David tried to laugh but his jaws ached and the water kept running. Severian winked at him, lifted him, and carried him, soaking wet, and sat him on the floor, so he could reach the latch and lock the door between that room and the middle one. “For now, once you lock this door, get as far away from it and this wall as you can, and do not open neither this door nor the corridor door unless you hear my mind, not my spoken voice, telling you to do so. Understood?”
“Understood!” said David, as Severian left, closing the door behind him. Even after drying his hands carefully with a towel, having slid a bit downwards, it still took a big effort for David to drag his arms high enough to reach the latch again and lock the door. Once done, he let himself slide, and lay on the floor, on his side, observing the carnage in the room. He had seen war and death before, but this much carnage with no need for bullets, daggers, bayonets, tanks or bombs, looked a tad surreal. Hearing Haim and Tony stir and moan in the bathroom, signs they too were on the mend, David forced himself to crawl back and get to them—even if, for now, he heard nothing but an ominous silence in the adjacent room.
After many long tense minutes, the contiguous room and Tony’s as well exploded into a savage ruckus of furniture thrown about, porcelain lamps shattered by what sounded like shots fired with silencers, carpets pulled perhaps to tumble several assailants, a combat crescendo leading to a chest of drawers toppling over, and a mirror crushing with an ugly thwack, followed by windows blowing up, as if hit by large ordnance. David stop midway into his crawl to the bathroom and went back, to better hear what he could not see and so assess the situation. However, soon enough a smell of something like an odd type of tear-gas forced him to do as Severian had told him, and find the strength to drag his body as far away from that middle wall and go, more writhing than leopard crawl, join the others in the bathroom.
Once there, he once again opened the shower. A little less numb now, the others could articulate—or gargle at least—some words as well. “Guess Severian chose me for being the most ‘hench’/corpulent of us, ‘hence’ the one less affected by the curare. Listen, I smelled smoke in the next two rooms, then something like tear gas. I don’t know if there was just weapons fire and tear gas or the next room is also on fire. Just in case, we’d better stay wet and away from the middle wall. Can you guys get dressed and prepare to run, soon? If the next room is burning…”
“I’ll run…naked…if I have to…” the others replied in choir, starting to put their pants on under the dripping shower. “What about our luggage?” gurgled Haim.
“The suitcases are under the bed, as Tony suggested,” replied David.
“Minutia,” scoffed Tony. “How are we going to get out of here?”
“Severian said to wait until he ‘spoke to my mind’ to tell me to open the door, to not open it if I heard his voice in the usual way, telling us to do it from the next room. Now it seems all hell has broken loose there. I see smoke coming under the crack on the middle door from…” Suddenly, David stiffened. He did not finish the sentence: as if confirming what he had just said, Severian’s voice surged inside his mind: “Get ready to leave. Grab all you need and open the door to the hallway, not the bodyguards’ room. That room is now on fire.” Signaling in the general direction of the luggage stored under the bed, he then whispered: “Let’s grab the luggage, and everything else you need. We have to go!”
For a moment the others looked skeptical. “Severian’s voice has…spoken to you?” mumbled Haim.
“Yes! And he said the next room is on fire, so we have to leave through the corridor,” answered David, in a louder voice, somewhat irritated.
“Are you sure you’re not…imagining things…?” Tony had begun asking when, smashed into a few large chunks, pulled from the handle first, and then clawed, giving the impression that two pairs of very long, revolving, crowbars had been attacking its reinforced frame, to quickly tear it to pieces, the door to the corridor flew outwards, torn from the hinges.
Outside, in the corridor, the three men could see Severian and another tall man, standing in the smoke. Suddenly they entered the room, at impossible speed, and, without a word, used the sheets to bag the two dead Slavic men and two dead women.
Severian’s friend, who stopped to introduce himself as Mircea, took the bagged corpses, a bit like Santa Claus carrying gifts, and went off the window taking the four dead with him. Severian quickly went into the shower to wash away some of the blood. He was cribbed with bullet holes and deep gashes that were healing in front of the three men’s confused eyes, as if the water had sprung from Ponce de Leon’s ‘Fountain of Youth’ or was the ‘Water of Life’ from Alexander’s Romance, and the bullet fragments clinking on the tiles.
