Still, wanting to keep talking while the courtyards emptied and the last guards moved farther from their chapel, her chest aching from the sense of loss and futility, Kate whispered idly, “How do you know it was a whatchamacallit . . . a Jet Ranger?”
O'Rourke surprised her. “I've flown one.”
She glanced at him in the dim light. His hair and beard were caked with rock dust and rust. She imagined her own hair. “Flown one?”
He turned and grinned, bobbing his head in a boyish way. “When I was in Vietnam, I was the only grunt I knew who actually enjoyed riding in slicks.”
“Slicks?” Kate ran her fingers through her hair, brushing out things she did not want to think about.
“Helicopters. Hueys.” O'Rourke looked back at the cars driving out through the guarded main gate. “Anyway, I knew a warrant officer there who flew slicks into the A Shau Valley and still enjoyed the flying. He gave me a few checkout, rides there, and later, after I'd gotten the new leg, it turned out that he was opening a flying service in California near where I was spending time in a VA hospital. “ O'Rourke rubbed his beard as if embarrassed by telling such a long story. “Anyway, he gave me lessons.”
“Did you get a license?” asked Kate. She was watching the exodus, wondering how they might find out where the next night's ceremony was. The town, the lovemaking, the tunnel, the torches, and the music were all unreal. Joshua was real. She forced herself to focus.
“No,” he said, testing the door. It was locked but only with a padlock and rusty hasp on the outside that could be kicked open. “I didn't think there was a big market for one legged chopper pilots, so I went into the seminary instead.” Suddenly he pulled her low and dragged her back into the smaller room, keeping her head low. “Shhh!” he whispered.
A minute later the padlock was tried and opened, flashlight beams swept the main chapel area, and then Kate heard the sound of the door being shut and locked again. They waited five minutes before either spoke again.
“Final check, I'd guess,” whispered O'Rourke. They crept back to the door. The courtyard was empty and dark. The main and secondary gates closed. Chindia Tower was only a dark silhouette against low clouds lit by fires and lights from the chemical plants to the northeast.
They waited another twenty minutes, Kate rubbing her face to fight off the numbness of exhaustion, and then O'Rourke kicked the door open, the hasp tearing out of rotten wood.
“The museum people may be upset at what we're doing to their chapel,” whispered Kate. It was a weak joke, but she felt weak at the relief of knowing they didn't have to go back out through the tunnel.
They moved slowly, keeping low behind tumbled stone walls and bloomless rosebushes, but there were no guards inside the palace grounds and no traffic on the streets beyond. It was as if they dreamt the entire ceremony.
The walls were still topped by razor wire and broken glass, but O'Rourke found a low pedestrian gate in the back of the compound that was climbable. Kate tore her slacks again as she went over the top.
The streets of Tirgoviste were still silent and empty after the evening's invasion of strigoi VIPs, but Kate and O'Rourke kept to the shadows and alleys. Even the city's dogs were not barking tonight.
The motorcycle was still in the barn. While O'Rourke fiddled with the balky machine, Kate climbed the ladder to retrieve her travel bag and the blanket from the loft. The reflected lights from the petrochemical plant came through the dusty window and illuminated the nest in the straw where she and O'Rourke had made love only hours before. Did that really happen? Kate sighed tiredly, folded the blanket, and went back down the ladder.
O'Rourke had the doors open and was pushing the clumsy machine outside.
“I'd give a thousand dollars for a bath tonight,” she said, still brushing muck from her hair and clothes. “Five hundred just for an indoor toilet.”
“Get your checkbook out,” said O'Rourke and gunned the engine to life.
The Franciscan monastery was in a section of Tirgoviste so old that the streets were not wide enough for more than one Daciasized car at a time. There were no Dacias or any other type of automobiles on the streets. The motorcycle exhaust sounded obscenely loud to Kate as it echoed back off the ancient stoneandwood buildings. The motorcycle's weak headlight revealed that every house here seemed to have some personal touch which belied the poverty and socialist drabness that had been imposed from above for so long; bits of brightly covered trim, splendidly arched windows on an ancient home little more than a hovel, intricate stonework on the bottom third of an old house, skillfully executed ironwork on a gate connected to a sagging fence, even the glimpse of elaborate linen curtains in a window of what could have passed for a farm shed in the States.
The monastery was a long, low onestory building set back from the street in a section where empty lots alternated with dark and frequently windowless buildings. O'Rourke cruised past once, turned around, inspected the building on another pass, and then turned down an alley and went slowly past the rear of the structure. It was dark and had an abandoned feel to it. There was a padlock on the gate, but the fence was low enough to climb. Kate caught a glimpse of elaborate gardens and trellises in the dark backyard.
“Wait here a minute,” O'Rourke said softly, parking the motorcycle in a copse of trees near where the alley met a larger street. “If the strigoi are hunting for us, they may have left someone behind.”
Kate touched his arm, feeling the electricity of the renewed contact despite her fatigue and depression. “It's not worth risking,” she whispered.
O'Rourke grinned. “A bath,” he said. “Indoor plumbing. Maybe fresh clothes.”
Kate started climbing out of the sidecar. “I'm going with you. “
O'Rourke shook his head. “Compromise. Get on the bike. If I come out in a hurry, gun the thing and pick me up on the run. Do you know how to start it and drive it?”
Kate frowned but nodded. She'd watched him enough during the trip to know that she could get it moving. For some reason she thought of her Miata back home, destroyed in the fire. She had loved that machine . . . loved the sense of freedom and exhilaration it imparted when she drove it hard on winding mountain roads, the clean Colorado sunlight on her face, the wind in her hair . . .
“Kate?” said O'Rourke, squeezing her shoulder. “You with me?”
“Yeah.” She rubbed her cheeks and eyes with the heels of her hands. Exhaustion lay on her like a physical weight.
O'Rourke slipped down the alley, his black clothes making him almost invisible, and Kate sat there dully, listening to the cold wind stir brittle leaves. There were no insect sounds, no birds, and no sound of traffic from the main road a hundred feet farther down the alley. She tried to remember the sense of excitement and humanity she had sensed in her walks through Bucharest in May, the young couples kissing in dark doorways, the laughter, the grandparents watching their children in the park at Cismigiu Gardens. It was all from another world.
“It's empty,” said O'Rourke from behind her and she jumped three inches. She'd been halfdozing again.
They left the motorcycle in among the trees, climbed the low fence, and entered the monastery through a side window that was unlocked.
“There's been a Franciscan presence in Tirgoviste since the thirteenth century,” O'Rourke said softly as he lit a candle.
“The light . . .” began Kate.
“We'll stay in the inner rooms and halls. The shutters are closed. I don't think the police will be back. The nine residents here were brought to Bucharest for questioning and probably will be released there tomorrow . . . today really . . . now that the strigoi have had their little ceremony.”