The Historian (39 page)

―We found the outer door to the library unlocked—Turgut said with a smile that he‘d known his friend would be prompt—and went quietly in, Turgut ushering Helen gallantly before him. The little entrance hall, with its fine mosaics and the registration book lying open and ready for the day‘s visitors, was deserted. Turgut held the inner door for Helen, and she had gone well into the hushed, dim hall of the library before I heard her intake of breath and saw her stop so suddenly that our friend almost tripped behind her. Something made the hair on the back of my neck rise even before I could tell what was happening, and then something quite different made me push rudely past the professor to Helen‘s side.

―The librarian waiting for us stood motionless in the middle of the room, his face turned, as if eagerly, toward our arrival. He was not, however, the friendly figure we‘d expected, nor was he already bringing out the box we‘d hoped to examine again, or some pile of dusty manuscripts on Istanbul‘s history. His face was pale, as if drained of life—exactly as if drained of life. This was not Turgut‘s librarian friend but ours, alert and bright-eyed, his lips unnaturally red and his hungry gaze burning in our direction. At the moment his eyes lit on me, my hand gave a throb where he had bent it back so hard in the library stacks. He was famished for something. Even if I‘d had the tranquillity of mind in which to conjecture about that hunger—whether it was a thirst for knowledge or for something else—I would not have had time to form the thought. Before I could so much as step between Helen and the ghoulish figure, she pulled a pistol from her jacket pocket and shot him.‖

―Later, I knew Helen in a great range of situations, including those we call ordinary life, and she never stopped surprising me. Often what astonished me in her were the quick associations her mind made between one fact and another, associations that usually resulted in an insight I would have been slow to reach myself. She dazzled me, too, with the wonderful breadth of her learning. Helen was full of these surprises, and I grew to consider them my daily fare, a pleasant addiction I developed to her ability to catch me off guard. But she never startled me more than at that moment in Istanbul, when she suddenly shot the librarian.

―I had no time for astonishment, however, because he stumbled sideways and hurled a book toward us, just missing my head. It hit a table somewhere to my left, and I heard it fall to the floor. Helen fired again, stepping forward and aiming with a steadiness that took my breath away. Then the oddness of the creature‘s reaction struck me. I‘d never seen anyone shot before except in the movies, but there, alas, I had seen a thousand Indians die at gunpoint by the time I was eleven, and later every sort of crook, bank robber, and villain, including hosts of Nazis created expressly for shooting by an enthusiastic wartime Hollywood. The strange thing about this shooting, this real one, was that although a dark stain appeared on the librarian‘s clothes somewhere below his sternum, he did not clutch the spot with an agonized hand. The second shot grazed his shoulder; he was already running, and then he bolted into the stacks at the rear of the hall.

―‗A door!‘ Turgut shouted behind me. ‗There is a door there!‘ And we all ran after him, tripping on chairs and darting among the tables. Selim Aksoy, slight and fleet as an antelope, reached the shelves first and disappeared among them. We heard a scuffle and a crash, then indeed the slamming of a door, and found Mr. Aksoy stumbling up out of a drift of fragile Ottoman manuscripts with a purple lump on the side of his face. Turgut ran for the door and I ran after, but it was shut tightly. When we got it open, we discovered only an alley, deserted apart from a pile of wooden boxes. We searched the labyrinthine neighborhood at a trot, but there was no sign of the creature or his flight.

Turgut collared a few pedestrians, but no one had seen our man.

―Reluctantly, we returned to the archive through the back door and found Helen holding her handkerchief to Mr. Aksoy‘s cheekbone. The gun was nowhere in sight, and the manuscripts were neatly stacked on the shelf again. She looked up when we came in. ‗He fainted for a minute,‘ she said softly, ‗but he is all right now.‘

―Turgut knelt by his friend. ‗My dear Selim, what a bump you have.‘

―Selim Aksoy smiled wanly. ‗I am in good care,‘ he said.

―‗I can see that,‘ Turgut agreed. ‗Madam, I congratulate you for trying. But it is useless to attempt to kill a dead man.‘

―‗How did you know?‘ I gasped.

―‗Oh, I know,‘ he said grimly. ‗I know the look of that face. It is the expression of the undead. There is no other face like that. I have seen it before.‘

―‗It was a silver bullet, of course.‘ Helen held the handkerchief more firmly on Mr.

