The Keep

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Then they were carried!”

  Despite what he had seen with his own eyes, he pressed for another explanation. The dead didn’t walk. They couldn’t!

  Woermann leaned back and stared at him with such disdain that Kaempffer felt small and naked.

  “Do they also teach you to lie to yourself in the SS?”

  Kaempffer made no reply. He needed no physical examination of the corpses to know that they had been dead when they had walked into his room. He had known that the instant the light from his lamp had shone on their faces.

  Woermann rose and strode toward the door. “I’ll tell the men we leave at first light.”

  “NO!” The word passed his lips louder and shriller than he wished.

  “You don’t really intend to stay here, do you?” Woermann asked, his expression incredulous.

  “I must complete this mission!”

  “But you can’t! You’ll lose! Surely you see that now!”

  “I see only that I shall have to change my methods.”

  “Only a madman would stay!”

  I don’t want to stay! Kaempffer thought. I want to leave as much as anyone!

  Under any other circumstances he would be giving the order to move out himself. But that was not one of his options here. He had to settle the matter of the keep—settle it once and for all—before he could leave for Ploiesti. If he bungled this job, dozens of his fellow SS officers were lusting after the Ploiesti project, watching and waiting to leap at the first sign of weakness and wrest the prize from him. He had to succeed here. If he could not, he would be left behind, forgotten in some rear office as others in the SS took over management of the world.

  And he needed Woermann’s help. He had to win him over for just a few days, just long enough to find a solution. Then he would have him court-martialed for freeing the villagers.

  “What do you think it is, Klaus?” he asked softly.

  “What do I think what is?” Woermann’s tone was annoyed, frustrated, his words clipped brutally short.

  “The killing—who or what do you think is doing it?”

  Woermann sat down again, his face troubled. “I don’t know. And at this point, I don’t care to know. There are now eight corpses in the subcellar and we must see to it that there aren’t any more.”

  “Come now, Klaus. You’ve been here a week…you must have formed an idea.”

  Keep talking, he told himself. The longer you talk, the longer before you’ve got to return to that room.

  “The men think it’s a vampire.”

  A vampire! This was not the kind of talk he needed, but he fought to keep his voice low, his expression friendly.

  “Do you agree?”

  “Last week—God, even three days ago—I’d have said no. Now, I’m not so sure. I’m no longer sure of anything. If it is a vampire, it’s not like the ones you read about in horror stories. Or see in the movies. The only thing I’m sure of is that the killer is not human.”

  Kaempffer tried to recall what he knew about vampire lore. Was the thing that killed the men drinking their blood? Who could tell? Their throats were such a ruin, and so much had spilled on their clothes, it would take a medical laboratory to determine whether some of the blood was missing. He had once seen a pirated print of the silent movie Nosferatu and had watched the American version of Dracula with German subtitles. That had been years ago, and at the time the idea of a vampire had seemed as ludicrous as it deserved to be. But now…certainly no beak-nosed Slav in formal dress was slinking around the keep, but there were most certainly eight corpses in the subcellar. Despite that, he could not see himself arming his men with wooden stakes and hammers.

  “I think we shall have to go to the source,” he said as his thoughts reached a dead end.

  “And where’s that?”

  “Not where—who. I want to find the owner of the keep. This structure was built for a reason, and it is being maintained in perfect condition. There has to be a reason for that.”

  “Alexandru and his boys don’t know who the owner is.”

  “So they say.”

  “Why should they lie?”

  “Everybody lies. Somebody has to pay them.”

  “The money is given to the innkeeper and he dispenses it to Alexandru and his boys.”

  “Then we’ll interrogate the innkeeper.”

  “You might also ask him to translate the words on the wall.”

  Kaempffer started. “What words? What wall?”

  “Down where your two men died. There’s something written on the wall in their blood.”

  “In Romanian?”

  Woermann shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t even recognize the letters, let alone the language.”

  Kaempffer leaped to his feet. Here was something he could handle. “I want that innkeeper!”

  The man’s name was Iuliu.

  He was grossly overweight, in his late fifties, balding on his upper pate, and mustachioed on his upper lip. His ample jowls, unshaven for at least three days, trembled as he stood in his nightshirt and shivered in the rear corridor where his fellow villagers had been held prisoner.

  Almost like the old days, Kaempffer thought, watching from the shadows of one of the rooms. He was starting to feel more like himself again. The man’s confused, frightened countenance brought him back to his early years with the SS in Munich, when they would roust the Jew shopkeepers out of their warm beds in the early morning hours, beat them in front of their families, and watch them sweat with terror in the cold before dawn.

  But the innkeeper was no Jew.

  Not that it mattered. Jew, Freemason, Gypsy, Romanian innkeeper, what really mattered to Kaempffer was the victim’s sense of complacency, of self-confidence, of security; the victim’s feeling that he had a place in the world and that he was safe—that was what Kaempffer felt he had to smash. They had to learn that there was no safe place when he was around.

