The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

  ‘What sort of movies did you watch?’ Hart didn’t know what he expected to hear, but it was probably along the lines of High School Cheerleader 4, or My Boyfriend is a Vampire.

  ‘Oh, everything and anything. I watched Bergman and Kurosawa. Scorsese and Coppola. Ford and Hawks. Gus van Sant and David Lynch. Anything I could lay my hands on. By the end they were running out of films to send me.’

  Hart stared at her. ‘You watched Howard Hawks?’

  ‘Yes. But not only him. I like 1930s and 1940s films the best. Film Noir and cowboy movies are my favourites. Films like Arizona and Out of the Past. Followed by glamour pics and white telephone movies. Oh, and I like Lubitsch and Sturges comedies. The Palm Beach Story. Sullivan’s Travels. Stuff like that. After that I like the 1970s. Jeff Bridges. Jack Nicholson. Robert Duvall. I watched them all. Five Easy Pieces is a masterpiece. Cutter’s Way. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Tender Mercies.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Why are you swearing? What have I said?’

  Hart shook his head in wonder. ‘Biljana, you do realize that Paris is the greatest city on earth to watch old movies in? That it has more dedicated art house cinemas than New York and London put together?’

  ‘No. I didn’t realize that.’

  Hart felt in his pocket and brought out the tattered copy of L’Officiel des Spectacles that he had been using to find them restaurants and art exhibitions. ‘Look at this list they’ve got here. At the beginning. These are all the movies showing in Paris this week. Choose one. Any one. And I shall take you to see it. And to hell with the bloody Templars. You will see the movie as it was meant to be seen. Not on a box the size of a cornflake packet. But on a big screen. Academy-sized. With an audience of aficionados who all love film sitting around you. You’ll be alone but not alone. It’s the very best feeling in the world.’

  Biljana stared back at Hart, her eyes shining. ‘I want you to choose one for me.’

  Hart sat back in his chair. ‘Are you sure about that? You might not like it.’

  Biljana ducked her head and nodded at him. ‘I’m very sure.’

  ‘Okay. Then I will.’

  Hart cast his eyes down the list. For some reason he realized that the choice he made now would in some way be significant. To both of them. That it would cement their relationship. Take it to another level. How he knew this was beyond him, but know it he did.

  ‘Have you ever seen Charles Laughton’s The Night Of The Hunter?’ he said at last.

  ‘Charles Laughton the actor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The one who was Quasimodo and Rembrandt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t know he directed movies.’

  ‘He didn’t. Or rather he directed only one. And it received such disastrous reviews that he never repeated the exercise. But in the years since it came out it has slowly been recognized for the masterpiece it is. There is no other film remotely like it.’

  ‘And you would like me to see it?’

  ‘Yes. I would.’

  ‘Why?’

  Hart shook his head. ‘If I knew that, Biljana, I would be a very wise man. But wise is something I am definitely not. So let’s both go and see it. Afterwards, you can tell me what you saw in it. And why you think I wanted you to see it. Maybe then I will be able to make out my own motives. Because I certainly can’t now.’

  FORTY-FOUR

  Biljana handed Hart the envelope. The performance was over. They were sitting in a brasserie across from the cinema. She was eating a Croque Monsieur and drinking an Orangina. Hart was eating a Bayonne ham sandwich washed down by a glass of his favourite beer in the world – a Pelforth Blonde.

  Biljana had been crying. Hard. It had started about halfway through the movie, when the two orphaned children, inadvertently hiding their dead father’s stolen loot, had escaped from the clutches of Robert Mitchum’s evil Reverend Harry Powell and set off together into the night. When the journey unexpectedly turned magical, thanks to Stanley Cortez’s extraordinary cinematography, Biljana went very quiet. But still Hart could see the tears coursing down her face and reflected in the light from the screen.

  He felt guilty enough about suggesting the film in the first place. By the end titles he felt suicidal. That is until Biljana turned her tear-stricken face towards his and told him how much she had loved the film. Every moment of it. Then she had handed him the envelope.

