The Historian (16 page)

Afew weeks later, my father said he thought it would be good for my nerves to take a trip, and I knew that he meant it would be better for him not to leave me at home. ―The French,‖ he explained, wanted to confer with representatives from his foundation before beginning talks in Eastern Europe that winter, and we were going to meet them one last time. It would be the best possible moment on the Mediterranean coast, too, after the hordes of tourists left but before the landscape began to look barren. We examined the map carefully and were pleased that the French had foregone their usual choice of a meeting in Paris and settled on the privacy of a resort near the Spanish border—close to the little gem of Collioure, my father gloated, and perhaps something like it. Just inland were Les Bains and Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyrénées-Orientales, I pointed out, but when I mentioned them my father‘s face clouded and he began to hunt along the coast for other interesting names.

Breakfast on the terrace at Le Corbeau, where we stayed, was so good in the fresh morning air that I lingered there after my father had joined the other dark-suited men in the conference hall, taking out my books reluctantly and looking up often at the aquamarine water a few hundred yards away. I was on my second cup of that bitter Continental
chocolat
, made bearable with a cube of sugar and a pile of fresh rolls. The sunlight on the faces of the old houses looked eternal in the dry Mediterranean climate with its preternaturally clear light, as if no storm had ever dared to approach these inlets.

From where I sat I could see a couple of early sailboats out on the edge of the marvelously colored sea and a family of small children going with their mother and their pails and their (to me) unusual French bathing suits down to the sand beach below the hotel. The bay curved around us to the right, in the form of jagged hills. One of these was topped by a rotting fortress the same color as the rocks and sere grasses, olive trees climbing ineffectively toward it, the delicately blue morning sky stretched behind it.

I felt a sudden twinge of unbelonging, of envy for those unbearably complacent children with their mother. I had no mother and no normal life. I wasn‘t sure what I meant bynormal life, but as I flipped through my biology book looking for the beginning of the third chapter, I thought vaguely it might mean living in one place, with a mother and father who were there every evening at dinnertime, a household in which travel meant the occasional beach vacation, not an endlessly nomadic existence. I felt sure, glaring at the children as they settled onto the sand with their shovels, that these creatures were never threatened by the grimness of history, either.

Then, looking down on their glossy heads, I realized that they were indeed threatened; they were simply unaware of it. We were all vulnerable. I shivered and glanced at my watch. In another four hours, my father and I would have lunch on this terrace. Then I would study again, and after five o‘clock we would take a walk toward the eroded fortress that ornamented the near horizon—from which, my father said, you could see the little sea-bathed church on the other side, at Collioure. In the course of this day I would learn more algebra, some German verbs, read a chapter on the War of the Roses, and then—what? Up on the dry cliff, I would listen to my father‘s next story. He would tell it unwillingly, looking down at the sandy soil or drumming his fingers on rock quarried centuries ago, lost in his own fear. And it would be up to me to study it again, to piece it all together. A child shrieked below me and I started, spilling my cocoa.

When I finished reading the last of Rossi‘s letters, my father said, I felt a new desolation, as if he had vanished a second time. But by now I was convinced that his disappearance had nothing to do with a bus trip to Hartford or a family illness in Florida (or London), as the police had tried to postulate. I put these thoughts out of my mind and set myself to looking through his other papers. Read first, absorb everything. Then build a chronology and begin—but slowly—to draw conclusions. I wondered if Rossi had had any premonition that in training me he might have been ensuring his own survival. It was like a gruesome final exam—although I devoutly hoped it would not be final for either of us. I wouldn‘t make a plan until I had read everything, I told myself, but already I had an inkling of what I would probably have to do. I opened the faded packet again.

