The General backed away a step. “I have neither the inclination nor the manpower to pursue these rebels. They are all yours.”
Reikel nodded, went back to the Mayor as if he had never been interrupted. He contemplated the photo. “Your daughter, she is beautiful. How old?”
“Seven,” Muresanu said with a trembling voice.
Reikel turned back to the open archway and spoke to the SS Lieutenant below.
“Seven, Lieutenant Guth. The number is seven. Adults only.”
Leaning over the balustrade, Van Helsing watched Guth, a thinner, younger version of the Major, his blond hair sheared close to the sides of his head, blue eyes without emotion. Guth walked over to the line of Brasov citizens who stood against the walls of the storefronts that lined the plaza. He drew his pistol from his holster and began counting the people, skipping the youngest.
“Eins, zwei, drei . . .”
“No.” Van Helsing heard his voice utter that single word.
At the count of “sieben,” Guth shot the man standing in front of him, Mihail Palade, a taciturn truck driver and sometime taxi service. Van Helsing winced as if he had been shot himself.
There was an audible gasp from the people lining the Square as Palade’s body slumped to the cobblestones.
Guth proceeded counting without pause. He reached “sieben” again and fired another shot. Another innocent, Nadia Tiriac, a woman who took in cleaning and sewing, very popular for her communion dresses. She collapsed like a string-cut puppet, a bullet in her head.
The people lining the Square roused from their shocked silence. A few began to protest. These were instantly and brutally clubbed by SS rifle butts. Other protestors were held back by the threat from the other end of the rifles pointed at them.
Guth kept on. Bodo Frontzek, an ironmonger and plow repairman, father of eight girls.
Counting and shooting. Again and again and again. The people of Brasov began turning their heads away at every seventh count.
Van Helsing knew every one of the victims. Knew their children, their parents, their wives and husbands. He felt every bullet.
One man, Mik Banfy, shouted, “Take me!” as the woman next to him, the widow Abady, faced the seven count. His appeal made no difference.
Women weeped and wailed. Grown men cried. Walderman Zirndorf raised up his hands, either to beg or futilely ward off the bullet that tore through his palm, then his face.
Janos Maer, former carpenter, now fierce partisan and lover of Van Helsing’s daughter, stood farther down the line. He could take no more and pulled his ancient Wembley pistol from under his shirt.
“No! No more!” he shouted. “Let’s take them! We outnumber them!”
And he fired at the German Lieutenant. The bullet chipped the stucco in front of Israil Zingher’s candy store. Guth did not even duck.
Janos was instantly the target of a dozen rifles and machine guns. His body danced for a brief second under the fusillade’s impact, then fell. The plaza was quiet, the report of the guns still echoing off the surrounding hills. The Germans eyed the residents with an intense vigilance, anticipating another outburst. It did not come.
“He does not figure in the count,” Reikel said in that quiet voice with the same insouciance as he did everything.
Van Helsing could only grit his teeth. He had heard a cry when Janos pulled the gun, a female voice that sounded much like his daughter, Lucille. He searched the faces in the plaza, but could not see her anywhere. He reversed the process and examined the line again, but still no Lucille. Had his mind played a trick on him, presenting his worst fear in this dreadful moment?
One man looked down the line and visibly counted the people from one victim to himself. The result was obviously a multiple of seven and he began to keen like an injured cat until the bullet from the German Lieutenant’s gun mercifully silenced him.
Guth kept counting and shooting, the shock weakening at every killing until toward the end his victims just stood and waited with a fatal torpor, standing in place as Guth reloaded, shot, and reloaded again. A large Corporal followed, handing him full magazines.
Van Helsing could barely restrain his outrage and grief, grinding his teeth until the muscles in his jaw ached.
“Barbarous,” Van Helsing spat, glaring at Reikel. The Nazi Major met his gaze without emotion.
