Radu Fortuna chuckled and nudged Ion. “How very touching,” laughed Fortuna. “How deeply moving.”
Kate wheeled on him. “Why did you beat him?”
Radu Fortuna said nothing, but Ion evidently felt he could add to the mirth of the moment. “The idiot priest, he have notreal leg. We do not know this. When men come last night to take him out of cell to see Father, idiot priest hit Andrei and Nicolae over head with leg he take off. He try to leave. Nicolae unconscious. Andrei and three others do not like and hit. Hit for long time and . . .”
“Shut up, Ion,” snapped Radu Fortuna, no longer smiling.
Ion shut up.
So Mike also saw the old man.
One of the strigoi guards opened the back door of the idling Mercedes. Kate made a mental note that if she somehow got out of this alive, she would never buy one of these goddamn cars.
“Well, I wish you good trip,” said Radu Fortuna, standing by the open door while one of the thugs shoved her inside.
“Where am I going?” She was disappointed to see Ion going around the car to slide in the backseat with her. The strigoi thug with a scar above his left eye slipped behind the wheel while the other thug stood just outside.
Radu Fortuna opened his hands in a dismissive gesture. “You wish to see Ceremony, yes? You have, I think, come a long way for this privilege. Tonight you have privilege.” He grinned at her and she saw a certain resemblance between Fortuna's gaptoothed smile and the incessant TV images of Saddam Hussein from the previous winter and spring: both men's facial expressions did not involve their eyes. Radu Fortuna's eyes were as dead as black glass. Only the mouth muscles went through the motion of human emotions.
“Well,” he continued, voice still brimming with humor, “I think maybe we must say our goodbyes now. I will see you tonight, yes, but. there will be many peoples there and you may be too busy for chitchat. Bye-bye.” He slapped his palm on the roof of the car, the other strigoi thug slid in next to her so she was sandwiched between Ion and this one with his garlic breath, Radu Fortuna slammed the door, and the Mercedes glided away, drove under the arch of the wall, down the hill past homes that were old in the Middle Ages, and out of Sighisoara.
They turned right onto a narrow highway. Kate looked past Ion and saw the white sign: MEDIAL 36 KM, SIBIU 91 KM. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the map she and O'Rourke had been referring to for several days. If the series of highways they had been on constituted a rough circle, ignoring the mountains and countless diversions, then she imagined traveling counterclockwise with Bucharest the starting point at the six o'clock position. Tirgoviste was not on the circumference of the circle but just beneath the center where the hands were attached. Brasov would be at the three o'clock position, Sighisoara at the twelve, and Sibiu would be somewhere around the nine.
Where was the castle on the Arges? Somewhere between the nine and Tirgoviste near the center. Would Sibiu be on the road to the Arges castle? It didn't seem likely. She and O'Rourke must have guessed wrong about Vlad Tepes' castle being important to the ceremony. Sibiu was their probable destination.
How many miles until I reach the place where I will die?
Less than sixty miles. Kate wiped her moist palms on her dark skirt. Suddenly her stomach growled.
Ion glanced at her and did not hide his smirk. “You do not like the breakfast?”
There had been no breakfast, no food the night before. Kate tried to remember the last thing she had eaten, and the memory of the chocolate biscuits she had shared with the women, Ana and Marina, made her dizzy with nausea.
There were few other cars on the road today, and those few were almost driven off the road as the strigoi driver honked at them and overtook them at what seemed breakneck speed for such a rough and winding road. The Mercedes slowed for nothing but animals, but even flocks of sheep were sent scurrying.
Kate thought that the Transylvanian countryside that she was watching pass by so quickly must be beautiful in the summer: high green meadows, thick forests rising into areas unscarred by roads, crumbling abbeys on hilltops, the onion domes of Orthodox churches visible in tiny villages down along the river, and the colorfully dressed peasant farmers and Gypsies working in fields. But even in October the weight of winter now lay on the land like a gray pall. The trees were black stripes against gray rock, the peasants walking with heads down along the highway or staring from muddy fields were gray faces in black wool, and the few villages seemed to be studies in gray stone and black wood.
Both the driver and the young strigoi to her right were smoking and there seemed to be no ventilation in the car. She could smell the sweatandurine reek of the men, and the odor of garlic from the young one to her right seemed stronger every mile. There was no silence during the ride. The driver was talking with either Ion or the young man all the way, each of them speaking in such rapidfire Romanian that she could not understand any of it. They all laughed a lot. Frequently she caught their glances toward her just before or after a laugh. Although the words were gibberish to her, she knew the tone and arrogance very welclass="underline" it was the swaggering selfassurance of the notterriblyintelligent male bully in a situation with a woman he knew, he controlled. Kate had heard these same tones of conversation, seen the same leers and glances, and suffered the same laughter as a girl in the company of older boys, as a student with sexist teachers, as a young doctor with fellow interns out to prove something, and as a divorced woman on her own. She knew these sounds well.
“You know there will be big party tonight,” said Ion, setting his huge hand on her knee. “You are invite . . . you are special guest. “ He translated for his cronies and the smelly air was filled with their laughter.
Ion's hand slid up the inside of her leg until Kate clamped her tied wrists against her thigh and stopped it. Ion said something and the men laughed again. He removed his hand and lit a cigarette.
If Kate had been sitting by one of the doors, she would have waited until the Mercedes slowedwhich it did only occasionallyand then thrown herself from the car. The road here was cracked concrete or pitted asphalt, the shoulder alongside it almost nonexistent, but jumping would to preferable to sitting here like a fat steer being driven to the slaughterhouse.
But the men crowded her on either side and she knew that she could not get the doors opened before they shoved her back in her center seat.
They passed through the city of Media, much larger than Sighisoara, but Kate had little impression of it except for factories, more factories, littered rail yards, a terrible stench that may have come from one of the many petroleum or textile plants, and the glimpse of a single church spire, very tall, rising above the industrial towers like a black ghost from the past. Then they were in the country again and following Highway 14 toward Sibiu.
She noticed a strange thing leaving Media. A factory shift must have let out and there were scores, hundreds, of workers standing along the highway leaving the ugly town. Traffic was backed up along a section of the road that was unpaved and these men, black with soot and grease, would step in front of the Dacias and other cars, wave their arms imperiously, palms down, as if they were ordering the automobiles to stop. ~ Kate realized that it was a Romanian version of the upraised hitchhiker's thumb.
The men did not try to wave down the Mercedes. Kate leaned forward and even raised her bound hands so that she could be seen, but the workers looked down and away from the black car. Some stepped back from the road almost fearfully.