The Templar Prophecy

by Mario Reading

  SIXTEEN

  Hart slept for three days. On the first day the shakes came back again, harder than ever. He was half aware of Colel Cimi by his bedside, feeding him pills, urging him to drink. Sometimes it would be the driver, Santiago, who visited him. Who sat him up. Bathed him. The man was unexpectedly tender, despite his initial air of detachment, and Hart soon gave up struggling and allowed himself to be ministered to. Each time he pissed his piss came out the colour of black Camellia tea.

  The second day was worse than the first. Hart knew that he must be running a fever, but beyond that fact lay nothing. No concept of time. No purpose. Just entropy.

  On his third day of fever Hart woke to find himself lying in a cold bath with ice cubes floating in it.

  ‘Can you stand up, Mr Hart?’ Colel Cimi was proffering him a towelling bathrobe. ‘You must try. I think the worst of the fever is over. We need to warm you. Quickly.’

  Hart levered himself out of the bath, his knees cannoning together as if he were dancing the Charleston. When he glanced down at his newly emaciated body he realized that he had yet another one of his spasmodic erections. He ignored it. He and his hosts were way beyond embarrassment by now.

  Colel Cimi enveloped him in the bathrobe. She called Santiago in from the corridor and the pair of them escorted Hart down the stairs and into a small room in which an open fire was burning.

  ‘Sit here. You will soon be warm. Santiago will bring you something to eat.’

  ‘Chicken soup? Isn’t that what you feed people after they’ve been involved in train wrecks?’

  ‘We have menudo rojo instead. Made from the tripe of the cow. We have been feeding it to you for three days, Mr Hart. Don’t you remember?’

  Hart’s physical body might be in abeyance, but his mind seemed crystal clear. ‘Three days? I’ve been here three days? You’ve got to be kidding me.’

  ‘Three and a half days to be precise.’

  Hart realized that there was no one in the world who gave a damn whether he lived or died – no one who would even notice that he had been out of circulation for eighty-four straight hours. Amira? On another assignment probably, busy burnishing her career. His mother? In a world of her own where no one could ever join her. His mute, prodigal father? Crucified by unknown parties before he had even been able to stutter out a first, tentative ‘hello, son’. Hart decided that he had drifted through life for thirty-nine years without making any mark on it at all. He might as well have been a will-o’-the-wisp.

  ‘Why are you doing this for me? Why are you and Santiago looking after me? My father is dead. You don’t owe me anything. In fact, you’ve got no earthly connection with me at all. You could have dumped me back at the local hospital and still felt noble. Nobody would have blamed you. Nobody called you to book. I’d have been just another visiting gringo who got sick.’

  ‘Listen to me, please, Mr Hart. Listen closely.’ Colel Cimi held Hart’s gaze with her own. For a split second Hart thought that she might be about to strike him, but she didn’t. ‘Your father is the only man I have ever known. He may have bought me from my own father, which is a bad thing, I agree, but from the outset he was good to me and gave me much freedom. Your father loved me very strongly. I would almost say he had a passion for me. He saw to it that I was properly educated. He never struck me. He never abused me. He waited until I was eighteen, and old enough to give my informed consent, before he took my virginity. We travelled everywhere together as a couple. He helped my village when times were bad, and protected us during the civil war. I owe him much. In Guatemala, women of my age and cultural background are usually dead by now. Or they are prostitutes. Or they’ve had ten children and their breasts sag to below their knees.’ Colel Cimi made a cutting gesture with her hand, akin to a person shooing away a fly.

  ‘And that’s why you’re looking after me? Because my father was kind to you and stopped your breasts from sagging? Why didn’t he marry you, then? Tell me that. Why didn’t he make an honest woman out of you if he loved you so much?’

  Colel Cimi laid her hand on her chest. ‘I know what you are trying to do, Mr Hart. You are lashing out at me because I have seen you at your weakest and most vulnerable. And because you are still angry at your father’s memory. Angry, too, that he allowed himself to be killed before you were able to come to terms with him. But you need to understand something about your father. Something very important. Your father was a Catholic. As am I. And we Catholics marry only once. Your father believed that he was married to your mother in the sight of God – divorce was therefore out of the question for him. I accepted that. It was the least I could do for him.’

