One of these men, snatched from his home before his mother’s terrified eyes, a fellow named Vuia, was actually a member of the local partisan cell. The Germans found a number of Rumanian Army uniforms buried under his chicken coop floor, plus a cache of weapons in an abandoned well on his property.
We were taught in our SOE training that everyone breaks under torture. Everyone. So it becomes a matter of how long you can hold out. But at the same time, it is incumbent for every man to remain silent as long as he is able, to give his compatriots the time to flee.
Vuia talked within a day. The Resistance had prepared for this in their organization, creating independent cells of two and three among the lower echelons. Vuia gave up names. One Zsigmond was dragged out of his own butcher shop, still wearing his bloody apron. He had been ordered to flee, but he bought into the myth that a strong man like his dear friend Vuia could stand up to anything the Nazis could dish out. That and his business and large family connections rooted him in the town, and he resisted all pleadings to run.
The Schmeisser and grenades Zsigmond hid in the carcass of a hog were confiscated as further proof, if any was needed, of his guilt.
The third leg of their cell followed orders and fled to another partisan group up north, avoiding capture. He left only hours before the Nazis appeared at his upholstery shed.
Reikel must have thought that he had wrung as much intelligence as he could from the two unfortunate men. Two days after their capture both Zsigmond and Vuia were paraded through town, then lashed upright to a machine-gun stanchion mounted in the bed of a three-quarter-ton lorry. Word quickly spread, and even I was allowed out of hiding to witness the spectacle that followed:
The Professor, his daughter, and I walked a short distance from their home, a half mile or so, where a scattering of locals had gathered at the intersection of two roads. Above us a murder of crows lined up on the telephone wires as if to view the scene for themselves. I tried not to take this omen too seriously. My error. At the approach of the Nazi lorry and accompanying vehicles, the birds took flight, swirling over our heads like some E. A. Poe harbinger of death.
Both men’s faces were bloody, swollen, bruised, and cut, Vuia’s face so plethoric that his eyes were but two slits. Their hands were mangled, malformed, fingers bent in ways not natural at all. There were large bloodstains in the crotch of their trousers, the cause not evident, but forcing your imagination to horrid conclusions.
Zsigmond tried to hold his head tall, defiant, but his strength or his pain betrayed him and he kept sliding down the pole that supported him. The two guards would haul him back to vertical by his hair. Vuia kept his head down, eyes to the floor, if he could see anything through the swelling. Whether his posture was from defeat, shame, or exhaustion one could not tell.
Some of the citizens lining the road stared, some averted their eyes, a few turned their backs. There was no indication whether the latter behaviour was out of repugnance or to protest the demeaning of these two brave men, poor, doomed souls that they were.
The procession, two German military cars front and aft of the lorry, stopped at the crossroad intersecting the main northern thoroughfare entering Brasov. Stakes were driven into the ground and both men were tied hands and feet to them, spread-eagled so that their bodies spanned the narrow road.
By this time, traffic had backed up six or seven vehicles deep. No one dared to complain. The cordon of armed Nazis was enough to discourage any protests. So we waited, mostly silent, only a low murmur of hushed voices, as if the audience were inside a church rather than out in an overcast spring day.
The arrival of Major Reikel, about whom I had heard so much, bestirred the crowd. The gathering was growing by the moment. Passengers from halted vehicles disembarked to see what was causing the delay, and folk from the neighbouring area arrived to see what the commotion was about. The Major rode up in a noisy half-track.
I was standing in a pasture along with thirty or forty observers, feeling like a hedgehog in a cat’s litter. I was not yet comfortable in my clandestine cover of worn baggy pants and a leather coat that hung on me like a tent without poles. But the Major, standing high on his perch, paid me no special attention.
Reikel—I was informed that this was the very beast from the Town Square massacre—stepped out of his half-track with an imperious air and strode over to the two partisans staked out across the road. He didn’t say a word, but examined them for a brief moment, a nearly imperceptible smile upon his cold face, then just walked back to his vehicle and mounted it. Standing erect, he nodded to his Lieutenant.
