Descendant (4 page)

He finished his drink and stood up. “I have to go now. I hope I have assisted you. If you find the people who murdered her—”

“We will. But you won’t find out about it. Besides, what’s the point of telling an art-nouveau jewelry designer who died in 1901?”

He nearly managed to smile. “You know the name Paul Hankar?”

I nodded.

“I’m impressed. I didn’t know Americans had such culture.”

We left the hotel just as the pregnant-looking longcase clock in the lobby chimed eight. Frank was straining so hard on his leash that he sounded like a Cajun squeeze-box. It hadn’t rained hard, but a fine wet mist had descended over the city, and the cobbles were all slippery and shiny. I could hear heavy bombers somewhere in the distance, but they were very far away.
Drone, drone, drone
. Then that
crumpity-bump-crackle
sound of anti-aircraft fire.

Corporal Little said, “Thirty-six of them, sir . . . Jesus. Do you know how far this could have spread? Half the city could be Screechers by now.”

“I don’t want to think about it. Let’s just concentrate on picking up the scent from Markgravestraat.”

We jolted our way back to Ann De Wouters’s apartment building. Somebody had taken the dead horse away. We were flagged down three times on the way by Canadian troops who wanted to check our papers, so it took us almost twenty minutes before we arrived there. “US Counterintelligence?” they asked, half respectfully and half disdainfully. Some of them were so young that their cheeks were still pink.

We were admitted to No. 5 by an old man in a saggy beige cardigan with a face the color of liver sausage. Frank snapped furiously at the old man’s worn-out slippers so that he almost had to dance upstairs to get away from him.

“He won’t hurt you,” I reassured him. “I promise you, he’s a friend to everyone.”

“I don’t have any friends who try to bite my feet,” the old man retorted.

“It’s not your feet, sir, it’s your slippers. He thinks they’re dead rats.”

We allowed Frank to have a good snuffle around Ann De Wouters’s room. We said nothing while he crossed from one side of the linoleum to the other, thrusting his head underneath the bed and into the curtained-off space where Ann De Wouters had hung her clothes. He spent a long time licking the dried blood that was spattered over the floor. Bloodhounds don’t identify scents with their noses, but with their tongues. I was hoping that the Screechers had left plenty of traces of saliva for him to pick up on.

When he was finished, Frank sat up straight and made a whining sound in the back of his throat.

“You ready, Frank?” Corporal Little asked him.

“
Urf
,” said Frank.

We went back down the narrow staircase. There was a light shining under Vrouw Toeput’s door but I didn’t want to disturb her. The old man with the dead-rat slippers was nowhere to be seen. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, Frank ignored the front door and turned sharp right, heading toward the back of the building. He led us past an alcove crammed with mops and
brooms and strong-smelling bleaches, and up to a heavy oak door. I pulled back the bolts and unlocked it, and we stepped out into the fairy-fine mist.

“Told you,” I said. “Out the back of the building, and on to Kipdorp.”

Frank hurried through a low archway on the opposite side of the yard, where six or seven bicycles were propped up, and then he hurried into the street, his claws clattering softly on the cobbles.

He hesitated for only a moment, and then he turned right, toward Sant Jacobs Markt, and Kipdorpbrug. Every now and then he paused and looked around, to make sure that we were following him. I seriously believe that he thought we were like two stupid children, and it was his responsibility to take care of us.

Although the sidewalk was wet, the scent of Screechers must have been very strong, because Frank went straight along the north side of Kipdorp and there was none of his usual circling and sniffing and whuffling around.

“I think we’ve got these jokers, sir,” said Corporal Little, triumphantly.

But when we reached Kipdorpbrug, Frank galloped straight up to the sandstone wall of the Maritime Bank and stopped. He looked upward, and barked, and then he turned back to us, whining in frustration.

We looked upward, too. The bank building was seventeenth century, five stories high, with a flat Flemish-style facade. Apart from the window ledges, there wasn’t a single handhold between the sidewalk and the roof.

I looked at Corporal Little and Corporal Little looked at me. We were both deeply impressed, and frightened,
too. “They went straight up,” I said. “At least one of them, anyhow.”

