‘It’s enough for an egg McMuffin. Sorry if it isn’t enough for you to score.’
‘I put a curse on you, man.’
‘Listen,’ Nathan told him, ‘if you don’t want the change, I’ll take it back.’
‘Then take it!’ the young man shouted at him, and showered the coins in his face.
Nathan stood there for a moment, half inclined to grab the young man and shove him up against the wall, but then he simply shook his head, and said, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’
‘Lucky? You call this lucky?’
‘You’re alive, you’re conscious. You have all of your faculties. What more do you want?’
‘What the fuck you talking about, man? I’ve told you. I’ve put a curse on you. There’s nothing going to go right in your life, ever again.’
Nathan walked away, and up the corrugated concrete ramp. As he reached the top, he turned around and saw the young man crouching down on the sidewalk, picking up the coins that he had scattered.
It took thirteen-and-a-half hours to fly to Kraków, changing planes in Chicago to the national Polish airline, Lot. Denver slept most of the way, with his MP3 player attached to his ears. Patti worked on her laptop for a while, moving her lips as she wrote, but then she folded it up and she fell asleep, too.
Nathan closed his eyes but he could think only of Doctor Zauber, and his white plaster face in the wall. Over the roaring of the engines and the hissing of the air conditioning, he could even hear Doctor Zauber’s voice.
When we die, nobody really cares. Nobody misses us. The carousel of life keeps on going around and around, and up and down, with everybody screaming and laughing.
He had the terrible feeling that Doctor Zauber was here on the plane, leaning over him and staring into his face. He abruptly opened his eyes. He couldn’t stop himself. But it was one of the flight attendants, leaning over him to tug Patti’s blanket to cover her shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ she smiled. ‘I did not mean to disturb you. Is there anything you would like? Coffee? Or a drink, maybe?’
‘Thanks. Maybe a glass of red wine.’
After that, he didn’t bother to try to sleep, but sat there nursing his glass of wine. Outside, it was already daylight, and the window shades were glowing with sunshine, although it was only four in the morning in Philadelphia. He still hadn’t finished his wine before the flight attendants began to serve breakfast.
Denver opened his eyes, blinked and yawned. ‘What’s happening, Pops?’
‘Breakfast.’
‘What, already? I was having this really scary dream. All of these statues came to life and they were chasing me.’
‘Just as well you woke up, then, before they caught you.’
They landed in Kraków at two thirty in the afternoon, leaving the sunshine five thousand feet above them and bumping downward through thick gray cloud. It was raining hard, and the raindrops crawled diagonally across the windows as they tilted and dipped toward the runway.
Rafał was waiting for them in the terminal of John Paul II International Airport. Nathan was surprised how much older he looked. He was a big, stocky man with short-cropped hair that had turned white since he had last seen him, and a heavy gray moustache like a yardbrush. He had bulbous cheeks and a bulbous nose and bulbous blue eyes, and he wore tiny steel-rimmed spectacles.
His droopy brown raincoat looked as if it belonged in a Cold War secret-agent movie, like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
‘Well, well! Nathan! Witają Polska! Welcome to Poland!’
He gave Nathan a huge, bearlike hug and slapped him on the back. He smelled strongly of tobacco and wet raincoat.
‘And this is your son! Welcome to Poland, young sir! And who is this charming young lady?’
Patti held out her hand. ‘Patti Laquelle, Philadelphia Web News. Pleased to meet you, sir.’
Rafał took hold of her hand and kissed it. Patti blushed and said, ‘First time anybody ever did that to me!’
‘Old Polish courtesy,’ grinned Rafał, showing tobacco-stained teeth, ‘Now, you must be very tired. I will drive you to your hotel, and you can maybe rest for a while. Then we can meet for a drink and some food and talk about what you need to do here.’
He had a silver Renault Espace waiting for them outside. He helped them to load their suitcases and then he drove them eastward toward the city.
‘I have booked you rooms at the Amadeus, near the Grand Square, which is very convenient for the Old Town and the Jewish Quarter. It is old-fashioned hotel but I think you prefer it. Maybe you do not have much time for seeing sights, I don’t know.’
