Kate sighed. “I know it doesn't make sense . . . but if the disease were contained in a family . . . requiring a rare double recessive to manifest itself . . . and the sufferers needed human blood to survive“ She stopped herself and looked down the hallway toward the room where the painting hung.
“A small, royal family,” continued O'Rourke, “requiring secrecy due to the nature of their disease and their crimes, having the money and power necessary to eliminate enemies and retain their secrecy . . . even to sending kidnappers and murderers to America to retrieve a baby from that family . . . a baby adopted by mistake.”
Kate looked down. “I know. It's . . . nuts.”
O'Rourke sipped his espresso. “Yes,” he said. “Unless you belong to a church that has had secret correspondence for centuries about just such an evil and reclusive family. A family which originated somewhere in Eastern Europe half a millennium ago.”
Kate's head snapped up. Her heart was already pounding and she felt the rise in blood pressure as a sharper pain in her aching skull. She ignored it. “Do you mean“
O'Rourke set down the cup and held up a single finger. “Still not enough to base a theory on,” he said. “Unless . . . unless you tie it to the strange coincidence of having met someone who looks very much like the late, unlamented Vlad Tepes.”
Kate could only stare.
O'Rourke reached into his coat pocket and took out a small envelope of color photographs. There were six of them. The background was obviously Eastern Europe . . . a dark factory town . . . a medieval city street, Dacias parked along the curb. Kate knew intuitively that the photographs had been taken in Romania.. But it was the man in the foreground who held her attention.
He was very old. That was immediately apparent from his posture, the curve of spine, the sense of a shrinking body lost in oversized clothes. His face was just visible above the lapels of an expensive topcoat, beneath the short brim of a homburg., But although sharpened and abraded by age and injury, it was a familiar face: no mustache here, but the broad underlip, the extended jaw, eyes sunken in the skull but still vaguely hyperthyroidal.
“Who?” whispered Kate.
O'Rourke slipped the photographs back in his coat pocket. “A gentleman I originally traveled to Romania with almost two years ago . . . a gentleman whose name you've probably heard. “
Two men began arguing loudly in German just behind O'Rourke's chair. A man and a woman, Americans from the looks of their casual clothes, stood three feet away watching Kate and the priest, obviously waiting impatiently for the table.
O'Rourke stood up and extended his hand to her. “Come on. I know a quieter place.”
Kate had seen pictures of the big wheel before; everyone had. But it was somehow more charming when encountered in reality. She and O'Rourke were the only passengers in an enclosed car that could have easily held twenty people. The car behind them, although empty this evening, was actually filled with dining tables set with linen and china. Slowly, the wheel rotated their car two hundred feet to its highest point and then stopped as other people loaded far below.
“Neat Ferris wheel,” said Kate.
“Riesenrad,” said the priest, leaning on a railing and looking out the opened window at the fall foliage burning in last glow of autumn twilight. “It means giant wheel.” As .he said that, the glow on the clouds faded and the sky began to pale and then darken. The car moved slightly around, swept down past the loading point, and then climbed above the treetops again.
Lights were coming on all over Vienna. Cathedral towers were suddenly illuminated. Kate could see the modernistic towers of UNO City off toward the Danube; Susan McKay Chandra had once described to Kate the excitement of attending a conference there at the headquarters of the United Nations Commission for Infectious Diseases.
Kate winced, closed her eyes a second, and then looked at O'Rourke. “All right, tell me about this man.”
“Vernor Deacon Trent. You've heard the name?”
“Sure. He's the Howard Hughesstyle reclusive billionaire who made his fortune in . . . what? . . . appliances? Hotels? He has that big art museum named after him near Big Sur.” Kate hesitated. “Didn't he die last year?”
O'Rourke shook his head. The car swooped low and the sounds of the few rides still operating came more clearly through the open window. Their car rose again. “Mr. Trent bankrolled the mission that brought me and a bunch of other guysa WHO bigwig, the late Leonard Paxley from Princeton, other heavy hittersinto Romania right after the revolution. I mean right after. Ceausescu wasn't cold yet. Anyway, I went back to the States in February of last year, 1990, to try to round up 'some Churchsponsored aid for the orphanages over here, and before I left Chicago in May of that year, I'd read that Mr. Trent had suffered a stroke and was in seclusion somewhere in California. But he was still in Romania the last time I saw him.”
“That's right,” said Kate. “Time had a thing about the corporate battle over control of his empire. He was incapacitated but not dead. “ She shivered at the suddenly cool breeze.
O'Rourke pulled the window almost shut. “As far as I know, he still hasn't died. But I was struck at the time we first came to Bucharest how much Mr. Vernor Deacon Trent looks like that old portrait of Vlad Tepes.”
“A family resemblance,” said Kate.
The priest nodded.
“But the painting we saw today was a copy . . . done a century after Vlad Tepes lived. It may be inaccurate.”
O'Rourke nodded again.
Kate looked at the lights of the old city. Screams came up from the looptheloop roller coaster below. “But if it is a family resemblance, then it may have some connection with . . . something. “ She heard how lame that last word sounded, even to herself, and she closed her eyes.
“There are about twenty-four million people in Romania,” O'Rourke said softly. “It has an area of . . . what? . .. . somewhere around a hundred thousand square miles. We have to start somewhere, even if all of our theories are halfassed.”
Kate opened her eyes. “Do you have to say a Hail Mary or something when you swear, O'Rourke? I mean, do penance?”
He rubbed his cheek but did not smile. “I give myself a dispensation . . . since I can't give myself absolution.” He glanced at his watch. “It's after six, Neuman. We'd better find a place to eat and get to bed early tonight. The hydrofoil is scheduled to leave at eight and the Austrians are nothing if not prompt. “
Chapter Twenty-two
THE hydrofoil was sleek and enclosed, the forward compartment holding half a dozen rows of no more than five seats per row on each side of the aisle, the curving Perspex windows giving a panoramic view of both banks of the Danube as the engines fired to life and moved the boat out carefully from the dock. The old city fell away quickly and within moments the only signs of habitation were the elevated fishing and hunting shacks along either side of the river; then these also fell behind and only forest lined the shores.
Kate looked at her DonauDampfschiffahrtsGesellschaft schedule, saw that it would take about five hours to travel down the Danube to Budapest, and said to O'Rourke, “Maybe we should have flown directly.”
The priest turned in his seat. He was dressed in jeans, a denim shirt, and a wellbrokenin leather bomber jacket. “Directly to Bucharest`”
Kate shook her head. “I still don't think they would let me in the country. But we could have flown directly to Budapest. “
“Yes, but the Gypsies wouldn't meet with us before tonight. “ He turned back to watch the south shore as the hydrofoil accelerated to thirty-five knots and rose on its forward fins. The ride was perfectly smooth. “At least this way we get to see the sights.”