We had known Screechers to run up twenty-foot walls, and jump from one sloping roof to another. We had seen one run across a ceiling. But we had never known one to climb up a sheer hundred-foot building.

Frank kept returning to the wall and jumping up and barking. “Good boy,” Corporal Little told him, pulling his ears. “Good boy, it’s not your fault you can’t climb walls.” It was difficult to know what to do next. We could have located the manager of the Maritime Bank and have him open up for us, so that we could follow the Screecher’s trail across the roof, but that could take us hours, and in any case the Screecher had probably climbed down the front of some other building and come back down to ground level.

“My guess is, this was a dead one,” I said.

Corporal Little nodded. “He must of left a real strong trail behind him, the way Frank’s getting himself so excited. And if he could shimmy straight up a wall like that . . .”

“It’s worth checking, though. Maybe he only climbed up part of the way, and then jumped back down again.”

I hunkered down and opened up the Kit. I took out the compass and opened up its silver filigree lid. The needle immediately swung around and pointed to the front of the bank building. When I held it up vertically, it pointed directly upward. There was no question about it. Our Screecher had gone all the way up to the roof, with no deviation.

“Like a rat up a drainpipe,” said Corporal Little, and
Frank let out another expectant bark. I swear that dog would have talked if he’d had the larynx for it.

As I was fitting the compass back into the Kit, however, the needle started to creep back the other way, in the direction of Kipdorpbrug. It wasn’t an urgent swing, but the needle was trembling a little, the way it always did when Screechers weren’t too far away.

“Look at this,” I told Corporal Little, shining my flashlight on it. “I don’t think all three of them went up the wall. Maybe only one of them. I’m definitely picking up another trail in this direction.”

Corporal Little took hold of Frank’s collar and tugged him away from the bank. “Hear that, boy? More Screechers! Go get ’em, boy!”

Frank was much less certain about this secondary trail, and he kept stopping and snorting and going back on himself. Now and then he got distracted and started to investigate a lamppost, and Corporal Little had to drag him away.

I kept the compass in my hand, and even though the needle was just as hesitant as Frank, and kept swinging from side to side, there was no question that it was pointing in the general direction of Centraal Station, and the Antwerpse Zoo.

“Maybe they thought they could get away by train,” Corporal Little suggested.

I shook my head. “There’s no civilian trains running. And even if they managed to ride a military train, where would they go? Mechelen? Brussels? There’d be a very strong risk of them being caught, if they tried to go south.”

All of a sudden, as he snuffled his way across the wide cobbled expanse of Koning Astridplein, Frank must have picked up a much more definite scent, because he started to run ahead of us with a curious lope, his head down and his ears swinging. By the time he had reached the
steps of the Centraal Station, he was galloping so fast that Corporal Little and I could hardly keep up with him.

The Centraal Station was an extraordinary building, like a richly decorated Renaissance palace, with a high glass dome which covered the platforms, and six elaborate spires. The square in front of it was jam-packed with Canadian and British trucks, as trainloads of troops were unloaded from Brussels. I can remember that night as if it were a dream: trying to follow Frank through all of those jostling soldiers and diesel-smelling trucks, all the lights and the shouting and the revving of engines. Some of the soldiers whistled at Frank and clapped their hands and called out, “Here, boy!” but Frank was man-trailing and he wasn’t going to be diverted by anything, not even lonely young Canadian soldiers who were missing their dogs from home.

He didn’t run into the station. Instead, he skirted around it, and headed toward the entrance to the Antwerpse Zoo. We left the noise of the Centraal Station behind us, and followed Frank to the Zoo’s main entrance. It was much quieter here, although I could still hear the distant grumbling of artillery fire. The Zoo was in darkness, but Frank ran straight through the turnstiles and disappeared.

“Frank!” shouted Corporal Little. “Frank, you’d better come to heel, boy, or else there’s no more marrowbones for you!”

We heard him bark, but he didn’t come back. Then we heard him bark again, even farther away.

“He’s found one, for sure,” said Corporal Little.

“We’d better get after him, then.”