  ‘Are you sure you want me to read this?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure. It was addressed to you. I should never have kept it.’

  ‘But you wanted there to be a reason for me to take you away with me? Was that it?’

  A fractional hesitation. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I want to tell you something.’

  She darted a look at him, part trepidation and part despair. ‘What is that?’

  Hart toyed with his beer glass. He was never comfortable when forced to verbalize inner emotion. His preference was to keep everything safely locked away. But something warned him that vulnerable young women like Biljana – young women who had managed to convince themselves that he might possibly be their father – might wish for something more explicit in terms of a declaration.

  ‘I am very glad indeed that you did what you did. Very glad, too, that you got me to bring you to Paris. Whatever it says in here…’ he prodded the letter with his index finger, ‘I don’t regret these days we’ve spent together. I’ve really enjoyed myself. I only wish your mother could have been here to share this time with us. You are an exceptional young woman. You would have made her proud.’

  Biljana lowered her gaze in awkward acknowledgement of Hart’s compliment. She had not yet reached the age where she could take such things in her stride. ‘Read the letter. Please.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes.’ Biljana sensed him hesitate. ‘I’m still thinking about the film. I’ll tell you why you wanted me to see it afterwards. Okay?’

  ‘Is this another of your deals, young lady?’

  ‘Yes. You’ve got to read the letter first, though.’

  Hart bent his head towards the envelope. A sense of fatalism overwhelmed him. There were a number of loose sheets of paper and a smaller envelope, still sealed, with his name printed on it inside. ‘This smaller one? You haven’t read it yet?’

  ‘No. My mother asks me not to read it in her main letter. You’ll see.’

  ‘So she expected you to read that?’

  ‘I think so. Yes. She left it unsealed. I would say, knowing my mother, that she knew I would read it. But she also knew that I would obey her about the other sealed letter.’

  Hart took a sip of his beer. He was aware of the girl’s eyes upon him. In the past few days she had tailed off a little from telling him he was her father. Almost as if she suspected that something was in the offing. Curiously, it had allowed them to draw a little closer one to the other. It was emotionally tiring denying something that you were in no position to substantiate. It was all very well saying you weren’t something – harder, though, if you couldn’t explain why you weren’t it.

  Hart looked at the loose sheets. Reams of Templar stuff. Clearly written for Biljana’s benefit, by a mother who knew she would read it.

  ‘Okay if I go straight to the other one?’

  ‘It is addressed to you. Please open it.’

  Hart glanced one further time at Biljana to monitor the expression on her face, but she was already flicking through the Officiel des Spectacles, busying herself marking off potential movies they might go to with a pencil.

  Hart felt a rush of affection for her. He was briefly reminded of himself, a generation before, on his first solo visit to Paris, sitting in a bar and doing exactly the same thing. As though, for that seemingly eternal moment, what he was doing had been the most significant action in the world.

  How
brief youth is, and how short its span, he decided.

  My dear friend. May I call you that? John is such an awkward name. At least to my lips. Johannes would be better because the J is soft. That is what your Templar ancestor was called, was he not? Johannes. The one I read about in the articles written by Amira Eisenberger. Is she your girlfriend? I suspect so. She writes about you as if she loves you. But then we women are sensitive to such things, whereas you men are not.

  By the time you receive this letter I shall be dead. Do not be sad. I have been dead ever since the Captain killed my family and destroyed my honour and my innocence. And you are right. The Templar material I researched with Biljana is so much stuff and nonsense. But I wanted something – anything – that would allow her to connect with you. But do not worry. I do not expect you to act as her father. All I want is for you to ease the first few weeks of my loss for her. Then you are free to go. I have left her a little money. The house, too, is in her name, thanks to my father’s foresight in keeping his assets outside the country during the Kosovo War. Biljana is an intelligent girl. She will manage very well. But she is entirely unaware of her past. I have spared her that. And I ask now that you do the same.

