The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

  And now he had. The Captain had won.

  ‘So you did hire those men at the graveyard,’ said Hart. ‘I suspected as much.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you still couldn’t walk with them? Behind your own mother?’

  ‘No. Only men can do this. Women make too much noise. We wail and we weep. So we are kept apart. The Quran orders it so.’

  ‘But you are not wailing and weeping?’

  ‘No.’

  They didn’t talk for the rest of the journey. Hart, because he was trying to work out why Lumnije would invite him over to Macedonia and then kill herself a few hours later, before she had a chance of seeing him. The girl for her own reasons. Maybe she was mourning? In shock? But it certainly didn’t look like it.

  ‘How old are you?’ Hart said at last, more to break the ice than for any ulterior motive. Privately he put her age at fourteen. Still a minor then. But if so, why was her father not present at the funeral? Or maybe fourteen was considered an adult in Macedonia? It was an odd sort of a country, after all. Yes. Maybe it was that.

  ‘I am fifteen.’

  ‘Fifteen?’ said Hart. ‘You’re fifteen?’ After the initial shock had worn off, he began a feverish series of calculations in his head. ‘Are you sure?’

  Biljana stared at him. ‘Of course I am sure. My birthday was two days ago. The day my mother killed herself. The day I came of age as a legal adult. Why shouldn’t I know my own age?’

  It’s true, thought Hart. This girl must be the Captain’s daughter. Has to be. The dates match completely. Because by any stretch of the imagination he couldn’t imagine the Lumnije he knew leaving Visoki Decˇani Monastery and letting another man anywhere near her. For months. If not years. If not for ever.

  So it had to be the Captain. Unless she had been raped again at some border crossing. Which was something he doubted very much. Lumnije had learned her lessons the hard way. She was not the sort of woman who needed telling twice.

  ‘And your father?’ said Hart lamely. ‘Is he waiting for you at home, perhaps? Shall I get to meet him?’

  ‘You are my father,’ said the girl, with a disdainful sideways glance. ‘That is why my mother called for you. Is it not?’

  THIRTY-SIX

  How was he to play it? Hart had made a solemn vow to Lumnije, before he had left her that final time at the monastery, that he would never speak to anyone about what had happened to her. Never reveal a word of her shame.

  ‘An Albanian woman’s life is over once her people know that she has been “touched”,’ she had told him. ‘If a woman is made pregnant, she will kill her own baby, or give it away, rather than bring up the rape child of a Serb. Her own community will abandon her. Her husband will disdain her. She will be forced to lie for the rest of her life. That is the future I face if I find I am pregnant. That is the future all we women face. Can I trust you?’

  Hart had sworn that she could. On his life and that of his future children. Lumnije had been implacable. The oath had meant that much to her.

  Since that time Hart had followed the aftermath of the Kosovo War as closely as he was able. He had read books. Studied articles. Read witness reports. He had learned that what Lumnije had told him was true. He knew of numerous examples of Albanian women giving birth to rape children, kissing their babies one final time, and then breaking their necks or suffocating them beneath their blankets. Others gave them up to monstrous orphanages, where the children received no affection and no stimulation and were disdained by those who ought to have been caring for them. They were rapists’ children after all. Serbian children. The neglect they suffered was worse than being killed. Far worse.

  Still other women – the lucky ones, Hart supposed one might call them – somehow managed to lie to their families and to their husbands, who were persuaded to think that the babies were their own. It was an unendurable position to find oneself in. Few, very few, ever asked for help from the outside world. Wartime rape for an Albanian Muslim woman was a private grief, to be dealt with privately. It was an unsalvageable calamity.

  So maybe Lumnije had made the right moral decision? The decision to keep her child after all? To give her innocent little girl a chance of life? Maybe this was why she had moved to a Christian village in Macedonia where questions wouldn’t be asked? Because if the girl thought that Hart was her father, she sure as heck didn’t have the remotest idea of the real circumstances behind her birth.

  ‘No. I am not your father.’

  ‘You have to say that. You want to check me out first. Make sure I am who I say I am. Well. That’s all right. I can understand.’

  ‘No. It’s not that.’

  ‘If you are not my father, then why did my mother keep all your cuttings? Follow your career all these years since my birth? Did you or did you not know her…’ she began counting on her fingers, ‘fifteen years and nine months ago?’

  Hart closed his eyes. A sense of the inevitability of life washed over him. ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘See. I knew it. You even look like me.’

  ‘No I don’t.’ Hart couldn’t prevent himself stealing a glance at the girl. This was ridiculous. Here he was, checking out a total stranger as if by some parthenogenetic miracle she could be his daughter, when he had never so much as kissed her mother, far less made love to her. Instead he had carried her on his back for twenty hours and then abandoned her, an Albanian Muslim, at a Serbian Orthodox monastery in the middle of a civil war. It had been all he could manage at the time. But it didn’t look good on paper. No. It certainly did not.

  ‘I can wait for you to check me out. I’m in no hurry.’

