by Dan Simmons
Slowly the crowds of red-cowled figures moved away from the chapel and the palace ruins and gathered at the base of Chindia Tower. There was music, as if a band were playing, and then Kate saw the portable tape unit, amplifiers, and speakers not far from the grounded helicopter and parked limousines. The music was vague, soulless—some Eastern European state anthem, perhaps—but then the tempo changed, chords rose in triumph, and Kate realized that the speakers were blaring the theme from Rocky. She shook her head. If this was all a nightmare, it had just gone from the surreal to the ridiculous.
Red-cowled figures stepped through the door onto the platform above the crowd. A great cheer went up from the men below. Then Kate gasped as she saw one of the men—was it Radu Fortuna? She could not tell for sure—hold a silk-wrapped bundle out over the railing as if offering it to the crowd below. The bundle stirred, and Kate gripped O’Rourke’s arm, sure that Joshua was going to be dropped.
The figures on the balcony seemed to listen to the cheering for a minute and then they stepped back through the arched doorway. Kate thought of some mad parody of a pope’s appearance. The music ended and the crowd below mingled, broke into clumps, and moved away from the tower. Kate saw cigarettes being lit and cowls being taken off. None of the faces looked familiar, although none were close enough to see too clearly. The feeling in the courtyard was like some Rotary meeting after business was finished.
But no one left yet.
It was twenty or thirty minutes later when the group of men came out of the tower. Kate strained but could not make out the baby for a minute. Did they leave him in there? Is someone or something in there with him? Her heart pounded. Then she saw the fifth man in the procession carrying something awkwardly, and could make out the red bundle in the red-clad arms.
Those in the courtyards made way, allowing a corridor through the crowd, and Kate’s view was blocked again. She had never felt so futile and frustrated.
Now the guards in black were making a cordon around the red-and-white-striped helicopter. A starter coughed, the rotors began to turn slowly, and the mob moved back instinctively, making a wider circle around the machine. Kate saw the doors close on several of the VIPs in red and then the engine sound filled the palace grounds, rotors blurred, the helicopter shuddered, seemed to lean forward on its skids, and then rose, dipped to the left, and climbed quickly above the bare trees to the north, navigation lights flashing. The crowd watched the lights until they disappeared in cloud, and then the men began filing back to their limousines, chauffeurs holding doors open and guards slouching at attention.
“Was that some sort of government helicopter?” whispered Kate. She wondered if it was headed back to Bucharest. It had been flying northwest, away from the capital, when it disappeared in the low clouds.
“It’s a Jet Ranger, American made,” whispered O’Rourke. “I don’t know what kind of choppers the government uses, but I doubt if they’d be American. My guess is that it’s privately owned.”
Kate nodded. She was not surprised that O’Rourke could identify the machine: males seemed so proud of their ability to give the proper name to the proper piece of machinery. Especially aircraft and war machines. Kate wished she had a dollar for every time she would be watching some silly war movie with Tom on cable and he would say something like—“Look at that! It’s supposed to be an old Sherman tank but they’re using an M-60.” Or “Do they really expect us to think that F-5 is a MiG-29?” It was all nonsense to Kate. She thought that boys learned all of that trivia because they loved to build models and never really grew out of the pride of naming exotic machinery.
Still, wanting to keep talking while the courtyards emptied and the last guards moved farther from their chapel, her chest aching from the sense of loss and futility, Kate whispered idly, “How do you know it was a whatchamacallit…a Jet Ranger?”
O’Rourke surprised her. “I’ve flown one.”
She glanced at him in the dim light. His hair and beard were caked with rock dust and rust. She imagined her own hair. “Flown one?”
He turned and grinned, bobbing his head in a boyish way. “When I was in Vietnam, I was the only grunt I knew who actually enjoyed riding in slicks.”
“Slicks?” Kate ran her fingers through her hair, brushing out things she did not want to think about.
