“But your father really believes that there’s a nest of strigoi here in New York?”

  “He is completely sure. He found some letters from the nineteenth century and also some bills of lading from a shipping company. Some of the letters were written in a kind of code, but it was not a difficult code to break.”

  She poured me another glass of wine. I didn’t really want one, especially since it tasted like sweaty leather watch-bands. But it was well past 2:00 in the morning and even though I felt exhausted and bruised and more than ready for bed, my brain was still jumping. Maybe the wine would act as a sedative, and maybe it would stop me from dreaming, too. Believe me, the last thing I wanted to do tonight was dream.

  Jenica said, “In 1869, two of the richest men in New York were Charles Redding, from New England, and Gheorghe Vlad, from Cluj-Napoca, in Romania.”

  “Sure, I’ve heard of them. Well, Charles Redding, anyhow. He founded Redding’s Department Store, didn’t he? And he built some incredible Greek-style mansion right next door to the Astors on Fifth Avenue.”

  “That’s right. Charles Redding and Gheorghe Vlad were business partners. Together they made millions of dollars by importing luxury goods from Europe and the Middle East—women’s fashions and furniture and carpets and glassware. Charles Redding was satisfied to stay in New York. But Gheorghe Vlad believed that they could become a hundred times richer if they opened department stores all over America—first in Denver, in Colorado, and then others in California. He traveled to Denver, and found a site for a new store, and then he sent back to New York for his wife and his six young children to join him. On their way across the Plains, though, his family was attacked by a war party of Teton Sioux, and all of them were tortured and killed, even his newly born baby.

  “Vlad swore an oath in front of God that he would have his revenge on the Indians, and that he would wipe out the Sioux—men, women and children, just as they had wiped his family out. He took his family’s remains back to Romania, and arranged a traditional funeral. But my father discovered that he arranged something else, too. He went to a village near Borsa in Transylvania, and arranged to take two hundred coffins from the vaults of the local churches, where they had been sealed since 1767 for safekeeping. According to the letters that my father found, these coffins contained strigoi, the undead, as well as a special iron sarcophagus containing one of the svarcolaci.

  “Gheorghe Vlad’s intention was to ship them to America, and then to have them carried to Sioux territory, where he would revive them, and they would exterminate every single Sioux they could find.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “That was a hell of a plan. But even in those days, how did he think that he was going to get away with it? I mean, anybody who wanted to cart two hundred dead bodies into Indian country wouldn’t exactly have been inconspicuous, would he?”

  “Of course. But there is some documentary evidence that Gheorghe Vlad was actually given support by the U.S. military, and even an offer of wagons. The Army saw it as an opportunity to defeat one of the most warlike of all the Indian tribes without having to risk any casualties among their own troops.”

  “But letting all those strigoi loose—that was a pretty risky idea, don’t you think? Once they’d wiped out the Indians, who were they going to feed on then? They would still have been looking for a regular diet of human blood, wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t know for certain,” Jenica admitted. “Maybe Gheorghe Vlad had thought of what he was going to do with all of those strigoi once he had taken his revenge. Maybe he hadn’t. But you have to understand that he would have had very strong control over them, through the Vampire Gatherer. The Vampire Gatherer is a dead vampire, remember. He would not have been able to come back to life until Gheorghe Vlad had performed the appropriate rituals to revive him, and once he was revived, he would have had to obey Gheorghe Vlad’s wishes, whatever they were. It is like the story from the Arabian Nights of the genie in the lamp. Whoever revives the Vampire Gatherer controls the vampires.”

  “But Gheorghe Vlad didn’t wipe out the Sioux, did he? I mean, the U.S. Army did it in the end.”

