“But that was different.”
“Maybe,” said O’Rourke and began cleaning up their modest picnic site. “But even if the strigoi have become so alien from human emotions that they’re another species…which I won’t believe until I see more evidence…it’s not enough. Not for me.”
Kate stood and brushed off her skirt. She pulled a jacket on over her sweater. The wind was colder now, the sky grayer. The brief return to autumn was over and winter was blowing down from the Carpathians.
“But you’ll help me find Joshua,” she said.
“Oh, yes.”
“And you’ll help me get him out of this…country.”
“Yes,” he said. He did not have to remind her of the police, the military, the border guards, the informants, the air force, the Securitate…all obeying the orders of those who took orders from the strigoi.
“That’s all I ask,” Kate said honestly. She touched his arm. “We’d better get moving if we have another hundred miles or so before we get to Sighişoara.”
“The main highway is faster,” said O’Rourke. He hesitated. “Did you want to continue driving for a while?”
Kate paused for only a second. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.”
The road down from the pass was a series of hair-raising switchbacks, but Kate had got the hang of handling the bike now, and used the compression of the lower gears to keep the brakes from overheating. O’Rourke had double-checked the gas tank and thought they would have enough to get to Braşov, but the uncertainty made Kate nervous.
There was no traffic at all on this steep stretch of the highway and Kate saw only a handful of cottages set far back in the pine trees. Then they were in the outskirts of Sinaia and the homes grew more frequent and larger, obviously country houses for the privileged Nomenclature—those party apparatchiks and smiled-upon bureaucrats who earned extra perks from the state. Sinaia itself looked like a typical Eastern European resort town—large old hotels and estates which had been fine places a century earlier and which had received little maintenance since, signs to winter sports facilities where a “ski lift” would involve ropes and the occasional T-bar, and a newer, larger section of town featuring Stalinist apartments and heavy industry pouring pollution into the mountain valley.
But the scenery above the town could not be compromised by socialist ugliness. On either side of Sinaia and the busy Highway 1 that ran through it, the Bucegi Mountains rose in almost absurd relief, leaping skyward to bare peaks whose summits reached 7,000 feet. Kate’s home—her ex-home—in the foothills above Boulder had been at 7,000 feet, and the peaks of the Rockies to the west had risen to almost 14,000 feet, but these Bucegi Mountains were much more dramatic, rising vertically as they did from the Prahova River Valley that was not far above sea level. The result, Kate thought, glancing up at the scenery while winding the motorcycle through truck traffic exiting from what looked like a steel mill, was a mountain scene that looked the way the nineteenth-century painter Bierstadt only wanted the Rockies to look: vertical, craggy, the summits lost in clouds and mist.
Kate had been to the Swiss Alps before, and the scenery here rivaled anything she had seen there. It was just the gray people shuffling along the highway, the empty shops, the decaying estates, the disintegrating apartment buildings, and the filthy industry pouring black smoke at the mountains that reminded her she was in an environment that no self-respecting Swiss would tolerate for an hour.
There was no gas station in Sinaia, and Kate pressed on toward Braşov thirty miles to the north. The road continued to follow the river, with cliffs and breathtaking views on either side. Kate was not looking at the view. When the truck traffic thinned out, she throttled back so that she could be heard. “O’Rourke,” she shouted. When he looked up from whatever thoughts he was lost in, she went on. “Why don’t you trust Lucian?”
He leaned closer as they rumbled past a closed-down Byzantine Orthodox church and followed the highway around a long bend in the river. “At first it was just instinct. Something…something not right.”
“And then?” said Kate. Clouds continued to pour between the mountains to the west, but occasional shafts of sunlight would illuminate the valley and the narrow river.
“And then I checked on something when I went back to the U.S. Before I went to Colorado and…before I saw you in the hospital there. Do you remember telling me that Lucian said he’d learned his idiomatic English during a couple of visits to the States? When he’d gone with his parents?”
