The Templar Prophecy

by Mario Reading

  But even this form of entertainment was starting to pall. Udo hadn’t put on his grandfather’s SS uniform since his little outing to Guatemala, and he missed the thrill. Just bashing people, or blackmailing them into conforming to his demands, didn’t cut the mustard any more. Udo needed action. And action involved death. Not the breaking of a bone or two that could easily be mended again. But death. The permanent solution to all problems.

  And the man Udo most wanted to kill was the fake English baron.

  Udo stood outside Haus Walküre and gazed up at Effi ’s bedroom window. He had seen Hartelius enter the house at seven o’clock. He had seen him embracing Effi. He had seen Effi cooking, like a proper German woman should, and wearing an apron. But she hadn’t been cooking for him – she had been cooking for the English prick.

  Later, after dinner, he had seen Effi and Hartelius playing a sort of game. At first Udo hadn’t been able to work out what they were doing. Were they pretending to be children? Hartelius was covering his eyes, but Effi wasn’t going anywhere to hide. She was standing in plain sight in the middle of the room.

  Then Udo saw Effi begin to undress. He could see her mouthing words. Probably telling Hartelius to keep his eyes closed. She stripped down to her red silk underwear whilst Udo watched. She looked like a goddess. Why had she let him fuck her once, and then closed down the gate? He was the one who knew her best. Who had the same aims as her. What did this idiot with the fancy title know of the real Germany? He couldn’t even speak the language. That was how close he was to the country of his ancestors. And the man’s grandfather had been a hero of the Third Reich – his grandmother a flying ace. And between them they had produced this – this thing. The thought made Udo sick to his stomach.

  Now Hartelius had his eyes open and Effi was turning round and letting him take a good look at her. She was behaving like a whore. With no decorum whatsoever. Bending over. Flashing him her breasts. Wriggling a little way out of her panties so Hartelius could have a view of her down there. Front and back. Like a striptease artist. Udo began grinding his teeth.

  As he watched, Hartelius strode towards her, hefted her over his shoulder, slapped her playfully on the rump a few times, and carried her towards the stairs. If Udo didn’t know that Effi’s outside doors were on a timed security lock, and that the whole house sealed itself automatically when anyone was inside it, he would have marched through the door then and there and had it out with them.

  But it was a good thing he didn’t. Udo needed Effi. Without her and her money and her father’s friends in high places who secretly supported the LB – not to mention her chemical factory in Gmund – nothing would go forward. He would remain a thug whose sole use was to beat up on people, and then Germany – the Germany he loved more than anything – would slide into the hands of foreigners.

  Udo watched the light go out in Effi’s bedroom. He could imagine her cries of joy as the Englishman porked her. He remembered her cries the one time she had been with him. They had driven him crazy with desire. How much more would she give to Hartelius now that she was in love with him? Because Udo wasn’t a fool. He knew Effi in real life and Effi after she met this clown, and the two bore no resemblance to each other. He’d watched them together for many hours now. For days, it seemed. He’d seen the way Effi looked at Hartelius. Let him do whatever he wanted to her. Submitted to him, despite her dominant position in real life.

  Maybe she secretly wanted to become a baroness? A Freifrau? How good that would look on the party billboards. Effi Rache, head of the Lanzen Brüderschaft, marries the hereditary Guardian of the Lance. It would be like a royal wedding. German high society might shun the occasion because of the political dimension – half the natural right-wingers in Germany didn’t dare come out into the open about their true beliefs because of the carry-over from the war – but it would still be a major event. A publicity overload. Udo wondered if Hartelius knew what Effi had in store for him. Maybe the man thought he was just having a rollicking affair with an upmarket bit of tail? Well, he would soon find out the truth of the matter.

  Udo walked the three kilometres back to his house in Abwinkl. At first he followed the Simperetsweg bicycle trail, then later he cut through the fields. At one point he chased what looked like a stray dog, but he couldn’t catch it. Later, when he was about a kilometre from home, he passed through a field of cows. He picked up a heavy stone from the side of the track and hefted it in his hand. He picked out a cow that stood apart from the others and edged up to it. It was dark. The animals were half asleep.

