I tried to congratulate Dracula on the success of his first foray, but I was rebuffed with a sneer and a command to leave him be. His mood was not lightened by the gift of new clothes either, the ungrateful punter. Though he did change out of his ruined clothing, his bad temperament continued. I envy the beast. His raid was an unqualified victory. He is a one-man army. If I had his powers—what havoc I could, would, cause.
While we waited for nightfall I managed to find a moment when Lucy and I could be alone.
“Lucy, I was wondering if you and I, if it may be possible, for us, you and I, well, more importantly, if I could have another chance to, uh, pursue our association. As before, I mean.”
“Association,” she repeated with a slight smile. I was so glad of that beam of lightheartedness. It was like a ray of sunlight after a grim storm. Encouraged, I pressed my suasion.
“If you could just give me more time to prove myself,” I said.
“Harker, please, don’t,” she said.
“Call me Jonathan. I’ll do anything, Lucy. Anything. Just tell me where I am lacking and I will surpass your expectations, I know.”
“Har . . . Jonathan, stop this. I thought we had resolved this matter. Let it be.”
And she walked away from me.
The drive to our next objective was silent, none of us speaking. For once I longed for one of Renfield’s vulgar tunes.
EXCERPTED FROM THE UNPUBLISHED NOVEL THE DRAGON PRINCE AND I by Lenore von Mueller
Lucille’s spy had alerted her about a supply train destined for Germany. Over thirty boxcars filled with chromium ore, a prime material needed to make ball bearings.
As Horea said, “No motor runs without bearings, no car or truck moves without bearings. No boats or planes or tanks. No bearings—no war.”
He had arranged for them to stay at a Masonic Hall. Crisan and Closca went into town to find an objective for the Prince who, despite his recent emotional turmoil, insisted that he do his part.
Lucille drove Renfield and Harker to reconnoitre the best location to attack the train. The Prince stayed behind, avoiding the daylight and seemingly deep into a book. Lucille knew he was not reading; he did not turn a page in the hour that she watched him.
Harker was sullen and withdrawn during the entire trip. Lucille wanted to chide him for this schoolboy pout but held back. She had done enough damage to what was obviously a fragile soul.
A suitable spot on the railway was found. It was far enough out of town that a derailment would not endanger any of the local inhabitants.
Upon their return to the hall Lucille checked, and it appeared that the Prince had read no further than when she left.
Horea laid out a table of meat pies and early tomatoes. Lucille ate while she walked over to the dark corner where the Prince had remained.
“You do not have to fight with us,” she told him. “You could withdraw from the battle.”
He gazed at her for a moment, pain evident on his face. “I am a weapon for you to use at will,” he softly replied. “But be cautioned thusly, I am indiscriminate in my slaughter, and I do not want the killing of innocents on my conscience. The further killing of innocents. Not anymore.”
“What happened last night?” she asked. “Tell me.”
“It will change your opinion of me,” he said. “And not for the better. And the loss of your esteem will cause me more pain than my deplorable act.”
“Do you think that I have not done something in this war that I am ashamed of, that I regret with every part of me?” She gestured to the men gathered around and eating. “We have all committed acts that haunt us at night. Except for Harker, I suppose. But it will happen to him, if he lives long enough. Dastardly acts are part of war. Tell me what weighs so heavily upon you. If we are to be colleagues in this conflict, if we are to depend on each other for our very lives, if we are to be friends, we need to know each other.”
She could see the Prince considering her words.
“There was a woman at the hotel, more of a girl, with one of the Huns, in his room, in the midst of coupling . . .” he began. “So young, thin, you could count her ribs . . . I was in a rabid fury, in no control whatsoever, and I attacked her.”
His eyes bored into her own, challenging her, daring her to hate him.
“I feasted on her, just as I did on our enemy. I ripped her asunder. She was an innocent.”
“Perhaps,” Lucille replied. “But in some of the occupied countries, Rumania even, someone who cohabitates with the enemy is deemed a collaborator. And they are quite often punished. Even killed.”
“And you approve of these reprisals?” he asked.
“No. But they happen,” she said. “Everyone fights their own war, creates their own morality. If what you did is an anathema to you, do not do it again.”
“You miss the point. If I could control myself . . . It is not that simple.”
“Yes, it is. You are an intelligent man. Cultured and with some control over your . . . passions, or hungers, or whatever drives you in these moments. You have not attacked any of us.”
“You do not know what I have wanted to do to you and your compatriots,” he said.
“No, you miss the point,” she said. “You have enough control to not rip us, as you say, ‘asunder.’ Try to do the same when you confront our enemy. War is not for coddling. Fight with us or go back to your tomb or prey on the innocents you seem to care so much about. You said before that you wanted to redeem yourself, that you would kill some Germans for us. Cry on someone else’s shoulder. Now, come over so you can be briefed on your next assignment. Or don’t, and I will find you transportation back to where Father found you.”