Kate nodded and maneuvered to miss a Gypsy wagon and a small herd of sheep. She swerved back to the right lane just as a logging truck roared by in the opposite direction. It was half a mile before they escaped its blue exhaust fumes. “So?” she said.
“So I called my friend’s office in Washington… Senator Harlen from Illinois?…and Jim promised to check on it for me. Just look at the visa records and so forth. But he didn’t get back to me before you and I left for Romania.”
Kate didn’t understand. “So you didn’t learn anything?”
“I told him to contact the embassy in Bucharest when he did get the records and have them leave word with the Franciscan headquarters there,” O’Rourke shouted over the engine. “They’d gotten the message when I spoke to Father Stoicescu the other morning. The morning after Lucian showed us the bodies of his parents and the thing in the tank at the medical school.”
Kate glanced at him but said nothing. The valley was widening ahead.
“Visa records show that Lucian visited the United States four times in the last fifteen years. The first time he was only ten. The last time was in late autumn of 1989, just two years ago.” O’Rourke paused a minute. “He didn’t go with his parents any of those times. Each time he came alone and was sponsored by the World Market and Development Research Foundation.”
Kate shook her head. The vibration and engine roar were giving her a headache. “I never heard of it.”
“I have,” said O’Rourke. “They called my superior in the Chicago archdiocese almost two years ago and asked if the Church would suggest someone to go on a fact-finding trip to Romania that the foundation was sponsoring. The archbishop chose me.” He leaned up out of the sidecar so that Kate could hear better. “The foundation was started by the billionaire Vernor Deacon Trent. Lucian went to the States four times at the invitation of Trent’s group…or perhaps at the old man’s personal invitation.”
Kate found a wide enough spot in the shoulder to pull over and did so. The river rushed past to their right. “You’re saying that Lucian knows Trent? And that Trent is probably the leader of the strigoi Family? Maybe even a direct descendant of Vlad Ţepeş?”
O’Rourke did not blink. “I’m just telling you what Senator Harlen’s office found out.”
“What does it prove?”
He shrugged. “At the very least it proves that Lucian was lying to you when he said he traveled to the States with his parents. At the worst—”
“It says that Lucian is strigoi,” said Kate. “But he showed us that blood test…”
O’Rourke made a face. “I thought he went to rather great pains to disprove something we hadn’t even suggested. Blood tests can be faked, Kate. You of all people should know that. Did you watch carefully when he did the test?”
“Yes. But the slides or samples could have been switched when I was distracted.” A heavy truck rumbled past. Kate waited for the roar to fade. “If he’s strigoi, why did he shelter us and take us to Şnagov Island to see part of the Ceremony and—” She took a deep breath and let it out. “It would be an easy way for the strigoi to keep tabs on us, wouldn’t it?”
O’Rourke said nothing.
Kate shook her head. “It still doesn’t make sense. Why did Lucian run away when the Securitate or whoever it was were chasing us in Bucharest? And why would he allow us to be separated like we are if his role was to keep tabs on us?”
I don’t think we have any real understanding of the power struggles going
on here,” said O’Rourke. “We’ve got the government versus the protesters versus the miners versus the intellectuals, and the strigoi seem to be pulling most of the strings on each side. Maybe they’re fighting among themselves, I don’t know.”
Kate angrily stepped off the bike and looked out at the river. She had liked Lucian…still liked him. How could her instincts have been so wrong? “It doesn’t matter,” she said aloud. “Lucian doesn’t know where we are and we don’t know where he is. We won’t see him again. If his job was to keep track of us, they probably fired him.” Or worse.
O’Rourke had uncoiled himself from the sidecar and was checking the gas tank. There was a fuel gauge on the narrow console between the handlebars, but it had no needle and the glass was broken. “We need gas,” he said. “Do you want to drive us into Braşov?”
“No,” said Kate.
They got no gas in Braşov.
Foreigners in Romania could not—at least theoretically—buy gas at the regular pumps using Romanian lei. Laws still required tourists to use their own hard currency to purchase petrol vouchers at hotels, the few car rental agencies, and Office of National Tourism outlets—each voucher good for two liters—and to exchange these for gas at special ComTourist pumps set aside at the few-and-far-between gas stations.
