The Templar Throne

by Paul Christopher

  They headed down the pathway through the high, broad plane trees and finally stepped onto the small plaza, the church the square was named for on their right along with the Scuola di San Rocco beside it, once a private religious fraternity and now a municipal building famous for its Tintoretto paintings. The rear of the looming brick Frari was on their left. The only way out lay directly ahead, straight across the plaza at the end of a narrow street, where a tour boat was loading passengers at the foot of a set of stone stairs.

  “Head for the tour boat,” said Holliday, craning his neck, checking the crowd on the plaza. There was an undeniable sense of imminent danger ringing alarm bells in his head; they were being watched. As they stepped out onto the neatly flagstoned campo Holliday reflexively looked upward, checking for open windows and rooftop sniper positions.

  The escape route across the relatively small open space reminded Holliday of Matar Baghdad Al-Dawli, the Baghdad airport road, once an eight- lane boulevard processional route between luxury hotels and high-rises. The war had changed all that. Now it was a gauntlet to be run holding your breath and praying not to be blown to bits by an IED or turned into a target for someone in the shadows with a hate-on for Americans and a Russian-made RPG.

  The danger there was to look too far down the road and lose your concentration. In Baghdad, death was always in the details, and Holliday had that same skin-crawling feeling now.

  Five steps into the plaza the sky overhead opened and it began to rain, a sudden downpour that seemed to have caught everyone off guard. Holliday breathed a sigh of relief. Gripping Sister Meg’s arm even tighter, he urged her forward, squinting through the deluge.

  “Run!” Holliday hissed in her ear; the rain made a perfect excuse. He was careful to keep them close to groups of other tourists running for cover; if the Peseks were out there watching, he wanted to offer the smallest target.

  They reached the far side of the campo drenched but unharmed and kept on going down the street to the canal. They were the last ones to board the canopy-covered tour boat. A plastic banner drooped from the canopy: “Brooklyn Italian-American Hospital Workers Auxiliary Annual Cruise.”

  “Biglietto, per favore,” said a tired-looking man in a very old officer’s cap with a gold anchor stitched into the crushed and stained peak.

  “Uh, we left them at the hotel,” muttered Holliday. “Albergo, hotel? Do you understand what I’m saying? Capisci quello che sto dicendo?”

  The man in the sailor’s cap shrugged. “Quarantasette euro,” he said. “Per uno.”

  It took him a second but Holliday finally figured it out. Forty-seven euros each. He dug into his wallet and took out two fifty-euro notes. He handed them to the tired sailor.

  “Tenere il resto,” said Holliday, hoping he’d got it right.

  The man looked down at the two bills, then up at Holliday.

  “Grazie,” the man grumbled sourly, clearly not impressed with what he perceived to be a measly tip. He wearily hauled in the little gangplank, slammed the boarding gate shut and blew a bosun’s pipe within a foot of Holliday’s ear. The shrill note was earsplitting. A few seconds later there was a rumbling cough from somewhere in the rear of the big bargelike party boat and they began to move ponderously away from the stone dock. The ticket taker in the sailor’s cap sat down on a stool and lit a cigarette. He leaned back and stared at the striped canvas canopy a few feet above him. From the front of the tour boat somebody started talking incoherently into a bullhorn. Rain tapped on the canopy loudly. People milled around on the deck, chattering happily in the rain, sipping complimentary drinks with umbrellas and eating soggy canapés arranged on a table forward of where Holliday and the nun were standing.

  “Where are we going?” Sister Meg asked.

  “Away from here, that’s all that counts,” answered Holliday.

  His sense of direction completely vanished as the boat lumbered through the sheeting rain along the narrow canal. The vessel was so wide it forced several soaking stripe-shirt gondoliers to give way, the slim, elegant vessels squeezing past them, rocking heavily in the tour boat’s backwash. Holliday was fairly sure the flat-bottomed craft had no business being in such a narrow thoroughfare but he wasn’t about to complain. There had been danger in the plaza of San Rocco, he was sure of it, and it was only luck that had saved them.

