These were the thoughts of Lucille Van Helsing as she bicycled her way down the country path into town. The last vestige of a fog lay low about the fields like frosty breath from the squatting remains of haystacks.
Lucille knew from her own St. George’s Day memories that in the village square confectioners were now setting up tables laden with sweets. Gypsies were erecting stands for fortune-tellers and other diverse entertainments. There would be a puppet show for the children, acrobats tumbling across the cobblestones, a stilt walker making everyone crane their necks as the village wits asked about the weather “up there.”
A fire-breather would belch flame to the alarm and subsequent delight of all. A wire would be strung from the Town Hall bell tower to the building across the plaza so that a tiny man in tights could precariously stride from one end to the other as the crowd below oohed and aahed.
And if one of the gypsies lifted a wallet or snatched a watch off an unsuspecting wrist, caused a necklace to disappear as if by evaporation, the pilfering did not seem to dissipate anyone’s enjoyment any more than the war that loomed over Europe.
Even the Rumanian soldiers would be in high spirits, laughing and drinking, partaking of the foods in the various stalls. A few would even pay.
On the doomed ship the music played and the passengers danced as the icy seas crept to their knees.
Lucille’s father had driven into town earlier, called to a meeting of the town leaders by the local Nazi Liaison Officer, Captain Lobenhoffer. Usually Lucille attended town meetings with her father, but today’s presence of the German prohibited her. Lobenhoffer would have recognised her from the incident at the Brasov Autonom where she had absconded with his Luger. During the encounter she had worn a black wig, but she wasn’t sure that was enough disguise to fool even the dense Nazi.
She was aware of the irony as she carried the German’s weapon nestled inside her knapsack like a loaf of fresh-baked bread for Grandmama.
Lucille did not mind having to bike into town. It was a trip she had made so many times as a child. On this very bicycle. She turned onto the main road. Memories ambushed her from every house and farm field she passed. She soaked in the sights and sounds of spring, the budding flowers in the fruit trees, apple, plum, pear, and cherry, mixed with the acrid bite of manure spread about the freshly turned fields. The brilliant green grass spread beneath the trees was decorated with fallen petals as if carefully laid there by an artistic carpet designer. She almost lost herself in the bucolic, verdant scenery.
The ship’s band played on. But Lucille was one who did not dance to their funereal song.
Most of the houses along the road were deserted, the occupants already in town for the festival, the roads likewise as empty. In the blue sky a flock of starlings swarmed in an undulating cloud, a collective mindless flight much akin, she thought, to this collective, mindless war.
Lucille tried to lose herself in the halcyon springtide. And it seemed to work. Her angry thoughts were slowly being ameliorated by the pastoral view. Until she heard a great rumble and engine growl behind her. Glancing back, she was able to see a convoy coming down the road.
She pulled her bicycle over to the narrow shoulder before she was forced off the road. Teetering at the edge of a drainage ditch, she was buffeted by the gusts thrown at her by the passing vehicles.
They were German.
Every human knows the value of appearances, women more than men; a red dress makes one kind of statement, a black sheath another. The proper coif, the persuasive artistry of make-up, and the right shoes, always the right shoes.
So Lucille could appreciate the adroit hand that was behind the creation of the German uniform, especially that of the dreaded Waffen SS. Comparing the grey, stylish, imposing Nazi SS uniform to the baggy brown serge of the Rumanian Army livery was the difference between a falcon and a yard chicken. Even the German transportation exuded ruthless power.
Lucille watched them pass, the lead vehicle a half-truck/half-track combination, rubber tyres up front and steel treads in the rear. The only passenger was an SS Major standing upright, one hand braced casually on the machine gun stand mounted in the centre of the vehicle. Lucille’s eyes were drawn to the officer’s dress hat and the dreaded death’s-head insignia. Under the shade of the cap bill were the cold, blue eyes of a man as hard as the steel upon which he rode. Over his shoulders, a long, black leather coat hung to the ankles of his black boots. He stood erect, as if he were a statue carved to honor the German Teutonic ideal.