  ‘So that’s why you had no children?’

  ‘We did have a child, Mr Hart. A daughter. She died of meningitis when she was seven years old.’

  Hart stared at Colel Cimi. His face was bereft of colour. ‘You and my father had a child together?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re telling me I had a sister? For seven years I had a sister, and no one thought to tell me?’

  Colel Cimi closed her eyes in a God-give-me-patience kind of a way. ‘I am telling you now, Mr Hart. Without being asked to. And without any need that I can see to provide you with this information.’ She got up and walked to a table in the corner of the room. ‘Here is a snapshot of your sister. She was called Carmen.’ She handed Hart a framed photograph.

  Hart glanced sheepishly at Colel Cimi. He had been unforgivably rude, he knew that now. She was a lady still in mourning for her lover and their only child, who had welcomed him into her house and seen him through a violent malarial flashback. She was also the lady his father had chosen to share his life with for more than thirty years, and he owed her a little respect. Added to that was the fact that she was his one remaining link to a past he was as yet unaware of, and she had offered, out of simple kindness, to share that with him. He was the one at fault here.

  He accepted the photograph and looked at it for a very long time. Tears collected on his eyelashes and began to fall unheeded onto his cheeks. He handed the photograph back.

  ‘She’s so beautiful. My sister is so beautiful. She looks like you.’

  Colel Cimi took the photograph from Hart’s hands and inclined her head.

  Hart began to sob – deep, wracking sobs that outwitted all his efforts to control them. He glanced at Colel Cimi in consternation and saw the echo of his own tears in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Señora. I don’t know what’s come over me lately. I’m not usually this emotional. I’m not usually emotional at all.’ Hart could scarcely get the words out.

  Colel Cimi smiled at him. ‘What is happening is that you are discovering truths about yourself and about your life, Mr Hart, that you never knew existed. This is a hard thing for any man to deal with. Much more so for somebody who has just survived their own near death. For a man such as you, who has been wound so tightly for so many years, the process must be overwhelming.’

  Hart sank his head in his hands. ‘I’m sorry for what I said just now and for the way that I said it. You have been more than generous to me. You deserve better.’

  She reached forward and touched him lightly on the wrist. ‘You look just like your father when you put your head in your hands like that. He would do the same when he wished to apologize to me. An infrequent occurrence, I have to admit. But there it is.’ She sighed. ‘You want to ask me something more, Mr Hart? I can see it in your face.’

  ‘What else do you have to tell me, Señora? What other bombshells do you have in store? I think I’m ready now.’

  Colel Cimi set the photograph tenderly back in its place. ‘Oh, much, Mr Hart. I have much else to tell you.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Haus Walküre, Bad Wiessee, Bavaria

  21 JULY 2012

  Elfriede ‘Effi’ Rache had blonde hair that cascaded to her shoulders in gentle waves. She had wide-apart blue eyes framed by a heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, and a cupids’ bow of a mouth with a prominent unde
rlip that gave her a slight air of childish obstinacy, as if, were you not to do her bidding, she might withhold both her approval and her favours until you did.

  Udo Zirkeler – or ‘Fat Udo’ as he used to be called before he discovered the joys of competitive weightlifting – craved Effi’s approval. He had just gone to considerable lengths to do her bidding, and now he was counting on some of those favours in return. Once, some months before, Effi had briefly allowed him into her bed, and the thought of her body, and her smell, and a particular trick she had of tightening her vagina when you least expected it, had driven him crazy with lust ever since. Not to mention the matching red underwear she had worn at the time and which Udo now pictured, with goatish certainty, nestling beneath her summer dress.

  But after that all-too-brief sexual interlude, Effi had scarcely looked in his direction. This was why Udo had offered her his services with such alacrity when she had asked for a volunteer to travel to Central America and collect something crucial to the future of the Lanzen Brüderschaft – the Brotherhood of the Lance – whose leader, by de facto inheritance via her father and grandfather, Effi Rache was. Effi was a National Socialist blue blood – the equivalent, to all intents and purposes, of Nazi royalty – and Udo was in awe of her. To repeat the ecstasies he had achieved that one time in her bedroom was his highest aim in life. Which was exactly what Effi had intended when she let him fuck her.

