The Fifth House of the Heart (23 page)

Abingdon and Sax had met some years earlier when Sax needed someone who could replicate metal alloys no longer manufactured in the modern world. Abingdon, in addition to being a drunken, sword-swinging medieval womanizer, was also in possession of a doctorate in archaeometallurgy. He could duplicate, in somewhat safer conditions than the original artisans, authentic mercury-vapor ormolu. He could craft wrought iron, rich in manganese, to precisely duplicate late-Roman artifacts, or make ingots of the strange metals developed quite by chance while alchemists pursued their dream of turning base metals into gold. Sax called him every couple of years to repair or duplicate some damaged piece that would otherwise have little place in the world, for all its antiquity.

“The thing is, I wonder if you're free the next week or so?” Sax said.

“I'm on the job, mate,” Abingdon whispered into the phone. “Got a bird here.”

“You can't shag all week, though, can you?” Even as Sax said it he knew it was a stupid statement.
Of course
Abingdon could shag all week.

“Been reading my diary, me old ginger beer. Right,” Abingdon said, resigning himself. “Your stuff's always interesting. I could use a few quid, it being the off-season for the old pleasure fairs, and my tackle could likely use a drying out. What, pray tell, 'ave you fucking got?”

Sax got off the phone grinning. He liked Abingdon. A hale fellow
such as they didn't often make anymore. He would have been a rock star, back in the day. Gotten into fistfights with Roger Daltrey and run fancy automobiles into hotel swimming pools. He did pretty well regardless. Abingdon was probably the only metallurgist with groupies.

Sax handed the phone to Paolo, who was still groggy.

“Ring up your chaps back in Rome and tell them we need access to this prisoner in Germany. Tell them it's a matter of his immortal soul or whatever you need to do. No later than three this afternoon.”

Paolo dialed the number. “
Ciao
, Fabrizio . . . ,” he began.

Sax went out to check that the barn was arranged for Abingdon's arrival.

T
he weather remained overcast and grim across all of northern Europe. It was getting chillier each day. Paolo steered the rental car through a colorless landscape from the farmhouse to the private airfield at Lemberg; the plane Paolo had chartered for them was waiting on the tarmac. It would have been a six-hour drive to their destination, and the flight took less than two, so it was well worth the Vatican's money, in Sax's opinion. He disliked small aircraft and wore earplugs to reduce the din of the engine.

The Cessna made its way across the tip of the Vosges Mountains, then over the Rhine Valley and through rough air above the Odenwald range. Then they descended, Sax feeling bilious with airsickness, along the top of the Ore Mountains to an airstrip outside Chemnitz, Germany. Sax had forgotten just how lumpy Germany could be, a mass of mountains and valleys in the southern half. It was only the north that was flat, those vast plains draining into the North Sea.

They hired a taxi to take them to the
Stadtgef
ängnis
. The taxi driver beguiled his passengers for the entire trip, complaining that Mercedes's quality had gone down so much he was now driving Opel
cars exclusively. Paolo seemed interested in the conversation and the two Europeans discussed cars until they reached the street that ran along the frontage of the prison. Then the driver became serious, all but doffing his cap. He might even have done so if he had been wearing one. A man in the habiliments of a priest arriving at the gates of a prison spoke of bad luck for someone on the inside.

There was a delay of almost an hour inside the facility, which had the crisp, prefabricated ambiance of a modern airport, only with fewer windows. Guards in severe uniforms marched in and out of the waiting area armed with paperwork to be filled out in triplicate. Phone calls were made. Superiors summoned. Throughout all this, a man in urban camouflage sat at a desk and ignored Sax and Paolo with a display of total indifference that must have been agony to keep up. An Italian priest and a mid-Atlantic
schwuler
: Was this evidence of the new liberality of the Church, or could this be a
gleichgeschlechtliche Partnerschaft
?

A guard in black trousers and white shirt emerged from the secure part of the building and, having checked their identification, ushered Sax and Paolo within.

