The Templar Prophecy

by Mario Reading

  Udo Zirkeler pushed the bedstead to one side and squeezed through the gap between it and the stair head. His SS uniform looked obscene against the studied modernity of Effi’s show house. Like a scorpion on a piece of nougat, Hart decided.

  Zirkeler clocked the situation between Effi and Hart and signalled to his men to wait downstairs for him. His smile was the smile of the victor.

  ‘Eisenberger, you say? That’s a Jewish name, isn’t it? She will be no great loss to humanity, then. My grandfather used to call the Jews “worm-eaters”. You know why?’

  Hart shook his head. ‘No. But I suspect you are about to tell me.’ He was still looking at Effi. Urging her with his eyes to turn the gun on Zirkeler. But he knew she wouldn’t. He felt disgusted with himself. With his own witlessness. With his self-serving blindness. He deserved to die. But Amira didn’t.

  Zirkeler gave Hart his best Burt Lancaster grin. ‘He saw a group of Yids one day scratching in the ground during a train stopover in Poland. This interested him. So he went over to take a look. The Yids extracted some wriggling red worms from the hole they had made. Fifteen centimetres long, he said. Like miniature snakes. Then they ate them. Just threw them down their throats like savages. Like you would throw back an egg. He told me their Adam’s apples rose and fell like jackhammers.’

  Hart stared at Zirkeler. He could feel himself seething. This was the man who had crucified his father. Who had returned to Guatemala to kill two innocent people because they might know something to his disadvantage.

  ‘That’s what happens when you starve people, Udo. That’s what happens when you strip them of their humanity and brutalize them.’

  ‘Jews have no humanity. You are labouring under a delusion.’

  Hart took a deep breath. His right eye began to tick. All his attention was focused on Zirkeler. He needed to control himself and keep a lid on his temper, or Amira was lost. ‘So, now that we’ve got that bit out of the way, may I ask what you intend doing with us?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Hart shrugged. His neck felt as if two vices had been attached at either side of his trapezius muscles. ‘So that’s why you want your men to stay downstairs? Are you sure they will go along with you so easily? I suspect most of them will never have killed before. How can you be certain they won’t lose their nerve at the last moment and turn you in to the authorities? This is Germany, Udo. Not Guatemala. And Amira Eisenberger is a celebrated journalist. There’s a crucial difference between beating someone up and killing them. One is called GBH and will fetch you five years, tops. The other is a capital offence and will get you life.’ Hart began to shout so that the men downstairs could hear him. ‘This man is going to kill us. Are you going to stand by and watch this? You will be a part of it. Killing sticks to a person. You’ll be accessories before the fact. You can say goodbye to your families. Your loved ones. Your lives.’

  Udo Zirkeler snatched the .410 from Effi’s hands and upended it, just as Hart had hoped he would, preparing to strike him in the face with the butt.

  Hart dropped to one knee and drew the Roth-Steyr from beneath his jacket.

  Zirkeler froze. Effi backed towards the bedroom.

  ‘Stand still. Both of you.’ Hart swung the gun barrel in an arc. ‘Udo, order your men outside. And tell them to shut the fucking door behind them.’

  Zirkeler laughed. ‘Why would I do that? I recognize the type of pistol you are holding. It’s a Roth-Steyr. Must be a hundred years old if it’s a day. If you fire it, it will blow up in your face.’

  Hart could feel his throat cramping with tension. When he spoke, his voice came out in a hoarse whisper. ‘Then why aren’t you turning that .410 round, Udo? Two seconds would do it. I can’t tell you how stupid you look standing there with your crappy little uniform and your inverted squirrel gun.’ Hart straightened up from his crouch. He took a step backwards so that he would be out of range if Zirkeler changed his mind and tried to swing at him. ‘Drop the gun now, Udo. I would dearly love an excuse to kill you.’

  Zirkeler glared at Hart. He stretched the wait to about half a minute, as though a part of him expected Hart to back down and lower his pistol out of sheer funk. Then he slowly unfolded his hands and placed the .410 on top of the upturned bed.

