most profitable and the least amenable to risk. In this way it was like ninety-five per cent of the other countries that Hart visited professionally, and he felt curiously at home. He would have had less of a grasp of the situation in federal Germany or metropolitan France, where graft, jobbery and official corruption took on more subtle colorations.

  He returned to his father’s house. Eva had taken it upon herself to clean up what she too called ‘Señor Pope’s special room’ after the mess left by the police and the paramedics, an act which struck Hart as above and beyond the call of duty. But the Maya, as he had learnt from her and her mother, accepted death as quotidian. Even violent death. The dead were of our world, not beyond it – they deserved consideration, not exclusion. They deserved respect.

  Hart forced his eyes upwards. The marks of his father’s crucifixion were still visible on the wall; only drastic redecoration would mask them. The room reeked of f
ly spray, bleach and insect repellent. If his father had left any odour in the room at all during his life – cigars, good whisky, medication even – it was no longer apparent.

  Hart sat down in his father’s library chair and lowered his eyes. A profound emptiness overwhelmed him – a deep sense of the hopelessness and futility of all human endeavour. In the entirety of his life Hart had never consciously spoken a word to his father. He’d no doubt gooed and gaahed and gagaahed at him as an infant, and maybe stuttered out the occasional ‘dada’, but he had no single memory of the man, nor any key to his nature or to his identity. And yet here he was, sitting in his father’s study, close to tears.

  Hart looked at his watch. Two o’clock. The funeral was scheduled for three. He forced himself up and into action. He had set himself the task of going through all his father’s things, and he was now at the penultimate stage in which lateral thought was being called for. He had already checked every conceivable cupboard, wardrobe and storage box throughout the house. Now he would search along the tops and bottoms of things in case anything had evaded his eye during the first few sweeps.

  It took him forty-five minutes to locate the photograph. It was taped beneath a drawer in his father’s desk – and relatively recently, for the Scotch was still fresh. The photograph had been cut from a book, as the black-and-white image bore a printed description beneath it and was blank on the back, as if it might have formed the frontispiece to something, rather than figuring within the double-sided bulk of the main illustrations. Hart upended the drawer and leant over to investigate the image.

  It was of two people: a man and a woman. The woman was in her early thirties, the man perhaps a little older – possibly Hart’s age. The woman was wearing a white flying suit, which must have been designed and cut especially for her, as it had a fox-fur collar that no male pilot would have tolerated for an instant. The woman had taken off her flying helmet and goggles and was squinting at the camera, one hand pushing back her blonde hair, as though the photographer had snapped her a split second before she was quite ready to be photographed.