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  He prepared to jump. Below, the bellowing wind still fought the wolves–now entirely transformed–while from above, almost unnoticed in the confusion, the partisans rained down their bullets. If only they had silver, the Rat thought, perhaps they would have made a difference.

  But this was the war. What silver there was had gone, secreted away or taken along on a pilgrimage of death.

  He jumped.

  The wind hit him like an iron bar. He stumbled, lashed out at a wolf who was too close.

  This was going to be fun. The bullets stopped as he landed, and now he had the square to himself. He felt the presence at his back quieten, shifting its attention to this creature who had fallen into its own private grievance.

  Then, "Vrolog!" the voices screamed. Vampire. There was a hint of amusement in its combined voice.

  The Rat turned, lashed out again, drew blood. His nails became long, sharp spikes. His teeth extended, fangs extruding. The world was painted red in front of his eyes; right here, right now, there was only one thing that mattered. Kill.

  He looked for Mengale. Scenting the man, he followed a bloody path through the wolves, lashing, biting, hitting. The wolves, already weakened by the wind and the bullets, did not fight as hard as the first one, back in Brasov; by the time he reached the truck, where his senses told him Mengale was hiding, he had left the corpses of three young men behind him.

  Seeing nothing but revenge in front of his eyes, the Rat broke the door to the truck as if it were a toy, and in one fluid motion threw himself inside.

  The bullets struck him as he was airborne, slamming into him with hot, searing pain, throwing him to the floor. Through blooded eyes the Rat saw Mengale watching him levelly, carefully re-loading a revolver with gleaming bullets. Inside, the noise of the storm abated somewhat, and the Rat had a sudden feeling of unreal serenity, as if he were encased in a small, comforting cocoon, a metallic womb–or a coffin.

  "It is fascinating," Mengale remarked, "the phenomenon of silver poisoning in vampires. I have had occasion to experiment on the more, shall we say, unwelcome members of the populace–communists, Jews, Gypsies–you know the type," he smiled casually at the Rat, "who happened to possess these particular diseases, but so few! I'm so glad I've found you." He aimlessly played with a couple of remaining bullets in his palm. "Teeth," he said. "Jewish teeth from my own foundry. Ironic, really, don't you think?" He levelled the revolver in the Rat's face. "It's been an extraordinary pleasure. It really has."

  He pulled the trigger.

  In the moment before the bullet erupted, the Rat sensed a sudden calm. Ancient instincts took hold of his body, metamorphosing his physical shape. As his body began assuming, arduously, the rat shape, he rolled. In the moment the bullet fired, the source of the calm outside hit the truck with an unnatural force.

  Sound came crashing back around them as the supersonic wave of the force tore through the truck and sent it flying in the air, propelling it upward and away. The Rat, half in human form still and half a rodent, slid helplessly down through the open doors, falling with a hard, painful impact to the ground. Above him he could see the truck, driven by the winds like a toy in the hand of capricious children, sailing over the market square and beyond the town's walls.

  For a long moment the Rat followed the movement of the truck until, from far away, came the sound of a reverberating crash.

  Then, at last, he passed out.

  Bucharest, September 1945

  The Rat stood in the shadow of the great train station, looking dubiously at the newly purchased ticket in his hand.

  It had taken a long time for his wounds to heal following the disastrous episode at Tirgoviste. Only months later, after his faithful partisans had operated on him yet again, pulling out silver bullets, preparing a shallow grave for the second time, scouring for blood, did he ask about Mengale.

  There was no body found.

  Tirgoviste's market square was nearly destroyed. The corpses of the Wolfkommando remained, and their bodies were carted to a common grave and set alight. The apparition of the old kings, of Tepes himself, had disappeared, and Castle Bran was once again inhabited by the living remnants of the royal family, the Queen and her children, cowering against the might of politics. Soon, they too would flee, and nothing would remain but a tourist attraction.

  As the Rat languished in his makeshift grave, Romania turned. In August 1944, the Red Army marched into Bucharest, and by the beginning of 1945 Hitler was in his bunker in Berlin, surrounded on all sides by the allied forces.

  It was the end.

  And, the Rat had decided, it was also a beginning.

  Draped in his new clothes, dark and unassuming, holding an English cigarette between his teeth, the Rat searched for the platform of the train to the coast.

  The Old World was dying, its dark forces powerless in the face of what later philosophers would call the banality of evil. Humanity could provide more evil, more pain and suffering and humiliation, than any legend up in the Carpathians. It brought about a cold, efficient mass murder, and it had done so sitting civilly around the table, drinking tea and listening to orchestral music.

  And the Old World was dying.

  Decisive now, the Rat threw down the cigarette to the floor, ground it with his foot and climbed onboard the train.

  He was going to a new world. The New World.

