“Because of that,” he then added, opening a box with a few crucifixes, “you might want to wear one of these!” Haim and David did nothing to hide their shock and disapproval. Faced with their reactions, Tony said nothing, but he and the bodyguards opened their shirts to show them all were wearing them. For all response, David and Haim opened their shirts to show them they already carried the expression of their faith hanging from their necks, and politely declined. Tony then cleared his throat, shrugged his shoulders, and closed the box. “We’re almost there,” he said, checking the limo’s cameras.
After a couple of minutes, their ride briefly stopped and the chauffer announced their arrival to those in the residence though the intercom.
Moments later, the heavy iron fence embellished by scores of massive, immaculately polished brass dragons, hummed and gradually slid open, with nay a groan. A superb, surprisingly long, tiled drive then allowed them to drive deep inside the lavish seventeen-century building. Rather obviously, its manicured lawns and lovely trees had recently been tended to. In fact, all around, lingered a very pleasant aroma of fresh-cut grass and precious woods.
No sooner had the limo come to a complete stop in an oval columned arcade that an electronic device opened the residence’s doors for them, and they let themselves in.
Just beyond a long atrium of marbled floors and Louis XIV furnishings, a man in shiny Italian couture suit, smelling of millions in exotic perfume, a very muscular Apollo with an intriguing face, and impeccable hands and hair, opened the door for them.
Haim and David were about to shake his hand, but Tony just politely nodded to him, said: “Thank you, Philippe!” and went past him.
“Monsieur vous attend dans le salon à gauche!” said Philippe, “Your escorts can wait on this area.” Tony’s ‘hench’ bodyguards seemed ready to protest, but Tony silenced them with a curt wave of the hand. After they sat and checked their weapons under their vests, Philippe smirked and vanished, taking long strides, in one of many corridors. Mere seconds after Haim, David and Tony had entered the large salon on the left, one of Tony’s bodyguards remained seated but the other left, taking the same corridors Philippe had, and apparently going in the same general direction.
In the meantime, Severian was sitting on what might appropriately be called a throne, yet an anachronism among all these Louis XIV, XV and XVI furnishings, saltpeppered here and there by some Empire heavily gilded pieces—all of them, it might seem, outrageously authentic. His throne of twist-turned and carved dark wood was perfect to shock and awe anyone, no matter how privileged, who would visit him, yet odd. In the midst of this display, the chairs, similar to those one could see in Targoviste, in Dracula’s castle, clearly stood out. Given that Vlad III Țepeș lived at most from 1428 to 1477, and Baroque barley-twist furniture came to England in the 1660s, when Catherine of Bragança married Charles II, and became all the Jacobean rage, this too seemed a tad anachronistic. Since it reportedly came to Portugal through the Spanish-Moorish frontier, perhaps it could have been in Wallachia earlier on. Regardless, this made Haim—a true history buff—smile a little bit. Strangely enough, Severian seemed to notice—and smiled back at him.
“Welcome, gentlemen,” Severian started before they had even finished entering the room. “Please do have a seat and avail yourselves to anything you might want to drink.
Pardon my directness, but, let me suggest that, since fate —or History, who’s to say? —has tossed us all together in this matter, it would be preferable for every one of us to play with all cards on the table.
To that effect, let me start by first clarifying what I am: vampire stories, from Stoker’s book, and movies, from Nosferatu to the charming remake with Luke Evans, are largely inspired by Romanian folklore. The Strigoi, my people used to believe, were living ‘witches’, with two hearts or souls. One soul could thus leave at night and go feed on the blood of their neighbors, or that of livestock. A more familiar version suggests they were reanimated corpses, which would jump out of the grave to feed on living family members.
In those days, anyone who looked a little odd was assumed to have consorted with the devil. Say, someone with too much facial hair, could be a werewolf, a lycan; people with any kind of deformity, premature babies, babies born out of wedlock, or who would die unbaptized, or who didn’t do things ‘normal’ people would do—say, eating salt—all of them could be accused of being ‘witches’ or ‘necromancers’.
