by Dan Simmons
“A small, royal family,” continued O’Rourke, “requiring secrecy due to the nature of their disease and their crimes, having the money and power necessary to eliminate enemies and retain their secrecy…even to sending kidnappers and murderers to America to retrieve a baby from that family…a baby adopted by mistake.”
Kate looked down. “I know. It’s…nuts.”
O’Rourke sipped his espresso. “Yes,” he said. “Unless you belong to a church that has had secret correspondence for centuries about just such an evil and reclusive family. A family which originated somewhere in Eastern Europe half a millennium ago.”
Kate’s head snapped up. Her heart was already pounding and she felt the rise in blood pressure as a sharper pain in her aching skull. She ignored it. “Do you mean—”
O’Rourke set down the cup and held up a single finger. “Still not enough to base a theory on,” he said. “Unless…unless you tie it to the strange coincidence of having met someone who looks very much like the late, unlamented Vlad Ţepeş.”
Kate could only stare.
O’Rourke reached into his coat pocket and took out a small envelope of color photographs. There were six of them. The background was obviously Eastern Europe…a dark factory town…a medieval city street, Dacias parked along the curb. Kate knew intuitively that the photographs had been taken in Romania. But it was the man in the foreground who held her attention.
He was very old. That was immediately apparent from his posture, the curve of spine, the sense of a shrinking body lost in oversized clothes. His face was just visible above the lapels of an expensive topcoat, beneath the short brim of a homburg. But although sharpened and abraded by age and injury, it was a familiar face: no mustache here, but the broad underlip, the extended jaw, eyes sunken in the skull but still vaguely hyperthyroidal.
“Who?” whispered Kate.
O’Rourke slipped the photographs back in his coat pocket. “A gentleman I originally traveled to Romania with almost two years ago…a gentleman whose name you’ve probably heard.”
Two men began arguing loudly in German just behind O’Rourke’s chair. A man and a woman, Americans from the looks of their casual clothes, stood three feet away watching Kate and the priest, obviously waiting impatiently for the table.
O’Rourke stood up and extended his hand to her. “Come on. I know a quieter place.”
Kate had seen pictures of the big wheel before; everyone had. But it was somehow more charming when encountered in reality. She and O’Rourke were the only passengers in an enclosed car that could have easily held twenty people. The car behind them, although empty this evening, was actually filled with dining tables set with linen and china. Slowly, the wheel rotated their car two hundred feet to its highest point and then stopped as other people loaded far below.
“Neat Ferris wheel,” said Kate.
“Riesenrad,” said the priest, leaning on a railing and looking out the opened window at the fall foliage burning in last glow of autumn twilight. “It means giant wheel.” As he said that, the glow on the clouds faded and the sky began to pale and then darken. The car moved silently around, swept down past the loading point, and then climbed above the treetops again.
Lights were coming on all over Vienna. Cathedral towers were suddenly illuminated. Kate could see the modernistic towers of UNO City off toward the Danube; Susan McKay Chandra had once described to Kate the excitement of attending a conference there at the headquarters of the United Nations Commission for Infectious Diseases.
Kate winced, closed her eyes a second, and then looked at O’Rourke. “All right, tell me about this man.”
“Vernor Deacon Trent. You’ve heard the name?”
“Sure. He’s the Howard Hughes-style reclusive billionaire who made his fortune in…what?…appliances? Hotels? He has that big art museum named after him near Big Sur.” Kate hesitated. “Didn’t he die last year?”
O’Rourke shook his head. The car swooped low and the sounds of the few rides still operating came more clearly through the open window. Their car rose again. “Mr. Trent bankrolled the mission that brought me and a bunch of other guys—a WHO bigwig, the late Leonard Paxley from Princeton, other heavy hitters—into Romania right after the revolution. I mean right after. Ceauşescu wasn’t cold yet. Anyway, I went back to the States in February of last year, 1990, to try to round up some Church-sponsored aid for the orphanages over here, and before I left Chicago in May of that year, I’d read that Mr. Trent had suffered a stroke and was in seclusion somewhere in California. But he was still in Romania the last time I saw him.”
