by Jon Land
“Michele,” Michael thought he heard a voice call.
It sounded like his father, and Michael shuddered.
Then he heard the wind whistle again and realized it was just his ears playing tricks on him.
* * *
Michael tucked the photograph of Hans Wolff and the news clipping back into the journal and closed it, eyes brimming with tears as he struggled to stand after sitting stiff for so long. His father’s journal and ledger tucked in his grasp, Michael then climbed back up the stairs, eyes squinting from the sudden wash of early afternoon sunlight at the top. He held a hand up briefly to shield them and pulled it away to the sight of dark blurry blips of shape enclosing him in a semicircle. Just an illusion, Michael thought, until his clearing vision locked on a figure dressed all in black, including a long thin coat riding just above the ground and a veil draped over his face, standing before the blurred shapes Michael now realized were gunmen.
“Welcome home,” said Vladimir Dracu.
EIGHTY-TWO
CALTAGIRONE, SICILY
Michael knew he was looking at the man Scarlett had described from the village of Vadja, the same man who’d undoubtedly ordered the massacre at the dig site. A muscular giant stood in his shadow, the biggest man Michael had ever seen, with a mask covering half his face.
“My name is Vladimir Dracu. Call me Vlad,” the man said through his black veil. “You may know me better as Black Scorpion. You are one of very few people alive who knows that now.” He advanced a single step. “Tell me, does my name mean anything to you?”
“Should it?”
“I suspect so. Your name, after all, means something to me.”
“How did you know this was my home?”
“You mean the home of Michele Nunziato?”
Michael stiffened, his eyes darting again to the hulking, masked figure at Dracu’s side.
“I see you’ve noticed Armura. That’s Romanian for armor. Do you know why I call him that? Because Armura, like steel, feels nothing. No emotion, no pain.” Dracu turned toward the hulking form. “The scars that deface him came from a Siberian tiger he killed to survive before it could kill him. It was the last time he felt pain, the last time he felt anything, because the attack stole his senses from him, damaged his nervous system to a degree that would’ve killed any other man. It was the last time the tiger felt anything, too. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.”
“What’s wrong with your face?” Michael asked him. “Or is that veil just some kind of fashion statement?”
Dracu angled his frame to keep Michael from glimpsing anything through the mesh. “We all have our crosses to bear. This is mine,” he continued, sweeping his gaze about the refuse of the farm, “while this is yours, Michele. Of course, this wasn’t Michele Nunziato’s home for all that long, was it? Seven years or so, yes? That’s how old you were when your father was gunned down. Tell me, Michele, how is the woman you and your warrior managed to rescue from the Securitate building?”
“Alive and well. She says she feels lucky to have escaped the devil.”
“That would be me, of course. Unfortunately, you will not be as lucky. How gracious of you to come here alone. It’s perfect, almost as if you wanted this meeting to be just the two of us.”
Michael ran his eyes from Armura about Dracu’s gunmen. “It’s hardly just the two of us.”
“I wish you’d brought the woman, Michele. She looks a bit like the first girl I ever loved. I guess you and I must have the same taste in women, so maybe we are not so different. My first love’s name was Dorina and she was a gypsy who found me wandering in Ankara after I escaped from my keepers. She was part of a gang of petty thieves and pickpockets. I never knew what love was until I met Dorina. Then a few years later I was forced to kill her when she betrayed me for another man who sought the gang’s leadership instead of me. So I killed them both, Michele.”
“My name is Michael.”
“Not to me it isn’t. After her death the memories of Dori were too strong, too painful. So I joined a band of cutthroats who fancied themselves modern-day pirates. Their leader was a man named Adnan Talu who sent a team to a simple farm to recover a certain invaluable relic, as priceless as it was potentially powerful. Am I getting through to you yet, Michele?”
Michael’s mouth dropped, but no words emerged. The past and present swirled together, clashing as a terrible truth began to dawn.
In that moment Michael became the boy in the barn from 1975 again, recalling the man who’d come looking while he hid in the haystack. Just about to plunge a pitchfork into the stack and twirl it about for good measure, when another of the killers rushed in and dragged him away, saying they had to hurry because the authorities were coming. A young man who was the same size as Vlad Dracu had dropped the pitchfork, seeming to meet Michael’s gaze briefly through the haystack before leaving the barn reluctantly.
“Ah, I can see from your eyes you remember me now,” Dracu resumed. “Vito Nunziato deserved what he got, your mother and sister, too. I violated my orders. Your family wasn’t supposed to die; our instructions were only to take the medallion from your father. Some rich and powerful American hired these Turkish pirates to retrieve it for him. I really didn’t give a shit. So I disobeyed my orders and came here that day to kill Vito Nunziato, and I’d kill him a hundred more times if I could,” Dracu paused, regarding Michael with a strange calm. “I would’ve killed you too that day, Michele. But you’d taken the relic we’d come for and run off to hide like the coward you are.” Dracu rotated his veiled visage about. “This should have been mine, too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My childhood, Michele. Would you like to hear what it’s like to be sold like a piece of meat? The other boys never had the chance to grow up. They gave up, while I got stronger, and at fifteen the man assigned to watch me became my first kill. I strangled him with a chain that bound me to a bedpost the night I escaped into the streets of Ankara.” Dracu paused and held Michael’s stare through the mesh veil. “And after I disobeyed orders and killed your family, I went back to Romania and built Black Scorpion from nothing. Call it my revenge against the world. Fitting, don’t you think?”