  Hart backed up to the stair head so that the men downstairs could see his pistol. ‘Clear out of the house. All of you. The police are on their way. If you get out now, you’ve got a chance of not being caught up in this. If you stay put, you’ll go to jail. It’s a simple choice.’

  Hart counted the men out the door. He made it seven. He tried to work out how many might be left inside, bearing in mind the two who had run away and the two he had injured near the factory. But it was useless. He could still be one or two out. He didn’t dare usher his prisoners downstairs for fear of being bushwhacked.

  ‘Effi. Throw me your phone.’

  ‘I left it downstairs. Do you want me to go and fetch it?’

  Zirkeler laughed. A single, vulpine bark. ‘What do you think of your girlfriend now, eh? Do you mean to send her to jail too? Or are you simply going to shoot her? The police aren’t coming. We both know that. Everything is still to play for here.’

  Hart could see Zirkeler struggling with whether it was worth risking a malfunction of the pistol or not. The shotgun was on the far side of the bedstead, about three feet from his left arm. Hart remembered the rusted spring in the Roth-Steyr’s ammunition clip. The three remaining bullets might have been in place since 1918. The bastard was probably right – it would blow up if used. Or simply misfire.

  He waved the pistol at Zirkeler. ‘Back away.’

  ‘No. We are staying here. You will have to shoot us.’

  Amira lurched through the bedroom door. Her face, save for a livid bruise on one temple and a three-inch graze on her chin, was as pale as a shroud.

  Zirkeler turned round to face her. ‘Ah. The Jewess.’

  ‘Amira, stay where you are. Don’t move.’

  Amira stumbled forwards into the hallway, toppling to one knee.

  Zirkeler twisted in place. At first it looked as though he might be going for the shotgun, but he went for Amira instead.

  Hart gritted his teeth and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The hammer was rusted solid. Hart tried to force it backwards with his thumb, but to no avail.

  Effi sprinted past him, heading for the .410. Hart tripped her up. She struck the floor with a crash and went sprawling. Hart reached for the stock of the .410 and swung the shotgun round.

  Zirkeler was holding his SS knife to Amira’s throat. ‘Another impasse. No?’

  Hart felt the absurdity of his position begin to overwhelm him. All these people are living in a fantasyland, he told himself. And I’m a part of it. I’m standing in a house in Bavaria wielding a squirrel gun, whilst a man wearing an SS uniform is holding a knife to Amira’s neck. How did I get here? What am I doing? How do I get out of this without killing someone? Or getting killed myself?

  Effi picked herself up off the floor. ‘How could you do that to me? I’m carrying your baby. You might have given me a spontaneous abortion.’

  Hart’s brain began to fizz and pop inside his head. ‘My baby? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I missed my period. And I never miss them. So I did a test. I was going to tell you later today over a bottle of champagne. You shouldn’t have thrown me to the floor like that, Johnny.’ Effi’s voice had reverted to the tone he knew so well. A tone that promised the world and all its treasures to whoever succeeded in gratifying its owner. ‘You must think of our son’s future now. This woman is almost dead. Let Udo dispose of her. Then you can join us. Marry me. Give him your name. What is her life compared to ours?’

  Zirkeler let out another of his barking laughs. ‘He’s made you pregnant, has he? And you want him to marry you? That’s rich. I’m so happy for you both. You know she let me fuck her too, Englishman? You’re not the only one who’s pulled that particular chain. Far fr
om it.’

  Effi ignored him. ‘This baby is yours, Johnny. You’re the only man I’ve known these past few weeks. We made this baby the first time we made love, when I was at the peak of my fertility cycle. I wanted your son. Now I want him to carry your name. To be a baron like you. The hereditary guardian of the Holy Lance.’

  Hart felt like upending the shotgun and sucking on the barrel. He was faced with Zirkeler’s grinning face on one side, and Effi’s earnest one on the other. They were both equally mad.

  There was a sudden commotion outside the house. Shouts. Curses. The sound of running feet on gravel. Hart craned his head to one side so that he could see downstairs.

  Two of Zirkeler’s men sprinted towards the front door from where they had been hiding. He had been right about the shortfall in numbers then. The two had been lying in wait for him. He’d have been ambushed if he’d ventured downstairs.

  ‘You see? The police are here.’