  He let the innkeeper shiver and blink under the naked bulb for as long as his own patience would allow. Iuliu had been brought to the spot where the two einsatzkommandos had been killed. Anything that had even remotely resembled a ledger or a record book had been taken from the inn and dropped in a pile behind him. His eyes roamed from the bloodstains on the floor, to the bloody scrawl on the rear wall, to the implacable faces of the four soldiers who had dragged him from his bed, then back to the bloodstains on the floor. Kaempffer found it difficult to look at those stains. He kept remembering the two gashed throats that had supplied the blood, and the two dead men who had stood over his bed.

  When Major Kaempffer began to feel his own fingers tingle with cold despite his black leather gloves, he stepped out into the light of the corridor and faced Iuliu. At the sight of an SS officer in full uniform, Iuliu took a step backward and almost tripped over his ledgers.

  “Who owns the keep?” Kaempffer asked in a low voice without preamble.

  “I do not know, Herr Officer.”

  The man’s German was atrocious, but it was better than working through an interpreter. He slapped Iuliu across the face with the back of his gloved hand. He felt no malice; this was standard procedure.

  “Who owns the keep?”

  “I don’t know!”

  He slapped him again. “Who?”

  The innkeeper spat blood and began to weep. Good—he was breaking.

  “I don’t know!” Iuliu cried.

  “Who gives you the money to pay the caretakers?”

  “A messenger.”

  “From whom?”

  “I don’t know. He never says. From a bank, I think. He comes twice a year.”

  “You must have to sign a receipt or cash a check. Whom is it from?”

  “I sign a letter. At the top it says ‘The Mediterranean Bank of Switzerland.’ In Zurich.”

  “How does the money come?”

  “In gold. In twenty-lei gold pieces. I pay Alexandru and he pays his sons. It has always been this way.”

  Kaempffer
watched Iuliu wipe his eyes and compose himself. He had the next link in the chain. He would have the SS central office investigate the Mediterranean Bank in Zurich to learn who was sending gold coins to an innkeeper in the Transylvanian Alps. And from there back to the owner of the account, and from there back to the owner of the keep.

  And then what?

  He didn’t know, but this seemed to be the only way to proceed at the moment. He turned and stared at the words scrawled on the wall behind him. The blood—Flick’s and Waltz’s blood—used as ink for the words had dried to a reddish brown. Many of the letters were either crudely formed or were not like any letters he had ever seen. Others were recognizable. As a whole, they were incomprehensible. Yet they had to mean something.

  He gestured to the words. “What does that say?”

  “I don’t know, Herr Officer!” He cringed from the glittering blue of Kaempffer’s eyes. “Please…I really don’t!”

  From Iuliu’s expression and the sound of his voice, Kaempffer knew the man was telling the truth. But that was not a real consideration—never had been and never would be. The man would have to be pressed to the limit, battered, broken, and sent limping back to his fellow villagers with tales of the merciless treatment he had received at the hands of the officer in the black uniform. And then they would know: They must cooperate, they must crawl over one another in their eagerness to be of service to the SS.

  “You lie,” he screamed and slammed the back of his hand across Iuliu’s face again. “Those words are Romanian! I want to know what they say!”

  “They are like Romanian, Herr Officer,” Iuliu said, cowering in fear and pain, “but they are not. I don’t know what they say!”

  This tallied with the information Kaempffer had gleaned from his own translating dictionary. He had been studying Romania and its languages since the first day he had got wind of the Ploiesti project. By now he knew a little of the Daco-Romanian dialect and expected soon to be passably fluent in it. He did not want any of the Romanians he would be working with to think they could slip anything by him by speaking in their own tongue.

  But there were three other major dialects which varied significantly from one another. And the words on the wall, while similar to Romanian, did not appear to belong to any of them.

  Iuliu, the innkeeper—probably the only man in the village who could read—did not recognize them. Still, he had to suffer.

  Kaempffer turned away from Iuliu and from the four einsatzkommandos around him. He spoke to no one in particular, but his meaning was understood.

  “Teach him the art of translation.”

  There was a heartbeat’s pause, then a dull thud followed by a choking groan of agony. He did not have to watch. He could picture what was happening: One of the guards had driven the end of his rifle barrel into the small of Iuliu’s back, a sharp, savage blow, sending Iuliu to his knees. They would now be clustered around him, preparing to drive the toes and heels of their polished jackboots into every sensitive area of his body. And they knew them all.

  “That will be enough!” said a voice he instantly recognized as Woermann’s.

  Enraged at the intrusion, Kaempffer wheeled to confront him. This was insubordination! A direct challenge to his authority! But as he opened his mouth to reprimand Woermann, he noticed that the captain’s hand rested on the butt of his pistol. Surely he wouldn’t use it. And yet…

  The einsatzkommandos were looking to their major expectantly, not quite sure what to do. Kaempffer longed to tell them to proceed as ordered but found he could not. Woermann’s baleful stare and defiant stance made him hesitate.

  “This local has refused to cooperate,” he said lamely.

