“‘Did my husband give you a good tour of our city?’ Mrs. Bora was asking Helen.
“‘Yes, some of it,’ Helen answered. ‘I’m afraid we have taken a lot of his time today.’
“‘No-it is I who have taken much of yours.’ Turgut sipped his coffee with obvious pleasure. ‘But we still have a great deal of work to do. My dear’-to his wife-‘we are going to look for a missing professor, so I shall be busy for a few days.’
“‘A missing professor?’ Mrs. Bora smiled calmly at him. ‘All right. But we must eat dinner first. I hope that you will eat dinner?’ She turned to us.
“The thought of more food was impossible, and I was careful not to meet Helen’s eye. Helen, however, seemed to find all this normal. ‘Thank you, Mrs. Bora. You are very kind, but we should return to our hotel, I think, because we have an appointment there at five o’clock.’
“We did? This was perplexing, but I played along. ‘That’s right. Some other Americans are coming for a drink. But we hope to see you both again right away.’
“Turgut nodded. ‘I shall immediately look through everything in my library here that might be of help to us. We must think about the possibility that Dracula’s tomb is in Istanbul -whether these maps perhaps refer to an area of the city. I have a few old books about the city here, and friends who have fine collections about Istanbul. I will search everything for you tonight.’
“‘Dracula.’ Mrs. Bora shook her head. ‘I like Shakespeare better than Dracula. A more healthier interest. Also’-she gave us a mischievous glance-‘Shakespeare pays our bills.’
“They saw us out with great ceremony, and Turgut made us promise to meet him at our pension the next morning at nine o’clock. He would bring new information, if he could, and we would visit the archive again to see if there were any developments there. In the meantime, he warned, we should exercise the greatest caution, watching everywhere for signs of pursuit or other danger. Turgut wanted to accompany us all the way back to our lodgings, but we assured him that we could take the ferry back by ourselves-it left in twenty minutes, he said. The Boras showed us out the front door of the building and stood together on the steps, hand in hand, calling out good-byes. I glanced back once or twice as we made our way along the street’s tunnel of figs and lindens. ‘That’s a happy marriage, I think,’ I commented to Helen, and was immediately sorry, because she gave her characteristic snort.
“‘Come on, Yankee,’ she said. ‘We have some new business to attend to.’
“Normally I would have smiled at her epithet for me, but this time something made me turn and look at her with a deep shudder. There was another thought that belonged to this strange afternoon visit, one I had suppressed until the last possible moment. Looking at Helen as she turned to me with her level gaze, I was unavoidably struck by the similarity between her strong yet fine features and that luminous, appalling image behind Turgut’s curtain.”
Chapter 33
When the Perpignan express had disappeared completely beyond the silvery trees and village roofs, Barley shook himself. “Well, he’s on that train, and we’re not.”
“Yes,” I said, “and he knows exactly where we are.”
“Not for very long.” Barley marched over to the ticket window-where one old man seemed to be falling asleep on his feet-but soon came back looking chastened. “The next train to Perpignan isn’t until tomorrow morning,” he reported. “And there’s no bus service to a major town until tomorrow afternoon. There’s only one boarding room at a farm about half a kilometer outside the village. We can sleep there and walk back for the morning train.”
Either I could get angry or I was going to cry. “Barley, I can’t wait till tomorrow morning to take a train to Perpignan! We’ll lose too much time.”
“Well, there’s nothing else,” Barley told me irritably. “I asked about cabs, cars, farm trucks, donkey carts, hitchhiking-what else do you want me to do?”
We walked through the village in silence. It was late afternoon, a sleepy, warm day, and everyone we saw in doorways or gardens seemed half stupefied, as if he or she had fallen under a spell. The farmhouse, when we reached it, had a hand-painted sign outside and a sale table with eggs, cheese, and wine. The woman who came out-wiping her hands on her proverbial apron-looked unsurprised to see us. When Barley introduced me as his sister, she smiled pleasantly and didn’t ask questions, even though we had no luggage with us. Barley asked if she had room for two and she said,“Oui, oui,”on the in-breath, as if she were talking to herself. The farmyard was hard-packed dirt, with a few flowers, scratching hens, and a row of plastic buckets under the eaves, and the stone barns and house huddled around it in a friendly, haphazard way. We could have our dinner in the garden behind the house, the farmwife explained, and our room would be next to the garden, in the oldest part of the building.
We followed our hostess silently through the low-beamed farm kitchen and into a little wing where the cooking help might once have slept. The bedroom was fitted up with two little beds on opposite walls, I was relieved to see, and a great wooden clothes chest. The washroom next door had a painted toilet and sink. Everything was immaculately clean, the curtains starchy, the ancient needlework on one wall bleached with sunlight. I went into the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water while Barley paid the woman.
When I came out, Barley suggested a walk; it would be an hour before she could have our dinner ready. I didn’t like to leave the sheltering arms of the farmyard at first, but outside the lane was cool under spreading trees, and we walked by the ruins of what must have been a very fine house. Barley pulled himself over the fence and I followed. The stones had tumbled down, making a map of the original walls, and one remaining dilapidated tower gave the place a look of past grandeur. There was some hay in the half-open barn, as if that building was still used for storage. A great beam had fallen in among the stalls.
Barley sat down in the ruins and looked at me. “Well, I see you’re furious,” he said provokingly. “You don’t mind my saving you from immediate danger, but not if it’s going to inconvenience you afterward.”
His nastiness took my breath away for a moment. “How dare you,” I said finally, and walked away among the stones. I heard Barley get up and follow me.
“Would you have wanted to stay on that train?” he asked in a slightly more civil voice.
“Of course not.” I kept my face turned from him. “But you know as well as I do that my father may already be at Saint-Matthieu.”
“But Dracula, or whoever he is, isn’t there yet.”
“He’s a day ahead of us now,” I retorted, looking across the fields. The village church showed above a distant row of poplars; it was all as serene as a painting, missing only the goats or cows.
“In the first place,” Barley said (and I hated him for his didactic tone), “we don’t know who that was on the train. Maybe it wasn’t the villain himself. He has his minions, according to your father’s letters, right?”
“Even worse,” I said. “If that was one of his minions, then maybe he’s at Saint-Matthieu already himself.”