The Avenger 33 - The Blood Countess (10 page)

“Yes, but let’s hope she stopped short of killing him.”

“I’m a jinx,” said Elizabeth. “Everyone who tries to help me . . . they only get hurt.”

“Stay away from generalizations like that,” Cole told her. “I’m trying to help you, and nothing is going to befall me.”

Elizabeth said, “Would that bulge there have anything to do with opening the secret door?”

“Where?”

“There, to the left of the lamp.”

Cole pressed the circular patch. “We’ll give it a try.”

A faint whirring began within the wall. Then it swung slowly out on its center.

“Runs on electricity,” he observed. “That doesn’t date back to the Middle Ages.” Turning, he took hold of the pale girl’s hands. “Do you have someone here to look after you? I think I have to go after Erika.”

“Yes, go ahead,” said Elizabeth. “Mrs. Andrade will take care of me.”

Cole let go her hands and stepped into the wall.

Bulcão jumped to his feet. A tiny blue light was flashing in the corner of the stone room. “Someone’s fallen into the trap.”

“Idiot!” said Ensolardo. “They followed you.”

“No one followed me.” He went scurrying to the ladder. “I’m not a novice at this business.” He pushed the trapdoor in the ceiling open and pulled himself up into the temple corridor, then drew a flashlight out of his dungarees and turned it on.

Ensolardo emerged into the corridor and snapped on a light of his own. “Perhaps your stupidity will turn out to our advantage,” he said. “If those two who found you at the warehouse have followed you to—”

“They didn’t follow me, I tell you. No one followed me. I know when someone’s trying to tail me.” He was walking purposefully along the corridor.

“I can’t imagine who else it would be.”

“Maybe it’s only some wild animal from the forest.”

“We shall see.”

Around another turning in the corridor, Bulcão stopped. There was a metal ring attached to the stone wall. Gripping the ring, he twisted it to the right. The door section of the wall pivoted open. “Now we’ll see just who . . .” He flashed his light into the room.

Smitty and MacMurdie were sprawled on the straw-strewn floor of the cell.

“Any idea who they are?” asked Ensolardo, chuckling.

“Yes, it’s the two who broke into the warehouse. But I can’t understand how they—”

Ensolardo crossed into the room, flashing his light on the body of Smitty. “This fellow must be the giant they call Smitty. Wouldn’t you think, Bulcão?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” He came slowly into the cell. He turned the beam of his light on MacMurdie. “Still breathing.”

“The fall rarely kills them,” said Ensolardo.

Bulcão began to sweep the floor with the light. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“You call me an idiot, and yet you don’t see it. Look . . . do you see the Avenger?”

Ensolardo now realized that Benson’s drugged body was not where it should be. “You’re right. He’s not here,” he said. “But then, where is he?”

“Right behind you, gentlemen,” said the Avenger.

Elizabeth sat near the empty fireplace. The heavy rain beat against the leaded windows. “Nothing seems very solid any more,” she said.

“You musn’t worry, child,” said Mrs Andrade, who was sitting in an armchair crocheting. “I’m sure everything will turn out all right.”

“I don’t know . . . I thought I was building myself a new life, away from . . . from everything that happened before.” She shook her head. “Now it’s all collapsed. I trusted Erika . . . but . . .”

“Don’t fret over all these unpleasant things.”

“Erika has to have been a German agent right from the start. So that some of the things that happened over there . . . it was due to her,” said Elizabeth. She rubbed the knuckles of one hand across her cheek. “There’s no way of telling how many other people she betrayed.”

“It isn’t your fault if you have a trusting heart.”

“But yes, it is, Mrs. Andrade. I’m a grown woman, not a child. All the people I worked with in Europe . . . I feel as though I let them all down. Being taken in.”

“Look on the brighter side,” said the older woman. “Sooner or later, you’ll be able to remember what it is the Americans are interested in. You will tell them, and that will be a great service to your friends overseas.”

“Yes, maybe . . .”

“You do believe you’ll be able to remember, don’t you?”

Elizabeth said, “Richard Benson thought so. He told me he might be able to use some kind of hypnosis to bring back the things I think I’ve forgotten. But I don’t know if he’s even alive.”

“He may be. We must pray that he is.”

The girl nodded, watching the rain roll down the black windows. “If Erika . . . then all the things I’ve been afraid of . . . she may have been responsible.”

“What things do you mean, child?”

“Oh . . . well, I don’t suppose it will do any harm to talk about them now,” said Elizabeth. “These killings that have been happening since we came here . . . I don’t know, I had the idea I might be somehow involved. But now . . . maybe that’s what Erika wanted me to think. Yes, for all her pretending to be so concerned . . . she may have been planting all the things I found. The blood, the muddy shoes, all of it. Stage-dressing to make me think I was even sicker than I really am.”

“That would be a terrible thing to do to anyone,” said the plump old woman.

Elizabeth sat up straight all at once. “But that would mean Erika was the one who committed all those brutal killings,” she said. “It would mean that she was the vampire.”

The old woman set aside her crocheting and stood up. “Oh, no, my child,
she’s
not the vampire.”

Water dripped down from the stone ceiling. Cole avoided the puddle the dripping water made and continued along the tunnel. He used a small flash to light his way.

“Have the feeling I may run into the Count of Monte Cristo any minute,” he said to himself.

“Does the fair assassin know I’m pursuing her? That is the question.”

