by P. W. Child
He wondered where Herr Heller was and what he must be thinking. Just when he and Heinz finally got along they were separated, and he had grown so fond of the grumpy old German with the well hidden sense of humor. For a moment Radu felt a twinge of the ache he remembered feeling after his mother had died, a homesick feeling, but for a person instead of a place. Now he felt that for Heinz-Karl Heller, the closest thing to a father he had ever known.
Above the steeples and spires of the old buildings and cathedrals the clouds descended ever lower, unraveling at their base to release odd ends of white fleece fogginess. It dropped just enough to obscure the tips of the towering tile and iron points and Radu imagined the clouds crying for the painful penetration of the sharp roofs.
“Here we are,” Greta said suddenly as they found a parking space. When they walked to the small eatery with the sidewalk tables and Romanian flags whipping in the cold wind, some people stared from across the road, others driving by passed a glance and slowed down and even some were peeking through the windows of their businesses. They recognized the young boy they used to chase off in some other parts of the city where he lived in the park and slept under the stairs of one of the churches.
Radu smiled to himself, but took care to look somber when Greta looked at him. She had her hand on his shoulder, ushering him to a table to order him whatever he wanted. Radu realized it would be wise to make sure people saw him with Greta Heller, even if just to make sure that the townspeople would remember her face should he go missing or turn up dead. This was the extent to which young Radu’s intuition warned him about Greta’s intentions.
“You are very far away, Frau Heller. So far away I almost miss you,” the boy charmed her.
Greta smiled sweetly at his adorable words and placed her hand on his.
“There is a lot on my mind, sweetheart,” she replied, and Radu could feel her hand shiver on his.
“Are you alright?” he asked. “You look sad.”
Greta did not expect the child’s question to hit her so hard and she choked on her sudden emotion. His innocence was disturbing to her, like the crystal clear disruption of a raindrop to wet ink, dispersing the darkness but only to reshape it.
“Liebchen,” her voice cracked under the uncontrollable mounting contrition she felt in advance. Her past deeds carried no guilt in her, because they were all in the name of glory, of legacy, of power. But what she was about to embark on, and the methods she would have to employ, was the first blot of blackness that she ever had to swallow back in with effort.
“Whatever it is, I will help you,” Radu smiled sincerely and it rocked Greta to a stunned silence where her tears burned through her composure.
“Ach, Liebchen, you are helping me more than you know,” she sniffed as the waitress served them their breakfast. Radu wolfed his food down but Greta was just rearranging her plate, deep in thought.
The boy knew what he was doing, contrary to the genuine implication of his offer. He watched her tremble, her control crumbling as she fervently sought another way out of putting the young child, her new son, at peril. Even if she could not avert danger, by the laws of the Black Tarot, or replace him with another Dealer, she had to find a way now that he had proved to her that she was never beyond redemption.
On the other hand, the rules were ironclad. Only one in a generation had The Hand to be the Dealer of the Deck. After Greta was betrayed by Petr Costita she made up her mind to pursue him to the end. And she did.
She swore it, that day when he defied her by denying her the Nazi treasure most coveted, The Black Tarot, that she would hunt down his offspring and show no mercy, grant no reprieve from her wrath. She would make Petr’s child, the next generation Dealer, suffer the perdition coming to the one who laid out the Great Spread that would topple the thrones of the entire world.
It had not taken much to persuade Petr to steal the deck from the excavations in Zbiroh for her and her organization. He did not even know who the Order of the Black Sun was after all, so she had offered him an exuberant amount of money to procure the deck for her society and bring it from the Czech Republic to Germany inconspicuously. Only, he elected to keep it for himself and fled to Cluj-Napoca where her agents tracked him down.
While others were hunting the Spear of Destiny and other more well-known relics to obtain its powers, she trumped them all by focusing on the mightiest relic of them all, forged by the blackest of magic – physics.
Transcending the mere supernatural components of holy relics and icons, superseding the arcane science of the Nephilim, this treasure could bring about the utter un-creation of events and dictators. Laid out correctly by the right man - a priest of malice and conjurer of avarice as Petr had been - the deck could shuffle the chronological fate of the world to bow to the dealer's will and thus reinvent history and its consequences. This was not magic. It was the application of human will, factored by the manipulation of super science dormant in certain places of the earth’s magnetic grids. One of these places existed but a few kilometers away from Greta – the haunted forest of Hoia Baciu.
When the curator of the Brno-, and later Plzeň museums would not reveal the location of the rest of the deck, she had him executed with his expedition colleagues in Nohra.
Dr. Miroslav Kulich had come under scrutiny by the Black Sun when an interview conducted by an Anthropology student exposed his knowledge of the deck and other Nazi treasures unearthed at the chateau his family used to own. It was after the death of Petr Costita that someone from Baciu contacted the curator to return the remaining cards of the infamous relic to its rightful owner, the Kulich Family, who had it in their possession since before the occupation of Prague Castle by the SS.