People would believe this so firmly they would dig up graves, a few years after death, to check for vampiric traits, before washing the corpse and reburying it. In case they should found any such traits, the head would be separated from the body, and a brick or stone inserted in the mouth. Sometimes holy water would be poured on the corpse, or silver coins inserted as well in the mouth—a privilege reserved only for well-to-do vampires.
This prologue is necessary since you all are worried nobody has seen me eating or drinking anything other than water, and those who have told others they have act more like hypnotized people.” He smiled, looked at Tony, and smirked, making him turn beet red and almost drop his glass of wine.
“There are unspoken truths that sometimes need to be spelled out. As a token of my good faith, I will tell David that his wife is not having an affair with her personal trainer and her personal trainer is indeed more interested in him that he is in her. Also, Haim: Becky knows you bought her tickets for a cruise in October. And Tony, your immediate boss is indeed back into heavy drinking and smoking meth. I tell you all these mildly embarrassing things, and not anything even more personal and embarrassing, just so you know my tentacles go very far—and also, to prove to you I can indeed read minds.
That step was necessary before telling you all that I was born, indeed, in Wallachia, in 1427. The rest, I leave to you imagination,” he said, giving the others time to process his words, as he played with a small enameled box. When he stopped tinkering with the box, a sudden, uncomfortable silence gripped the room.
After waiting a long moment, he let the sounds of everyone else swallowing hard die down, rested the box on a small nearby table, and only then continued: “Years ago, I visited father Lajos. I went to tell him that, when someone accompanying George Macovescu—Romania’s First Vice-minister for Foreign Affairs under Ceaușescu, on his visit to Golda Meir on April 14, 1972—went to discuss peace in the Middle East, he carried a special gift from Ceaușescu. That gift, some say, Ceaușescu got through Moses Rosen. It was a product of Nazi plunder during the Second World War: an old manuscript, that not only mentioned the Alphabet of Ben Sirath, but also a prophecy—one that particularly fascinated Himmler.”
“The…Moses Rosen?” asked Haim.
“Yes. Ceaușescu’s ‘shtadlan’, the ‘go-between’, Romania’s chief Rabbi, the one who sold freedom to Jews who wanted to emigrate to Israel but only extracting from them as high a price as possible, to enrich Ceaușescu; and also, the man who gave Romania the Most Favored Nation status by fooling Jews in the United States, and so on. Some saw him as a savior, many as a traitor—yes, the one and same Moses Rosen.
But Romania is strange: anti-Semitism there was once worse than in Germany at its worst during the III Reich. Even stranger, Macovescu, an anti-Nazi communist married to a Jewish woman, was First Vice-minister for Foreign Affairs under Ceaușescu, a brutal anti-Semite—who, however, was more corrupt than bigoted. Some said at the time: give him enough money, he would divorce Elena and marry another sow.
That’s how things worked out there. That’s how Lajos first saw the swirls and the stickman in the oldest part of the Giurgiului Cemetery, in Southern Bucharest, where the victims of the 1941 pogrom are buried. Paradoxically, this anti-Semitic fever made Romania the perfect place for exchanges between Nazis and Jews. And that, it seems, was how the manuscript ended up in Himmler’s hands.
Apparently, someone had retrieved the manuscript from beside Himmler’s corpse, when he committed suicide near Hamburg in 1945, and brought it back to R
omania. Unfortunately, so to speak, after Reinhardt Heydrich—the man who got Himmler the manuscript from a Jew he caught in Prague, escaping the Romanian pogroms—was killed in 1942, one of very few people who might have known what Himmler intended to do with it (Eichmann), died June 1st, 1962. So, to avoid unnecessary controversy, the manuscript was returned to Ceaușescu, with a profusion of thanks and apologies.
And then, it disappeared in 1989—during Ceaușescu’s downfall.