  “Well, you are right. The ship carrying the coffins arrived safely in New York harbor . . . my father found a written record of that. Unfortunately for him, Gheorghe Vlad died of a stroke an hour before the ship docked. So here were all these coffins in the ship’s hold, but nobody knew what was in them, or why they had been shipped all the way from Romania. Apart, that is, from the clerics in Borsa, in Romania, and two or three senior officers in the U.S. Army. Once GheorgheVlad was dead, of course, nobody from the Army was going to come forward to requisition the coffins. Even if any of their officers had known how to revive the strigoi, which they didn’t, somebody in authority would have asked what they wanted them for, and they wouldn’t have been prepared to admit that they were planning on genocide.”

  “So what happened to the coffins?”

  “Charles Redding ordered them to be stored in the basement of Redding’s Department Store until he could find out why his partner had brought them across the Atlantic. He thought that maybe they were the remains of Gheorghe Vlad’s relatives, and that Vlad had wanted them all to be buried in America, where he could pay his respects to them and tend their graves. He sent letters of inquiry to Bucharest, but he never received any replies, and only five months later, in the winter of 1871, he himself died, of pneumonia.

  “Redding’s Department Store almost went bankrupt after his death, and it was bought by Green’s, and then by Bloomberg’s, and nobody knows what happened to the coffins. Presumably they were bricked up and buried in the foundations when Redding’s Department Store was demolished in 1907.”

  “But now it looks like they’ve showed up?”

  “Yes. My father and I, we both believe that these strigoi have come from Gheorghe Vlad’s nest. But there is a big question. Who has revived them? They must have been discovered by somebody who knew how to bring the Vampire Gatherer back to life.”

  “There can’t be many people who would know how to do that.”

  “Of course. But we have no ideas who it is. Somebody who knows old Romanian legends perhaps.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “I don’t know. If we want to stop this epidemic, we have to find out where is the nest, and where is the Vampire Gatherer, and who has revived him.”

  “And why he revived him, surely? I mean, whoever knew how to do it, they must have had some idea of what the consequences would be.”

  “Of course. So we are looking perhaps for a terrorist. Or maybe somebody worse than a terrorist. A complete madman, maybe.”

  “That’s encouraging.”

  I tried my cell phone again, but it was still dead. I listened, but for now the city seemed to be weirdly silent. No sirens, no helicopters, no traffic.

  “Do you want to come to bed?” asked Jenica.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You can sleep in my father’s bed if you wish. There is nothing more we can do tonight.”

  “Oh, right. That would be great. And I could really use a toothbrush, if you have one. My mouth feels like I’ve been French-kissing an armadillo.”

  Jenica smiled. “That is Romanian wine. They say it gives a man such breath that he can knock down a house made of brick.”

  I was woken up by somebody touching my shoulder. I thought it was Karen at first, and I batted her away.

  “Sleep,” I protested.

  “Mr. Harry, I have brought you tea.”

  I opened one eye and tried to focus. Jenica was standing over me, wearing a silky fuchsia-pink robe, very loosely tied. I lifted my head and looked around, and realized that I was lying on her father’s cement-slab four-poster bed, in his gloomy museum of a bedroom, and that I was fully dressed, apart from my shoes.

  I sat up. I could see myself in a blotchy mirror on the opposite side of the room. My hair was sticking up like Erskine the Mad, and my left cheek was embossed with Oriental patterns from the cushion that I had used as a pillow. There was a hole in my fawn-colored sock, and my big toe was poking out of it.

  “What time is it?” I asked her.

  “Six.”

  “Six? Oh, wonderful. Almost three-and-a-half hours’ sleep.”

  “Yes, but now the sun is bright we can begin to search for the strigoi.”

  Strigoi. It was the crack of dawn and she wanted to go looking for strigoi. She placed a glass on the table beside me. “Would you like breakfast?” she asked me. “I have yogurt and honey and farina with dried apricots.”

  “Oh, no. I’m fine, thanks. I make it a rule not to put anything solid into my mouth until I’m officially awake, and I’m not officially awake until noon.”

  I picked up the glass and took a sip of tea. I’m not a tea person, as a rule. As far as I’m concerned, a drink should (a) wake you up or (b) nourish you or (c) knock you unconscious, which is why I stick to strong black coffee and Guinness and Jack Daniel’s. Tea is just leafy water, and you can find leafy water in the woods.