  With half a lifetime spent in critical situations, Holliday knew a great deal about luck, good and bad, and either way it never lasted. The only thing you could be sure of was that the needle was always in motion; the trick was to know the difference between the upswing and the down. The Peseks were pros of the first order; if their contract included himself and the red-haired nun beside him, then the assassin couple would be relentless. The biggest problem was that his only sight of them had been a brief glimpse across a dark road in Le Suquet, a collection of narrow twisting streets in the old section of Cannes on the west side of the famous yacht basin. He vaguely remembered Antonin Pesek as a well-dressed man with a graying, neatly trimmed goatee and Daniella as a good- looking woman in her fifties with the slightly aristocratic strut of a woman who rode horses. He doubted that he’d recognize either one if they were standing right beside him.

  The tour boat slowed as it made a wheeling turn out into the broad reach of the Grand Canal, and even in the rain Holliday got his bearings straight; they were heading east and slightly north, a course that would take them to the Rialto Bridge and their hotel. He was tempted to bribe the man in the sailor’s cap to let them off at the dock beside the bridge, but Holliday followed his better judgment and said nothing; there was nothing at the hotel they couldn’t live without, and whoever was on their trail was almost sure to have the place under surveillance.

  That was the question of the day: Who was on their tail and why? The Peseks didn’t kill people just for the hell of it; someone was paying them. Holliday was on the trail of an obscure Templar knight who was using an even more obscure navigation instrument; it might upset a historical applecart or two, but it wasn’t earth-shaking. Sister Meg was filling in the blanks in the life of a mother superior at a relatively obscure convent of Irish nuns in a Czech convent; hardly the stuff of James Bond and Jason Bourne.

  At first he’d thought it was the Vatican Secret Service, Sodalitium Pianum, but that didn’t make sense either. The bald guy in Prague was clearly a contract investigator, and the Peseks were hirelings, as well, and as Holliday knew from personal experience, the Vatican had plenty of assassins of their own. Somewhere in the lives of two dead lovers from four hundred years ago there was an answer.

  The tour boat and its well-oiled partying passengers made another turn, this time to the right onto a narrower canal that ran alongside the elegant façade of a massive old palazzo, its half-submerged foundations stained a crumbling, putrid brown by the effluent in the water and a thousand years of twice-daily tidal fluctuations.

  Sister Meg tugged at his arm.

  “What?”

  “I just overheard a conversation; I know where we’re going.”

  “Where?”

  “Some place called the Isola di San Michele. That’s the third reference to Saint Michael that’s come our way.”

  “Maybe it’s an omen,” Holliday said and smiled.

  “You’re making fun of me,” said the nun, color rising in her cheeks.

  “I’m making a joke,” said Holliday, exasperated.

  “At my expense.”

  “Don’t be so sensitive,” said Holliday. “We don’t have time for it. There’s a dead kid back there with a hole in his head, remember?”

  Sister Meg lapsed into silence. Overhead the rattling of the rain on the canvas canopy slowed and then stopped altogether. As quickly as the storm had come it vanished, the clouds rolling back and letting in broad, slanting beams of sunlight. On their left the canal widened considerably and a forest of masts appeared—a large marina, and beyond it the sudden sweep of the Venice ship channel between the islands of the archipelago
and the mainland.

  “Sacca della Misericordia,” said the tired man in the sailor’s hat, still slumped on his stool.

  “Sacca,” said Holliday. “What the hell is a sacca, a bag of some kind? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Cove, I think,” said Sister Meg. “Cove of the sheltering virgin.”

  The man in the hat pointed to an island to their right about half a mile out into the broad ship channel. “Isola di San Michele, una isola del muerte.”

  Holliday squinted. The island looked almost artificial, a wall surrounding it with towers at the corners. A prison?

  “Cimetero di Napoleon,” the tour guide explained.

  “It’s a cemetery,” said Holliday. “We’re going on a tour of a cemetery.”

  13

  At one time in its history the Isola di San Michele had actually been two islands divided by a canal. During Napoleon’s brief occupation of Venice he decreed, quite rightly, that the mainland cemeteries were unsanitary, their swampy “vapors” almost certainly the cause of the endless rounds of cholera and plague epidemics that regularly visited the tiny republic on the shore of the Adriatic. If there was one thing Napoleon was good at, it was cemeteries. He’d moved dozens of local cemeteries during the reconstruction of imperial Paris and he did the same thing in Venice.

