The Origin of Dracula

by Irving Belateche

  “Dealt by Dantès,” I countered.

  “But that’s exactly the point of my uncle’s advice. The cards are coming from the enemy, and somewhere along the line, he’s gonna make a mistake. One of those clues is gonna have his fingerprints on it. It’s going to tell us more than he wanted it to.”

  I supposed that was possible, but it seemed like a long shot, especially when Nate’s life was riding on it.

  “Let’s say the Firegrill is the right move,” I said. “How did he pull it off? Did he pay the homeless guy to say that? To tell us that whole story?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But that wasn’t totally true. Lee knew more than he let on, enough to want to follow some of these breadcrumbs, no matter how outlandish they were. And maybe if he’d told me just a bit more—even though I still wouldn’t have believed him—I would’ve felt better about this lead. Instead, the closer we got to Alexandria, the more I felt we were off course. I stared at the lights of Rosslyn, and at Key Bridge, crowded with cars, each hauling scores of revelers into Georgetown’s nightlife, and I wondered if I should turn around and go back to Lucy’s office.

  Out of nowhere, Lee said, “Was there something else that made you want to talk to the homeless guy? I mean, I get the Something Wicked This Way Comes part, but was that it?”

  I weighed whether to tell him about the vagrant’s lack of a reflection. But this peculiar phenomenon seemed more in line with the madness of the vagrant’s story, not a part of the harsh reality of Dantès’s three murders. Lucy, Grace, and Quincy. It was insanity to bring it up.

  But Lee did. “He didn’t have a reflection, right?” he said.

  I glanced at him. “It must’ve been because he was standing too far away from the glass.”

  “Yeah,” Lee said, not quite sarcastically, but his tone said, If you want to believe that, go right ahead, but you’re lying to yourself. He didn’t explain why he was so calm about meeting a man who didn’t cast a reflection, and I didn’t press him. If I had, he might’ve tried to get me to believe more than I was willing to. Instead he went on to another observation.

  “The breadcrumbs are designed for you. Novel therapy—even though you hate it—is your deal.”

  His insight would turn out to be perfectly timed. In a way, he had just predicted Dantès’s next move. Dantès was about to integrate Lee fully into his game.

  Gliding along the GW parkway, I took in the Potomac, which ran wide and calm here, bordered by bike paths and monuments instead of rocky, muddy shores and cliffs. This didn’t look like the same river that had come back to haunt me.

  *

  Friday night wasn’t the best night to be headed into Old Town Alexandria, where Dan T.’s Firegrill was located. Old Town boasted an even more active nightlife than Georgetown, so its bars and restaurants were packed every weekend.

  I’d never been one to partake in D.C.’s nightlife—not during high school, not during summers back from college, and not even during my post-college years. That didn’t change when I met Lucy. We were cut from the same cloth. Neither of us was big on Georgetown or Alexandria or any other popular nightspots. Our favorite outings consisted of dinner out at one of the small Vietnamese restaurants in Arlington, then a movie.

  Our first date was dinner at The Four Sisters, a Vietnamese restaurant just off Wilson Boulevard. That had started our tradition of Vietnamese dinner and a movie. On that date, we’d been so intrigued by the exotic appetizers—from the quail dipped in lime sauce to the baby clams—that we’d ordered all eight appetizers on the menu as our dinner. Ironically, our last date—Nate was at a sleepover—had also been at The Four Sisters. But that time we ordered normal entrees, and it still depressed me that we didn’t go for the smorgasbord of appetizers. Who could’ve predicted that this date and the first date would be the bookends to our life together?

  A wave of nausea hit me as I realized that this rhetorical question actually had an answer. Dantès could have predicted it.

  I closed in on King Street, which went through the very center of Old Town, and traffic came to a standstill. Lee pulled out his cell phone and mapped out a new route to the Firegrill, one that skirted Alexandria’s main arteries.

  We circled around a bevy of bars, restaurants, boutiques, and galleries, which together added up to the gentrified parts of historic Old Town, and ended up on a street lined with rundown brick townhouses. This was a neighborhood of glum facades and understated signage, a neighborhood that didn’t cater to the nightlife a few blocks away.