I opened the stud of my holster and tugged out my Colt .45 automatic. This was only the third time since we had landed in Normandy that I had taken it out, and I had never fired it at anyone. It was loaded with bullets that had allegedly been cast from the pewter goblets from which the Disciples had drunk during the Last Supper, so it wasn’t the kind of weapon that you would fire indiscriminately. But the Zoo grounds were impenetrably black and very extensive—nearly twenty-five acres of parkland and trees and animal houses, and if there were Screechers here I didn’t want to be caught by surprise.

Corporal Little and I climbed awkwardly over the turnstiles and made our way along the path to the mock-Egyptian square where the elephant house stood. Our flashlights made shadows jump across the buildings like hopping hunchbacks, and a couple of times I was tempted to fire.

“
Frank!
” called Corporal Little, in a hoarse stage whisper. “
Frank—where the hell are you, you disobedient mutt?
”

We heard him bark again, and this time his bark echoed, like somebody shouting in a swimming pool.

“He’s in there,” said Corporal Little, shining his flashlight on the elephant house.

There were no elephants in there, of course. When the Germans had first entered Antwerp, the zoo staff had shot all of the animals—elephants, tigers, gorillas, giraffes—in case they broke out of their cages and escaped. Apart from that, there was little enough food for the human population, let alone animals.

We entered the elephant house cautiously, with our
weapons raised. It was like walking into Tutankhamen’s tomb. The columns were gilded and decorated with acanthus leaves, and Egyptian hieroglyphs had been painted all over the walls. It was also dark and smelly and the tiled floor was gritty and wet, so that our boots made a scrunching noise.

“Frank?” called Corporal Little.

Frank turned around, and we saw his yellow eyes reflected in our flashlights, like some kind of hound from hell.

“
There
,” said Corporal Little.

Cowering in the corner, one hand clinging on to the bars of an elephant pen, the other hand raised to shield his face from my flashlight, sat a Screecher. He was tall and emaciated, with thinning brown hair, and a pallid, bony face. He was wearing a dirty gray overcoat with a deluge of brown stains down the front of it, and a cheap brown business suit, and his shoes had holes in the soles. Most people would have passed him on the street without a second glance, but Corporal Little and I had seen enough Screechers to recognize him immediately for what he was. It was the way he couldn’t look directly at the light, and the way that his eyeballs kept darting from side to side, like cockroaches. He looked anxious and scheming, rather than terrified. Like most of the Screechers we’d encountered, he obviously believed that humans couldn’t kill him, no matter what we did to him, but he did know that we could hurt him. What he was looking for with his shifty little eyes was a way to escape.

“Well, well,” I said, walking right up to him. I sniffed, and I could smell the unmistakable odor of rotting poultry and dried dill. “Where are your friends, then?”

He said nothing, so I holstered my .45, knelt down on the floor and opened up the Kit. I took out the shiny silver mirror and held it up at an angle so that I could see his face in it. Contrary to what you’ve seen in the movies or read about in
Dracula
, Screechers are clearly visible in mirrors. The only difference is that pure silver doesn’t reflect evil, so the mirror showed me the Screecher as he used to be, before he was infected.

Sometimes, of course, you can make a mistake, and a smelly, homely-looking character that you suspected of being a Screecher looks just as homely in the mirror. In that case you apologize and let him go on his way without banging nails into his eyes. But what I saw in the mirror that night at the Antwerpse Zoo was a good-looking young man in his midthirties with wide-apart eyes and a heavy jaw. He looked German, or Austrian, or maybe Swiss.

“
Wo sind deinen Freunden?
” I repeated, waving my flashlight from side to side to dazzle him. “If you tell me where your friends are, I might be able to save your life. If you don’t, then I won’t have any choice. I’ll have to kill you, here and now.”

The Screecher kept his hands held up in front of his face, and didn’t answer me. Frank barked at him, but even Frank was sensible enough not to go too close. The Screecher may have looked like a down-and-out, but I knew from experience that he was quite capable of ripping Frank’s head off with his bare hands.

“I’m giving you one last chance,” I said, in German. I took out my pistol again, and pointed it directly at his heart. “We can save you . . . give you back the life you used to have before. Think of it, your family, your
sweetheart. All you have to do is tell us where your friends are.”