Descendant

Mill Valley, 1943

I was swinging in the hammock in my parents’ backyard when my father came walking through the overgrown grass and said, “There’s two military guys want to talk to you.”

I sat up a little and shaded my eyes with my hand. Two middle-aged men in sharply pressed army uniforms were standing by the kitchen steps with their hats tucked under their arms. One had a silvery-gray crewcut and the other had horn-rim glasses and a heavy black mustache.

“They wouldn’t tell me what they wanted,” said my father. “If you’d prefer me to say that you’re not at home, well, I’m more than happy to. You know my views on the military.”

My father was what you might call a professional nonconformist. He always reminded me of Groucho Marx in Horse Feathers when he sang “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” He looked a little like Groucho Marx, too, in his slopy-shouldered cardigans and his baggy corduroy pants, with his pipe always sticking out of the side of his mouth. He was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley, but he was also a writer and a fly-fisherman and when he played the piano on summer evenings with the parlor windows open his music was so sentimental that he could make you choke up.

The officer with the silvery-gray crew cut raised one hand and called out, “James Falcon Junior? Need to talk to you, sir!”

I looked at my father and my father shrugged. I clambered out of the hammock, catching my foot so that I staggered on one leg for the first couple of paces, but I managed to hold on to the apple I’d been eating.

The officers approached me. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Bulsover and this is Major Leonard Harvey.”

They stood with their backs like ramrods and they almost had me standing up straight. Not long ago, I found some photographs of myself that my brother took around that time, and you’ve never seen such a skinny, lanky, twenty-five-year-old streak in your life, in a baggy pair of jeans and a striped shirt that was five times too big for me.

“We need to talk in private,” said Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover. He didn’t look at my father and at first my father didn’t understand what he was saying.

“This is just about as private as you can get,” he said, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “There isn’t another house for half a mile. Hey — we could beat a pig to death with baseball bats and nobody would hear us.”

Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover looked at him as if were mentally deficient. “When I say private, sir, I mean that I need to talk to your son confidentially. On his own.”

“Oh? Oh. What for? This family doesn’t have secrets.”

“That’s as may be, sir. But this is wartime, and this country has secrets.”

“Oh.”

My father hesitated for a moment and then he put his pipe back in his mouth and walked away across the grass, jerkily turning around now and again as if half expecting us to call him back. Eventually he climbed the steps and disappeared into the kitchen. The screen door banged.

Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover placed his hand in the small of my back and gently steered me down toward the far end of the yard, where the tangled raspberry canes grew. It was very hot and still that day, and I remember that everything looked magnified, as I were seeing it through a lens.

“Major Harvey and I, we’re attached to the Office of the Coordinator of Information in Washington, DC. About three weeks ago we received some information from a resistance agent in Belgium. He confirmed something that our intelligence agents have been suspecting since the early days of the war in Europe.”

“Oh, yes?”

Major Harvey cleared his throat with a single sharp bark. “Mr. Falcon — what Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover is about to tell you now is absolutely top secret. That means you are prohibited from divulging any of this information to anybody. Your father, your mother, your best friend, even your family cat. If we discover that you have been giving anybody else even the faintest hint of what we are going to discuss with you, you may discover that your life is forfeit.”

“What?”

“You’ll be shot,” said Major Harvey.

I stared at him in disbelief. “I’ll be shot? Are you serious? In that case, excuse me, I don’t want to hear it.”

“You have to hear it, James,” said Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover, firmly. Then, in a quieter tone, “You have to. You’re the only person we’ve been able to find who seems to have a comprehensive knowledge of the particular problem we’re faced with. The only person of an appropriate age, anyhow.”

“I don’t understand. I don’t know anything about any military stuff.”

“I know that. But you know all about these.” With that, Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover reached inside his coat and produced a sharply folded sheaf of papers.

I didn’t have to open them to recognize what they were. They were tear sheets of my paper “The Strigoi: myth versus reality in popular Romanian folk-culture.” I had written it for my anthropology exam in the summer, and Professor Ewan had been so impressed with it that he had submitted it to the North American Journal of Ethnography. Admittedly, the Journal’s circulation was only a little over 2,500 copies, so it wasn’t exactly like being published in Life magazine, but it was first article I had ever gotten into print, and I was seriously proud of it. I even had some cards printed, James R. Falcon Jr., Author and Anthropologist, and handed them out to all of my friends, until my father told me to stop acting so swell-headed.

“The strigoi?” I said, cautiously. I was strongly beginning to suspect this was a practical joke, set up by some of my friends at Berkeley. “What do the strigoi have to do with the war in Europe?”

“More than you’d think. In August of 1940, under the terms of the Vienna Diktat, Germany forced Romania to give up the territory of Northern Transylvania to Hungary, which Hungary had been claiming for centuries was theirs.”

“Well, sure, I know that.”

“What you may not know is that the Romanians would have had to surrender Southern Transylvania, too, but they made some kind of offer to the Germans, which the Germans accepted, and allowed them to keep it.”

Major Harvey said, “We’ve been trying for three years to find out exactly what this offer was. It was codenamed Umarmung, which didn’t mean anything to us, at the beginning.”

“Umarmung,” I repeated. “Embrace.”

“That’s right. And how many times does the word ‘Embrace’ appear in your article, James? Forty-seven, to be exact. And according to what you’ve written here, the Embrace is the way in which the strigoi initiate humans into becoming one of them.”

I shrugged. “Could be a coincidence. I mean, ‘embrace,’ that’s a pretty common word, wouldn’t you say? You can embrace all kinds of things, you know — like a religion, or a philosophy. Or your next-door-neighbor’s wife.”

“True. And the Romanians embraced Nazism. They still chose to fight on the German side, even though the Germans made them surrender all of that territory. But after we received this report from Belgium, we’re pretty sure now that ‘Embrace’ means something very specific. We think it’s the kind of embrace that you were writing about.”

I kept a straight face for about ten seconds longer, and then I burst out laughing. “God, you guys are good! You even sound like you know what you’re talking about! Who set this up? I’ll bet it was Stradlater, wasn’t it? Tell me it was Stradlater!”

“James — ” said Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover, but I interrupted him.

“ ‘How many times does the word “Embrace” appear in your article, James?’ ” I mimicked him. “ ‘Forty-seven, to be exact.’ You’re excellent! Look at you standing there, like you both have pool cues stuck up your asses!”

Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover waited until I had finished. Then, as if I hadn’t said anything at all, he continued.

“Since February last year, James, we’ve been receiving reports of some very unusual killings. They started in Romania. More than sixty members of the Red Knights resistance group were murdered, all within the space of a week. That immediately deprived us of vital intelligence and it drastically reduced our ability to sabotage the Nazi war effort from within.”

I looked at him with my eyes narrowed. “Come on, now. This is a joke, isn’t it?”

“Not for the victims. And not for the Allies, if this continues.”

“Come on, admit it. If it wasn’t Stradlater, who was it? Not Dungan! Dungan wouldn’t have the brains!”

“James,” said Major Harvey. “It wasn’t any of your friends and it isn’t a joke.”

“All right,” I said, although I still believed that they were bullshitting me. “What does any of this have to do with me?”

“Since the Red Knights were all murdered, we’ve been receiving more and more intelligence which suggests that the Nazis have been infiltrating local resistance groups and literally wiping them out. It happened all across the Eastern Front, especially after they took Bessarabia and Bukovina back from the Russians. Now it’s happening in Holland and Belgium and France.

“The reason why this has everything to do with you is that all of the victims had their chests cut open, their main arteries severed and the blood drained out of their bodies.”