  I know Biljana will assume that you are her father. She will grow out of this. I have neither said it was so, nor have I denied it. The subject of Biljana’s paternity has never come up between us. In this I have been rigorous. I know, when you took your vow, that you did not know that I was pregnant. Neither did I. But if I had done, I would have asked for your promise, that day when you left me at the monastery, never to tell any child of mine how it was conceived. I ask this of you again now.

  Have a good life, John Hart. I have thought of you many times over the years. Of your madness in saving me from that house of shame. Of your foolhardiness in confronting the Captain. Of your steadfastness in carrying me to safety. For if you had not chosen to come back from the dead the Captain would surely have killed me. Twisted passions such as his are invariably lethal.

  Please forgive yourself for leaving me at the monastery. You had your life to live. I had mine. There was no connection between us beyond that created by happenstance. I am sorry to have to call on you now. Consider it the price one has to pay for thwarting fate. One intervenes in this world at one’s peril. It makes you not a good photojournalist, John, because you are not able to detach. But it makes you a good man.

  Now I think about it, maybe you were born to be a priest? Yes. I think that is what you should have been. Like your distant ancestor before you. A soldier priest. A Templar.

  Lumnije Dardan

  Biljana was staring at Hart with a curious intensity, as someone in the jury at a trial might stare at a prisoner accused, but not yet convicted, of an atrocious crime.

  ‘What is it? Why are you staring at me like that?’ he said.

  ‘Your face.’

  ‘What about my face?’

  ‘It has gone white. Bleached of all blood. Like you have seen a ghost.’

  Hart managed a hollow laugh. ‘Maybe someone just walked over my grave.’

  Biljana’s eyes flared in shock. ‘My mother you mean?’

  Hart shook his head. ‘You know I didn’t mean that. It’s just a stupid expression. The sort you toss out without thinking.’

  Biljana held out her hand. ‘May I read the letter now, please?’

  Hart looked at her in consternation. ‘Of course not. It is addressed to me. You told me so yourself. Your reading it wasn’t ever part of the deal.’

  Biljana sat back in her seat. Not once, in the entire course of the movement, did her eyes leave Hart’s face. ‘Are you still pretending you don’t know why you wanted me to see the film?’

  Bravo. Biljana had wrong-footed him again. Hart felt himself flush with outraged virtue. Far from wanting to know what the film signified, all Hart wanted to do was to thrust the letter inside his jacket pocket and forget all about its existence. Then he wanted to spring to his feet and run out into the street yelling for a taxi to the nearest airport. ‘Tell me,’ he said at last. ‘Tell me why I wanted you to see the film.’

  Biljana collected her thoughts. The effort was clearly visible on her face, for her features were so expressive that each action she took was semaphored ahead as if by advance messenger. ‘You wanted me to see the film because you unconsciously wished me to understand how lies can blight a person’s life. That’s so, isn’t it? But you were unable to tell me so yourself.’

  Hart groaned.

  ‘You see. I am right. The two children in the film were lied to by everybody, weren’t they? Only their father, who was a criminal, and was destined to hang, told them the truth. Because he had nothing left to lose. Other people, in positions of power, always abused them. And you are in a position of power, just like them. You may or may not be my father. You tell me you are not. But you will not tell me who is. By what right have you, a stranger, to dictate my life to me? That is what the film has told me. That is the message you wanted me to receive, is it not? That you are a good man. Not like the people in the film. Not like the reverend. But you do not behave like a good man should.’

  Hart closed his eyes. He felt as if he had been caught napping by a freak wave and swept under by its weight. Part of him almost wanted to drown. To let himself sink inside the groundswell and have done with it. ‘I am not a good man. You’ve got that bit right.’

  But Biljana was not done with him. ‘Does my mother, in that letter, direct you to lie to me?’