  When Effi admitted to Udo that the object she sought was the actual Holy Lance itself, mislaid for nearly seventy years, and just now waiting to be reclaimed by the Brotherhood and to serve once again as its talisman, Udo had recognized his chance to shine. Now Effi was holding the broken spear he had brought back from Guatemala – at considerable risk to himself – as though it was contaminated with dog shit.

  ‘And this is it? This is the Holy Lance? You are sure?’

  ‘Absolutely sure. This is the sacred object Johannes and Inge von Hartelius were transporting to your grandfather at the Führer’s direct request when their plane was shot down. According to the version Pope gave me, his father was the first GI on the scene and simply snatched the case, thinking it was loot that he could sell on after the war. Papa Pope didn’t speak German, however, and when he opened the case and found only a broken bit of spear and a sheaf of illegible papers, he shut it up again and buried it in his attic. Pope only received the thing, along with a mass of other stuff, on his father’s death, aged ninety, back in January. Pope speaks a bit of German so he was able to make out your grandfather’s name and address, together with the Führer’s unbroken personal seal on the main envelope. He thought about it for a while, decided that what was past was past, trawled the internet for your grandfather’s heirs, found out that the only heir left was you, and that you were living at the very same address that was on the covering letter, and got in touch. The rest is history.’

  ‘And Pope was happy to volunteer all this to you, Udo? He didn’t want anything in return? This American patriot was simply happy to restore the Holy Lance to its rightful Nazi owners and not sell it on eBay? Do you seriously expect me to swallow this truckload of manure you have transported me?’

  ‘No.’ Udo made a sour face. ‘No, I don’t expect you to swallow it. I’d much rather you swallowed something else, Effi.’

  Effi Rache slapped him. ‘My name is Elfriede. Either that or Fräulein Rache, depending on who is addressing me and in what context. Only my friends and my equals are allowed to call me Effi. And you are neither. You are merely an instrument for me to use when and how I see fit.’

  Udo stared hard at her but he did not retaliate. He had taken the Führer Oath to obey whoever happened to be leading the Brotherhood at whatever time they happened to be doing the leading, and Elfriede Rache was, in consequence, his lawful superior by direct right of birth. Udo’s family had served the Raches, and shared their politics, for close on a century. Obedience to a central organizing authority was so deeply ingrained in Udo’s nature that not even sex and a hefty dose of misogyny could shake it. ‘Pope wasn’t happy to tell me anything. He played up from the beginning and pretended that he no longer knew what I was talking about. When I remonstrated with him, he tried to tell me that he was mentally ill and that he’d changed his mind and didn’t want to hand over the Lance after all.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I changed his mind back for him.’

  ‘How did you do this?’

  ‘I have my ways.’

  ‘Is he going to be a problem for us? This is what I need to know.’

  ‘No. He’s retired from public life. Permanently.’

  ‘You mean you killed him?’

  ‘Of course I killed him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I nailed him to the wall, questioned him, and then I killed him. With that, actually. With what you are holding in your hand. I whacked it in with a book. It wasn’t easy. The thing has lost most of its edge over the years, but I still managed it. That’s why it’s got all that gore stuck to it. Just at the spot where you are holding it. You see? There.’

  Effi didn’t actually scream. But she did throw the Holy Lance onto the table beside her as if it had transformed itself into a centipede in her hand. ‘Why did you do that? Why did you kill him that way?’

  ‘I thought it would look like Pope was killed by fundamentalist Christians. Or maybe by some homosexual drug-crazed nutcase with a Christ fetish. I don’t know. It was fun. It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘You cretin. You utter imbecile.’