Nathan said, ‘I don’t think we will, I’m afraid. You heard about all of those old people who were burned alive in a bus?’
‘You mean here, near Kraków? Yes, of course. But what does that have to do with Doctor Zauber?’
‘I suspect it has everything to do with Doctor Zauber,’ said Nathan, and he told Rafał about his encounter with Doctor Zauber and his basilisk at the Murdstone Rest Home, and what had happened to Grace, and how so many of the Murdstone’s residents had been killed by fire.
Rafał shook his head. ‘All for this “life-energy”? This is very hard to believe. If anybody else but you had told me this—’
‘Rafał, I saw it with my own eyes. Otherwise I wouldn’t believe it, either.’
Although it was raining, the streets of Kraków were teeming with tourists wearing plastic capes and carrying umbrellas. Rafał drove them past the old stone walls which had once surrounded the city, and pointed out the baroque turrets and elaborate spires of Wawel Castle, on a hill overlooking the River Vistula.
‘In medieval legend, you know, a terrible dragon lived in a cave there on Wawel Hill. The story goes that some stupid boys did not believe it existed, even though the village elders told them to stay well away. The dragon had been hibernating for hundreds of years but the boys went into the cave and woke it up. After that it came out every day, killing and eating cattle and sheep and even some people when it caught them unaware.
‘The dragon was killed in the end by a wise alchemist called Krakus. He mixed up a paste of nitrate, tar and sulfur, and coated six dead sheep with it. He left the sheep outside the dragon’s cave and the dragon came out and ate every one of them with a single bite. Inside its stomach the paste started to burn like fire, and so the dragon flew down to the Vistula and drank and drank as much water as it could.
‘But the river water made the paste burn even hotter, and in the end the dragon drank so much water that it burst apart, and died.’
‘Great story,’ said Nathan.
‘And it has a moral, too,’ said Rafał. He stopped at a traffic light and a blue-and-white tram went moaning past, with faces staring out of every window, like a moving gallery of sad, pale portraits. ‘The moral is that just because we cannot see something, that does not mean that it does not exist. Like the dragon of Wawel Hill.’
He drove them to the Rynek Glówny, the huge market square in the center of the city, which covered almost ten acres. On the far side of the square stood the Cloth Hall, with a Gothic façade that had been built over seven hundred years ago; and the thirteenth-century Town Hall Tower. There were cafés and restaurants all around the square, with umbrellas and awnings that flapped in the rain.
‘What an amazing place,’ said Patti, and Nathan would have agreed with her, if it hadn’t been raining so hard, and they hadn’t come here to Kraków on such a dangerous and miserable mission.
Rafał drove them to Mikolajska Street and parked outside their hotel. The Amadeus was a flat-fronted eighteenth-century building, painted white, with a decorative porch. A porter came out to take their luggage, while Rafał gave Nathan another bear hug, and kissed Patti’s hand again.
‘I will see you six o’clock, yes? I have made some research for you which may help you. And I have been asking many people about Christian Zauber, if they have seen him or heard where he might be. If he is here
in Kraków, I promise you that we will find him. I have many friends in many different walks of life. Students, tram conductors, shopkeepers, waiters. People who notice what is going on.’
They were checked in by a pretty, bosomy girl with blonde pigtails and intensely blue eyes. Patti nudged Denver and said, ‘Hey, Denver, she’s too old for you. And you don’t speak the lingo.’
‘Who needs to speak the lingo?’ Denver retorted.
‘I guess you’re right. A slack, goofy grin speaks a thousand words, even in Polish.’
Nathan eased off his shoes and rested on his bed until five forty-five p.m. His room had a high ceiling, but it was very gloomy, with a huge mahogany bed and a massive antique wardrobe that could have accommodated an entire family, as well as their pets. On the wall hung a dark picture of a peasant woman with a brown headscarf, walking through a field under a thundery sky. It suited his mood.
