The Origin of Dracula (12 page)

He stopped and stared at me intently for a few seconds, then concluded: “You don’t believe me, do ya?”

He may have been off his rocker, but he was reading me perfectly. I was thinking that he’d come up with this story
after
he’d heard what had happened in the parking lot, and that he’d added his own bizarre elements. I’d have to see if Detective Wyler or another officer had interviewed him on the night of the crime.

Lee hadn’t said a word up to this point, but now he passed judgment. “Let’s move on. You threw your money down a rat hole.”

If this vagrant was the reason Otranto had sent me to Lucy’s office, then I wasn’t picking up on the next breadcrumb yet. Oh, I got that he was connected to Dantès. If the lack of a reflection wasn’t enough to make that point, his story about a black-eyed man with white skin and the big, smart-looking dog on Maple Street—which I took to be a wolf—clinched it.

“You don’t believe me, ’cause you can’t see it,” the homeless man said to Lee.

“See what?” I said, not ready to give up.

“You’re stuck in the cave. That’s why you can’t see.”

Lee shook his head and smirked. “Enough already.”

“I’m stuck in a cave,” I said, “but what can’t I see?”

“Everything,” he said, and started to walk away.
Skrrritt. Skrrritt. Skrrritt.

My anger boiled up again. The homeless man—my lead—had gone from recounting a semi-coherent story to spewing crazy talk.

“Did Dantès tell you to say that?” I said, harshly.

Skrrr—
he stopped in mid-step. “Dantès?” he whispered, almost to himself, then glanced back at me. “Are you looking for Dantès’s Firegrill?”

Lee’s eyes went wide, surprised by this reversal of fortune.

“Yes. Yes I am,” I said.
Wasn’t I?
“Where is it?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What do you mean you don’t remember?”

He shook his head. “I don’t got too good a memory when it comes to the good times.”

“You had a good memory when it came to what happened in the parking lot.”

“Bad times got a way of sticking with me.”

I couldn’t argue with that—the same was true for me. “So what’s Dantès’s Firegrill?” I said.

“It’s where the good times roll.” He walked away again.
Skrrritt. Skrrritt. Skrrritt.

I was about to start after him when Lee said, “Let the good times roll—it’s some bar. It’s a place where he used to get drunk.”

I pulled out my cell phone, looked it up, and hit my first snag with this clue. There were pages of Google hits for Dante’s Firegrill, but not one of them was in Virginia. Granted, I hadn’t looked up the name with the spelling D-a-n-t-e-s-apostrophe-s, because I made the assumption that whichever bar used this name was playing off of the name “Dante” as in Dante’s
Inferno
, so that’s the way I spelled it.

Dante’s
Inferno
was a celebrated work of fiction, part of the trilogy known as
The Divine Comedy
. In it, the Roman poet Virgil guides Dante through hell. There was no doubt the bar owner had replaced “Inferno,” the fires of hell, with “Firegrill” and thought himself or herself clever.

As for me, I realized that this meant Dantès had changed the meaning of his pen name. Rather than referring to Dantès in
The Conte of Monte Cristo,
the master of revenge, he was now referring to Dante from Dante’s
Inferno
, as if he was now guiding me toward hell.

But since there were no Dante’s Firegrills in Virginia, I took a chance and tried searching with the spelling D-a-n-t-e-s-apostrophe-s. As I’d expected, I came up empty. Not one hit.

“What you got?” Lee said.

“Nothing in Virginia. Maybe we’re going to have to go down to North Carolina. There’s one there. Or maybe it’s not the clue.”

“We should check out your wife’s office. That’s why we’re here, right?”

“Dante’s Firegrill,” I said, wondering how it could not be a clue.

“He didn’t say Dante’s Firegrill,” Lee said. “He said
Dan T.’s
Firegrill.”

“Are you sure?”

“I wasn’t the smartest kid in the class, but I wasn’t the dumbest either. I know the difference between ‘Dante’ and ‘Dan T.’”

I typed
Dan T.’s Firegrill
into the Google search bar, and the first hit was a bar in Alexandria, less than twenty minutes away.

After I got onto Leesburg Pike, heading toward the GW Parkway, which would take us into the heart of Alexandria, I told Lee why I had jumped on this lead. Because of novel therapy. I explained that Dantès was plucking his breadcrumbs from fiction. From Dante’s
Inferno
, to
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, to
The Castle of Otranto
, to William Faulkner’s quote.

