The two Englishmen glanced at each other. Then Quint smiled obligingly. ‘Er, true,' he said. ‘Your thinlyness is most accommodating.'
‘Good.' She gave a curt nod.
The car sped on out of the city, picked up the motorway.
Kyle and Quint had spent the night at the Dunarea Hotel in the city centre, while Krakovitch had spent most of it up and about making connections and arrangements. This morning, looking haggard and hollow-eyed, he'd tuned them for breakfast. Gulharov had picked them up and they'd driven to the Office of Cultural and Scientific exchanges where Dobresti had been getting her instructions from a Soviet liaison officer. She had met Krakovitch ‘lie night before. Now they were on their way into the Romanian countryside, following a route Krakovitch knew fairly well.
‘Actually,' he said, stifling a yawn, ‘this not too surprising. Coming here, I mean.' He turned to look at his guests. ‘I know this place. After that business at (Château Bronnitsy, when Party Leader Brezhnev give tie my appointment, he ordered me to find out everything I could about… about what happened. I suspected Dragosani was at root of it. So I came here.'
‘You followed his old tracks, you mean?' said Kyle.
Krakovitch nodded. ‘When Dragosani have holiday, he always come here, to Romania. No family, no friends, but he come here.'
Quint nodded. ‘He was born here. Romania was home to him.'
‘And he did have one friend here,' Kyle quietly added. Krakovitch yawned again, peered at Kyle through eyes which were a little red in their corners. ‘So it would seem. \anyway, he used to call this place Wallachia, not Romania. Wallachia is a country long gone and forgotten, Hut not by Dragosani.'
‘Where exactly are we going?' Kyle asked.
‘I was hoping you could tell me!' said Krakovitch. ‘You said Romania, a place in the foothills where Dragosani was a boy. So that is where we are going. We'll stay at a little village he liked off the Corabia-Calinesti highway. We should be there in maybe two hours. After that,' he It rugged, ‘your guess is as good as mine.'
Oh, we can do better than that,' said Kyle. ‘How far is Slatina from this place where we're staying?'
‘Slatina? Oh, about —,
‘One hundred twenty kilometres,' said Irma Dobresti. Krakovitch had earlier told her the name of the place they were staying — a difficult and meaningless name to the two Englishmen — but she had known it fairly well. A cousin of hers had lived there once. ‘About an hour and half to travelling.'
‘Do you want to go straight to Slatina?' Krakovitch asked. ‘What's in Slatina, anyway?'
‘Tomorrow will do,' said Kyle. ‘We can spend tonight making plans. As for what's in Slatina,
‘Records,' Quint cut in. ‘There'll be a local registrar, won't there?'
‘Pardon?' Krakovitch didn't know the word.
‘A person who registers marriages and births,' Kyle explained.
‘And deaths,' Quint added.
‘Ah! I begin to see,' said Krakovitch. ‘But you are mistaken if you think a small town's records will go back five hundred years to Thibor Ferenczy.'
Kyle shook his head. ‘That's not it. We have our own vampire, remember? We know he, er, got started out here. And we more or less know how. We want to find out where Ilya Bodescu died. The Bodescus were staying in Slatina when he had some sort of skiing accident in the hills. If we can trace someone who was involved in the recovery of his body, we'll be within an ace of finding Thibor's tomb. Where Ilya Bodescu died, that's where the old vampire was buried.'
‘Good!' said Krakovitch. ‘There should be a police report, statements — perhaps even a coroner's report.'
‘Doubting,' said Irma Dobresti, shaking her head. ‘How long ago this man die?'
‘Eighteen, nineteen years,' Kyle answered.
‘Simple death — accident.' Dobresti shrugged. ‘Not suspicious — no coroner's report. But police report, yes. Also, ambulance recovery. They make report, too.'
Kyle began to warm towards her. ‘That's good reasoning,' he said. ‘As for getting hold of those reports through the local authorities, that's your job, Mrs er
‘Not Mrs. Never had time. Just call me Irma, please.' She smiled her yellow-toothed smile.
Her attitude in all of this puzzled Quint a little. ‘You don't think it's a bit odd that we're here hunting for a vampire, er, Irma?'
She looked at him, raised an eyebrow. ‘My parents come from the mountains,' she said. ‘When I am little they sometimes talk about wampir. Up there in Carpatii Meridionali, old people still believe. Once there were great bears up there. And sabretooth tigers. Before that, big lizards — er, dinosaurs? Yes. They are no more — but they were. Later, there was plague that swept the world. All of these things, gone. Now you tell me that my parents were right, there were vampires, too. Odd? No, I not think so. If you want hunt vampires, where better than Romania, eh?'
Krakovitch smiled. ‘Romania,' he said, ‘has always been something of an island.'
‘True,' Dobresti agreed. ‘But that not always good. World is big. No strength in being small. Also, being cut off means stagnation. Nothing new ever comes in.'
Kyle nodded, thinking to himself, and some of the old things are things you can well do without.
It had been a rough night for Brenda Keogh.
When Harry Jnr had finished his small hours feed, he hadn't wanted to go back to sleep again. He wasn't bad about it, just wouldn't sleep.
After an hour or two of rocking him, then cradling and crooning to him, she'd finally put the baby down and gone back to bed herself.
But at 6.00 A.M. he'd been right on time again, crying for his change and another feed. And she'd known from the way he twisted his little face and clenched his fists that he was tired: he'd been awake right through the night, from no cause that Brenda could discover. But good? What a good little chap he was! He hadn't cried at all until he was hungry and uncomfortable, just lay there in his cot through the night doing his own thing — whatever that might be.
Even now his will to stay awake and be a part of the world was strong, but his yawning told his mother that he couldn't. With dawn an hour away, Harry was going to have to go to sleep. The world would have to wait. No matter how fast your mind grows up, your body goes more slowly.
As his baby son went to sleep, Harry Snr found himself free and was struck with a thought as strange as any he'd ever had, even in his thoroughly strange existence.
He's leeching on me! he thought. The little rascal's into my mind, into my experiences. He can explore my stuff because there's lots of it, but I can't touch him because there's nothing in there — yet!
He put the extraordinary idea to the back of his mind. Now that Harry Jnr had released him he had places to go, people — dead people — to talk to. There were things he knew which he was unique in knowing. He knew, for instance, that the dead inhabit another sphere; also that in their lonely nether-existence they go on doing all the things they've done in life.
The writers write masterpieces they can never publish, each line perfectly composed, each paragraph polished, every story a gem. Where time isn't a problem and deadlines don't exist, things get done right. The architects plot their cities of the mind, beautiful aerial constructs flung across fantastic worlds and spanning sculpted oceans and continents, each brick and spire and sky-riding highway immaculately positioned, no smallest detail missing or botched. The mathematicians continue to explore the Formulae of the Universe, reducing THE ALL to symbols they can never put on paper, for which men in the corporeal world should be grateful. And the Great Thinkers carry on thinking their great thoughts, which far outweigh any they thought in life.