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  “Major Harvey and I, we’re attached to the Office of the Coordinator of Information in Washington, DC. About three weeks ago we received some information from a resistance agent in Belgium. He confirmed something that our intelligence agents have been suspecting since the early days of the war in Europe.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  Major Harvey cleared his throat with a single sharp bark. “Mr. Falcon—what Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover is about to tell you now is absolutely top secret. That means you are prohibited from divulging any of this information to anybody. Your father, your mother, your best friend, even your family cat. If we discover that you have been giving anybody else even the faintest hint of what we are going to discuss with you, you may discover that your life is forfeit.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll be shot,” said Major Harvey.

  I stared at him in disbelief. “I’ll be shot? Are you serious? In that case, excuse me, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You have to hear it, James,” said Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover, firmly. Then, in a quieter tone, “You have to. You’re the only person we’ve been able to find who seems to have a comprehensive knowledge of the particular problem we’re faced with. The only person of an appropriate age, anyhow.”

  “I don’t understand. I don’t know anything about any military stuff.”

  “I know that. But you know all about these.” With that, Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover reached inside his coat and produced a sharply folded sheaf of papers.

  I didn’t have to open them to recognize what they were. They were tear sheets of my paper “The Strigoi: myth versus reality in popular Romanian folk-culture.” I had written it for my anthropology exam in the summer, and Professor Ewan had been so impressed with it that he had submitted it to the North American Journal of Ethnography. Admittedly, the Journal’s circulation was only a little over 2,500 copies, so it wasn’t exactly like being published in Life magazine, but it was first article I had ever gotten into print, and I was seriously proud of it. I even had some cards printed, James R. Falcon Jr., Author and Anthropologist, and handed them out to all of my friends, until my father told me to stop acting so swell-headed.

  “The strigoi?” I said, cautiously. I was strongly beginning to suspect this was a practical joke, set up by some of my friends at Berkeley. “What do the strigoi have to do with the war in Europe?”

  “More than you’d think. In August of 1940, under the terms of the Vienna Diktat, Germany forced Romania to give up the territory of Northern Transylvania to Hungary, which Hungary had been claiming for centuries was theirs.”

  “Well, sure, I know that.”

  “What you may not know is that the Romanians would have had to surrender Southern Transylvania, too, but they made some kind of offer to the Germans, which the Germans accepted, and allowed them to keep it.”

  Major Harvey said, “We’ve been trying for three years to find out exactly what this offer was. It was codenamed Umarmung, which didn’t mean anything to us, at the beginning.”

  “Umarmung,” I repeated. “Embrace.”

  “That’s right. And how many times does the word ‘Embrace’ appear in your article, James? Forty-seven, to be exact. And according to what you’ve written here, the Embrace is the way in which the strigoi initiate humans into becoming one of them.”

  I shrugged. “Could be a coincidence. I mean, ‘embrace,’ that’s a pretty common word, wouldn’t you say? You can embrace all kinds of things, you know—like a religion, or a philosophy. Or your next-door-neighbor’s wife.”

  “True. And the Romanians embraced Nazism. They still chose to fight on the German side, even though the Germans made them surrender all of that territory. But after we received this report from Belgium, we’re pretty sure now that ‘Embrace’ means something very specific. We think it’s the kind of embrace that you were writing about.”

  I kept a straight face for about ten seconds longer, and then I burst out laughing. “God, you guys are good! You even sound like you know what you’re talking about! Who set this up? I’ll bet it was Stradlater, wasn’t it? Tell me it was Stradlater!”

  “James—” said Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover, but I interrupted him.

  “ ‘How many times does the word “Embrace” appear in your article, James?’ ” I mimicked him. “ ‘Forty-seven, to be exact.’ You’re excellent! Look at you standing there, like you both have pool cues stuck up your asses!”

  Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover waited until I had finished. Then, as if I hadn’t said anything at all, he continued.

  “Since February last year, James, we’ve been receiving reports of some very unusual killings. They started in Romania. More than sixty members of the Red Knights resistance group were murdered, all within the space of a week. That immediately deprived us of vital intelligence and it drastically reduced our ability to sabotage the Nazi war effort from within.”

  I looked at him with my eyes narrowed. “Come on, now. This is a joke, isn’t it?”

  “Not for the victims. And not for the Allies, if this continues.”

  “Come on, admit it. If it wasn’t Stradlater, who was it? Not Dungan! Dungan wouldn’t have the brains!”

  “James,” said Major Harvey. “It wasn’t any of your friends and it isn’t a joke.”

  “All right,” I said, although I still believed that they were bullshitting me. “What does any of this have to do with me?”

  “Since the Red Knights were all murdered, we’ve been receiving more and more intelligence which suggests that the Nazis have been infiltrating local resistance groups and literally wiping them out. It happened all across the Eastern Front, especially after they took Bessarabia and Bukovina back from the Russians. Now it’s happening in Holland and Belgium and France.

  “The reason why this has everything to do with you is that all of the victims had their chests cut open, their main arteries severed and the blood drained out of their bodies.”

