The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

  Hart could feel himself bridling. ‘Maybe. Yes.’

  ‘To which she dedicated the final years of her life.’

  ‘Well. Yes. It does seem so, doesn’t it?’ He slapped the pile of papers in front of him in an attention-grabbing sort of way. ‘But she’s only theorizing, don’t you see? She doesn’t actually come up with any cast-iron location. One might as well go looking for a needle in a haystack. I have a profession, Biljana. And it’s not treasure hunter. Or fictioneer. Or mythologizer. It’s photojournalist, and it pays the bills. Gives me immense satisfaction. Completes me. I don’t need this. I really don’t.’

  Biljana took a letter out of the breast pocket of her blouse. ‘No. But you need this.’

  Hart looked at the envelope Biljana was holding in her hand. ‘What is that?’

  ‘My mother’s final letter.’

  ‘So she did write one. I knew you were fibbing.’ Hart watched Biljana from across the table. ‘And do you intend to show it to me?’

  Biljana slid the letter back inside her blouse pocket. ‘No. Not yet.’

  Hart threw up his arms. ‘Bravo then. We are in something of a quandary, it appears. Might I ask if the envelope is specifically addressed to me?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Then shouldn’t you give it to me?’

  ‘Why?’

  Hart made a face. ‘Why?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’ Biljana made a face back at him.

  Hart was nonplussed. What the hell did this girl want from him? ‘Biljana, what are you trying to pull?’

  ‘I’m not trying to pull anything. I want to make a deal with you.’

  ‘A deal?’

  ‘Yes. Father to daughter.’

  Hart prodded the tabletop with his forefinger. He felt more like striking it with his head. ‘Listen. For the very last time. I am not your father. I met your mother around the date you were conceived. Yes. But that’s as far as it ever went. We never went to bed together.’

  ‘I do not believe you. You are lying. You are holding something back from me.’

  What could Hart say? The girl was right. He was holding something back from her. And he’d continue to hold it back. Just as he’d promised her mother on pain of hell and damnation when he left her at Visoki Decˇani Monastery for the final time.

  Biljana will survive this, he told himself, without learning the truth from me. She is young. She speaks fluent English. She’ll get her life back on track. Maybe even go to school at last. Then on to college. Macedonia was a young country, both in terms of average age and in terms of expectation. Biljana had her whole life ahead of her. Why blight it for her as her mother’s life had been blighted? It didn’t make sense.

  ‘I’m holding nothing back.’ The lie stuck in Hart’s craw, but still he mouthed it. ‘What you see is what you get. Please give me your mother’s letter.’

  ‘No.’

  Hart stood up. ‘Right. I’m going. It’s been very nice meeting you. And thanks for the food. I’m sorry about your mother. I truly am. She was a remarkable woman. I was very fond of her. Very fond indeed. But I am far too old to play games. If you change your mind about the letter you will find me just across the lake at the Hotel Royal View until tomorrow midday.’ Hart started towards the door. ‘I won’t take these.’ He pointed to Lumnije’s papers. ‘Because they are utterly useless to me without the letter you are holding back from me.’

  Hart expected Biljana to run after him. To beg him to reconsider. She thought he was her daddy, didn’t she? How could she possibly let him go just like that? He was expecting to hear her voice calling after him all the way out to the car.

  But it didn’t work out that way. Maybe Hart had an image of an ideal fantasy teenager somewhere in his head? Polite. Respectful of her elders. Non-assertive. But that teenager was not Biljana.

  He slid into the car, started the engine, and headed up the track for Ohrid.

  He had done the right thing, hadn’t he? Surely he had? A man of his age couldn’t allow himself to be blackmailed by a fifteen-year-old kid.

  Why, then, did he feel so bloody wretched? And so all-fired bloody guilty?

  THIRTY-NINE

  ‘What deal?’

