The Color of Light (49 page)

We headed south, warming ourselves on Greek islands, the fabled Côte d’Azure, the Dalmatian coast. By day we slept in rooms shuttered from the sun. By night we walked the streets, feeding on easy pickings from the service industry that always revolved like satellites around the idle rich.

On June 3, 1940, bombs began to fall on France. Three weeks later, Hitler was posing for snaps in front of the Eiffel Tower. We were in Antibes when Anastasia got the telegram from Rudi. His
frau
and four stocky children were staying firmly put in the castle on the Rhine. For the duration of the war, he installed Anastasia at the Ritz.

I wasn’t ready to return to Paris. The memories were too new, too raw. It was like watching the movie of my life story playing out around me, but all the major actors had left for other projects, and there was nothing left but the sets.

So I journeyed to London, taking over my father’s house. When the neighbors commented that they hadn’t seen the old boy for some time, I told them he’d been called upon to invent something for the war effort, very big, very hush hush. They nodded wisely, say no more, say no more.

The Germans started bombing in August.

Anastasia was right; war is beautiful, especially at night. The wail of the air raid siren. The deafening drone of bombers flying low overhead, grouped so tightly that they blocked out the moon. Searchlights crossing and crisscrossing the sky. Entire blocks of eighteenth-century Georgian townhouses erupting into giant fireballs, shivering and splintering down into the street. The continual thunderous thud-thud-
boom
of exploding shells approaching, reverberating off the buildings, the earth shaking beneath my feet. Unidentified glowy things floating through the blackness and then incandescing into a rain of fire. Crackling orange firepits of burning rubble that used to be a grocer, or a school, or a cathedral.

This was my Blitz. Smoke limiting visibility, making it very easy for a fellow to find a meal. Helpless lovelies trapped in the ruins of collapsed buildings waiting for a bloke to pull them out. Solitary men clutching binoculars, perched atop buildings, hoping to be the first to spot the airplanes. Tasty tidbits sheltering in the shadowy recesses of the Tube. Armies of the newly displaced, heading for the outskirts of the city, or camping out in the split-open ruins of their homes. In wartime, people disappear all the time.

“You said you took over your father’s house,” said Tessa. “Where did he go?”

“I, ah,” he looked uncomfortable, lapsed into silence.

She paled. “Did you…um, did you…”

“Did I drink his blood? No. Don’t be silly. Seems a bit like incest, doesn’t it? I let Anastasia do that.”

She cringed. She was trying to hide it, but he was looking right at her, she definitely cringed.

Still love me now, sweet girl?
Time to change the subject. “Did I ever tell you where I got that one?” He was gazing at the Rembrandt.

“I thought all the Rembrandts were in museums.”

“Not this one.” Lovingly, he admired the fleshy feminine figure, the filigree brushwork, the crabbed little men hidden in the shadows, before going on. “Anastasia phoned me in London. She was accompanying Rudi to the East, would I like to come along. This would be late in the spring of 1941.”

“This Rudi. Was he a Nazi?”

“Yes. I don’t remember his title exactly. Reich Commissioner of the Department for Raping Countries of Their Natural Resources, something like that.”

“And you two were…friends?” She had to prod herself to get the word out, as if it tasted bad on her tongue.

“Friends?” His eyebrows came together. “Not exactly. We shared a lover. He could be useful.”

Tessa didn’t say anything, but he knew what she was thinking. It was occurring to her for the first time that someone she loved, someone she trusted, might have been on the wrong side of World War II. What could he say? He was guilty, incredibly guilty. As if this were the worst thing he’d admit to tonight.

With a sibilant hiss, the logs in the fireplace lapsed into ashes. How much should he tell her? he wondered. His stories were part of Tessa’s history, she had as much a right to them as he did. But knowledge was a double-edged sword. What dreadful images might he set free to pursue her, night after night, through her dreams? What was necessary, and what was dangerous?

He’d lost the thread of the conversation. “What was I saying?”

“Anastasia. The East. Rembrandt.”

Her voice anchored him in the present. He adjusted the painting a fraction of an inch. “Right then.”

Rudi had promised Anastasia a pleasure trip to see the ruins of a castle she used to live in, belonging to the bloke who’d changed her. Well. Belonged to him before he was staked, beheaded, and burned, that is.

