"And they won't die," Woermann said.
"What?" Kaempffer finally looked up from the glass of kummel.
"The villagers—I let them go."
"How dare you!" Anger—he began to feel alive again. He rose from his chair.
"You'll thank me later on when you don't have the systematic murder of an entire Romanian village to explain. And that's what it would come to. I know your kind. Once started on a course, no matter how futile, no matter how many you hurt, you keep going rather than admit you've made a mistake. So I'm keeping you from getting started. Now you can blame your failure on me. I will accept the blame and we can all find a safer place to quarter ourselves."
Kaempffer sat down again, mentally conceding that Woermann's move had given him an out. But he was trapped. He could not report failure back to the SS. That would mean the end of his career.
"I'm not giving up," he told Woermann, trying to appear stubbornly courageous.
"What else can you do? You can't fight this!"
"I will fight it!"
"How?" Woermann leaned back and folded his hands over his small paunch. "You don't even know what you're fighting, so how can you fight it?"
"With guns! With fire! With—" Kaempffer shrank away as Woermann leaned toward him, cursing himself for cringing, but helpless against the reflex.
"Listen to me, Herr Sturmbannführer: Those men were dead when they walked into your room tonight. Dead! We found their blood in the rear corridor. They died in your makeshift prison. Yet they walked off the corridor, up to your room, broke through the door, marched up to your bed, and fell on you. How are you going to fight something like that?"
Kaempffer shuddered at the memory. "They didn't die until they got to my room! Out of loyalty they came to report to me despite their mortal wounds!" He didn't believe a word of it. The explanation came automatically.
"They were dead, my friend," Woermann said without the slightest trace of friendship in his tone. "You didn't examine their bodies—you were too busy cleaning the crap out of your pants. But I did. I examined them just as I have examined every man who has died in this godforsaken keep. And believe me, those two died on the spot. All the major blood vessels in their necks were torn through. So were their windpipes. Even if you were Himmler himself, they couldn't have reported to you."
"Then they were carried!" Despite what he had seen with his own eyes he pressed for another explanation. The dead didn't walk. They couldn't!
Woermann leaned back and stared at him with such disdain that Kaempffer felt small and naked.
"Do they also teach you to lie to yourself in the SS?"
Kaempffer made no reply. He needed no physical examination of the corpses to know that they had been dead when they had walked into his room. He had known that the instant the light from his lamp had shone on their faces.
Woermann rose and strode toward the door. "I'll tell the men we leave at first light."
"NO!" The word passed his lips louder and shriller than he wished.
"You don't really intend to stay here, do you?" Woermann asked, his expression incredulous.
"I must complete this mission!"
"But you can't! You'll lose! Surely you see that now!"
"I see only that I shall have to change my methods."
"Only a madman would stay!"
I don't want to stay! Kaempffer thought. I want to leave as much as anyone! Under any other circumstances he would be giving the order to move out himself. But that was not one of his options here. He had to settle the matter of the keep—settle it once and for all—before he could leave for Ploiesti. If he bungled this job, there were dozens of his fellow SS officers lusting after the Ploiesti project, watching and waiting to leap at the first sign of weakness and wrest the prize away from him. He had to succeed here. If he could not, he would be left behind, forgotten in some rear office as others in the SS took over management of the world.
And he needed Woermann's help. He had to win him over for just a few days, until they could find a solution. Then he would have him court-martialed for freeing the villagers.
"What do you think it is, Klaus?" he asked softly.
"What do I think what is?" Woermann's tone was annoyed, frustrated, his words clipped brutally short.
"The killing—who or what do you think is doing it?"
Woermann sat down again, his face troubled. "I don't know. And at this point, I don't care to know. There are now eight corpses in the subcellar and we must see to it that there aren't any more."
"Come now, Klaus. You've been here a week ... you must have formed an idea." Keep talking, he told himself. The longer you talk, the longer before you've got to return to that room.
"The men think it's a vampire."
A vampire! This was not the kind of talk he needed, but he fought to keep his voice low, his expression friendly.
"Do you agree?"
"Last week—God, even three days ago—I'd have said no. Now, I'm not so sure. I'm no longer sure of anything. If it is a vampire, it's not like the ones you read about in horror stories. Or see in the movies. The only thing I'm sure of is that the killer is not human."
Kaempffer tried to recall what he knew about vampire lore. Was the thing that killed the men drinking their blood? Who could tell? Their throats were such a ruin, and there was so much spilled on their clothes, it would take a medical laboratory to determine whether some of the blood was missing. He had once seen a pirated print of the silent movie, Nosferatu, and had watched the American version of Dracula with German subtitles. That had been years ago, and at the time the idea of a vampire had seemed as ludicrous as it deserved to be. But now ... there certainly was no beak-nosed Slav in formal dress slinking around the keep. But there were most certainly eight corpses in the subcellar. Yet he could not see himself arming his men with wooden stakes and hammers.
"I think we shall have to go to the source," he said as his thoughts reached a dead end.
"And where's that?"
"Not where—who. I want to find the owner of the keep. This structure was built for a reason, and it is being maintained in perfect condition. There has to be a reason for that."
"Alexandra and his boys don't know who the owner is."
"So they say."
"Why should they lie?"
"Everybody lies. Somebody has to pay them."
"The money is given to the innkeeper and he dispenses it to Alexandru and his boys."
"Then we'll interrogate the innkeeper."
"You might also ask him to translate the words on the wall."
Kaempffer started. "What words? What wall?"
"Down where your two men died. There's something written on the wall in their blood."
"In Romanian?"
Woermann shrugged. "I don't know. I can't even recognize the letters, let alone the language."
Kaempffer leaped to his feet. Here was something he could handle. "I want that innkeeper!"
The man's name was Iuliu.
He was grossly overweight, in his late fifties, balding on his upper pate, and mustachioed on his upper lip. His ample jowls, unshaven for at least three days, trembled as he stood in his nightshirt and shivered in the rear corridor where his fellow villagers had been held prisoner.
Almost like the old days, Kaempffer thought, watching from the shadows of one of the rooms. He was starting to feel more like himself again. The man's confused, frightened countenance brought him back to his early years with the SS in Munich, when they would roust the Jew shopkeepers out of their warm beds in the early morning hours, beat them in front of their families, and watch them sweat with terror in the cold before dawn.