ledgers of trade he mentioned here contain clues to Vlad Tepes’s demise or burial? Had Rossi actually looked through them himself, or had he merely had time to list the possibilities in that archive before being scared away from it?
There was one last item on the list from the archive, and this one took me by surprise, so that I lingered over it for a few minutes. “Bibliography, Order of the Dragon (partial scroll form).” What surprised me about this jotting and made me hesitate over it was the fact that it was so uninformative. Usually Rossi’s notes were thorough, self-explanatory; that, he liked to say, was the point of note taking. Was this bibliography he mentioned so hurriedly a list the library had put together to record all the material they housed that pertained to the Order of the Dragon? If so, why would it be in “partial scroll form”? It must be something ancient itself, I thought-perhaps one of the library’s holdings from the time of the Order of the Dragon. But why had Rossi not explained further, on this otherwise mute sheet of notebook paper? Had the bibliography, whatever it was, proven irrelevant to his search?
These musings over a far-away archive, which Rossi had looked through so long ago, hardly seemed a direct path to his disappearance, and I dropped the page in disgust, tired suddenly of the trivia of research. I craved answers. With the exception of whatever lay in the scrolls of accounts, in the ledgers, and in that old bibliography, Rossi had been surprisingly thorough in sharing with me his discoveries. But that was like him, that conciseness; besides, he’d had the luxury, if it could be called that, of explaining himself in many pages of letters. And yet I knew little, except what I must probably attempt to do next. The envelope was completely, depressingly empty now, and I hadn’t learned much more from the last documents it had contained than I’d learned from his letters. I realized also that I must act as fast as possible. I had often stayed up all night before, and in the next hour I might be able to assemble for myself what Rossi had told me about the previous threats on his life, as he saw them.
I stood, my joints creaking, and went to my dismal little kitchen to boil some bouillon for soup. As I reached for a clean pot, I realized that my cat had not come in for his supper, a meal I shared with him. He was a stray, and I suspected that our arrangement was not wholly monogamous. But around supper time he was usually there at my narrow kitchen window, peering in from the fire escape to let me know he wanted his can of tuna or, when I’d splurged on him, his dish of sardines. I had come to love the moment when he jumped down into my lifeless apartment, stretching and crying in an extravagance of affection. He often stayed a while after eating, sleeping on the end of the sofa or watching me iron my shirts. Sometimes I thought I saw an expression of tenderness in his perfectly round yellow eyes, although it might also have been pity. He was powerful and sinewy, with a soft black-and-white coat. I called him Rembrandt. Thinking of him, I lifted the edge of the blind, pushed up the window, and called him, waiting for the thud of feline feet on the windowsill. I could hear only distant night traffic from the center of the city. I lowered my head and looked out.
His shape filled the space, grotesquely, as if he had rolled there in play and then gone limp. I drew it into the kitchen with gentle, fearful hands, immediately aware of the broken spine and weirdly flopping head. Rembrandt’s eyes were open wider than I’d ever seen them in life, his lips drawn back in a snarl of fear and his front paws splayed and thorny. I knew at once he could not have fallen there, so precisely, onto the narrow windowsill. It would take a large and strong grip to kill such a creature-I touched his soft coat, rage welling under my terror-and the perpetrator would have been scratched and perhaps bitten fiercely. But my friend was incontrovertibly dead. I had set him softly down on the kitchen floor, my lungs filling with a smoky hate, before I realized that under my hands his body was still warm.
I whirled around, closed and latched the window, then thought frantically of my next move. How could I protect myself? The windows were all locked, and the door was double bolted. But what did I know about horrors from the past? Did they leak into rooms like mist, under the doors? Or shatter windows and burst directly into one’s presence? I looked around for a weapon. I didn’t own a gun-but guns never prevailed against Bela Lugosi, in the vampire movies, unless the hero was equipped with a special silver bullet. What had Rossi advised? “I wouldn’t go around with garlic in my pocket, no.” And something else, too: “I’m sure you carry your own goodness, moral sense, whatever you want to call it, with you-I like to think most of us are capable of that, anyway.”
