The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

  Hart took a step towards her, but she raised both arms against him in the shape of a transversal cross. She began to sob.

  One of the young women hurried towards her. Took her by the shoulders. Led her away.

  Hart was left standing in the clearing, the early moonlight settling on his face, bereft.

  TWELVE

  ‘They are close,’ said the corporal. He shone his torch onto the ground. The moonlight was so strong, though, that he scarcely needed it. ‘Look.’

  The Captain leant forwards. ‘Menstrual blood.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then one, at least, is not pregnant.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Incredible. How did she manage that, do you think?’

  The corporal shrugged. ‘Maybe her body closed down? Killed the baby? This can happen. I have heard of it. If you hate enough, your body listens to you.’

  The Captain squinted at his subordinate. ‘Where do you learn this claptrap?’

  The corporal swallowed. ‘I don’t know. I listen to the women sometimes.’

  ‘In between raping them?’

  ‘Yes, sir. In between raping them.’

  ‘Then you are a stupid ass. Who listens to women?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The corporal consciously closed down. He knew what his commander was capable of. Had seen it a hundred times. They were alone out here. He did not want to die.

  ‘Of course you don’t know. You are an idiot.’ The Captain thought for a while. ‘How far ahead?’

  The corporal looked at the blood. He touched it with his finger. It had scarcely had time to clot. ‘Ten. Fifteen minutes at the most.’

  ‘Good. We catch them up within the hour.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  They began walking again, this time at a faster pace. The Captain unslung his gun. The corporal, seeing him, unslung his too. He wondered for a moment if he should use it to kill the Captain. Then run back. Say they had been ambushed by the KLA. The Captain scared him. The man was visibly out of control. In recent weeks he had taken to playing God. Sometimes, when they were purging villages, the Captain spared people on a whim. All those with glasses, maybe. Or bald ones. Totally at random. Other times, he killed old people or a child – someone you would usually let escape, encourage towards the border. Why would a man kill old people and children? There were more than enough men of fighting age left to kill in the normal run of things.

  He twitched the barrel of his gun away from the Captain’s back to forestall temptation. It would be so easy. Later, he could shoot himself in the fleshy part of the arm just before his return and act wounded. Pretend he was a hero. Who was to know the KLA hadn’t dragged off the soldiers he would claim to have shot? A man made his own way in this world. The Captain’s days were numbered. He sensed it. You couldn’t go on killing as the Captain did and not have it affect you.

  ‘Move on ahead. What are you lingering behind me for? Who is meant to be the guide here? You or me?’

  ‘Me, Captain.’

  ‘Then guide. Don’t fuck around waving your gun at my arse.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  They came upon the two girls forty minutes later, running back down the track towards them. At first the corporal thought he was seeing ghosts. Then he realized that the girls were wrapped in white sheets, like ponchos. Even so, he had come perilously close to shooting them.

  ‘Stop.’ The Captain walked past him. ‘Where do you think you are going?’

  One of the girls fell to the ground. The other stood on the track. Frozen. The corporal saw that she was pissing herself.

  ‘You heard me,’ said the Captain. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘We are coming back.’

  ‘Bullshit. Where were you going? I will ask it once more.’

  Both girls were weeping.

  The corporal looked at the Captain. The Captain was lighting a cigarette. It was what he always did before executions.

  ‘Shall I take them back to the house?’ said the corporal quickly. ‘You could go on alone.’

  The Captain appeared to consider. He looked at the two girls. Then at his cigarette. ‘Yes. You better get them out of here. The bastard has probably already photographed them.’

  ‘He will have their faces, yes,’ said the corporal. He didn’t know why he was trying to defend the girls. He had raped them both numerous times. Had used them like toilet roll. But somehow, out here, away from their hysterical companions, they seemed more human to him.

  ‘How far are the other three ahead?’

  The girl on the track looked up at him uncomprehendingly. It was the standing one who answered him.

  ‘Not three of them. Two. Short distance. Not far. Five. Ten minutes.’

  ‘Who is this man? What is his name?’

  She shook her head. ‘Anglez.’

  ‘An Englishman? What is he doing here? Is he a journalist?’

  The girl shook her head again.

  ‘Why did you run?’

  Both girls shook their heads.

  ‘Did the other one run?’

  A nod.

  ‘Was it the one from my room?’

  Another shake of the head.

  ‘Are your villages near here? Was that why you ran?’

  Silence.

  The Captain took out his pistol.

  ‘Look,’ said the corporal, ‘I take them with me, heh? I get them back. Then I go and get the other one. Soon we have them all.’

  The Captain paused. He took aim at the supine girl’s head and made a paf sound with his mouth. Then he did the same to the standing girl. She fell down.