For all the nurse knew, he was still in the castle trying to find a way into the wall.

“But she knows Elizabeth got a look at her using the concealed door,” he reminded himself. “Being the clever wench she appears to be, she may have a booby trap awaiting me somewhere up ahead.”

He began to walk a little more slowly.

Another puddle of water, bigger.

Cole skirted it, scanning the stone floor beyond it. There were the still damp traces of Erika’s footprints.

Something was nagging at the back of Cole’s mind. Not the possibility that Erika might be planning an ambush . . . something else entirely.

Something that had happened in the castle. “Put the famed Wilson intellect to work, old chap,” he urged himself. “Let’s—as Professor Colonna has so aptly put it—cogitate.”

The door in the wall. That was it.

The fact that it operated electrically. That meant it wasn’t completely a relic of the romantic past. Someone had to have had the job done in recent times.

“What was it the good colonel told us? Yes, until recently no one has lived in the castle. And, in fact, until two years ago, no one out this far had electricity at all.” He stopped walking and stood rubbing a hand across his chin. “Now, if dear Erika arrived with Elizabeth it’s unlikely she could have done the job. No, not with several husky minions of the Foreign Service standing guard. And if the lass isn’t an electrician, she would have had to get outside help. Well, then . . . whodunit?”

Possibly a few stray Nazis had slipped in before the girls arrived and done a little clandestine wiring. No, that couldn’t be, because . . .

Cole snapped his fingers. “Because Mrs. Andrade, according to Colonel Heberden, has been living here for nearly a year. She was hired by some relative of Elizabeth’s the minute they thought she might be eventually coming here.”

He turned and began running back the way he’d come, not bothering to avoid puddles.

Bulcão spun, his free hand going for his revolver. He’d caught the Avenger in the beam of his flashlight. “Don’t make a move,
senhor,
or you will be dead,” he warned.

Ensolardo turned and trained his gun on Benson. “Enjoy your nap?”

“Very much,” replied the Avenger.

“You’d best prepare for a much longer one, you and your loutish friends,” Ensolardo told him, laughing. “You have at last met your match, Avenger.”

“In you two? I hardly think so,” he said. “Smitty, if you please.”

Smitty had, soundlessly, risen from the stone floor. He caught hold of both the Nazi agents’ heads and clacked them together.

They dropped all their guns and flashlights.

The giant threw Bulcão aside, and the small man went hopping across the cell to smash against the wall.

Ensolardo he lifted up by the scruff of the neck. “You guys overestimated your talents, buddy.”

Feet not touching the ground, the agent said, “That fall should have knocked you out for a long time.”

“Naw, not a little drop like that.” With the man suspended in the air he frisked him with his other paw. “Another gun under his coat.” He extracted the weapon and tossed it to the Avenger.

“You played possum,” Ensolardo realized. “And we were fools enough to fall for it.”

“About the size of it, chum.” He tossed him in the direction of the stunned Bulcão.

“Whoosh,” said MacMurdie from the floor. He sat up, shaking his head. “Mon, my head feels like a bag of haggis. Wot’s been going on?”

“Nothing much,” said Smitty. “We found Dick and caught a couple of Nazis. Outside of that, it’s been pretty quiet while you was snoozing.”

Elizabeth stared at the plump housekeeper. “What are you talking about, Mrs. Andrade?”

The older woman’s face had changed, lost its look of amiable concern. The face was twisted, threatening. “You should be able to understand, child,” she said in a harsh voice. “You’re a bright girl, even with the drugs Erika’s been feeding you.”

“Erika’s been—”

“But that’s not the point, dear. The point is that none of the killings have been the work of dear Erika. Not at all.”

Slowly the girl got up from her chair. The sound of the night rain seemed to fill the large room, to muffle the housekeeper’s words. “You mean
you’re
the one who . . . ?”

“Yes, of course,” replied Mrs. Andrade. “Erika is an efficient agent, but hardly capable of what I’ve accomplished.”

“But the murders . . . they’ve been . . .”

“Vicious and brutal?” The plump woman nodded. “Many people don’t understand the joy involved in killing, the excitement. But, of course, child, to really enjoy a killing one has to savor it, to linger over it as much as circumstances allow. Otherwise there’s no meaning to it.”

Elizabeth swallowed and brought a hand up to her throat. “But the blood . . . everyone said it was a vampire.”

The housekeeper began to come closer to the pale girl. “Some of them don’t understand about the blood, even some of them I must work with,” she said, a twisted smile on her lips. “You see, dear, many of the old stories are true. Blood does have the power to renew life. To make one younger, more vital. You have only to look at me to realize the truth of that. To drink the warm blood of your victim is—”

“My God.” Elizabeth backed away, moving behind her chair.

“Surely you can understand,” said the fat old woman. “Blood is life, I depend on it. Serving the homeland is important, as well. But the blood—”

“Help! Someone get in here!” cried the girl as loudly as she could.

Mrs. Andrade laughed and came closer. “They can’t hear you above the sound of the storm, child,” she said, reaching out one plump hand toward Elizabeth. “And, you see, they’ve intent on protecting you from
outside
harm.”

“Help!” cried Elizabeth again.

“No use at all. It’s just the two of us here.”

“You’re not going to kill me,” the girl told her.

“Oh, but I am,” said the old woman. “I’ve been anticipating it since first you arrived, my dear. And now, no matter what happens to dear Erika, you must be killed. You can’t tell what you know.”