They walked down noisy, echoing corridors with bright light and not a single fleck of dirt or chipped paint or any other evidence of use; they passed through an armored door, then a slightly less sterile corridor, and finally entered the place of imprisonment. Here the cell blocks looked far more like those everywhere else in the world: built to withstand constant abuse, and constantly abused. The acoustics were terrible.

The guard led them along a passageway with a clear acrylic partition that divided it from the cell blocks, on two levels, to the left; on the right was a wall of concrete block with slit windows high up near the ceiling. At the end of the passage was a further heavy door, but this one stood open, and another guard sat on a folding chair on the
threshold. This one stood up and took over escorting duties, while the first guard returned the way they had come.

Beyond the door were six cells. Two of these cells were occupied. The guard led his charges to the one on the right, opened a small grille set into the porthole in the door, clicked his heels, and returned to his folding chair.

“Right,” said Sax. “You speak better German than me, Paolo, so you do the talking.” There was a terrible stink coming through the window from the cell. It smelled like human dung. Inside the cell was a man wearing hospital-style scrubs. His red face was a mindless blank, eyes bulging and yellowish with bright blue centers. His pupils were constricted to pinpoints. This was Jakob Bächtold.

Paolo spoke to the inmate. It took some time to get the man's attention, as he was studying the surface of the cell wall, tracing imaginary routes with a fingertip along the seams of the concrete. Sometimes he would look around the room, wonderingly, like an infant. His mouth was constantly working, chewing on unintelligible words.

Eventually Bächtold turned to the cell door and, seeing Paolo in the window, lunged forward. Paolo involuntarily jerked backward. The guard stood up. Sax shook his head:
it's
all fine
. Bächtold's breath huffed through the porthole; it stank of ulcerated teeth. He pressed his face to the wire.

Paolo translated Sax's questions into German. Who hired him to steal the candelabra? Where was he to bring it? Why were the other things found but not the candelabra? Again, who hired him to steal the candelabra? Why? The same questions, over and over, all with the same result: vacant mumbling.

Paolo was starting to sweat. He did not like being so close to the eye-rolling imbecile on the other side of the door. Bächtold was gazing around at invisible flies.
Just like Renfield
, Sax thought. This gave Sax an
idea.

“You're going to ask him some different questions,” Sax said quietly, twisting his eyes toward the guard to indicate Paolo should be discreet. “This may get a reaction. Keep with it if it does.”

“As long as we can get away from here,” Paolo said.

“I thought you Christian-charity types loved going to these sorts of places,” Sax said.

“I get claustrophobia,” Paolo said. He made the admission sound like a confession.

“Ask him this. Ask him what the vampire did.”

Sax heard Paolo's Italian-accented German clunking along for a few words, then the word
vampir
, and in the next instant, Bächtold went berserk.

He screamed, gobbets of saliva spraying through the window.
“Blutsauger kommen f ür mich!”
Then he leapt into the air and began hurling himself around the cell, clawing at the walls. Amid his high-pitched shouting Sax caught a few words he recognized,
stein
being one of them, but most of it was such a cacophony it was all he could do not to run away. The guard rushed to the cell, pressed a button on a small electronic box on his belt, and flung the cell door open. Seconds later, he was joined by four more guards, two of whom grabbed Sax and Paolo. The rest rushed into the cell and the shrieking, struggling Bächtold went down beneath them, flailing with such mad strength the guards had to beat him into submission. Then the scene was out of view to Sax, and he was trotting down the hall after Paolo with hard guardsman's fingers dug into his shoulder. Two minutes later, they were back in the waiting area, panting with fear and exertion.

Blutsauger kommen f ür mich!
Bächtold had cried. Sax knew what that meant, more or less.

The bloodsucker is coming for me
.

Once out on the street again, following a reprimand from a senior
administrator of the prison with no neck, Sax's hands began to tremble uncontrollably. Paolo sucked in deep drafts of cold air, letting them out in white plumes that drifted halfway down the block before they faded from sight.

“Quickly,” Sax said. “Before you forget. What was he saying?”

“The warden? He's very upset with us disturbing his prisoners. He says a man of the cloth—”

“Yes yes yes. No. The madman, Bächtold.”

