“It isn’t a phenomenon so much as a pain in the arse,” I remarked.
“Can you do the double shuffle when your balls hang low . . .” Renfield belted out the beginning of another piece of drivel.
“Renfield, please,” Dracula addressed him and as in times before, the Sergeant ceased instantly. As many times as I had tried to silence him, he had not acquiesced once. Another reason for me to resent the vampire, I suppose. But no, I had sworn to stop this kind of thinking.
“How fast do we travel?” Dracula asked as he unwound his window and stuck his arm out and began to glide his hand in the slipstream much like I had when I was seven or eight years old. I shook my head at the preposterousness of the act and I could hear Lucille’s chuckle behind me.
“Fifty-two kilometres per hour,” I told him.
“Genius,” he said again. It was his favorite word, as of late. He wound the window back up and shook the moisture from his hand.
There was silence in the car, just the Bentley’s engine purring beneath the hood and the drone of the tyres on the road. Van Helsing broke the quietude.
“So, Prince Vlad, my daughter has told me that you have struggled and succeeded in tempering your more sanguine tendencies,” he said.
“I do strive for such control,” Dracula said.
“I hope so,” Van Helsing said. “Still, you cannot blame me for having doubts. The last time we met . . .”
“I had little control over my desires,” Dracula acknowledged.
“But you do now, you say,” Van Helsing said.
“I do. I think I do,” Dracula said somberly. “Try to understand. When a young boy comes of age, his senses overwhelm him with certain primal urges.”
“Sex,” Lucy offered.
“Lucy!” Van Helsing exclaimed.
“The forthrightness of your daughter no longer offends me,” Dracula went on. “She is blunt, but yes. The juvenescent male has little control over his own body; his senses are ruled by his lusts.”
“Women feel it, too,” Lucille interrupted. Her father’s sigh could be heard all the way up front.
“Then you know of what I speak,” Dracula continued. “In England, that unfortunate incident with the poor Miss Westerna and young Harker’s grandmother, I was not in control of myself. I was ruled by my monstrous desire.”
“Lust.” Lucy brought the discussion to a point.
“Yes. For blood. Bloodlust,” Dracula said. “And something more. Survival, I suppose.”
“It is still lust,” Lucille countered.
He looked back at her and I checked her face in the rearview mirror. Did this conversation have an undercurrent to which I was oblivious?
“Yes, you are correct.” Dracula turned his gaze back and peered through the window into the endless dark outside the car. “When I was in my tomb these last forty years plus, I had much to think about.”
“You were conscious?” Van Helsing was horrified. “All that time? Lying there in your coffin?”
“I was,” Dracula acceded. “After all, I am the un-dead. At first I thought that I would go mad. But instead I began contemplating my past, my metamorphosis into . . . what I am, what you see before you. And I decided if my mortal being can transmogrify, then I can do the same with my thoughts. Now I feel I have accustomed myself to my state. And I am in control. At least more so than ever in my past.”
“We shall see,” Van Helsing said.
“Yes,” Dracula concurred. “We shall see.”
During my unconventional warfare training at the SOE’s graduate school at Beaulieu Manor in the Hampshires, I had an instructor who was a veteran of the Burmese Shoe Question conflict, and one day between sessions, having a smoke behind the old mansion, he gave me a bit of advice.
“Know your area of operation,” he told me. “Always get yourself a map. Even if all you have is one of the buggers made by the bleeding Geographical Society, study it. Don’t be mucking about. Use your own blooming eyes, take note of your bleeding surroundings, and make a blooming map of your own. From memory. Compare the two, yours and the official. Then do it again. Do it until you know your way around like it was your girlie’s drawers.”
I took his counsel to heart. In our southern sojourn I studied local maps, then, as instructed, paid mind to the roads and landmarks every time I travelled about. Every day I would draw a map of my own, from memory, repeating the process over and over until I knew my area of operation as if I had been born and raised there. With these maps I plotted our egress strategies.