  Jenica looked pleased with herself. “I have looked through my father’s library and found his book of all the svarcolaci. It was compiled by a special brotherhood of priests in the late 1700s, the Black Purifiers. In those days, vampires were spreading through Transylvania and Wallachia faster than a plague, and so the bishops of the Romanian Orthodox Church demanded a purge of every svarcolaci and strigoi and moroi.

  “The Black Purifiers searched every cellar and every steeple, and they impaled every vampire they found, or beheaded them, or burned them alive; or else they sealed them up in caskets and sarcophagi. The book has the pictures and names of every known svarcolaci that they managed to track down.”

  “That’s terrific. Maybe you can give me a couple of minutes for my eyes to focus, and then I can take a look at it.”

  “You would like more tea? It is bison grass tea. It is supposed to make men have the more virility.”

  I peered short-sightedly into the depths of Jenica’s cleavage and thought that the last thing I wanted right now was to have the more virility.

  “I hate to be ungrateful,” I said, “but do you think there’s any chance of some coffee?”

  “Of course. Wash, and I will make you coffee. I have laid out towels.”

  I limped into the Moorish bathroom and climbed into the shower. It had a baffling array of old-fashioned faucets, and I blasted myself three times with freezing cold water before I managed to adjust it to a heavy, tepid downpour, the kind where you have to hold your breath to stop yourself from drowning.

  I was toweling myself dry when Jenica walked into the bathroom as unself-consciously as if we were married. “You would like cake?”

  “No, no. Just coffee.”

  “Always I used to think that it was not really true, about the strigoi in New York, even though my father was so sure. Who would believe that it was true? Who would believe that we would have to hunt the strigoi, you and I?”

  “We don’t have to hunt them, you know. We could always barricade ourselves in and wait until they’ve gone away.”

  “You are losing your nerve, Mr. Harry?”

  “Of course not. I’m just saying that we’re not actually obliged to go out looking for them. Nobody’s going to think any the less of us if we don’t.”

  Jenica shook her head. “We will think less of us. Besides, the strigoi will never go away until they have drunk the last drop of human blood in the city. Then, this will only be a city of the night, and there will be no people here by day. It happened before, in Tirgu Mures, in Romania. It can happen here.”

  The trouble was, I knew she was right. It seemed impossible that the most important city in the United States was being overrun by blood-sucking creatures from the Dark Ages. In fact, it seemed insane. But on September 11, 2001, New York’s two tallest buildings had been brought down by a handful of nut jobs armed with nothing more than box cutters, and more than three thousand of its citizens killed, and on the evening of September 10, who could have imagined anything more insane than that?

  It’s always hard to believe that anybody can hate you that much, for no reason at all. Once I was dressed, I went through to the living room and found Jenica poring through her father’s book. It was a very thin book, bound in cracked tan leather that had the texture of dried human skin, with some kind of mystic symbol on the front, an oval with an eye in the middle. On each page there was a finely rendered woodcut of a man’s face, and a few paragraphs of dense handwritten text.

  “Here is your coffee,” said Jenica, and passed me a tiny blue porcelain cup that she must have burgled from a doll’s house. I peered into it and it was only a third full. But it had a rich nutty aroma, and when I tipped it back and swallowed it, I felt as if I had instantly grown a thick black beard, and I was quite surprised when I didn’t start talking like James Earl Jones.

  “Perhaps soon your Singing Rock will give you the name of your Vampire Gatherer,” said Jenica.

  “I guess I could try asking him, although I doubt if he will. I think there’s a strong possibility that he might have given it to me already and I just haven’t realized it, and he’s kind of huffy about doing things twice.”

  Jenica said, “It is most important for us to have this name. We need to know which of the svarcolaci we are looking for, because a different ritual is necessary to dismiss each one of them. This ritual is what you would call the disenchantment, and it is supposed to force the svarcolaci to return to their coffins and to seal them up until they are summoned again.”