“That’s right,” said Kate. “Time had a thing about the corporate battle over control of his empire. He was incapacitated but not dead.” She shivered at the suddenly cool breeze.
O’Rourke pulled the window almost shut. “As far as I know, he still hasn’t died. But I was struck at the time we first came to Bucharest how much Mr. Vernor Deacon Trent looks like that old portrait of Vlad Ţepeş.”
“A family resemblance,” said Kate.
The priest nodded.
“But the painting we saw today was a copy…done a century after Vlad Ţepeş lived. It may be inaccurate.”
O’Rourke nodded again.
Kate looked at the lights of the old city. Screams came up from the loop-the-loop roller coaster below. “But if it is a family resemblance, then it may have some connection with…something.” She heard how lame that last word sounded, even to herself, and she closed her eyes.
“There are about twenty-four million people in Romania,” O’Rourke said softly. “It has an area of…what?…somewhere around a hundred thousand square miles. We have to start somewhere, even if all of our theories are half-assed.”
Kate opened her eyes. “Do you have to say a Hail Mary or something when you swear, O’Rourke? I mean, do penance?”
He rubbed his cheek but did not smile. “I give myself a dispensation…since I can’t give myself absolution.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s after six, Neuman. We’d better find a place to eat and get to bed early tonight. The hydrofoil is scheduled to leave at eight and the Austrians are nothing if not prompt.”
Chapter Twenty-two
THE hydrofoil was sleek and enclosed, the forward compartment holding half a dozen rows of no more than five seats per row on each side of the aisle, the curving Perspex windows giving a panoramic view of both banks of the Danube as the engines fired to life and moved the boat out carefully from the dock. The old city fell away quickly and within moments the only signs of habitation were the elevated fishing and hunting shacks along either side of the river; then these also fell behind and only forest lined the shores.
Kate looked at her Donau-Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft schedule, saw that it would take about five hours to travel down the Danube to Budapest, and said to O’Rourke, “Maybe we should have flown directly.”
The priest turned in his seat. He was dressed in jeans, a denim shirt, and a well-broken-in leather bomber jacket. “Directly to Bucharest?”
Kate shook her head. “I still don’t think they would let me in the country. But we could have flown directly to Budapest.”
“Yes, but the Gypsies wouldn’t meet with us before tonight.” He turned back to watch the south shore as the hydrofoil accelerated to thirty-five knots and rose on its forward fins. The ride was perfectly smooth. “At least this way we get to see the sights.”
The warm sunlight fell across their row of seats and Kate half-dozed as the hydrofoil carried them northeast around the curve of the Danube near Bratislava, then southeast until a young woman announced over the intercom that the shore to their right now belonged to Hungary, with Czechoslovakia still on the left. The forest along the river seemed more advanced into autumn here, with many of the trees bare. As they turned south, the sky began to cloud up and the warm band of sunlight across Kate first dimmed and then disappeared. Warm air began to blow out of the ship’s ventilators to make up for the sudden chill outside.
> O’Rourke had thought to have the hotel pack a lunch for them, and they opened the sealed containers and munched on salad and roast beef as the Danube hooked south into Hungary proper. Just as they had finished their lunch, O’Rourke said, “This area is known as the Danube Bend. It’s been important since Roman times…the Romans actually had summer homes along here. It was the border of the Empire for centuries.”
Kate glanced at the forested riverbanks and could easily imagine the northeast shore being the edge of the known world. The cold wind spiraled leaves onto the gray and choppy surface of the Danube.
“There,” said O’Rourke, pointing to their right. “That’s Visegrad. The Hungarian kings built that citadel in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. King Matthias occupied it during the height of the fifteenth-century Renaissance.”
Kate barely glanced to her right. She saw the ancient fortification on the hill and a broad wall running down to an even older-looking tower near the riverbank.
