Paul Christopher: Valley of the Templars

Ninety minutes later, their Zodiacs sunk in seventy feet of water, the four-hundred-and-eight-man unit landed on a rocky abandoned beach twenty miles west of the town of Trinidad. They stripped off their rebreathing gear and stowed it in the waterproof knapsacks where their camo gear had been kept. The weapons bags were unsealed, each man armed himself according to his role in the mission and at three fifteen in the morning the company-handpicked men from the Blackhawk Special Forces elite Special Boat Unit moved off the beach in double time, and within another hour they had vanished into the deep jungles covering the slopes of the Escambray Hills. They were the third such unit to be landed successfully on the empty beaches of Spiritus Sancti Province, and there were three more to come over the next six weeks. Operation Cuba Libre was in full swing.

Holliday’s stay at Ramstein Air Force Base lasted much longer than he’d wanted, and both Christmas and New Year’s had come and gone before he was released along with Eddie. The Cuban had been keeping in erratic touch with his aging mother and father, but there was still no news of the vanished Domingo, Eddie’s older brother, or at least no news her mother or father wanted to share with the listeners at the Signals Intelligence Base just south of Havana.

In early spring, Holliday’s still-healing wound and battered brain pan leaving him unable to drive and Eddie never having been behind the wheel of a car in his life, the two friends took the high-speed ICE train from Mannheim to Amsterdam, then checked into the Hotel Roemer on the Visscherstraat. The snowbanks were melting, the canals were thawing and the first leaves were appearing.

“I have to see a guy about something,” Holliday said cryptically when they had settled in. “I’ll be back in an hour. Order something from room service.”

“I think I will sleep instead,” said Eddie. “I will dream of the beaches near my home in Alamar.”

“Alamar?”

“Fidel’s great gift to the people of Havana.”

“What is it?”

“A slum, built with Russian concrete.” The Cuban smiled. “But very close to the sea.”

Holliday left the hotel and made his way to Nieuwmarkt on the edge of De Wallen, Amsterdam’s red-light district. The place he was looking for was squeezed in between a sex shop and a bierhaus. A green neon sign in the blacked-out front window read DARBY’S AMERICAN BAR, EST. JUNE 16, 1969-the day its owner, Danny Farrell, finished his second and final tour in Vietnam, Holliday knew. After seeing the way things were upon landing in San Francisco, Farrell slipped into civvies in the toilets, caught the next plane home to New York and then kept right on going, opening the bar in Amsterdam that had always been his dream in-country.

Holliday stepped in and let his eyes adjust to the dim light. The bar was on the right, a row of vinyl-covered booths on the left. A big TV was mounted on the wall behind the bar, playing CNN with the sound turned off. Holliday sat down at the bar and checked the grimy plastic-coated menu. Burgers, fries, BLTs, Denver sandwiches and Reubens on dark rye. All the foods that Farrell had talked endlessly about in the hooch.

The bartender made his way down the bar to where Holliday was sitting. He was thin, no more than five-six, bald, with oversized ears a huge, broad nose, and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in a wrinkled white shirt with sleeves rolled up, blue jeans and a barman’s short apron. There was a fading tattoo of a skull backed by a parachute and a sword on his right forearm. Holliday would have recognized him anywhere, mostly because of the lumpy, jagged scar that ran from just under his right ear to his chin. It was lumpy and jagged because Holliday only had the needle and thread he used to darn his socks with him when the piece of shrapnel from the tin plate mine opened up Farrell’s face. It wasn’t easy to do a great job of battlefield surgery on the slope of a hill with the enemy popping mortar shells your way and screaming “Yanqui, you die!” over their bullhorns.

“Help you?” Farrell said, his voice bored.

“BLT, easy on the mayo, and a double Maker’s Mark if you wouldn’t mind, Beagle.”

Farrell called out something unintelligible in Dutch toward a closed door at the far end of the bar, then turned slowly back to Holliday, a suspicious look in his eyes. “What did you call me?”

“Beagle, just like everyone else.”

The man involuntarily reached up with one finger and touched an ear. “Am I supposed to know you or something?”

“November 1967, Hill eight eighty-two, Dak To. I was the one who sewed that up,” said Holliday, pointing at the scar. “You called me Frankenstein after that.”

“Doc Holliday! I’ll be screwed, blued and tattooed! It’s been, what, thirty-five years or something?” The ex-Ranger grinned from one big ear to the other, turning the scar into a curling snake slithering across his face.

“Closer to forty-five.”

“You’re not still in, are you?”

“I was for a long time.”

“You look like you took a few hits of your own.”

“Here and there.”

“So, what you been up to lately?”

“Wandering around the world, getting into trouble.”

A Chinese cook appeared with the BLT, dropped it in front of Holliday and retreated. Farrell made a generous double of Maker’s Mark and set it down on the bar. “What kind of trouble?”

Holliday took a bite of the sandwich, which was delicious, and sipped his drink. “The kind of trouble that might require some new documents.”

“What kind of documents?”

“Passports, drivers’ licenses, birth certificates, the works.”

“You been getting into serious trouble, then, Doc.” Farrell shook his head. “Not the Doc I knew.”

“Not the Doc I knew, either,” said Holliday. “Don’t worry, though, Beagle. I’m still on the side of truth, justice and the American way.”

“Well, that’s okay, then, Doc.” Farrell smiled. “None of us are the way we were back then. All of us are missing parts of one kind or another.”

“Can you help me out?”

“I think I got a name and an address somewhere, but this guy is bad news, Doc. He does good work, but he’d slit your throat for a dollar if he could get away with it.”

“Nice friends you have.”

“Nice friends don’t forge passports.”

“True enough.”

Holliday stayed and finished his sandwich and whiskey, talking about old times with his scarred buddy from a lifetime ago, but old times weren’t necessarily good times and he left with both of them promising to stay in touch and both of them knowing they were lying.

Holliday called the number Farrell had given him, and he and Eddie arrived at the appointed address shortly after eight o’clock the following evening. Kostum King was located between a Christian bookstore and a Braun cafe on Raadhuisstraat between the Herrengracht and the Singel canals in the center of Old Amsterdam. It was a narrow building with a tattered blue awning and four dusty-looking Michael Jackson Thriller costumes complete with shoes and rubber masks dangling in the window from what looked suspiciously like meat hooks. The sign on the door said CLOSED, but Holliday rang the bell anyway.

The man who answered was short, scraggly-haired, clubfooted and with a large hump on his back. The suit he wore was as dusty as the Michael Jackson costumes.

“ Ja? ”

“Dirk Hartog?”

“ Ja. ”

“Darby sent us.”

“Ah yes, come in.”

They stepped into the shop, bypassing the hunchback, who closed and locked the door behind him. The shop was long and narrow with costumes of all kinds hanging in gloomy rows. None of them looked as though they’d been rented in years, and the most modern U.S. president mask they appeared to have was Richard Nixon. There was even a Jane Fonda mask and a set of long-haired Beatles masks lined up on a shelf. The hunchback led them to a door at the back of the room and opened it, ushering them inside. It was an office, crammed with filing cabinets and a large wooden desk with a vinyl-covered office chair. There were two other chairs for guests and a coffee machine on top of one of the filing cabinets. The only picture on the walls was a framed Rembrandt cigar ad from a magazine. To the right of the hanging picture was another door, probably leading into some sort of storeroom. The hunchback sat down at the desk, slipped out of the hunchback jacket and the scraggly-haired wig and slipped off the clubfoot shoe.