  Hart sighed. How was he going to extricate himself from this one without causing havoc? Was he to overturn the girl’s life by telling her that she was the child of the Serbian war criminal they called ‘the Captain’, who had locked her mother in a rape house and abused her unmercifully for close on a month? After first killing her parents and her brother in front of her eyes? No. He could not do it. Far less so, given that Lumnije was now dead and he had vowed to her, while she was still living, that he would treat what had happened to her with terminal discretion.

  Or had Lumnije meant her suicide as a message to him? How else to explain the timing? But surely, in that case, she would have mentioned something over the phone? Or maybe not. Either way, it was enough to drive a man mad.

  ‘Your mother said she had something for me.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘It’s why she wanted to see me.’

  ‘Maybe she meant me?’ Biljana’s eyes never left his face.

  Hart swallowed. He could imagine his ex-girlfriend Amira’s voice now, berating him from back in London when he called her with the news. ‘You’re like a piece of human flypaper, John. Stories stick to you like glue. Now you’ve really bought the lottery ticket.’

  ‘Have you brothers or sisters at least?’ Hart said.

  ‘No. My mother never had another man after you.’

  Hart rolled his eyes. What was he going to do? Take her for a DNA test? Hard to do in Macedonia. And he certainly wasn’t going to ferry her back to England with him. No way was he going to risk opening that particular can of worms.

  ‘Listen to me, Biljana. I am not your father. Your mother phoned me out of the blue two days ago. I hadn’t heard from her before that for nearly sixteen years. She asked me to come over here to visit her. That she had something for me. Something that was important for my work. Something that would make me famous.’

  ‘Is that what you want to be? Famous?’

  Hart felt like whacking the steering wheel with his forehead. ‘No. No, I don’t. I am just telling you her words.’

  ‘They could as well be referring to me.’

  ‘What? You being my daughter would make me famous?’

  Both sides fell silent. Bilj
ana indicated with a wave of her hand that Hart should turn off the main road and go down a track towards the lake.

  Hart decided that he had no choice but to go with the flow. He owed Lumnije that much. And any fifteen-year-old girl, who had just lost her mother to suicide, was bound to be feeling fragile. However effectively this particular one was attempting to disabuse him of the notion.

  He couldn’t just abandon her, could he? Couldn’t just leave her to her fate as he had done with her mother?

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  It rapidly became clear to Hart that Biljana had not been exaggerating her situation. She had no one. She and her mother had lived alone in this house, in a Christian village, far from any possibility of contact with anyone from their own community of Albanian Muslims.

  Biljana did not attend high school, but was instead being home taught. Such a thing was more or less legal in Macedonia, she assured him, to the extent that nobody really cared what anyone else did. Plus the Christians did not tangle with the Muslims, and vice versa. History was too close at hand. Tempers too raw. Macedonia had so far avoided being caught up in any of the Balkan conflicts, and the majority of its citizens, whatever their religious affiliation, wished only to maintain the status quo.

  Biljana had, however, been attending an external TEFL course in Struga, given by an Englishwoman of Balkan origin. Every three months her teacher would pop over some convenient border and then come back in again possessed of a brand-new three-month visa. This was the way things were done here. And this was why Biljana spoke such good English.

  ‘Are you close to your English teacher? Could she help you out in any way?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you have no idea what your mother left for me? Why she called me over here just a few hours before she committed suicide?’

  ‘I’ve told you. She left you me. That must be clear to you by now.’

  Hart had given up declaring to Biljana that he was not her father. It simply washed over her. She had made up her mind on the subject and that was that. He decided to ride the tiger for the time being until a reasonable opportunity presented itself for him to get out from under. Meanwhile he needed to get to the bottom of just what Lumnije had intended when she had called him across from England. He owed her memory that much.

  ‘Do you mind if I go through your mother’s things?’

  ‘If you must.’

  Hart had no experience dealing with teenagers. And certainly not angry ones, with attitude, who were busy blocking any grief they might be feeling on the false premise that, despite having just lost a distant mother, they might conceivably have inherited an even more distant father on the back of it. Albeit one who was resolutely refusing to recognize them as such.

  Christ, Hart told himself, he didn’t even like the girl. She was clearly so angry with him that her movements, when he was in her vicinity, took on a nightmarish quality, as if she were a doll that someone else was manipulating. Someone with a powerful grudge against him. If he were to approach her for a hug, for instance, due to some misguided attempt at sympathy, he suspected that she would probably stab him. A chip off the old block then.

  He sat at Lumnije’s desk and looked around himself. Where to start? And might this not all be some grand misunderstanding, and Lumnije had never had anything for him in the first place? Maybe she had just wanted a temporary stopgap to look after her daughter in the wake of her suicide and felt that he owed her? And who better? Suicides were self-obsessed by default. And he was one of only two men on earth who knew her full story. Who would understand the ramifications of her actions and not feel the need to tell tales out of school. How was she to know her daughter would jump to all the wrong conclusions and imagine that her wayward daddy had finally decided to come home?