  I peered at the page she was pointing at, although I couldn’t understand any of the words, let alone pronounce them. “Ci, ii dracul cu dracoaica, striga cu strigoiul, deochiu cu deochitorul, pocitura cu pocitorul, potca cu potcoiul. . . .”

  But then I looked more closely at the woodcut. It depicted a man, smiling, with his eyes closed. Around his face was a decorative border of toads and dragonflies and tiny flowers. Although the man’s face was different, and the border was different, the design bore a strikingly close resemblance to the medallion that I had taken from Ted Busch. I wedged my hand into my back pants pocket and dragged the medallion out.

  “Here,” I told Jenica, holding it up. “I took this from the young guy I was telling you about last night.”

  Jenica held it in her hand, and peered at it closely. Then she looked at me with those dark, liquid eyes as if I was the village idiot. “Why did you not show me this before?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know. I forgot about it.”

  “How could you forget about it? This is one of the svarcolaci.”

  “Well, I know that now.”

  She turned it over. “The inscription on the back, this is a kind of protection. From vampires and from a home with vampires, from those who cast the evil eye, keep me safe.”

  “The poor guy said that it was given to him by a Russian-looking girl.”

  “Hmnh,” said Jenica, dismissively. “I would be sure that she was Romanian, probably, and she was the strigoica who infected him. You see, she would have given him the medallion to keep him safe from other vampires who wanted to cut his throat and drink his blood. She must have liked him, and wanted him to become strigoi like her, one of her lovers.”

  “How about the face?”

  “We have to look through the book.”

  I stood close beside her as she carefully turned each page. There were over eighty svarcolaci and most of them were very similar—handsome, in a Slavic way, thin-faced and pointy-nosed, although some were very swarthy-looking and some were sporting huge moustaches and enormous beards. Maybe they’d been drinking Jenica’s coffee. Each svarcolaci, however, had a different decorative border drawn around his face—everything from songbirds to razors to mulberry leaves.

  “Here,” said Jenica, suddenly. “This, I am thinking, is our Vampire Gatherer.”

  I was thinking that she was right. The man in the woodcut was wearing a striped turban wound around his head, and one elaborate earring, but it was definitely the same man whose likeness was embossed on Ted Busch’s medallion. The border was the same, too—snakes intertwined with each other, and stars. His expression was grim, as if he were seriously pissed that we had discovered him.

  The name below the picture was Vasile Lup. Jenica immediately covered it with her hand and said, “Do not read this out loud. This could be the name that your spirit guide was warning you about.”

  “My lips are sealed, believe me.”

  Jenica took her hand away and began to translate. “His name means The Wolf. It says here that he was a cousin of Vlad Tepes, known as Vlad the Impaler, or Draculea.”

  “You’re kidding me. Draculea as in Dracula?”

  “Well, of course. But Draculea himself was only a man of very extreme cruelty, the voivode of Wallachia.”

  “The what of where?”

  “He was like a prince, in the southern part of Romania. But he was never a vampire.”

  “But this guy was?”

  “That’s right.” Jenica’s fingers traced along the thick black lines of Romanian script. “It says here, ‘Late in September 1457 when he was hunting in the mountains for wild boar’—well, I shall say ‘The Wolf’ each time, instead of his real name—‘The Wolf became hopelessly lost, and he was forced to spend several nights sleeping in the forest. Each night as soon as it grew dark he was approached by swarms of strigoica.’ These were the female vampires who were always looking for male lovers, so that they could turn them into strigoi.

  “ ‘There were too many strigoica and The Wolf’s efforts to keep them at bay were hopeless. He became one of the undead himself. When he eventually found his way back to Draculea’s castle he would say nothing of what had happened to him, although after his return from the forest he was never seen abroad during the day and he became very secretive in his behavior.’ ”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. I think I’d be pretty secretive if I was dead.”

  Jenica frowned at me. She was so serious about all of this strigoi stuff that it was hard not to believe that it was all true—even though, hello? we were talking about Dracula here, and real live dead people who were five-and-a-half centuries old.