He closed his eyes but found it impossible to sleep. There were too many unfamiliar noises, like the elevator whining, and the wobbling sound of car tires on the cobbled street outside.
Eventually he picked up the phone and called the Hahnemann, and spoke to one of Grace’s nurses.
‘No change, Professor, I’m afraid. I wish I could tell you different.’
‘Well, if you could just tell her that Nathan loves her, even if she can’t hear you.’
‘Of course.’
He showered, and changed into black corduroy pants and a gray denim shirt. As he combed his hair in the bathroom mirror he thought how haggard he was. And I thought that Rafał looked as if the years had beaten him down.
He went downstairs in the cramped little elevator, surrounded on all sides by countless reflections of his haggard self. He walked through to the dimly lit restaurant and found Patti and Denver already sitting in one of the brown-leather booths together. He didn’t know what they were talking about but they were sitting with their heads very close together, and nodding to each other in unison, as if they were listening to the same inaudible song.
‘You want a beer?’ he asked Denver, as he sat down next to them.
‘A beer? Sure. Thanks. But I ordered myself a Coke already.’
‘Cancel the Coke and have a beer. If you’re old enough and ugly enough to help me track down Doctor Zauber, you’re old enough to have a beer.’
A few minutes later, Rafał arrived, smelling of carbolic soap and tobacco. They went through their now-familiar ritual of hugging and back-slapping and kissing Patti’s hand. Rafał sat down and ordered a glass of vodka and some dark chocolate cookies, which tasted of spice.
He knocked back his vodka and held out his glass to the waitress for another. ‘A half-hour ago,’ he announced, ‘I had a phone call from a friend of mine, a real estate agent who rents out property in the Kazimierz district.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘He told me that more than five years ago Doctor Zauber took out a lease on an old house near the intersection of Kupa and Izaaka Streets. It is very fashionable to live there now, but in those days not so much. It used to be very run-down. But Doctor Zauber did not live there himself. He sub-let the house to two couples, and also an artist. About a month ago, though, he gave his tenants notice to quit, and now he has moved back into the house himself.’
‘So he is here,’ said Nathan.
‘What did I tell you?’ Patti put in. ‘We should schlep round there, pay him a visit?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to scare him off. If he disappears again, he may disappear for good.’
Patti said, ‘You think? He doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who scares easy.’
‘What do you think we should do, Rafał?’ Nathan asked him.
‘It is difficult for me to say. Doctor Zauber was always a very unpredictable man. One minute all smiles, the next minute angry like a volcano. He may welcome your arrival here in Kraków, on the one hand, because he wants so desperately to pick your brains. On the other hand, you have told him that you will have no part in killing old people, for this so-called “life-energy” that he needs to keep his creatures alive. In final analysis, I don’t think he will trust you.’
‘Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. That’s a chance I’ll have to take. But I do have some leverage over him. The Philadelphia police are very anxious to talk to him, and if he had anything to do with that bus fire—’
‘Yes, the Polish Policja would probably be very interested in talking to him, too.’
‘I think we just have to play it by ear,’ said Nathan. ‘I’m not going to do anything until I find out how to bring Grace out of her coma.’
‘I think to be cautious is right,’ Rafał agreed. ‘Particularly since you suspect that Doctor Zauber may be breeding another basilisk, and maybe other creatures. It is not wise to go hunting for basilisks at night. Or gryphons, for that matter, or any of those beasts. Much safer in the daytime, when most of them are sleeping.’
Rafał took them to the Wierzynek Restaurant on the Grand Square, only a short walk away, because it served food in the traditional Polish style. It had stopped raining and when they reached the restaurant it was warm and noisy and very crowded, with candles burning everywhere.
They sat at a circular table in the corner, and Rafał ordered beetroot soup and cheese pierogi and crayfish, as well as roast duck and saddle of venison and river pike.