That was the theory. In practice, O’Rourke explained, the ComTourist pumps usually sat idle while the gas station manager waved tourists to the front of the inevitable line at the regular pumps. This involved hateful stares from the people in the long lines while the time-consuming voucher paperwork was done, as well as baksheesh to the person whose job it was to pump the gas (never the manager of the station and all too frequently a woman in six layers of coats and stained coveralls).
Braşov itself was a once-beautiful medieval city which had been covered with industry, Stalinist apartment tracts, half-finished Ceauşescu-started construction, abandoned systematization projects, and even more industry like barnacles on a sunken ship. It may have been possible to find some streets or vistas of former beauty, but Kate and O’Rourke certainly did not during their ride down the busy Calea Bucureştilor and Calea Făgăraşului boulevards in search of the Sibiu/Sighişoara highway and the gas stations the map promised.
One of the gas stations was closed and derelict, windows broken and pumps vandalized. The other, just past the turnoff from the boulevard to the Sibiu/Sighişoara highway, had a line that stretched more than a mile back into the city proper.
“Merde,” whispered O’Rourke. Then, “We can’t wait. We’ll have to try the ComTourist pump.”
A fat man in stained coveralls came out to squint at them. Kate decided to hunker down in the sidecar and be invisible while O’Rourke handled things; few things were more conspicuous in Romania than a take-charge Western female.
“Da?” said the manager, wiping his hands on a grease-black rag. “Pot sa te ajut?”
“Ja,” said O’Rourke, his demeanor suddenly self-assured and a bit arrogant. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Ah…vorbiţi germana?”
“Nu,” said the man. Behind them a woman in several layers of jackets pumped gas into the first car in a line that stretched literally out of sight. Everyone was watching the exchange by the ComTourist pump.
“Scheiss,” said O’Rourke, obviously disgusted. He turned to Kate. “Er spricht kein Deutsch.” He turned back to the manager and raised his voice. “Ah…de benzină…ah…Faceţi plinul, vă rog.”
Kate knew enough Romanian to catch the “Fill ’er up, please.”
The manager looked at her, then turned back to O’Rourke. “Chitanta? Cupon pentru benzină?”
O’Rourke at first looked blank and then nodded and pulled an American twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket. The manager took it but did not look happy. Nor did he unlock the heavy padlock on the gas pump. He held up one grease-black finger and said, “Please…you…to stay…here,” and went back into the tiny station.
“Uh-oh,” said Kate.
O’Rourke said nothing. He got back on the bike, gunned the engine to life, and drove off slowly. Eyes watched from the cars in line as they headed back into town. “Dumb, dumb, dumb,” O’Rourke was saying to himself.
“Aren’t we going the wrong way?” asked Kate.
“Yes.” He drove back to the main boulevard, swung right at a traffic circle, and accelerated out into the truck traffic heading southwest. A road sign said RIŞNOV 13 KM.
“Do we want to go to Rişnov?” called Kate over the roar and rattle.
“No.”
“Do we have enough gas to get to Sighişoara?”
“No.”
Kate asked no more questions. In the outskirts of Braşov another highway branched northwest and O’Rourke swung onto it. A kilometer marker said FĂGĂRAŞ. O’Rourke pulled over and they studied the map. “If we’d kept going on the Sibiu/Sighişoara road, that fat toad could have sent the police right after us,” he said. “At least now they might look south before checking north. Damn.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” said Kate. “We had to get gas.”
O’Rourke shook his head angrily. “Running out of gas is a way of life in this country. Dacias have little pumps built in under the hood so people can transfer a liter or two to someone who’s broken down. Everyone carries liter jars in their trunks. I was an idiot.”
“No, you weren’t,” said Kate, “You were just thinking in American terms. Run low on gas, stop at a gas station. So was I.”
O’Rourke smoothed the map on the edge of her windscreen and pointed. “I think we can get there this way. See…stay on Highway One here until this village…here, Şercaia about fifteen klicks this side of Făgăraş…and then take this smaller road up to Highway Thirteen, then straight to Sighişoara.”
