The Vampire Affair - McDaniel David - Страница 14

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Colonel Hanevitch was in his office as usual, and his voice answered their knock with a cheerful invitation to enter. When he saw them he put down his pen and stood up.

"Solo and Kuryakin! I suggest you telephone the inn at once. Domnisoara Eclary has been most concerned as to your whereabouts." He indicated a bulky telephone on his desk, and, as Illya placed the call with the sleepy operator, added, "I think you can understand her apprehension."

"Believe me," said Napoleon, "we were not entirely free of apprehension ourselves."

"Quite so," said Illya. "And this is the reason we came directly to you." He turned back to the telephone and spoke soothingly to Hilda, as Hanevitch raised an eyebrow or two at Napoleon.

"Well," he began, "we were digging the bullets out of the trees where Carl was found, when it got dark. We started back to the car to get the flash..."

Illya had hung up the telephone long before the story was finished, and added a few corroborative touches to the narrative.

Colonel Hanevitch listened politely all the way through, making no comment by word or expression. When they finished, he leaned slowly back in his swivel chair, which creaked sharply beneath him. He looked over his folded hands at them, and shook his head slowly.

"Your reputations are well known as honorable," he said. "You would have no imaginable reason for coming to me with so fantastic a story—and you would not create such a lie. If you were to lie, it would at least be a logical and believable lie. Therefore I have no choice but to believe that this is truly what you think happened. What actually happened, I must reserve judgment on. Perhaps you were drugged and hypnotized into remembering all these things. But wolves are very rare in this part of the mountains—and seeing twenty or thirty of them all together..." He shrugged, expressively. "As for the cave—do you think you could find it again?"

"I think so," said Illya. "I could find the path and follow it back from where we picked up the car."

"That might be worth doing," said the Colonel. "Perhaps footprints, or other clues, might avail themselves to a careful search—in full daylight, of course."

"Of course," said Illya automatically.

"Did you get a clear look at your rescuer?"

"Fairly clear," said Napoleon. "He walked close enough to us that his cloak brushed against me, and I had the pen-light on him at the time."

"Do you think you would recognize him?"

"Yes," said Napoleon definitely. "It was a...well, an unusual face. It was a very long oval shape, heavy-lidded eyes, high thin nose, thin dark lips, high cheek-bones, bushy eyebrows..."

"Did he look anything like your friend Zoltan?"

Napoleon thought. "Not as tall, and thinner. The face shape was similar, and the nose was the same."

The Colonel turned in his swivel chair and reached up to a small shelf for a dusty leatherbound book. Gold lettering was stamped deep into its cracked dark red spine. He opened it on the desk before him, and leafed through it, stopping at a double page of small oval portraits. He spun the book to face Illya and Napoleon. "Do you recognize any of these pictures?"

They studied the faces in the book for a while, and then Napoleon said, "Yes. I see one."

"Which?"

"Just a minute. I want to see if Illya picks the same one."

Illya looked very carefully at a few of the portraits, then nodded slowly. "Yes. Yes, beyond a doubt. This one, Napoleon."

Solo nodded as his friend's finger touched a face in the book. It was the face they had seen in the cave, above a cloak the color of the night, apologizing for his pets.

Hanevitch rose slightly, and looked at the book as they turned back to him and pointed. He nodded slowly. "I was afraid of that," he said. "This is the Vlad Tsepesh Stobolzny, five-times-great-grandfather of Zoltan Dracula. He is believed to have died in 1704, but there were rumors he was a demon, and the village did not rest easy for many years. He left his men while on a hunt in the forest, and disappeared. His trail ended in a pool of blood, with other tracks leaving. Mr. Solo, they were the footprints of a gigantic wolf."

Chapter 7: "Oh-oh, Here Comes Zoltan."

Zoltan appeared beside the table the following morning as Napoleon, Illya and Hilda were addressing themselves to breakfast, and offered his condolences on their nerve-shattering experience of the night before. He seemed concerned, and Hilda invited him to join them.

"I told him last night," she explained, "as soon as Illya called from Satul Contru. And I told him this morning whose picture you recognized."

Zoltan frowned and nodded. "Yes," he said. "My five-times-great-grandfather, the Vlad Tsepesh. He was the grandson of Petru, on whom the name of Dracula devolved in 1658. According to family tradition, it was he who was responsible for the loss of the documentation of our title. He was a cruel and wicked man, and met a death fitting to his manner of life."

"Look," said Napoleon after a pause. "Illya, you're going to be looking for that cave today, and Hilda will be helping you. I'd like to run down to Brasov, to check through the records on the castle of Zoltan's. See if there's anything odd about its present ownership."

"I had intended to start my queries here in Pokol," said Zoltan, "but if you would like to have a companion in your researches, I would be most happy to accompany you."

"As a matter of fact, that's what I had in mind. You know the language better than I do, and you can go places I can't and get questions answered. As long as you don't tell people your real name..."

Zoltan's eyebrows drew together slightly, and his lips thinned. "I bear my name proudly," he said. "I do not give it to those who do not need it, but I would never deny it. Besides, this is..."

"... a rational country?" asked Napoleon. "You aren't even fooling yourself on that one. This country is no more rational than anyplace else on Earth that has people in it. And if you want to go around looking for trouble, I'm going to start letting you get yourself out of it, too."

Zoltan smiled slightly. "I have done well enough in the past."

"Okay. It's up to you. But when they're trying to drive a stake through your heart, don't look at me. You could be bad for my reputation."

* * *

As Hilda and Illya went off to borrow Gheorghe's horse-drawn cart for the trip into the forest, Napoleon and Zoltan fueled up the big black Poboda and started down the narrow winding mountain road towards the main highway which led to Brasov, some forty miles north.

It was shortly past noon when they arrived in the city, and not quite an hour later when they found the office of records and the city library. Zoltan, being Rumanian, was less likely to be held up by red tape in his examination of the history of Castle Stobolzny since his grandfather had sold it, before his death in 1939. Napoleon, therefore, went to the library.

The goal of his search was any written material on vampirism in the local area, including case histories; specifically those connected with the Stobolzny family, and even more specifically anything at all to do with the Vlad Tsepesh.

The custodian of the books on folklore and history—the two subjects are inextricably intermingled in this part of the world—led him to a reading room. The ceiling was almost lost in the shadows, and dust motes made the shaft of sunlight coming in from a high window seem solid enough to climb. She brought him a stack of material pertaining to the subjects he requested, and told him in a low voice that the other volumes on the vampiric legends were in use by the gentleman over there.

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