This Lieutenant, Guth by name, shouted out to the assembled crowd, “Let this be a warning. Any terrorist activity will be punished. Not only against the perpetrators. The citizenry who allow these insurrectionists to hide among you will be punished at the same quota established by your former Mayor. Seven to one.” Then he walked to the first vehicle in the queue. It was a big two-ton flatbed hauler driven by a heavily bearded man.
“Proceed,” the Lieutenant ordered the driver.
The man looked down from his cab at the two men prostrate in his path. There was no way to drive around them, with a steep drainage ditch on one side of the road and a high kerb bordering the other. The driver shook his head.
The Nazi stepped up onto the running board, drew his pistol, and put the barrel to the recalcitrant driver’s temple. The man put the lorry in gear. The vehicle began to roll forward slowly.
Vuia and Zsigmond turned their heads to watch the approaching wheels, big, black, knobby tyres.
“Fast!” Zsigmund cried out.
The driver closed his eyes and stomped on the pedal. The engine roared and the great mechanical beast jumped forward.
The massive wheels rolled over the men.
The driver, tears in his shut eyes, flinched at every bump.
A scream was heard from one of the victims, which one it was hard to discern. There was also an outcry among the spectators.
After the German leapt from the running board, the driver sped on, eager, I suppose, to put the whole nightmare behind him.
The next car was forced to do the same, then the next, and so on. Over and over, the gruesome exercise in terror continued, until the two men were but bloody smears on the road. One driver, a young man with a profound harelip, screamed to himself as he drove the short distance.
Reikel watched us with a look of business-like satisfaction, and then rode away, his point made. The crowd of witnesses dissipated like morning fog under the glare of the sun.
As I followed the Van Helsings back toward my warren in the basement, the old man, my contact, and his irritating but beguiling daughter paused to converse with a pair of men lurking in the shadows of a great elm.
I stopped with them, wanting to ask the Professor about his efforts contacting London, requesting an airdrop to provide me with a new radio. But the atmosphere was glum, properly so, and I decided not to broach the subject. We all looked at each other.
“A warning, they say,” one of the men said. “More like a display of savagery.”
“It is a preview of the world to come,” the Professor said.
“You have to agree, Van Helsing,” the other man said. “It is time for the turtle to pull in its head.”
Van Helsing! I was dumbfounded. The utterance was like ice water thrown into my face. I heard no more of the conversation as that name echoed around my brain like a shout inside a tunnel. Van Helsing!
On the trek back to the cottage I was in a dream state. Van Helsing. I watched the old man before me. It was as if a personage of myth and legend had materialised right before my eyes, as if Ulysses or King Arthur had suddenly appeared and asked me to high tea. Van Helsing: the Dutch physician, philosopher, man of letters, lawyer, folklorist, teacher. My grandfather’s colleague. The hero of The Book.
When we reached their house I was told to return to the basement, and I did so reluctantly. Would one want to leave the presence of the Scarlet Pi
mpernel? But I went.
I descended the stairs in a fugue state and found Renfield, for that was what everyone called him now, being kept company by our three abductors. The room had a dirt floor, smelled of earth and onions from the racks where an assortment of vegetables was stored. Shelves were filled with jars of home-canned goods, more shelves with tools, cans full of nails and odd bits, bicycle parts. A coal chute was the only other exit, no windows, the walls constructed of smooth river rock. The dank centre of the room was furnished with a few unmatched chairs, a small table sporting a wine bottle encrusted with a kaleidoscope of wax drippings, and two folding cots that had been brought in for the Sergeant and me. A dismal affair, all in all, but not uncomfortable considering that a few days before I had been contemplating a prisoner-of-war camp or worse.
“Show us your toys,” said the one who called himself Horea. No one had so far revealed their real name, just code names to maintain our covert mode.