I found a clean towel in one of the kitchen drawers and gently wrapped my friend’s body in it, laying him out in the front hall. I would have to bury him tomorrow, if tomorrow were going to come around the way it usually did. I would inter him in the backyard of the apartment house-deeply, where dogs couldn’t get at him. It was hard for me to imagine eating now, but I made my cup of soup and cut a slice of bread to go with it.
Then I sat down at the desk again and cleared away Rossi’s papers, putting them neatly back in the envelope. I set my mysterious dragon book on top of that, taking care not to let it fall open. On top of these I placed my copy of Hermann’s classicGolden Age of Amsterdam, which had long been one of my favorite books. I opened my dissertation notes across the center of the desk and propped up in front of me a pamphlet on merchants’ guilds in Utrecht, a reproduction from the library that I had yet to peruse. I laid my watch beside me and saw with a thrill of superstition that it showed a quarter to twelve. Tomorrow, I told myself, I would go to the library and swiftly do any reading I could find there that might equip me for the coming days. It couldn’t hurt to know more about silver stakes, garlic flowers, and crucifixes, if those were the peasant remedies prescribed against the undead for so many centuries. That would show a faith in tradition, at least. For now I had only Rossi’s advice, but Rossi had never failed me where it was in his power to help. I picked up my pen and bent my head over the pamphlet.
Never had I found it so difficult to concentrate. Every nerve in my body seemed alert to the presence outside, if it was a presence, as if my mind rather than my ears might be able to hear it brushing up against the windows. With an effort, I planted myself firmly in Amsterdam, 1690. I wrote a sentence, then another. Four minutes to midnight. “Look for some anecdotes about Dutch sailors’ lives,” I noted on my papers. I thought of the merchants, banding together in their already ancient guilds to squeeze the best they could from their lives and their wares, acting day by day on their rather simple sense of duty, using some of their surplus to build hospitals for the poor. Two minutes to midnight. I wrote down the name of the pamphlet’s author, to look up again later. “Explore the significance for merchants of the city’s printing presses,” I noted.
The minute hand on my watch jumped suddenly, and I jumped with it. It showed just shy of twelve o’clock. The printing presses might be extremely significant, I realized, forcing myself not to look behind me as I sat there, especially if the guilds had controlled some of them. Could they actually have purchased control of some of them, bought up ownership? Did the printers have their own guild? How did ideas about freedom of the press among Dutch intellectuals in that setting relate to the ownership of the presses? I grew interested for a moment, in spite of myself, and tried to remember what I’d read about early publishing in Amsterdam and Utrecht. Suddenly I felt a great stillness in the air, then a snapping of tension. I glanced at my watch. Three minutes after midnight. I was breathing normally and my pen moved freely across the page.
Whatever stalked me wasn’t quite as clever as I’d feared, I thought, careful not to pause in my work. Apparently, the undead took some appearances at face value, and I appeared to have heeded Rembrandt’s warning and settled down to my usual task. I wouldn’t be able to hide my real actions for long, but for tonight my own appearance was the only protection I had. I moved the lamp closer and settled into the seventeenth century for another hour, to deepen the impression of retreat into work. As I pretended to write, I reasoned with myself. The final threat to Rossi, in 1931, had been his own name on the location of Vlad the Impaler’s tomb. Rossi hadn’t been found lying dead over his desk two days ago, as I might be soon if I weren’t careful. He hadn’t been discovered wounded in the hallway, like Hedges. He had been abducted. He might be lying dead somewhere else, of course, but until I knew that for certain, I had to hope he was alive. Beginning tomorrow, I would have to try to find the tomb myself.
Seated on that old French fortress, my father was staring out to sea, rather as he’d looked across the gap of mountain air at Saint-Matthieu, watching the eagle bank and wheel. “Let’s go back to the hotel,” he said finally. “The days are getting shorter already, have you noticed? I don’t want to be caught up here after sunset.”
In my impatience, I dared a direct question. “Caught?”
He glanced at me seriously, as if considering the relative risks of the answers he could give. “The path is really steep,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t want to have to find my way back through those trees in the dark. Would you?” He could be daring, too, I saw.