  Before the cow was able to react, Udo brought the stone down on its star – the apex of an imaginary triangle between its eyes and its poll. The cow fell to its knees and toppled over onto its side. Its legs windmilled for a while and then became still.

  Udo grinned. Yes. First time. One blow. It was how you killed horses when using a pistol. But he had never done it to a large animal like a cow. And with simply a rock.

  Udo turned to his audience for approbation. In recent days his ‘secret sharers’ – the chorus made up of his ancestors, his chosen Norse Gods, and Germany’s greatest kings – seemed to have been avoiding him. Now they were back in force. Watching him. Approving him. Urging him on.

  Udo felt vindicated. The night, he decided, had not been entirely wasted.

  FORTY-THREE

  Hart waited until Effi was asleep before padding downstairs to her writing desk. The desk was situated in the library section of her open-plan living area – the section that housed the photo museum dedicated to her grandfather.

  Hart switched on the desk lamp and began checking through the drawers. At one point he caught sight of himself reflected back from the study window. He looked furtive. Like a sneak thief at a boy’s school. He straightened up and listened for any sound that might suggest Effi was waking up. But apart from the ticking of her ridiculously ornate rococo desk clock, there was only silence.

  What was he doing here, in this strange house? Making love to the woman who headed Germany’s most powerful far-right political party? Was he really so naïve as to believe that she had nothing whatsoever to do with the three murders in Guatemala? Well. Yes. He was. Otherwise why was he down here in the dead of night going through her things?

  His meeting earlier that day with Amira had begun as a catastrophe and ended as a disaster. Beforehand, he had found no difficulty in convincing himself that he was adhering to Plan A – the plan which he and Amira had agreed in London, and which involved inveigling himself as close to Effi Rache as he possibly could and passing on any information that he found. In the original scenario he would have become magically transformed into a hero by these actions, and finally worthy of Amira’s love.

  But he hadn’t counted on his own susceptibilities in the matter. The sheer physical magnetism of Effi Rache had blindsided him. She was far and away the most purely carnal being he had ever encountered. In Effi’s mind sex seemed an entirely natural function one enjoyed in any way one chose to enjoy it. It was uncomplicated. Innocent, even. Hart had seldom, if ever, known the delights of pure sex – of carnality without complications. Sex with Amira had been like jogging through a minefield naked. Sex with Effi was like diving into the Mediterranean Sea in mid-summer from the highest rock you could find. The whole thing was baffling.

  He took Effi’s passport out of its black leather folder and held it up to the light. It was still in date. He flicked through the pages. Visits to Romania, the Seychelles and the United States. Hart wondered who Effi had gone to the Seychelles with, but then thrust the thought into the far recesses of his consciousness. More visits. To the Ukraine. Moldova. Even Transnistria, wherever that was. But nowhere in Central America. And no pages, that he could see, had been cut out, as each page was numbered one to thirty-two, and they were all intact.

  Could she have driven down from the United States and done it? Crazy, but possible. He checked the dates again. No. Effi had visited the United States in July 2010. On a visa waiver
. And with a visa waiver you got only one bite of the cherry. If you wafted back across the border on anything but a transit flight, you’d have to have a very good reason for your return visit.

  Hart replaced the passport, then stood there looking down at the desk. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. He sifted through the remaining drawers but found little apart from a sheaf of bank balances. He held them under the light, and then did a double take when he saw the figures – 6,433,171 euros in various investments. Hart tore a piece of paper off a pad on the desk and wrote down the account numbers, the figures and the bank names. But there was nothing illegal here that he could see. The accounts were in Munich and Berlin, not Zurich, and no doubt entirely aboveboard. One had only to look around to realize that Effi was a very rich young woman. Her father and her grandfather had left her well provided for. Alongside the Bad Wiessee house, Effi had already admitted to him that she possessed a house in Deia, Mallorca, and a four-bedroom apartment on the Île St Louis in Paris. He could imagine Amira’s disdain when he told her.

