The Historian

Chapter 74

"Helen touched her father's forehead with two fingers, as if conferring a blessing. She was fighting sobs now. 'How can we move him out of here? I want to bury him.'
"'There's no time,' I said bitterly. 'He'd rather we got out alive, I'm sure.' "I took my jacket off and spread it gently over him, covering his face. The stone lid was too heavy to put back on. Helen picked up her little pistol, carefully checking it even in the midst of her emotion. 'The library,' she whispered. 'We must find it immediately. And did you hear something a moment ago?' "I nodded. 'I think I did, but I couldn't tell where it was coming from.' We stood listening hard. The silence hung unbroken above us. Helen was trying the walls now, feeling along them with her pistol in one hand. The candlelight was frustratingly dim. We went around and around, pressing and tapping. There were no niches, no oddly protruding rocks, no possible openings, nothing that looked suspicious.
"'It must be almost dark outside,' Helen muttered. "'I know,' I said. 'We've probably got ten minutes and then we shouldn't be here, I'm sure of that.' We went around the little room again, checking every inch. The air was chill, especially now that I wasn't wearing my jacket, but sweat began to trail down my back. 'Maybe the library is in another part of the church, or in the foundation.'
"'It has to be completely hidden, probably underground,' Helen whispered.
'Otherwise someone would have known of it long ago. Also, if my father is in this grave - ' She didn't finish, but it was the question that had tormented me even in the first moment of shock, seeing Rossi there: where was Dracula?
"'Isn't there anything unusual here?' Helen was looking at the low, vaulted ceiling now, trying to reach it with her fingertips.
"'I don't see anything.' Then a sudden thought made me snatch a candle from the stand and crouch down. Helen followed me swiftly.
"'Yes,' she breathed. I was touching the carved dragon on the vertical of the lowest step. I had stroked it with my finger during our first visit to the crypt; now I pushed it hard, put my weight into it. It was firm in the wall. But Helen's sensitive hands were already feeling the stones around it, and she suddenly found a loose one; it simply came out in her hand, like a tooth, from where it was embedded next to the dragon carving. A small dark hole gaped where it had been; I put my hand in and waved it around, but encountered only space. Helen slipped hers in, however, and brought it back toward the dragon, behind the carving. 'Paul!' she cried softly.
"I followed her grasp into the dark. There was certainly a handle there, a large handle of cold iron, and when I pushed on it the dragon lifted easily out of its space under the step without disturbing any of the other stones around it or the step above it. It was a finely chiseled piece of work, we saw now, with an iron handle in the shape of a horned beast drilled into it, presumably so you could pull it shut behind you when you went down the narrow stone steps opening before us. Helen took a second candle and I grabbed the matches. We entered on hands and knees - I remembered suddenly Rossi's bruised and scraped appearance, his torn clothes, and wondered if he'd been dragged more than once through this opening - but we were soon able to stand upright on the steps.
"The air that came up to meet us was cold and dank in the extreme, and I fought to control a trembling deep inside and to keep a firm hold on Helen, who was also trembling, during the steep descent. At the bottom of fifteen steps was a passage, infernally dark, although our candlelight showed iron sconces pinned high on the walls, as if it had once been illuminated. At the end of the passageway - again, it seemed to me about fifteen steps forward, and I was careful to count them - was a door of heavy and clearly very old wood, wearing into splinters near the bottom, and again that eerie door handle, a long-horned creature wrought in iron. I felt more than saw Helen raise her pistol. The door was wedged firm, but on examining it closely I found it bolted from the side we were on. I put all my weight under the heavy latch, and then I pulled the door open with a slow fear that nearly melted my bones.
"Inside, the light of our candles, feeble as it was, fell on a great chamber. There were tables near the door, long tables of an ancient solidity, and empty bookshelves. The air of the room was surprisingly dry after the chill of the passage, as if it had some secret ventilation or was dug into a protected depth of earth. We stood clinging to each other, and listened hard, but there was no sound in the room. I wished devoutly that we could see beyond the darkness. The next thing our light picked up was a branching candelabrum filled with half-burned candles, and this I lit all over. It illuminated high cabinets now, and I looked cautiously inside one of them. It was empty. 'Is this the library?' I said. 'There's nothing here.'
"We stood still again, listening, and Helen's pistol glinted in the increased light. I thought that I should have offered to carry it, to use it if necessary, but I had never handled a gun, and she, I knew very well, was a crack shot. 'Look, Paul.' She pointed with her free hand, and I saw what had caught her gaze.
"'Helen,' I said, but she was moving forward. After a second my light reached a table that had not been illuminated before, a great stone table. It was not a table, I saw an instant later, but an altar - no, not an altar, but a sarcophagus. There was another nearby - had this been a continuation of the monastery's crypt, a place where its abbots could rest in peace, away from Byzantine torches and Ottoman catapults? Then we saw beyond them the largest sarcophagus of all. Along the side ran one word, cut into the stone: DRACULA . Helen raised her gun, and I gripped my stake. She took a step forward and I kept close to her.