Earlier I had engaged in a bit of a chin-wag with Horea and the two chaps, Closca and Crisan, my kidnappers. They all seemed as attached to each other as if they were triplets. Horea was the short man who sported a quite impressive Stalinist mustache, one wing of which was in a constant droop, making his face seem lopsided. He wore a beret, not, I suspected, as a sartorial choice but to conceal an excess of scalp in the northern realm. He was a staunch Communist, having been educated so in the Soviet Republic.
Closca was his opposite, a tall, older man with crisp, grey, short-cropped hair, like the bristles on a brush, standing straight up, wild eyebrows curling toward his widow’s peak, and a steel-like posture as befitted an ex–Iron Guard, the legendary Rumanian Legion of the Archangel Michael, religious fanatics who openly courted martyrdom. They had assassinated four Prime Ministers before Antonescu had them disbanded and many of them imprisoned.
The third man, Crisan, had that dark gypsy complexion, constant black stubble, and eyes ever squinting as if peering through a smoky room. He had a ready laugh, and he laughed often, the gold in his teeth flashing like Ali Baba’s treasure in a dark cave.
These men had nothing in common. In fact, in different circumstances they might have warred with each other, but a hatred of the Nazis and/or Antonescu was enough to unite them for now. What would occur between them after the war was grim to imagine, but for now they were allies.
Under the baleful glare of an overhead bulb, I opened my kit and proceeded to give them a little show of the trinkets provided by my dear friends in the SOE research and science departments, plus a few items an American OSS mate had given me to “field-test” for his own spy bureau.
There was my pipe that could provide a decent smoke until the proper occasion presented itself and then, with a twist of the stem, fire a bullet.
I demonstrated the invisible ink, which no secret agent is complete without. A miniature camera the size of a wristwatch and disguised as such. The Welrod pistol with silencer. Black Joe, the explosive in the guise of a lump of coal. They were particularly tickled at a similar device in the shape of a horse turd.
The trio became fascinated by the cigarettes treated with tetrahydrocannabinol acetate, an extract of Indian hemp that supposedly acted as a truth drug. The theory was to provide the ciggies to the enemy in a social circumstance and then be able to pump them for information.
Crisan wanted to test one on Horea to see if he actually was receiving the favors of a certain Floarea, but I had to refuse as my supply was limited.
Lastly I gave a small chalk talk, sketching on the earthen floor with a bit of wood, on the uses of the pen fuse, a pocket-sized time-delay incendiary. SOE called it the time pencil, and each could be set to go off for units of ten minutes to thirty days. You only had to press a ridge on the device to release acid that ate through a wire. When the wire snapped, the explosive inside detonated, igniting the attached explosive.
We had a lively discussion over the practicality and possible uses of these various diabolical instruments, they smoking fags and I trying to keep my pipe going for more than thirty seconds. I still had a small tin of Arcadia tobacco. We consumed a bottle of middling Tokay that Closca materialised from his leather coat like a magician drawing a bunny from his hat.
Their enthusiasm for my little presentation was fulsome, and they wanted demonstrations of everything. Since it all was in short supply and with no radio to call for more, I steered them away from the more dangerous creations and let them experiment with the invisible ink, adding that milk and urine could provide a suitable substitute. This prompted a testing of all three liquids. Subsequently there was a tincture of asparagus in the air, and I took the opportunity to update this journal.
Renfield meanwhile busied himself with his own kit containing a few boxes of gelignite, blasting caps, fuses, detonators, and spools of wire. I kept an eye on his handling of the explosives, enough to obliterate the house we occupied, but he was as conscientious as if he were in full use of his faculties. He checked every cap with the delicate care of a watch repairman, returning each metal tube to its berth in the specially constructed shock-absorbing box. The gelignite, itself a powerful explosive, was inert until primed, and he was careful to keep it separate from the ignition devices.
