"If they find anything," grumbled Brennan. He butted his cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. Cardinal Spada let out a long-suffering sigh. He was tired of discussion. Why didn't Brennan just do as he was told?
"The best way to guarantee that they find nothing is to stop them looking," the cardinal said. "Besides that, if what you told me earlier is true, then this man Holliday has been entrusted with the true secret of the Templars-the numbers for their bank accounts. A bonus, although the money rightfully belongs to the Church, anyway."
"If we do this thing we can't have this coming back on us," warned Brennan.
"I understand that," Cardinal Spada said and nodded. "Hire outside help if you wish." The man in the scarlet skullcap stared across the desk. "Holliday is important, but remember who the woman is, as well."
"They're in Prague. I know just the people."
"Then get on with it," said Spada.
It was a dismissal.
Brennan left Spada's office and went down two flights of marble stairs to his own, much smaller office on the second floor. It was a plain square room with bare wooden floors, a metal desk, some black metal filing cabinets and a plain cross on the wall.
The only other decoration was a photograph of his long-dead sister Mary, a Magdalene nun, standing in front of St. Finnbar's in Cork City, smiling into the camera, squinting in the sunlight. The picture was from the late sixties, faded to sepia.
She'd worked as a supervisor of the indentured girls at the Magdalene Laundry on Blarney Street, above the North Mall and the River Lee with its famous swans. She'd so loved to feed the swans. She'd imagined they were the souls and spirits of ugly girls come back to the world as something beautiful. She'd died of some terrible respiratory sickness a year after the photo was taken, coughing her lungs out and praying to a heedless god.
The priest sat down at his desk, flipped through his old-fashioned Rolodex and came up with a number with a 420 prefix. He dialed and almost immediately the Vatican switchboard broke into the call. He gave the male operator the number, and then a name. There was a pause and then the double tone of the call ringing through in Prague. The phone rang three times and then was answered.
"Prosim?" The voice was a slightly phlegmy baritone.
"Pan Pesek? Antonin Pesek?"
"I am Pesek," said the voice. "Who are you?"
"This is Romulus," said Brennan, staring blankly at the photograph of his sister as he ordered the killing. "I have a job for you."
The Convent of St. Agnes of Bohemia is located on Milosrdnych Street in the Josefov, or Jewish Quarter, of Prague, the eleventh-century center of the original city that had grown on the banks of the Vltava River a thousand years before. The convent, now part of the National Gallery of Prague, was a collection of meticulously refurbished fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Gothic buildings centered around the old vaulted cloisters that now contain one of the finest collections of Baroque and Renaissance art in the world.
Holliday and Sister Meg got off the Metro at the Namesti Republiky stop and climbed up into the sunlight. The square was crowded with tourists and local shoppers, and there was a festive feeling in the air. People were eating cotton candy and popcorn as they strolled along, talking and laughing. Uniformed cops walked in pairs, doing as much window-shopping as the people around them. There was a line out the door at McDonald's.
Holliday and the nun walked north up Avenue Revolucni, a wide thoroughfare noisy with rumbling street-cars and lined with shops of all kinds, interspersed with ATMs every hundred yards or so just to make sure you had lots of Czech crowns in your pocket.
They turned west a block short of the river and took a shortcut through a government building parking lot to Rasnovka Alley, a narrow cobbled lane that led them down to the main entrance to the old convent. They paid their hundred and fifty koruna, roughly six dollars, and went into the thousand-year-old building.
The cloisters that made up the gallery were almost empty, and except for an old man dozing on a bench and a young couple more interested in each other's anatomy than the paintings on the wall, Holliday and Sister Meg had the place to themselves.
"I came for the archives, not the art," said Holliday. "Shouldn't we be next door at the monastery?"
"There's something here I wanted to show you," said the nun, eager excitement in her voice. "Something I remembered last night." After their escape from their bald pursuer Holliday was willing to indulge her. The paintings, the religious statuary and the extraordinary carved wooden altarpieces were certainly worth looking at, even if they had nothing to do with their objective.
They went up a narrow set of steps to the upper floor of the cloisters and down a long arched hall. Meg led Holliday to a large gilt-framed painting hanging on the plain, off-white plaster wall.
A man in armor stood on the left, a veiled woman on his left wearing a cowl on her head, throwing her face into shadow, a long black gown obscuring her figure. The man was wearing a full-length chain mail hauberk that came down to his ankles. He had a long sword sheathed at his waist and an overshirt with the familiar Saint-Clair engrailed cross coat of arms, while his shield bore the red Maltese cross of the Templar order.
The knight was holding what appeared to be a wooden engrailed cross in his free hand. Behind the two figures was a heraldic portrayal of a winged gold lion with a sword held in its right front paw and standing on a rippling blue field of water. In one corner, like the illustration from an ancient tarot card, six monks in their white habits prayed as they stood around a well. In the opposite corner of the painting was a stamped symbol of a heart with a cross in it.
Sister Meg read the description of the painting on a small plinth next to it. "The Blessed Juliana With Her Protector, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1427." She stared up at the near life-sized figure of the woman in the painting. "She always appeared veiled so men wouldn't be distracted by her great beauty," said Sister Meg, awe clear in her voice. She turned to Holliday. "Does her protector remind you of anyone?"
"It's Jean de Saint-Clair," said Holliday. "And that's a Jacob's Quadrant in his hand. The navigation instrument I told you about."
"Do you know the significance of the lion with the sword?" Sister Meg asked. "I couldn't figure it out, or the six monks around the well." She shrugged. "I even ran it through Google. There are lots of lions with swords but none that quite match up. The closest was the old imperial crest of Persia."
"I don't know about the well and the monks but a golden lion with a sword standing on water is the coat of arms of Venice," said Holliday. "It's also a quadrant on the coat of arms on the Zeno family crest, the ship-builders who leased the Templars most of their fleet during the Crusades. According to this I'd say your Juliana and Jean de Saint-Clair went to Venice together, probably to rent a ship."
8
They found a little terrace restaurant on the other side of the Jewish Quarter and sat at a shaded table out of the direct sunlight. The restaurant was called U Vltavy, probably because it was only a block from the river. They had an odd menu-part Mexican, part Austrian and part Czech. Sister Meg had gazpacho and some sort of pork dish with freshly ground horseradish, while Holliday settled on beef stroganoff with rice and some of the same horseradish. They ate in silence for a while, enjoying the summer warmth and watching the tourists go past.
For some reason he didn't quite understand, Holliday had always enjoyed Prague more than any other city in Europe, east or west, even during the Soviet era. The locals had a sense of humor and seemed innately curious about everyone and everything. They'd use any excuse to engage tourists in friendly conversation, and a favorite game on the subways was to trade language-a few words of Czech in exchange for a few words in English. There was even a television channel that showed nothing but English movies with Czech subtitles as a language teaching aid.