The Templar Key, By Number One Author (Peter Sparke Book 3) Read online

  He took the stairs up to the restaurant two at a time and paused to draw breath. Tilly caught up a few seconds later.

  “That was a bit of a sprint,” she said. “Are you all right? You look a wee bit flustered.”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” said Sparke through a tight smile.

  “How do I look?” said Tilly. “I feel a total mess. Should I put on some lipstick do you think?”

  Sparke turned to look at Tilly and realized that he had paid no attention to what she was wearing. She had on a pale blue blouse and a navy blue trouser suit.

  “You look fantastic,” he said, smiling.

  Just then the door to the restaurant was opened by Karin. Behind her, Sparke and Tilly could see the assembled guests. Every man was wearing a suit and all the women were in dresses. Apparently Germans did dress up sometimes. Tilly turned to Sparke with a look of pure venom, but it was Karin who spoke, clearly surprised.

  “Oh, Peter, I see you have brought someone.”

  City and people

  A crowd immediately formed on the quayside and all work stopped in a fifty-yard radius as the machine was wheeled out of the crate. To all the men who saw it, it was a thing of perfection. The Customs official read the shipping documentation aloud.

  “Motorcycle, AJS manufacture, V Twin 800 cc engine, color Black with Gold livery enamel. Sidecar De-Lux model D / Hayward back sprung seat.”

  Compared to its drab surroundings, the motorcycle combination was a diamond in a coal bucket.

  Bastian ran his hand over the sleek black tank, remembering the feeling of freedom that his motorcycle had given him on the deadly roads of the Gallipoli beachhead. Two things had kept him alive when so many others had died: the speed of a motorcycle and the steel skin of an armored car. He wanted nothing to do with armored cars now, but the idea of being back on a motorcycle like this filled him with a joy that he rarely allowed himself.

  “A beautiful machine, sir,” said the Customs Officer. “And such a sidecar. For a special passenger, no doubt. Ideal for a young lady, perhaps?”

  Bastian smiled. He was often seen now in the company of Clarise and they were welcomed together into the best houses in the city. In the aftermath of the war, there were new rules. Behavior between men and women was relaxed to a level that would have been unthinkable a few years before and the idea of Bastian riding through the streets of Smyrna with Clarise in the sidecar was only mildly shocking.

  But there was another role for this machine. The luxury of the sidecar was no romantic extravagance. This machine was the only way that his father was ever going to get through the high pass to the Monastery, up to where the bodies of Bastian’s brothers lay. He and his father had unfinished business in the hills, but as Bastian’s horizons became more and more local, and his ambitions seemed to be attainable, the world started to roll against his dreams and it moved with thousands of years of history behind it.

  Smyrna had been Greek for as long as there had been people there. Certainly there was no record of a city until they arrived in their ships three thousand years before. A hundred generations of Greeks spent their lives around the natural harbor, trading, with other Greeks mainly, but sometimes with the country people who lived in the dark hinterland of Anatolia. They saw empires come and go, welcomed the Governors sent by Alexander the Great, Roman Caesars and later the henchmen of warlords with the best grace they could muster. But they were always Greeks in a Greek city.

  As they led their small Mediterranean trader lives, surrounded by corn and olives, populations were booming and crashing thousands of miles away in the steppes of Eurasia’s heartland. Driven by changes in the weather and the food supply, each new cycle created a slow explosion of humanity, pulsing out across the continent, every new pulse pushing settled peoples from their land as new, hungrier and more desperate waves took their lands, forcing the displaced in turn to invade their own neighbors. Invaders became victims in the next cycle, as nomadic raiders spread east, west, and south.

  One of these great population pulses pushed a nomadic horde of horsemen, called the Turks, into Anatolia. They found what they needed and stayed, flourishing and covering the land that had belonged to a dozen peoples before them. Their people wandered into Smyrna, settling among the Greek population and the lands around the city. The Turks settled, not just on the coastline like the Greeks, but across the whole of the landmass, and eventually they became part of the great Islamic Empire.