The project seemed to calm him and, rather than singing one of his obnoxious ditties, he happily hummed to himself like a busy bee. I think I discerned the melody of “Boo, Boo Baby, I’m a Spy.” As impaired as he was, did he still retain a sense of humour?
While he was so occupied, my mind went back to my astounding discovery—Van Helsing.
As a child, I was acutely aware of the dark secret that shadowed my family, the Thing of Which We Must Never Speak. My father and mother were both adamant that The Book and anything to do with it were forbidden subjects in our house. Of course this taboo was itself enough to prick my adolescent rebelliousness. Hence, I strove to unlock that mystery at every opportunity. My grandfather, the font of this secret, discovered my interest, a scrapbook that I hid under my bed during one of my frequent visits to his home. I had diligently filled it with film reviews, magazine articles, and assorted material, everything I found concerning The Book and The Movie. If my mother’s and father’s attitudes toward the subject were any guide I was expecting a severe castigation from him.
But in a tribute to my grandfather’s intellect and perspicacity, in lieu of punishment and further admonitions, the old man brought me into his confidence, a secret society of two, never telling my parents of our shared communion with his past.
There were no documents, no evidence of the truth of the matter, just The Book, the scar on my grandmother Mina’s forehead, and the contents of my scrapbook, the trivial musings on a bit of popular fiction. I hung on his every word as he related the events, tragic and otherwise, that had transpired so many years ago. I knew the story by heart, and it was as much a part of me as if I had personally participated. His version often varied from The Book, such as my grandmother’s scar, which in the printed story miraculously disappeared but in actuality was seen every day, hidden behind a fringe of hair she wore over it.
All in all the two accounts stayed true, at least in the larger narrative if not in the particulars. Yet, because of the variations, I suppose there was always a part of me that thought it all might actually be a fabrication, a divertissement for my beloved grandfather as he bonded with me, maybe a chance similarity of names that he took advantage of and I, a gullible child, embraced. This niggling doubt had always chewed at a corner of my mind like a rat at a block of cheese.
But now I had evidence! Van Helsing! Another name linked to the story. In the country of its origin! My curiosity was a fire within me.
I heard the basement door open and the daughter’s voice announce supper. We went upstairs, where a pleasant and hearty repast was laid upon the dining room table. The daughter, Lucille—at last she had revealed her name—had prepared an Italian meal of noodles and a pesto sauce, trout from the local streams, crusty bread from oat flour, and
olive oil for dipping. The wine, a Grasa de Cotnari, 1928, more than earned its title of Rumania’s Bloom.
The home was a small Saxon cottage, three bedrooms upstairs with modern bathrooms. The downstairs also had a recent renovation to contain the Professor’s vast library and a separate medical receiving and examination suite. The furniture was a variety of styles and eras, and every room was crammed with objects collected, I assumed, from Van Helsing’s wanderings about the globe. Curiosities abounded: stuffed creatures, shrunken heads, bits of stone with hieroglyphics, ancient jars. He also seemed to have a predilection for modern devices, from stereopticons to electric massage instruments. Besides a most impressive library, there were books and periodicals stacked on every available surface in every room, even the kitchen and the loos. Recording devices seemed to be a particular obsession of the old man; wire and wax recorders of various types and manufacturers were piled willy-nilly in one corner of the downstairs parlour.
As we dined, a great blaze flamed and flared in the fireplace, sending a hollow roar up the chimney. The warmth sunk through my flesh and gave me such lethargy that I had to move myself away.
During the meal the Professor, who ate sparingly, passed around a leaflet that the Germans had posted all over Brasov. In Rumanian, it declared that the area was henceforth under martial law, announced a curfew that went into effect immediately, and warned that any transgression or “acts against civility or the peaceful enforcement of military rule will be met with instant and considerable justice.”
“Justice,” the daughter spat.
“They think this will stop us?” Horea declared defiantly.
“Many more reprisals like the slaughter in the Square will turn the people against us,” Closca warned.
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