  ‘Paf!’ The Captain said again. ‘Paf! Paf! Paf! They all fall down.’ He laughed. ‘Go on. Take them back with you.’ He started up the track. Then he stopped. ‘Corporal?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Your heart. It’s mush. It’s mashed potato. It’s old stew. You need to harden it. If not, we never win. Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then understand this. When you get back, tell Markovic´ I am rescinding the final part of my orders. Let the first part stand.’

  The corporal swallowed. He looked at the two girls. They might as well be dead now. He knew that if it wasn’t for the sound a gun makes, and which might risk spooking their quarry, the Captain would have killed them on the spot. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Tomorrow I return. Make sure the house is cleaned before I get back. Sparkling. No mess left.’

  Before the corporal could reply the Captain turned on his heel and disappeared up the track.

  THIRTEEN

  When Lumnije came back, she was alone. The other two girls were gone.

  ‘Did you tell them to go?’ Hart said. ‘Did you encourage them to leave?’

  ‘No. Why would I do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe they have villages near here too?’

  ‘No. They are both from my village.’

  Hart looked at her. There was no sign at all that Lumnije had been weeping. Her face was blank. Shut off from him. In another place entirely. ‘Then why?’

  ‘They think you will rape them.’

  ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘I am very serious.’

  Hart took a step towards her. ‘Couldn’t they see that I was trying to help them?’

  Lumnije echoed his movement, but backwards, as if they were engaged in a formal dance neither knew the rules to. ‘They are beyond help. Can’t you see that?’

  ‘Are you beyond help too? Is that what you are telling me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why do you stay with me?’ Hart was really angry now. He could feel the seeds of outraged virtue building inside him. He had tried to help these girls and they had spurned him. What were they thinking
of? He was a decent man. Not like the filth who were perpetrating this. ‘Why did you come back? Why didn’t you run off too?’

  Lumnije turned away from him. ‘I don’t know. I cannot tell you this.’ She put her hand on her chest as if she might somehow be able to control the frequency of her breathing. ‘I no longer know myself. I am not myself. I no longer exist.’

  ‘What are you saying? Of course you exist. You have your whole life in front of you.’

  ‘No. I no longer exist.’

  ‘Bullshit. What age are you? Twenty? Twenty-two?’

  ‘I am sixteen.’

  Hart felt the anger leach out of him. He was like a bladder someone has just popped. He wanted to reach out and hug her, but he knew she would probably scream, and then he would lose her for good. And for some obscure reason he knew he had to keep her. Keep this last one. That it meant something. Held some deep significance for his future life. For him now, even.

  ‘We need to move on,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘They can’t be far behind us,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  They were writing their relationship in words, not movements. He realized that. She was staying with him for the comfort of words. Not even in her own language. Just words. It wasn’t about him. He was just a conduit. He could be anyone. It was the first time in his life that he truly felt the tenor of his own insignificance.

  They hurried through the woods, still keeping to the track. Hart knew that it was a dangerous thing to do, but veering off would only slow them down. They would get lost, stumble off into the void. For some reason the track represented security, even though it was the one thing that made them the most vulnerable.

  ‘How far is the monastery?’

  ‘By walking? Maybe two days.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two. Maybe three. Now there is just the two of us I think two.’

  ‘Are you still okay?’

  Lumnije looked at him. How could she tell him about the cramps she was getting in her stomach? The pain in her back and hips? The burning in her vagina and anus where the Captain had entered her, sometimes three or four times in a row. How could she tell this man such things? How could she tell any man? Anybody?

  ‘I am okay.’

  ‘Maybe the Captain is not after us. Maybe we’re just imagining it?’

  ‘He is after us. We are not imagining.’

  Hart felt excluded. Out of the loop. He was in a country he did not understand, doing something he did not know how to do. ‘Can I photograph you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It might serve to protect you. If I can get the photos out, that is. I could photograph the bruises on your front and back – what you showed the other girls. It might help.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay. I was just asking.’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘No. I won’t. I won’t ask again.’

  He did not know why he kept the cameras now. They were only slowing him down. He was cluttered up with paraphernalia. But maybe he could take some distant shots of the Serb soldiers, if he somehow managed to avoid them killing him. Get some faces on film. Hand the results over to the International Criminal Tribunal.

  Because there would sure as hell come a time when all this bestiality would have to be paid for. You don’t destroy a country, rape its women, kill its men and boys, without some comeback some time. If not now, then later, a few years down the line. Any photographs he took would be evidence. He wanted to kick himself for not taking any photos of the house when he had had the chance. Bloody fool. He had come all this way to photograph a rape house, and when he found one all he did was escape from it with a bunch of girls who then left him because they thought he would do the same thing to them the soldiers had done. It wasn’t a pretty story. He felt his twenty-five years of life like a lesson only partially learned. A botched project, half finished.

  ‘We need to go higher.’

  ‘Are you sure you know where we are?’ Hart said.