“That’s where our friend Vlad Dracula was imprisoned from 1462 to 1474,” said the priest. “King Matthias had him under house arrest for most of the last years of his life.”
Kate swiveled in her seat to watch the old wall and tower fall behind on the right. She continued staring even after the fortifications were out of sight. Finally she turned back to her companion. “So you don’t think I’m completely crazy to be interested in the Dracula family? Tell me the truth, O’Rourke.”
“I don’t think you’re completely crazy,” he said. “Not completely.”
Kate simulated a smile. “Tell me something,” she said.
“Sure.”
“Why do you know so much about so many things? Were you always this smart?”
The priest laughed—an easy, sincere sound that Kate realized she loved to hear—and scratched his short beard. “Ahh, Kate…if you only knew.” He looked out the window a moment. “I grew up in a small town in central Illinois,” he said at last. “And several of my childhood friends were really smart.”
“If these small-town buddies include Senator Harlen and that writer, they must’ve been,” said Kate.
O’Rourke smiled. “I could tell you a few things about Harlen, but yeah, you’re right, our little group had some pretty smart kids in it. I had a friend named Duane who…well, that’s another story. Anyway, I was the dummy of the group.”
Kate made a face.
“No, seriously,” said the priest. “I realize now that I had a learning disability—probably a mild case of dyslexia—but the result was that I flunked fourth grade, was left behind all my buddies, and felt like a moron for years. Teachers treated me that way, too.” He folded his arms, his gaze turned inward at some private memory. He smiled. “Well, my family didn’t have enough money to get me into college, but after ’Nam—after the Veterans’ Hospital I should say—I was able to use the G.I. Bill to go to Bradley University, and then to seminary. I guess I’ve been reading ever since, sort of to make up for those early years.”
“And why the seminary?” Kate asked softly. “Why the priesthood?”
There was a long silence. “It’s hard to explain,” O’Rourke said at last, “To this day I don’t know if I believe in God.”
Kate blinked in surprise.
“But I know that evil exists,” continued the priest. “I learned that early on. And it seemed to me that someone…some group…should do its best to stop that evil.” He grinned again. “I guess a lot us Irish think that way. That’s why we become cops or priests or gangsters.”
“Gangsters?” said Kate.
He shrugged. “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
A woman’s voice announced over the intercom that they were approaching Budapest. Kate watched as the farms and villas began appearing, to be superseded by larger buildings and then the city itself. The hydrofoil throttled back and came off its forward planes; they began to bounce along in the wakes of barges and other river traffic.
Budapest had perhaps the most beautiful riverfront Kate had ever seen. O’Rourke pointed out the six graceful bridges spanning the Danube, the wooded expanse of Margitsziget—Margaret Island—splitting the river, and then the glory of the city itself—old Buda rising high on the west bank, younger, sprawling Pest stretching away to the east. O’Rourke had pointed out the beautiful parliament building on the Pest side and was describing Castle Hill on the Buda side when exhaustion and dismay suddenly washed over Kate like a great wave. She closed her eyes a second, overwhelmed by sorrow, a sense of futility, and the sure knowledge that she had been displaced forever in space and time.
O’Rourke quit talking at once and gently touched her forearm. The hydrofoil’s engines rumbled as they slowed and backed toward a pier on the Pest side of the river.
“When do we meet the Gypsy representative?” asked Kate, her eyes still closed.
“Seven tonight,” said O’Rourke. He still touched her arm.
Kate sighed, forced the tide of hopelessness back far enough that she could breathe again, and looked at the priest. “I wish it were sooner,” she said, “I want to get going. I want to get there.”
O’Rourke nodded and said nothing else while the hydrofoil rumbled and bumped its way to the end of this leg of their voyage.