"At that moment we heard a commotion behind us, at a distance, and the crash of footsteps and scrambling bodies, which almost obscured the faint sound in the darkness beyond the tomb, a trickling of dry earth. We leaped forward like one being and looked in - the largest sarcophagus had no covering slab and it was empty, as were the other two. And that sound: somewhere in the darkness, some small creature was making its way up through the tree roots.
"Helen fired into the dark and there was a crashing of earth and pebbles; I ran forward with my light. The end of the library was a dead end, with a few roots hanging down from the vaulted ceiling. In the niche on the back wall where an icon might once have stood, I saw a trickle of black slime on the bare stones -  blood? An infiltration of moisture from the earth?
"The door behind us burst open and we swung around, my hand on Helen's free arm. Into our candlelight came a strong lantern, flashlights, hurrying forms, a shout. It was Ranov, and with him a tall figure whose shadow leaped forward to engulf us: G¨¦za J¨®zsef, and at his heels a terrified Brother Ivan. He was followed by a wiry little bureaucrat in dark suit and hat, with a heavy dark mustache. There was another figure, too, one who moved haltingly, and whose slow progress, I realized now, must have hampered them at every step: Stoichev. His face was a strange mixture of fear, regret, and curiosity, and there was a bruise on his cheek. His old eyes met ours for a long sorrowful moment, and then he moved his lips, as if thanking his God to find us alive.
"G¨¦za and Ranov were on us in a fraction of a second. Ranov had a gun trained on me and G¨¦za on Helen, while the monk stood openmouthed and Stoichev waited, quiet and wary, behind them. The dark-suited bureaucrat stood just out of the light. 'Drop your gun,' Ranov told Helen, and she let it fall obediently to the floor. I put my arm around her, but slowly. In the gloomy candlelight their faces looked more than sinister, except for Stoichev's. I saw that he would have hazarded a smile at us if he had not been so frightened.
"'What the hell are you doing here?' Helen said to G¨¦za before I could stop her.
"'What the hell are you doing here, my dear?' was his only answer. He looked taller than ever, dressed in a pale shirt and pants and heavy walking boots. I hadn't realized at the conference that I actually hated his guts.
"'Where is he?' Ranov growled. He looked from me to Helen.
"'He's dead,' I said. 'You came through the crypt. You must have seen him.'
"Ranov frowned. 'What are you talking about?'
"Something, some instinct I owed to Helen, perhaps, stopped me from saying more.
"'Whom do you mean?' Helen said coldly.
"G¨¦za trained his gun a little more exactly on her. 'You know what I mean, Elena Rossi. Where is Dracula?'
"This was easier to answer, and I let Helen go first. 'He is not here, evidently,' she said in her nastiest voice. 'You may examine the tomb.' At this the little bureaucrat took a step forward and seemed about to speak.
"'Stay with them,' Ranov said to G¨¦za. Ranov moved carefully forward among the tables, glancing around at everything; it was clear to me that he'd never been here before. The dark-suited bureaucrat followed him without a word. When they reached the sarcophagus, Ranov held up his lantern and his gun and looked cautiously inside. 'It is empty,' he threw back to G¨¦za. He turned to the other two, smaller sarcophagi. 'What is this? Come here, help me.' The bureaucrat and the monk stepped obediently forward. Stoichev followed more slowly and I thought I saw a light in his face as he looked around him at the empty tables, the cabinets. I could only guess what he made of this place.
"Ranov was already peering into the sarcophagi. 'Empty,' he said heavily. 'He is not here. Search the room.' G¨¦za was already striding among the tables, holding his light up to every wall, opening cabinets. 'Did you see him or hear him?'
"'No,' I said, more or less truthfully. I told myself that if only they didn't injure Helen, if they let her go, I would consider this expedition a success. I would never ask life for anything else. I also thought, with fleeting gratitude, of Rossi's delivery from this whole situation.
"G¨¦za said something that must have been a curse in Hungarian, because Helen nearly smiled, despite the gun aimed at her heart. 'It is useless,' he said, after a moment. 'The tomb in the crypt is empty, and this one is also. And he will never return to this place, since we have found it.' It took me a moment to digest this. The tomb in the crypt was empty? Then where was Rossi's body, which we'd just left there?
Ranov turned to Stoichev. 'Tell us about what is here.' They had lowered their guns at last and I drew Helen to me, which made G¨¦za give me one sour look, although he said nothing.
"Stoichev held his lantern up as if he had been waiting for this moment. He went to the nearest table and tapped it. 'These are oak, I think,' he said slowly, 'and they could be medieval in their design.' He looked under the table at a leg joint, tapped a cabinet. 'But I do not know much about furniture.' We waited, silently.
"G¨¦za kicked the leg of one of the ancient tables. 'What am I going to say to the Minister of Culture? That Wallachian belonged to us. He was a Hungarian prisoner and his country was our territory.'
"'Why don't we quarrel about that when we find him?' Ranov growled. I realized suddenly that their only common language was English, and that they loathed each other. At that moment I knew whom Ranov reminded me of. With his heavyset face and thick dark mustache, he looked like the photographs I'd seen of the young Stalin. People like Ranov and G¨¦za did minimal damage only because they had minimal power.
