Descendant Page 8

  “Estate agents. It was a total fluke that we found out who might have killed them.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “One of our senior chaps just happened to be round at Scotland Yard for some security powwow when the news about the murders first came in. Look at that bloody cyclist! He must have a death wish!” He leaned out of the window and shouted, “Nutcase!”

  “Go on,” I told him.

  “Oh, yes. As luck would have it, our chap used to liaise with US counterintelligence during the war, and he remembered that your people always wanted to be urgently notified of any mass killings, especially if the victims had their hearts cut out, or the blood drained out of them. At the time, your people never actually told him why they wanted to be notified, or what it was all about, and our chap still had no idea what it was all about, but he thought, ‘Hallo! Mass killing—people with all the blood drained out of them,’ and he got on to your people anyway. Your people came back to us in less than twenty-four hours, and they came round to HQ and gave us the full SP. I must say I find it really fascinating, in a grisly sort of way. But it isn’t exactly easy to believe, is it? You know—vampires.” He bared his teeth and gave a bad imitation of a Bela Lugosi “ho-ho-ho!”

  “Let me tell you, Terence,” I said, “you need to believe.” I probably sounded too serious and pontificating, but I was very tired. “If you think that Russian spies are dangerous, you don’t know what dangerous is. The strigoi are the most vicious creatures you are ever going to meet in your entire life.”

  We drove around Hyde Park Corner, with its massive stone arch and its triumphant statue of Winged Victory. Then we made our way down the Mall and past Buckingham Palace. A troop of Horse Guards jingled their way down the center of the road, their helmets sparkling in the sunlight. The last time I had been in London it had been grim and gray and badly bombed, but this was like driving through a brightly colored picture-postcard.

  After another fifteen minutes of sitting in traffic around Trafalgar Square and up Ludgate Hill, we arrived at MI6 headquarters in the City. It was a large ugly office building with a soot-streaked facade and plastic Venetian blinds in a nasty shade of olive green. Terence parked his Humber around the back, and led the way in.

  “You’re fully cleared, right up to level one,” said Terence, clipping an identity tag on to my shirt pocket. I peered down at it. I don’t know where my photograph had come from, but my eyes were half-closed and I looked as if my mouth was stuffed with cheeseburger.

  The building was very warm and stuffy and smelled of floor-polish. Three or four plain-looking women passed us in the corridor and they all said “Hillo!” with that funny little English yelp.

  We went up to the top floor. Terence said, “It’s supposed to stay warm until Sunday, but I can’t see it myself. You know what they say about the English summer—three hot days followed by a thunderstorm.”

  He knocked at the walnut-paneled door marked Director of Operations (SIS), and we walked into a large office with a panoramic view of the City and the River Thames. I could see Tower Bridge, and London Bridge, and the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Everything was hazy with summer heat, so that it looked like an impressionist painting, except for the constant sparkling of traffic.

  As we entered, a tall, heavily built man in a gray suit rose up from behind an enormous desk, like a whale coming up for air. He had a large elaborately chiseled nose and deep-set eyes, and short shiny chestnut-colored hair, which I could imagine him polishing every morning with a matching pair of brushes.

  “Aha! You’re the, ah, Screecher fellow,” he said. He spoke in a hesitant drawl, with the sides of his mouth turned down as if he found the whole business of talking to be rather a damn bore. He reached across his desk and gave me a crushing handshake. “Charles Frith. So gratified that you could get here so promptly. Good flight?”

  “Great, thanks. I never flew over the Pole before.”

  “Really?” he said, as if I had admitted that I had never ridden to hounds. “This is all turning out to be very unpleasant indeed, so we’re ah. Glad of any help that you can give us.”

  “How many have been killed altogether?”

  Charles Frith blinked at me. “Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea? I usually have one around now. Or coffee? I think we can run to some instant.”