“I can’t leave you three alone. There might be more killers coming,” Severian explained. “The first two, and the hookers, were freelancers. The new Odessa hires them to harass Jews. They tried double dipping. They wanted to film you being screwed, to put you on the dark web. The pervs are high-priced killers and kidnappers; the hookers are their sidekicks, baits and deadly killers in their own right as well. The other ones Mircea and I had to neutralize were hired by those two, to take you somewhere for ransom by the highest bidder. But those have a more sinister origin I’ll tell you about later. They were also going to kill our two rapists and the two hookers, since they don’t like witnesses. Now, let’s go. Soon the fire brigade will get here.”
Without further explanation, Severian then proceeded to open a metallic container and splashed its contents all over the room as they were leaving. Finally, he threw it against the door separating their room from the other two on fire, with such violence that the metallic can made a hole in the door. The accelerant he had spread in the room burst in flames, and the entire room instantly became a raging hell.
“We need to cover our tracks,” explained Severian. “Let everyone else believe you are all dead for now, until the authorities sort this DNA mess, if they can find any. There might elements in the police who sympathize with ‘the other ones’. Let’s go! Now!”
As they were madly dashing down the emergency stairs, alongside other terrified hotel guests, Severian entered the minds of three men, to tell them to follow him to the parking underground. “This one is a very good 4x4. It’s also bulletproof. Our friends won’t need it anymore. Give me a second. Here…and…here…” he said, fumbling about the 4x4 at baffling speed.
There: I have removed the GPS traceable features, so you can drive it and not be tracked. Let’s go visit Mircea at the hospital, so we check if you got anything other than some curare in your blood. Somehow I doubt they sterilize their shurikens. Other than that, you need not worry: Mircea and I have drunk plenty tonight. He will also either send the corpses somewhere else—if Tony’s superiors want to have them examined—or, otherwise, redirect them to the hospital incinerators. But we should be quick about it: Mircea and I have now about an hour and a half left, before sunrise forces us into slumber.
You three can sleep in a hospital room, or go back to the hotel if you prefer. If you do, though, you might have to answer a number of uncomfortable questions, and might even end up being kidnapped again. My suggestion: stay dead for now. It isn’t so bad.”
The three barely exchanged ten words as they drove to the hospital. When Mircea greeted them there, probably to reassure Haim and David more than Tony, he explained he was a bit older than Severian, adding he had been named in honor of Mircea the Elder, Dracula’s grandfather, the true Father of Wallachia, and not of Mircea Eliade—that of the Order of Saint Michael and the Iron Guard, violently anti-Semitic from the 1930s and 40s.
After that clarification ended the presentations in a slightly less tense note, Severian and Mircea left the three men in a locked room, inside a section of the hospital closed for perennial renovations. All the same, before leaving, they gave them three fake badges, reminded them to sleep with their guns and combat knives close by, just in case, and to make themselves scarce as soon as th
ey could.
Haim and David, unsure where trouble might come from, stayed up a bit longer. Too tired to think or care, shortly after Tony went to lie down, wearing his steel knuckles, and tried to sleep.
Unable to, he kept thinking how to contact his superiors now that an important briefcase had gone missing—possibly incinerated. Haim and David also were eager to call home, as promised to their respective wives, now probably seriously worried about them. Nonetheless, given the risks, all phones would remain deactivated, kept inside a wave trap.
David, who couldn’t sleep either, mumbled: “Maybe if we stay dead a little longer, we’ll emerge from this mess alive.” But Haim didn’t seem to appreciate the humor: “I didn’t want anything to do with Mircea Eliade, but I wonder why they felt the need to clarify the point.”
“If Mircea read your mind and knew you would recognize the name, I suppose, he did it to put your mind at ease,” contemporized David. “I guess so…but I still don’t feel comfortable being read like an open book,” sighed Haim.
