Stoker's Manuscript

by Royce Prouty

  I nodded.

  “This creature,” Mara said, “let you live. Why?”

  I shrugged, keeping thoughts of the crucifix to myself. Considering all that had happened, I continued to wear it.

  “Nobles,” she said. Her look told me that I knew the answer.

  “Nobles?”

  “Nobles—the ones born with parts. But since no one has seen any female breeders in centuries, there are no new breeders.”

  “Are the Commons as dangerous as the Nobles?”

  “Of course. They are the warriors who protect the Nobles. But don’t worry,” Mara said as she pointed to my crucifix. “So long as you wear that, they will not harm you unless ordered to.”

  As I prepared to leave, she reached behind a stack of books on her top bookshelf and handed me an untitled journal bound in a Victorian-patterned fabric with the initials G.A. written on the inside cover. It was handwritten, with several old photos and a couple letters. I recognized the paper from the Aachen region, circa the 1880s and placed it in my jacket pocket.

  “Take this,” she said. “You will need it to do your research.”

  I recalled the first time I had driven out to Mara’s cabin to deliver a rare German printing of The Vampyre. She entertained me with tales of vampire hunters who might be able to glean clues of locations from the book. I had paid little attention, intent on hurrying the check to the bank. This time I asked, “Is he . . . ?”

  “Yes,” she said, as if to read my thoughts. A hunter.

  I left with as many questions as I had arrived with, plus a few more, and promised to return with details.

  Doug Carli had left several phone messages and said he would wait for me, and after the long drive in from southern Wisconsin I arrived to find him alone in his office after hours.

  “Come in, come in,” Doug said, and closed the door behind me. “Please.” He pointed to a chair across from his desk.

  “Thanks,” I said, though I’m certain I didn’t look particularly grateful. “Your message mentioned due diligence.”

  “I took the liberty of calling my guy in Zurich about your man Ardelean there, and he did not want to talk over a landline. I got a cell call the next day, and this guy said the family you are dealing with is old Euro money.”

  “I assumed that.”

  “No, I mean old. As in older than the Swiss bank itself.”

  That did not surprise me.

  “Joseph, that means their wealth predates the entire banking and currency system. Whoever this is,” Doug said, looking over his reading glasses and wagging a finger, “do not cross them or screw up this deal.”

  “No mistakes. Appreciate it.”

  “I also made a call to one of my clients, a heavy hitter at the Field Museum.” By that, Doug meant someone on the top tier of the donor list. “Guy knows the curator at the Rosenbach. Got him in touch with the family’s selling agent.”

  It made me uneasy to think an outside party was being alerted to this transaction. “Did you need to do that?” I asked. I’m sure I sounded annoyed, because his response was a notch higher on the volume knob.

  “This is how you get things done.” He said it in such a way as to distinguish done from trying. “If you can pick up the phone and make things happen to conclude a transaction before walking into negotiations, that’s getting things done.”

  I shrugged and nodded.

  “As opposed to doing nothing and hoping that when you get there it works out for the best.”

  “So what did you do?” I asked.

  “Found out what the agent thinks it will take to close the deal without letting it get to auction.”

  “And the curator?”

  “He’s not in on the deal.”

  I nodded. “Good—didn’t want to soil a good referral source.”

  “So when you were here before, you figured a million or so at Christie’s. He thinks the family is looking for twice that. Your buyer in for that much?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “How much did he authorize?”

  I held up four fingers.

  “Perfect. What we have is the ideal scenario to consummate a deal—equally motivated buyer and seller. So here’s how you play it, Joseph: You offer two-point-six . . .” He stopped. “You tracking?”

  I was reminded how weary and worn I must have appeared. I acknowledged with a nod. “Two-six.”

  “You offer two-point-six and let the agent run that by the family. He’ll suggest that he thinks he can get more. At six hundred large, he knows that you’re halfway raised, and he’ll talk them into three million two.”

  I was thinking four. “What about the rest?”

  “Joey, stunod, your deal is for four mil. That’s what you wire to the agent’s escrow account. This is not like a real estate purchase, where the seller gets a copy of the escrow settlement sheet from the title company; the seller just gets a wire out of escrow.”

  “So . . . the rest falls to the agent for pushing through the deal.”

  “You’re a quick study.” He pointed a finger at me. “And a couple nice donations to the museums will go a long way toward your next referral.”

  “How nice is nice?”

  “Fifty should do it.” I must have looked blank, because he clarified, “Large. That would be fifty large.”

  My life was simple before that phone call came in, just a merchant dealing with markups and keeping dust off the jackets, tending to a closed shop with plenty of time to read. “Would I be rude to ask where your take comes from all this, Doug?”

  “You don’t worry about that, my friend, but I’d really like to hold that manuscript in my hands, just once. A treasure for the ages, you know.”

  That I would not be able to pull off unless he wanted to accompany me to Philadelphia the next day. “I’m going directly from the museum back to Europe the day after transacting, so you may have to go there if you want to hold it.”