  “And so you think beating him unconscious—or to death, perhaps—will get you what you want? How intelligent!” Woermann moved forward to Iuliu’s side, blandly pushing the einsatzkommandos aside as if they were inanimate objects. He glanced down at the groaning innkeeper, then fixed each of the guards with his stare. “Is this how German troops act for the greater glory of the Fatherland? I’ll bet your mothers and fathers would love to come and watch you kick an unarmed aging fat man to death. How brave! Why don’t you invite them someday? Or did you kick them to death the last time you were home on leave?”

  “I must warn you, Captain—” Kaempffer began, but Woermann had turned his attention to the innkeeper.

  “What can you tell us about the keep that we don’t already know?”

  “Nothing,” Iuliu said from the floor.

  “Any wives’ tales or scare stories or legends?”

  “I’ve lived here all my life and never heard any.”

  “No deaths in the keep? Ever?”

  “Never.”

  As Kaempffer watched, he saw the innkeeper’s face light with a kind of hope, as if he had thought of a way to survive the night intact.

  “But perhaps there is someone who could help you. If I may just get my registration book…?” He indicated the jumbled ledgers on the floor.

  When Woermann nodded to him, he crawled across the floor and picked out a worn, stained, cloth-covered volume from the rest. He fumbled feverishly through the pages until he came to the entry he wanted.

  “Here it is! He has been here three times in the past ten years, each time sicker than the last, each time with his daughter. He is a great teacher at the University of Bucharest. An expert in the history of this region.”

  Kaempffer was interested now. “When was the last time?”

  “Five years ago.” He shrank away from Kaempffer as he replied.

  “What do you mean by sick?” Woermann asked.

  “He could not walk without two canes last time.”

  Woermann took the ledger from the innkeeper. “Who is he?”

  “Professor Theodor Cuza.”

  “Let’s just hope he’s still alive,” Woermann said, tossing the ledger to Kaempffer. “I’m sure the SS has contacts in Bucharest who can find him if he is. I suggest you waste no time.”

  “I never waste time, Captain,” Kaempffer said, trying to regain some of the face he knew he had lost with his men. He would never forgive Woermann for that. “As you enter the courtyard you will notice my men already busy prying at the walls, loosening the stones. I expect to see your men helping them as soon as possible. While the Mediterranean Bank in Zurich is being investigated, and while this professor is being sought out, we shall all be busy dismantling this structure stone by stone. For if we should obtain no useful information from the bank or from the professor, we shall already be started toward destroying every possible hiding place within the keep.”

  Woermann shrugged. “Better than sitting around and waiting to be killed, I suppose. I’ll have Sergeant Oster report to you and he can coordinate work details.” He turned, pulled Iuliu to his feet, and pushed him down the corridor, saying, “I’ll be right behind you to see that the sentry lets you out.”

  But the innkeeper held back an instant and said something to the captain in a low tone. Woermann began to laugh.

  Kaempffer felt his face grow hot as rage welled up within him. They were talking about him, belittling him. He could always tell.

  “What is the joke, Captain?”

  “This Professor Cuza,” Woermann said, his laughter fading but the mocking smile remaining on his lips, “the man who might possibly know something that could keep a few of us alive…he’s a Jew!”

  Renewed laughter echoed from the captain as he walked away.

  ELEVEN

  BUCHAREST

  Tuesday, 29 April

  1020 hours

  The harsh, insistent pounding from without rattled their apartment door on its hinges.

  “Open up!”

  Magda’s voice failed her for an instant, then she quavered out the question to which she already knew the answer. “Who is it?”

  “Open immediately!”

  Magda, dressed in a bulky sweater and a long skirt, her glossy brown hair undone, was standing by the door. She
looked over at her father seated in his wheelchair at the desk.

  “Better let them in,” he said with a calm she knew was forced. The tight skin of his face allowed little expression, but his eyes were afraid.

  Magda turned to the door. With a single motion she undid the latch and jerked back as if fearing it would bite her. It was fortunate that she did, for the door flew open and two members of the Iron Guard, the Romanian equivalent of German storm troopers, lurched in, helmeted, armed with rifles held at high port.

  “This is the Cuza residence?” the one toward the rear said. The question had been uttered as a statement, as if daring anyone listening to disagree.

  “Yes,” Magda replied, backing away toward her father. “What do you want?”

  “We are looking for Theodor Cuza.” His eyes lingered on Magda’s face. “Where is he?”

  “I am he,” Papa said.

  Magda was at his side, her hand resting protectively atop the high wooden back of his wheelchair. She was trembling. She had dreaded this day, had hoped it would never come. But now it looked as if they were to be dragged off to some resettlement camp where her father would not survive the night. They had long feared that the anti-Semitism of this regime would become an institutionalized horror similar to Germany’s.

  The two guardsmen looked at Papa. The one to the rear, who seemed to be in charge, stepped forward and withdrew a piece of paper from his belt. He glanced down at it, then up again.

  “You cannot be Cuza. He’s fifty-six. You’re too old!”

  “Nevertheless, I am he.”

  The intruders looked at Magda. “Is this true? This is Professor Theodor Cuza, formerly of the University of Bucharest?”

  Magda found herself mortally afraid, breathless, unable to speak, so she nodded. The two Iron Guards hesitated, obviously at a loss as to what to do.