One of very few people who might know the current whereabouts of that manuscript, is a rather reclusive family in Romania, a minority among minorities, a Jewish family who lives among the Hungarians in Transylvania, not that far from Castle Poenari—as you might have guessed after my introduction, a very familiar place to me.
For what I have gathered by peering inside your brains, Haim’s theory about the Wotanists trying to gather tortured souls to turn them into “draugar” might not be far from the truth. However, almost six centuries have told me one thing: It’s far better to get information at the source than to go blindly hunting shadows, guided only by hunches and plausible theories. That is why, if we want to solve this puzzle, I think we must get that manuscript back. So, will you gentlemen join me on a trip to my old stomping grounds?”
“Since you can read our minds, would there be any point to us pretending we have objections or reservations, just to play hard to get?” asked Tony.
“No. Tomorrow, then, I hope to see you all, as early as possible after sunset, ready to depart for Bucharest. When Vittorio and Philippe are done cavorting, you gentlemen should be on your way, I guess.”
“Cavorting? Who is Vittorio?” asked David.
“One of my bodyguards,” replied Tony, visibly discomfited.
“Ah! Cavorting…Oh, I see,” chimed Haim.
“Well, if you can tell that from here and read our minds, I’m glad you are on our side,” said David.
“In fact, I’m on my side, first; and that of my clients, second. Many of them—and a substantial part of my foundations—could be in danger if this strange ‘revival’ of cultist anti-Semitism is as strong as we fear.
On the subject of my unusual abilities, I am just short of six hundred years old. There are stronger, older beings on my kind out there—and not all of them are on ‘our’ side.
In any case, while we wait for the love birds to finish their love dance,” said Severian pressing a button that opened a sliding door on the wall and retrieving a tray from it, “here is a batch of a new, experimental type of croissants. I would very much appreciate you gentlemen’s opinion about them.”
“Why?” asked David.
“Well,” said Severian, chuckling, “if they don’t beat the airplane food you last ate, I’d say they’re utterly hopeless.”
8—Romania
Next night, accompanied by Vittorio and Pietro (Tony’s other bodyguard), Severian, Tony, Haim and David travelled to Bucharest. Until they arrived at the hotel at least, they had seen no signs of sunglassed ‘hench’ men of any sort following. Reassured, at the hotel lobby Severian left, saying he needed a bite. Nobody felt like asking him any question other than where should they next meet. Before answering, Severian called Tony and they had a brief aside. When Tony came back, he told the others the rest of the group would rent a car and meet Severian in Pitești, the capital of Argeș, district where Poenari (Dracula’s) Castle is situated.
Pleased by the clean arches and almost Napoleonic furniture of the building, the others soon got over their unease at being kept out of the loop, and settled comfortably in three communicating rooms, with Vittorio and Pietro staying in the middle one.
Unannounced, at about one in the morning, two voluptuous Romanian ladies showed up and knocked on Tony’s door. Assuming that, unless they were mistaken, they should be going to the middle room, he started to walk towards the door between his room and that of the bodyguards’ to ask them if they were expecting company. He had taken barely three long steps when one of the ‘ladies’ stuck him with a small shuriken, seemingly smeared with some powerful curare-type drug.
Then, quickly, leaving the door wide open, the two ‘ladies’ silently alerted the same Slavic ‘hench’ men who had created a giant mêlée at Charles de Gaulle’s sloping ramps, rapidly moved on to the middle room where they threw those same shurikens at the two bodyguards, and next continued towards the door giving access to David and Haim’s room. Before the bodyguards could do anything to stop them, the Slavic mountains of muscle attacked them from behind, and killed them both on the spot with surgical precision.
Finally the ‘ladies’ knocked, got into Haim and David’s room, and stuck shurikens on them as well. Before either of them could do a thing, they were being handcuffed, and, seconds after, one of the ladies was already calling someone on her cellphone, to tell whoever that was that the “Kosher food” was ready for pickup.
