Descendant (7 page)

“It’s OK, boy,” Corporal Little reassured him, but Frank never did get used to the seismic shock of V-2 explosions, which made the cobblestones knock together like pebbles on the beach. If bloodhounds are capable of having nervous breakdowns, poor old Frank got pretty close to it.

That Sunday, October 15, a rocket destroyed twenty-five houses on Kroonstraat at Borgerhout, killing four people and injuring a hundred more. Over the next few days, more and more V-2s hit the city center. There was a total news blackout—nothing on the wireless, and nothing in the newspapers except vague warnings about “flying
bombs”—so nobody knew what was really happening. The city authorities were desperate to avoid any panic, and, just as importantly, they didn’t want the Germans to find out whether their rockets were hitting their targets or not.

After the Schildersstraat attack, Corporal Little and Frank and I spent three more weeks in Antwerp, searching for any trace of the Romanian Screecher and his German companion, just in case Ernst Hauser had been lying to us, or they had been hiding in some other house when the V-2 struck. But after we had dragged Frank up and down every rubble-strewn street and every smelly alley between Prinsstraat and Lange Nieuwstraat, and talked to more than two hundred people, including police officers and hospital orderlies and priests, we finally had to conclude that they had either left Antwerp and returned to Germany, or else that first V-2 had simply atomized them.

As the winter grew colder and colder, and the Germans retreated, we were sent into Holland. We visited houses in Eindhoven and Breda and Tilburg, and found the grisly evidence that Screechers had been there—men, women and children, with their hearts cut out and all of the blood drained out of them. But the Screechers themselves had long gone, and they had left no trail that Frank could usefully follow.

Whenever I think of that winter, I think of finger-numbing cold, and skies as dark as lead. I think of desperate tiredness, and boredom—driving miles and miles between avenues of poplar trees, and seeing nobody for
hours. It felt as if the war had passed us by and we were completely alone in the world.

On the morning of January 16, 1945, a message came through Brussels that my mother had died, and that I should return home immediately. Operation Screecher was over—as far as I was concerned, anyway—because I was never sent back to Europe. Corporal Little was ordered to take Frank back to Antwerp, where he could help the Belgian rescue services to locate buried bodies. The city was still under daily attack from V-2 rockets, and already more than three and a half thousand people had been killed.

The last time I saw Corporal Little and Frank was on the long stone mole at Zeebrugge harbor, where I was due to board a British troopship. It was the middle of the afternoon and it was snowing hard. The lighthouse on the end of the mole was back in action, and every now and then the snow was illuminated by a bright sweeping light.

“Well, Henry, it’s been an experience.”

“Yes, sir, it has.” He hesitated for a moment, and then he said, “Think we did any good, sir?”

“I don’t know. I guess we never will. I can’t see us going into the history books, can you?”

“No, sir. But we’ll remember it. You and me, and Frank.”

Frank made that whining noise in his throat and irritably shook the snowflakes from his back.

I shook Corporal Little’s hand and walked back along the mole to the dockside. Somewhere, in some alternative existence, I think that I’m still walking along it
now, with the lighthouse flashing on and off, and the snow falling all around me, and the bang and clatter of cranes still echoes in my ears.

I didn’t yet know how my mother had died, but I was already feeling a devastating loneliness, as if I had lost not only the woman who had given birth to me, but part of my ancestry, too.

I was swinging in the hammock in my parents’ backyard when my father came walking through the overgrown grass and said, “There’s two military guys want to talk to you.”

I sat up a little and shaded my eyes with my hand. Two middle-aged men in sharply pressed army uniforms were standing by the kitchen steps with their hats tucked under their arms. One had a silvery-gray crewcut and the other had horn-rim glasses and a heavy black mustache.

“They wouldn’t tell me what they wanted,” said my father. “If you’d prefer me to say that you’re not at home, well, I’m more than happy to. You know my views on the military.”

My father was what you might call a professional nonconformist. He always reminded me of Groucho Marx in
Horse Feathers
when he sang “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” He looked a little like Groucho Marx, too, in his slopy-shouldered cardigans and his baggy corduroy pants, with his pipe always sticking out of the side of his mouth. He was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley, but he was also a writer and a
fly-fisherman and when he played the piano on summer evenings with the parlor windows open his music was so sentimental that he could make you choke up.

The officer with the silvery-gray crew cut raised one hand and called out, “James Falcon Junior? Need to talk to you, sir!”

I looked at my father and my father shrugged. I clambered out of the hammock, catching my foot so that I staggered on one leg for the first couple of paces, but I managed to hold on to the apple I’d been eating.

The officers approached me. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Bulsover and this is Major Leonard Harvey.”

They stood with their backs like ramrods and they almost had
me
standing up straight. Not long ago, I found some photographs of myself that my brother took around that time, and you’ve never seen such a skinny, lanky, twenty-five-year-old streak in your life, in a baggy pair of jeans and a striped shirt that was five times too big for me.

“We need to talk in private,” said Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover. He didn’t look at my father and at first my father didn’t understand what he was saying.

“This is just about as private as you can get,” he said, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “There isn’t another house for half a mile. Hey—we could beat a pig to death with baseball bats and nobody would hear us.”

Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover looked at him as if were mentally deficient. “When I say private, sir, I mean that I need to talk to your son confidentially. On his own.”

“Oh?
Oh
. What for? This family doesn’t have secrets.”

“That’s as may be, sir. But this is wartime, and this country has secrets.”

“Oh.”

My father hesitated for a moment and then he put his pipe back in his mouth and walked away across the grass, jerkily turning around now and again as if half expecting us to call him back. Eventually he climbed the steps and disappeared into the kitchen. The screen door banged.

Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover placed his hand in the small of my back and gently steered me down toward the far end of the yard, where the tangled raspberry canes grew. It was very hot and still that day, and I remember that everything looked magnified, as I were seeing it through a lens.

“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.”

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.