She walked to where the other men were eating. The Prince followed. He made a slight bow to Harker.
“I thank you for the new wardrobe,” he said to the Englishman. “Now, where am I needed next?”
Closca and Crisan briefed them about a telephone-switching centre a few miles away where a German Gestapo contingent was lodged. Phone calls from all across the country were being monitored by the Nazis.
“Gestapo?” Dracula asked.
“The Nazi intelligence apparatus,” Harker explained. “A particularly nasty group of blighters, fond of torture, kidnapping, and assassination.”
Lucille turned to the Prince.
“Are you game, Prince Vlad?” she asked.
“Indubitably,” he replied.
When dark fell they went their separate ways. Horea once again accompanied the Prince. Before they left Lucy took Horea aside.
“Stay close. Don’t just drop him off this time,” she told him. “Make sure he attacks only our enemies. But do not put yourself in jeopardy if he . . . loses control. Understand?”
Horea nodded and she gave him a quick embrace, wished him luck, and joined Harker and the others. The drive was uneventful, nary a Rumanian military patrol in sight.
At the railroad tracks Harker put the tools of the saboteur’s trade into Renfield’s hands, and the demolition expert once again emerged from the daft balladeer.
“The pressure switch.” At a rail siding Renfield showed them a little box with a prong standing out of the top. “Responds tae weight hitting on a hinged metal plate, striking and igniting the detonator.”
A hole was dug and the unit set beneath the steel rail, the prong just touching the underside.
“Plastic explosive.” Renfield held up a block twelve inches long, a couple thick, four wide. A pale yellow putty-like substance. “Unlike ammonium nitrate, ’tis safe tae store and handle.”
Lucille was well versed in the use of ammonium nitrate, and how dangerous it was. How it caked in humid conditions and then became hazardous. One of her fellow partisans lost a hand when a caked portion spontaneously blew up while he was merely trying to carry it to a hiding place.
Renfield set a few pounds of the plastique under the rails some distance behind the pressure switch, then connected the two.
When
the charges had been set, Lucille and the others lay in a potato field two hundred metres from the booby-trapped rail line.
In less than an hour the locomotive engine rolled across the booby-trapped spot and struck their mine. She heard a sharp blast and saw the engine leap into the air. It came down upon the gravelled siding. Sheer momentum propelled the iron beast across the ground, scouring the earth like a plow blade. With infinite slowness, the massive engine fell onto its side and came to a shuddering stop. The cars filled with chromium ore accordioned to a great cacophony of screeching steel and piled up upon each other like tin toys discarded by a petulant giant.
The locomotive’s boiler blew, sending a fireball into the air and momentarily turning night into day. The concussion pounded through her body. Lucille watched the conflagration with her mouth hanging open, stunned.
She and the demolition team returned to their hideaway, and this time Harker refrained from the celebratory drinking. They found Horea and the Prince already returned from their own mission, the vampire peeling off another bloodied shirt. Lucille approached Horea, who was opening a bottle of rachiu he had found somewhere. He had a truffle hog’s ability to sniff out alcohol.
“How did your visit go?” she asked.
“It was quick work for his majesty,” Horea replied. “The Gestapo worked out of a private room. We caught them at the midnight shift change, herded both shifts into the eavesdropping room without being seen. While the Dark One went in to do his dirty work I gathered the telephone employees and sent them on their way. Once the Dragon was done, we blew up the entire switching station. Stuff old Renfield gave me. It was a merry blast.”
Lucille left him to his celebration and walked over to where the Prince was sorting through his books. “I’m afraid I am running out of stories,” he told her.
“We’ll have to find a bookstore,” she said. “So, how was this venture?”
“I seemed to have ruined another set of clothing,” he replied.
“You know what I mean.”
“I . . . I was able to restrain myself this time.”
“Good for you.”
“It was most difficult.”
“But you succeeded,” she said.
“Barely,” he sighed. “I almost gave in to my more savage instincts. As I left I encountered a young man. An employee, I suppose, another innocent. I was in thrall of my bloodlust and . . . He was most . . . His pulse was like a siren song, I could hear his heart, I could taste . . . He was nothing to me but a surcease of my thirst, this hunger that overcomes, that rules me. I stopped but . . . I am afraid that I have lost any humanity that I may have possessed.”
“I doubt that,” she replied. “You take joy in literature, poetry. You seem to hunger for that as well. So there must be a sliver of humanity left somewhere in there.”
She tapped him on his naked chest. He did not recoil from her touch.
“True,” he answered.
“And there must be a few other random emotions flitting about inside you, no matter how dormant. You once felt love, if that novel was in any way correct. For Lucy Westerna and Nina Murray, as I recall.”
“Not my proudest moment.” He shook his head as if trying to dislodge the memory. “You remind me of a time when I lost control completely.”
“But you felt something human,” she said. “That was my point. Maybe that wasn’t the best example. Tell me, when was the last time, before your dalliance in England, that you were in love?”