  Doug shrugged. “One more thing,” he said, pointing his nose down and staring over his reading glasses. “When I said family, I mean you’re dealing with . . . a family.”

  I looked at him for clarification.

  “What I mean is, you already made your deal. You have to go through with it.”

  Don’t I know it . . .

  I thanked Doug as heartily as I could and left.

  My last stop for the day was to visit my brother, who was reading in the rectory from the front of the book—must have been the Old Testament. I didn’t know if he would have a fatherly scowl for my decision or be happy to see me, and I was pleased to see him excited as I held out his gift bag. But when he looked at my face, he quickly placed the offering on the table.

  “You have the widow’s stare,” he said. “Come in, tell me what you saw.”

  “Padoc de .” The Paddock of the Damned.

  He nodded. “So you met the caretaker, too.”

  “Yeah.” I accepted Bernhardt’s offer of bottled water. “A bunch of memories came flooding back in, none of them nice.”

  “Eight years later and I still see that place.” He looked down and shook his head. “When I was there I stopped in front of an orphanage. There were a dozen or so little boys, maybe five or six years old, with their little fingers gripping a chain-link fence. They were naked and in diapers.” He choked up. “I was too ashamed to stop and see if I could help.”

  “What could you have possibly done?”

  “Same thing someone did for us once. But I failed, Joseph. I failed my test.”

  “You can’t save everyone. Especially in that country.”

  He nodded. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” I paused. “Lot of strange things happen there.”

  “Easy to see why those people are so superstitious.”

  “Yeah.” I drained the
water bottle, and for the first time in my life I had an off-limits topic separating me and my brother. I started to ask him if he had any other strange encounters there, but instead pointed to his gift bag to change the topic. “Go ahead.”

  He spread the handles apart and looked in, and the smile returned to his face. He unwrapped the cross. “Old Believer.”

  “I thought it fit.”

  “A treasure from home. A good memory.”

  I nodded. “The square, at Stephen’s Tower.”

  He turned it over and over before kissing it, and his eyes watered.

  “And something to wear,” I said.

  He reached in the bag and unwrapped the embroidered shirt and held it up in front of him. “It’s perfect. I’ve been invited to a Serbian wedding out in Mundelein next month. I shall wear it to the party.”

  “Careful, Berns, some girl will ask you to dance.”

  “Girls ask more than that these days, Joseph.” He pointed toward his Bible. “I was just reading Sodom and Gomorrah again.”

  “The part where the whole town’s doin’ the lowdown, or the part where the lady turns to salt?”

  “The part where God agrees that if there’s only one righteous man . . . Where did you get that?”

  He saw my crucifix after I unzipped my jacket. “A gift from the buyer.”

  “Saint Olga.” He reached his hand out, wanting to see it. “This is magnificent. Nice ruby.”

  “A spinel, actually.”

  “Amazing.” He looked closer and turned it over. “Serve and protect.”

  “Maybe the police should wear these.”

  “This is really old.”

  I dummied up. “You were saying?”

  “Oh . . . yes. I’ve been thinking that you’ve been granted a very special gift, and here in the prime of your life when you have no obligations except to yourself, this . . . opportunity comes in the form of some solicitation from afar.”

  “And you’re thinking it’s no coincidence that it’s our homeland.”

  “That’s right. You didn’t think that someone from the old country just opened up the Chicago directory of booksellers and landed on you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s God’s way of testing you, to see if you’d go to the one forbidden place in pursuit of wealth.”

  I looked down. “Only a fool would dismiss the coincidence, and I . . . I didn’t listen to your advice.”

  “It was not my advice,” he said.

  I nodded. It was the nuns who raised us that warned against ever returning there, that we would not be welcome. This was told to the Don by our benefactor, the person who arranged our immigration.

  “You’d be surprised, Joseph. There are a whole lot more fools out there than sages.”

  “So I’m being tested.”

  “God tests hermits, too, you know.”

  I nodded. This I knew.

  “Joseph, I don’t go out looking for calamity in my life; it just comes into my confessional and spills every Saturday. I’m here to tell you that every single sin someone confesses is some test they failed. At first I thought it was just random bad behavior and giving in to temptation. Now I see they have patterns—a person’s going along minding his own day-to-day, and wham, he gets tested.”

  “And fails.”

  “And fails, yes,” he said. “It starts a pattern of sin.”

  “So what’s my test?”

  “You’ve been working on your business half of your life already, and out of nowhere comes this offer for a lot of money. I assume you’re getting a large consulting fee out of this, a lot more than your standard fare.”

  “Mult mai mult.” Much more.

  “But you were told never to return there. The one place.” He strummed his fingers in that way that told me I should have already gotten it. Just in case, he continued, “My son, I have given you all you could want, just stay away from that one tree, that one fruit.”

  Adam being tested; I knew what he was getting at. “I look at it another way, Berns.”

  He gave me a look. “Sinners always do.”

  “No, really,” I said. “God gives me a special talent so that I don’t have to live like those other orfani on the streets over there, and now He opens a door to give me a comfortable life for the rest of my days, not to mention helping others, like a good father who wishes better for his son.”