The next three items were maps, as Rossi had promised, each drawn by hand and none of them looking older than the letters. Of course: these would be his own versions of the maps he had seen in the archive in Istanbul, copied from memory after his adventures there. On the first that came to hand, I saw a great region of mountains, which were drawn in as little triangular notches. They formed two long east-west crescents across the page and clustered densely on the west side as well. A broad river looped along the northern edge of the map. No cities were visible, although three or four little Xs among the western mountains might have marked towns. No place-names appeared on this map, but Rossi—it was the penmanship of that last letter—had written around the borders:

―Those who do not believe and die while they are unbelievers, on them falls the curse of Allah, of angels, and of men (The Qur‘an),‖ and several similar passages. I wondered if the river I saw here could be the one that had seemed to him symbolized by the dragon‘s tail in his book. But no; in that case he‘d been referring to the largest-scale map, which must be among these. I cursed the circumstances—all of them—that prevented my seeing and holding the originals; in spite of Rossi‘s fine memory and neat hand, there must surely be omissions or discrepancies between original and copy.

The next map seemed to focus more closely on the western mountain region shown in the first. Again, I saw here and there Xs, marked in the same relation to one another as on the first map. A smaller river appeared, curling through the mountains. Again, no place-names. Rossi had noted across the top of this map: ―(Same Qur‘anic mottoes, repeated).‖

Well, he had been just as careful in those days as the Rossi I knew. But these maps, so far, were too simple, too crude an outline, to suggest any specific region I‘d ever seen or studied. Frustration rose in me like a fever, and I swallowed it down with difficulty, forcing myself to concentrate.

The third map was more enlightening, although I wasn‘t sure exactly what it could tell me, at this point. Its general outline was indeed the fierce silhouette I knew from my dragon book and Rossi‘s, although without Rossi‘s discovery of the fact, I might not have noticed that at once. This map showed the same kind of triangular mountains. They were very tall now, forming heavy north-south ridges, a river looping through them and opening out into a reservoir of some sort. Why couldn‘t this be Lake Snagov, in Romania, as the legends of Dracula‘s burial suggested? But, as Rossi had noted, there was no island in the broadened part of the river, and it didn‘t look like a lake, anyway.

The Xs appeared again, this time labeled in tiny Cyrillic letters. I assumed these were the villages Rossi had mentioned.

Among these scattered village names I saw a square, marked by Rossi: ―(Arabic) The Unholy Tomb of One Who Kills Turks.‖ Above this box was a rather nicely drawn little dragon, a castle crowning its head, and under it I read more Greek letters, and Rossi‘s English translation: ―In this spot, he is housed in evil. Reader, unbury him with a word.‖

The lines were unbelievably compelling, like an incantation, and I had opened my mouth to intone them aloud when I stopped and closed my lips tightly. They made a sort of poetry in my head, nevertheless, which danced there infernally for a couple of seconds.

I set the three maps aside. It was terrifying to see them there, exactly as Rossi had described them, and stranger yet to see not the originals but these copies in his own hand.

What was to prove to me, ultimately, that he hadn‘t made the whole thing up, drawing these very maps as a prank? I had no primary sources in this matter, apart from his letters.

I drummed my fingers on the desktop. The clock in my study seemed to be ticking unusually loudly tonight, and the urban half darkness seemed too still behind my venetian blinds. I hadn‘t eaten in hours and my legs ached, but I couldn‘t stop now. I glanced briefly at the road map of the Balkans, but there was nothing unusual on it, apparently—

no handwritten marks, for example. The brochure on Romania also yielded nothing striking, apart from the weird English in which it was printed: ―Avail yourselves of our lush and appalling countryside,‖ for example. The only items that remained to be examined were the notes in Rossi‘s hand and that small sealed envelope I‘d noticed on first turning through the papers. I had meant to leave the envelope for last, because it was sealed, but I couldn‘t wait longer. I found my letter opener among the papers on my desk, carefully broke the seal, and drew out a sheet of notepaper.

It was the third map again, with its dragon shape, curling river, towering caricature mountain peaks. It had been copied in black ink, like Rossi‘s version, but the hand was slightly different—a good facsimile but somehow cramped, archaic, a little ornate, when you looked at it closely. I should have been prepared by Rossi‘s letter for the sight of the one difference from the first version of the map, but it still hit me like a physical blow: over the boxlike tomb site and its guardian dragon curved the words BARTOLOMEO

ROSSI.