  Lumnije moved her head around as if she was sniffing the air. The first fingers of dawn were lighting the trees. ‘No. I do not know for certain. Only the direction.’ She touched the moss on the back of a tree. ‘This is south.’ She touched the bald side of the tree. ‘This is north. We need to go east.’

  ‘That’s it? That’s all you know?’

  ‘It is enough.’

  FOURTEEN

  The Captain sensed that the two of them, the man and the girl, were picking up speed. It had been a clever thing of them to get rid of the two whores clothed in sheets. He would have done the same thing in their position. Driven them off. Maybe not killed them, but driven them off. Hell, maybe he would have killed them just for slowing him up.

  This set the Captain to thinking back to the first man he had ever killed. It was during the Bosnian War. At Srebrenica/Potocˇari, following the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia into warring factions made up largely of Serb Christians and Bosniak Muslims. He had been a junior lieutenant in the Scorpions, 12–13 July 1995. He and the other Serbs had held back until then, not sure how the Dutch UNPROFOR troops who were nominally maintaining peace would react. But when the Dutchbat forces refused to intervene in what the Serbian forces were doing at the place they called the White House, something broke in him. Something was liberated.

  First he joined in the gang rape of a young Bosniak girl by three other Serb soldiers. Then he asked to be able to shoot a Bosniak prisoner. Some kid they had captured. He shot the kid, and one of the soldiers with him cut the kid’s nose, ears and lips off. Why, he couldn’t tell.

  But it freed him. There was a craziness in the air. He suddenly realized he could do anything he wanted with these people and no one would care. No one would protect them. No one would fight back. It was total power. Something he had never experienced before.

  All through that night and into the next day, he raped and killed with impunity. The Dutch soldiers just stood by and watched. Maybe they were getting a kick out of it too?

  By the second night he and his people were killing the Bosniaks on an industrial scale. Lighting up the killing fields with arc lights. Carting the bodies away in trucks and bulldozers. Burying them in mass graves. Raping women when they wanted a break from the killing. Sometimes in front of their fathers and mothers. In front of their children. Some of the victims they just buried alive. Nothing much counted any more. Dutch soldiers were watching all this happening. Some had Walkmans on. They were listening to music while the raping and killing and mutilation went on. How do you account for that?

  He himself was crazy by then. His unit was out of control. They had gone too far to ever stop. Stories were coming back that people were committing suicide in the refugee camp rather than waiting for the Scorpions to come get them.

  That was power, thought the Captain. That was total war. Action, pure and simple. No thought, no holding back. You acted just as you saw fit. When and how you saw fit. You were God. There was no God. How could there be? How could God let this happen if He existed? Or didn’t He care about people? A Serbian Orthodox priest had even blessed his unit before they started killing. How could anyone take God seriously after that? When even priests reckoned God was on your side while you murdered people?

  It was well after dawn when the Captain heard the noise ahead of him. He upped his pace. He was carrying his automatic rifle unslung all the time. Part of him wondered whether Markovic´ had killed all the girls back at the camp yet. Because now, by virtue of the orders he had given, he was killing even when he wasn’t killing. That was a neat trick. But everything needed tidying up back there. The corporal would deal with the two white-sheeted girls somewhere along the road home. Dump them in a ditch. Probably rape their dead bodies. That was something he had never tried. Some people swore by it. They killed the wo
men just as they were ejaculating inside them. Crazy. Crazy what this war had thrown up in the way of pleasure.

  He came into the clearing at the half-run. There were ten people there, all Albanians. He could tell. Refugees, heading for the border, half men and half women. Some of the men were fighting age. The Captain raised his rifle and shot them before they could get away. Then he shot the old men. The women were shrieking and howling like they always did on these occasions, so he shot them too.

  Ten. He’d just killed ten people. No one had escaped. Their bodies lay scattered along the track like debris from a runaway train. He kicked them one by one down into the gulley and watched them tumble away, their limbs flailing.

  Shit. Now he’d warned the two he was following. He should have kept one of these ones alive and asked them questions. Whether the two had passed them by, stuff like that. But he’d needed to be quick. They’d been scattering in all directions by the time he’d decided to shoot.

  He stood at the top of the gulley and looked down. He was the master. The master of everything. What he said, mattered. What he did, counted.

  He was the Captain.

  FIFTEEN

  Hart and Lumnije looked at each other when they heard the gunshots.

  ‘The soldiers have killed them,’ said Hart. ‘Those people we saw.’

  ‘It was the Captain,’ said Lumnije.

  ‘Him and all the others.’

  ‘No,’ said Lumnije. ‘That was only one gun.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  Lumnije stared at him as if he was mad. ‘I hear before. Soldiers practising. At the house. They shoot the walls. The trees. When they not raping us, or drinking, or smoking, they practising.’