Kate studied the thin red line between the two highways. “That road would be in poorer condition than the cow path we took over the mountains.”
“Yeah…and less traveled. But there aren’t any high passes that way. Worth a try?”
“Do we have a choice?” said Kate.
“Not really.”
“Let’s go for it,” she said, hearing an echo of Lucian in the slang. “Maybe we’ll be lucky and find another gas station.”
They were not lucky. The motorcycle ran out of gas about six miles north of Şercaia on the mud and gravel road that was a fat red artery on the map. There had been no traffic since they had left the main highway and very few houses except for one huge collective farm, but now they could see a single home a quarter of a mile or so ahead, set back only slightly from the road behind a fence laced with dried wisteria vines. Kate got out and walked while O’Rourke pushed the heavy bike and sidecar along the road for a distance.
“To heck with it,” he said at last, rocking the bike to get it through muddy ruts. “Let’s hope they have a liter jar of benzină.”
An old woman stood outside the gate and watched them approach. “Bună dimineaţa!” said O’Rourke.
“Bună ziua,” the old woman replied. Kate noticed that she had said “good afternoon” rather than morning. She glanced at her watch. It was almost one P.M.
“Vorbiţi engleză? Germana? Franceza? Maghiar? Roman?” said O’Rourke, standing casually.
The old woman continued to stare, occasionally working her toothless gums in what might have been a smile.
“No matter,” he said, smiling boyishly. “Imi puteţi spune, vă rog, unde este e cea mai apropiabă staţie de benzină?”
The old woman blinked at him and raised empty hands. She appeared nervous.
“Simtem doar turişti,” said O’Rourke reassuringly. “Noi călătorim prin Transilvania…” He grinned and pointed to the motorcycle down the highway. “…’de benzină.”
When the woman spoke, her voice was like old metal rasping on metal. “Eşti însetat?”
O’Rourke blinked and turned to Kate. “Are you thirsty?”
Kate did not have to think about it. “Yes,” she said. She smiled at the old woman.
“Da! Mulţumesc foarte mult!”
They followed her through the muddy compound and into the home.
The house was small, the porch where they sat much smaller, and the old woman’s daughter or granddaughter who joined them was so tiny that she made Kate feel grossly oversize. The old woman stood in the doorway speaking in her raspy, rapid-fire dialect while the daughter or grand-daughter ran back and forth, fluffing pillows on the narrow divan for them, waving them to their seats, then rushing in and out of the room bringing glasses, a bottle of Scotch, cups, saucers, and a carafe of coffee.
The younger woman also spoke no German, French, English, Hungarian, or Gypsy dialect, so they all tried to communicate in Romanian, which led to much embarrassment and laughter, especially after the Scotch glasses were refilled. They held more than the diminutive coffee cups.
Through pidgin Romanian they ascertained that the old woman was named Ana, the younger one Marina, that they had no benzină here, on the farm, but that Marina’s husband would be home soon and would be happy to give them two liters of petrol, which should be enough to get the motorcycle to Făgăraş or Sighişoara or Braşov or wherever they wanted to go. Marina poured more coffee and then more Scotch. Ana stood in the door and beamed toothlessly.
Marina asked in slow, careful Romanian whether they were staying in Bucharest, how did they like Romania, were they hungry, what were farms like in America, had they seen the tourist sights yet, and would they like some chocolate? Without waiting for an answer she jumped up and ran into the other room. The radio, which had been playing softly, came on much louder; a moment later Marina returned with small chocolate biscuits that Kate guessed had been saved for a special occasion.
O’Rourke and Kate munched the biscuits, sipped the coffee, said “Este foarte bine” to compliment the food and drink, and asked again when Marina’s husband might be getting home. Would it be long?
“Nu, nu,” said Marina, smiling and nodding. “Approximativ zece minute.”
O’Rourke smiled at her and said to Kate, “Can we wait ten minutes?”