  With one exception.

  At the end of the block, a large red neon sign publicized Dan T.’s Firegrill. The sign ran along the top of a squat, two-story building, painted red.

  We found parking a couple blocks away and walked back. The front of the building boasted a mural that conjured up hell—at least, it did for me. It was a straightforward but enormous painting of a barbecue pit. Huge red and orange flames lashed up from deep inside the pit. If the mural was supposed to advertise the Firegrill’s culinary treats, it did a bad job of it: the pit didn’t have a grill on top, nor any food barbecuing in the flames. Instead, it advertised the blazing flames themselves.

  I wondered how many other Firegrill patrons saw those flames as the flames of hell. Of course, I had a reason to—I’d been descending closer to those flames ever since I’d received that letter. And even before then. Since Lucy’s death.

  Inside, the bar was packed, loud, and oppressively hot. As you’d expect hell to be. And Lee and I were in the thick of it.

  “So what now?” Lee said.

  I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess I thought the breadcrumb would appear in the bar. And maybe it would, but it was still likely that we’d have to look for it.

  “We talk to Dan T.,” I said. That seemed like a logical place to start.

  “Okay.” Lee nodded toward the large bar in the back. “Let’s ask a bartender if Dan’s around.”

  With that shaky plan in mind, we started inching our way through the crowd. Sweat immediately formed on my brow. I wiped it off and took a deep breath. It felt like I was stuck in an overheated swamp. I took a closer look at my surroundings, hoping this would ground me and keep me from racing outside.

  Tall bar tables surrounded by patrons formed small islands in the otherwise free-floating crowd. Booths ran along the walls, providing more havens from the unmoored mass. Waitresses, in short black skirts and tight white blouses, swam through the crowd, delivering drinks and food.

  The Firegrill’s patrons were surprisingly varied. There were hipsters, the men in skinny jeans and Buddy Holly glasses, the women in floral, vintage dresses and costume jewelry; young professionals, the men in suits, ties loosened, the women in sleek dresses, their hair down; faux cowboys in boots and bolos, and faux cowgirls in wide skirts; college kids in T-shirts and jeans; and old-timers, also in T-shirts and jeans.

  As Lee and I moved closer to the bar, dishing out excuse me’s right and left to get through the throng, I wondered if the varied clientele was a clue in itself—a message that hell didn’t discriminate, that everyone was welcome.

  Including and especially me.

  We made it to the bar area, where every stool was taken and the hordes massed around the seated customers, ordering drinks, paying, and then retreating. Lee forced his way closer to the bar, cutting past people who shot us dirty looks and barked out what the hells. Lee didn’t care and continued to steamroll his way forward.

  I held back, sure that his aggression would end in a confrontation. And I wasn’t the only one who was thinking that; a waitress came up behind me and asked, “Can I get you and your friend something to drink? He seems mighty thirsty.” A kind way of saying he was too pushy.

  “Is Dan T. around tonight?” I asked.

  “He’s around every night.” She motioned to the far end of the bar. “That’s him. Behind the bar.”

  She’d singled out a dramatically handsome man with a square jaw that was covere
d in a three-day stubble. He was talking to a patron who was sitting at the bar finishing off a draft beer. From this vantage point, their conversation—in contrast to all the other conversations swirling around me, overly animated and bursting with exaggerated laughs—looked easygoing, two guys calmly shooting the shit as if they were sitting on a back porch far from the madding crowd.

  I raised my voice. “I found him, Lee.”

  Lee stopped his steamrolling, looked back at me, and the waitress gave out a little sigh of relief. “Good,” she said. “It’s too early for trouble. So what can I get you to drink?”

  Lee stepped up to me. “Where is he?”

  I pointed out Dan T., then thanked the waitress and started toward the end of the bar with Lee in tow. But that didn’t last long. When Lee saw that I was politely making my way forward, he cut in front of me and muscled himself a path. He was still pissing people off, though not quite as badly as before, since now he wasn’t actually cutting in line.