“Exactly,” Reikel replied. “Total war. Nothing less. Once people witness the consequences of any hostile action, they will cease their futile resistance. Or their wiser neighbours will persuade them. Oh, I forgot.” He leaned out the archway. “Lieutenant Guth, prepare a bed for the Mayor.”
Then he turned to the office entrance where Van Helsing could see two SS waiting patiently. Had they been there all along? He could not remember them arriving. Reikel nodded to them and the two soldiers quickly approached the perplexed Muresanu and, before the little man could react, grabbed him by his feet and shoulders and tossed him over the portico wall.
Van Helsing and the others rushed to look down and saw six German soldiers standing at rigid attention below, bayonets mounted on the barrels of their rifles, weapons held at the vertical.
The Mayor fell upon the upright knives and was impaled. He screamed in agony, writhed like a snake struck by a hoe.
Reikel, too, leaned out and impassively regarded the poor wretch.
“Finish him,” Reikel ordered softly and quickly withdrew his head.
The six soldiers fired their rifles, perforating the man stuck to their weapons. There was a report, a fountain of blood and meat spewed into the air.
“You bastard!” growled Constable Chiorean and lunged at the Nazi Major. Van Helsing put his body between the policeman and Reikel. The impact was formidable, staggering Van Helsing. The two SS soldiers used their rifle butts to knock Chiorean to the floor, and the air went out of the man.
Reikel surveyed the angry faces of the four remaining men.
“It is always best to make an example of one of the elite, to show that no one is immune from reprisal.” That fiendish little smile played across his mouth. “Absolutely no one.”
Reikel took the seat behind the Mayor’s desk, made himself comfortable, tossed the photo of the Mayor’s family into the trash basket. He looked at the four men as if he were surprised that they were still there.
“You are dismissed.”
“Revenge has no place in war.” This was a pronouncement from Lucille’s father after a partisan raid when many of her Resistance comrades were killed. Lucille’s anger and sense of loss had overcome her, and she had been about to shoot a captured soldier. Her finger tightened on the trigger of the Schmeisser she had pointed at a poor Rumanian soldier’s weeping face. But her father gently pushed the gun barrel aside and whispered those words into her ear.
She had relented and later contemplated that wisdom. The curious morality of war was thus: War was about killing the man who was trying to kill you, killing the man who was thinking about killing you, killing the man who had the potential to kill you. He had killed your friend—was that not reason enough to exact some kind of justice? She still disagreed with her father’s pronouncement. These were her thoughts as she dashed down the belfry stairs, taking them two, three at a time, in one headlong rush.
Lucille Van Helsing opened the church door and slowly walked across the Square, one hand deep inside her sweater, fingers tight around her Luger, ready to kill the SS Major if her father was to follow the Mayor out the window. Revenge might not be justifiable in war, but on a personal level revenge would be all that she would have remaining to her.
Lucille’s confidence in her protective spell had completely evaporated. In the belfry, peering through her binoculars at the Town Hall, she had heard a clink and looked down at the coins arranged at her feet. One of them had just flipped over, as if by an invisible finger. And at that very instant the Mayor had been tossed out the window to his gruesome death. She feared the worst. Had she botched the spell? Seeing the barbarous mur
der of the Mayor made her shudder in horror, and knowing that her father could be next, she flew down the belfry steps.
In the plaza the dead were being collected by their families under the watchful eyes and guns of the SS troops. Lucille saw an old woman, Ecaterina Tula, cover the dead face of Janos Maer with her tatty shawl while his mother moaned in misery.
Lucille did not pause to mourn. There would be a time for that later. She had learned this during preceding months, in raid after raid, losing one compatriot after another, some of them friends, close friends. The ordeal had taught her another lesson: Don’t become emotionally involved with anyone who fought alongside her. Until Janos. He had been a slip, one that she knew she would pay for in tears. She swore, not for the first time, never to let anyone get close to her again.
The only exception, of course, was her father. Father and daughter were exceptionally close due to the death of her mother when Lucille was ten. The mother was much beloved, and after the loss Lucille clung to her father and he to her.
