“I sat in suspense for a few long minutes while Helen read in silence, and at last she looked up. There was a spark of excitement in her face; her eyes shone. ‘Listen to this-as well as I can translate.’ And here, I reproduce for you an exact translation, which I have kept these twenty years in my papers:

They rode to the gates, up to the great city.

They rode to the great city from the land of death.

“We are men of God, men from the Carpathians.

We are monks and holy men, but we bring only evil news.

We bring news of a plague to the great city.

Serving our master, we come weeping for his death.“

They rode up to the gates and the city wept with them

When they came in.

“A shudder went through me at this weird verse, but I had to object. ‘This is very general. The Carpathians are mentioned, but they must show up in dozens or even hundreds of old texts. And ”the great city“ could mean anything. Maybe it means the City of God, the kingdom of heaven.’

“Helen shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘For the people of the Balkans and Central Europe-Christian and Muslim-the great city has always been Constantinople, unless you count the people who made pilgrimages to Jerusalem or Mecca over the centuries. And the mention of a plague and monks-it seems to me somehow connected to the story in Selim Aksoy’s passage. Couldn’t the master they mentioned be Vlad Tepes himself?’

“‘I suppose,’ I said doubtfully, ‘but I wish we had more to go on. How old do you think this song is?’

“‘That’s always very hard to judge in the case of folk lyrics.’ Helen looked thoughtful. ‘This volume was printed in 1790, as you can see, but there is no publisher’s name or place-name in it. Folk songs can survive two or three or four hundred years easily, so these could be centuries older than the book. The song could date back to the late fifteenth century, or it could be even older, which would defeat our purposes.’

“‘The woodcut is curious,’ I said, looking more closely.

“‘This book is full of them,’ Helen murmured. ‘I remember being struck by them when I first looked through it. This one seems to have nothing to do with the poem-you’d think it would have been illustrated by a praying monk or a high-walled city, something like that.’

“‘Yes,’ I said slowly, ‘but look at it up close.’ We bent over the tiny illustration, our heads nearly touching above it. ‘I wish we had a magnifying glass,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t it look to you as if this forest-or thicket, whatever it is-has things hidden in it? There’s no great city, but if you look carefully here you can see a building like a church, with a cross on top of a dome, and next to it -’

“‘Some little animal.’ She narrowed her eyes. Then, ‘My God,’ she said. ‘It’s a dragon.’

“I nodded, and we hung over it, hardly breathing. The tiny rough shape was dreadfully familiar-outspread wings, tail curling in a minute loop. I didn’t need to get out for comparison the book stored in my briefcase. ‘What does this mean?’ The sight of it, even in miniature, made my heart pound uncomfortably.

“‘Wait.’ Helen was peering at the woodcut, her face an inch from the page. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘I can hardly see it, but there is a word here, I think, spaced out among the trees, one letter at a time. They’re very small, but I’m sure these are letters.’

“‘Drakulya?’ I said, as quietly as I could.

“She shook her head. ‘No. It could be a name, though-Ivi-Ivireanu. I don’t know what that is. It is not a word I have ever seen, but ”u“ is a common ending for Romanian names. What on earth is this about?’

“I sighed. ‘I don’t know, but I think your instinct is right-this page has some connection with Dracula, otherwise the dragon wouldn’t be there. Not that dragon, anyway.’

“We glanced helplessly at each other. The room, so pleasant and inviting half an hour before, looked dismal to me now, a mausoleum of forgotten knowledge.

“‘The librarians know nothing about this book,’ Helen said. ‘I remember asking them about it, because it is such a rarity.’

“‘Well, we can’t solve this either, then,’ I said at last. ‘Let’s at least take a translation with us, so we know what we’ve seen.’ I took down her dictation on a sheet of notebook paper and made a hasty sketch of the woodcut. Helen was looking at her watch.

“‘I must return to the hotel,’ she said.

“‘Me, too, or I’ll miss Hugh James.’ We gathered our belongings and replaced the book on its shelf with all the reverence due a relic.

“Perhaps it was the turmoil of imagination into which the poem and its illustration had thrown me, or perhaps I was more tired than I’d realized from travel, staying up late at Aunt Éva’s restaurant, and lecturing to a crowd of strangers. When I entered my room, it took me a long moment to register what I saw there, and a longer one to conclude that Helen might be seeing the same sight in her own quarters two floors above. Then I suddenly feared for her safety and took flight for the stairs without stopping to examine anything. My room had been searched, nook and cranny, drawer and closet and bedclothes, and every article I possessed had been tossed about, damaged, even torn by hands not merely hasty but malicious.”

Chapter 42

“But can’t you get the police to help? This place is overflowing with them, it seems.‘ Hugh James broke a piece of bread in half and took a hearty bite. ’What a dreadful thing to have happen in a foreign hotel.‘

“‘We’ve called the police,’ I assured him. ‘At least I think we have, because the hotel clerk did it for us. He said no one could come until late tonight or early tomorrow morning, and not to touch anything. He’s put us in new rooms.’

“‘What? Do you mean Miss Rossi’s room was ransacked, too?’ Hugh’s great eyes grew rounder. ‘Was anyone else in the hotel hit?’

“‘I doubt it,’ I said grimly.

“We were seated at an outdoor restaurant in Buda, not far from Castle Hill, where we could look out over the Danube toward the Parliament House on the Pest side. It was still very light and the evening sky had set up a blue-and-rose shimmer on the water. Hugh had picked out the spot-it was one of his favorites, he said. Budapestians of all ages strolled the street in front of us, many of them pausing at the balustrades above the river to look at the lovely scene, as if they, too, could never get enough of it. Hugh had ordered several national dishes for me to try, and we had just settled in with the ubiquitous golden-crusted bread and a bottle of Tokay, a famous wine from the northeastern corner of Hungary, as he explained. We’d already dispensed with the preliminaries-our universities, my erstwhile dissertation (he chuckled when I told him the scope of Professor Sándor’s misconceptions about my work), Hugh’s research on Balkan history and his forthcoming book on Ottoman cities in Europe.

“‘Was anything stolen?’ Hugh filled my glass.

“‘Nothing,’ I said glumly. ‘Of course, I hadn’t left my money there, or any of my-valuables-and the passports are at the front desk, or maybe at the police station, for all I know.’

“‘What were they looking for, then?’ Hugh toasted me briefly and took a sip.

“‘It’s a very, very long story.’ I sighed. ‘But it fits in pretty nicely with some other things we need to talk about.’

“He nodded. ‘All right. Unto the breach, then.’

“‘If you’ll take your turn, as well.’

“‘Of course.’

“I drank half my glass for fortification and began at the beginning. I wouldn’t have needed the wine to erase any doubts about telling Hugh James all of Rossi’s story; if I didn’t tell him everything, I might not learn everything he knew himself. He listened in silence, with obvious absorption, except when I mentioned Rossi’s decision to conduct research in Istanbul, when he jumped. ‘By Jove,’ he said. ‘I’d thought of going there myself. Going back, I mean-I’ve been there twice, but never to look for Dracula.’