“Well, at least he is on our side,” grumbled Tony. “It’s six AM, guys. Let’s get the truck out of here, go to our safe house here in Bucharest—if I can remember the address and find it, now that we have no more GPS and can’t use the phones either. There, we should be able to call home, get new phones, eat, change, shower, maybe get a new truck, and, by mid-morning, be on our way to Pitești. We should be there in time for lunch.”
Haim and David didn’t need much convincing. Mid-morning, as Tony had anticipated, they were, indeed, on the road to Pitești.
On a sunny, uneventful day, the E81, with its open plains, horse and cart occasional sightings, helped them partially recover from a stressful night. Now without bodyguards—except Severian at night—the three took turns to drive, half awakened by vats of “cafea la ibric” (the Romanian version of Turkish coffee).
Once in Pitești, the hotel was easy enough to find using their new car—provided by the safe house as a precaution—and their settling down, sedate enough for all of them to have a welcome siesta.
At midafternoon, they finally woke up, and, after a hasty bite, started trying to locate any Jewish memorabilia connected with Ceaușescu. All went, at first, seemingly well. But after visiting a few shops, they started to get suspicious looks when not outright hostile glances, whispering onlookers pointing fingers at them, and curt negatives from a couple of obviously scared antique dealers—one of whom seem unusually keen in getting their contact information, all the same.
In fact, he even followed them for over two blocks—until David, not as colossal as Tony’s now dead bodyguards, but rather imposing nonetheless, told the man, in semi-decent Romanian, that, unless he’d piss off pronto, things might not end well for him.
At night, as agreed, Severian met them at a café.
Before they could even tell him about the art dealer, Severian explained that the antique dealer was trying to spy on them to sell information to some sordid elements in the underground; but now, his mind erased, he wouldn’t bother them any longer. He also had some good news: Ceaușescu’s failed gift to Golda Meir, after disappearing in 1989, did re-emerge in the region—and, apparently, Izsák, a Transylvanian Hungarian Jew who emigrated out of the country, did indeed receive it as a gift, during one of his visits to Romania. Where exactly in the world Izsák emigrated to, nobody in Pitești now seemed to know, but members of his family had stayed in Romania—more precisely in Timișoara. It was time to move the quest down there.
Having lost the last night flight, after very short deliberation, they decided to drive full tilt the whole six hours to Timișoara. However, to get there and avoid being followed, instead of using the faster E81, they took the Transfăgărășan Highway— the highway in the Carpathians that Ceaușescu built between 1970 and 1974, in case Russia should invade Romania as it did to Czechoslovakia in 1968—a very picturesque highway during the day, but a bit of an adventuresome itinerary at night, with many hairpins, sharp drops, and so on.
All the same, shortly after passing Curtea de Argeș, someone started and kept firing bullets at them. In the dead darkness of the region, they heard the bullets bouncing on the rocks at the sides of the highway before they first saw the flashes. They seemed to be coming from both sides; yet, strangely, either those sharpshooters were not very sharp or this might not be the same people that had ‘visited’ them at the hotel in Bucharest.
At some point, Severian got tired of the shooting match, told the others to continue driving as fast as they could—while avoiding precipices—and vanished into the night, through an open window. When he somehow returned to the car, still going at full speed, through the window as he had left, he just dropped in, sat, lazily cleaned his mouth with the back of his sleeve, thought a moment, and nonchalantly summarized his brief foray: “A few thugs looking for easy money. Nothing of consequence.”
Tony simply asked if he was sure. Severian shrugged. Just in case, they kept going as fast as the terrain and mad swerves would allow, leaving their doubts as to who might really have been behind the shooting for another time.
Farther north, before arriving at the E68, a rolling boulder, the size of a small car, narrowly missed their vehicle, to in the end fall a couple of hundred meters down a nearby cliff. Severian went out again, and came back through the window as well. This time, he wiped his mouth, looked around and commented: “I think I might soon need to go on a diet!” Predictably, nobody laughed.
Arriving at Timișoara, a couple of rocket-propelled grenades narrowly missed their vehicle, and Severian went out, yet again. When David commented: “Severian is going to get an indigestion tonight!” nobody laughed at the joke.
