Red Templar

dogs, cats and rats, of slaughtered pigs and sheep, plastic bags, their contents weighty enough to pull them halfway into the impenetrable flow. The body of a man drifted by, so bloated and corrupt it was little more than a floating island for the writhing swarms of maggots industriously eating their way to adulthood on its purple decomposing flesh.

The “banks” of the river were two-foot-wide concrete walkways, dangerously slick with a layer of mucuslike slime that seemed to work its way down off the walls like slow-moving lava from a volcano. A climber’s piton had been hammered into the concrete, and tied to it was a twelve-foot-long, five-foot-wide inflatable boat, complete with a pair of plastic oars and a five-horsepower Hidea outboard engine screwed onto the transom at the back.

“It really is worse than St. Petersburg,” said Holliday, looking out at the broad flow of waste, foaming eddies and pinwheels of gray-yellow muck making slow-motion patterns on the lumpy surface.

“Your black friend in the front, since he is the heaviest, you and Victor in the center, and I will take the controls,” said Ivanov.

“We are supposed to go out there in this little boat?” Eddie asked, looking out at the sluggishly moving flow, the light on his hard hat glinting off a bobbing empty bottle of Kubanskaya vodka, its red-and-black label still clearly visible.

“Afraid so, companero,” said Holliday, grinning behind his mask. “You first.”

“Cono,” grumbled the Cuban, but he stepped down into the boat, dropping instantly into a crouch, then making his way carefully forward. Genrikhovich followed, then Holliday, who sat down beside him, and finally Ivanov took his place at the throttle of the outboard. Holliday reached out and undid the line tying them to the concrete, then used one of the plastic oars to push them out into the current.

“Everyone turn off your lamps except your black friend, Colonel Holliday. We must conserve the batteries.”

“His name is Eddie,” said Holliday, his tone curt.

“Gracias, amigo,” muttered Eddie softly. The rest of them turned off their lamps, leaving only the beam of Eddie’s lamp to light the way.

Ivanov turned on the electric starter and there was a gruesome burbling sound as the propeller chewed into the muck. The boat headed out into the center of the current, and then Ivanov steered straight ahead and turned the throttle of the outboard. The horrible burbling increased and they moved slowly off down the ghastly river.

32

Cardinal Antonio Niccolo Spada, Vatican secretary of state through three popes, one of them assassinated, sat at his permanently reserved table in the dining room of Capricci Siciliani, the remains of his roulade of baked anchovies with its wonderful citrus-seafood tang on the plate in front of him. He sipped from his glass of pale Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi and gave a slightly melodramatic sigh as he set the glass down beside his plate.

“Father Brennan, you are no aid to a man’s digestion.” The cardinal shook his head. “I have an office, as you well know; I keep regular hours. Why can’t we save our discussions for those times?” In the distance the blaring of horns from the nighttime traffic on the Lungotevere Tor di Nona could be heard, and beyond that the never-ending rumble of the city of Rome.

For Spada a meal in the peaceful old section of the city was an escape from the complex responsibilities and intrigues of his occupation in the Vatican, but even now, late in the evening, those responsibilities and intrigues reached out and found him. The fact that they took the form of the disheveled, chain-smoking and foulmouthed head of the Vatican Secret Service just made the intrusion that much more distasteful.

“Sorry to be bothering Your Eminence’s evening meal, but some things just won’t wait. Even for a man such as yourself and his plate of sardines.”

“Anchovies, Father Brennan, cooked in garlic butter with parsley and tomato sauce with the juice of a lemon. It is a classic dish from Sicily, where I had the great fortune to be born.”

Brennan frowned. “Anchovies? Salty things they put on pizza pies, aren’t they, Your Eminence? Couldn’t be good for the blood pressure, could they?” Like most Irish the cardinal had ever met, Brennan never made a statement without making it a question.

“Anchovies aren’t born salty, Brennan-these are fresh.”

“Is that right? Well, you could knock me over with a feather now, couldn’t you?”

Spada had known Brennan long enough to recognize when the Irish priest was needling him. “Get on with it, Father Brennan; what ill wind is it that blew you to my table tonight?”

“Pesek was to call me with a report tonight.”

“And?” Spada said, sipping his wine.

“He has not done so.”

“Perhaps you should call him then.”

“It’s not in the way of how he does things, Your Eminence.” The priest paused, gauging whether the cardinal’s meal was actually over and whether or not it was diplomatic to light a cigarette. It had been almost twenty minutes since his last and he decided to chance it. He took a dark blue flip-top pack of Richmond Superkings and lit one from the store of kitchen matches he kept in his jacket pocket. The cardinal frowned. A busboy appeared and cleared away the dinner plate, and a few seconds later a waiter arrived with Spada’s dessert, Cassatella di Sant’Agata, literally the Breasts of Saint Agatha, a delicate layer of shortbread in the shape of a breast, then stuffed with chopped pistachios and custard. Finally it was covered in pink icing and each mound was topped with a maraschino cherry.

Realizing he’d made a mistake, Brennan pinched out the tip of the cigarette with a stained and calloused thumb and forefinger, then dropped the butt in his other pocket.

“Certainly a way to test your vows of celibacy,” said Brennan, looking at the mildly obscene dessert.

Spada smiled and plucked one of the cherries from the tip of one of the sugar-icing breasts. He popped it into his mouth. “Saint Agatha was tortured cruelly; the eating of her breasts is an act of fealty to her passionate faith in Jesus Christ.”

“Patron saint of bell founders and bakers, too, as I recall, yes?”

“As you know perfectly well, Father Brennan.” Spada ate the other cherry. “Now get on with it.”

“As I said, Pesek hasn’t called and he’s long past due.”

“Some context for all of this would be nice,” said Spada, sticking a fork in the left breast, breaking through to the oozing custard-and-chopped-nut center.

Brennan flinched a little; had the cardinal been in his full red cassock and biretta it would have been something out of an old Fellini movie. He looked up at the ceiling of the dining room and spoke. “Pesek had traced them to their hotel in Moscow. He somehow learned they were to meet with Genrikhovich later that evening. He was going to deal with the situation for us then.”

“Does Pesek have any idea who Genrikhovich really is?”

“I doubt it. He would have been in his late teens at the time, and it was not the name by which he was generally known. It was his patronymic, and he generally went by his mother’s name, even inside Russia.”

“What about Holliday?”

“Almost certainly not; in the first place, if he knew he would have run like an Irishman from a temperance meeting.”

“He’s a historian.”

“He’s an American historian, Your Eminence. In the history books of the United States the name Genrikhovich probably doesn’t even rate a footnote. Besides, his specialty is medieval history, not the Cold War.”

“All right, assuming that is so, why do you think Pesek has not called?”

“Either he’s forgotten, lost them somehow, or Holliday has killed him instead of the other way around.”

“Which do you think is the most likely?”

“If Pesek hasn’t called me within the next couple of hours I’d put my money on Holliday. He almost killed Pesek in Venice; maybe the bugger succeeded this time. He’s got the skills.”