  Greek Smyrna now became an island. For a thousand years it lived with the sea in its face and a Turkish nation at its back and by the end of the First World War, two things were obvious: Smyrna was obviously Greek, right down to its deepest core, and, equally obviously, Smyrna was in Turkey.

  In 1918, the Turkish and Greek visions of Smyrna were no longer things that could both exist. One had to prevail and the Greeks chose to roll the dice, partly to defend their people from the savage deportations the Turks had been inflicting on the Greek populations.

  The Greeks were aiming for more than self-defense. They had their dreams of a restoration of the ancient Greek Empire and they had powerful friends to help them achieve it. They had been on the winning side of the Great War and were viewed with great cultural and racial sympathy by the Western powers in their conflict with the Turks.

  So, with powerful patrons behind them, and with the Turks prostrate after four years of defeat before them, they planned their move. War had arrived in Smyrna.

  Party

  When she finally emerged from the bathroom, Tilly had somehow managed to transform her appearance. Five seconds after walking into the party she had fled towards the ladies and had been there for over ten minutes.

  “How did you do that?” said Sparke, gazing at her as though he had never seen her before. “You look amazing.”

  Her hair had been pulled back and somehow wrapped up and pinned to the top of her head, showing her slender neck, and she had obviously been carrying makeup in her handbag. To Sparke, she now looked like the most glamorous woman in the room. Even her suit and blouse now looked like a deliberate decision to dress casual chic, making the other women seem slightly overdressed.

  “And you look like a dead man,” she hissed quietly, through a gleaming, false smile. “I thought you said this was a few casual drinks after work? These people are dressed for the bloody opera.”

  Before Sparke could respond, Karin reappeared from the crowd, followed by a waiter carrying a tray of champagne glasses.

  “Please,” said Karin. “Champagne.”

  Sparke and Tilly both took a glass, Sparke swallowing half the glass in one gulp.

  “Congratulations on your engagement,” said Tilly.

  “Yes,” agreed Sparke quickly. “Congratulations. Where is Dieter from Compliance?”

  “Dieter is over there with his friends from the club, and it’s all right just to call him ‘Dieter’, rather than ‘Dieter from Compliance’, when he is not at work.”

  Sparke had never thought of him outside work, just as the slightly bland and eternally correct head of the company’s Compliance Department. Sparke could not remember any conversation with him that did not involve Dieter frowning seriously and saying, ‘Compliance is everyone’s business’, as though it was a novel and valuable piece of business wisdom.

  “What club?” he said.

  “The ski club,” said Karin. “You are aware that we have a ski club in the company, aren’t you, Peter?”

  “Of course,” lied Sparke, who never considered that the people he worked with had a life outside office hours. He noticed that Dieter was at the center of a group of people who were all laughing a lot. He realized that he had done nothing to properly introduce Tilly to Karin.

  “This is Professor Pink, Tilly,” he said. “We met when I was doing that Scottish thing.”

  “Of course,” said Karin, smiling. “We read all about you in the newspapers. Welcome to Munich. Are you working on something here, or is this a social trip?”

>   Karin’s delivery was flawless, but the question was obviously more than a piece of casual conversation.

  “Just some research here, mostly in the State Archives,” said Tilly.

  A silence then descended on the three. Sparke never considered himself a workaholic until he found himself in situations where work was not a topic and he would often find himself talking to someone, then simply run out of things to say. He was shocked to find this happening to him now, with the two people whom he had spent more social time with than anyone else for many months. The silence went from a polite pause and into difficult until, eventually, the obligation of being host kicked in and Karin broke the silence.

  “I hear you are taking some days of vacation, Peter. Is this a real holiday or another personal project?”

  “It’s Tilly’s project,” said Sparke. “I am just riding along.”

  “Now, that’s not true,” said Tilly. “Peter is the main event. I am doing background research.”