Lee listened more patiently than I would’ve expected, so I went on to tell him how novel therapy had started. How I’d lost my dad. How my dad had been rambling with me at the dinner table one night, and was gone the next, the dinner table silent, cold, and distant.

“I liked your dad,” Lee said. “I know that sounds stupid, since I met him only four or five times. But he seemed like a nice guy.”

“He was,” I said, but I didn’t as feel sorry for my sixteen-year-old self as I usually did. My childhood had been a blessing when compared to Lee’s. He’d had indifferent, selfish parents, and his dad had turned him into a home healthcare worker at the age of six.

I also told Lee what worried me about using novel therapy to uncover Dantès’s identity: “Garbage in, garbage out.”

“Yeah—but you’re going with the cards you’re dealt,” he said.

“Dealt by Dantès,” I countered.

“But that’s exactly the point of my uncle’s advice. The cards are coming from the enemy, and somewhere along the line, he’s gonna make a mistake. One of those clues is gonna have his fingerprints on it. It’s going to tell us more than he wanted it to.”

I supposed that was possible, but it seemed like a long shot, especially when Nate’s life was riding on it.

“Let’s say the Firegrill is the right move,” I said. “How did he pull it off? Did he pay the homeless guy to say that? To tell us that whole story?”

“I don’t know.”

But that wasn’t totally true. Lee knew more than he let on, enough to want to follow some of these breadcrumbs, no matter how outlandish they were. And maybe if he’d told me just a bit more—even though I still wouldn’t have believed him—I would’ve felt better about this lead. Instead, the closer we got to Alexandria, the more I felt we were off course. I stared at the lights of Rosslyn, and at Key Bridge, crowded with cars, each hauling scores of revelers into Georgetown’s nightlife, and I wondered if I should turn around and go back to Lucy’s office.

Out of nowhere, Lee said, “Was there something else that made you want to talk to the homeless guy? I mean, I get the
Something Wicked This Way Comes
part, but was that it?”

I weighed whether to tell him about the vagrant’s lack of a reflection. But this peculiar phenomenon seemed more in line with the madness of the vagrant’s story, not a part of the harsh reality of Dantès
’
s three murders. Lucy, Grace, and Quincy. It was insanity to bring it up.

But Lee did. “He didn’t have a reflection, right?” he said.

I glanced at him. “It must’ve been because he was standing too far away from the glass.”

“Yeah,” Lee said, not quite sarcastically, but his tone said,
If you want to believe that, go right ahead, but you’re lying to yourself.
He didn’t explain why he was so calm about meeting a man who didn’t cast a reflection, and I didn’t press him. If I had, he might’ve tried to get me to believe more than I was willing to. Instead he went on to another observation.

“The breadcrumbs are designed for you. Novel therapy—even though you hate it—is
your
deal.”

His insight would turn out to be perfectly timed. In a way, he had just predicted Dantès’s next move. Dantès was about to integrate Lee fully into his game.

Gliding along the GW parkway, I took in the Potomac, which ran wide and calm here, bordered by bike paths and monuments instead of rocky, muddy shores and cliffs. This didn’t look like the same river that had come back to haunt me.

Friday night wasn’t the best night to be headed into Old Town Alexandria, where Dan T.’s Firegrill was located. Old Town boasted an even more active nightlife than Georgetown, so its bars and restaurants were packed every weekend.

I’d never been one to partake in D.C.’s nightlife—not during high school, not during summers back from college, and not even during my post-college years. That didn’t change when I met Lucy. We were cut from the same cloth. Neither of us was big on Georgetown or Alexandria or any other popular nightspots. Our favorite outings consisted of dinner out at one of the small Vietnamese restaurants in Arlington, then a movie.

Our first date was dinner at The Four Sisters, a Vietnamese restaurant just off Wilson Boulevard. That had started our tradition of Vietnamese dinner and a movie. On that date, we’d been so intrigued by the exotic appetizers—from the quail dipped in lime sauce to the baby clams—that we’d ordered all eight appetizers on the menu as our dinner. Ironically, our last date—Nate was at a sleepover—had also been at The Four Sisters. But that time we ordered normal entrees, and it still depressed me that we didn’t go for the smorgasbord of appetizers. Who could’ve predicted that this date and the first date would be the bookends to our life together?