  The train, with a bellow of steam, pulled out of the station, heading for the coast and the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

  And in the small port in Greece, the Rat had decided, he would follow the rest of the war's survivors, the rest of the uprooted and the homeless.

  In the words of so many before him, he would take ship to America.

  The Rat settled down in the narrow chair, leaning against the window. He opened his coat pocket and took out the by now bruised and worn book, Stoker's book, and with the immigrant's hunger for the language of his new homeland, began re-reading the familiar passages as behind him the Carpathian Mountains disappeared slowly from view.

  Uganda

  The following is a collection of documents found in the archives of the Wiener Library, London. What follows next are copies of two diary entries in what appears to be Theodore Herzl's handwriting. In the first, the paper is brittle and badly smudged, almost as if it had been in a fire. The edges are roughly torn. It is dated five months before Herzl's death. The second is the most well-known of his diary entries.

  #

  January 15th, 1904

  He is known as the Rabbi, though if he had ever been one, that fact is lost in the distant past. He is a noted criminal, a man of arcane learning and appetites who evokes unsavoury stories from those who knew him. He is not one of us, yet he could be sympathetic to our cause...I would...with my life, but can I trust him with all of our lives?

  I shall...tomorrow.

  #

  September 3rd, 1897.

  Were I to sum up the Basle Congress in one word–which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly–it would be this: at Basle I have founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will know it. The foundation of a State lies in the will of the people for a State.

  #

  From a transcript of an interview conducted by A. (a scrawled footnote in blue ink indicates he is a possible member of Mossad, Israel's secret service) with a man identified as The Rabbi (R). Some lines are unintelligible due to water damage.

  A: How did it start?

  R: I was living in Paris at the time. (Pause). You know what I was doing there.

  A: I'm not sure I do. I understood you were running some sort of a gambling scheme to do with illegal ring fights?

  R: That's essentially correct.

  A: There were wild stories at the time that you were using golems. (Laughs).

  R: (Laughs).

  A: Did you know him?

  R: We've met before.

 
; A: I was not aware of that. Under what circumstances?

  R: (Unintelligible)

  A: So he trusted you.

  R: I wouldn't say that. (Pause). No, he didn't trust me. But he had no choice.

  #

  The following comes from a microfilm of a notebook marked Rabbi's Journal, January 16th, 1904

  A cold, clear day. I walked along the left bank in the early morning fog, watching the Seine. Notre Dame looked monstrous in the morning, like an ogre in the process of turning into stone. The place had a slimy, organic feel to it. I'd often wondered if it could be reanimated. Or perhaps it was constructed as a sort of uncompleted golem, left disused at the last moment before the placing of the shem.

  By the time I arrived at the bookshop, the sun was fully formed in the sky and some of the fog had dispersed. I was about to open the door when I noticed a coach had drawn to a halt a little further from me. Steam rose from the horses' nostrils as though they had been driven hard to come here.

  I recognised him as soon as he stepped off the coach. He stepped briskly, though his eyes were tired and there was a gauntness about him. I said nothing. We didn’t speak, then.

  I opened the door and he followed me inside. I sat him down and prepared tea. The shop was cold in the mornings. I lit the oven and waited for the warmth to spread.

  "You have been to Africa before," he said, breaking the silence at last. He was always a direct man.

  "Your information is always reliable," I said.

  "What were you doing there?"

  "Do you not know?"

  "Tell me."

  I put cinnamon and honey into the teapot and stirred slowly, the way you stir old memories. "I followed that ass, Stanley," I said reluctantly.

  "That was, what, in 1871?"

  "I don't remember exactly."

  "That was quite a journey. I recall reading about it. Seven hundred miles into the interior, and back?"

  "I was younger then."

  And Stanley had his porters, all two hundred of them, while I walked behind, unseen and with nothing but myself to keep me alive. Stanley even had porters to carry his big brass bath for him. I washed in streams and in the rain, or didn't wash at all.

  "Were you there since?"

  "A few times."

  "Where?"

  "Zanzibar, the east coast." I poured the steaming tea into two mugs and added sugar. "I was with the Zulus in the Second Boer War."

  "What were you doing?"

  "I was studying with an Inyanga. Look, is this leading somewhere? I have a business to run."

  He laughed. "Not many book buyers this time of the morning, by the looks of it."

  "What do you want?"

  "I hear the shop has a basement connected to the catacombs," he said.

  "You heard wrong."

  "So you're out of the fights?"

  I sipped my tea. I didn't like him coming to find me. I had not expected to see him again. I kept quiet, and I waited.

  "I want you to go back to Africa," he said.

  "Why?"

  And then he told me.

  #

  The goal of our present endeavours must not be the "Holy Land," but a land of our own. We need nothing but a large piece of land for our poor brothers; a piece of land which shall remain our property from which no foreign master can expel us.

  Leo Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, 1882

  #

  A: He mentioned Africa.