From there the deck had been moved and hidden by a soldier sent to aid the SS in establishing a headquarters at Zbiroh, an explosives expert, who wrote a letter begging the reader to rid the world of the iniquitous relic.
Now she was back where she had failed to procure the deck from her thief many years before, with his son in her charge. And apparently she was also within close proximity of Sam Cleave, the only man who could bury her and her name under tons of filthy totalitarian excrement. She would be exposed as a common murderer and traitor, leaving her squeaky clean reputation obliterated in history. That could never happen. The only problem was not knowing who contacted Dr. Miroslav Kulich in the first place. It was someone who knew what the deck was capable of, someone who knew that the Kulich line used to guard the Black Tarot. Greta was aware that the very same person had to have the rest of the cards Petr tossed through the portal before he died.
But to find the culprit she would have to use the cards she had, hopefully prompting a revelation of who her target was. Igor would be assigned to kill Cleave and retrieve the evidence while she would track down the keeper of the cards, revealed in the tarot reading.
It was odd, Greta pondered, that Igor had not contacted her lately.
Chap ter 30 – Playing with Fire
The night before Greta’s arrival in Cluj, Stefan had invited Sam, Petra and Nina to spend the night with him and his kin. He was related to an astounding amount of people, they thought, but that was the purpose of calling it a commune where a phrase like ‘extended family’ came well into play. The van drove into a small street that formed a horseshoe curve, populated by several tiny houses stacked next to each other. Horse carts stood here and there, the horses away to their sheds for the night. Nina narrowed her weary eyes to study the intricate design of the decorative wagons where a lot of couples lived next to the houses of their family.
“What are those, Stefan?” she asked, pointing at the wagons.
“Vardos, Nina. Burtons and Brushes over there. Actually, about five or six types of wagons are from different eras and countries all similar to these you see here. They are like caravans, nomadic homes from our traditional culture, but a lot of us stay in modern day caravans, as you can see,” he reported from the green light of the dashboard, pointing to the ot
her horse-drawn caravans on the other side of the bend of the bumpy road.
“You will be sleeping in one of those tonight,” he smiled, eager to share his culture with the foreign scholars he had befriended.
“Cool!” Nina said and Sam smiled, imagining her cussing in such a small space. She hated little boxes with locked doors, so he looked forward to see how long her enthusiasm would last.
“You also, Professor, unless you wish to claim a bed in my cousin’s house. He has four bedrooms, but the children can share for tonight…”
“No, please, Stefan,” Petra smiled dryly. She placed her hand reassuringly on his forearm. “I will sleep in a vardo as well. What about you, Sam? If you don’t have a cab of your own you are welcome to share mine,” she teased. Nina chuckled as Petra winked at her.
“I think I’ll crash on someone’s couch, rather. I intend to get properly blootered before bedtime, so one of those wagons and their ladders would be a problem. I’m bound to pan my head in,” Sam said.
“Watch it with the bevvy, Sam. Just now you are up on the table again, doing your Highland dancing,” Nina warned. He touched her fingers with his where her hand was pressing on the seat.
“He does that?” Petra asked, truly amused. “Over the crossed swords and all?”
“Aye. But this time I will avoid wearing the kilt when I fall off the tables,” he admitted sheepishly, recalling an especially embarrassing incident at the Highland Games a good while back.
“Without the kilt?” Petra lamented. “Pity. I imagined Sam would have quite the piping ability.”
Stefan and Nina were in stitches, while Sam sank his chin and shook his head with a shy grin at the professor’s playful advances. The houses looked a bit dilapidated. Rusted vehicle frames and old appliances piled up behind some of the walls and fences and the tall, swaying trees played host to more of the peculiar wind chimes full of an array of trinkets.
In the bare patch of ground opposite the houses, the inside of the horseshoe, a pillar of blazing fire reached angrily for the night sky. Around it several lawn chairs and stools were put out, some occupied by residents already.
“This is where we come together on special occasions,” Stefan smiled proudly. “We tell stories and sing around the bonfire. We have some really good musicians.”
“I love the atmosphere,” Petra remarked. “It has a certain old world welcome to it.”
“Creeps me the fuck out,” Sam mentioned through barely moving lips. Nina slapped his arm again.
“It is charming. And this party is in our honor,” Nina corrected him.
“Aye, that is what cannibals always say to their guests,” he replied casually.
After the introductions and settling around the fire, most of the locals were very warm to the foreigners, however eyeing them with a hint of concern. Stefan told them that Petra, Sam and Nina had lost a colleague in the Baciu forest, to which most responded with little more than a nod of sympathy for the loss of the visitors’ friend. The others they just scoffed and shook their heads, some spitting to the side to show their cursing of the place and its appetite for the living.
Among them was a very old man whose face and hands were so ravaged by age that he had the likeness of a mummy. They took him for the patriarch of the group, because the children brought him a blanket for his knees while the woman served him hand and foot. His deep sunken beady black eyes were hardly visible under his boney forehead and colorful bandana. Under a crooked nose his lips had vanished through the years, leaving his mouth little more than a wet gash. He pointed a twisted finger in the air and everyone went quiet at once.