This day I had taken what I knew of Brasov from map and memory and drawn a path to our destination for tonight. So, this time I needed no directions and was able to find my way to the road that paralleled the railway angling northwest.
The tracks were to my left and the mountains to my right. On the other side of the rails a river coursed along the valley, where mountains rose into a vertical wall. At a point several miles from town, at least two hours’ drive, the road veered right as the rails passed through a gap only wide enough to allow the river and the rail line through.
The obstacle was a tower of basalt a few hundred feet high called by the locals “the Devil’s Tooth.” The road circled the base and returned us to the rail line on the other side. Here there was a wider valley that crossed the road at an angle, creating a flat area of a few acres.
This was to be the location of our interdiction with the train.
Three lorries waited and two more cars were parked near the tracks, hidden by another rock outcropping the height of a London double-decker bus. Anka and Farkas waited next to the vehicles with three lorry drivers and the Marx Brothers: Horea, Closca, and Crisan. I was quite happy to see my comrades-in-arms again.
The group was smoking and conversing like all soldiers before battle. All were heavily armed, sub-machine guns and bandoliers filled with magazines. The gypsy, Crisan, had decorated his vest with six or seven grenades, which hung on it like ornaments on a Christmas tree.
I parked and climbed out, arming myself with my own machine gun and bandolier. Then the vampire made his appearance, stepping out of the Bentley like King George from his carriage.
All conversation ceased as the three drivers stared in awe and fear. One man’s mouth actually dropped open and his cigarette fell off his lip, the ember a tiny meteor falling and exploding as it hit the ground.
Lucille chambered a round in that archaic, long-barrelled Luger. Seeing that Van Helsing was unarmed, I offered him my Browning, but he declined with a quick jerk of his head.
“With my shaky hands I would be more of a danger to my colleagues than the enemy,” the old man said with a smile. “I am here only to observe and advise. This operation belongs to the Prince.”
And he turned to Dracula, who gave him a small, Old World bow of thanks. Everyone watched the vampire as he craned his head skyward, glancing at the moon, which at the moment was hiding behind a nimbus of wispy cloud. He surveyed the valley, the mountains to the north, the Devil’s Tooth rising in a straight vertical until the top disappeared into the darkness.
“First we must stop the locomotive,” Dracula intoned.
“Aye, with a boom!” Renfield grinned his lunatic simper. Then his face changed and he once more transformed into the demolition expert. “Ah can blow the tracks. Ah can blow the train. Timed or direct detonation—your choice, Master.”
“No, no, my friend.” Dracula frowned at the tracks bending around the Tooth until they disappeared. “This cannot appear to be a partisan attack.”
“Ah could create an avalanche!” Renfield was getting excited now. “One carefully placed wee charge and Ah could bring down the whole bliddy mountain. Ach, but how ye get up there Ah have no idea.”
“No,” Dracula repeated. “That would harm the prisoners being transported. I have a role for you and your deadly contrivances, but later. I will stop this locomotive myself.”
“How?” Lucy and I asked simultaneously. I smiled at her. She did no
t return it.
Dracula didn’t have a chance to answer as Pavel roared up on his motorbike, coming to a stop with an eruption of gravel and sand.
He lit a cigarette off Farkas’s as we gathered around him.
“After giving the sentries their bottle . . . By the way, what was that stuff, Professor? It put them out quicker than a hammer to the head.” He grinned through the smoke wafting from his mouth.
“Chloral hydrate,” Van Helsing replied.
“The old Mickey Finn.” Lucy laughed. When a few of us showed a lack of comprehension she explained. “An American idiom. Continue, Pavel.”
“Right. After putting the soldiers to bed I rode to the train depot, climbed onto the station roof. There I can see the Germans herd the prisoners aboard cattle cars. People beg, want to know where they go, but only get kicks and gun butts for answers. The Nazis rob some, some are stripped naked, clothes ripped off their backs. Especially the women. The rat bastards burnt the pile of clothes after, so it was all for sport.” He spat onto the ground for punctuation.
“Did you see our people?” Anka asked.