  Hart trawled back through his recent telephone conversation with Lumnije. To the exact tone she had used. But Lumnije’s voice had always been next to impossible for him to read.

  Something deep inside her appeared to have closed down at the rape house. For ever, he now realized. What had happened to her there had been the equivalent of a ticking bomb. She had chosen to wait for her fifteen-year-old daughter to reach some sort of spurious emotional majority before finally stepping off the merry-go-round. And how could he possibly criticize her for her actions? He had never suffered anything as remotely traumatic in his life as what had happened to her. He had no conceivable idea how he would have responded in her place. Maybe even in the same way? Although he suspected not. His emotional core was tender. Lumnije’s was hard as ice. And there was the rub.

  ‘Here,’ said Biljana. ‘Here is what my mother left for you.’

  Hart took the papers from Biljana’s hand. ‘Where did you suddenly find these?’

  ‘In the rice bin. Where she keeps her money.’

  ‘Oh.’ He glanced at the papers. They were handwritten. In block capitals. Fastidiously. In English. ‘Have you looked at them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Hart glanced up at her. ‘Look. I haven’t asked you this yet. But I need to. Was there a suicide note? Did your mother try to explain anything to you in writing? About why she did what she did?’

  Something passed across the girl’s face. Some fleeting emotion that Hart could not interpret. ‘No.’

  ‘And there was nothing else? Only this?’

  That same look again. ‘Only this.’

  This time Hart caught the look. The girl was lying. There had been something else. But this was all he was going to get for the time being. That much was clear.

  He was in Biljana’s house. On her terms. In her territory. She was the injured party, not him. She would play this thing as she saw fit.

  And not, he was forced to admit, without some justification.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on and read this, shall I?’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  It proved to be nonsense, of course. Some guff about the Knights Templar and their lost great treasure. All derived from dubious books about the final days of the confraternity, following the arrest of their last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, on 13 October 1307, and his public burning, seven years later, on 18 March 1314. The winding up of the old Order. Stuff that could be found anywhere, and from a variety of sources.

  Hart was inured by now to Templar fantasies. As the direct descendant of ex-Templar Johannes von Hartelius, twelfth-century Guardian of the Holy Lance, he had suffered more than his fair share of false trails and wish fulfilment fantasies, culminating in his recent illegal incursion into Iran on God’s own wild goose chase that had nearly seen him blown up on a mountain track twenty feet behind his kulbar guide during an ill-advised attempt to recover King Solomon’s Copper Scrolls.

  Despite all this, the ‘Templar’ nickname that his journalist ex-girlfriend Amira had publicly foisted on him following his infiltration into an extreme German right-wing organization two years before seemed to have stuck for good. And Lumnije had fallen for it, hook, line and sinker. She had clearly felt she needed some additional pretext to lure him over, and she had done her homework well. She’d had that sort of brain.

  The more he read, the more he realized that she had gone considerably beyond merely secondary sources to devise a theory of her own about the location of the Templar’s lost treasure. And she had pinpointed this to the original site of the last great Paris temple in the Marais. To the exact place where Jacques de Molay and his unfortunate acolytes had first been imprisoned.

  The snag, as Hart knew only too well, was that the entire temple precincts and the former keep had been flattened under Napoleon, and was now represented by a notional four streets delineating the Quartier du Temple – the rue du Temple, the rue du Bretagne, the rue de Picardie and the rue Béranger. Nothing of the original edifice was left. End of story.

  ‘Well?’ Biljana stared at him across the dinner table. It was two hours later. They were eati
ng meze and flatbread, which she had prepared while he was busy reading.

  Hart spooned some chopped salad into his mouth and chewed ruminatively – the older, more experienced man patiently according his time to the callow younger woman. ‘You know about the Knights Templar, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course. I know everything about them. My mother spoke of little else these past two years. I have been doing all her research for her.’

  ‘Ah.’ Hart pushed away his plate and spread Lumnije’s notes out on the table in front of him. He was relieved to have something neutral to talk about for a change. ‘Your mother has convinced herself that the Templars, forewarned, perhaps, of King Philip’s intention to destroy their Order and seize all its assets, somehow found the time to immure their immense treasure, plus the mask of Baphomet—’

  ‘The what?’

  Chalk one up for the grown-ups, thought Hart. ‘The mask of Baphomet is the embalmed face of Christ. The most holy relic in Christendom. Anyway, according to your mother the Templars found time to secrete all this immense treasure inside the vaults of the great Paris temple just a few hours before the shutters came down. And not only that. For despite torture and questioning and the possibility of a martyr’s death under the Inquisition, they all steadfastly declared that the treasure had instead been taken away by ship and concealed somewhere in Scotland. Rosslyn Chapel, probably. Or maybe with the Freemasons.’

  ‘You don’t sound convinced?’

  ‘Of course I’m not convinced. It’s total nonsense. Fool’s gold. Your mother should have known better.’

  ‘And yet she did this for you.’

  Hart swallowed. Maybe he had been laying it on a little too thick? ‘Yes. Apparently she did.’

  ‘And meant it as a gift?’