“Many years ago when I was a boy, I remember a shepherd walked into that forest with his flock of sheep and never came out again. Two hundred animals and their minder they just…” he gestured with both hands, “…pooffff…disappeared, never to be found again,” the old Gypsy told them. His English was adequate but the visitors had to listen carefully because of his heavy pronunciation.
“Maybe he came out somewhere in Australia,” Sam remarked out of turn without thinking. Nina fought back an irresistible giggle and Petra looked down at her shoes to hide her own amusement. They congregation of Romani did not find it nearly as funny, but they tolerated the annoying wise guy with the dark eyes.
“What pictures did you get on that?” the same old man asked Sam pointing curiously at his camera.
“Just some of the trees of the forest. We recorded some footage while we were…” Sam searched for the least absurd wording he could present, “…at the clearing.”
Nina swallowed hard when the people all nodded and murmured as if they knew what had happened.
“You were there tonight?” the old man asked casually, as if it was normal to walk into time loops around there.
“Y-yes,” Nina replied.
He nodded at the pretty small woman who sat against the annoying camera man. She looked spooked by the whole thing, as most foreigners with strange experiences did.
“That is just the way the forest is,” he said softly, however small a reassurance that was to Nina.
“We were there to look for the last place Petr Costita walked before he died,” Petra said suddenly in her deep crystal clear voice. It stunned everyone to abrupt silence for a moment and then suddenly a choir of disapproving shouting emanated from the group, not to mention a lot of spitting. Older members of the community frowned in disgust and the children shuddered with fear in their eyes at the mention of his name.
“Great going, Professor,” Sam whispered. But Petra looked unperturbed in her impatience for all the delays she had been subjected to since she arrived at Hoia Baciu. She was not here for a holiday, but to track down something her brother died for. On top of that her failure to do so in the forest earlier only made her more reckless in her pursuit and perhaps downright insulting to the Romani people. For some reason she felt compelled to push hard without fear of the consequence, as if time was running out.
Mihail and his wife showed up with two bottles of moonshine, proposing a toast. At the sight of the wicked liquor they had partaken of at Mihail’s house, the three friends gagged. They reluctantly cheered in response to the clairvoyant and his wife, while the bitter taste of Petr Costita’s name still lingered around the fire.
“Why were you looking for the demon’s footprints?”, an old woman, almost as old as the chief, asked Petra.
Stefan took the liberty of explaining to them why Petra and her friends were looking for the place Costita died. Although the visitors did not understand a word he said, they could see the reaction of the family implying that they understood the professor’s urge.
Mihail’s wife looked riddled by pain – or was it sorrow? She sat down next to Nina and forced a smile as greeting.
“Hello,” Nina smiled at her healer. She leaned over to the woman as soon as two fiddlers began to play in melody and harmony, a sweet song with a cheery rhythm in the background that turned the gathering into a magical night of merriment. “You cured me, it seems,” Nina told the woman, but, realizing that she could probably not understand her, the historian pulled up her sleeve to show the woman that the wound was better.
With a gasp the Romani woman stopped Nina from revealing the scar. With both hands she grabbed Nina’s arm and pulled her sleeve back down, shaking her head. Her eyes were rife with warning and she said something in Romanian that sounded in tone as if she was going to explain later. Lightly tapping Nina’s arm and nodding, she made it clear that she will talk later and Nina accepted that.
The old man was looking at the footage Sam was showing him of the forest at night where he and Nina were trapped earlier. He looked at Sam with astonishment, and then followed amusement at the wonder of the strangeness. Petra was engrossed in conversation with one of the young men who could speak excellent English. He had studied in England for a year and he was fascinated with the Czech woman who knew so much of cultures and religions. She found out that he knew a lot about the hoard
s the Nazis had hidden in Germany and the Czech Republic during the war and he knew very well about the excavations she had previously referred to in their conversation.
“You should not say Petr’s name here, Professor,” he told her once they had warmed up to each other. He spoke under his breath, so that the others would not know that he was discussing the wretch who came to their family by marriage to one of the chief’s daughters.
“Why? Nobody wants to tell me why I cannot get information on the heirloom left to my family that was stolen by the damn Nazi society in Prague and then by this man. What the hell is going on?” she ranted in a hard whisper that barely rose above the notes of the fiddles.
“Listen, the man was evil. He was a warlock, for lack of a better word, Professor,” he told her. “Gypsies, as you call us, are very superstitious because we know secret things are true. Living here, growing up here, I can tell you these things are real and any man or woman who practices sorcery of any kind is not welcome here,” he explained.
“What about the Black Tarot?”, she asked.
“Those were his,” he said, and then added, “well, after he stole it from your brother’s care, of course. But he brought it here and with him followed misery and death, even his own.” The young man paused and looked around to his elders, then turned to see if anyone could see him talking of hidden things. “Professor, what do you want with the evil cards?”
His straight question was sobering, but she deemed him worthy of an explanation, hoping that he could look beyond his family restraints and help her find the cards.