But first, he had the Reich’s interests to look out for. The places we would visit produced oil, coal, chemicals, copper, zinc and wheat, essential resources Hitler required to continue making war. He rolled his eyes in telling us this information, as if we were children and he was dragging us to a boring grownup chore before going to the park.

We traveled by night, stopping by day in the grandest hotels Old Europe had to offer. After dark we emerged to dine on clean, safe streets, in well-manicured parks, on well-fed, gainfully employed citizens of the Third Reich.

At a cocktail party in Amsterdam, Rudi introduced me to someone who mentioned that he was holding something especially nice, for a real connoisseur, very confidential, a real bargain. The next evening, there was a soft knock at the door of my room. A nervous little man was selling a painting for a friend who needed the cash, a small Rembrandt, Susannah bathing. I would be doing him a favor, actually. American dollars only,
bitte.

This is when I began to acquire art in a serious way.

In Amsterdam, there were the Michelangelo drawings, a sweet Madonna, a playful child, the pencil lines as fresh and spontaneous as the moment he’d finished it. In Vienna, I came into possession of the Klimt, also a set of Art Nouveau silver, place settings for forty-eight, in a glossy Rococo wooden box. In Budapest, I picked up the Botticelli and a castle-sized Persian rug, the one in my Great Room. In Prague, I met a man on the old Charles Bridge, under the sculpture of a crucified Christ ringed with golden letters in an exotic alphabet that I recognized from the storefronts in Le Marais. It was a misty night, the great domes of the Old City swam in and out of view in the distance. I was offered a Vermeer, a servant girl pouring milk in the light of the sun streaming in through a window. The seller looked hunted, distracted. He needed to leave the country, he said.

Of course I knew that the Jews were being persecuted. Everyone knew. You couldn’t walk past a restaurant, a movie theater, or a park bench without coming across those idiotic signs shouting that Jews were unwelcome. What did I care? I was beyond that. In my worldview, the living were all equally delicious.

All around me, people were disappearing. Somewhere not far away, young men were dying. Just over the border, airplanes flew overhead, raining death from the sky.

It was open season in Europe, a moveable feast. But I never saw another vampire. I don’t know why. I read somewhere that Hitler believed in the supernatural. Perhaps the undead were frightened too, staying undercover until it all blew over. They alone had all the time in the world.

It was the middle of June by the time we turned south toward Romania.

For the trip, Rudi had thoughtfully procured for us a diplomatic touring car, a Mercedes with darkened windows. With Anastasia at the wheel,
we drove through mile after mile of wheat fields, past tight little groupings of red-tiled rooftops overshadowed by ruined fortifications. Narrow, pointed haystacks dotted the landscape, Queen Anne’s lace and purple wildflowers grew wild over the softly sloping terrain.

Soon we were winding up the steeply rolling hills at the base of the Carpathians. As we came upon the medieval walls of Sighisoara, birthplace of the great Romanian warrior Vlad Dracul, the sun was setting behind mountain peaks as sharp and menacing as jackals’ teeth.

It must have been market day. In the main square, farmers were loading willow crates filled with flapping chickens, mud-caked potatoes, and wormy cabbages back onto crude wagons drawn by shaggy horses. The men wore colorful embroidered vests over white shirts, the women were draped in long black shawls. They stopped working and stared as we drove by. A tall, strong-looking fellow crossed himself when he caught my eye.

“Don’t look at them,” she admonished me softly. “They know what we are.” A smile played at the corners of her red lips.

At the top of the tallest peak, Anastasia stopped the car. I could hear the bass string twang of frogs croaking, and leaves rustling together like the souls of the damned. Peering forward into the trees, I could make out the ruins of a thick stone wall.

“Careful where you step,” she said as we climbed out. “There used to be a moat here.”

She had dressed for the occasion in a gold lamé Vionnet gown. It shimmered and sparkled in the headlights. “Welcome to
Luceafarul De Dimineata,”
she said. “Morning Star. When it was built in the fifteenth century, it was the strongest citadel in all of Transylvania. You used to be able to see the flags flying on the towers from five miles away. It withstood Turkish and Tartar invasions. But it could not withstand the onslaught of an angry mob of villagers armed with torches and buckets of burning pitch.”

