‘I know the place,’ said Dragosani. ‘I drove through here not half an hour ago. Do you think he could help me?’
‘Oh, yes – if he wanted to.’ That sounded cryptic. ‘Well, go on – ?’
The librarian seemed unsure, looked away for a moment. ‘Oh, I made a mistake two or three years ago, sent a couple of American “researchers” to see him. He wanted no truck with them, threw them out! A bit eccentric, you see? Since that time I’m more careful. We’ve had a good many requests of this nature, you understand. This “Dracula” thing is something of an industry, apparently, in the West. And it’s this commercial aspect that Mr Giresci is anxious to avoid. That’s his name, by the way: Ladislau Giresci.’ ‘Are you telling me that this man is an expert on vampirism?’ Dragosani felt his interest quickening. ‘Do you mean to say that he’s been studying the legends, tracing their history through these documents, for twenty-odd years?’
‘Well, among other things, yes, that’s what I’m saying. It’s been what you might call a hobby – or perhaps an obsession – with him. But a very useful obsession where the library has been concerned.’
Then I have to go and see him! It might save me a great deal of time and wasted energy.’
The librarian shrugged. ‘Well, I can give you directions, and his address, but … it will be entirely up to him whether or not he’ll see you. It might help if you took him a bottle of whisky. He’s a great whisky man, when he can afford it – but the Scottish sort and not that filth they brew in Bulgaria!’
‘You just give me his address,’ said Dragosani. ‘He’ll see me, all right. Of that I can assure you.’
Dragosani found the place just as the librarian had described it, on the Bucharest road about a mile outside of Titu. On a small estate of wooden, two-storey houses set back from the road in a few acres of woodland, Ladislau Giresci’s place was conspicuous by its comparative isolation. All of the houses had gardens or plots of ground surrounding them and separating them from their neighbours, but Giresci’s house stood well away from all others on the rim of the estate, lost in a stand of pines, hedgerows run wild amid untended shrubbery and undergrowth.
The cobbled drive leading to the house itself had been narrowed by burgeoning hedges, where leafy creepers were throwing their tendrils across the cobbles; the gar dens were overgrown and slowly returning to the wilderness; the house was visibly affected by dry rot in a fairly advanced state, and wore an atypical air of almost total neglect. By comparison, the other houses on the estate were in good order and their gardens well maintained. Some small effort had been made at maintenance and repair, however, for here and there at the front of the house an old board had been removed and a new one nailed in place, but even the most recent of these must be all of five years old. The path from the garden gate to the front door was likewise overgrown, but Dragosani persisted and knocked upon panels from which the last flakes of paint were fast falling.
In one hand he carried a string bag containing a bottle of whisky bought from the liquor store in Pitesti, a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, some fruit. The food was for himself (his lunch, if nothing else was available) and the bottle, as advised, for Giresci. If he was at home. As Dragosani waited, that began to seem unlikely; but after knocking again, louder this time, finally he heard movement from within.
The figure which finally opened the door to him was male, perhaps sixty years of age, and fragile as a pressed flower. His hair was white – not grey but white, like a crest of snow upon the hill of his brow – and his skin was even paler than Dragosani’s own, with a shine to it as if it were polished. His right leg was wooden, an old peg as opposed to any sort of modern prosthetic device, but he seemed to handle his disability with more than sufficient agility. His back was a little bent and he held one shoulder gingerly and winced when he moved it; but his eyes were keen, brown and sure, and as he enquired as to Dragosani’s business his breath was clean and healthy.