  “Tea’s fine.” During the war, the British seemed to spend more time brewing up tea than they did fighting the Germans. It was usually strong and astringent and tooth-achingly sweet, but I had developed a taste for it myself.

  “Ninety-seven fatalities so far,” said Terence. “That’s including yesterday’s figure.”

  “Any eyewitness statements?”

  “One or two people have said that they heard things. At the Selsdon Park Hotel, there were several reports of screaming in the middle of the night. But the screaming didn’t last very long, apparently, and the witnesses thought it was somebody throwing a party. Well, I mean, it could have been, for all we know.”

  Charles Frith said, “I talked to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner yesterday evening, and unfortunately he can give us very little to go on. The police found footprints made by some very narrow shoes, but no identifiable fingerprints, and no fibers to speak of. In several cases there was no obvious means of entry and ah. The premises were secured from the inside, making access virtually impossible. To a human assailant, in any case.”

  We all sat down around Charles Frith’s desk. All he had in front of him was a leather blotter, three telephones—one black, one green and one red—and a framed photograph of a grinning blonde woman with a gap between her front teeth.

  “I expect CIC told you that the strigoi are capable of entering a room through the thinnest of apertures,” I told him. “They rarely leave much in the way of finger-prints or footprints, but they do leave a very distinctive smell, which is why we use dogs to hunt them down.”

  “We’ve arranged for a tracker dog. And ah. Somebody to handle him.”

  “OK, that’s excellent. The sooner I meet him the better.”

  “Her, as matter of fact,” Terence corrected me.

  The Full SP

  We sat in Charles Frith’s for the next three and a half hours, so that we could study all of the case files together—all the forensic evidence, all of the photographs, all of the witness statements. I wanted to see maps and reconstructions and transcripts of coroners’ court proceedings.

  I insisted that we go right back to the very beginning, from the moment that a Thames dredger called the Mary Ellen had struck the propeller of that buried DC3. I didn’t tell Charles Frith or Terence that I knew who had died in it. I was afraid that I might catch myself unawares, and fill up with tears.

  The wreckage had been discovered on April 11th. It had been raised out of the mud on May 15th by a combined team from the Air Ministry and the British Aeronautical Archeological Committee. It had been taken on a flatbed truck to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farn-borough for cleaning, research and possible restoration.

  Because of the total secrecy that had surrounded Operation Paperclip, the disappearance of this plane and its cargo had never been officially reported. After the war it had mostly been forgotten, since the counterintelligence agents involved had gone back to civilian life, or retired, or died. Even when the plane’s excavation was widely shown on television, radio and newsreels—even a two-page spread in Life magazine—nobody in the CIC put two and two together and realized which plane it was, and what it had been carrying. That only happened when the pilots and their marine escort were formally identified—and by that time it was too late.

  For me, the most poignant paragraphs came from HM Coroner Sir Philip Platt-Dickinson, at Southend-on-Sea. “The remains of five adult individuals were discovered in the wreckage. There was no soft tissue remaining, only bones, but judging from the positions in which they were found, all of them were instantly killed when the airplane struck the water at a speed that must have been well in excess o
f 200 mph, and was almost completely buried in the estuary mud.

  “The pilot and his copilot were identified by their dog tags as officers in the United States Army Air Forces. The remains of two further individuals, both male, were identified as officers in the United States Marine Corps. The remains of the fifth individual, who was female, carried nothing at all that allowed me to make a positive identification, although the recovery team found a gold wedding ring and a rectangular gold wristwatch from Shreve and Company, which I am given to understand is a respected jewelry shop in San Francisco, California. Her dress and shoes were also of American origin.

  “Animal remains were found close to the female individual and these were identified as being those of a bloodhound, probably six or seven years old.

  “The American Embassy in London was notified of the exhumation of these individuals and their remains were duly removed for repatriation to the United States, where they could be formally identified, and given appropriate funeral rites.”