  Hart wondered about Effi’s mother. Why did she never figure in Effi’s narrative? What had Effi called her? A Jargenried? No. That was her grandmother – the one who came from the family where the women only gave birth to blonde children. Hart wrote that name down too. At least all this information would provide him with something to take to Amira. A sort of peace offering. Something to get her teeth into, whilst he – yes, he might as well admit it – carried on his affair with Effi.

  As he started towards the stairs, an object tucked under an occasional table tight against the side of the desk caught his eye. It was an old-fashioned fireproof box – the sort with a lock, not a combination. Hart hesitated for a moment, and then retraced his steps. He slid the box out and tested the lid. Tight as a drum. He sat down on the floor and looked at the box. Was there any point trying to pick the lock with a paperclip or something similar? No. That only happened in the movies.

  He flicked at the lid with a finger and it bumped open.

  Hart sat staring at it for a moment, lost for words. The lock was down, the mechanism committed. How had he been able to open it?

  He dragged the box towards him and focused on the lock. It was an old box – probably 1950s vintage – and the lock’s reverse seat had simply worn away over the years until it rested on a diminishing lip. One tug and it would hold. Two, and it would pull free. The thing must have sentimental value for Effi, he decided, because it served no useful purpose whatsoever.

  Hart sifted through the papers inside. Share certificates, a will, some American Express dollar travellers’ cheques that had probably been forgotten about as they were already curling at the edges and, underneath them all, an old, browned envelope, with the remnants of a wax seal adhering to it. Hart held the envelope under the banker’s light on Effi ’s desk. There was a slip of paper inside. Hart looked at the signature.

  To term it higgledy-piggledy would be to accord it a compliment. The signature ran from above to below, with the H of Hitler done in a ridiculously ornate style, and the R at the end of the name finished off in a descending mouse’s tail, similar to the Snakes & Ladders boards of his childhood. The single sheet of paper was headed by a raised bevel in the top left-hand corner with the German Eagle standing atop a circled swastika; the words ADOLF HITLER were printed in upper case beneath it. On the upper right-hand side the words ‘Berlin, den’, meaning ‘Berlin, on the’, were printed for the convenience of the sender. Hitler had filled in the date below: 29 April 1945. The day before he committed suicide. The day he had ordered Hart’s grandfather and grandmother on their final, doomed flight out of Berlin. The note was addressed to ‘Mein Lieber Heinrich’ – ‘My dear Heinrich’. Effi’s grandfather.

  Hart tried to disinter the meaning of the note using his rudimentary German, but it was impossible. The note was handwritten, and virtually illegible. Dots were transposed to slashes, and each sentence ended on a downward falling spiral, as if Hitler had been unconsciously mirroring his own imminent doom in the way he wrote. Old German was hard enough, but old German written by an elderly man with shaking hands who had decided to kill himself the very next day was an impossibility.

  Hart could hear the sound of Effi’s voice calling him quizzically from the bedroom. He stood up, his senses on full alert. He looked down at the note in his hand. Did he dare keep it and simply return the envelope to the box? Could he count on the lock snapping open a second time when he wanted to put the note back?

  He heard the squeak of Effi’s bare feet on the old wooden floorboards at the top of the stairs.

  Hart slipped the empty envelope back into the strongbox and clicked it shut. Then he slid the box back underneath the table. He looked first at the letter and then down at himself. He was buck-naked from bed – the house was far too well heated and insulated to even consider wearing pyjamas or a nightshirt. So where should he put the thing? And what could he use as an excuse for being down near Effi’s desk in the middle of the night?

  Hart ran to the Heinrich Rache picture gallery and snatched the photograph of his grandfather off the wall. He felt around the back of the frame and sliced into the mount with his thumbnail. He slipped Hitler’s letter inside.

  When Effi reached the bottom of the stairs, all she saw was Hart standing in his birthday suit, staring at the photograph.

