Stoker's Manuscript (20 page)

“
sute.” Two hundred.

I turned and looked at Sonia. “Pardon?”

“Years,” she said, and in my head the words formed:
You asked about the birthday party.

“They let the human slaves live two hundred years?”

“Is that not long enough?” she asked.

I stood and walked toward her kitchen to look out the window and pondered living two hundred healthy years, from the Jefferson Administration to George Bush, from horse-drawn everything to the space shuttle, and of course losing friends or relatives in every war the country fought. I quickly dismissed the thought of outliving my brother, the only companion my cheated life was granted.

No.
I turned toward Sonia. “Do not blame God for the womb He placed you in, for He makes no mistakes.”

“We just read that He resented making humans, some more than others, I’m sure.”

She looked solemnly at me.
He gave you tools to do this job.

I don’t want this job. I didn’t ask for it.

Maybe you did.
Her stare continued, but the outer corners of her eyes turned downward to reflect sorrow. Several silent minutes passed. “Come,” she said, walking toward the back door. “Let us walk. Daylight, it is safe.”

“You worried about your neighbors seeing me with you?”

“Come.” She held out her hand. “There is much to discuss.”

We walked upriver, and while I heard demons amongst the trees and trembled at every small creature’s sound and scamper, Sonia wandered slowly, deliberately along the path, stopping occasionally to reach for flowers. When we arrived at the spot where the river began its rise, we crossed by jumping from rock to rock and returned on the opposite side. She may have appeared at first to be middle aged, or perhaps it was just her attire, but she moved with the agility of an active person my age.

“Tell me about your time in America.”

She stopped and looked at me, then looked around. In my head popped the word
Chicago
.

I smiled. “That’s where I live.”

“That is where the Fair was. My husband was electrician in charge of grounds lighting.”

“Gheorghe?”

“It was big job, months to set up, never done before.”

I must have looked puzzled.

“There was no power at the time,” she said.

“When
was
this?” Chicago hasn’t hosted a World’s Expo since . . .

“It was terrible financial time. Your president was man named Cleveland, like city. He was not good speaker.”

I stood there staring at her, and she read my thoughts. Removing her scarf and pulling away her collar, she showed me the sides of her neck—nothing, no scars.

“Healed?” I asked.

“Yes. I was young and so in love. Gheorghe was great man, great mind, always trying to harness electricity. He seemed not to age, which I think is strange, so I ask his secret.”

“He was one of their slaves,” I said.

She nodded. “He exchange long life for work.”

“And you?”

“I wanted more than anything to stay young and beautiful for him.” She looked down in shame.

I thought about why she carried no scar.

“The Regulat assigned to me was killed in battle many years ago. I resume aging process.”

At a slower rate, I assumed. “When did you become a widow?”

“Your president was McKinley. I come home from America and wait for Gheorghe while he work with Tesla. He never come home.”

“Wait. Who did you say he worked with?”

“A great man, great inventor, Nikola Tesla.”

I had read biographies of Tesla and knew a little about him. For one thing, Tesla had received the contract to install and showcase AC power for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, arranged by George Westinghouse, I recall. It had bested Thomas Edison’s DC power proposal. It was the biggest thing to ever happen in Chicago until Michael Jordan arrived.

“As I recall, though, Tesla worked alone,” I said.

“My husband take notes. Only one who could keep up with Tesla’s words. Gheorghe understood what Nikola working on. Not many did.”

Gheorghe
sounded like
George
. A thought occurred. “Your husband wasn’t George Westinghouse?” I asked.

“No. I met Mr. Westinghouse there, but my husband’s name was Gheorghe Antonescu.”

“He must’ve been busy; that was a huge event.”

“Yes. My husband said I met Stoker, the author, and his employer, Henry Irving, but I not recall the meeting.”

The World’s Fair display had been such a success that eastern cities ordered AC power plants up and down the Hudson River. “Did your husband stay on with Tesla during the growth years?”

“Gheorghe install power in the royal residences and palaces all over Europe.”

“An electrician,” I said.

“Yes. He put in the electricity at Irving’s theater in London.”

“The Lyceum?” I asked.

Sonia nodded. She appeared to want to say something, but did not.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Gheorghe rescued something . . . from the fire.”

“The fire at the publishing house or the theater?”

“The theater,” she said.

Immediately my thoughts raced to the epilogue, and she must have picked up on it, because she responded aloud: “Yes, the missing epilogue.”

I pointed to her. “Do you have it?”

“No,” she said. “He kept pages in a safe place. And you must go find them. This is part of your mission.”

“Where are they?”

“He took them back to America to Tesla’s lab. They are with the inventor’s scientific papers.”

Of course,
I thought,
the safest place to store documents for posterity would be in the inventor’s great volume of research files.
After Tesla’s passing in 1943, a prodigious inventory of work, including his papers and drawings, were moved from storage in New York and New Jersey across the Atlantic to Serbia and to a museum in the inventor’s honor.

“The Tesla Museum in Belgrade?” I asked.

“Yes,” Sonia said. “If the chapter survives, it will be in Tesla’s files.”

I had a hundred more questions for her. “How did your husband—”

She interrupted me by lifting her hand, then spoke. “First you go find the chapter. Then return and I will answer the rest of your questions.”

M
onday morning I left Sonia and walked through the village toward the Gypsy’s house, while the residents waited for sunrise to unshutter their homes. Father Andrew nodded and blessed me as I crossed the river back to the land of living souls. Considering what I had witnessed on Friday night, these Dumitra villagers had every reason to keep barred doors and loaded weapons between me and their loved ones.