  “I see.” My brother nodded. “I’m sure most people who win the lottery overlook their sin of gambling on their way to thanking God for finally picking their Ping-Pong balls.”

  He had a point, but this was not some game of chance; it was the result of a lot of work. Or perhaps I just didn’t want to heed his advice.

  I asked, “Then how would you say I should recognize the difference between the culmination of hard work versus staying away from the tree?”

  “You’ll know,” he said. “You probably already know.”

  “How?”

  “When things start happening that you cannot explain, things that confound humans or seem outside of natural law.” They already had done that, and more. “When what comes next is evil,” Berns said, “you’ll know where that came from.” He pointed downward.

  “Maybe something good’ll come out of it.” I changed the subject. “Like selling the Knowles?”

  “Oh, the Don thanks you very much. Sold the Secker and Warburg edition.”

  “Hope it helps.”

  “Every bit helps,” he said. “They’ve got medical bills ahead.”

  I had never flown on a private jet before, but with business concluded at the Rosenbach, Arthur arranged logistics, including armed guards and movers who crated and loaded the documents and display case into an armored truck bound for the airport. There we boarded some sort of large aircraft (I wouldn’t know a Gulfstream from a Greyhound, except maybe for the wings), and I shared a quiet cabin with the workers and crew bound for Bucharest. I settled into a reclining leather chair and fell asleep before takeoff.

  The transaction had gone as if choreographed. Following pleasantries and legal formalities that essentially cleared the museum of its bailment, my $2.6 million offer was countered and accepted at $3.2 million, and I placed a call to Arthur to authorize the $4 million wire. Waiting had proved to be the most difficult part, as the international wire desks close at noon local. I spent a sleepless night in the hotel until the bank confirmed receipt the following morning.

  All too soon I awoke, still aboard a jet. And as is often the case with me, worry moved in and hogged my blankets. Mentally I had not spent any of the money, since I had yet to receive my fees. I could have made it legit and insist on a reasonable fee inside escrow with a side deal, or I could have insisted on the payment being upon delivery, but I signed the contract “upon delivery and acceptance.” Then I made the mistake of not clarifying the term acceptance in the body of the contract. I realized too late that I should have inserted a proviso stating it meant acceptable as I had purported it to be. As written, the contract remained silent as to what constituted the buyer’s acceptance. Alas, in the eventuality of legal contest, I, like the goods, would not be in a Chicago court, but rather dealing with the likes of Escu & Escu, Esq.

  I took the opportunity afforded by the long flight to commit to memory snippets from the epilogue verses that described the supposed location of Dracula’s tomb:

  From Dreptu . . . Ladies River . . . last chestnuts . . . Bethany Home . . . see their fate at sunrise . . . wicked Men’s destination . . . five minutes . . . Juden await judgement . . . batter across the first building . . . beyond the stone bridge . . . path not to miss . . . seconds . . . shading eyes at sunrise . . . tripping over stones.

  Like my original impression, I continued to find the references odd, as they seemed at once both specific and cryptic, with the sequence strangely brief, as
well. So much ink had spilled on the great battle that produced Dracula’s demise; why so little on his interrment ceremony? No encomiums over the grave, no celebrations staged; it seemed almost as if the pallbearers wished to finish and exit with haste. What seemed more important to me as I inspected the document was that the riddle content was verbatim from the assistant’s notes, and then Stoker wrote different verses in what seemed to be an attempt at metering, only to have them boldly lined through and replaced by the original words. I surmised the assistant won out on this closing page and insisted on precise obscurity, but I felt puzzled. Why in his novel’s final scene would the author accede to the assistant?

  The jet put down in Bucharest and, rather than approaching a terminal, taxied toward a hangar. It slowed to a stop, then one last nudge and the plane rolled inside with the great door closing behind us. I stepped outside into a spotless hangar as an armored truck backed up to receive its cargo.

  Arthur was quick to extend a hand and smile. “This is an historic day.”

  “Indeed,” I said.

  In fact I wished he would have handed me a check and seen to it that the jet was refueled and homeward bound. But instead I found the open door to a black Suburban. It was not until we departed the airport grounds that I realized we had not passed through Customs, nor were we southbound toward the city, but northbound toward in the SUV tailing the armored truck. Outside occasional rain splattered the windshield on an overcast day. They drove in a way as not to bring attention to themselves, although the armored vehicle was the only one on the road. Rather than take the road to , the drivers opted for the more direct but treacherous route up 73A at the town of Predeal. We climbed the hill past several small villages while mud splashed the wheel wells and decorated the black paint. It turned to late evening, and the rutted road snaked steeply in the woods before reuniting with a road that had a number, but still no pavement. Just as I was trying to figure out our location, the sight of Castel Bran loomed above in an overcast evening. Had I been a first-time tourist, I would have marveled at the sight.

  The vehicles drove through the lower gate, and I missed out on my carriage ride. Inside I was seen to my corner tower suite and informed that dinner would be room-served within the hour. Arthur left before I had the opportunity to get clarification on the balance of the transaction.