  ‘I’m not an imbecile. And I’m not a cretin. In fact, I’m not even Fat Udo any more, as you might remember if you cared to think back to a few months ago, when you allowed me, ever so briefly, inside your knickers. I did exactly what you asked of me, Effi Rache. I got you the Holy Lance. I got you the papers. Thanks to me you now hold in your hands exactly what the Führer intended for your grandfather sixty-seven years ago. What did you think I would do when you sent me out there? Offer the man a pension? I was in Guatemala, not Luxembourg. Do you expect the local police to throw up their hands in panic and call in Interpol? The per capita murder rate in Guatemala is worse than in Mexico, and the clean-up rate is maybe a tenth of one per cent. They’ll bury it, and bury it deep. Anyway, I needed the practice. Murders in Germany are far too risky these days. And I must keep my hand in. As we both know only too well.’

  Effi closed her eyes. She recognized Udo Zirkeler for exactly what he was. A foot soldier. A useful robot. The contemporary equivalent of a not very intelligent master sergeant in one of her grandfather’s SS Einsatzgruppen units. Udo was someone who loved killing for killing’s sake. He was the modern-day equivalent of the young man who had beaten fifty people to death with an iron crowbar in Kaunas, Lithuania, on 25 June 1941, at her grandfather’s bemused instigation, and who had then sat down and played the Lithuanian national anthem on his accordion for the further edification of his cheering audience.

  Effi knew that she had made a catastrophic mistake in ever allowing Zirkeler into her bed. She had hoped that the brief act would cement his dedication to her. When in fact all she had succeeded in doing was to drive him wild with lust and guarantee that he would dog her everywhere she went in a single-minded desire to repeat the exercise. Now she felt compelled to use every excuse she could to send him away and keep him separate from the conventional, political wing of the Brotherhood. Men like Zirkeler were necessary fifth columnists if one ever wished to attain real power – but it was a clear case of lighting the touch paper and standing well back. She ran him, yes. But she was also afraid of him.

  ‘And what about the mistress?’ Effi said.

  ‘What mistress?’

  ‘The mistress Pope has been living with for the past thirty years.’

  Udo made a face. ‘There is no mistress. He lived alone. I went through his belongings with a toothcomb. There were no women’s clothes in any of his cupboards. Not even a hairbrush.’

  ‘They have another
house. A ranch. He keeps her safely out of town.’

  Udo threw his head back in a movement he had learnt from watching endless film clips of Benito Mussolini. ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Because I asked one of our people in Guatemala to check up on any comeback we might receive thanks to your morbid enthusiasm for high theatre. They came up with this.’

  ‘So you knew I’d crucified him all along? You were simply playing with me? Pretending to ask me questions to which you already knew the answers?’

  Effi picked up a paper knife from the table beside her and held it a few centimetres away from Udo’s right eye. ‘You can function equally well with only one eye. I am this close –’ she pricked the bridge of his nose with the point – ‘from pushing it all the way in.’

  The smile froze on Udo’s face, but he refused to move. He was in the grip of two conflicting, though equally powerful, emotions. One side of him recognized that he might, after all, have gone a little too far in crucifying the man in Guatemala, and that Effi might have a point in being irritated with him. The other side was filled with admiration at her boldness in standing up to him. He was nearly a foot taller than her and outweighed her by at least sixty kilograms – which meant that he could break her neck with one sweep of his hand if he wanted to. But he didn’t want to. This was a woman worth following to hell and back. A woman who acted without compunction. A woman after his own heart.

  Udo felt an overwhelming testosterone surge – the sort of rush he usually only felt when he was beating up on somebody, or imposing his will on them in some way. If Effi hadn’t been who she was – and been related to who she was related to – he would have raped her there and then, and to hell with the consequences. Then he would have made her eat her red silk underwear and throttled her with the leftovers.

  But she was who she was – that much was set in stone. And a man needed order in his life. Someone and something to fight for. Someone to think things out for him. A hierarchy. And Effi fitted that bill perfectly. Plus there was still the outside chance that she would one day relent and take him back into her bed. Women were always changing their minds, weren’t they? Then he would really make her suffer. He would send her out into the world bowlegged, and with his mark upon her. And if anyone else tried to get near her in the meantime, he would kill them.