  It had taken Hart less than twenty minutes car time to reconsider his position. He couldn’t up sticks and leave just like that, he decided. This girl’s mother had been his friend. She had come back for him, risking her own life, when she had thought him dead. He had saved her life in his turn. Which meant that he had saved Biljana’s life too, when all was said and done. In the womb. Before either he or her mother had even dreamt of her existence. That meant something, surely?

  The fact that she was the Captain’s rape child was neither here nor there. As her mother’s daughter she had a clear right to his consideration. He carried information about her that could blight the remainder of her life if he was ever foolish enough – or drunk enough – to blurt it out. Surely he owed this vulnerable young woman – his friend’s daughter, for Pete’s sake – the courtesy of complying with her requests?

  Biljana had been crying. This fact so shocked Hart, who had convinced himself by now that the girl was rock hard and emotionally unreachable, that he didn’t know how to react.

  ‘I thought you’d left me for good,’ she said.

  ‘So did I,’ he said. ‘Believe me. So did I.’

  Hart looked down at her. He held out a tentative hand but she shook her head, too proud to accept what might still prove to be false sympathy.

  Hart could hardly blame her. It was he who had behaved like a boor, not she. She’d just lost her mother to suicide. Imagined she had finally found her father after fifteen years. She was in shock. Had to be. And he had acted like a boor.

  ‘What deal?’ he said again.

  Biljana looked up. She dabbed at her eyes with the sleeves of her pullover.

  Hart proffered her his handkerchief but she shook her head.

  ‘You take me to Paris with you,’ she said. ‘If we find the treasure, half is mine, half is yours. If we do not find it, I give you the letter anyway and you can read what my mother says about you. Then you decide whether to acknowledge me as your daughter or throw me away.’

  Hart closed his eyes. He was having a hard time trying to block the ‘throwing away’ bit. ‘You want me to take you to Paris with me? On a sort of glorified treasure hunt?’

  ‘Yes. I have my own passport, you know. And I have my mother’s money. I will not be a burden to you. Emotionally or financially. I promise you that.’

  FORTY

  ‘So this girl thinks she is your daughter?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hart was standing outside the men’s lavatory at Skopje Airport. He was talking to Amira on his mobile phone. Biljana was seated twenty yards away in the waiting area, listening to music through a pair of headphones. Her hair was hanging down either side of her head in sheets. The pair of them had barely exchanged two words since Hart had agreed to her deal. ‘And she has no one. I mean no one. No friends. No neighbours. No distant relatives who survived the war. Her mother took her to a country where she wasn’t known and they isolated themselves in a Christian village, even though they are Muslims. Which is like dropping off the ends of the earth. No one is going to come looking for her.’

  ‘And is she?’

  ‘Is she what?’

  ‘Your daughter.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Amira.’

  ‘Well, we all know how much trouble you have keeping your dick tucked away inside your pants. They don’t call you “Hart the Tart” for nothing.’

  ‘That isn’t funny.’

  ‘All depends on which side of the room you are sitting. From my perspective, it’s a scream a minute. You always wanted a child. Well. Now you’ve got one. Your dreams have been answered.’

  Hart was tempted to pitch his mobile phone across
the terminal. ‘You wouldn’t feel like that if you were sitting here watching her. What the hell do I do?’

  ‘Do? Do? Why are you asking me?’

  ‘Because you’re a woman.’

  Amira snorted down the line. ‘I’m not a woman. I’m a journalist. And what do journalists know about real life?’

  ‘Amira. Please.’

  There was a long silence. ‘All right. Do you know what I would do?’

  ‘What? Tell me. I need to know.’

  ‘Take the girl to Paris with you,’ said Amira. ‘Just as you are doing now. Go through the motions. Give her a nice time. Bond a bit. Offload all the guilt you feel about what you did or didn’t do for her mother onto her and then, when it becomes patently obvious that you are not her father – as it will, John, as it will – send her back to Macedonia to get on with the rest of her life.’

  Hart let out a long-suffering groan. ‘And what does a grown man do with a fifteen-year-old girl in Paris?’