In the meantime, the two men took Tony, carrying him handcuffed and unable to speak, and dropped him in the same room as David and Haim. David understood clearly one of the muscle men: the man didn’t seem to be joking when he suggested they should rape the prisoners while they waited. To confirm his fears, moments later, one of the two voluptuous ladies pulled out a massive tube of personal lubricant from her purse, but no condoms. One of the Slavic muscled monsters in particular seemed ‘high as a kite’, very eager, and visibly ready to proceed. Noticing this was no idle threat, the three mumbled, strained and tried to rear like panicked horses in a calèche, all to no avail.
Suspecting the drug smeared on the shuriken was acting a bit like the curare used by some tribes in the jungles of South America, David kept trying to remember how many minutes would it take him to, either die of diaphragmatic paralysis, or start recovering the capacity to fight back. By then, one of the hookers had already removed Tony and Haim’s underwear and David saw her approaching him to, presumably, do the same to him. The two Slavic guys now had removed their glasses. Their eyes were strange, full of hatred, even those of the one who was clearly beyond buzzed. Soon both had pulled down their pants, their raging erections now in full display.
David began to think this had to be a very bad, very disturbing nightmare. What had someone put in the soup he had at that last restaurant in Paris? Just in case he wasn’t dreaming, he tried to fight the hooker; but she easily restrained him, swung her long index like a pendulum, as she flashed her absurdly long nails painted in a tacky golden nail polish, and smacked her lips, visibly amused, fanning the room with her grotesque fake eyelashes. David had now a rope on his throat and prepared for what now seemed unavoidable.
However, before any of the two attackers could ‘proceed’, as in a dream as well, David saw both Slavic men’s heads roll on the floor leaving a thin trail of blood, their erections fast disappear as blood spurted everywhere, and their limp bodies fall backwards, like cow carcasses just snagged by a butcher’s hook.
Preparing to throw more shurikens, the two hookers then pivoted towards whatever had decapitated the two massive men. Before they could release a single ninja star, one of them already had her innards ripped off. The other—now David recognized—Severian was immobilizing, grabbing by the hair and right arm, and then sticking his fangs, long like upholstery needles, in her neck, while she wiggled in vain, less and less, as life gradually left her body and her tacky eyelashes could bat no more. Although the entire scene lasted less than a minute, for some reason, images in David’s head now seemed to stretch, as if all this had been happening near the event horizon of a black hole.
When that last surviving hooker finally collapsed, the curare-like effects had started to wear off on David. He wanted to say something, but the tape on his mouth only allowed him to mumble some guttural desperation noises, and that, with great difficulty. All the same, he kept trying. As he did, he first felt the clicking sound of keys unlocking handcuffs, one, two, three, four, five, six times. Then, after charitably putting everyone’s underwear back on, Severian took Haim, David and To
ny to the bathroom and sat them against the wall, under the showerhead. Only then did he rip the tape from everyone’s mouth.
“This will keep you warm, make the effect wear off faster without drowning you,” he said partially turning the warm water in the showerhead on. “When you are again able to move, Tony will have to arrange, somehow, for all these people to be investigated, as discretely as possible. I have my contacts at the hotel as well. All the same, you better try to recover quickly and wake up Tony and Haim fast. And, yes, I know, David, you’re glad I am on your side. Guess now you have no doubt I am not a simple eccentric human.”
“I’m sorry I doubted your nature. I am a scientist, and…” began David, barely intelligibly, slurring the words and suddenly stopping, to avoid being drowned.
“Good. It’s wearing off,” said Severian, looking David in the eyes. “Time to find some anti-curarizing agents. I have a doctor friend in the hematology service of a nearby hospital. Can you close the door between the rooms from this side? I would call my friend to ask him to bring anti-curares, but if I read these people’s minds right, about a dozen hostile operatives will be here in about ten minutes. So, before we can give you any anti-curares, my friend and I will likely first be forced to have an impromptu snack at the parking lot. Taking care of Tony and the “Kosher food” will have to wait until after we’re done.”
Quest for the Ark Page 7