“Many of them,” he reported, listing a dozen names unfamiliar to me. “And the gypsies. Maleva, remember, the girl who walks the tightrope, swings in air in tight clothes? She was singled out by a German officer. Separated from the others. There are two cars of these Nazi officers, coming from Bucharest maybe. Maleva’s father, Ouspenkaya, the fire-eater? He fought the Germans, to protect his daughter, but he was beaten to his knees, thrown into the cattle car.”
“What happened to Maleva?” Lucy asked.
“She was thrown into one of the officers’ cars. A luxury car, red velvet curtains, chandeliers even. Full of German officers, drinking, smoking cigars. They watched the beating of the prisoners as if it were performance at a private theatre. I heard the bastards laugh. The girl Maleva was brought to this car, tossed at their feet like meat for a hound.”
“How many Germans on the train?” Van Helsing asked.
“I count ten officers in one car, fourteen in the other,” Pavel replied. “At each luxury car is one guard. That is two. Two guards on coal car behind the engine. Now four.”
“Just those four cars?” Anka asked. “Two luxury cars, two cattle cars?”
“A coal car,” Pavel said. “Plus five oil tanker cars towed at the rear.”
“How far behind you?” Dracula asked.
“Ten minutes, a little more,” Pavel answered. “I am a fast rider.”
Dracula turned to me. “Quickly, you must drive me.” He headed toward the Bentley, shouting to the others, “The locomotive will stop here. Be ready to evacuate your friends. Keep your weapons at bay, if you will.”
I heard Anka murmur something about who is giving orders now. Jumping behind the wheel as Dracula slammed the passenger door shut, I heard the thunk of another door close and glanced into the rearview mirror to see Lucy sitting in the back seat.
I was about to object, but the look on her face disposed of any such action.
“Drive back the way we have come,” Dracula ordered, and I sped away. I rounded the Devil’s Tooth, and when we reached the other side where the road rejoined the rail tracks, he told me to stop.
As soon as I brought the car to a halt he threw his door open and stepped out of the vehicle. Lucy and I rushed to his side as he stared up at the vertical cliff. The sheer rock was studded here and there with mountain ash and thorn, roots anchored in the cracks and crevices of the stone precipice.
“Go back to the other side,” Dracula said. “I will meet you there.”
Then, to my astonishment, he flexed his knees and made a great leap up, twenty feet or so. His fingers made purchase upon the ragged rock and he began to climb the sheer face of the mountain.
Once, on a summer jaunt with my parents, we travelled across northern Italy and into Switzerland. On a lazy Saturday morning, dining alfresco at our chalet hotel, I watched in amazement as three men climbed the mountain across the valley from us. The ping of their hammers pounding against their pitons echoed across the canyon. They made their way slowly up a sheer wall of basalt. During our entire meal I don’t think they managed to climb but thirty feet.
But Dracula scampered up the rock with exceeding alacrity. I admit I stared, gobsmacked at this remarkable athletic demonstration. I turned to Lucy, who was as stunned as I.
“‘For the dead travel fast,’” I murmured to myself. “‘Denn die todten reiten schnell.’” Lucy turned to me with a frown. “Gottfried August Burger’s ‘Lenore,’” I attributed, but she just shook her head in annoyance.
Dracula sped up the cliff a hundred feet in a matter of seconds, just as a lizard skitters up a wall. He then performed an even more singular feat. He stopped, clinging to the rock face by his bare hands, and reversed his position, hanging upside down. His cape fell over his face with a flash of the scarlet lining, and then, to our mutual amazement, he released one hand from his grip on the wall of stone and brushed the cape away so that his view was unobstructed. He was clinging to the cliff with but one hand and his feet.
I was about to declare my stupefaction to Lucille when I heard her say, “The train.”
And then I heard it, too, the unmistakable, rhythmic grind of a locomotive echoing through the canyons behind us.
As the black steel beast came into view the din increased, smoke billowing from the engine.
