The Fifth House of the Heart (28 page)

Somehow, though he racked his brain during every spare moment, he couldn't come up with any solution that didn't involve his direct, central participation. There wasn't any other way, or he most certainly would have embraced it.

This was it, then. He had only two choices: be slaughtered on the threshold of the monster, or cancel the entire operation. So in truth he had only one choice, because there was no way he could walk through that portcullis into the vampire's fortress. The caper was not happening. He would already have confessed to Rock and Gheorghe that he couldn't go through with his plan, except he hadn't told them his plan,
and he lacked the bravery even to admit the whole scheme was already a bust.

His own failures of courage just cascaded outward in endless folds and permutations until Sax was sure there was no less valiant creature in all the world. And it could have been avoided if he hadn't long ago allowed his greed to overmaster his terror and set his foot for the first time inside a vampire's château. He might have been like every other old queen peddling vintage knickknacks in the world but for that one failure of cowardice; now here he was, much more sensible, much less able, and certain he was not going to make the same mistake again.

Sax considered the possibility that there wasn't anything in the castle—no vampire, no hoard, no clock. According to the gift shop guidebook on the history of the castle, Mordstein had been cleaned out by American officers at the end of the Second World War, its contents bound for Wolfsburg by train. But of five boxcars, only one arrived, having been attached to a different engine from the rest. The rest were considered lost treasure, and constituted one of the mysteries of the postwar period.

Sax made phone calls while they circled the mountain, keeping his fingers on the many strands of web that stretched out from where he was to assorted schemes and operations around the world. The detective working on Alberto's murder at the warehouse wasn't available—it was nearly nine p.m. in New York—but the sergeant on duty told Sax they had a suspect, completely crazy, who had left fingerprints at the scene, a known professional thief from Newark who appeared to have lost his mind. Sax thought that madness would resemble what he'd seen in the prison in Chemnitz. And he had received a message while his phone was off during the freezing vigil: Abingdon had called to report his metallurgical research had yielded a formula for the hammer silver that was extremely high, oddly enough, in sulfur, which ought to have turned it black, but there was also a lot of lead in the
mixture, which might isolate the sulfur. Abingdon did not know. Sax called back.

“Christ, man, it's two in the bloody morning,” Abingdon groaned down the line.

“There's no time to waste,” Sax said. “I need you to use that formula and make me some hammers, first order of business tomorrow.”

“How many do you want?” Abingdon asked, now fully awake and interested.

“Oh . . . a dozen, I should think,” Sax said.

It occurred to him to call Paolo and ask him what he knew about hundings, but things were complicated enough as it was. It would be the bloody Ordine dei Santi Contro l'Uomo Lupo getting involved next, if he wasn't careful. And if he woke everybody up at this hour, they might panic.

Then Rock announced simply, “We're here.”

They were in the hills behind Castle Mordstein. The final leg of the route they'd taken was hardly a road, designed only for access to a handful of prewar holiday chalets tucked away in the trees. They didn't look like they'd been occupied for decades. As the headlights swept over them, there was a mournful aspect to the cottages with their drooping eaves and rotting gingerbread trim, the unpainted wood dark brown and silver, the shingles on the roofs as mossy as river stones. They seemed to mourn the children who had played amongst them, then went to war and never came back.

Sax remained with the vehicle as before, alone with the empty chalets and the black trunks of the trees and the brown corpses of the summer ferns.

The other men set off at a brisk pace up the rocky slope of the nearest hill, Gheorghe leading with the night-vision goggles. They would quickly scout the lower part of the cliffs there, then get out before dawn came. If the werewolves were back in the forest, both
Gheorghe and Rock had guns with hollow-point bullets, something Gheorghe had gotten hold of on his way into France, by means Sax did not wish to know about. The problem was that hundings, being made of the same material as vampires, were extremely difficult to kill. They could shoot the things and stop them for a moment, but they would continue the attack as long as they could move their limbs.

