TWENTY-ONE

Kate had never been to Vienna before, but her jumbled, jet-lagged impressions of it were pleasant: beautiful old architecture co-existing with the most modern refinements, parks, gardens, and palaces set along the circular ring roads of the old city, easy affluence, efficiency, cleanliness, and an obvious care for aesthetics that had not faltered in centuries. She thought that she might like to return to Vienna someday when she was sane.

She and O’Rourke had arrived shortly after sunrise and taken a cab to the Hôtel de France on Schottentör, near Rooseveltplatz, and a cathedral that O’Rourke said was called the Votivkirche.

“You’ve been to Vienna before,” said Kate, trying to focus through the headache and jet lag.

“Even cities as prosperous as Vienna have orphanages,” said O’Rourke. “Here, I’ll check us in.”

Their rooms were on the fifth floor, in a modern edition of the hotel carved out of a two-century-old building behind the main structure. Kate blinked at the gray carpet, gray walls, teak furniture, and twenty-first-century appointments.

O’Rourke dismissed the bellboy in German and turned to leave for his own room when Kate called to him from the door.

“Mike … I mean, Father … wait a minute.”

He paused in the narrow hall. Behind him, greenhouse-style windows looked down on slate roofs and old courtyards.

“O’Rourke,” said Kate, trying to return from the dark place her sad weariness kept taking her, “I forgot to reimburse you for your ticket and for … all this.” She gestured lamely at the hallway.

The priest shook his head. “I’ve got a loan from a well-to-do childhood buddy.” He grinned for the first time in the week he had stayed with her, showing white teeth against his dark beard. “Dale’s a writer and never does anything with his ill-earned profits anyway. He was happy to give me a loan.”

“No, I’ll reimburse you for … everything,” she said, hearing the exhaustion in her own voice. She frowned at him. “You never told me while we were discussing all this … where does your diocese or bishop or whoever your boss is … where do they think you are?”

O’Rourke’s grin remained. “On vacation,” he said. “Six years overdue. Everyone from His Excellency to the WHO administrator I work with to my housekeeper in Evanston think that it’s a great idea that I’m finally taking some time off.”

Kate leaned tiredly against the doorframe. “And what would it do to your reputation if they learned that you’re traveling across Europe with a woman?”

O’Rourke tossed his room keys in the air and caught them with a jingle. He traveled with a single leather carry-on garment bag and he slung the strap over his shoulder with the practiced ease of an inveterate traveler. “It would improve my reputation immensely if some of my old seminary buddies and instructors could see me now,” he said. “They always thought I was too serious. Now you get some sleep and we’ll get together for a late lunch or early dinner whenever you waken. All right, Neuman?”

“All right, O’Rourke.” She watched him stroll whistling down the hall and noticed his slight limp before she closed and locked her door.

*   *   *

They had an appointment with the Gypsies in Budapest on Sunday evening, and O’Rourke had booked them aboard the Vienna-Bucharest hydrofoil leaving at eight A.M that Sunday morning, October 6.

“It’s the last day the hydrofoil runs,” he said as they walked in Rathaus Park the next day. “Winter’s coming on.”

Kate nodded but did not really believe it. The day was warm, in the mid-sixties at least, and the blaze of fall foliage in the gardens and along the Ringstrasse merely added to the crisp perfection of the weather. Kate’s mood called for rain and cold.

“We have the day,” the priest said softly, as if reluctant to invade her thoughts. “Any ideas how to spend it? You should be resting, of course.”

“No,” Kate said firmly. The idea of lying in her hotel bed made her want to scream with impatience.

“Well, the Kunsthistorisches Museum has a wonderful collection of art,” he said. “And this is a big year for Mozart.”

“Didn’t you tell me that the Kunsthistorisches had a portrait of the real Dracula?” asked Kate. She had been reading everything she could on historical Transylvanian rulers since she had first diagnosed Joshua’s illness three months earlier.

“Yeah … I think so,” said the priest. “Come on, we can catch the Number 1 tram.”

*   *   *

The small sign under the portrait read VLAD IV, TZEPESCH: WOIEODE DER WALACHEI, GEST. 1477, DEUTSCH 16. JH. A smaller sign under the painting said, in German and English: On Loan from the Ambras Museum, Innsbruck. Kate stared at the face in the life-size portrait.

As a doctor, she saw the large, slightly protruding eyes as possibly hyperthyroidal, the prognathous jaw and extruded underlip of a type sometimes associated with mental retardation or certain types of pituitary and bone disorders. Platyspondylist? she wondered. The kind of characteristic abnormality found with thymic dysplasia and other Severe Combined Immune-Deficiency symptoms?

“Cruel eyes, aren’t they?” said O’Rourke. The priest stood with his hands locked behind his back, rocking slightly on his heels.

Kate was almost startled by the question. “I wasn’t thinking about whether they were cruel,” she said. She tried looking at the portrait without medical prejudice. “No,” she said at last, “I’m not struck by the cruelty in that gaze … arrogance, to be sure. But he was a prince.”

“Voivode of Wallachia,” agreed O’Rourke. “That’s the really frightening thing about Vlad the Impaler’s monstrosities—they were more or less par for the course in those days. That’s the way princes remained princes.” He turned and watched Kate’s absorbed gaze. “You really think Bela Lugosi here has something to do with the strain of Joshua’s disease?”

Kate pretended to smile. “Dumb, huh? But you heard the clinical description of the immunoreconstructive process the disease feeds on. Drinking blood. An enhanced lifespan. Amazing recuperative powers … almost autotomizing.”

“What’s autotom—whatever?”

“Autotomizing is the way some reptiles like salamanders can actually shed their tails in an emergency and regrow them,” said Kate. Her head hurt less when she thought about things medical. The black tide of sorrow receded then as well. “We don’t know much about regenerative powers in salamanders … only that it occurs on a cellular level and that it requires an immense amount of energy.”

O’Rourke nodded toward the portrait. “And you think maybe Vlad had some salamander in his royal lineage?”

Kate rubbed her forehead. “It’s crazy. I know it’s crazy.” She closed her eyes a moment. The museum echoed with footsteps, coughs, conversations in German that sounded as harsh as the coughs, and an occasional laugh which sounded as insane as she felt.

“Let’s sit down,” said the priest. He took her arm and led her to an area on the second-floor rotunda where cake and coffee could be purchased. He chose a table away from the traffic flow.

Kate was fuzzy for a moment, becoming aware of things again as O’Rourke urged her to take another sip of strong Viennese coffee. She didn’t remember his ordering it.

“You really believe that the Dracula legends might have something to do with Joshua’s … abduction?” His voice was just above a whisper.

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 Ţepeş.”

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 the 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 Hughes–style 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 guys—a WHO bigwig, the late Leonard Paxley from Princeton, other heavy hitters—into Romania right after the revolution. I mean right after. Ceauşescu wasn’t cold yet. Anyway, I went back to the States in February of last year, 1990, to try to round up some Church-sponsored 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 Ţepeş.”

“A family resemblance,” said Kate.

The priest nodded.

“But the painting we saw today was a copy … done a century after Vlad Ţepeş lived. It may be inaccurate.”

O’Rourke nodded again.

Kate looked at the lights of the old city. Screams came up from the loop-the-loop 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 half-assed.”

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.”