  ‘Not the police. They don’t arrive by osmosis.’ Zirkeler’s body language suggested that he was dealing with a congenital idiot. ‘Someone else is joining the party. Maybe that old bitch at the Alpenruh called in some of her leftist friends? I knew I should have killed her when I had the chance.’ Zirkeler glared at Effi. Then he twisted the tip of his knife so that it drew blood from Amira’s neck. ‘Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. Time is running out for your little Jewess.’

  Hart straightened up. ‘How do you want to play this?’ Despite his words, all he could think about was that Effi was pregnant. And by intent. She’d drawn him into her web right from the outset. She was like the Lorelei, luring sailors to their doom on the Rhine. No wonder she’d found him so devastatingly attractive. He couldn’t have presented himself better if he’d tried. He’d been a title with a cock attached.

  ‘What you do is you put down the shotgun. You know you can’t risk using it. The spread would hit your Jewess. I shall count to ten. On ten I’m going to slice through your girlfriend’s carotid artery. Then I’m going to throw her at you.’ Udo Zirkeler moved into a more comfortable position behind Amira, so that his entire body, save for his feet, was hidden behind her.

  Hart shot Zirkeler’s left foot. It was situated about eight inches from Amira’s leg. Zirkeler had been about to tuck it in, but hadn’t yet shifted his weight. Hart was a countryman by birth. He had shot game all his life. He knew that a shotgun spread starts tight and then expands later. At under seven feet, it is still tight as a drum.

  Zirkeler screamed.

  Hart sprinted towards him, reversing the .410 as he ran.

  Zirkeler’s hand holding the knife dropped briefly to one side.

  Hart smashed the .410 stock into Udo’s face. Then he felt something heavy land on his back. It was Effi.

  The four of them – Effi, Zirkeler, Amira and Hart – rolled onto the floor in a bloody, tangled mass.

  Hart tried to wrest the knife from Zirkeler’s hand. Amira was flailing around like a rag doll between them.

  Zirkeler was a stronger man than Hart, despite the wound to his foot. Hart felt himself beginning to be turned over. He realized, to his horror, that Effi was doing some of the turning. Hart quickly overcame any scruples he might have about hitting a woman and struck backwards with his elbow. He heard Effi grunt. But still she held on.

  Zirkeler took the opportunity to lunge at Hart with his knife. Hart twisted away from the blow. The point of the knife glanced off the collar of Hart’s leather jacket and skidded past his neck. Effi cried out behind him. Hart felt something spray onto the back of his head.

  Beneath him, Amira began to struggle for air.

  Hart brought both his forearms down on Zirkeler’s knife hand.

  Zirkeler dropped the knife. He wriggled out from beneath Amira and dragged himself to his feet. He was still mobile. The stiff leather of his SS jackboot had taken the worst of the squirrel-gun blast.

  Hart threw out an arm and gave Zirkeler’s leg a glancing blow. Zirkeler fell with a crash against the upper edge of the stairs. He twisted round and made a grab for the Roth-Steyr, which had fallen out of Hart’s pocket in the fracas. He thumbed back the rusty hammer – something that Hart had failed to do – and fired directly at Hart’s face.

  The pistol exploded. Zirkeler began to scream – a series of long, wet howls, like those a wolf will make just after he has killed. Zirkeler’s face looked as though it had been encased in a red plastic bag.

  Hart crab-walked backwards across the floor. His face and torso were covered in Zirkeler’s blood. Two of Zirkeler’s severed fingers lay in his lap. Hart skittered them off as though they were still alive.

  Zirkeler sat at the top of the stairs waving the stump of his pistol hand and screaming. The niveous glint of his teeth shone through the breech where his mouth should have been.

  Hart dragged Amira away from where Effi lay. Effi’s hands were twitching as if she were dreaming. Her upper body was surrounded by a widening pool of blood. Hart would remember later how beautiful her blood had seemed – pristine, like the surface of the lake in the moonlight a few hours earlier.

  Effi appeared to be looking through him, her face framed by the blood as if in a surrealist painting. Hart caught himself wondering how a woman blessed with the features of an angel could be so evil? What trick of fate had triggered the aberration that had turned such beauty into madness?