Sax waited in the icy dark inside the van, afraid to turn on a light or run the heater, trusting instead to his thoughts to occupy him, and his three pairs of socks to keep him from losing any toes. An hour before dawn, Sax was in an exhausted doze when he awoke to the sound of small stones rattling down the slope to his right, pelting off the roofs of the chalets. Then Rock and Gheorghe came rushing to the doors, shouting for Sax to get them open. They leapt inside and Rock scratched at the ignition keyhole, his cold fingers not up to the fine motor control required.

“We gotta get the fuck out of here, man!” Rock yelled, apparently at his own useless fingers.

“Allow me,” Sax said, and guided the key into the slot. Rock cranked it over and gunned the engine and shoved the gas pedal to the floor. The camper lurched forward and he snapped on the headlights and in that moment there was a shape in the beams, a man, but not a man. Sax saw the thing rushing at the windshield, a long gray coat flying up around it like bat wings, its one eye a glistening marble, the other eye socket empty, the light finding nothing but gristle within. Its face was a scarred and festering mass of wreckage, lipless, the broken teeth snapping, and then the thing slammed into the camper and Rock almost lost control of the wheel, fighting it from side to side as the impact flung the machine heavily toward the trees on the margin of the track.

Gheorghe's door scraped noisily along one of the trunks and the mirror flew off the frame and then Rock had the van jolting violently
onto the road and it was moving fast, now, and Sax looked out the rear window but did not see the thing they'd rammed in the glow of the taillights.

“It's gone,” he said. And at that moment the fist slammed into the roof above his head, buckling the sheet metal, and Sax threw himself on the floor. The monster was on top of them.

Gheorghe shouted a continuous stream of Romanian, rummaging in his backpack, throwing things around in his haste. Sax was making a high-pitched sound like a goat trapped in a cistern. A bloody-fingered hand crashed through the window of the sliding door above Sax's head, showering him with crumbs of safety glass. The thick, raw fingers snatched at the air, trying to get into Sax's hair. The monster was going to pull him out.

Rock slammed the van from side to side, trying to shake off the creature on the roof. The hand stretched for Sax, and Sax shoved himself across the floor of the van and now he could see up and the thing's single, lifeless eye was fixed upon him, that ruined, scabby jaw gaping, upside down because it was leaning far over the roof to get at him.

There was a bang and a bright flash and the monster was gone in a whirl of gray fabric. Rock kept the pedal down and drove them out of the forest at a speed that had surely never before been attempted on that neglected road.

“The
Rus
ă
,” Gheorghe said, when he had his breath back. “Min's Russian.” He shoved the big .45 automatic into his backpack.

Sax got himself onto his knees and tried not to throw up. His heart was slamming against his ribs at a tremendous rate and there were purple and green zinnias blossoming and vanishing behind his eyelids. He sucked for air and after a long minute had some oxygen back in his racing blood and he began to feel like he might survive. The wind was howling in through the broken window, bringing on its wings a blast of polar ice. Sax spat a fragment of glass from his
mouth, coughed, and at last answered Rock's repeated demands to know if he was all right.

“No, I'm not bloody all right!” Sax barked. “Bloody
vampire
attack, in case you didn't notice.”

“
Acela a fost un vampir foarte furios
,” Gheorghe muttered, and crossed himself. This irritated Sax. Childish mock-religious gestures weren't going to help anybody.

“Speak English, you berk,” Sax said.

“I say,” Gheorghe said, turning around in his seat, “that was one pissed-off vampire.”

T
he strangest thing they had seen on their exploratory mission, Rock said once they had reached their hotel, was a helicopter. “On top of that real tall tower with the flat roof. This vampire travels in style.”

“Really,” Sax said, “a helicopter.”

“Harrison Ford has his own helicopter, man.”

“That explains it.”

The narrative continued. Rock and Gheorghe had made it as far as the bottom of the cliff, a scree of large, broken boulders that had fallen or been thrown down over the centuries to form a moraine along the foot of the mountain. Gheorghe thought they might be able to ascend to the ridge from there, but Rock didn't want to take the chance at night. They wouldn't be able to use a route on that side anyway, simply because it didn't connect with anywhere they could keep a vehicle. It was no good for getaway purposes. They had argued at that point. Gheorghe was an opportunist. He liked to strike when he saw the chance, and this felt like a chance to him. Rock insisted they stick to the plan. They were in whatever the opposite of a hurry was. Voices got raised, Rock admitted.