  Dinner with the Falcons

  That evening, my mother made bors cu perisoare, sour meatball soup, which was one of the specialities of her village in northeastern Romania. We sat and ate it in the kitchen, with the windows open, so that the last of the sun shone across the table.

  My mother Maricica was beautiful in a dark-haired, white-skinned way, like a Madonna in a church painting. She did everything gently and gracefully. She could even peel apples gracefully, their skins unwinding in spirals. She always spoke softly, too, although the quietness of her voice belied a very strong character.

  Dad was fuming. He didn’t like secrets and he didn’t like anything to do with authority. His father had been a biochemist and a violin player and had knitted his own sweaters, mostly green with orange zigzags. He had brought Dad up to believe that a man was answerable only to his own intellect, and God, in that order.

  “You can’t even give us a hint what they want you to do? Your own family?”

  I shook my head. “They said if I told anybody—even you—they’d shoot me.”

  “Oh my God,” said my mother. “They threatened you? They come here, uninvited, into my house, and threaten to shoot you, my son, in my yard?”

  “Hey, it’s my house, too,” my father protested. “And my son. And my yard, come to that.”

  “We should complain to the army,” said my mother.

  “They said I have to go to Washington next week,” I told her. “They’re going to pay my fare and everything.”

  “They can’t coerce you,” said my father. “Is this why we pay taxes? Tell them you don’t want to go to Washington.”

  I spooned a meatball out of my soup. “But I do want to go to Washington. I think this is going to be really, really interesting.”

  “I see. It’s so interesting you can’t tell us what it is?”

  “Dad—not only will they shoot me, they’ll probably shoot you, too.”

  “Pah!” said my father, pushing his chair back in disgust, the same way he did when I beat him at c
hess.

  But my mother was staring at me across the table and there was a look in her eyes which told me that she had guessed why the army had come looking for me. After all, what was the one thing that made me different from all of the rest of my college friends? I had a Romanian mother, who had told me all kinds of scary Romanian folk tales when I was little. None of my friends had been brought up on stories of strigoi and strigoaica, the creatures of the night, and none of my friends had researched Romanian legends as thoroughly as I had, and published a paper on them.

  I have to admit that I decided to write a paper on strigoi out of perversity, almost as a joke. Everybody in my class thought that I was a clown, including my professors, and I guess I decided to live up to their expectations. It’s difficult to grow up normal when your father expects you to recite Edward Arlington Robinson to amuse his lunch guests when you’re only four years old, and your mother sings you Romanian lullabies about what will happen to you if you betray love. “If you betray love, you will squirm like a snake, walk like a beetle, and you will own nothing but the dust of the land.”

  The Strigoi

  Even though she told me so many stories about them, my mother never gave me the impression that she actually believed in the strigoi—and she was brought up in Tanacu, where they still cross themselves if a crow flies down their chimney, or a black dog urinates against their gatepost. As recently as the summer of 2005, a priest from the Holy Trinity monastery in Tanacu strangled and crucified a nun because he thought she was possessed by demons.

  To begin with, I didn’t believe in the strigoi, either—but like I say, I thought it would be a terrific wheeze to write a paper that discussed them as if they were real. Only two or three weeks after I had started work on it, however, I began to come across credible documentary evidence that the strigoi might be more than imaginary—letters, newspaper reports, even some blurry old photographs. I couldn’t help asking myself: what if they did exist? Even more intriguing: what if they still do?

  I studied the strigoi for nearly two years. I made scores of phone calls and talked in person to more than two hundred Romanian immigrants of all ages. I searched through private libraries and smelly old collections of rare books. Without realizing it, day by day, I was becoming one of the world’s greatest experts on strigoi.

  One of the elderly Romanian immigrants I interviewed for my college paper talked to me about his cousin, who became a strigoi mort. “He was the handsomest man you ever met. Tall, witty and irresistible to women. But he could be very melancholy, too. Once when he came to visit us I saw him standing by the window and there were tears in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘Look.’ He reached out his hand and it passed straight through the glass of the window pane without breaking it. I could actually see his hand outside the window, still with his gold wedding band on it. Then he drew his hand back in again, and the glass was completely intact. I felt a chill like nothing I had ever felt before. He said, ‘I am dead, Daniel, and I can never go home again, ever.’ ”

  It was this man who first drew me a picture of the wheel which the strigoi mortii wear around their necks—a diagonal cross to symbolize a kiss, with a circle around it to represent endlessness. Usually, the strigoi mortii fashion the wheels themselves. They use gold from any rings they wore when they were still human, with copper to enhance its electrical conductivity. The wheel is much more than symbolic: it gives the strigoi mortii exceptional night vision, and it contains the protective power of absolute evil. Several respected academics suggest that J. R. R. Tolkien was inspired by the wheel when he wrote The Lord of the Rings, and that the physical and spiritual degeneration of Gollum is a close parallel to what happens to people when they become infected by strigoi. You’ll remember that Gollum’s eyes lit up, so that he could see better in the dark, just like the strigoi mortii when they wear the wheel.