"'Tell your aunt to be more careful with her phone calls.' G¨¦za gave Helen a baleful look and I felt her stiffen against me. 'Now leave this damned monk to guard the place,' he added to Ranov, and Ranov issued a command that made poor Brother Ivan tremble. At that moment, the light from Ranov's lantern suddenly fell in a new direction. He had been raising it here and there, examining the tables. Now his light slanted across the face of the dark-suited, severely hatted little bureaucrat, who was standing silently by Dracula's empty sarcophagus. Perhaps I wouldn't have noticed his face at all if it hadn't been for the strange expression it wore - a look of private grief suddenly illuminated by the lantern. I could see plainly the bone-thin face under the awkward mustache, and the familiar glitter of the eyes. 'Helen!' I shouted. 'Look!' She stared, too.
"'What?' G¨¦za turned on her in an instant.
"'This man - ' Helen was aghast. 'That man there - he is - '
"'He's a vampire,' I said flatly. 'He followed us from our university in the United States.' I had barely begun to speak before the creature was in flight. He had to come straight toward us to get out, barreling into G¨¦za, who tried to seize him, and pushing past Ranov. Ranov was quicker on his feet; he grabbed the librarian, they collided hard, and then Ranov leaped back from him with a cry and the librarian was in flight again. Ranov turned and shot the hurtling figure before it was many feet away. It didn't falter for a second - Ranov might have been shooting into air. Then the evil librarian was gone, so suddenly that I wasn't sure whether he'd actually reached the passage or vanished before our eyes. Ranov ran after him, through the doorway, but returned almost immediately. We all stood staring at him; his face was white, and where he grasped the torn cloth of his jacket, a little blood was already trickling between his fingers. After a long minute Ranov spoke. 'What the hell is this about?' His voice trembled.
"G¨¦za shook his head. 'My God,' he said. 'He bit you.' He took a step back from Ranov. 'And I was alone with that little man several times. He said he could tell me where we could find the Americans, but he never told me he was  - '
"'Of course he never told you,' Helen said contemptuously, although I tried to keep her quiet. 'He wanted to find his master, to follow us to him, not to kill you. You were more useful to him this way. Did he give you our notes?'
"'Shut up.' G¨¦za looked inclined to strike her, but I heard the fear and awe in his voice, and I quietly drew her away. "'Come.' Ranov was herding us with his gun again, one hand on his wounded shoulder. 'You have been of very little assistance. I want you back in Sofia and on a plane as soon as possible. You are lucky we don't have permission to make you disappear - it would be too inconvenient.' I thought he was going to kick us as G¨¦za had done to the table leg, but he turned instead and ushered us brusquely out of the library. He made Stoichev walk ahead; I guessed with a pang what the old man must have been through, in the course of this coercive chase. Clearly, Stoichev hadn't intended for us to be followed; I'd believed that from my first glimpse of the misery in his face. Had he made it back to Sofia before they forced him to turn around and follow us? I hoped Stoichev's international reputation would protect him from further abuse, as it had in the past. But Ranov - that was the worst of it. Ranov would probably return, infected, to his duties with the secret police. I wondered if G¨¦za would try to do anything about this, but the Hungarian's face looked so forbidding that I didn't dare to address him.
"I looked back once, from the doorway, at the princely sarcophagus that had lain here for nearly five hundred years. Its occupant might be anywhere now, or on his way to anywhere. At the top of the steps we crawled one by one through the opening - I prayed none of those guns would go off - and there I saw something very strange. The reliquary of Saint Petko sat open on its pedestal. They must have had some tools, to open it where we had failed. The marble slab underneath was back in place and covered with its embroidered cloth, undisturbed. Helen shot me a blank look. Glancing into the reliquary as we passed it, I saw a few pieces of bone, a polished skull - all that remained of the local martyr.
"Outside the church, in the heavy night, there was a confusion of cars and people - G¨¦za had apparently arrived with an entourage, two of whom were guarding the church doors. Dracula certainly hadn't escaped that way, I thought. The mountains loomed around us, darker than the dark sky. Some of the villagers had gotten wind of the arrivals and come up with lighted torches; they fell back at Ranov's approach, staring at his torn and bloody jacket, their faces strained in the uneven light. Stoichev caught my arm; his face bobbed near my ear. 'We closed it,' he whispered.
"'What?' I bent to listen to him. "'The monk and I went down first, into the crypt, while those - those thugs searched the church and the woods for you. We saw the man in the grave - not Dracula - and I knew you had been there. So we closed it up and when they came down they opened the reliquary only. They were so angry then that I thought they would throw out the poor saint's bones.' Brother Ivan looked sturdy enough, I thought, but Professor Stoichev's frailty must conceal a rare
strength. Stoichev looked sharply at me. 'But who was that in the grave underneath, if it was not - ?' "'It was Professor Rossi,' I whispered. Ranov was opening car doors, ordering us in.
"Stoichev gave me a quick, eloquent look. 'I am so sorry.'"
"That is how we left my dearest friend resting in Bulgaria, may he sleep there in peace until the end of the world."