“You are most inquisitive,” he said.
“Too much so?”
“No, no. I am not used to a woman so forthright,” he said. “If you must know, my last great love died in my arms, withered and diseased with age, gasping for breath and cursing me for not aging with her.”
“So, you felt sorrow and guilt,” she noted. “A step in the right direction. Next thing you know you’ll be telling bad jokes and farting out loud. You do—”
“Woman, you presume too much!” His anger was quick and then just a suddenly dissolved into a wide, wolfen grin. She laughed with him. Lucille saw Harker watching them and the distress on his face. She sighed; another wounded man she must deal with. Sometimes she felt more like a nanny than a warrior.
FROM THE WAR JOURNAL OF J. HARKER
(transcribed from shorthand)
I think I have found the source of the disaffection between Lucy and me. For two nights I have seen her and the vampire in deep conversation, putting themselves apart from the rest of our merry band. They speak in low tones. I cannot hear the words, but there is an obvious intimacy between the two. Has that insidious creature been seducing Lucy all this time? The ruddy gall of the man. Has he mesmerised her? He is capable of such, this I know from conversations with Lucy.
What can I do about this situation? I am a clever man, top of my class in “Clandestine Manoeuvres.” Surely I can figure a way to eliminate my rival without giving myself away.
It was my decision to drive to the next town in the daylight, the vampire ensconced in the back of the hearse, the windows blacked out. Dracula read, lying next to the comatose Renfield.
We had two objectives at our next location, a coming convoy that had originated in the south plus a synthetic rubber plant that was to be a target for the vampire.
“Rubber is vital to their war machine, all those tyres and other parts, gaskets and belts and such,” I said. “That and fuel.”
This factory was in the process of being disassembled, the machinery packed up to be sent to the Rhineland. I explained the reasoning behind the Nazis’ actions to Lucy. The vampire listened from behind the partition that separated the front seat and the cargo section of the hearse.
“The Germans are removing all highly technical industries from their slave countries and plan to re-establish them in Germany so that the subjected peoples will become dependent on the benevolence of their German masters. Then the slave populations will produce the raw materials and labour to feed these industries and the food to feed the Nazi bastards. Rumania and countries like it will become only mining and agricultural communities forever under the yoke of Germany—and without the technology to ever rebel.”
“Very clever of them.” Dracula’s voice could be heard from behind me.
“But we are smarter,” Lucy said.
“So, this rubber manufacturing establishment, I am to eliminate the German supervisors, correct?” Dracula asked. “Where do they spend their nights?”
“They sleep on-site,” I told him. “They have taken over the foreman’s residence.” Then I added, “I was thinking I could go with you on this one.”
Lucy frowned at me. Perhaps she could ascertain my real motive: to probe Dracula about his intentions toward her.
“I think not,” Dracula replied. “Horea will do. You are needed with the ambush unit.”
I could not argue. Not without revealing my subterfuge. We arrived at our latest refuge, the grain warehouse of a local who was loyal to our cause—the German levies on his stocks (at below-market costs) most likely added to his justification to help us.
Leaving the vampire in the safety of the dark building, Lucy, Renfield, and I drove away to scout our next ambuscade. A land mine was put into Renfield’s hands, and he became alive with excitement at the explosive possibilities before him.
On our return Lucy insisted on stopping thrice, once to purchase some new clothing for the vampire and again at a bookstore to replenish his dwindling stores of reading material. I could not help myself and was nearly overwhelmed by a wave of jealousy. The very vision of Lucy shopping for me, as mundane a purchase as a shirt, made my heart beat faster and my mind swoon with a paroxysm of intimacy. I had to stop this.
The third stop was to use a friendly phone to call her father and receive an update on the circumstances in Brasov. Most of her inquiry, though, seemed to be quizzing him about whether he was eating properly and not climbing a ladder to trim the roses on the cottage, not without having someone to spot this da
ngerous chore. There was a pause as she listened to something her father said.
“We are having great luck with our mushroom hunt” was her reply. Clever girl, knowing that the phone lines might be monitored. There was another pause, then, “Father, do not worry. We have been avoiding the poisoned ones.”
Upon our return we feasted on a meal scavenged by the Marx Brothers, as Lucy refers to our compatriots. I do not know if my palate has been rendered numb by the repetitive diet or that the rations no longer have an alien enticement about them, but lately food has become nothing but fuel. No enjoyment there, either.
While we ate, consumed the better term, a middling wine, and yet another variation on cornmeal, I could not help but notice Lucy watching Dracula, the vampire deep into a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. He reads all the time, like some dowager with nothing to else to do. I suppose if you do not sup, at least at mealtime, or sleep, then you must find a way to pass the time. Still he is an arrogant fellow, even asking me to dust off his sitting place once, treating us often like vassals. I have no patience with someone who thinks the sun surely shines out of his arse.
Dracula vs. Hitler Page 19