  R: Yes. He seemed well-informed regarding my history there. But then, he was always well-informed.

  A: Did he say what he wanted?

  R: Not straight away. He led up to it. He talked a lot about politics.

  A: What did he say?

  R: He talked about the Russian pogroms. He felt there was a desperate need to find a place for the Jews of Russia, as they were under threat. (Pause). He wanted a homeland for the Jews.

  A: But not Palestine?

  R: I understood it wasn't feasible at the time. He mentioned negotiating with the Turkish Sultan. There was mention of land in Mesopotamia, Syria and Anatolia, but Palestine was excluded.

  A: What else?

  R: Cyprus. South Africa. America. He had given up on the Sultan. He was looking to the English for help. They were also talking about El Arish, in Egypt. (Unintelligible). He was working his way to it slowly.

  A: Uganda?

  R: It never was Uganda. That was a misconception from the start.

  #

  From the Rabbi's Journal, January 16th, 1904 – Continued

  "They're offering British East Africa," he said. "I had meetings with Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary. They're willing to grant us land there."

  My tea had cooled on the table. The room felt warmer. Ancient books piled up on the floor and leaned against the wall. The sun scraped weakly against the grimy windows. I thought about Africa, about the heat that becomes a part of you, the smell it has, and of watching that endless blue sky and the smoke rising from distant human dwellings. I didn't want to admit to him I missed it.

  "He told me the part he mentioned was on very high ground, with fine climate and every possibility for a great colony, one that could support at least a million souls."

  "Where, exactly?"

  He shrugged. "The Uasin Gishu Plateau."

  He saw my look. Returned it. "It's on the border with Uganda, in the KenyaProvince. I don't really know more than that." He paused and put his hands palms down on the table. "It's why I came to you."

  "I don't know anything about it either," I said.

  "But you could find out. You could go there."

  I laughed. He looked at me with eyes whose calmness hid behind it a storm. "This is threatening to divide the Congress," he said quietly. "In fact, it has divided the congress. There are those who will settle for nothing less than Palestine. But, for now at least, this is a real possibility. An opportunity. I won't let it go past. Not lightly."

  "Send your own people," I said. "I am not a surveyor."

  He smiled. His fingers drummed a little on the tabletop. "We will be sending out a small expedition. An official expedition. To survey the land, to evaluate its suitability. To bring back a detailed and public report."

  I waited.

  "Then there's you."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  And he grinned at that, because he knew he had successfully hooked me.

  #

  A: So he wanted you to go to East Africa.

  R: Yes.

  A: And you agreed.

  R: Not at first. I told him to (unintelligible).

  A: You didn't say that.

  R: What did you expect? He came out of nowhere, out of the past, to ask me for a favour I didn't want to give. He had a lot of nerve.

  A: But you agreed to do it. (Pause). You agreed to go.

  R: (A long silence). Yes.

  A: Did he tell you who else would be going?

  R: No. He didn't know at that point. I was not to deal with him directly any more. All he gave me was one name.

  A: Who was that?

  R: Leopold Greenberg.

  #

  [The proposal to settle Jews in East Africa] is monstrous, extravagant, and unconstitutional, and opposed not only to the best interests of Christendom but of civilization at large.

  E. Haviland Burke, M.P., parliamentary debate, 1904

  #

  From the Rabbi's Journal, January 16th, 1904 – Continued

  I watched him go. He walked with his shoulders straight and his head high, poised like a man looking further ahead than anyone else I had ever known. But he moved slowly and he looked tired as he climbed into the coach. I watched him disappear into the traffic. He had given me one name.

  "What do you need me for?" I had said.

  "Think of it as backup," he said. "Of a...spiritual kind."

  He was not a man given to talk of spirituality. He had a practical mind-set.

  So did I.

  "Leopold Greenberg will be or
ganising the expedition. He is a British Jew. He was instrumental in our talks with the Colonial Office. You will communicate with him. He will make the official arrangements and pick the men. He will be your contact."

  "Where will I find him?"

  His fingers were splayed on the table. His skin looked brittle, like a page from an old bible.

  "In Basle," he said. "It all comes back to Basle. He will contact you once he has made the preparations."

  "The Congress," I said. He nodded. "This is splitting us up," he admitted. "But it might be our only option. When the time comes, you will know what to do."

  When he was gone, I returned to the shop. Now, as I sit at the table writing this, I am filled with premonition. I am wary of his plans. And yet...I would be glad to see Africa again, and hear the elephant herds calling in the distance, and feel the warmth of a fire against my palms, and taste the smell of wood smoke. There are mysteries enough in Africa for a man's lifetime.

  #

  A: When did you get the call?

  R: It came in November. It was snowing in Paris.

  A: What did it say?

  R: It was a summons. He was already dead by then. But Greenberg (unintelligible).