Paul Christopher - The Templar throne

"I'm going to get up and go into the restaurant. Cue Ball will think I'm going to the bathroom. Count to sixty, then get up and do the same. At a dead run it'll take him a couple of minutes to get down here. Got it?"

"Of course," snapped the nun irritably.

Holliday stood and disappeared into the restaurant. Sister Meg waited as long as she could, then followed him inside. He was waiting at the rear of the dining room, standing beside a young dark-haired waiter in a long apron.

"Sledujte mne, prosim," said the young man, motioning with one hand. Follow me, please. He led them through a pair of swing doors, into the kitchen and through another door that led to a narrow courtyard. At the back of the cigarette-butt-littered space was a low stone wall that looked very old. It was made of small stones mortared together and topped with curved, half-pipe terra-cotta tiles to facilitate drainage. Holliday boosted himself up onto the wall and the young man cupped his hands into a stirrup for Sister Meg. A few seconds later she was on top of the wall with Holliday.

"Dekuji," said Holliday, thanking the waiter.

"Za malo." The waiter shrugged. No big thing. He lit a cigarette and stood watching as Holliday and the red-haired nun jumped down on the far side of the wall.

The Josefov cemetery is the oldest existing Jewish burial ground in Europe, dating back to 1439 and used up until 1787. It is small as cemeteries go, taking up less than an acre made up of the courtyards of a long, L-shaped block, but more than a hundred thousand people are buried there, some in spots twelve coffins deep, the headstones only marking the people buried in the top layer.

With most of the stones less than a foot apart, there is almost no space for grass to grow. The roots of the big overarching shade trees have moved the worn and almost indecipherable headstones every which way and there is a ruined, abandoned sense to the place that is far from true. Countless visitors flock to the cemetery each year, paying their ten crowns and their respects to the dead. Rabbi Low, the creator of the forerunner of Frankenstein's monster, the golem from Vlatava mud, is buried here, as are other Jewish notables.

Dropping down into the cemetery, Holliday and Sister Meg found themselves hemmed in by headstones and had to pick their way slowly and carefully between the markers until they reached one of the main paving-stone pathways that wound around the property.

The pathway was crowded, mainly with tourists, some of them carrying cameras, some reading the old Hebrew inscriptions. The only thing they had in common was the fact that none of their heads were bare. For a few moments as they threaded their way through the crowds, Holliday wasn't sure why everyone seemed to be glaring at him. Then he remembered that it was considered disrespectful to enter a Jewish cemetery without some kind of head covering.

Less than a minute later they reached the exit, an old gatehouse, and bullied their way out onto a narrow street lined with souvenir carts selling postcards, paper hats and little plastic golems. The whole thing was so crass Holliday almost expected one of the carts to be selling Rabbi Low action figures.

"Now what?" Sister Meg said. It was hot and a thin line of sweat had formed on her forehead where her headpiece was tight.

"I've got an idea," answered Holliday. He took a quick look around to make sure that Cue Ball wasn't anywhere in sight, then turned down Stroka Street, heading for the river. They reached the open plaza of Jan Palach Square and crossed to the statue of Antonin Dvorjak. Jan Palach Square had once been known as Namesti Krasnoarmejcu, or Square of the Red Army Soldiers, but had changed after a twenty-year-old student named Jan Palach covered himself with gasoline and set himself alight to protest the Soviet occupation in 1969.

Skirting the statue, they went down a few steps to the park that ran beside the river. Directly in front of them, in the shadow of the Manesuv Most, or Lesser Town Bridge, was a large floating dock with an outdoor cafe and several tour boats tied up.

A boat with a Staropramen beer ad on the side named Vltava Kralovna, Vlatava Queen, was loading passengers. Holliday and Sister Meg joined the lineup. Holliday paid thirty dollars for each of them and they went aboard. The boat was not much more than a barge with rows of seats and a fiberglass canopy. A few minutes later they cast off and headed downriver. Holliday had kept his eyes on the gangplank and there'd been no sign of Cue Ball. It looked as though they'd lost him for the second time.

The boat slipped under the bridge and continued downstream, the immense looming fortress of Prague Castle on the high bluff on the far side of the river to their left, with the Lesser Town laid out below it. They rounded a bend, making their way through a near traffic jam of tour boats and sport fishermen, and then went under the low gray span of the Cechuv Bridge.

"Just exactly where are we going?" Sister Meg asked. "Or is this some kind of mystery tour?"

"No mystery," answered Holliday. "We're going to the train station without Cue Ball knowing where we're going. If he managed to follow us we'd know it. I was watching the gangway after we got on. He's not aboard."

Stavice Island lies slightly off center in midriver about a mile downstream from the Lesser Town Bridge where they had embarked. Although awkwardly located, Stavice had been home to Prague's first professional hockey rink and grass tennis courts. The island was also where there had once been a series of dangerous rapids, now smoothed to a simple weir with no more than a three-foot drop and with a lock installed between the island and the nearside riverbank to make downstream navigation possible and as an aid to flood control, a perennial problem in the spring.

Their tour boat entered the long lockway and waited for the enclosure to empty before the lock doors opened to let them through.

"Come on," said Holliday. He grabbed Meg by the hand and pulled her over to the gunwale on the right-hand side of the boat, elbowing chattering passengers out of the way as he did so.

"What are you doing!?" Meg yelped as Holliday quickly climbed up onto the broad steel gunwale. An older woman in a large floppy hat and enormous lime green sunglasses let out a squeaking shriek of alarm.

"Getting off the boat," answered Holliday. He leaned out, grabbed an iron rung bolted into the stone wall of the lock and began to climb. Meg had no choice except to follow, acutely aware of the heavyset German in the Hawaiian shirt and his apple-dumpling wife who were getting a perfect view up her skirt.

Using swear words she hadn't uttered since high school, she clambered up the iron ladder after Holliday. A furious-looking lockmaster came charging out of his little control booth yelling as Holliday hauled her up onto the walkway at the top of the ladder. He turned and yelled back at the man.

"Policiye!" Holliday bellowed.

Down in the lock the captain of the tour boat sounded his air horn. Confused, the lockmaster turned and ran back into his control booth to activate the big swing doors.

"Run," said Holliday.

They headed up a wide set of concrete stairs. At the top of the steps was a paved road, and on the far side a series of fenced-in clay tennis courts, all in use, the pock-pock hollow sound of tennis balls sounding like a metronome. Behind the open courts were the bloated science-fiction sausages of several canvas inflatable domes.

"Where are we?" Meg asked.

"Stavice Island. It's a big public sports complex."

"Why here?"

Holliday pointed to the left. Through a stand of trees Meg could see the approaches to a bridge.

"That's Hlavkuv Most," said Holliday. "The Hlavek Bridge. Cross that and you're on Wilsonova, which is where the main Prague train station is. Satisfied?"