He passed Lucille without a glance in her direction. This was in itself unusual, as Lucille Van Helsing was used to being appreciated. Her radiant red hair, striking features, and lithe but curvaceous body usually caused at least one look, more often a second and third. She took no great pride in this. It had been a fact of her life since her teens. She just took it for granted. And yes, she had used it more than a few times, but regarded it as no more than a bit of luck in the hereditary lottery.
The half-track rattled past her, the slapping of the steel treads a loud obscenity in the rural idyll that surrounded Lucille. Four trucks followed, filled with German soldiers, also standing. What lower-ranking man would dare sit if their commandant stood? Their uniforms were smart, clean as the rifles and machine guns strapped across their chests. Every truckload that passed sent a chill through Lucille. These were not peasant soldiers. These were hardened troops, every man having the countenance of a combat veteran. Lucille knew the difference. She recognised the look, had seen it in her own mirror. These were killers.
The game had changed.
As soon as the last truck had passed, Lucille remounted her bicycle and pedalled as hard as she could into the dusty wake of the convoy.
She had to warn her father and the others.
As she neared the outskirts of town, she began to see familiar landmarks with new eyes. With German eyes. The fire-blackened hulk of a tank, pushed to the side of the road. The graffiti scrawled in whitewash on the turret: “Antonescu Die!” A series of Rumanian Army helmets set atop fence posts—all riddled with bullet holes. The Resistance had displayed these trophies in the same manner that medieval legions set out the decapitated heads of their enemies. Lucille now had second thoughts about the taunts and worried that they would suffer for it.
She redoubled her pedalling. The air was rent with the pealing of bells from the Brasov churches, whether tolling in celebration or warning, Lucille could not tell. She did notice that one of the bells gave off a discordant note as if cracked. She had never noticed this before. Was this a recent event, or were her nerves magnifying her senses?
The convoy roared through the narrow streets of Brasov. With a silent, raised hand from the Major, the half-track stopped a dozen blocks from the square. The following trucks lined up behind it. Lucille saw them park and she made a brisk turn down a side alley. In her handlebar mirror she could see the Nazi officer consult a map and spit out orders to his underlings.
Racing through the narrow side streets and alleys of Brasov, her mind flew from one frightening scenario to another.
Her father was in danger. The committee meeting was a trap. The Resistance had been betrayed. Who? Why? What could she do? She had to do something. Anything to save her father. Anything!
She entered the Old Town section, speeding through the narrow paths between the ancient Saxon buildings, having to tuck in her arms to escape brushing the thirteenth-century walls. She curled around the old Greek Orthodox Church, brilliant white in the noonday sun. Past the graveyard of Rumanian and German dead from the First World War, the German crosses still visible on the weatherworn cement markers, poking their grim heads over the tops of the uncut grass.
The band played an old familiar song.
At the Schei Gate she almost collided with a gaggle of schoolchildren. They were dressed in traditional costume for the St. George’s Day pageant. She sped past the Johannes Honterus School and approached the Black Church, so named from when it was burned down by the Austria
ns during one of Brasov’s many invasions. Her bicycle rattled over the cobblestones so violently that she was afraid it would shake itself apart.
Dumping her bicycle against the church wall, she snatched her knapsack from the basket and entered the small door at the “wedding” portal. The church interior was dark and smelled of sandalwood incense. Lucille hurried down the aisle, past the wooden pews alongside the nave reserved for the old Guilds, their emblems emblazoned across the fronts.
Checking to make sure the church was empty and she wasn’t being observed, Lucille hurried toward the bell tower stairway. She paused but a second and dashed up the spiral stairs. The climb seemed to go on forever, and her breathing became loud, deep, rasping gulps of air. She felt a stabbing pain in her side. When she had reached the belfry landing, she took a moment to catch her breath before peering out one of the tower’s narrow slits.
Lucille remembered how she and her girlfriends used to sneak into the church and climb these endless steps to hide in this belfry and smoke illicit cigarettes while they giggled over the racy bits of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the only sections they actually read. Had she ever been that innocent? It was also here that she secretly read that Forbidden Book, by herself, of course.