  By the time I had finished writing my paper, I still hadn’t conclusively proved that the strigoi did exist (like, I had never knowingly met one) but I had a wealth of anecdotal evidence that they might. I ended up my paper by saying “on balance, it appears highly likely that the strigoi did once haunt the remoter regions of Transylvania and Wallachia, and a few may do so even today.”

  And I was right. Which was why Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover and Major Harvey came knocking at my door to tell me that the joke was on me.

  My Training

  I flew to Washington, DC, on August 11th, 1943. It was the first time I had ever flown, and I saw mountains with scatterings of snow on them and fields of wheat that seemed to stretch forever, with cloud shadows moving over them slow and lazy, as if whales were swimming through the sky. Somewhere I still have the blue American Airways timetable with “Buy More War Bonds!” printed on the front.

  I was met at Washington National Airport by a skeletally thin man in a flappy gray double-breasted suit and tiny dark glasses. He raised his hat to me and asked me to call him Mr. Corogeanu. He drove me to a large ivy-covered house on the outskirts of Rockville and it was there, during the next three months, that I was given my basic training in strigoi hunting.

  Since I already knew a whole lot more about the strigoi than almost anybody else, what they were really giving me was military training. I was taught to fire a gun, and to read a map, and to climb over a ten-foot wall. I was also introduced to a laconic animal-trainer with no front teeth who had been specially recruited from Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. He gave me daily instruction in wielding a bullwhip, which is a darn sight more difficult than it looks. I spent whole afternoons lashing my own calves until they looked like corned beef.

  Meantime, the strigoi-hunting Kit was gradually being assembled, mostly according to the details I had provided in my college paper, although it was Mr. Corogeanu who suggested the black and white paint. According to him, strigoi are repelled by the sight of a dog with an extra pair of eyes painted above its real eyes.

  It was during my training sessions that we started calling the strigoi “Screechers.” The word strigoi comes from the Romanian word striga meaning “witch,” and this in turn comes from the Latin cognate strega, which has its origins in strix, the word for a screech owl. Besides that, my side-arms instructor always used to say, “If you want to immobilize those creatures, you have to hit ’em dead center,” and the way he slurred his words always made it sound like “tho’ Screechers.”

  I wish I knew where they acquired the nails from the crucifixion. I asked Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover several times but he always refused to tell me. All he said was, “It was a case of you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” I always wondered if this meant that—in return for these priceless relics—the United States had agreed to support the creation of an independent State of Israel, but maybe I was reading too much into it.

  Six weeks before D-Day, I was introduced to Corporal Little and Frank, so that Frank could get used to my smell and Corporal Little could be briefed on what he was supposed to be doing. Three weeks before D-Day, we were embarked from New York on the USS New Hampshire to sail to England. We were taken over to Normandy a week after the first landings on Omaha Beach. We were all seasick, even Frank. The rest I’ve already told you.

  Except that it didn’t end there. Nothing ends, when you get yourself involved with the strigoi. The strigoi are immortal, and their sense of grievance is immortal. That’s why, when two US Army officers drew up outside my house in New Milford, Connecticut, in July 1957, I almost felt a sense of relief, because I had always known in my heart of hearts that this was coming.

  New Milford, 1957

  My wife Louise answered the door. The two officers stood on the veranda with their caps tucked under their arms, just as Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover and Major Harvey had done fourteen years before. It was a hot, bright day, and they were both in shirtsleeves.

  “Captain Falcon?”

  I came out of my study and put my arm around Louise’s shoulders. “Help you?” I asked them. I didn’t like the sound of
“Captain.”

  “Like to have a few words with you, Captain, if that’s OK.”

  “Sure. What’s it about?”

  “Maybe we could come inside?”

  I invited them into the living room. The dark oak floor was highly polished and the sun was shining on it, so that when they sat on the couch opposite me it was difficult for me to make out their faces. They were both young, though. One was sandy-haired and the other was wearing black-rimmed eyeglasses like Clark Kent.

  “We’re from counterintelligence at Fort Holabird, sir. We need to speak to you in confidence.”

  I turned to Louise and said, “How about some coffee, honey?”

  “OK,” she agreed, although she wasn’t especially happy about it. Louise was very petite, with bouncy brunette hair and an Audrey Hepburn look about her, but she had her own opinions about almost everything, which were usually the exact opposite of mine, and she never allowed me to treat her as if she were a “little woman.”

  She went into the kitchen and started a percussion solo for spoons and cups and coffee percolator. The officer in the black-rimmed eyeglasses leaned forward and said, sotto voce, “We’ve had a communication from British intelligence, Captain—MI6. It concerns a series of incidents in the suburbs south of London, England.”

  “Incidents? What kind of incidents?”

  The sandy-haired officer said, “Homicides. Well, I say they’re homicides, but they’re practically massacres, to be honest with you. Thirteen people killed at a business conference; six children killed at an orphanage; nine women killed at a social club. Altogether, seventy-three people dead in the space of five weeks.”

  I slowly sat back. I didn’t say anything. I had already guessed what was coming.

  “MI6 have kept all of these killings out of the news. They’ve been telling relatives that there’s some kind of bug going around—Korean Flu, something like that. In fact they’re actually calling their investigation ‘Operation Korean Flu.’ ”