It was unprofessional. They had failed to keep their situation in
mind. Then pebbles began to shower down from above, and bits of stone, and it hurt, so they scrambled out of the way and shone their high-intensity flashlights up the cliff face. That's when they saw the monster coming down at them, headfirst, clinging to the rock by jamming the toes of its boots and the tips of its fingers into cracks in the stone. It moved at terrifying speed, half falling, half clinging. They wasted precious seconds just staring at it, the hideous purple mess of its face coming closer and closer.

“How did you know it was the Russian?” Sax interrupted.

They were sitting in Sax's hotel room, heads close together, passing around a half-liter of brandy. All three men were hunched forward with their elbows on their knees as if planning a prison break under the watchful eye of the guards. Their voices were low: The walls have ears. And also it was five in the morning.

“I know it was the Russian because of his boots were Russian,” ­Gheorghe said, as if that was conclusive. But it
had
to be him—­Yeretyik. Min said she'd blown his face off. The description certainly fit. And it meant nothing that he was well enough to descend cliffs with his bare hands—vampires healed much faster than men, especially if fed copious amounts of fresh human blood. But why was the mystery vampire, the female, helping the Russian to get well? Why had she rescued him in India? It could be love, Sax knew, but that was such a rare thing amongst vampires. They liked their lovers dead, so they could dwell on the good old days without having to deal with them in the present. Yet he was there, defending the castle on her behalf. For that matter, Yeretyik had sought Nilu as a victim. So did he plan to switch genders? Was the mystery vampire a lesbian? Did vampires swing both ways? Maybe orientation didn't matter to a creature that could be male or female according to its nibbles.

And did all of this have something to do with the ormolu clock? Sax wondered. After all, it had once been owned by a Russian, although
how a ballet master tied in to the whole business was beyond him. Then there was poor murdered Radiguet, the French writer, who had at least
known
the ballet master, and was slain by such a fiend. He might somehow fit in as well. It was mysterious and disturbing to Sax. He felt like a child stirring the black waters of an
étang
with a stick, watching the rotten things swirl up from the bottom, emerging indistinctly through the murk, becoming clear for a moment just below the surface before sinking again into the mire.

Rock and Gheorghe swapped back and forth to finish narrating their adventure: they had bolted at the same time, the vampire descending the cliff, and when they ran, the monster leapt into the air and crashed down through the trees. It had missed Rock by inches and hit an actual rock instead, which slowed it down considerably and gave them time to flee through the darkness, running pell-mell down the treacherous slope in the pitch black with their lights whirling uselessly in all directions.

They couldn't believe the thing could move at all. It had fallen sixty feet and it was in rough condition to begin with. But move it did, and gathered speed as it went. By the end, both men were screaming for air and not so much running as hurling themselves down the rugged hillside through the trees, and then they saw the roofs of the chalets and a moment later, the van beyond them, and Sax knew the rest.

“She knows,” Sax observed when the tale was told and they had sat in silence for a while.

He sat back and drummed his fingers on the arm of the upholstered chair. Rock was seated on the bed. He fell backward and let out a long breath and stared at the ceiling with his fingers laced across his chest. Gheorghe was in the desk chair. He put his elbow on the glass top of the desk, then pressed his fist into the side of his jaw and sat there with his pale skin and the dark circles around his eyes lending him the look of a silent film star posing for a photograph.

“She knows we're here, and she will not sit back and wait for us to return,” Sax went on.

Things had become urgent. The game had come to them.

Sax wasn't ready for it. The Russian, Yeretyik, added a dangerous twist to things. The vampire had a watchdog. And literally so, in the case of the hundings. They'd been gathering the things up in that truck. Why? Yeretyik should not have had to defend the castle himself. Surely half a dozen savage, murderous creatures with no regard for their own lives would make a wiser home security mechanism than a wounded lover? Could it be that the vampire had
wanted
them to go out exploring, and corralled the werewolves for that very purpose, knowing the men would be watching? Sax's mind was bursting with questions.