The Professor had always treated his perspicacious daughter as an equal. Lucille, thrust into a sudden maturity, tried to take her mother’s place in the household, cooking, supervising the help, assisting in the clinic. Her intelligence and lively mind made her a formidable companion. As a teenager, her mind became more than a match for his own far-ranging intellect.
He tutored her himself, outside the local school curriculum, and furthered her education at Swiss private schools. He brought her with him for his own lengthy studies in Munich, Prague, and Zaragoza. Her enrollments at a succession of private schools were brief due to what she called “an independent spirit” and the schools labelled in other terms.
She always rejoined her father, telling him that she learned more in a week with him than in an entire semester with immature, rich brats and boring, doltish instructors. He wondered if she was just trying to flatter him, if there was a spoonful of honey in that tea, but she meant every word.
To tell the truth, she was a daddy’s girl, as lonely without him as he was without her. This was why Lucille was determined to personally assassinate every German in Brasov, Rumania, the entirety of Europe, if the Major had so much as harmed a hair on her father’s head.
But just as she was fuelling the furnace of revenge, within a few steps of the Town Hall entrance, her father walked out of the doorway with General Suciu, Father Petrescu, and the Constable. Each man at the moment appeared intent on being somewhere else. Professor Van Helsing was last, his face twisted with his inner thoughts.
He saw his daughter. “Lucille, what are you doing here?” He glanced back at the two SS soldiers who braced both sides of the door. Neither paid particular attention to the Van Helsings. And Lobenhoffer’s men had obviously left with their Captain.
He put an arm around her, whether for support or comfort she could not tell, as he led her toward the small group of mourners gathered about the bodies scattered around the plaza perimeter. Lucille also felt weak, the familiar aftermath of a spell casting and the usual residual headache that threatened to split open her skull.
“Did any of them survive?” he asked, mournfully perusing the aftermath.
“They are all dead. The Germans are, if nothing else, efficient.” Lucille pulled him away. “Please, Father, leave this place now.”
“What are you doing here? You could have been shot,” he chided in alarm. “Like those unfortunate ones.”
“I was in the bell tower,” she told him. “I saw . . . everything.” Her voice was filled with bile. “When they killed the Mayor . . . I came down. I couldn’t . . . there was nothing I could do . . . nothing.”
“I know,” he whispered. “I know.”
“I just stood there while they executed innocent people.” She shook her head at her own failings. “I am a coward. I am ashamed.”
“We live to fight another day.” Her father offered what little comfort he could. “We could have fought. And all died. Then who would resist the barbarians?”
“Janos fought them.”
“And Janos fights no more. What good is he to the Resistance now? We don’t need martyrs. We suffer under a surplus of martyrs.”
He sagged against her shoulder. She led him around the corner of the church. Her father paused to glance back at the Square. She turned, too, in time to see a giant swastika flag unfurled from the Town Hall portico.
“There are not that many of them,” she said. “We can eliminate them. Every single one of the bastards.”
“They have plenty more in Berlin,” her father said.
They collected her bicycle and walked in silence toward the outskirts of town and around the green dome of Tampa Mountain. Their house sat in the southwest shadows. They trod the entire way to their tiny villa without a word spoken. Lucille did not mention her spell cast. Her father was a man of science, a non-believer in the arcane arts. This despite his own experience with that great, emblematic creature of the occult. He was unaware of his daughter’s dabbling in the mystic arts, and she wanted to keep it that way, avoiding any useless confrontation. Her only regret was that she had not the strength to save everyone in the Mayor’s office, protecting only her father. She took the death of the poor Mayor on her own shoulders.
Sucking on her torn knuckle, Lucille observed her home as if she had never lived in it. A hundred-year-old cottage, its outside walls plush with climbing roses just beginning to bud. Her mother had planted them, and her father had faithfully tended the vines. The buds were but hints of colour, red, pink, yellow, and white, so full of promise that Lucille felt the irony deep in the pit of her stomach. Janos . . .