  Karin looked taken aback by the casual, almost intimate, way that Tilly contradicted Sparke. Normally he inhabited a world where the things he said were treated very seriously.

  “Tell me,” said Karin, “what is the big mystery?”

  Sparke thought for a moment. Then he tried to sum up the story in his head. As ever with Sparke, when he had to summarize a situation he seemed to go into a form of autopilot.

  “Almost a hundred years ago, a young British man was caught up in a massacre when the Turks recaptured the city of Smyrna from the Greeks. Thousands of people fled to the docks but had no way to escape. This man had a guaranteed place on a British warship and safety, but he turned around at the last minute, gave his baby son an ancient Templar key, disappeared into the mob and was never seen again.”

  “And is this definitely true?” said Karin, now paying close attention.

  “All the facts are there,” said Sparke. “Certainly on the Templar side, and that is mainly due to Tilly’s work, but how things might hang together is absolutely still in the dark.”

  “Will this be a famous discovery and will we see your face in the papers again?” said Karin.

  “One thing is for sure, this will never end up with me dealing with the media,” Sparke said with feeling. “Tilly will be the one facing the cameras. She knows much more than I do, and anyway she is about a hundred times more photogenic. I mean, look, who would think she had spent the day reading medieval archives?”

  At the back of his mind, Sparke was faintly aware that praising the beauty of one woman when he was at another woman’s engagement party was not the best idea in the world. He quickly drained his glass and said, “Oh, I’ve run out of wine. Can I get you both a drink?” and plunged into the crowd, leaving Tilly and Karin alone.

  For a moment, the two women smiled at each other, and then Karin spoke.

  “You seem to have quite an impact on our Peter.”

  “Really?” said Tilly. “He always seems to be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, a little bit mad. Funny.”

  “Well,” said Karin, “I hope you look after him.”

  Tilly wasn’t sure how to take the comment, but she knew there was nothing in it she liked.

  “He’s not mine to look after,” she said, a little too sharply. “He seems well enough able to look after himself.”

  Another silence fell between the women, broken by Sparke’s arrival with his hands full of champagne glasses.

  “More champers,” he said, his face slightly flushed with the drink and the stress he felt from the situation, a stress he felt all the more acutely as he had no real idea why he should feel anything at all. Karin took a glass from Sparke.

  “We are about to start the dancing, I think. I must find Dieter from Compliance.”

  She smiled at them both and made her way elegantly across the room. Tilly watched her go and turned to Sparke.

  “Is she your ex? You might have told me that you were bringing me to the engagement party of someone you dumped.”

  “We did go out together, once. It was a total disaster. I wanted it to go further but she didn’t, it seems.”

  “She dumped you?”

  “Yup.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “It happened the day before I decided to come to Turkey with you.”

  “She only dumped you a few weeks ago and now she is engaged to someone else?”

  “Ah, yes, I’m afraid that is about right,” said Sparke, looking at Tilly, fully aware that he had never mentioned this to anyone. “I have no idea what happened.”

  “She was shopping around,” said Tilly, glancing at Karin. “You looked nice in the window. But not a good enough fit take home.”

  Arrival

  “I do.”

  Bastian could not contain his smile as he said the words that turned him into a married man. His romance with Clarise had been mirrored around the world, as men had come back from war in their millions and, desperate to leave the boredom and horror of war behind them, had run as fast as they could towards a new life.

  Clarise and Bastian had gone from strangers to friends within days of meeting each other, and from friends to lovers before the first month was out. Nothing seemed to make more sense to them than the idea of always being together, so as they walked along the shoreline near his family home one evening, he had asked her to spend the rest of her life with him and she had said ‘yes’ before his words had faded on the sea breeze.