O’Rourke had booked rooms for them in a Novotel in the Buda side of the city, and Kate marveled at the island of Western efficiency in this former Communist country. Budapest made Kate think of Bucharest, Romania, in twenty-five years—perhaps—if capitalism continued to make inroads there. Never very interested in economic theory, Kate nonetheless had a sudden insight, however naive, that capitalism, or at least the individual initiative component of it, was like some of the life forms that found a foothold in even the most marginal of ecological niches until eventually—voilà!— a proliferation of life. In this case, she knew, the proliferation would grow and multiply until the balance of old and new, public and commercial, aesthetically pleasing and standardized mediocre would be lost and all the tiresome, leveling by-products of capitalism would make Budapest look like all the other cities of the world.
But for now Budapest seemed a pleasant balance of respect for antiquity and interest in the Almighty Dollar—or Forint, whichever the case might be. CNN and Hertz and all the usual pioneer buds of capitalism were present, but even a glimpse of the city in the cab had shown Kate a rich mix of the old and the new. O’Rourke mentioned that all of the bridges and the palace on Castle Hill had been blown up by the Germans or destroyed in fighting during World War II, and that the Hungarians had rebuilt everything lovingly.
In her room, staring out the window at a stretch of autobahn that could have been any American Interstate, Kate rubbed her head and realized that all of this apparent interest in travel trivia was just a way to distract herself from the dark tide that continued to lap at her emotions. That, and a way to avoid the anxiety at the coming entry into Romania.
She was surprised to realize that she was afraid of what lay ahead—afraid of the Transylvanian darkness which she’d glimpsed from the hospitals and orphanages of that cold nation—and in that sudden, sharp realization of fear, she had the briefest glimmer of hope that there was a path she could follow to a place where there were some emotions other than sorrow and shock and hopelessness and grim resolve to recover what could not be recovered.
There was a knock at the door.
“Ready?” said O’Rourke. His bomber jacket was cracked and faded with use, and for the first time Kate noticed that the web of laugh lines around the priest’s eyes contained small scars. “I figure we can get a light dinner here at the hotel and then go straight to the rendezvous.”
Kate took a deep breath, gathered up her coat, and slung her purse over her shoulder. “Ready,” she said.
They did not talk during the brief cab ride to Clark Adam Ter, the traffic circle at the west end of the Chain Bridge and just below the walls of Castle Hill. O’Rourke said nothing as they rode the funicular railway up the steep hillsid
e to the ramparts of the Royal Palace itself.
“Let’s sightsee,” he said softly as they stepped out of the cog railway. He took her arm and led her past glowing streetlamps toward a huge equestrian statue farther south along the terrace.
Kate knew from going over city maps that the Matthias church was in the opposite direction, and she had no urge whatsoever to sightsee, but she could tell from the tone of O’Rourke’s voice and the tension in his hand on her arm that something was wrong. She followed without protest.
“This is Prince Eugene of Savoy,” he said as they circled the giant statue of a seventeenth-century figure on horseback. The view beyond the balustrade was magnificent: it was not quite six-thirty in the evening, but the city of Pest was ablaze with lights and traffic, brightly lit boats moved slowly up and down the Danube, and the Chain Bridge was outlined with countless bulbs that made the river glow.
”That man near the steps is following us,” whispered O’Rourke as they moved into the lee of the statue. Kate turned slowly. Only a few other couples had braved the chill evening breeze. The man O’Rourke had indicated was standing near the steps to the terrace near the cog railway; Kate caught a glimpse of a long, black leather jacket; glasses and beard beneath a Tyrolean hat. The man was studiously looking out over the railing at the view.
Kate pretended to consult her city map. “You’re sure?” she said softly.
The priest rubbed his beard. “I think so. I saw him catch a cab behind us at the Novotel. He rushed to get in the car next to ours on the funicular.”
Kate walked to the broad railing and leaned on it. The autumn wind brought the scent of the river and dying leaves and auto exhaust up to her. “Are there any others?”
O’Rourke shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m a priest, not a spy.” He inclined his head toward an elderly couple walking a dachshund near the palace. “They may be following us, too… I dunno.”