Aksoy‘s cheek and eased his head back against her shoulder. ‗But, as you saw, he moved, and I missed his heart. I know I took a great risk‘—she looked deeply at me for a moment, but I couldn‘t read her thoughts—‗but you could see for yourselves that I was right in my calculation. A mortal man would have been seriously wounded by such shots.‘ She sighed and adjusted the handkerchief.

―I looked from one to the other in bewilderment. ‗Have you been carrying around that gun all the time?‘ I asked Helen.

―‗Oh, yes.‘ She pulled Aksoy‘s arm over her shoulder. ‗Here, help me get him up.‘

Together we lifted him—he was light as a child—and steadied him on his feet. He smiled and nodded, shrugging off our assistance. ‗Yes, I always carry my pistol when I feel any sort of—uneasiness. And it is not so difficult to acquire a silver bullet or two.‘

―‗That is true.‘ Turgut nodded.

―‗But where did you learn to shoot like that?‘ I was still stunned by that moment when Helen had drawn and aimed so quickly.

―Helen laughed. ‗In my country, our education is deep as well as narrow,‘ she said. ‗I received an award for my shooting in our youth brigade when I was sixteen. I am glad to find I have not forgotten how.‘

―Suddenly Turgut gave a cry and struck his forehead. ‗My friend!‘ We all stared. ‗My friend—Erozan! I am forgetting him.‘

―It took us only a second to grasp his meaning. Selim Aksoy, who seemed recovered now, was the first to hurry into the stacks where he‘d received his injury, and the rest of us scattered quickly around the long room, searching under tables and behind chairs. For a few minutes the hunt was fruitless. Then we heard Selim calling us, and we all rushed to his side. He was kneeling in the stacks, at the foot of a high shelf laden with all kinds of boxes, bags, and rolled-up scrolls. The box that housed the papers of the Order of the Dragon lay on the floor beside him, its ornate lid open and some of its contents scattered nearby.

―Among these relics, Mr. Erozan was stretched out on his back, white and still, his head lolling to one side. Turgut knelt and put his ear to the man‘s chest. ‗Thank God,‘ he said after a moment. ‗He is breathing.‘ Then, examining him more closely, he pointed to his friend‘s neck. Deep in the loose, pale flesh just above the shirt collar, there was a ragged wound. Helen knelt beside Turgut. We were all silent for a moment. Even after Rossi‘s description of the bureaucrat who had confronted him many years before, even after Helen‘s injury in the library at home, I found it hard to believe what I was seeing. The man‘s face was terribly pale, almost gray, and his breathing came in shallow, short gasps, barely audible until you listened carefully.

―‗He has been polluted,‘ Helen said quietly. ‗And I think he has lost quite a bit of blood.‘

―‗A curse on this day!‘ Turgut‘s face was anguished, and he pressed his friend‘s hand in his two big ones.

―Helen was the first to rally. ‗Let us think sensibly. This is perhaps only the first time he has been attacked.‘ She turned to Turgut. ‗You didn‘t see any sign of this in him when we were here yesterday?‘

―He shook his head. ‗He was quite normal.‘

―‗Well, then.‘ She reached into her jacket pocket, and I recoiled for an instant, thinking she was about to pull out the pistol again. Instead she drew forth a head of garlic and placed it on the librarian‘s chest. Turgut smiled in spite of the grimness of the whole scene and drew a head of garlic from his own pocket, placing it with hers. I couldn‘t imagine where she‘d gotten it—perhaps on our stroll through the souk, when I‘d been absorbed in other sights? ‗I see great minds think the same,‘ Helen told him. Then she took out a paper packet and unwrapped it, revealing a tiny silver crucifix. I recognized it as the one she‘d purchased at the Catholic church near our university, the one she had used to intimidate the evil librarian when he‘d attacked her in the history section of the library stacks.

―This time Turgut stopped her with a gentle hand. ‗No, no,‘ he said. ‗We have our own superstitions here.‘ From somewhere inside his jacket he took a string of wooden beads, such as I‘d seen in the hands of men on the streets of Istanbul. This one ended in a carved medallion with Arabic lettering on its face. He touched the medallion gently to Mr.