I knew the story. In life, Anastasia had been a lacemaker, straining her eyes for fourteen hours a day in a poorly-lit cellar under a shop. At forty her eyes gave out. The foreman of the lace shop was sorry to see her go, but that was business. She was returning home late that night, wondering how she was going to pay the bills, when fate intervened in the person of Constantin Mondragon. Training his dark-rimmed eyes on her as she
walked slowly down Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, too preoccupied with her troubles to notice, he folded her into the black wings of his coat on the night of October 31, 1869.

Constantin swept her back to Transylvania, traveling in a dirt-filled box on the back of a wagon, made her the mistress of his castle. He took her with him on his travels, introducing her to leaders of society and heads of state, artists and musicians, gypsies and debased religious figures, bomb makers and anarchists. She smiled prettily and listened, absorbing lessons from them all, while her natural curiosity grew into a ferocious intelligence. She was his constant companion until 1899, when he was staked, beheaded, and set on fire. His castle and everything in it burned to the ground.

“I watched it all from behind that rock over there,” she said. Her eyes were opaque and remote. “I’ve never seen such brutality in my life.”

From the boot of the car, she took a dusty green bottle and three wine glasses. She handed the bottle to Rudi, who uncorked it and filled our glasses. The liquid was a deep red-brown, the consistency almost viscous.

“This, my darlings, is the very last bottle of wine from Constantin’s vineyard, bottled just before the phylloxera virus killed all the grapevines.
Vizuina Dragon,
Dragon’s Lair. I tracked it down in Budapest.” She poured the rest of the bottle on the stony ground. “To Constantin, who gave me the world, then nurtured my spirit as if I were a cherished child. I miss you every day.
Noroc,
my darling.
Te iubesc.”

We heard it at the same time; twigs snapping, the crackling of last year’s leaves, the noises of purposeful movement through the trees. A loose cadre of men bore down upon us, carrying torches. At their head was some kind of a religious authority in a white and saffron robe emblazoned with golden crosses. An old man, at least seventy, with a gaunt face and a long scraggly beard, a figure out of an El Greco painting. He held before him an enormous painted cross bearing a hapless Jesus, suffering under a crown of thorns, his wounds raw and bleeding.

They came to a halt a short distance away from us. By the firelight I could see there were seven of them including the priest, wearing the clothes of the village. They wore the obligatory cross around their necks, garlands of garlic bulbs, and wreathes of garlic flowers in their hair. They
came equipped for a fight, each man wielding the tool of his trade; scythes, pitchforks, hoes and spades.

The man in front had the smoldering eyes of a true believer. His gaze was fixed firmly on Anastasia. In a deep voice, he was declaiming something long and canonical in Romanian, making the sign of the cross in the air in front of him with two fingers over and over again. “Oh, he can’t be serious.” I heard Rudi mutter.

“Grigorii? Is that you?” Anastasia said playfully. “An Archbishop! You’ve done very well for yourself. You were just a monk back when I used to visit town.”

“And you, Anastasia Bonheur,” he changed over to sonorous French. “Forty years have passed, but you are unchanged. We are here to return your immortal soul to God, so that you may finally rest in peace.”

“Am I dreaming?” I whispered to Anastasia. “Nobody says this stuff.”

His gaze turned slowly to me. He handed the cross to the man behind him. “You were made only recently,” he said, his voice gentle. “I can still see traces of a soul behind your eyes.”

He stretched out his hand, beckoning me closer. Fierce, dark-rimmed eyes bored into mine. “My son. You are still a child of God. You die a little each time you take a life, don’t you. Come to me and together we can rescue your tormented soul.”

I took a step forward into the clearing, then another one, till I was standing directly in front of him. Behind me, I could hear Anastasia hissing. “What are you doing?” in English.

From a pocket in his robe he took a small vial of oil and anointed my forehead, my chin, my cheeks, my hands, my nostrils. He indicated that I unbutton my shirt, and when I did, he dabbed oil on my chest. As he did these things, he intoned something liturgical in Romanian, stopping once to ask me my name. He smelled of garlic and patchouli.

“He’s giving you extreme unction, you idiot.” Anastasia informed me.