A wave of nausea hit me as I realized that this rhetorical question actually had an answer. Dantès could have predicted it.

I closed in on King Street, which went through the very center of Old Town, and traffic came to a standstill. Lee pulled out his cell phone and mapped out a new route to the Firegrill, one that skirted Alexandria’s main arteries.

We circled around a bevy of bars, restaurants, boutiques, and galleries, which together added up to the gentrified parts of historic Old Town, and ended up on a street lined with rundown brick townhouses. This was a neighborhood of glum facades and understated signage, a neighborhood that didn’t cater to the nightlife a few blocks away.

With one exception.

At the end of the block, a large red neon sign publicized Dan T.’s Firegrill. The sign ran along the top of a squat, two-story building, painted red.

We found parking a couple blocks away and walked back. The front of the building boasted a mural that conjured up hell—at least, it did for me. It was a straightforward but enormous painting of a barbecue pit. Huge red and orange flames lashed up from deep inside the pit. If the mural was supposed to advertise the Firegrill’s culinary treats, it did a bad job of it: the pit didn’t have a grill on top, nor any food barbecuing in the flames. Instead, it advertised the blazing flames themselves.

I wondered how many other Firegrill patrons saw those flames as the flames of hell. Of course, I had a reason to—I’d been descending closer to those flames ever since I’d received that letter. And even before then. Since Lucy’s death.

Inside, the bar was packed, loud, and oppressively hot. As you’d expect hell to be. And Lee and I were in the thick of it.

“So what now?” Lee said.

I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess I thought the breadcrumb would appear in the bar. And maybe it would, but it was still likely that we’d have to look for it.

“We talk to Dan T.,” I said. That seemed like a logical place to start.

“Okay.” Lee nodded toward the large bar in the back. “Let’s ask a bartender if Dan’s around.”

With that shaky plan in mind, we started inching our way through the crowd. Sweat immediately formed on my brow. I wiped it off and took a deep breath. It felt like I was stuck in an overheated swamp. I took a closer look at my surroundings, hoping this would ground me and keep me from racing outside.

Tall bar tables surrounded by patrons formed small islands in the otherwise free-floating crowd. Booths ran along the walls, providing more havens from the unmoored mass. Waitresses, in short black skirts and tight white blouses, swam through the crowd, delivering drinks and food.

The Firegrill’s patrons were surprisingly varied. There were hipsters, the men in skinny jeans and Buddy Holly glasses, the women in floral, vintage dresses and costume jewelry; young professionals, the men in suits, ties loosened, the women in sleek dresses, their hair down; faux cowboys in boots and bolos, and faux cowgirls in wide skirts; college kids in T-shirts and jeans; and old-timers, also in T-shirts and jeans.

As Lee and I moved closer to the bar, dishing out
excuse me’s
right and left to get through the throng, I wondered if the varied clientele was a clue in itself—a message that hell didn’t discriminate, that everyone was welcome.

Including and especially me.

We made it to the bar area, where every stool was taken and the hordes massed around the seated customers, ordering drinks, paying, and then retreating. Lee forced his way closer to the bar, cutting past people who shot us dirty looks and barked out
what the hells
. Lee didn’t care and continued to steamroll his way forward.

I held back, sure that his aggression would end in a confrontation. And I wasn’t the only one who was thinking that; a waitress came up behind me and asked, “Can I get you and your friend something to drink? He seems mighty thirsty.” A kind way of saying he was too pushy.

“Is Dan T. around tonight?” I asked.

“He’s around every night.” She motioned to the far end of the bar. “That’s him. Behind the bar.”

She’d singled out a dramatically handsome man with a square jaw that was covered in a three-day stubble. He was talking to a patron who was sitting at the bar finishing off a draft beer. From this vantage point, their conversation—in contrast to all the other conversations swirling around me, overly animated and bursting with exaggerated laughs—looked easygoing, two guys calmly shooting the shit as if they were sitting on a back porch far from the madding crowd.

I raised my voice. “I found him, Lee.”

Lee stopped his steamrolling, looked back at me, and the waitress gave out a little sigh of relief. “Good,” she said. “It’s too early for trouble. So what can I get you to drink?”