  ‘Look for the hidden Templar treasure. What else?’

  ‘And failing that?’

  ‘There’s always Disneyland.’

  FORTY-ONE

  Hart booked adjoining rooms at the Hotel Les Deux Miroirs. It was cheap. It was central to the Marais. And the manager remembered Hart from a previous trip he had made when he had needed to consult some photo files at the Bibliothèque Française.

  ‘And who is this beautiful young lady?’

  ‘I am his daughter,’ said Biljana.

  Hart closed his eyes. The manager stared at him. Then at Biljana. ‘Ah. A family trip.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hart. ‘A family trip.’

  The manager gave Biljana her passport back. He somehow managed to contrive an expression on his face which said, ‘Well, if you wish to involve yourself with underage young women, that is entirely your own affair. I am a man of the world. Why should I cast the first stone? But if you damage the reputation of my hotel you are dead in the water.’

  ‘Why did you have to say that?’ said Hart, as they travelled up together in the lift.

  ‘Because it’s true.’

  ‘Look. We don’t even share the same surname. He probably thinks I am trying to groom you.’

  ‘Groom me? What is “groom me”, please?’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Hart. ‘Forget it.’

  That evening, before deciding on where to go for dinner, Hart took Biljana on a tour of the wasteland that had once been the temple. ‘Do you have any idea yet when you are going to relent and tell me where I have to dig? I’m assuming your mother will have given full details of the treasure’s location in that letter you have in your pocket. You know? The one that is addressed to me?’

  ‘Let’s not run before we can walk, shall we?’

  Hart stopped dead in his tracks. He turned to Biljana, an unbelieving expression on his face. ‘Did you just say “let’s not run before we can walk”?’

  ‘I did say that, yes. It’s a good expression, isn’t it? My English teacher taught it to me.’

  Hart thrust both hands inside his pockets as if this was the only way he could prevent himself from throttling the girl. ‘You’re not bullshitting me by any chance? There really is a letter? That is not just an empty envelope you have in your pocket that you happened to snatch off the mantelpiece when you thought I might be leaving?’

  ‘No. It isn’t.’

  Hart still couldn’t read the young woman in front of him. However hard he tried. And the more closely he looked, the more he saw of the Captain in her. Maybe being a sociopath was inheritable too? ‘Shall we eat?’ he said at last.

  ‘Might as well.’

  ‘French? Or I suppose you want a McDonalds?’

  ‘I don’t want a McDonalds.’

  ‘Right. French it is then.’

  He took Biljana to a small brasserie near the Place des Vosges.

  ‘Will you order for me?’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure you want me to?’

  ‘I don’t understand any French. I have never been here before. I don’t know where to start.’ She looked ready to cry again. ‘If you don’t help me, nobody will.’

  Hart’s stomach gave a sudden lurch. Looking at Biljana’s forlorn face, he could feel the scales slipping from his eyes. How could he have played it so wrong? Sitting across the table from him was his friend Lumnije’s daughter. Not some juvenile delinquent who had latched onto him in the hope of a reward.

  Hart tried to reimagine the young woman in front of him as his goddaughter, and that he was taking her out for a treat. In Paris. No strings attached. Just a forty-one-year-old photojournalist, on furlough after a traumatic posting, with his fifteen-year-old goddaughter in tow. What was so hard about that? Why, then, was he finding the whole thing so damnably difficult? Why was he making it so complicated for both of them? Why was he feeling so resentful? So put upon?

  ‘Have you ever eaten snails before?’ he managed at last.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I will order them then. And Boeuf en Daube. Which is marinated beef in a thick gravy. You drink wine, I suppose?’

  ‘I drink Coke.’

  Hart rolled his eyes. ‘One cannot drink Coke with a Boeuf en Daube and snails. You shall have red wine. You are fifteen. Almost a grown woman.’

  ‘I am not a grown woman.’