Erozan‘s lips, and the librarian‘s face gave a grimace, as of involuntary disgust, twitching and curling. It was an awful sight, but a momentary one, and then the man‘s eyes opened and he frowned. Turgut bent over him, speaking softly in Turkish and touching his forehead, then giving the wounded man a sip of something from a little flask he conjured out of his jacket.

―After a minute, Mr. Erozan sat up and looked around, groping at his neck as if it hurt.

When his fingers found the little wound with its trickle of drying blood, he buried his face in his hands, sobbing, a heartrending sound.

―Turgut put an arm around his shoulders, and Helen placed a hand on the librarian‘s arm.

I found myself reflecting that this was the second time in an hour that I had seen her tending with gentle touch to an afflicted being. Turgut began to question the man in Turkish, and after a few minutes he sat back on his heels and looked at the rest of us. ‗Mr.

Erozan says the stranger came to his apartment very early this morning, while it was still dark, and threatened to kill him unless he opened the library for him. The vampire was with him when I called him this morning, but he dared not tell me about his presence.

When the strange man heard who had called, he said they must go at once to the archive.

Mr. Erozan was afraid to disobey, and when they arrived here the man made him open the box. As soon as it sprang open, the devil leaped on him, held him on the ground—my friend says he was incredibly strong—and put his teeth in Mr. Erozan‘s neck. That is all he remembers.‘ Turgut shook his head sadly. Mr. Erozan suddenly grasped Turgut‘s arm and seemed to be imploring something of him in a flood of Turkish.

―For a moment Turgut was silent, and then he took his friend‘s hands in his, pressed the prayer beads into them, and gave him a quiet answer. ‗He told me that he understands he can be bitten only twice more by this devil before becoming one himself. He asks me if this thing should come to pass to kill him with my own hands.‘ Turgut turned away, and I thought I saw a glistening of tears in his eyes.

―‗It will not come to that.‘ Helen‘s face was hard. ‗We are going to find the source of this plague.‘ I didn‘t know whether she meant the evil librarian or Dracula himself, but when I saw the set of her jaw I could almost believe in our eventual success in vanquishing both. I had noted that look on her face once before, and the sight of it took me back to the table of the diner at home, where we‘d first talked about her parentage. Then she had been vowing to find her disloyal father and unmask him to the academic world. Was I imagining it, I wondered, or had her mission shifted at some moment that she herself hadn‘t noticed?

―Selim Aksoy had been hovering behind us, and now he spoke to Turgut again. Turgut nodded. ‗Mr. Aksoy has reminded me of the work we have come here to do, and he is right. Other researchers will begin to arrive soon, and we must either lock the archive or open it to the public. He offers to desert his shop today and serve as librarian here. But first we must clean up these documents and see what damage has been done to them, and above all we must find a safe place for my friend to rest. Also, Mr. Aksoy would like to show us something in the archives before other people are present.‘

―I began at once to gather up the scattered documents, and my worst fears were immediately confirmed. ‗The original maps are gone,‘ I reported gloomily. We searched the stacks, but the maps of that strange region that looked like a long-tailed dragon had vanished. We could only conclude that the vampire had hidden them on his person even before we‘d arrived. It was a dreary thought. We had copies, of course, in both Rossi‘s hand and Turgut‘s, but the originals represented to me a key to Rossi‘s whereabouts, a closer link than any other I‘d handled so far.

―In addition to the discouragement of losing this treasure, there came to me the thought that the evil librarian might unlock its secrets before we did. If Rossi was at Dracula‘s tomb, wherever it lay, the evil librarian now had a fair chance of beating us there. I felt more than ever the twin urgency and impossibility of finding my beloved adviser. At least—it came to me again, strangely—Helen was now solidly on my side.

―Turgut and Selim had been conferring beside the sick man, and now they turned to ask him a question, it seemed, for he tried to raise himself and pointed feebly to the back of the stacks. Selim vanished, returning after a few minutes with a small book. It was bound in red leather, rather worn, with a gold inscription in Arabic on the front. He set it on a nearby table and searched through it for some time before beckoning to Turgut, who was folding his jacket to make a pillow for his friend‘s head. The man seemed a little more comfortable now. It was on the tip of my tongue to suggest we call an ambulance, but I felt Turgut must know what he was doing. He had risen to join Selim, and they conferred earnestly for a few minutes while Helen and I avoided each other‘s eyes, both of us hoping for some discovery, and both fearing further disappointment. Finally, Turgut called us over.