“Helicopters. Hueys.” O’Rourke looked back at the cars driving out through the guarded main gate. “Anyway, I knew a warrant officer there who flew slicks into the A Shau Valley and still enjoyed the flying. He gave me a few checkout rides there, and later, after I’d gotten the new leg, it turned out that he was opening a flying service in California near where I was spending time in a VA hospital.” O’Rourke rubbed his beard as if embarrassed by telling such a long story. “Anyway, he gave me lessons.”
“Did you get a license?” asked Kate. She was watching the exodus, wondering how they might find out where the next night’s ceremony was. The town, the lovemaking, the tunnel, the torches, and the music were all unreal. Joshua was real. She forced herself to focus.
“No,” he said, testing the door. It was locked but only with a padlock and rusty hasp on the outside that could be kicked open. “I didn’t think there was a big market for one-legged chopper pilots, so I went into the seminary instead.” Suddenly he pulled her low and dragged her back into the smaller room, keeping her head low. “Shhh!” he whispered.
A minute later the padlock was tried and opened, flashlight beams swept the main chapel area, and then Kate heard the sound of the door being shut and locked again. They waited five minutes before either spoke again.
“Final check, I’d guess,” whispered O’Rourke. They crept back to the door. The courtyard was empty and dark. The main and secondary gates closed. Chindia Tower was only a dark silhouette against low clouds lit by fires and lights from the chemical plants to the northeast.
They waited another twenty minutes, Kate rubbing her face to fight off the numbness of exhaustion, and then O’Rourke kicked the door open, the hasp tearing out of rotten wood.
“The museum people may be upset at what we’re doing to their chapel,” whispered Kate. It was a weak joke, but she felt weak at the relief of knowing they didn’t have to go back out through the tunnel.
They moved slowly, keeping low behind tumbled stone walls and bloomless rosebushes, but there were no guards inside the palace grounds and no traffic on the streets beyond. It was as if they dreamt the entire ceremony.
The walls were still topped by razor wire and broken glass, but O’Rourke found a low pedestrian gate in the back of the compound that was climbable. Kate tore her slacks again as she went over the top.
The streets of Tîrgovişte were still silent and empty after the evening’s invasion of strigoi VIPs, but Kate and O’Rourke kept to the shadows and alleys. Even the city’s dogs were not barking tonight.
The motorcycle was still in the barn. While O’Rourke fiddled with the balky machine, Kate climbed the ladder to retrieve her travel bag and the blanket from the loft. The reflected lights from the petrochemical plant came through the dusty window and illuminated the nest in the straw where she and O’Rourke had made love only hours before. Did that really happen? Kate sighed tiredly, folded the blanket, and went back down the ladder.
O’Rourke had the doors open and was pushing the clumsy machine outside.
“I’d give a thousand dollars for a bath tonight,” she said, still brushing muck from her hair and clothes. “Five hundred just for an indoor toilet.”
“Get your checkbook out,” said O’Rourke and gunned the engine to life.
The Franciscan monastery was in a section of Tîrgovişte so old that the streets were not wide enough for more than one Dacia-sized car at a time. There were no Dacias or any other type of automobiles on the streets. The motorcycle exhaust sounded obscenely loud to Kate as it echoed back off the ancient stone-and-wood buildings. The motorcycle’s weak headlight revealed that every house here seemed to have some personal touch
which belied the poverty and socialist drabness that had been imposed from above for so long: bits of brightly covered trim, splendidly arched windows on an ancient home little more than a hovel, intricate stonework on the bottom third of an old house, skillfully executed ironwork on a gate connected to a sagging fence, even the glimpse of elaborate linen curtains in a window of what could have passed for a farm shed in the States.
The monastery was a long, low one-story building set back from the street in a section where empty lots alternated with dark and frequently windowless buildings. O’Rourke cruised past once, turned around, inspected the building on another pass, and then turned down an alley and went slowly past the rear of the structure. It was dark and had an abandoned feel to it. There was a padlock on the gate, but the fence was low enough to climb. Kate caught a glimpse of elaborate gardens and trellises in the dark backyard.
“Wait here a minute,” O’Rourke said softly, parking the motorcycle in a copse of trees near where the alley met a larger street. “If the strigoi are hunting for us, they may have left someone behind.”