  Hart grimaced. ‘No. You’re not. I don’t know why I just said that. I can’t imagine what came over me.’

  Biljana stuck out her chin. Her lips were trembling. ‘Because you wish I was a grown woman. Then I would not be bothering you, would I? You could get rid of me with a clear conscience and get on with your life.’

  Hart stared at her.

  Biljana stared back.

  Hart gave her the briefest of nods. ‘Touché.’

  He looked up at the hovering waiter. ‘Coke it is then.’

  FORTY-TWO

  They spent most of the next morning scouring bookshops and libraries and museums for any material relating to the Templars. The weather sailed perilously close to perfection. The parks were full. Le tout Paris was outside celebrating spring.

  They visited a food market near the Rue des Rosiers and bought a picnic lunch which they ate on the banks of the Seine, on the far tip of the Île St Louis. Hart took Biljana to his favourite church of St Gervais. They bought honey made by the nuns. Had tea sitting by one of the open air tables. By the end of the afternoon they had walked every street and covered every inch of what remained of Templar Paris. And they had found nothing. No abandoned chapels. No Templar churches. No vaults. No catacombs. It was as if the Templars had been struck off the map and their fields sown with salt, like ancient Carthage.

  That evening Hart bought tickets to the Opera Bastille via the concierge, who still hadn’t decided whether Hart was actually a paedophile, or merely an over-compensating guilty parent. As Hart and Biljana never touched, it was clear that he was still veering towards the paedophile reading.

  They saw La Bohème. Biljana’s eyes never left the stage. She watched the opera as if mesmerized. Hart found himself almost liking her for the first time. Not viewing her as a desperate load he was unwillingly being forced to carry, but as a person in her own right, with feelings, faults, and frailties just like his own. The daughter of a very close friend.

  At midnight they sat outside a café and drank hot chocolate with petit fours he had bought at a chocolatier on the Rue Jacob a few hours before. Hart didn’t mention the letter. Neither did Biljana. It was like the dark secret a married couple share but which they refuse to confront, fearing the loss of years of fastidiously built up trust. The loss of investment in the substance of their relationship.

  When he said goodnight to her that evening she offered him a brief kiss on one check. Chaste. A child’s kiss. The sort of kiss a daughter will give her father. And he reciproca
ted.

  Later, much later in the night, he fancied that he could hear her sobbing through the walls of his room. But it might just have been the wind.

  FORTY-THREE

  The two days Hart had initially allocated to placating Biljana and following up her mother’s Templar investigations soon turned into four. Then five. Quite how this transmogrification occurred escaped Hart. But he gradually found himself relishing showing a young person around Paris for the very first time – viewing it as a privilege rather than a penance. And this change of heart appeared to affect Biljana too.

  The initial impetus for the transformation occurred after yet another wasted day searching for non-existent clues to a no doubt non-existent Templar treasure. It occurred when Hart discovered that he and Biljana shared a mutual love of film. They were sitting in a café in the Rue de Flore. She was drinking hot chocolate and Hart was drinking Red Label whisky over ice. They had spent most of the day in the Quartier du Temple, as usual, beating their heads against a brick wall. Their conversation was in imminent danger of grinding to a halt.

  Casting around for something to ask her that would not risk bringing her mother back into the dialogue, Hart had a brainwave. He would ask her about herself. People always liked talking about themselves, didn’t they? And young girls were doubtless no exception to that rule.

  ‘What did you do with yourself?’ he said at last, with every appearance of interest.

  ‘What did I do with myself?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. You persist in telling me that your mother had no friends. That she never invited anybody back to the house. That she taught you herself. So what did you do with yourself in your spare time?’

  Biljana looked at Hart as if he had taken temporary leave of his senses. ‘I watched movies, of course. Lots of them. My mother approved of that because it was good for my English. So we subscribed to a film rental club in Skopje. They sent us movies by post. It got to the point where I was receiving twenty or thirty films a month. We got good value out of that subscription, I can tell you.’