  He knelt beside Effi and pressed his finger deep into her carotid artery, where Zirkeler’s knife had nicked her. It was the only way he knew to staunch arterial blood.

  Effi’s legs began to drum on the ground.

  Hart began to cry. With one hand still on Effi’s neck, he reached his other hand across her body and laid it gently across her stomach, like a blessing. He felt her hand briefly rest on his – like a child’s hand will do when it is half asleep – and then fall away. Her lips moved. He pressed his head close to hers and listened for what she had to say.

  ‘I hated you,’ she said. ‘I loved you.’ And then, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Hart caressed her hair with the back of his hand. ‘Take care of our child.’

  He felt the pulse beneath his hand weaken and then stop. He looked up, his face contorted with grief.

  Zirkeler was struggling to his feet, using the banister as a crutch. One eye was hanging on a thread down his cheek and one of his ears was missing. What was left of his mouth hung open inanely, as if he were about to ask a question but had forgotten his original point.

  Hart stood up and strode towards Zirkeler. He could hear shouting from downstairs. The sound of approaching feet.

  He slammed Zirkeler in the chest with both his hands.

  Zirkeler threw his arms in the air and toppled backwards. His head struck the stairs about eight feet down. He did a reverse somersault, his legs flailing above him. When he reached the bottom of the staircase, he lay still.

  SIXTY-THREE

  Hart was ordered to leave Amira’s bedside at two in the afternoon, just fifteen minutes after the hasty departure of the lawyer her newspaper had sent down from Munich to check her copy for libel. Fräulein Eisenberger needed her rest, he was told. Her doctors also failed to understand why she persisted in speaking endlessly on her phone despite such objects being banned in the hospital. They were a danger to medical equipment. Didn’t these English people know that? Neither did they understand why Fräulein Eisenberger kept relentlessly tapping at her computer whilst still visibly ill. Patients should be patients. Thinking for oneself under such circumstances was forbidden by decree.

  In the end, one of Amira’s doctors insisted that she be tranquillized by intravenous drip. She had a severe concussion, he told Hart, albeit with no internal bleeding. But a concussion nonetheless. The hospital did not wish to be sued by her newspaper because their patient had suffered unnecessary swelling or traumatic brain injury. The publicity would be catastrophic.

  For a few moments, standing forlornly outside the hospital gates, Hart did not know what to do with himself. The t
hought of Effi and their unborn child ate away at him like acid. What had constrained her to act the way she did? Had she been mesmerized by Zirkeler? Or was it she who had done the mesmerizing? The thought of the beautiful, vital woman he had known being buried in a casket six feet beneath the ground, with his child still inside her, was almost more than he could bear. How could she have brought this on herself? She had been given everything – only to throw it all away because of some insane sense of fidelity to a flawed and foregone history.

  Hart hadn’t dared confess his real name to the German police during the course of his six-hour interrogation. He had decided to continue using his Johannes von Hartelius alias until the publication of Amira’s detailed piece about the LB triggered the case for his exoneration. The local Tegernsee police force, overwhelmed by the ramifications of the case, had requested to see his passport, had given it a cursory viewing, and then kept it. They would no doubt run it through Interpol eventually. But the hold-up bought Hart some precious time. With his luck, when the Germans did finally cross-check his identity, Scotland Yard would drop the murder case against him and open up a brand-new case involving the use of a false passport by a man masquerading as himself.

  Finally, pretty much by default, Hart found himself boarding the Bad Wiessee ferry. He sat in the same place, on the same boat he’d shared with Amira the day before. But everything looked different now. Then, he’d fancied himself in love. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, the main emotion he had been experiencing had probably been lust, twinned with just a little vainglory. He was an Aries. A man-child. A mythologizer. He had welcomed Effi Rache’s seduction of him as his due. No. That still didn’t cover it. In the final analysis, he had seduced himself.

  He disembarked at the Bad Wiessee terminus and started up the hill towards the Alpenruh. He hadn’t been able to visit Frau Erlichmann in the direct aftermath of what had taken place at Haus Walküre, but, thanks to her grandson Thilo and his friends, he knew just how much he owed her. She had acted like his fairy godmother throughout. And as his conscience.