Then he raised his glass and said, ‘Jedzcie, pijcie i popuszczajcie pasa! Eat, drink, and loosen your belts!’ Nathan raised his glass, too, but his mouth felt dry and he had very little appetite. He couldn’t help feeling guilty because he was sitting here in this lively restaurant, eating good food and drinking wine, while Grace was still lying unconscious in hospital. At least he hoped that she was unconscious, and that she wasn’t trapped inside some terrifying nightmare.
Rafał carefully wiped his moustache with his napkin. ‘I have left until last the most important evidence that I have discovered,’ he said. ‘You remember that I told you that when Doctor Zauber was obliged to leave the Jagiellonian University he gave up mythology and said that he was turning instead to archeology. I found at the university one of the students he paid to help him – although this student is now a lecturer. Doctor Zauber and his students excavated many different historical sites all around the city, but the most important was the vault underneath Saint Casimir’s Basilica, a small church which overlooks Zygmunt Square.
‘According to this gentleman, Saint Casimir’s Basilica was constructed in the late fifteenth century on top of a much older church. But the builders used the existing vaults and the ruins of the older church as their foundations. This was common in Kraków, and some churches even have glass panes set into the sidewalk next to their walls, so that you can look down and see the more ancient layers underneath.’
Nathan was beginning to see where this was going. ‘So what was Zauber looking for, exactly?’
‘He told his assistants that he was looking for holy relics. After all, there is a story that all of the nails that were taken from the true cross were sealed in a casket and eventually found their way to Kraków, brought here by pilgrims from the Holy Land. It is also rumored that the gold medallion worn by Pontius Pilate is secreted somewhere in the walls of the Basilica of the Virgin Mary. There are supposed to be many more artifacts, such as hair from the beard of John the Baptist.
‘Doctor Zauber and his assistants dug down through three vaults, each of which had collapsed on top of the other. In the very lowest vault they discovered the skeletal remains of three monks, still in the rotted remnants of their habits. They also found a parcel of leather tied up with cord, and sealed with black wax.
‘My informant at the university tells me that he remembers this parcel well, because Doctor Zauber opened it immediately, which of course is not the usual practice with valuable historical relics. Usually, they are wrapped up and taken carefully to a laboratory to be examined under controlled conditions.
‘Doctor Zauber also refused to allow any
of his assistants to take photographs of this parcel. He told them whatever it was, it was undoubtedly a fake, and he did not want to be made a fool of in the academic journals.’
‘So what was inside this parcel?’ asked Patti. ‘Did your friend manage to get a look?’
Rafał nodded. ‘He said that it was a collection of large bones which looked as if they had come from a large animal like a horse, perhaps, and also some smaller bones, like black branches. But there was also a fragment of skin, scaly and thick, like that of a large snake. It was dark gray or black, he thinks, but Doctor Zauber wrapped it up again very quickly, and the light was poor.’
‘Did he have any idea what it was?’
‘No – none whatsoever, although one of his fellow students thought that it looked like the bones of a demon. He said maybe it had been exorcized and killed by priests, and its remains sealed with black wax to prevent it from ever escaping and reconstituting itself. But he was just trying to give everybody the heebie-jeebies. That is right, yes? “Heebie-jeebies”?’
Nathan said, ‘That student was nearer the mark than he realized. It wasn’t a demon, but it was something pretty close to a demon. And if there was any DNA left in those bones or that skin, then it was capable of being brought back to life.’
‘Then you think the same as I think,’ said Rafał. ‘Doctor Zauber was searching for the remains of a basilisk, and he found them.’
Denver said, ‘OK, so he found them. But he didn’t have any kind of laboratory, did he, like Pops?’
‘No . . . but that is why he went to the United States. He had obviously read about your father’s work in cryptozoology, and he wanted to take advantage of his expertise. But he must have realized that your father would not condone the killing of elderly people to take their life-energy, or their soul, or whatever you want to call it. That is why he bribed your father’s assistant to steal his research.’
Nathan said, ‘All I want now is to find out how to bring Grace out of that coma. I’m not interested in what happens to Zauber, so long as he tells me that.’
‘That is very gratifying to know,’ said a thickly accented voice, very close to his ear.
Basilisk Page 19
