"Dan Simmons - Children of the Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

The stone vaults smelled like a meat locker.
"Securitate," said Fortuna and spat on one of the brown-shirted men lying facedown in a frozen pool. "They fled
like rats down here and we finished them like rats. You know?"
Father O'Rourke crouched next to one of the corpses for a long moment, head bowed. Then he crossed himself
and rose. There was no shock or disgust on his face. I remember someone having said that the-bearded priest
had been in Vietnam.
Dr. Aimslea said, "But Ceausescu did not retreat to this . . . redoubt?"
"No." Fortuna smiled.
The doctor looked around in the hissing white light. "For God's sake, why not? If he'd marshaled an organized
resistance down here, he could have held out for months. "
Fortuna shrugged. "Instead, the monster, he fled by helicopter. He flied . . . no? Flew, yes . . . he flew to
Tirgoviste, seventy kilometers from here, you know? There other peoples see him and his bitch-cow wife get in
car. They catch."
Dr. Aimslea held his lantern at the entrance to another tunnel from which a terrible stench now blew. The doctor
quickly pulled back the light. "But I wonder why . . ."
Fortuna stepped closer and the harsh light illuminated an old scar on his neck that I had not noticed before.
"They say his . . . advisor . . . the Dark Advisor . . . told him not to come here." He smiled.
Father O'Rourke stared at the Romanian. "The Dark Advisor. It sounds as if his counselor was the devil."
Radu Fortuna nodded.
Dr. Aimslea grunted. "Did this devil escape? Or was he one of those poor buggers we saw back there?"
Our guide did not answer but entered one of the four tunnels branching off there. A stone stairway led upward.
"To the National Theater," he said softly, waving us ahead of him. "It was damaged but not destroyed. Your
hotel is next door. "
The priest, the doctor, and I started up, lantern light throwing our shadows fifteen feet high on the curved stone
walls above. Father O'Rourke stopped and looked down at Fortuna. "Aren't you coming?"
The little guide smiled and shook his head. "Tomorrow, we take you where it all began. Tomorrow we go to
Transylvania. "
Dr. Aimslea gave the priest and me a smile. ."Transylvania," he repeated. "Shades of Bela Lugosi." He turned
back to say something to Fortuna but the little man was gone. Not even the echo of footfalls or shimmer of
lantern light showed which tunnel he had taken.

Chapter Three
We flew to Timisoara, a city of about 300,000 in western Transylvania, suffering the flight in an old recycled
Tupolev turboprop now belonging to Tarom, the state airline. The authorities would not allow my Lear to fly
from city to city in the country. We were lucky; the daily flight was delayed only an hour and a half. We flew
through cloud for most of the way, and there were no interior lights on the plane, but that did not matter because
there were neither flight attendants nor the interruption of a meal or snack. Dr. Paxley grumbled most of the
way, but the scream of the turboprops and the groaning of metal as we bounced and bucked our way through
updrafts and storm clouds muffled most of his complaints.
Just as we took off, seconds before entering the clouds, Fortuna leaned across the aisle and pointed out the
window to a snow-covered island on a lake that must have been about twenty miles north of Bucharest.
"Snagov," he said, watching my face.
I glanced down, caught a glimpse of a dark church on the island before the clouds obliterated the view, and
looked back at Fortuna. "Yes?"
"Vlad Tepes buried there," said Fortuna, still watching me. He pronounced the last name as "Tsepesh."
I nodded. Fortuna went back to reading one of our Time magazines in the dim light, although how someone
could read or concentrate during that wild ride, I will never know. A minute later Carl Berry leaned forward
from the seat behind me and whispered, "Who the hell is Vlad Tepes? Someone who died in the fighting?"
The cabin was so dark now that I could barely make out Berry's face inches from my own. "Dracula," I said to
the AT&T executive.