Tony added something even more ominous: “Those were not run-of-the-mill RPGs. Those were Russian 9M133 Kornet, the equivalent to American Javelin rockets or worse, a rather war-like type of arsenal—an overkill to stop us, simple souls.”
“And how does a simple priestly soul know how to recognize a Kornet-E anti-tank guided missile?” asked Haim.
“And how does a simple rabbi know the export designation of a Russian ATGM?” retaliated Tony.
Everybody blushed, then laughed, then waived an accusing index, then pretended nobody had said anything suspicious, and the matter was, apparently, forgotten.
Almost at dawn, their 4x4 truck in the end barely damaged, they finally arrived in Timișoara. As they drove by, Severian took refuge in a graveyard not far from downtown, in the occurrence Timișoara’s Jewish cemetery.
After settling again in the hotel, once again under assumed names, different from those they had used in Pitești, Haim, Tony and David woke up, once again, when half the morning was already gone.
Telling neither David nor Haim, because of Father Lajos previous warnings about anti-Semitic infiltrates in Vatican City, Tony decided he would not yet update his superiors about any progress on this search. Although that would probably make the whole endeavor safer, it sure would make harder as well—no safe houses, no heavy weapons, not backup of any sort. Those Russian rocket launchers added a whole new dimension to his concerns, but things were already bad enough to worry too much about that.
Aside from Lajos misgivings, hadn’t Severian mentioned the Alphabet of Ben Sirath as well? Mixing anti-Semites with writings that, if not just a rabbinical joke, could lead to questioning the Holy Church’s dogma, could produce a most flammable mixture. For as long as he could, he would try to prevent ignition by staying away from the flame: Tony would try using some of his own leads, and David’s fast improving basic Romanian, and good looks, to supplement information he had already extracted from the dark web.
By nightfall they had found out exactly where the family lived in Timișoara—on the Strada Emanoli Ungureanu. However, given past near-misses, now without bodyguards, and, especially, after Tony’s decision to keep his bosses in the dark for now, it made sense to wait until Severian came out of his ‘slumber’ to approach them. So they enjoyed the luxury of a good
siesta, long showers, a relaxed dinner, and long dolce far niente.
As they were leaving the restaurant, Severian joined them. Without asking any questions, he went right to business: “Wait for me at the lobby of your hotel. I should be there in less than half an hour.” Seconds later, like the wind, he was gone.
True to his word, in hardly twenty minutes, he was back. “Izsák’s friend died a few years ago; and Izsák himself, a few months ago. But his friend’s widow knew that Izsák gave the manuscript to his son, an avid collector of antiques, in particular manuscripts—the rarer and more controversial the merrier. This one, obviously, had not escaped him.
Izsák’s son, however, doesn’t live in Timișoara. He lives in California, not far from Los Angeles.”
“So, we don’t need to pimp David to charm widows anymore? Can we go back home then?” wondered Haim in loud voice, splaying his hands.
“So it seems, gentlemen,” replied Severian, chuckling at David’s noticeable embarrassment. “One more thing: in this cemetery too, I found that symbol and the oddly swirling winds.”
“You did?” asked David and Tony in choir.
“Yes. And indeed, it was painted with blood. Not any run of the mill blood…but blood it was… Moreover, it seems someone has seen it also at the obelisk to the victims of the pogrom of Iaşi, in front of Iaşi’s Great Synagogue.”
“There too?” asked Tony, shaking his head.
Stone-faced, Severian just nodded.
“What sort of blood?” asked Haim.
“Unusual,” Severian demurred.
“In what sense?” asked David.
“To establish that, as you would say in your country, be above my pay grade. I would have to make some enquiries. But now, I must leave you. Unlike you three, I haven’t had dinner yet,” he whispered, tapping one of his fangs with the tip of his index.
Immediately after, before David’s chill could finish running down his spine, or anyone else could ask any more questions, or Tony could stop shaking his head, Severian had vanished in the thick shadows nearby.
Quest for the Ark Page 8