From her sixty-five-metre-high vantage point she could view the entire Brasov Town Square below her. The festival looked like an Arabian bazaar, most of the town having turned out for the celebration. The food stalls and gypsy entertainment were at full frolic. Children’s laughter and adult shouts of joy rose up to Lucille’s ears. The pleasant aroma of gomboc and budinca mingled with the noise.
Reaching into her knapsack, she withdrew the Luger. Pulling back the toggle, she chambered a round, flipped on the safety, and stuck the pistol into the pocket of her sweater—rather, a sweater of her father’s that she had claimed as her own. The weight of the handgun pulled down the ancient knit until it hung a foot below the other pocket. That wouldn’t do.
Pulling the pistol out, she instead stuck it in the back waistband of her pants, the motion reminding her of a Bogart/Cagney gangster movie for a brief moment. She felt foolish.
But then, recalling the impending danger, she fumbled in her knapsack for her binoculars. She often bicycled around future ambush sites, playing the role of bird-watcher, peering through her glass at various birds, even cataloguing her sightings in a tiny notebook. She had, of course, studied a guide on Rumanian birds in case a suspicious soldier stopped and queried her. She could recite enough particulars to fool any amateur and probably a few professionals, being fully knowledgeable about the short-toed and golden eagle, the black woodpecker, assorted dippers, and the scarce ring ouzel. It was a way to monitor troop movements without arousing too much suspicion.
Lucille was usually able to bat her lashes and twist a flirtatious finger through her copper hair and talk her way out of any encounter, more of them lately, but the notebook, the binoculars, and her avian spiel were always ready to prove her case. The pistol, if they failed.
So far the use of the Luger had not been required.
She focused her glasses on the building at the centre of the plaza—the three-hundred-year-old Town Hall. Two storeys tall, with a clock tower adding a third. In the old days the Council House was where the one hundred privileged citizens, representatives of the various Guilds, used to rule Brasov. With the power of the Guilds now only history, today the upper floor contained the Mayor’s offices, his own inner sanctum facing the Square, fronted by a large portico. This porch, roofed, but with large, open, arched windows, was where the town leaders were now meeting, the men drinking and dining alfresco, able to gaze down at the festivities in the plaza below.
She could see the men gathered in the portico. They were obviously waiting for something or someone. They ambled about the great office, glasses of sherry in hand, smoking the sulphurous cigars handed out by the Mayor, who kept the good tobacco for himself in a humidor hidden in his side bar.
Lucille knew them all. General Suciu, the Rumanian commander of the Mountain Division, which held dominion over Brasov and the surrounding area of Transylvania. He was a lackadaisical officer, wearing his wrinkled, ill-fitting uniform as if it were a pair of overalls. Never comfortable with his military position, he spent more time with his lumber business, fleecing the government, selling overpriced green wood. Business was good. War, as always, was good for business.
The General had recently expanded his interests into a manufacturing plant in Targoviste, relining gun barrels to enable various field cannon to fire the same 75mm round the Germans used. Not coincidentally, his own units were ordering these artillery refits in large numbers. Lucille had personally put his factory on the Resistance’s list for sabotage.
He was a soft-looking man, always seeming distracted from the conversation at hand, his Division known for their lack of aggression and general slovenliness. Every Resistance mission was grateful for this listless attitude. There were rumours that Suciu regularly stole his men’s rations for resale and that one could purchase an officer’s rank or a promotion within his organization with coin or, in one instance, a land deed. He was doing well in the war and so was his tailor, who kept busy letting out the waistband of the General’s uniform trousers.
Right now the fat-faced General was leaning out the window, his dishwater-grey eyes enjoying a bird’s-eye view of the women’s cleavage below. Since it was proper during festivals to wear the traditional open-necked peasant blouse, his eyes were flitting about in his head like a canary trying to escape its cage, and his little pink tongue constantly slimed his lips.