Past the village the Gypsy waited at the end of his driveway, a waving family sending him off to
with his copper wares. I hopped on with a nod and stretched my neck to show him it was free of puncture wounds or scars. He shared his coffee with a grunt, and I watched the town disappear into the landscape. Though I could not see the far end of the village, I felt Sonia’s parting look, one that said she was proud of me.

The morning was cool, with humid air raising woolly columns of steam off the river and an abundance of deer foraging. And while birds sang, I listened with all the concentration I could muster, trying to discern a pattern, anything that might indicate a sinister motive for participating in the ritual. Such are the missteps on the other side of the bridge to unreality. Returning to this side, I noticed wildflowers of yellow and purple decorated fields that only three days earlier had been bare. Summer had finally arrived.

I fended off ugly images with more pleasant memories featuring Berns and found myself tipping the bill of my imaginary cap and holding up fingers when I noticed the Gypsy turn to look at me, no doubt a sanity check.

“Do you like baseball?” I asked.

He shook his head, equally, I think, to reject the sport as to reject the question. I smiled and thanked him again for the ride. How I wished for a different fate than the one before me.

At the edge of
, where I had been dropped off on Friday, Arthur waited in the black Suburban. The horse cart halted, and another sum of money was exchanged. My companion Gypsy did not return my call of gratitude, only gave a farewell nod. Arthur opened the back door for me. Inside was Luc, whose stony expression clearly conveyed that my surprise side trip on my first visit to Romania had caused him a spot of grief.

Once in the vehicle, Arthur tossed me a copy of the weekend newspaper, the
Bucharest Herald
, its pages folded to reveal the
section, the county where Baia Mare and Baia Sprie reside. The article spoke of ritual sacrifice, not at the monastery but in the cemetery I’d found, with townspeople reporting great noise and plague-sized invasions of bats. Graves had been disturbed, and there was speculation of a possible connection to a murder in the United States of a Romanian ex-pat named Mara Sadoveanu. No corpses were found in the graveyard, but plenty of blood had been spilled.

I recalled Sonia mentioning last night, during a wide-ranging discussion of the life cycle and habits of vampires, that they always remove their dead from the battlefield, even the enemy, because they cannot afford to have humans autopsy their bodies. The species also has no fingerprints, so it is tough to place them at crime scenes.
Not so for frightened foreign visitors,
I thought.

Arthur turned from his front seat to face me. “Seems you have created a bit of a
strica
, Mr. Barkeley. It is not wise to be destructive when you carry a passport.”

“You know I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Ah, but I am not a judge, you see, and here, let us say, our ways are not the ways of your land. Juries of peers are an American invention.”

“I don’t intend to be tried.”

“Over the weekend I received a call from the
.”
Police.
“They queried your whereabouts and suggested I contact them as soon as I once again meet up with you.”

My silence prompted him to continue.

“Mr. Barkeley, I took the liberty to schedule an appointment with an
avocat
, a lawyer, in
, since it appears obvious that you will be in need of such services.”

Immediately my worries mounted. Did they have something similar to the Fifth Amendment? Would I be innocent until proven guilty? Was there attorney-client confidentiality?

We stopped at a small office complex and parked, and while Luc and the driver remained in the car, Arthur showed me through the doors of a law office. Annemarie Pope was the lawyer’s name, and she commanded the top-floor corner office in a modest space. I learned there are no private law firms in Romania, that
group together to form a
barou
as part of a union. The offices lacked the panache of an upscale American white-shoe firm, but the guest chairs were comfortable leather and invited one for a long stay. Arthur and I were shown to her office without delay.

Annemarie Pope carried the air of money in her stride. She dressed entirely in shades of gray, from her mock turtle blouse to her thoroughly Western pantsuit and pumps. She wore no wedding ring.

Pointed, harsh, and purse-lipped, she looked ready to pounce. “So you are the ex-pat stirring these suspicions from here to Chicago.” She spoke perfect Midwest English and pointed to a chair after shaking my hand. “Please call me Anna.”

I looked at the letters framed on her walls, including a degree from the University of Michigan Law School to complement her Romanian degrees and certification. “Ms. Pope.” I sat across from her large dark-stained oak desk.

She nodded. “So you have decided to seek legal counsel prior to answering questions as a person of interest.”

“Yes. I didn’t know what happened until my brother phoned me here.”

“When was that?” she asked.

I looked down and started counting on my fingers. It all seemed like one long day since I had arrived. “I don’t know.”

“Mr. Barkeley,” she said, “you will need to account for your time since the . . . unfortunate incidents, all of it, if you wish to appear credible.”

I looked up at her. “Should I write it on a calendar?”

“However you recall it, you must secure it in your memory.”

I nodded, though I no longer trusted my memory.

“Let me tell you a few things I know of this case, Mr. Barkeley.” She looked down at her notepad. “When Mr. Ardelean engaged my services, I placed a couple phone calls back to the States, and I must tell you that things do not look good for you at this point.”

“Ms. Pope, I don’t even know when these murders happened, so I don’t know what days to account for.”

“Let me begin again,” she said. “I am not the person you need to convince of your innocence. What this initial consultation is intended to accomplish is for me to ask you certain questions, queries you are likely to face either during questioning or a trial, so that I can advise you of your options. Is that okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What day and time did you arrive at the airport in Bucharest?”

I thought it over. “The first or second time?”

“This latest trip.”

I gave her the date.

“Is that what your passport stamp will verify?”

“Yes,” I said reflexively, then remembered that the private flight had taxied to a hangar and we left with the cargo and bypassed Customs.

“May I see your passport?” She held out her hand.

“No.”

“I may not see it, or the stamp will not verify the date?”

Silence stole several seconds of airtime before I answered. “Both.”