  I sat in that MI6 office in London and in my mind’s eye I could see that rectangular gold wristwatch. I could even remember the day that my father had given it to my mother—their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in April 1941. We had drunk sweet white wine in the yard while cherry blossoms blew all around us like snow and my mother had sung Romanian doina.

  “Who made doina?

  The small mouth of a baby

  Left asleep by his mother

  Who found him singing the doina.”

  The casket had been examined by an Air Ministry crash-investigation team led by Professor Roger Braithwaite, who was renowned worldwide for his expertise on unusual air accidents. Apparently it had been secured to the floor of the DC3 with webbing straps, but these had snapped on impact when the aircraft crashed. The casket had slid forward, smashing into the copilot’s seat and breaking his back.

  Terence passed me a selection of black-and-white photographs. These showed the casket from four different angles, resting on a trestle in a large empty hangar, with several bespectacled men in laboratory coats standing around it. It appeared to be fashioned out of a thick lead alloy, beaten and welded by hand. It measured approximately nine feet long, three feet wide and two feet six inches deep. It weighed over 750 pounds.

  When it was lifted out of the aircraft, the casket was tightly fastened with two lengths of braided silver wire, which formed a cross over the lid. At 6:45 on the evening of May 17th, Professor Braithwaite jotted in his notebook that he had decided to cut this wire and take the lid off the casket to see what was inside.

  The next morning, May 18th, when RAE technicians opened up the hangar, they noticed that the casket appeared to be intact, but the silver wire had been neatly cut and was lying on the floor. There was no sign of Professor Braithwaite or his two assistants.

  By 6:00 PM that day, Professor Braithwaite and his assistants had still failed to put in an appearance, and none of them were answering their home phone numbers. The security services were immediately notified, and a major search initiated. Watches were kept on all British ports and airports, and roadblocks set up in Hampshire and Surrey. Several houses were searched, including Professor Braithwaite’s holiday cottage in the Lake District.

  Some days later, when the press made polite inquiries about Professor Braithwaite’s whereabouts, they were told that he had flown to the United States to undertake several weeks of “background research.” It’s hard to remember how trusting the press used to be in those days.

  To date, though, neither Professor Braithwaite nor his assistants had been sighted anywhere, dead or alive, and there was no evidence to explain what might have happened to them.

  Except, of course, the empty casket. The lid of the casket was still in place on the morning of May 18th, but investigators were able to lift it open without difficulty. Inside they found it to be lined with whitethorn wood, and thickly bedded with dried garlic flowers and wild roses. On one side lay an empty sack made of thin brown linen, like a torn-open shroud. There was a deep impression in the petals, as if somebody had been lying there, motionless, for a very long time.

  “Didn’t anybody suspect what had happened, even then?” I asked Charles Frith. “Didn’t anybody think to ask what kind of creature could have been lying in a sealed casket for nearly thirteen years, without air, or food, or water?”

  “Afraid not, old man. Security services are never very good at communicating with each other, at the best of times.”

  “Somebody could have used their imagination.”

  “Imagination?” Charles Frith blinked at me as if I had used a four-letter word. “Not a requirement for MI6, I’m sorry to say.”

  The police reports on all of the recent killings were depressingly similar, and all of the photographs, too. Heaps of bodies with their clothes torn open, their abdomens sliced apart and their hearts pulled out from underneath their rib cages. Men, women and children—even toddlers, in little white socks. In the background, cheap floral wallpaper, decorated with loops and spatters of blood. Nobody had ever seen anybody entering the crime scenes. Nobody had ever seen anybody leave.

  “We’re um—we’re quite certain that this is the work of—you know—strigoi?”

  “No doubt about it. One strigoi mort and at least two strigoi vii, and they’re going to multiply fast.”

  “More tea?”

  “No thanks. I think I’ll go to my hotel, if that’s all right with you, and take a shower. I need to call my wife, too. Then I want to go to this house in Croydon and take a look at this birthday party. Terence, do you think you can arrange for our dog handler to meet us there? Say about three-thirty?”