Father Petrescu, the Catholic priest, was glancing at the General with resigned contempt. Though most of Brasov was Lutheran, Petrescu was the agreed-upon religious leader in the area, a position earned by his Krakow University education and his equanimity in any dispute. His face was always red, made more so by the stark contrast with his white collar and black cassock, his skin burned by the sun in the summer and chafed by the wind in the winter, as he bicycled from one end of the parish to the other trading selected morsels of gossip for food and drink. For the isolated farmers, wives and children of the valley, he performed the roles of newspaper, radio, and, every once in a while, priest.
His whippet-thin physique induced every woman on his route to try to fatten up the cleric with a hearty meal, often providing provisions for the road, which he parcelled out to the least prosperous of his flock. It was a tribute to the man’s conviviality and charity that a good many of his invitations often came from non-Catholic homes.
Constable Chiorean leaned over the priest to refill his glass. The regional police officer was a great bear of a man, his imposing height and barrel chest enough to intimidate any criminal or rabble-rouser. Yet he combined this with a benign calm in any situation. No matter how excitable anyone else became, the good Constable’s quiet demeanor, accompanied by his giant hand laid upon an angry shoulder, was enough to defuse any volatile situation. He was also the hairiest human Lucille had ever encountered. His mustache sprouted from nose to sideburn, his hands were carpeted with hair long enough to braid, tendrils of hair curled out from his collar and tufted out of his ears, and his eyebrows grew like one long hedge over his brown eyes.
The Constable and the priest were in deep conversation with Mayor Muresanu, a tiny man who compensated for his bald pate with an explosion of beard. His face was dominated by a nose the size of a pear that was tapestried with a filigree of red and blue veins. He assumed the mantle of office as if it were a birthright and strutted around Brasov like the majordomo of an exclusive French restaurant, his self-importance bloated miles beyond his station.
Lucille’s father, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, was accepting a light for his cigar from Captain Lobenhoffer. She would chide him later for this; he had promised to give up nicotine, which he himself declared a poison. He was in his eighties now and, by his own diagnosis, his lungs were not what they were. Lucille was going to give him hell—if he lived to hear it
.
The Nazi, Lobenhoffer, was a tall, sallow man with glasses who always appeared to have a bad taste in his mouth. His thin, blond mustache seemed to be constructed of only twelve hairs and hovered over a wet, thin mouth that twitched when he was frightened. Lucille knew this firsthand.
The Captain and her father were in deep conversation, most likely about Lobenhoffer’s distinguished heritage going back to Gebhard von Blucher, the famous Teutonic General. Her father had told Lucille that Lobenhoffer could recite his lineage like a child declaring the alphabet and did it with the same singsong rhythm. The trouble was that the German could never remember whom he had told, therefore Van Helsing and everybody Lobenhoffer encountered in Brasov had heard the list of ancestors so many times they could repeat it back to him.
Her father, who still maintained a remarkable memory, was probably biting his tongue to keep from finishing the recitation for Lobenhoffer.
From Lucille’s view, the group in the Mayor’s office seemed a congenial lot. They were completely unaware that the dreaded German SS were about to interrupt the conviviality.
Lucille tried to think of a way to warn her father, pull him out of danger. She could not do it herself; Lobenhoffer might recognise her. Was there a phone downstairs in the church Chapter-house? Could she enlist one of the gypsies to carry a message? She surveyed the crowd below and spotted Janos. Janos!
Lucille and Janos had been lovers since the partisans had ambushed the convoy in the forest, their union the result of a celebratory bacchanal. He had also played a major part in the Brasov Autonom rescue, commandeering the tank, but he had covered his face with a scarf so Lobenhoffer would not recognise him. Janos could go warn her father and the others. Was it worth the risk?
Focusing her binoculars on the plaza below, she found Janos gorging himself on pup de crump at Afina Vula’s table. The woman was throwing her great bosom into his face at every opportunity, feeding him with her own hand like one would offer an apple to a horse. Somehow grated potato crumbs kept falling into that great chasm of cleavage, forcing her to forage for them. It appeared that Janos was suffering from momentary vertigo as he watched her fat fingers dive into that fleshy abyss.
Dracula vs. Hitler Page 4