Kate touched his arm, feeling the electricity of the renewed contact despite her fatigue and depression. “It’s not worth risking,” she whispered.
O’Rourke grinned. “A bath,” he said. “Indoor plumbing. Maybe fresh clothes.”
Kate started climbing out of the sidecar. “I’m going with you.”
O’Rourke shook his head. “Compromise. Get on the bike. If I come out in a hurry, gun the thing and pick me up on the run. Do you know how to start it and drive it?”
Kate frowned but nodded. She’d watched him enough during the trip to know that she could get it moving. For some reason she thought of her Miata back home, destroyed in the fire. She had loved that machine…loved the sense of freedom and exhilaration it imparted when she drove it hard on winding mountain roads, the clean Colorado sunlight on her face, the wind in her hair…
“Kate?” said O’Rourke, squeezing her shoulder. “You with me?”
“Yeah.” She rubbed her cheeks and eyes with the heels of her hands. Exhaustion lay on her like a physical weight.
O’Rourke slipped down the alley, his black clothes making him almost invisible, and Kate sat there dully, listening to the cold wind stir brittle leaves. There were no insect sounds, no birds, and no sound of traffic from the main road a hundred feet farther down the alley. She tried to remember the sense of excitement and humanity she had sensed in her walks through Bucharest in May, the young couples kissing in dark doorways, the laughter, the grandparents watching their children in the park at Cişmigiu Gardens. It was all from another world.
“It’s empty,” said O’Rourke from behind her and she jumped three inches. She’d been half-dozing again.
They left the motorcycle in among the trees, climbed the low fence, and entered the monastery through a side window that was unlocked.
“There’s been a Franciscan presence in Tîrgovişte since the thirteenth century,” O’Rourke said softly as he lit a candle.
“The light…” began Kate.
“We’ll stay in the inner rooms and halls. The shutters are closed. I don’t think the police will be back. The nine residents here were brought to Bucharest for questioning and probably will be released there tomorrow…today really…now that the strigoi have had their little ceremony.”
Kate followed him down the corridor, glancing in rooms as she passed them. The candle stretched their shadows along rough walls to the ten-foot ceiling. Kate had never been in a monastery and was not quite sure what to expect: Gothic trappings, perhaps…dungeon-like cells, wooden bowls and utensils, perhaps a few well-used cat-o’-nine-tails for self-flagellation.
Get a grip, Kate, she thought. She wanted to go to sleep again.
The house was larger and cleaner than most homes she had seen in Romania, less cluttered, but it might have been the residence of a large farm family. The rooms were simple, but contained comfortable-looking beds and dressers. Only the simple crucifixes on the walls of each bedroom suggested a monastery. The kitchen was more modern than most Romanian kitchens: no wooden bowls here, but lots of plastic plates and tumblers that reminded Kate of summer camp. The dining room had a battered and unadorned but undeniably elegant twenty-foot table that would have sold for several thousand dollars in an American antiques store. One of the rooms on the other side of the dining room had been turned into a modest chapel with a small altar and individual kneelers for twenty or so people. Kate’s impression, even by candlelight, was of simplicity, cleanliness, and community.
“Have you spent time here?” whispered Kate. It was hard not to whisper in the silence.
“Occasionally. It was a good jumping-off place when I was working with children in the mountain cities. Father Danielescu and the others here are good people.” O’Rourke opened another door.
“Ahhhh,” said Kate. The bath was large and deep and had tiled ledges on three sides. It was immaculately clean. Kate ran her hand along the tile and enamel of the tub itself, then frowned. “Where are the taps? How do you get water in this thing?”
O’Rourke set the candle on the ledge and walked over to the corner, where there was a counter with a farmhouse-style pump over a huge galvanized tin tub sitting above what appeared to be a small propane stove with a single burner. “It takes a while,” said O’Rourke, “but it’s the hottest water in Tîrgovişte.” He began pumping.