  Thousands of bodies were exhumed, packed in ossuary boxes and taken to the islands. The canal was filled in, making the two islands into one, and a wall was built around the entire perimeter.

  Within a few years new burials took precedence over the old and special funeral gondolas plied the waters between the city and the island with the regularity of a bus route. Napoleon’s prim, gardenlike cemetery with its parks, lines of tall trees and statuary became a cluttered slum of headstones and monuments that ranged from the simple and plain to the ornately vulgar.

  Over time the “Island of the Dead” attained a certain romantic cachet and it became the final destination for a broad spectrum of the famous and the infamous, from Joseph Brodsky, the exiled Russian poet; Ezra Pound, the exiled American poet; Igor Stravinsky, the composer; and Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, the dance impresario and founder of the Ballets Russe. A little more than two hundred years from its beginnings the island had apparently now become a tourist attraction.

  The boat edged around to the near side of the island and a small wharf. With the sun shining brightly out of a clearing sky, the passengers obediently trudged off the barge and headed through a gate in the wall that led to the cemetery.

  “Now what?” Sister Meg asked.

  “We have to get to the mainland,” said Holliday as they followed some stragglers along a broad gravel pathway. The cemetery had been subdivided into immense neat squares, each square crammed with hundreds of headstones, new and old. From the looks of things there were only a few real mourners; the rest were tourists taking photographs and peering at inscriptions.

  “I think the tour is heading back to the city when we’re finished here. I heard people talking about getting to the hotel in time for dinner.”

  “There has to be another way off the island,” said Holliday. “They’re almost certain to have found the kid by now.”

  “It looked like there was another little dock farther along the wall,” suggested Meg. “Maybe we can find someone to rent us a boat or something.”

  The path they were on ended at the façade of San Michele in Isola, an early Renaissance church fitted into one corner of the island. There was a redbrick cloister attached to one side of the church. Sandaled, dark-robed Franciscan monks were tending the flower beds around the church. More Franciscans, thought Holliday, the male counterparts to the Poor Clare nuns of the St. Agnes convent in Prague. A Franciscan conspiracy? That was right up there with The Da Vinci Code on the religious conspiracy paranoia scale. The Vatican might be a hotbed of conspiracy, but all of them were inevitably and invariably about money.

  He shook the feeling off and looked for a way around the church. In the far corner, against the brick wall of the cemetery, they found a simple wooden door. Checking to see if anyone was watching, Holliday gently tried the latch. The door creaked open on rusty hinges. Just beyond the doorway he caught the ripe smell of rotting wood and seaweed.

  “Come on,” he said, and stepped through the doorway.

  They found themselves standing on a narrow breakwater. The only thing between them and the dark waters of the ship channel was a row of tarred beams creating an artificial barrier against erosion.

  To their right was the rear façade of the church, to the left a small brick boathouse. In front of the boathouse was an old cabin cruiser that looked almost homemade—sheets of plywood painted flat, robin’s egg blue for the stubby hull, with more painted plywood for a simple deckhouse.

  The tired-looking craft was powered by a big Mercury outboard clamped to the frail-looking transom. The boat was hugely overpowered. An engine that size at full throttle would tear itself off the transom. The name on the stern identified the ramshackle boat as the Casanova III and its home port as Venice. There were half a dozen long fishing poles scattered on the roof of the deckhouse, and the afterdeck itself was cluttered with more fishing equipment, most of it obviously untended for a long time. A wooden five-spoked wheel was positioned on the cabin bulkhead and a set of controls was bolted to the port gunwale. A narrow door led into the cabin proper.

  “Our chariot awaits,” said Holliday.

  “Where’s the owner?” Meg asked. “We can’t just steal it.” She paused. “Can we?”

  “I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth,” said Holliday. He went quickly along the narrow sea-wall and jumped down into the boat. There were bow and stern lines looped around cast iron rings set into the blackened, railway-tie-sized beams. “Cast off the lines,” he said.

