Paul Christopher - The Sword of the Templars

“I ordered for us,” said Holliday. “The waitress didn’t give us much choice, so it’s full Irish for both of us.”

“In England that would be egg and chips,” said Peggy.

“I think full Irish is a little more extreme,” said Holliday.

The waitress appeared a few minutes later, an enormous plate in each hand. She set them down in front of Holliday and Peggy.

“Holy crap,” murmured Peggy, looking down at the plate. On it were two fried eggs, sunny-side up, swimming in iridescent grease, their undersides a burnt-crisp web of charred whites, the yolks staring wetly up at her like deep orange eyes.

Beside the eggs there was a lump of baked beans in the shape of an ice cream scoop, two wrinkled rashers of pale pink bacon, a raft of link sausages, a small crop of fried mushrooms next to a dissolving slice of fried tomato, a mountainous pile of fried potatoes, and two fried circular objects each the size of a silver dollar, one black, one white.

“What are those?” Peggy asked, indicating the coin-shaped objects on the plate.

“Black pudding and white pudding, miss,” explained the waitress.

“What’s black pudding?” Peggy asked.

“Pig’s blood and oatmeal, miss,” said the waitress. She pronounced the word “blood” as “blud.”

“And white pudding?” Peggy said.

“Pork meat and suet,” said the woman in the maid’s outfit. “They used to use sheep’s brains, but they’re too afraid of the scrapie since mad cow. Best part of twenty years past,” she added, as though the lack of scrapie-infected sheep’s brains was somehow a terrible culinary loss.

“Ah,” said Peggy.

“Will that be all?” asked the waitress, turning to Holliday. He nodded. The waitress turned and left the room.

“I’ve lost my appetite,” said Peggy, looking down at the plate.

“When I ate with Uncle Henry he used to scold me if I didn’t eat everything on my plate. ‘Think about the starving children in China,’ he’d say.”

“With me it was the starving kids in Africa,” Peggy answered. She started to eat, carefully avoiding the black and white puddings. The waitress reappeared with a vintage toast rack filled with half a dozen thick-cut slices and a plate of butter.

“I wonder what the rate of heart attacks is in Ireland,” said Peggy. She picked up a slice of toast and used it to mop up a sea of leaking egg yoke. Holliday didn’t answer, concentrating on his own breakfast for a little while. As he ate he found himself thinking about the firefight at Carr-Harris’s the day before, the old professor, his arms spread wide as he died, the man with the Russian submachine gun in the narrow hall, the bark of the Mauser.

Almost twenty-four hours ago now. Soon someone would come by the old man’s house, the mailman or the milkman or a neighbor, and everything would begin to come crashing down on their heads. Two dead bodies in the house, their rental left behind in the yard. They’d left a trail of bread crumbs a blind man could follow, let alone the police. Except for fleeing, they’d done nothing illegal, but if they fell into the bureaucratic horror show that was bound to surround Carr-Harris’s death it would take days if not weeks to escape.

“This is getting out of hand,” he said finally.

“The breakfast?” Peggy said.

“No. What we’re doing. Tracking down an old sword that Hitler might or might not have owned is a long way from murdering people. We’re way out of our depth here,” said Holliday.

Peggy put down her fork. She turned her head and looked out through the filmy sheer curtains. A bright yellow double-decker open tour bus rumbled by, its side panels covered in manic advertising slogans, the seats on the upper decks crammed with stunned-looking tourists in bright clothing trying to cram Dublin into a day trip.

“I think it’s too late to back out now,” the young woman said finally. “You said it yourself: those guys shooting at us yesterday must have followed us to Carr-Harris’s place. They knew exactly what they were doing.” She paused. “I don’t think people who are willing to kill to get what they want are going to back down. Even if we did bail out and head for the hills, I think they’d just track us down and try it again. We have to keep going.”

“I can’t put your life in danger,” said Holliday. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Do I detect a note of sexism here?” Peggy said. “A bit of patronizing from my overprotective cousin?”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “It’s hard enough in the kind of situation we were in yesterday without…” He let it dangle, afraid of putting his foot in his mouth. Peggy did it for him.

“Without a woman along?” she said, finishing the unspoken sentiment.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you were going to,” grinned Peggy. “Admit it.”

“Never,” said Holliday, grinning back.

“Believe me, Doc, the people who were shooting at us yesterday aren’t sexist; they’ll kill anyone who gets in their way or has something they want.”

“Who are they?” Holliday asked. “Some kind of neo-Nazi group? I thought that kind of idiocy went out with the whole skinhead thing.”

“Old Nazis never die,” said Peggy, picking up her fork again and prodding a sausage on her plate. “They just change their names.” She put the fork down again and pushed the plate away from her slightly. “There’s lots of them around. The British Nationalist Party, Combat 18, the BNP’s armed division, the Nationalist Party of Canada, Aryan Nations back home. France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, even Germany.”

“What about the Russians?” Holliday suggested, remembering the Bizon submachine gun.

“There used to be a bunch called Pamyat back in the early nineties, and there’s been an upsurge of Russian neo-Nazis in Israel,” said Peggy. “The Russian National Socialist Party is an offshoot of Pamyat. They released a video a while back showing somebody being beheaded in a forest.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Holliday.

“Dead serious,” said Peggy. She shrugged. “They run a newspaper called Pravoye Soprotivleniye or Right Resistance with a circulation of at least a hundred thousand. The paper used to be called The Stormtrooper.”

“Are they big enough to have organized the attack on Carr-Harris?”

“Almost certainly,” answered Peggy. “The neos these days are very computer savvy; they’ve even got an electronic clearinghouse on the Internet called ‘Blood and Honour’ and their own version of Wikipe dia called ‘Metapedia.’ Spooky stuff.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about it,” said Holliday.

“I did the pix on a series of articles for Vanity Fair last year,” she answered.

“So what do we do now?”

Peggy glanced down at the various remnants of fried food congealing on her plate.

“Buy the Irish version of a roll of Tums and figure out our next step.”

“Carefully,” said Holliday.

“Very carefully,” agreed Peggy.

Doc Holliday and Peggy Blackstock stood on the upper deck of the small car ferry and peered out across the broad lake as they neared the German side of the water. Here the lake was called the Bodensee; on the Swiss side it was called Lake Constance.

They were within a mile or so of the dock at Friedrichshafen, but there was nothing to be seen ahead except a gray wall of fog, the horizon stolen and the sun invisible. Every few seconds the ferry’s foghorn would moan, the sound repeated back to them out of the featureless gloom like the unrequited mating calls of vanished sea creatures. Barely visible, the inky waters of the ancient alpine lake broke thickly against the sides of the ferry.

“The Twilight Zone,” said Peggy, the sound of her voice flattened by the heavy mist. There were other people nearby on the deck, but they were as invisible as everything else, no more than shadows appearing and disappearing as they went by. When people spoke it was in murmurs and low whispers, like children afraid of the dark unknown.