F. Paul Wilson - The Keep

"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.

But the innkeeper was no Jew.

It really didn't matter. Jew, Freemason, Gypsy, Romanian innkeeper, what really mattered to Kaempffer was the victim's sense of complacency, of self-confidence, of security; the victim's feeling that he had a place in the world and that he was safe—that was what Kaempffer felt he had to smash. They had to learn that there was no safe place when he was around.

He let the innkeeper shiver and blink under the naked bulb for as long as his own patience would allow. Iuliu had been brought to the spot where the two einsatzkommandos had been killed. Anything that had even remotely resembled a ledger or a record book had been taken from the inn and dropped in a pile behind him. His eyes roamed from the bloodstains on the floor, to the bloody scrawl on the rear wall, to the implacable faces of the four soldiers who had dragged him from his bed, then back to the bloodstains on the floor. Kaempffer found it difficult to look at those stains. He kept remembering the two gashed throats that had supplied the blood, and the two dead men who had stood over his bed.

When Major Kaempffer began to feel his own fingers tingle with cold despite his black leather gloves, he stepped out into the light of the corridor and faced Iuliu. At the sight of an SS officer in full uniform, Iuliu took a step backward and almost tripped over his ledgers.

"Who owns the keep?" Kaempffer asked in a low voice without preamble.

"I do not know, Herr Officer."

The man's German was atrocious, but it was better than working through an interpreter. He slapped Iuliu across the face with the back of his gloved hand. He felt no malice; this was standard procedure.

"Who owns the keep?"

"I don't know!"

He slapped him again. "Who?"

The innkeeper spat blood and began to weep. Good—he was breaking.

"I don't know!" Iuliu cried.

"Who gives you the money to pay the caretakers?"

"A messenger."

"From whom?"

"I don't know. He never says. From a bank, I think. He comes twice a year."

"You must have to sign a receipt or cash a check. Whom is it from?"

"I sign a letter. At the top it says The Mediterranean Bank of Switzerland. In Zurich."

"How does the money come?"

"In gold. In twenty-lei gold pieces. I pay Alexandru and he pays his sons. It has always been this way."

Kaempffer watched Iuliu wipe his eyes and compose himself. He had the next link in the chain. He would have the SS central office investigate the Mediterranean Bank in Zurich to learn who was sending gold coins to an innkeeper in the Transylvanian Alps. And from there back to the owner of the account, and from there back to the owner of the keep.

And then what?

He didn't know, but this seemed to be the only way to proceed at the moment. He turned and stared at the words scrawled on the wall behind him. The blood—Flick's and Waltz's blood—with which the words had been written had dried to a reddish brown. Many of the letters were either crudely formed or were not like any letters he had ever seen. Others were recognizable. As a whole, they were incomprehensible. Yet they had to mean something.

He gestured to the words. "What does that say?"