  Meg didn’t hesitate. She undid the twin lines, tossed them inboard and jumped into the deck well herself. While Holliday figured out how to start up the Casanova , she picked up a long gaff hook and pushed them away from the wooden breakwater.

  Holliday examined the rudimentary controls. There was a single throttle connected by a cable to the outboard. The ignition switch looked as though it had come out of an old car, but instead of a key there was a yellow-handled Phillips screwdriver jammed into the mechanism. It was a wonder that the boat hadn’t been stolen long before this, thought Holliday.

  He twisted the screwdriver. There was a preliminary whine and cough from the engine and then it caught, the full-throated sound of the big outboard shattering the somber calm and quiet of the church and the cemetery beyond.

  Holliday notched the throttle into the forward position and spun the wheel, taking them away from the island. Directly ahead of them was the much larger island of Murano. To the port side Holliday could see the dark line of the train bridge connecting Venice to the mainland.

  He closed his eye briefly, trying to recall the simple map he’d seen back at the hotel. On the far side of Murano was open water and Marco Polo Airport. Twenty minutes across the bay and they’d be home free. He ratcheted the throttle a little farther forward and the decaying old boat started bouncing over the small waves, the deck beneath his feet as springy as a trampoline.

  As a child he’d often gone fishing with his uncle Henry on Canadaway Creek a few miles inland from Lake Erie in upstate New York. Every now and again, just for the hell of it, his uncle would take their flat-bottomed rowboat down to the lake and let the little twenty-five-horsepower trolling engine rip. They’d go flying over the lake, skipping like a stone across the water, the bottom of the boat thumping and jumping just like the Casanova was now. Remembering his uncle and missing him, Holliday let out a whoop of pleasure to his memory as they pounded across the bay; luck was with them once again.

  It was a wonder that the boat hadn’t been stolen long before.

  Holliday had a sudden, vivid image of the shower scene from Psycho. He’d had recurring nightmares for weeks after he’d seen the film one
afternoon while playing hooky from the Christian Brothers Parochial School.

  For a while he’d even believed his confessor, who’d told him the nightmares were divine retribution for the sin of cutting classes.

  The screwdriver in the ignition.

  Casanova III had been stolen.

  “Oh, crap,” groaned Holliday, putting it together. The hairs on the back of his neck rose in warning, giving him a split-second advantage as the flimsy cabin door burst outward and Antonin Pesek hurtled through the opening, a dark flat automatic already raised in his hand.

  Instinctively, Holliday threw the wheel hard over and the flat-bottomed boat slewed drunkenly to port, throwing the assassin off balance, the pistol flying out of his hand as he fought to stay on his feet. The weapon spun across the deck, lost in the clutter of equipment around the transom.

  The killer barely paused, a broad-bladed knife appearing almost magically in his right hand. Pesek lunged and Holliday backed against the gunwale as the lethal instrument slashed across his belly. Another quarter inch and Holliday would have been gutted like a fish.

  Somehow Pesek had been one step ahead of them. He’d seen Holliday and Meg get on the tour boat and managed to get to the Misericordia marina before them. He’d stolen the cabin cruiser and reached the cemetery island before the lumbering tour boat, lying in wait, knowing that Holliday and the nun would be desperate to get off the island and to the mainland. The Casanova had been a baited trap and Holliday had stepped into it like an amateur.

  The Casanova was swerving wildly now, reacting to the slightest swell or wave, the wheel spinning freely. If they weren’t thrown overboard they’d be swamped or they’d hit another boat.

  They were in the middle of the shipping lane from the east, and out of the corner of his eye Holliday could see a massive red-and-black-hulled oil tanker bullying its way across their bow less than a quarter mile ahead, the sheer side of the ship tall as a cliff and getting closer with each passing second.

  Pesek lunged again. Behind him, Sister Meg thrust the gaff hook toward his ankles. The assassin’s feet went out from under him and he stumbled forward, cursing and giving Holliday a chance to spin out of his way, one hand clamping the killer’s wrist and dragging him into a close embrace, probably the safest move in a knife fight.