  Hart glanced down at the letter on the table in front of him. Suddenly, for no reason that he could fathom, he pushed it towards Biljana. ‘Why not read it for yourself and see? That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?’

  Biljana’s hand froze halfway towards the envelope. ‘Is this a trick? Is the letter about something else entirely?’

  Hart shook his head. ‘No. There’s no trick. It’s about you.’

  ‘Why now then? Why not before?’

  Hart gazed at her. ‘Because you could have read it any time in the last week and you didn’t. And because you’re right, though it crucifies me to have to admit it. I owe you the truth. Your mother is dead. You are living. There’s a difference. The dead should not be allowed to dictate to the living. That would be both morally and ethically wrong.’

  ‘So you won’t be breaking any vows in showing it to me?’

  ‘No. Your mother didn’t know she was pregnant when she asked for my promise never to tell anyone what had happened to her. By killing herself, and by calling me over to look after you in the aftermath of her suicide, I figure that she broke any deal that I originally made with her. If I were you, I’d want to know who my father is too. So I’ve got no right to treat you in a way I would refuse to be treated myself. Read the letter, Biljana. Then ask me whatever you want to ask. No more lies. No more prevarication. You can have the truth. Though you may not thank me for it in the end.’

  ‘Like in the film?’

  ‘Oh yes. Just like in the film.’

  FORTY-FIVE

  It wasn’t an easy few hours. Biljana veered from anger to tears and then back to anger again, often in the space of a few minutes. At first Hart tried to control the situation, but he soon realized he needed to let Biljana expend herself in whatever way she saw fit.

  They spent some time in the back of a taxi. Later they sat in one of the countless small parks dotted around the centre of Paris. Still later he tried, but failed, to get her to eat something in a late-night café that advertised twenty-four-hour meals.

  At a little after two in the morning they returned to their hotel and Hart helped put Biljana, still fully clothed, into bed. Later, hearing her crying through the walls of his room, he was tempted to go into her room to see if he could help, but finally decided against it. He wasn’t her father. And young girls, especially young teenage girls full of hormones and without fathers, were prone
to inappropriate crushes. He was sure of himself, but he wasn’t sure of her. The last thing he wanted was for his and Biljana’s relationship to veer off into dangerous territory. She was far too young and far too vulnerable for him to take those sorts of risks.

  Over breakfast the next morning Hart made Biljana the offer of formally adopting her, or, at the very least, securing a special guardianship order until she was eighteen. He told her that this was so she would be guaranteed a modicum of security and some sort of still centre inside the vortex in which she now found herself. The offer surprised him even as he made it. Although he had always wanted children, Hart did not, in his customary perverse manner, see himself as a particularly paternal man.

  ‘But I already have a father. I know that now. I would have liked him to be you. But he is not.’

  Hart stared at her across the breakfast table. He didn’t know, for a moment, whether to laugh or to cry. ‘But the Captain’s a war criminal, Biljana. A rapist. He’s also a Serb, and, in theory at least, a Christian. You are a Muslim. The situation is impossible. Added to which he’s probably dead. And if he isn’t, he should be.’

  ‘I want to meet him.’

  Hart tried to rein in his sense of frustration. ‘Even after what he did to your mother? Even after all the horrors he perpetrated on God knows how many innocent victims? The killings? The torture? The man is a monster. He killed your grandparents, Biljana. He killed your uncle. I know this is true because your mother told me so. She watched him do it.’

  ‘But he is my father. I need to see him.’

  Hart felt as Pandora must have felt when she first opened the box. Pandora had managed, so it was said, to seal in hope. Hart didn’t give much for his chances of pulling off a similar trick. ‘That’s an impossible request. He could be anywhere. If he’s alive he’ll be in hiding, for he’ll certainly be on the United Nations watch list. Which means that if he shows his face in any civilized country he’ll be immediately imprisoned and sent to trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He’d be lucky to escape with thirty years. In any rational society he’d be put up against a wall and shot.’