She fought the pull of her memories of the young man as a drowning victim fights for air, clawing toward a surface that kept receding as she sank into the depths of despair. The buoy that saved her was the thought of revenge. She clung to that desire to keep herself sane.
They were approaching their own door when her father finally spoke. “We need to reevaluate our tactics. Circumstances have been altered.”
“I’ll call a meeting,” she told him as he opened the door, glad to have some thought other than that of Janos to occupy her mind.
“Be most careful,” he advised, hanging his hat in the hall. “I have a feeling that this . . . Major is not so tepid an adversary as Lobenhoffer.”
A noise drew their attention to the front window. Coming down the road was another German convoy, trucks filled with stoic SS soldiers. The column of dust raised by the vehicles took forever to settle in the windless air.
“Reinforcements already. We have to be careful,” her father repeated. “Very, very careful.”
The knock at the back door startled both of them. She put her hand on her pistol and went to answer. Easing the door open, finger on the trigger, she saw a nervous figure standing in the shadow of the eaves. It was Closca, one of the partisans.
“We have caught us a spy,” he said.
Lucille’s first and only thought: Revenge.
FROM THE WAR JOURNAL OF J. HARKER
(transcribed from shorthand)
APRIL 24, 1941
Some bloody spy I turned out to be. Not behind enemy lines three days and I was on my way to a prisoner-of-war camp to sit out the rest of the war. Silly sod. King and country would be so proud—not to mention my mum.
Of course, I could just get shot. The thought did cross my mind. More than once. Maybe every ten seconds or so. I had no idea who had nabbed me. The hood over my head was completely opaque and cinched at my neck. The raw burlap rubbed the skin around my throat, causing an irritating burn. The least of my worries, I kept reminding myself, but the chafing was extreme. Plus, I was re-breathing my own hot breath over and over, creating a suffocating claustrophobia. I tried not to hyperventilate, as I knew I would pass out from oxygen deprivation. My hands were bound behind my back, otherwise I would have been clawing at the damned sack like the trapped animal that I was.
I called out to my Sergeant a few times and re
ceived no answer, not that he could have responded or would have in his current state. I assumed that he was similarly trussed. Rough hands manhandled me out of the paddock where we had spent the night. The thugs who awakened us so rudely trundled me into the back of a lorry of some sort. I found myself lying upon a steel bed reeking of manure and hay. There was also a sharp odour of diesel fuel, and I heard the rhythmic rattling of a four-cylinder engine. I bounced about the hard floor like a marble in a cigar box, rapping my skull more than once. Nothing like tenderizing the meat before tossing it into the cooking pot.
There were a few stops, more than a few turns. I tried to keep track of the twists and turns, but soon lost any sense of distance or direction. I could hear other engines, some passing. I could hear voices, but just a murmur, no words that I could make out.
After a while—time was immeasurable—the lorry stopped, and I was dragged across the floor and hoisted by my shoulders and feet like a sack of grain. I felt a brief flash of warmth as the sun seeped through the bag over my head, then darkness again as I was carried down a flight of stairs, my abductors grunting with the effort. I was put on my feet and eased into a sitting position on a hard chair. Retreating feet climbed the stairs, I heard a door close, with the creaking of hinges moaning for a bit of oil, and then I was left alone for what seemed like hours.
The possible loss of my life or years of imprisonment were nullified by an even more pressing concern. During this whole ordeal my bladder was near bursting. I am a man of habits, one of those being the emptying of such organ first thing every morning upon waking. Subsequently, the trip in the lorry was a circle of hell for me; every bump and jolt had been like somebody beating my bladder with a truncheon. Sitting in that chair, the wood jabbing into my bones, the urge became all-encompassing, and finally, to my dismay and profound embarrassment and, I have to admit, some relief, nature took its course. I almost wept in shame.
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