He did not intend to. But later, when he bothered to think about it, he realized that it had been inevitable. Like a boy losing his virginity. But this – the virginity thing – he had done the year before with his sister Antanasia.

As far as his sister was concerned, she had only given him what she had already given to pretty much the entire adult male population of Cenucenca at one time or another. Dracul’s father, Adrian, rented her out on Friday nights when he needed drinking money for his
rachiu
. The two siblings shared a bedroom at the back of their father’s ramshackle wooden farmhouse, so Dracul had been forced to listen ever since the whole thing began, somewhere around Antanasia’s tenth birthday. He had listened for four years. Then, close on the arrival of his first erection, he had tried it for himself.

But killing a man was better. Much better.

In order to earn himself a little extra money, Dracul had formed the habit of setting out, early every Sunday morning, for the thirteenth-century Orheiul Vechi cave hermitage, situated six kilometres up the valley from his father’s house. The hermitage was a twenty-minute uphill walk from the nearby village of Butuceni. It was positioned on top of a wild plateau dominating the Ra
ŭ
t River, just a few hundred yards from the equally vertiginous parish church of St Maria.

The prehistoric cave complex was almost completely sealed off from the outside world, as was the section that housed the now abandoned troglodyte monastery, which was set high on a massive limestone buttress overlooking the gorge. The remaining hermitage, which was all that was left of the once thriving Pestere monastery, loomed over a landscape that resembled nothing so much as a slice of the planet Mars, transposed, like an alien spaceship, onto the Gaeto-Dacian plateau.

The main chapel, which formed part of a vast honeycomb formation beneath the surface of the plateau, could only be reached via a stout door, and from there down a flight of stone steps which led to the main crypt. The crypt contained a carved wooden reredos, built to the exact dimensions of the cave, and a few random pieces of furniture laid out over threadbare oriental carpets. Devotional paintings and ancient icons were scattered about the walls. The solitary embrasure let in little light, and the door that led through to the unfenced stone walkway overlooking the river, 200 feet below, let in little more, for it was covered in its entirety by a frayed set of damask hangings that some generous soul had donated to the hermitage when they were no longer of use elsewhere.

One old monk occupied the hermitage these days, and he spent most of his time praying, reading the Bible, or painting icons, and was thus tolerated by the state authorities. So Dracul had been able, by degree, to make the exterior of the cave complex his own.

When touring parties visited – Young Communists maybe, or the Society of Cognac Workers, or members of the nomenklatura, drunk after a visit to the nearby Cricova or Coju
ş
na wineries and craving a breath of fresh upland air – Dracul would be there, waiting for them. Then, depending on the inebriated or non-inebriated state of the party, and on whether they had formal guides or not, he would step in and offer his services.

‘You give me money. I take you places you never see. Secret places. You see views that make you sick with fear. You see snakes. You see wild boar. You see wolves. Maybe even bears.’ It was all bullshit of course, but as Dracul insisted on being paid upfront, he was generally able to show the expectant tourists a clean set of heels before the promised wonders failed to appear. There were, needless to say, few repeat visits.

Dracul wasn’t an easy boy to get past. From earliest childhood he had been a natural salesman. Golden-tongued, his mother had called him – her golden boy. If the visiting parties refused to employ him, Dracul would spread-eagle himself across the single main entrance to the rock-cave complex and refuse to move. This presented the visitors with something of a conundrum.

They could either remove him bodily – but there was usually some good soul around to object to grown men or women abusing a child – or they could come to an accommodation with him and be permitted inside. And the accommodation was generally easier.

Especially if one were drunk and out of one’s head, like the astronaut Yuri Gagarin had been for two days, in 1966, during a visit to the Cricova winery. The Moldovan authorities had finally sent down a search team to identify and carry him out. Dracul knew this, because his father had been part of the team. The team had been dispatched into the underground winery on the first day of Gagarin’s visit. They, too, had emerged, blind drunk, twenty-four hours later. As his father said – there were 120 kilometres of tunnels in that complex, situated 100 metres below the earth’s surface, of which a full 60 kilometres were used to store wine. What was a man to do? During the ensuing visit to the monastery they’d had to attach Gagarin to a guide rope in case he inadvertently stumbled over the edge of the unfenced precipice, triggering a public relations disaster that would have ended Russia’s domination of the Space Race once and for all.

These days it was usually government apparatchiks – less drunk, perhaps, than Gagarin, and a great deal less eminent – who reeled up the endless stone steps leading to the great cross, which sprang, like an outstretched hand, from the pinnacle of the Orheiul Vechi plateau, halfway between the St Maria church and the sunken entrance to the hermitage.

The old monk – whose name Dracul had never bothered to learn – appeared oblivious to Dracul’s goings-on. He had recently taken to crossing himself, however, whenever Dracul hove into sight, so he must have suspected something, even if the exact details eluded him.

There were times when it seemed to Dracul as if he had taken on the role of penitential burden, which the monk, by default, now had to carry. This pleased Dracul. He liked being a penitential burden.

But the murder had come as a shock, even to him.

People almost never came to the hermitage alone. In Moldova, only high-up members of the Communist Party could afford to run cars, and such individuals were hardly likely to indulge themselves in a day trip to see a solitary monk going about his business in a 700-year-old glorified cave.

But on this occasion a black armour-plated ZIL-115 pulled up on the outskirts of Butuceni village. A single man got out. He was wearing a shiny suit, a red tie, and a white cotton handkerchief neatly triangulated in his top pocket. To Dracul’s eyes, he looked like Leonid Brezhnev, whose picture his father kept on the wall of the outside privy. This man had two small medals pinned below his display handkerchief – exactly like Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev in his father’s picture. In fact he gave the impression of having just left an important meeting, and of having decided, on a whim, to pass the time before his next appointment on a short rural visit. Maybe he had been born in Butuceni, thought Dracul, and wished to revisit the cherished scenes of his youth? Or maybe he was just slumming?

Dracul spied on the man from behind a shambling stone wall.

First the man smoked a cigarette. Dracul could smell the tobacco drifting towards him on the icy breeze. Then he barked at his chauffeur. The chauffeur hurried out of the car and went to fetch his employer’s black fur coat. This he draped around the man’s shoulders, so that the coat hung down near the ground.

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