Kate had never ridden in a sidecar . . . had only ridden on a motorcycle a few times with Tom . . . and found that it was a trick to fold oneself into the small space. The windscreen was chipped and discolored with age, the leather seat cracked and taped in a hundred places. When she had finally folded her legs well enough to fit in the eggshaped pod, O'Rourke handed her a blanket and pair of goggles. “Put these on.”
Kate adjusted the goggles, imagining how she looked with her soaked peasant coat and scarf and these absurd things. Even the goggles were semiopaque with age. “Where did you get all this?” she asked.
The priest was adjusting his own goggles and a leather flying helmet that made Kate want to giggle. “Father Stoicescu had offered this the other day,” he said. “One of the visiting fathers had purchased this while he was here and left it in a garage near the university. I didn't see a need for it until today.” He turned a key, fiddled with a fuel valve on the side of the ancient machine, and leaped up to come down on a pedal.. Nothing happened.
“Are you sure you know how to drive this thing?” Kate felt exposed and ridiculous sitting along the curb in the sidecar. She expected the Securitate Mercedes to arrive any second.
“I used to have one before I went to 'Nam,” muttered O'Rourke, fiddling with another lever on the side. He stood again, rose, dropped his weight on the pedal. Again nothing. “Shit on a stick,” grumbled the priest.
Kate raised an eyebrow but decided to say nothing.
O'Rourke tried again and was rewarded with a few pops from the cylinder, a backfire, and silence. “Damn cheap gas,” he said and fiddled with something above the engine.
“Did you say that you knew where the ceremony was tonight?” Kate said softly. It had begun to rain again and there were no pedestrians or traffic at the moment, but she still felt the urge to whisper.
O'Rourke paused in his fiddling to lean over and pull a map out of an elastic compartment on the inside of the sidecar. “Look,” he said.
Kate noticed it was a Kummerly + Frey roadmap, scale 1:1000000, and then she unfolded it, realized that half of it was of Bulgaria, folded it to have central Romania revealed, and saw the red pencil around several cities. “Brasov, Tirgoviste, Sighisoara, and Sibiu,” she said. “They're all circled. Which one is it . . . and why?”
O'Rourke tried the pedal again and the machine roared to life. He revved the throttle a few times until it was running smoothly, then throttled back and leaned her way. His finger stabbed down on Tirgoviste, a city about fifty miles northwest of Bucharest. “These are all cities of special importance to the strigoi Family,” he said. “I think they'll be the sites for the next four nights of the ceremony.”
“How do you know?”
O'Rourke glanced over his shoulder and pulled out into the street with a roar and a cloud of exhaust fumes. Kate hung on to the edge of the sidecar with her free hand. She found the sensation of riding in the low pod singularly unpleasant. “How do you know?” she repeated in a shout.
“Let me explain later,” he yelled back. He turned into traffic on Bulevardul Gheorghe GheorghiuDej, then turned north again on Bulevardul Nicolae Balcescu through the center of town.
“Just tell me how you know that Tirgoviste is the place for tonight's ceremony,” demanded Kate, leaning closer to him as they paused for a red light just past the Intercontinental Hotel.
O'Rourke rubbed his cheek. Kate thought that he looked very little like a priest with his beard, helmet, and goggles. “Father Stoicescu mentioned the Tirgoviste monastery I visited two days ago,” he said. The light changed and they moved ahead with the thin traffic. It was still drizzling. “There's no phone contact with them.”
“So?” Kate did not have to shout as long as they were moving this slowly.
“They were arrested,” he said. “Securitate just rounded them up. After all these centuries of being tolerated by the authorities, the monastery was suddenly cleaned out. One of the monks was out shopping for groceries in the marketplace, returned just in time to see his fellow monks loaded aboard police vans, and managed to get into Bucharest to inform the Franciscan headquarters here.”
“I don't understand,” shouted Kate. They had passed the Triumphal Arch in the north part of town and were headed past Herastrau Park on soseaua Kiseleff. To their right she could see only bare chestnut trees and brown grass. There were no black Mercedes behind them.
“The Franciscans know of the strigoi,” O'Rourke shouted back. “The Tirgoviste monastery has monitored the strigoi Family for centuries. If the Securitate is rounding up the priests . . . even for a short detention . . . it may be because there's something happening in Tirgoviste tonight that they don't want us to know about.”
Kate said nothing but felt little confidence in this analysis. “What about Lucian?” she shouted over the engine roar. She noticed that they had changed from the Kiseleff Road to one labeled “Chitilei.”
O'Rourke leaned her way without taking his eyes off the road and traffic ahead. “If he's free and if his Order of the Dragon is real . . . or even if it's not . . . the best bet on our meeting up is being at the next site for the ceremony. “
Kate used her hand to rub her goggles free of a film of muddy water. She could imagine what her face looked like. Again, the logic left something to be desired, but she had no better suggestion. They had just passed the last row of Stalinist apartments and the ring roads at the edge of the city when the motorcycle engine pitch dropped and O'Rourke began to brake. Kate saw the cars backed up ahead a moment after she saw the signs pointing straight ahead to PITESTI and TIRGOVISTE.
“Accident?” she said. Police flashers were visible a block ahead.
' O'Rourke stood on the pedals. “Shit,” he whispered to himself. Then, “Sorry.”
“What is it?”
“A roadblock. Police seem to be inspecting papers.”
Kate looked behind her and saw the traffic backing up there as well. Three cars back there was a black Mercedes with four dark figures in it.
Chapter Twenty-nine
THE police ahead, not content to wait until the traffic reached their roadblock, were moving down the line of cars, peering in windows and demanding papers. O'Rourke revved the motorcycle and began turning around on the narrow stretch of road.
Kate tugged at his sleeve.
“I see the Mercedes,” he said, the loose strap of his flying helmet flapping. “We'll just have to risk it.”
Kate used both hands to clutch the rim of the sidecar, lowered her head so that little more than her scarf and goggles were visible, and peered to her left as they roared back the way they had come.
The four men in the Mercedes did not glance up as they passed. Looking back, Kate could see the Mercedes sweep out of line and drive on the left side of the road to the barricades. The police saluted and let it through. Other cars and a few motorcycles were turning back from the roadblock.
O'Rourke pulled over when they were in the fringe of the city again, parking near some workers' apartments. Kate studied the grim Stalinist buildings, each with its complement of empty shops on the ground floor, while the priest studied the map. She shifted her legs in the tight pod and turned back to him. “What next?”
“Maybe take the main road to Pitesti,” he said. “Take E 70 to this village . . . Petesti, south of Gaesti . . . and then follow 72 north to Tirgoviste.”
“What if they have E 70 blocked?” asked Kate.
O'Rourke tucked the map back in its elastic slot. “We'll deal with that when it happens.”
E 70 was blocked. The line ran back almost two miles. The priest understood enough Romanian to decipher the grumbles of truck drivers walking back to their rigs: the police were examining papers at the point the street left the city and became a fourlane highway to Pitesti.