I looked up and saw Dracula perched high above the tracks, like a bat hanging from a cave wall. At that same moment he jumped. Too soon, I thought. The train was still a hundred metres from the cliff. He spread his cape into wings and glided down. It appeared that he would plunge short of the locomotive and, if nothing else, be run over by the engine. I held back a shout of warning. It was too late for that.
But, no, he flew right into the white worm of steam and disappeared for a brief second.
The next time I saw him he was standing in the middle of the coal car, having landed as lightly as a crow upon a telephone wire, moving toward the two guards sitting on the front edge of the car.
They had their backs to him, but something roused their interest and they both turned to gaze upon the vampire, his cape billowing behind him like the smoke from the engine stack. One of them was too stunned to move, this sudden apparition standing before them. The other reacted a bit faster, stood, and raised his MP38 sub-machine gun. He fired a burst at the vampire. Dracula was staggered by the impact. Despite the monstrous noise of the train passing, I heard Lucille gasp next to me.
But I was intent on the vampire as he charged that guard, made a spear point with his fingers, and plunged his hand into the man’s chest. The guard’s scream was cut short and he looked down in time to see his heart plucked from his rib cage. I doubt he lived long enough to realise what had just happened to him.
The other guard wisely turned to run, but Dracula was upon him in one long leap, his fangs sinking into the man’s neck. The poor fellow struggled like a fish on a line, his arms flopping in the air as though he were attempting to fly away. The motions slowed, then his arms fell limply to his side and Dracula tossed the drained carcass far out into the river that ran along the tracks.
This whole Mephistophelean scenario I glimpsed in pieces as the billowing steam from the engine swirled and danced around the figures like lace curtains in a demonic wind.
The train disappeared around the Devil’s Tooth.
“We must go!” Lucy yelled into my ear, and I was suddenly aware that she was clutching my arm with such power that she was actually causing me pain.
We sprinted to the car, and I sped back to where the others waited.
What happened on the train while it was out of our sight I learned later from the devil himself.
When Dracula finished with the two guards, he approached the engine compartment, where two men minded the boiler, a large man stoking the fire with shovelfuls of coal and an old engineer casually monitoring his gauges, both unaware of the coming threat.
Dracula jumped from the coal car into the open engine compartment and the man with the shovel stopped, his huge frame backlit by the fire from the boiler’s open door. He stared at the vampire.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded in German.
“Stopping this train,” Dracula calmly replied. He stepped between the two men to examine the dials and levers that operated the locomotive.
The stoker raised his wide shovel and charged the vampire.
Moving with blinding speed, Dracula stopped the shovel’s downward arc with one hand. Stunned that he had been interrupted in mid-strike, the sweaty stoker strained, muscles bulging, putting his massive body and both hands behind the contest with Dracula’s one arm. And the stoker was losing.
Dracula pounced, bit. The brute struggled under him, futilely. The vampire drained the man, then, surging with a new power, snapped the giant’s neck and dropped him. The behemoth hit the floor like a sack of old rags.
Dracula turned to the engineer, who cowered in a corner of the compartment.
“Don’t hurt me,” the old man pleaded. “Please.”
“Are you not German?” Dracula asked, perceiving a familiar accent in the man’s voice.
“No. Rumanian. From Slobozia. Don’t kill me.”
“Slobozia . . .” Dracula considered. He was still not confident in the rules he had agreed upon. Was he only to kill the German enemy, or were Rumanian collaborators fair game? He decided that because of his earlier transgressions he ought to err on the side of compassion. “Not Transylvanian, but . . . you are free to go.”
“Go?” The old man rose to his feet. “Go where?”
“Out,” Dracula said and grabbed the old man by the collar with one hand, by the belt with the other, and threw him into the dark night like a sack of mail tossed to the depot. The engineer sailed into the river with a splash.
Then Dracula pulled the long brake handle.
Lucy and I arrived on the other side of the Devil’s Tooth just as the train began screeching to a stop, a keening of steel against steel that hurt the ears. Sparks spewed between rail and wheel.
Dracula vs. Hitler Page 26