Red Templar

“Okay,” agreed Holliday.

“How much you want?”

Holliday thought about it for a second. The Stechkin on full auto went through bullets like popcorn. “Five hundred of the nine and a hundred of the twenty-five.”

“I can do that,” said Bondarenko. He paused again. “Just in case you and your friends are going through Belarus I’ll throw in the transit visas for nothing-it’s just a stamp.”

“Thanks,” answered Holliday. “If that’s everything, why don’t you get your credit card swiper and we’ll let you get to work.”

“No problem,” said the Ukrainian with a pleasant smile. “I can do it myself.”

“No, you can’t,” said Holliday. And he wasn’t smiling at all.

At six thirty-one that evening the three men carrying the passports and transit visas of Michael Enright, Simon Toyne and Andre Belekonev left the city of Odessa on Russian Railways train number twenty, the Pivdenny Express fast train to St. Petersburg. Thirty-four hours later, they arrived in the city of the czars.

Less than twelve hours after their departure, Gennadi Bondarenko and his girlfriend, Natasha Bohuslava Shtokalo, were found brutally murdered and their apartment ransacked. Bondarenko had been tortured savagely before he’d been killed by a bullet to the back of the head, and gaspazha Shtokalo had been raped a number of times before receiving the same treatment.

In a statement to the press, Odessa colonel of militsiya Yuriy Fedorovych Kravchenko stated that Gennadi Bondarenko was a well-known member of the criminal establishment and the murders were clearly gang related. In addition, robbery might well have been a motive, since there was some evidence that Bondarenko dealt in large amounts of cash. There had also been rumors that Bondarenko might have been soliciting for gaspazha Shtokalo’s services as a prostitute, although that had not as yet been confirmed.

When queried, Colonel of Militsiya Kravchenko said that neither he nor his lead investigators had any expectations of making any arrests in the near future; nor did he care. The prosecutor’s office had no interest in going forward with the investigation and he didn’t either. As the policeman bluntly put it: “The deaths of these two people simply means that there are two fewer criminals on the streets of the Odessa Oblast.”

9

Genrikhovich lived in an old five-room apartment in a nineteenth-century stucco building on Nevsky Prospekt not far from the train station and the Hermitage. By old-fashioned Soviet standards it was lavish, sharing a bathroom and toilet with only one other apartment and having a kitchen of its own.

The apartment had apparently been assigned to his grandfather by the local party committee shortly after the revolution. His grandfather, curator of the Hermitage’s Treasure Gallery, raised Genrikhovich’s father there, and he in turn passed it along to his son.

Genrikhovich’s wife had fled for greener pastures after the fall of the USSR in 1991, and Genrikhovich had lived alone in the apartment ever since. The furniture was of the large, dark, Victorian variety, the chairs old, worn and comfortable, the lamps fringed. There were books everywhere, and where there weren’t books there were paintings, mostly small and gilt framed, some with their own little lamps and virtually all of them horticultural or seascapes.

Genrikhovich excused himself and left the apartment to use the toilet facilities. Holliday wandered around the living room while Eddie sank gratefully into a plump, overupholstered chair.

Holliday checked out the bookcase and frowned. Like the paintings, many of the books were about horticulture and the sea. Erskine Childers’s TheRiddle of the Sands; Aero-Hydrodynamics and the Performance of Sailing Yachts by Fabio Fossati; Illustrated Custom Boatbuilding by Bruce Roberts-Goodson; The Gardens at Kew; The Gardener’s Essential Gertrude Jekyll; Botanica’s Trees amp; Shrubs; The No-Work Garden by somebody named Bob Flowerdew, which had to be a pseudonym; David Austin’s English Roses; the bookcase was packed with them.

He stepped over to what was obviously Genrikhovich’s “comfy chair,” a Russian version of a La-Z-Boy recliner with a perfectly placed reading lamp and a side table stacked with books and magazines.

Holliday looked at the titles: WoodenBoat,Hortus, The Marine Quarterly. On top of the pile was a paperback called Black Fish by Sam Llewellyn, a sailing thriller. Holliday seemed to recall that he’d read some of Llewellyn’s early historical novels and quite liked them.

“I smell a rat,” said Holliday.

“?Una rata!” Eddie said, jumping up out of his chair. “?Adonde va?” He whirled around frantically. “?Odio las ratas!”

“The books and the magazines,” said Holliday. “They’re all in English. I thought Genrikhovich didn’t speak any English.”

“?No hay ratas?” Eddie said, confused. “There is no rat?”

Genrikhovich came back into the room. “I’m sorry to have deceived you, Colonel Holliday,” the Russian said, his English tinged with a slight Oxford plumminess. “I assure you that it was entirely necessary, given the circumstances.”

“Sorry isn’t good enough,” snapped Holliday angrily, turning to face the Russian. “I’m in a shitload of trouble with the secret police because of you. People are dead because of you, Mr. Genrikhovich, and now I find out you’ve been lying to me.”

“It’s Dr. Genrikhovich, Colonel Holliday,” said the Russian stiffly. “And as I have already informed you, my deception was completely necessary.”

“You’ll have to explain that,” said Holliday. He dropped down in one of the stuffed chairs. Genrikhovich sat down in the recliner. Eddie stood for a moment longer, scanning the baseboards carefully and muttering in Spanish. He finally seated himself again.

“I know who you are, Colonel Holliday, and more important, I know what you are.”

“So who and what am I?”

“In effect, you are the keeper of the king’s keys; do you know what that is?”

“I’m a historian, Genrikhovich; of course I know what it is. It’s what they sometimes call the chief yeoman warder of the Tower of London. For seven hundred years the chief yeoman has locked up the Tower every night at exactly nine fifty-three; he goes through a pass-and-be-recognized ceremony with the sentry.” He recited the ancient exchange:

Who comes there?The keys.Whose keys?The king’s keys.Pass, king’s keys. All’s well.

Holliday frowned. “But I’m not sure what any of that has to do with me.”

Genrikhovich smiled. “In this case the king in question happens to be Czar Nicholas the Second, emperor and autocrat of all the Russias, and now formally recognized by the Russian Orthodox Church as Saint Nicholas the Passion-bearer.”

“I still don’t see the connection,” replied Holliday, his voice stubborn.

“You perform the same function within your order. With the exception of Brother Dimitrov at the monastery outside Ahtopol, you are the last of the White Templars, the keeper of their keys, their secrets, their wealth and their power.”

“Fairy tales, Genrikhovich. There are no Templars, and the original Templars were anything but ‘white.’ They were bankers, builders, spies and speculators. Somewhere on the Pilgrim Road they lost their way. I’m not convinced they ever found it again.”

“A cynical point of view, Colonel.”

“I’ve fought in half a dozen wars, some legitimate, some not. Scratch any soldier my age and you’ll find a