For fifteen minutes they were busy filling, heating, carrying, and dumping, but eventually the tub was filled. They paused then. Kate showed more embarrassment than O’Rourke. Is he still a priest? Am I ruining something important? Was that just an aberration in the loft? A sin to be confessed?
To hell with it, she thought and began unbuttoning her filthy blouse.
“I’ll go check the doors and shutters,” said O’Rourke, pausing in the doorway. “You go ahead and take your time, I’ll bathe next.”
Kate stood in her underwear and stared him in the eye. “Don’t be silly. That would be a waste of time and hot water. Besides, I’ll have my eyes closed when you get in. The tub’s big enough. We won’t even know the other is there.” She removed her bra and white cotton pants.
O’Rourke nodded and went down the dark hall.
Kate felt like crying when she lowered herself into the steaming water. It seemed there was no heating in the monastery other than fireplaces in the central rooms, the air temperature in the house equaled the late-autumn chill outside, and the bath literally steamed, raising a delicious fog that rolled over the edge of the tub, slid along the tiled ledges, and crept along the floor.
The water was hot. A lump of soap shaped like a small meteorite sat on the ledge; she lathered herself and let the soap create bubbles as she lay neck deep in the hot water, laid her head back, and closed her eyes.
She heard O’Rourke come in, squinted at him as he set down towels and a pile of folded clothes, and then closed her eyes while he stepped out of his own clothes and into the tub. He sat on the ledge for a minute, she heard the soft sound of plastic on the floor, and she realized he was taking off his prosthesis. Kate opened her eyes and looked at him.
“Now you’ve really seen me naked,” he said with no sign of embarrassment. He raised his good leg and his shortened left leg and gingerly settled in the steaming bath. “There is a heaven,” he whispered.
The water rose higher around Kate’s chin, and she felt his thigh brush hers. There was room in this antediluvian hot tub for the two of them to sit side by side in opposite directions without crowding.
“I feel like we should be doing something,” whispered Kate. “Going after Joshua.” O’Rourke handed her a sponge and she squeezed water onto her face. “Something.”
“We don’t know where they went,” he said softly.
Kate nodded, letting her arms and hands float. The heat made her breasts ache and reminded her of all the bruises she’d received and muscles she’d strained in the long nightmare crawl through the palace tunne
l. “You had cities circled. Places you thought the ceremony might be held. Lucian thought that there would be four nights of ceremony. Did your priest friends know where the next two nights will be held?”
“No.” O’Rourke lathered his arms and shoulders. “There are dozens of cities and sites that were important to the historical Vlad Ţepeş and that might be part of any ritual centered on him. Braşov, Sibiu, Rîmnîu Vîlcea, Rîşnov Citadel, Bran, Timişoara, Sighişoara, even Bucharest itself.”
“But you had several circled on the map,” said Kate. She had to sit up and sponge her chest and neck or fall asleep.
“My guess was Sighişoara, Braşov, Sibiu, and the so-called Castle Dracula,” he said. “They’re extremely important places in the actual history of Vlad Ţepeş. But I don’t know which places…or which night.”
Kate brushed soap out of her eyes. “There is a Castle Dracula? I thought the Romanian Office of National Tourism just invented that.”
“They take tourists to phony sites…like Bran Castle that had nothing to do with Vlad Ţepeş,” said O’Rourke. “Or they drive the few Dracula tourists way up to Borgo Pass and other places that Bram Stoker wrote about but that have no historical significance. But there is a Castle Dracula…or at least the ruins of it…on the Argeş River, less than a hundred miles from here.” He described it then, the heap of rocks high on a crag overlooking the remote Argeş Valley.
“You’ve been there?” said Kate.
“No. The road is impassable much of the year, and the passable parts have been closed off most of this last year. There’s a hydroelectric plant up there beyond the castle in the Făgăraş Mountains above the city of Curtea de Argeş and the military is very vigilant about guarding that area. Also, Ceauşescu had the site closed because there was some serious restoration going on at the ruins. They probably abandoned the project when Ceauşescu died.”
Kate suddenly felt very awake. “Unless the restoration was a strigoi project.”