  Just before he made it to Dan T., he stopped and waited for me to catch up. When I did, he said, “You’re up.”

  So even though he’d led me through the swamp, he expected me to take the lead when it came to interrogating Dan T. Of course, he had every reason to expect me to—so far, this night had been my show.

  I stepped up to the bar and made eye contact with Dan. He stopped his conversation and flashed me a friendly smile. “What can I help you with?” he said.

  It was only then that I realized I hadn’t thought this through. I didn’t know the homeless man’s name, and he was my only connection to the Firegrill.

  “I’m sorry to butt in,” I said, “but I wanted to ask you a few questions.” Was there any other lead I could ask him about? Anything that didn’t make me sound like a lunatic?

  He grinned. “A few questions? Am I in trouble with the law?”

  “No—not at all—but you might know someone who is,” I said, regretting it immediately. I couldn’t jump right into asking him about Lucy’s or Grace’s murders.

  “Are you serious?” His grin disappeared.

  “It’s a long story, but—”

  “Listen, if you’ve got a beef with me or my place, you need to talk to my lawyer.” He was calm, but his friendly demeanor had turned ice cold.

  His buddy at the bar glanced at me with narrowed eyes, as if he was ready to defend Dan T. using his fists. With his leathery skin and thick neck, he looked more rural than suburban. He was wearing a T-shirt with the motto Virginia Is For Lovers on it, but the word Lovers was crossed out and Americans was stamped over it, declaring his bigotry to the world.

  “I’m doing a crappy job of explaining,” I said. “I just wanted to ask you a few questions about a former customer. He said you could help us.”

  “Who’s the customer?” Dan said, still cold, but also still calm.

  “I don’t know his name.”

  “That’s a bad start.” He turned his attention back to his buddy. “You ready for another beer, Frank?”

  Lee lurched forward, brushing up against Frank, who instantly leapt off his stool with a “What the fuck?” Frank was ready to brawl—his chest was puffed out and a blue vein bulged in his forehead.

  Lee ignored him and focused on Dan. “Listen, we don’t want to be here as much as you don’t want us here. But I got a problem. A big problem. My wife was murdered and I want to know who did it.”

  Frank retreated a few inches, not so eager to brawl anymore. His eyes began to dart back and forth between Dan and Lee as if he was now expecting Dan would be the one getting into a brawl with Lee.

  “Why the hell would I know who did it?” Dan said.

  “I don’t know why, but I know you do,” Lee barked out, exaggerating the lead we had beyond recognition. “One of your former customers told us you do.”

  Dan shook his head, disgusted, pulled out his cell phone, and began typing a text. “I got some friends who are going to help you find your way out.”

  Lee leaned across the bar. “I don’t need your goddamn bouncers to show me the way out.”

  “Then get the fuck out yourself.”

  This venture had turned into a bust, built on imaginary connections. It wasn’t worth salvaging, and my thought was that we should get the fuck out.

  Dan looked over at Frank. “So—can I get you that refill?”

  “That’s what I been waiting for,” Frank said, and sat back on his barstool.

  Dan grabbed the empty beer mug and was about to turn away when Lee put all our cards on the table. “Some homeless drunk told us you could help us out. He said we can’t see things. We’re stuck in a cave or some shit like that, and we can’t see the killer. He told us we’d find something here.”

  It was clear from the curious expression on Dan’s face that Lee had hit a nerve.

  “Do you know what any of that means?” I said.

  “I know what part of it means,” Dan answered.

  “Then tell us,” Lee said. His tone was still belligerent, so I added: “Then we’ll be out of your hair.”

  “Your homeless drunk was talking about the Allegory of the Cave,” Dan said, then walked away with the empty beer mug. I stood there dumbfounded, taken aback at hearing a reference to the Allegory of the Cave in a bar in Old Town Alexandria. Dan dumped the mug into a plastic bin filled with dirty glasses and dishes.