“Oh,” Paolo said, and for a terrifying moment his face went Bächtold-blank and Sax thought he actually had forgotten. But Paolo was only organizing his jumbled thoughts.

“He said the blood drinker was coming to get him—” Paolo began.

“I got that bit. Then he said something about
stein
?”

“Ah. That's ‘stone' in German,” Paolo said. “He said, ‘She will come down from the stone of murder.' She is the master or mistress, and he is the slave, and she will come down for him from the stone of murder and suck his blood.”

“And?” Sax said when Paolo failed to continue.

“I don't know! I was very frightened when he started to shout. I am the weakest servant of God, an unworthy man only,” Paolo added. Then, to Sax's astonishment, Paolo dashed a tear from his eye with the sleeve of his black jacket.

“You're a berk and an idiot,” Sax seethed. “A cretin. He did all that shouting and you can't remember it? What a balls-up. This is what comes of trusting a priest.”

“I am not really a priest.”

“Worse yet. Let us proceed to plan B, because you are certainly a fool.”

Plan B was a terrible waste of time and wasn't much of a plan at all. Sax wished to go through with it primarily because it was a way of punishing Paolo, which wasn't really anything to do with Paolo but
rather was a way for Sax to channel his own frustration that the magic bullet had turned out to be a squib.

They found with difficulty a place to rent yet another car, put it on the Vatican tab, and left Chemnitz approximately four hours after they'd arrived. The city was one of those places that had been bombed unrelentingly during the war, and consequently the entire core of the town was overtaken by slabs of dull concrete architecture, steel-and-glass office boxes, and all the aesthetic ills to which East German territory had been heir, relieved by outlying neighborhoods of red-roofed or slated structures from a time before explosives could be dropped from the sky. The landscape was bitter, leafless, and sere with frost, but attractive in its forms. There were low, wooded hills and distant gray pastures and a broad, flat river not yet frozen.

Sax was not setting out entirely blind. He had in the calfskin notebook his lists, his cross-references and provenances, and scattered points of information. He had a sheaf of documents from Eric at the Louvre. The details of the Interpol bulletin were useful as well. He started with that.

Aided by a petrol map from the nearest filling station and the GPS unit mounted on the dashboard, which Paolo could not operate but, for reasons mysterious to himself, Sax could, they found the site of the robbery—a local Great House that had been turned into a museum for tax purposes. They didn't go inside. It was just a place to begin, a way to make physical the origin of the crime.

The house stood by a tributary of the larger river in a flat piece of ground. The property had a brick gated entrance but no wall; the gate was just a bit of pomp. The house itself was a pastiche of medieval styles, all lead-framed windows and rustic plaster, the sort of thing rich people whipped up in the nineteenth century to give themselves airs.

“The break-in occurred there, on the water side,” Sax said, reading
from the bulletin. “Now, we know something else, which is that the criminal, that chap we just visited, got caught in . . . ah, damn, I've lost my place. Hang on . . . in Schönbrunn. So that's our next destination, if it's not too far away. I should have done this before—but I was so certain we'd get something from Bächtold.”

Sax phoned back to the farm in Petit-Grünenwald. Rock answered. Sax explained that their mission had come up against a minor obstacle and they might be detained in Germany a day or two; meanwhile, please stand by. He explained who Abingdon the metallurgist was and what to expect when the man arrived.

“You'll have a great deal to discuss, I'm sure,” Sax concluded. “Abingdon is also a warrior, although his specialty is combat prior to the year 1600. Is Nilu still alive?”

“She's hanging in there but she doesn't look real good. I was talking about the hospital, but Mad Min says no way.”

Sax made a low noise in the back of his throat. “She's right. Hospitals don't know anything about what she's got. They'd kill her without fail.”

“Didn't Paolo say there's a Catholic hospice where they can treat her?”

“If you try to take Nilu there, Min will kill her. Trust me on that,” Sax said, and with a few further words of instruction, ended the call. He knew Min's type. All vampires must die, and also all people connected to vampires—even their infected victims, who could themselves become dangerous.