I fought down assumptions, fears, and conclusions, and willed myself to set the paper aside and read the pages of Rossi‘s notes. The first two he had apparently made in the archives at Oxford and the British Museum Library, and they told me nothing he had not already. There was a brief outline of Vlad Dracula‘s life and exploits, and a listing of some literary and historical documents in which Dracula had been mentioned over the centuries. Another page followed these, on a different notepaper, and this was marked and dated from his trip to Istanbul. ―Reconstituted from memory,‖ said his swift yet careful handwriting, and I realized they must be the notes he had thrown onto paper after his experience in the archive, when he‘d sketched the maps from memory before leaving for Greece.

These notes listed the Istanbul library‘s holdings of documents from Sultan Mehmed II‘s time—at least whatever had struck Rossi as pertaining to his own research—the three maps, scrolls of accounts from the Carpathian wars against the Ottomans, and ledgers of goods traded among Ottoman merchants at the edge of that region. None of this seemed to me very enlightening; but I wondered at what point, exactly, Rossi‘s labors had been interrupted by the ominous-looking bureaucrat. Could the scrolls of accounts and ledgers of trade he mentioned here contain clues to Vlad Tepes‘s demise or burial? Had Rossi actually looked through them himself, or had he merely had time to list the possibilities in that archive before being scared away from it?

There was one last item on the list from the archive, and this one took me by surprise, so that I lingered over it for a few minutes. ―Bibliography, Order of the Dragon (partial scroll form).‖ What surprised me about this jotting and made me hesitate over it was the fact that it was so uninformative. Usually Rossi‘s notes were thorough, self-explanatory; that, he liked to say, was the point of note taking. Was this bibliography he mentioned so hurriedly a list the library had put together to record all the material they housed that pertained to the Order of the Dragon? If so, why would it be in ―partial scroll form‖? It must be something ancient itself, I thought—perhaps one of the library‘s holdings from the time of the Order of the Dragon. But why had Rossi not explained further, on this otherwise mute sheet of notebook paper? Had the bibliography, whatever it was, proven irrelevant to his search?

These musings over a far-away archive, which Rossi had looked through so long ago, hardly seemed a direct path to his disappearance, and I dropped the page in disgust, tired suddenly of the trivia of research. I craved answers. With the exception of whatever lay in the scrolls of accounts, in the ledgers, and in that old bibliography, Rossi had been surprisingly thorough in sharing with me his discoveries. But that was like him, that conciseness; besides, he‘d had the luxury, if it could be called that, of explaining himself in many pages of letters. And yet I knew little, except what I must probably attempt to do next. The envelope was completely, depressingly empty now, and I hadn‘t learned much more from the last documents it had contained than I‘d learned from his letters. I realized also that I must act as fast as possible. I had often stayed up all night before, and in the next hour I might be able to assemble for myself what Rossi had told me about the previous threats on his life, as he saw them.

I stood, my joints creaking, and went to my dismal little kitchen to boil some bouillon for soup. As I reached for a clean pot, I realized that my cat had not come in for his supper, a meal I shared with him. He was a stray, and I suspected that our arrangement was not wholly monogamous. But around supper time he was usually there at my narrow kitchen window, peering in from the fire escape to let me know he wanted his can of tuna or, when I‘d splurged on him, his dish of sardines. I had come to love the moment when he jumped down into my lifeless apartment, stretching and crying in an extravagance of affection. He often stayed a while after eating, sleeping on the end of the sofa or watching me iron my shirts. Sometimes I thought I saw an expression of tenderness in his perfectly round yellow eyes, although it might also have been pity. He was powerful and sinewy, with a soft black-and-white coat. I called him Rembrandt. Thinking of him, I lifted the edge of the blind, pushed up the window, and called him, waiting for the thud of feline feet on the windowsill. I could hear only distant night traffic from the center of the city. I lowered my head and looked out.