  ‘What are you doing, Johnny? It’s the middle of the night. Why are you standing here naked?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep. So I decided to come down and visit my grandfather and grandmother. I have no copy of this photograph, Effi. In fact, I have no photographs of either of them. Would you have it copied for me one day, please? I’d be really grateful.’

  Effi came up to him. ‘You are a sentimental old beast, aren’t you?’ She took the photograph from his hand and carried it to her desk. ‘I’ll do it for you tomorrow. I promise.’ She glanced down at his midriff. ‘You may be up, but he looks like he’s gone to sleep.’

  Hart laughed. ‘Don’t worry. He’s only resting.’

  Effi put on a broad smile. ‘Well, then. Shall we see if we can wake him up again?’

  FORTY-FOUR

  When he and Effi had finished making love and she was safely asleep again, Hart spent the remainder of the night worrying how he might get the Hitler letter out of the photoframe before Effi had time to ask her private secretary, Frau Schwirk, to make a hard copy of it for him on the MFP in her office. Frau Schwirk’s office was situated in what used to be the cattle byre attached to the house, and was far too convenient for comfort. Hart knew the way Effi’s mind worked by now in terms of giving him pleasure. It would be the first thing she would ask Frau Schwirk to do when she came in for work at ten o’clock.

  In the end, he needn’t have worried. Effi insisted on making him an early breakfast of scrambled eggs, oven-crisped bacon and fresh mohnsemmel rolls to make up for the shenanigans she had involved him in the night before. He had ample time, whilst he was waiting for her to squeeze the orange juice and make the coffee, to go back to her desk, pretend to be perusing his grandparents’ photograph in broad daylight, and slip the letter into his pocket.

  There were definite advantages to being involved with German women, Hart decided. Amira never made him breakfast. In fact, it was usually him who ended up preparing necessities like that – in the rare absence of hotel staff – whilst she prodded and poked at whatever variety of laptop, tablet or phone she was enamoured of at that particular time. Amira also smoked wherever and whenever she felt like it, which Effi didn’t. And Amira was subject to moods – ecstatic, depressive or seething – whereas Effi always seemed bright and cheerful. Hart supposed it was what came of being beautiful, blonde and a millionaire, rather than half Arab, half Jew, and irredeemably intense. Further than that he didn’t care to go.

  ‘I need to go and sort out my stuff at the Alpenruh. They must be wondering where I spend my nights.’

  ‘The old cow knows, don’t you worry about it. She’l
l even have our bed plan sketched out by now. She’s used the same maid for the past forty years. And her maid knows my maid. And maids gossip.’ Effi shrugged the shrug of a woman who has been used to staff catering to her every whim all her life. ‘It would be much easier if you came to live here, Johnny. There’s enough room, and it’s the political dead season. I’m entitled to a summer holiday. And if I want to take it at home, who’s to stop me?’

  ‘You want me to live here with you?’

  ‘Only if you want to? If you think it would be comfortable enough for you? Convenient enough?’ Each sentence ended on an upward lilt, turning it into both question and tease.

  Effi was entirely confident by now of Hart’s sexual interest in her. She stood up and walked over to the kitchen counter for more coffee. She knew how much Hart liked to watch her. It was one of his major attractions, for Effi needed a male audience. And Hart was far and away the best audience she had ever encountered. Plus he never said no to anything she suggested. In fact, he dreamt up new things all the time by himself. She’d never met a man who relished women and their ways as much as he did, and she was not about to let him escape.

  ‘You really mean that?’

  ‘Why waste money paying for a room you never sleep in? Breakfasts you never eat? Maid service you never use? I will service you for free, Johnny.’

  Hart burst out laughing. ‘How can I say no to an offer like that?’

  ‘Yes. It’s an offer you can’t refuse.’

  ‘Like in The Godfather?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  FORTY-FIVE

  ‘You’re going to live with her? You’re going to live with Effi Rache? In her house?’ Amira was unable to hide her dismay. Her face was drawn, her expression sallow, and she smelt of stale cigarettes. She looked as if she hadn’t slept for the past few nights.