  Despite his wishes for a quiet wedding, the Navy decided to make an event of it and the city was treated to the sight of Royal Navy officers parading through town in full dress uniform, including ceremonial swords. The ballroom of the Hotel Corniche was filled beyond bursting point as the city’s elite fought for elbow room and dancing space with the Navy contingent. Noise, music and laughter flowed from the hotel’s ballroom and brought to an end the musty silence that had enveloped the city during the war years. The atmosphere of youthful exuberance was obvious as Bastian and Clarise left the wedding reception to a chorus of champagne corks, roaring into the night on motorcycle and sidecar.

  The celebration of Bastian and Clarise’s wedding spread a feeling of good will across the city like a spring day after a long winter. For the city, it was the sole topic of discussion for days, but some senior allied officers had something else to occupy their minds: they were waiting for a convoy, and they were not at all sure that they were looking forward to its arrival.

  The Greek troopships arrived late in the day and the harbor pilots who guided them into their berths brought the news to the city. Within hours, every cafe in the city had only one topic of conversation: Smyrna was to be occupied by the Greek Army. Unlike other land grabs by the victorious allies, there was no legal pretext for this. Greece wanted Smyrna and it had the power to seize it.

  Troops began disembarking and forming up on the quayside, and almost immediately the Greek population thronged the harbor. Orthodox Church leaders blessed the troops, and local women, often in tears, grasped the hands of soldiers in gratitude. To the Greeks, who made up perhaps half the city, this was liberation, the recovery of their ancient birthright and the re-establishment of Greek rule over the city.

  Once they were able to disentangle themselves from the adoring crowds, the Greek troops marched along the same route Bastian and his tiny party of sailors had taken when they first landed, marching past the barracks where hundreds of Turkish soldiers were still housed.

  Catcalls and angry insults were exchanged between the Greek and Turkish soldiers. A shot rang out followed by a ragged volley of firing. Greek troops broke formation and rushed into the barracks, quickly joined by a mob of civilians. Turkish troops poured out of their barracks and a savage fight broke out. The chaos spread like wildfire. Turkish-owned businesses were overwhelmed by the mob, and their owners dragged to their deaths in the street. The sound of breaking glass and screams echoed through the city as buildings burned and bodies
were hurled into the filthy harbor waters.

  Bastian, who had been watching the arrival from the Harbormaster’s office, rushed to his family’s warehouse on the quayside. More than half of the hundred men who worked there were Turkish. As soon as he arrived, he had the rear doors barricaded and stood, pistol in hand, in uniform at the front of the building. Two of his Greek foremen took position by his side and were subjected to a torrent of abuse from the mob, but the idea of tangling with a British naval officer, and an armed one at that, was unappealing to the crowd. There were easier targets for their fury. The riot lasted for hours, leaving hundreds dead and a terrified Turkish population cowering in their own areas of the city. As the Greek troops were finally brought to order and marched out of the area, the city, which had escaped the war unscathed, looked like a battlefield. Bodies, all Turkish, floated in the water between the ships.

  Bastian’s boots crunched over broken glass as he walked along the quay, accompanied by the shocked Harbormaster who had come to join him once the hurricane of violence had passed.

  “This was the Turks’ fault,” said the Harbormaster. “But they learned a lesson today.”

  Bastian looked at the man.

  “You might want to be careful teaching Turks lessons,” said Bastian. “They aren’t good at learning when to give up.”

  In the days following the arrival of the first troopships, others arrived from Athens loaded with soldiers and artillery. Senior members of the Greek General Staff joined them. To the many observers with military experience, it was clear that this was no local garrison sent to safeguard the Greeks of Smyrna. This was an invasion force.

  Bastian watched the flood of troops pour ashore and through the city. He was now often accompanied by his father, who was gradually becoming adjusted to sitting in the sidecar of the AJS motorcycle. For Bastian, the years spent entombed in the gloom of Royal Navy battleships had left him with an abiding dislike of small spaces. For his father, the motorcycle was a transformation. Escaping from the house brought him a new lease on life. From the first short trips around the suburb where they lived, Bastian and his father gradually built up the length of time they could travel. Soon they were speeding along the good coastal road, and then, eventually, Bastian felt happy to tackle more difficult tracks.