Paul Christopher: The Templar throne

"And maybe there shouldn't have been," Holliday said and shrugged, beginning to enjoy baiting the young woman. "Canada became a nation on its own quite peacefully. They never had a crippling civil war and they abolished slavery thirty years before we did without killing more than half a million young men in the process."

"You're not much of a patriot, are you?" Sister Meg responded.

" 'The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders,' " quoted Holliday. "That is the easy part. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." He glanced at the nun seated across from him. "Sound like a familiar policy? A bit of Fox News?"

"Who said it?" Sister Meg sighed.

"Hermann Goring," answered Holliday. "Commander of Hitler's Luftwaffe."

"Maybe we should stick to medieval history," suggested the nun.

"Maybe you're right," said Holliday.

They drove on in silence.

They followed the Autoroute east, bypassing Pilsen, where Pilsner beer had been invented, and reached the outskirts of Prague an hour later. It hadn't changed much since Holliday had been there last-it still looked like a poster for Stalin-era architecture, block after dreary block of concrete high- rise slabs filled with hundreds of tiny apartments. Looking carefully you could see the differences, though-there was no laundry drying on the balconies now and the cars in the parking lots were mostly Japanese instead of the ubiquitous twenty-horsepower East German Trabants or the locally manufactured Skodas with their infamously faulty brakes. Funny how bad Soviet cars had been, Holliday thought. They'd made excellent tanks and machine guns during World War Two.

"Presumably you'll want to go to the convent," said Holliday as he navigated his way through the unfamiliar cloverleafs and the equally unfamiliar blue and white signage.

"No," answered Sister Meg quietly. "The only accommodation is at the monastery next door. The convent has been entirely converted into a museum now."

"All right, the monastery then."

"I've only been doing research here. The Convent of St. Agnes isn't my Mother House. This is the high season for the monks. They make most of their income from renting out the cells in the monastery to young travelers. I have my own source of private income. I was renting a room in Andel, but they are tearing the building down to put up another condominium. I'm really quite homeless."

"Don't worry, I know just the place," said Holliday.

He guided the big Volkswagen off the D5 and onto the narrower E50, coming into the city from the south-east. They drove into another clutch of function- before-beauty apartment blocks. He turned off on Slavinskeho Street. The fuselage and tail section of an old Tupolev airliner in Czech Airlines red-orange livery stood pancaked and wheels-up in a vacant lot beside a long windowless building.

"Good Lord," said Sister Meg, staring. "What on earth is that doing there?"

"It's a prop," explained Holliday. "The Barrandov Film Studios are down the way about half a mile. I think the building there is a special effects lab." Holliday turned onto Geologika Street and pulled into a parking lot beside a three-story barracks-style building with a curved glass extension along the front that looked like a greenhouse. On the other side of the street was a row of apartment blocks.

There was a familiar Best Western sign on the scruffy lawn in front of the glass extension that read HOTEL SMARAGD.

"Smaragd means Emerald," explained Holliday. "When they built all those high-rises across the street during the Soviet era the hotel was a barracks for the foreign workers they brought in. After the Soviet Union collapsed a couple of brothers bought the building for next to nothing and turned it into a budget hotel. They didn't have much money to work with and the only paint they could get was an awful government green; that's the reason for the name. Everything's white now. It's not the Ritz but it's comfortable and it's cheap."

"It looks fine," Sister Meg said. They climbed out of the car, got their bags from the trunk and went into the small, low-ceilinged lobby of the hotel. An open archway on the right led into the curved glass extension-the hotel restaurant and bar. On the left was an enclosed counter with something like a sitting room behind it. A balding man in a T-shirt was leaning on the counter reading a newspaper. At the rear of the lobby a wide staircase led to the second floor. There was a scattering of seventies Swedish Modern armchairs beside the reception counter and a rack of postcards. A fat man in a bad suit came into the hotel and sat down in one of the armchairs and opened up a copy of Czekhiya Sevodnya. His head looked like a shiny cue ball.

They booked in, taking a double room, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The rooms were oddly laid out, reflecting their barracks origins. Each double room had a small tiled foyer with a shared bathroom against the outside wall and a door leading into a bedroom to each side. The rooms were square, utilitarian, and equipped with twin beds, one lamp, one child-size desk with a telephone and a television. Nothing had changed since Holliday's last stay; there were two channels in English, British Sky News and CNN. Everything else was in Czech or German.

Holliday dropped off his bag, washed his hands and then went across the room to Sister Meg's room. She'd changed into a man's white shirt, jeans and sneakers, but still wore the obviously religious head covering. Apparently there was no middle ground for Sister Meg; a nun was a nun was a nun.

"Settled in?" Holliday asked. He gave her his best smile, feeling a little guilty for baiting her in the car the way he had.

"As well as can be expected." She glanced around the bleak little room. "Not much in the way of ambience, is there?"

"It has a certain ascetic je ne sais quoi," answered Holliday in a la-de-dah voice.

The nun laughed, which seemed to be a step in the right direction.

"I thought we could go down to the restaurant and have something to eat. The last time we did was in that awful place on the Autobahn."

"Nordsee?" Sister Meg said. She made a face.

"You should have known better than to order curried prawns and fries in the middle of Germany," Holliday said with a grin.

"Is the food any better here?"

"They do a good goulash and their veal cutlets and dumplings are good."

"As long as the chef hasn't changed."

"He's one of the brothers who owns the hotel," said Holliday.

They went downstairs to the restaurant, a long narrow room looking out onto the scrappy lawn with tables on the right and a bar on the left. A man in an apron sat on a stool behind the bar reading a newspaper. There were only two other people in the dining room, a gray-haired man with a Vandyke beard drinking Bacardi and Coke and a lean and quite handsome middle-aged man who was vaguely familiar, drinking a long- necked Staropramen beer. The familiar-looking man spoke only English and the older man with the beard spoke accented English, but ordered in Czech.

"E.T.," Holliday said finally.

"The Extra-Terrestrial. He was in the movie, the guy at the back of the room. One of the kids. Tyler, I think. He's been in all sorts of things since."

"The dark-haired one or the man sitting with him?"

"The dark-haired one."

"That's quite a memory you have," commented Sister Meg.

"C. Thomas Howell," said Holliday, getting it at last.

"Never heard of him."

"That's because you aren't a film buff."

"I assure you, nuns watch movies," the woman answered curtly.

"Nun movies?"

"There's such a classification?"