  “I don’t anticipate any problem with that, ‘Jim.’ I’ll give her a tinkle.”

  I stood up and Charles Frith stood up, too. “Tremendously pleased to have you on board, Captain Falcon.”

  “Well, me too, sir. I have a very personal interest in catching this particular Screecher.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a long story, sir. I’ll report back to you later.”

  “Ears. Good. Oh—but there’s one more thing. You’ve been issued with a side arm. Colt .45 automatic, I gather. It’s all been approved but I have to ask you to be very discreet with it. This is England, you know, not the Wild West.”

  “Of course,” I told him.

  “Ears,” he repeated.

  On the way back along the corridor, I said to Terence, “He kept saying ‘ears.’ What did he mean by that?”

  “Oh . . . that’s English upper-class for ‘yes.’ ”

  House of Flies

  For my first night in England, the SIS had booked me a room at the Strand Palace Hotel. It was comfortable in a well-worn, shabby way, although the traffic was so noisy that I had to close my window, and the furniture reeked of cigarettes. I booked a transatlantic call to Louise, and tried to take a shower. The showerhead gurgled, and sneezed, and then dribbled. I took a shallow bath instead.

  I was lucky. It could take hours before a call to the States came through, but the operator rang me back after only twenty minutes. Louise answered, and although she sounded quite close, I kept hearing an echo, so that she said everything twice.

  “I’m going to the Marriotts’ this evening. They’re having a cookout they’re having a cookout.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Are you going to see your sister this weekend?”

  “I don’t know, it depends if Dick’s coming home if Dick’s coming home.”

  “Listen, I have to go, but I love you.”

  “Be careful, Jimmy, won’t you please won’t you please?”

  “I’ll be careful.” I hadn’t been allowed to tell her what I was doing here in England—only that it was connected with my work for the intelligence services during the war. But Louise wasn’t the kind of woman to be easily fooled. She had stood in the bedroom doorway watching me pack as intently as if she were making an 8mm home movie in her head—a home movie that she could play
back later, in her mind’s eye, if I never came back to her.

  I had known Louise since college. We had dated once or twice, and had a good time together, but Louise was always much more serious than I was. She liked string quartets and art galleries and live theater, while I preferred beer and swing music and W. C. Fields movies. Not that I wasn’t academic. You couldn’t help being academic, with a father like mine. But I wasn’t a sensitive academic. I didn’t carry a lily around, and I didn’t lisp.

  As it happened, though, Louise and I met up again in 1949, at a friend’s party in North Beach, and I invited her to Mill Valley for the day. We were both different people by then. She had been through a violent marriage and lost a baby. I had been chasing strigoi in Europe. We saw qualities in each other that we hadn’t been able to appreciate when we were younger. In Louise, I saw thoughtfulness, and a deep appreciation for the value of human life, but an unexpected willingness to have fun, too. I don’t exactly know what she saw in me, but I always tried to be kind to her, and protective, and I even pretended to like her cheese and macaroni.

  Terence called for me at 2:30 PM and we drove to Croydon. Terence was right, Croydon was “pretty grotty”—a densely overcrowded suburb with mile after mile of Victorian and Edwardian shops and pubs, interspersed with sorry-looking semidetached houses and filling stations and used-car lots. The sky was beginning to cloud over, although the heat was still unbearable. Terence was steadily perspiring in his coat and necktie, but he didn’t make any attempt to take them off.

  We reached an ugly red-brick pub called the Red Deer, where the main road divided. Terence took a right up a steep, narrow street lined with scabby-looking plane trees. We passed a huge Victorian church, faced with flint, and then pulled up outside a large three-story house. There were two men standing around outside the front gate, smoking. Terence said, “Couple of our chaps. Couldn’t have the constabulary here, somebody might ask awkward questions.”