  I was sure that the Allegory of the Cave fell far down the list of usual discussion topics at a place like the Firegrill—below work, gossip, relationships, sports, politics, and at least several hundred other more common topics of conversation. But I remembered the reference from a college philosophy class—it came from Plato, that much I knew—but I didn’t remember the allegory itself.

  Dan plucked a fresh mug from a rack of clean ones hanging over the bar and stuck it under a tap. As the beer flowed into the glass, he sent another text, which I assumed canceled his request for bouncers—for now. Then he grabbed the mug, wiped the foam from the top with a small wooden paddle, and headed back our way.

  He plunked the beer in front of Frank and looked to Lee. “I’m sorry about your wife,” he said.

  Lee nodded, but it wasn’t gracious gesture of peace. It was a gesture that said Let’s get on with this, and Dan responded in kind: a flicker of hardness covered his face and his jaw tightened. So I said something to keep the lead alive. “Can you just take a minute to tell us why you think your former customer wanted us to know about this allegory?”

  “I have no idea why.”

  “Can you just tell us the allegory then?”

  “How the hell is my little bar story going to help you with a murder case?”

  “Who knows?” I said, and that was the truth—though I had to admit that when he had used the word “story,” it had given me a slight bit of hope.

  “Why aren’t the cops involved?” he said. A reasonable question.

  “They are,” I said. “But so are we.”

  He stared at me a beat, then smiled. “Good answer.” He looked over the Firegrill as if he was surveying his kingdom, then said, “Okay. No skin off my back.”

  Frank grabbed his beer and slid off his stool. “I’ll check back in later. I heard this one already.” He retreated into the crowd.

  “I’m giving you the bite-size version,” Dan said, and dove right in, clearly ready for us to be on our way. “There’s a bunch of people who live in a cave, and they’ve lived there all their lives. They’re chained down, sitting on the ground, like prisoners. So they can’t move. And they’re facing this blank wall. It’s the only thing they can see.

  “Now, behind them, there’s a fire. They don’t know about it, and they don’t know there are other people in the cave walking in front of that fire. Those people are carrying these wooden figures—figures of all different shapes and sizes. And because of the fire, the figures are casting shadows on that blank wall. So to the prisoners, those shadows are the real world, because it’s the only thing they’ve ever known.
They’ve never seen anything else. But if someone freed them, they’d see that the shadows are just shadows. And that the real world is something else.”

  Dan folded his arms. “So that’s my little story, boys. Sometimes I stretch it out if people aren’t getting it.”

  I got it. It all came back to me from that college philosophy class. I looked over at Lee to see if he got it. His brow was creased, and I thought it was because he was thinking about it. But I was wrong.

  “So what?” he said, confronting Dan even though Dan had obliged our request.

  Before Lee pissed him off again, and in case there was more information to be gleaned, I ignored Lee’s belligerence and answered his so what. “It means what we think is real isn’t real. It’s just a shadow of what’s real.”

  “I got that,” Lee said, and before he said anything more, I interjected.

  “Why do you tell your customers that story?” I asked Dan.

  “It does some good for some of them,” he said.

  “How? Why that story?” I was pressing him because I had nothing. No breadcrumb.

  “I came up through the ranks, and any bartender who does has got to be a psychologist,” he said. “That story is part of my go-to advice.”

  “I don’t get it.” I didn’t see how the allegory would help his customers, and I certainly didn’t see how it would help us.

  “I’ll bottom-line it for you. If someone has a problem they’re obsessing about, sometimes it’s all in their head. The reality they’re seeing isn’t real at all. It’s just a shadow on a wall. If they get out of their cave and look behind them, they’ll see another reality. The one outside their head.”

  Lee grunted—annoyed and dismissive. “When your wife dies, that’s fucking reality.”

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  “Of course,” Dan said, “I get that. If the problem isn’t in your head, then I got other advice. For example, you need to calm the fuck down.”

  I was sure Lee was going to leap across the bar. But he didn’t. He actually took Dan’s advice. He shook his head, not so much disgusted, just ready to give up. Then he glanced at me and said, “Let’s go.”