“Tell me why you followed me here, what it is you want?”
Dracu took another two steps forward, out of the shadows and into the sun, seeming uncomfortable in the light. “It’s too late to get everything I want, so I’ll have to settle for a certain object that is rightfully mine: The relic we came for the day I murdered your father,” he finished, pointing toward Michael’s chest.
“Rightfully yours?”
“Your father was a brave man, Michele, but also a liar,” Dracu said, noticing the ledger and journal in Michael’s grasp. “I suppose you’ve figured out all of the truth by now.”
“Except what it has to do with you.”
“Your father had fallen in love with one of the women he saved from the fire, a beautiful and kind young woman named Stefania Tepesche.” Dracu paused there, as if the words were suddenly coming hard for him. “She was my mother, and Davide Schapira was my father. We’re half brothers, Michele.”
EIGHTY-THREE
CALTAGIRONE, SICILY
“My full name is Vladimir Tepes Dracu,” he continued. “I took my real last name and joined it to my new last name because it was especially fitting.”
“Because it means devil? Because your mother believed her family was descended from the actual Vlad Tepes?”
Dracu gestured toward the dilapidated remains of the farmhouse. “Let’s continue this where I should have grown up, too. Inside.”
He took a Beretta pistol from Armura, and they came forward together. Michael felt the hulkish figure frisk him with hands that felt like slabs of steel, leaving his father’s journal in Michael’s possession. Then Dracu signaled Armura to remain where he was and gestured Michael on ahead of him at gunpoint toward the farmhouse.
Still trying to process Dracu’s revelat
ion about them being half brothers, Michael squeezed through a chasm just beyond the entrance to the root cellar into what had been the home’s first floor. The walls were all gone now, most of the ceiling too. And what wood framing and stone foundation remained smelled of mold and rot. The ceiling’s absence allowed the sun to bore through into what had been the kitchen and living room. But there were no shingles in evidence, as if petty thieves had made off with them. Dust swirled through the air with each breeze, deepening the stench of decay and hopelessness.
Dracu followed him inside, holding the Beretta on Michael from across what had been the living room.
“How’s it feel to be home, Michele?”
“This hasn’t been my home in a very long time.”
“As it was never mine.”
Michael watched Dracu slowly lift the mesh mask to reveal a smooth face that might’ve been handsome, if not for its pasty, milk-colored complexion.
“I was our father’s firstborn, Michele. But he never knew I even existed. I remember my mother telling me stories about how brave and strong he was, how handsome. How someday he’d come back and rescue us from all the poverty and despair. I would go to sleep at night staring at a picture from a newspaper of him carrying my mother out of the burning building where she worked. It was the only picture she had of him, because he’d never allow any to be taken.
“So many nights I’d catch her shivering in the cold by the window, looking out as if expecting him to come. But he never did and I grew to hate him more every day, because he was a coward and a liar. How do you feel about our heroic father now? Being a farmer I imagine how he must’ve stank of cow shit. I would’ve liked to stuff it down his throat until he choked to death, instead of just shooting him while you hid somewhere, a coward just like he was. I bet you even smell the same.”
“Why don’t you come closer and find out?” Michael said, feeling his own rage starting to simmer.
“But I haven’t finished my story yet, Michele. Finally, my mother and I set out to find the piece of shit and found only hell instead. My mother was forced into the life she’d avoided in Romania at all costs, because our chickenshit father never came for us. I was a little boy, what did I know? I thought he’d come for us someday. I really believed that because I believed my mother. And she wasn’t a lying scum like our father—she believed he’d come for us, too.” Dracu gazed about the house’s crumbling confines and advanced farther forward, into a ray of sunlight where his flesh took on a painted-on, corpse-like quality. “I remember the men who paid her pennies to ravage her body, but not their faces, as if they all had the same face. Most were drunk. Some would beat her and one night one of them beat her so much she died. I dreamed of killing them all, Michele, the same way you probably dreamed of killing me. The difference is I finally got my chance to kill the man I wanted dead more than anything while you never got to kill me.”
“Not yet.”
Dracu’s expression flirted with a smile. “I wouldn’t hold your breath, if I was you.”
“You’re not me.”
“Not yet,” Dracu said, Michael’s own words thrown back at him. His expression had gone stiff as plaster in the sunlight. “My mother died that night when I was six, but her heart had already given out years before when her only true love, our father, never returned. How I came to hate him in the years that followed; it was that hatred more than anything that kept me alive in Turkey. Imagine what it was like when I got my chance to kill him while working for those pirates, when I recognized his face from that newspaper I stared at every night I can remember until they took me to hell. Imagine what it felt like to see this man I’d been told was so brave and strong nothing but an ignorant farmer.”
“You blame him for not coming to your rescue, even though he never knew you existed,” Michael charged.
