Above the steeples and spires of the old buildings and cathedrals the clouds descended ever lower, unraveling at their base to release odd ends of white fleece fogginess. It dropped just enough to obscure the tips of the towering tile and iron points and Radu imagined the clouds crying for the painful penetration of the sharp roofs.
“Here we are,” Greta said suddenly as they found a parking space. When they walked to the small eatery with the sidewalk tables and Romanian flags whipping in the cold wind, some people stared from across the road, others driving by passed a glance and slowed down and even some were peeking through the windows of their businesses. They recognized the young boy they used to chase off in some other parts of the city where he lived in the park and slept under the stairs of one of the churches.
Radu smiled to himself, but took care to look somber when Greta looked at him. She had her hand on his shoulder, ushering him to a table to order him whatever he wanted. Radu realized it would be wise to make sure people saw him with Greta Heller, even if just to make sure that the townspeople would remember her face should he go missing or turn up dead. This was the extent to which young Radu’s intuition warned him about Greta’s intentions.
“You are very far away, Frau Heller. So far away I almost miss you,” the boy charmed her.
Greta smiled sweetly at his adorable words and placed her hand on his.
“There is a lot on my mind, sweetheart,” she replied, and Radu could feel her hand shiver on his.
“Are you alright?” he asked. “You look sad.”
Greta did not expect the child’s question to hit her so hard and she choked on her sudden emotion. His innocence was disturbing to her, like the crystal clear disruption of a raindrop to wet ink, dispersing the darkness but only to reshape it.
“Liebchen,” her voice cracked under the uncontrollable mounting contrition she felt in advance. Her past deeds carried no guilt in her, because they were all in the name of glory, of legacy, of power. But what she was about to embark on, and the methods she would have to employ, was the first blot of blackness that she ever had to swallow back in with effort.
“Whatever it is, I will help you,” Radu smiled sincerely and it rocked Greta to a stunned silence where her tears burned through her composure.
“Ach, Liebchen, you are helping me more than you know,” she sniffed as the waitress served them their breakfast. Radu wolfed his food down but Greta was just rearranging her plate, deep in thought.
The boy knew what he was doing, contrary to the genuine implication of his offer. He watched her tremble, her control crumbling as she fervently sought another way out of putting the young child, her new son, at peril. Even if she could not avert danger, by the laws of the Black Tarot, or replace him with another Dealer, she had to find a way now that he had proved to her that she was never beyond redemption.
On the other hand, the rules were ironclad. Only one in a generation had The Hand to be the Dealer of the Deck. After Greta was betrayed by Petr Costita she made up her mind to pursue him to the end. And she did.
She swore it, that day when he defied her by denying her the Nazi treasure most coveted, The Black Tarot, that she would hunt down his offspring and show no mercy, grant no reprieve from her wrath. She would make Petr’s child, the next generation Dealer, suffer the perdition coming to the one who laid out the Great Spread that would topple the thrones of the entire world.
It had not taken much to persuade Petr to steal the deck from the excavations in Zbiroh for her and her organization. He did not even know who the Order of the Black Sun was after all, so she had offered him an exuberant amount of money to procure the deck for her society and bring it from the Czech Republic to Germany inconspicuously. Only, he elected to keep it for himself and fled to Cluj-Napoca where her agents tracked him down.
While others were hunting the Spear of Destiny and other more well-known relics to obtain its powers, she trumped them all by focusing on the mightiest relic of them all, forged by the blackest of magic — physics.
Transcending the mere supernatural components of holy relics and icons, superseding the arcane science of the Nephilim, this treasure could bring about the utter un-creation of events and dictators. Laid out correctly by the right man — a priest of malice and conjurer of avarice as Petr had been — the deck could shuffle the chronological fate of the world to bow to the dealer's will and thus reinvent history and its consequences. This was not magic. It was the application of human will, factored by the manipulation of super science dormant in certain places of the earth’s magnetic grids. One of these places existed but a few kilometers away from Greta — the haunted forest of Hoia Baciu.
When the curator of the Brno-, and later Plzeň museums would not reveal the location of the rest of the deck, she had him executed with his expedition colleagues in Nohra.
Dr. Miroslav Kulich had come under scrutiny by the Black Sun when an interview conducted by an Anthropology student exposed his knowledge of the deck and other Nazi treasures unearthed at the chateau his family used to own. It was after the death of Petr Costita that someone from Baciu contacted the curator to return the remaining cards of the infamous relic to its rightful owner, the Kulich Family, who had it in their possession since before the occupation of Prague Castle by the SS.
From there the deck had been moved and hidden by a soldier sent to aid the SS in establishing a headquarters at Zbiroh, an explosives expert, who wrote a letter begging the reader to rid the world of the iniquitous relic.
Now she was back where she had failed to procure the deck from her thief many years before, with his son in her charge. And apparently she was also within close proximity of Sam Cleave, the only man who could bury her and her name under tons of filthy totalitarian excrement. She would be exposed as a common murderer and traitor, leaving her squeaky clean reputation obliterated in history. That could never happen. The only problem was not knowing who contacted Dr. Miroslav Kulich in the first place. It was someone who knew what the deck was capable of, someone who knew that the Kulich line used to guard the Black Tarot. Greta was aware that the very same person had to have the rest of the cards Petr tossed through the portal before he died.
But to find the culprit she would have to use the cards she had, hopefully prompting a revelation of who her target was. Igor would be assigned to kill Cleave and retrieve the evidence while she would track down the keeper of the cards, revealed in the tarot reading.
It was odd, Greta pondered, that Igor had not contacted her lately.
Chapter 30 — Playing with Fire
The night before Greta’s arrival in Cluj, Stefan had invited Sam, Petra and Nina to spend the night with him and his kin. He was related to an astounding amount of people, they thought, but that was the purpose of calling it a commune where a phrase like ‘extended family’ came well into play. The van drove into a small street that formed a horseshoe curve, populated by several tiny houses stacked next to each other. Horse carts stood here and there, the horses away to their sheds for the night. Nina narrowed her weary eyes to study the intricate design of the decorative wagons where a lot of couples lived next to the houses of their family.
“What are those, Stefan?” she asked, pointing at the wagons.
“Vardos, Nina. Burtons and Brushes over there. Actually, about five or six types of wagons are from different eras and countries all similar to these you see here. They are like caravans, nomadic homes from our traditional culture, but a lot of us stay in modern day caravans, as you can see,” he reported from the green light of the dashboard, pointing to the other horse-drawn caravans on the other side of the bend of the bumpy road.