“Because he never came back for my mother. He promised and then he didn’t, left her waiting by the window, looking for her one true love without realizing he was a peasant and a scum. An ant in the afterbirth whose life amounted to nothing. You know that in your heart as well as I, Michele. You just don’t dare admit it for fear you’re no different, a coward just like him in the end.”
Michael felt the urge to rush Dracu then and there, to risk the hail of bullets on the chance he might be able to kill him before the gunshots took their toll.
“I knew our father, you didn’t,” he said instead, opting for a different means of attack. “You said it yourself, Vlad, he was a hero. If he’d known you existed, he never would’ve let you become the monster you are.”
Dracu sneered, his eyes holding the glassy look of a man about to be sick. The sun streaming in through the hole where the ceiling had been caught only half of his face now, leaving the rest in shadows and seeming to cut him in half.
“Or maybe he would’ve just left me as he left my mother,” he said. “He didn’t care about her, only about the Nazi monsters he was hunting. Like Hans Wolff, the SS legend he let escape.”
“In order to save your mother.”
“And then he abandoned her and broke her heart. He should’ve just let her die.” The sun ducked behind a cloud, placing all of Dracu in the shadows. Contempt had twisted his features into an angry knot, the flat softness of his pale features turning even more hateful, as Michael watched. “You fancy yourself a genius, the billionaire boy wonder of Las Vegas who beat the boys’ club. And the name you took, Tiranno, I imagine you fancy yourself a tyrant, too, so perhaps we have more in common than just blood.”
“We have nothing in common.”
“Really? So you’ve never killed, Michele, never taken a life or ordered one to be taken? Because I seem to recall a freighter called the Achilles and its captain who went by the name of Skouros. He worked for me. That ship was mine, along with the twenty crewmembers who died at your hand or the hand of someone you sent, your warrior probably. I should’ve sent you a bill for sinking it.”
“They all deserved what they got.”
“But that doesn’t change the fact that you think of yourself as a high and mighty hero dispensing justice, when what you really were was a cold-blooded murderer, just like me. You see, it takes one to know one. But imagine my surprise when I put it altogether. Imagine another blessed twist of fate delivered to me when I learned who you were and then followed who you became. I’ve been watching you since you showed up in Las Vegas as Michael Tiranno, Michele, following your rise to fame and fortune, thinking you had it all without realizing I could strike at any time and take it all away.” He shook his head, smugly satisfied by the effect his words were having. “Look at you: A tyrant, a tycoon? Hah! You’re nothing but a peasant who happened to find a relic. It was the relic that made you, so I guess you could say that I made you, Michele, my coming here and killing the rest of your family. Without me, you might still be planting crops, milking cows, and shoveling shit today. You should be thanking me, brother.”
“I’ll pass on that, if you don’t mind. But you do seem to know an awful lot about my medallion.”
“Because it’s rightfully mine.”
“You don’t deserve it, Vlad.”
Dracu laughed, shaking his head when he finally stopped. “Oh, so you believe yourself less wicked than me? You think I don’t know all you’ve done to get where you are, all the sins you’ve committed, all the men who paid with their lives for standing in your way? The time has come to make you pay for your sins, Michele. I’ve watched you long enough.”
Michael maintained the stare that held them together. “Watched me through that veil?”
Reflexively, Dracu stepped farther back into the shadows, clinging to them now to avoid the sun altogether. He started to raise a hand to lower his veil again, but stopped in mid-motion.
“What’s it for?” Michael continued. “To hide your face or your intentions? You’re ashamed of your past, of yourself, of the ugliness that’s permeated your entire life. But hiding behind a mask changes nothing. You’re still the same p
erson when you take it off. Were you hoping to scare me with it like you scare everyone else? Sorry to disappoint you, Vlad, but I don’t scare so easily. And I could see right through that veil to the man you really are even before you raised it for me. I may have hidden in the barn as a boy, but who’s the real coward now?”
Dracu started forward once more, getting only as far as the sunlight stretching across the floor. “I’ve lived in darkness long enough. It’s time to try the light, see if treats me as well as it’s treated you. Your relic will be mine, Michele, everything you have will be mine.”
“By killing me, taking my medallion? You think it’s as simple as that?”
“You’re missing the point. But this is a point you can’t possibly see. Nobody can, not yet. But soon everyone will, the entire world. That’s when what I started the day I killed our father comes full circle. Fitting, don’t you think?”
“I think you’re a psycho.”
“All geniuses are a bit crazy, Michele, even you. The difference is my rise to ultimate power comes without any help from a piece of gold our father gave to you instead of me. And now it’s just you and me, Michele.”
“Really? Are you sure you got everyone that day?” Michael heard himself say, as if it were someone else talking, the long disparate pieces of his past falling into place. “Are you sure there wasn’t a little girl? You said the orders you disobeyed came from a man named Adnan Talu. What you don’t know is that Talu adopted the little girl you missed killing and raised her as his heir, probably out of guilt over what you’d done against his orders. Our sister, Vlad.”
Dracu’s expression tightened, his brow starting to furrow when he seemed to rein his emotions back in. “Then I’ll find and kill her too, but not before I kill you, not—”
And that’s when the first shots rang out.