The Ghost Rider Read online

  Stres walked over. The graves, neatly aligned and covered with slabs of black stone, were identical, made in a shape that suggested a cross as well as a sword, or a man standing with his arms stretched out. At the head of each grave was a small niche for an icon and candles. Beneath it the dead man’s name was carved.

  “There’s his grave,” said the deputy, his voice hushed.

  Stres looked up and saw that the man had gone pale.

  “What’s the matter?”

  His deputy pointed at the grave.

  “Take a good look,” he said. “The stones have been moved.”

  “What?” Stres leaned forward to see what his aide was pointing to. For a long moment he examined the spot carefully, then stood up straight. “Yes, it’s true. There’s been some disturbance here.”

  “Just as I told you,” said the deputy, his satisfaction in seeing that his chief shared his view mixed with a new surge of fear.

  “But that doesn’t mean much,” Stres remarked.

  His deputy turned and looked at him with surprise. His eyes seemed to say, sure, a commander must preserve his dignity in all circumstances, but there comes a time when one must forget about rank, office and such formalities. A battered sun strove to break through the clouds. They looked up, in some astonishment, but neither uttered the words each might have expected to hear in such circumstances.

  “No, it doesn’t mean anything,” Stres said. “For one thing, the slabs could have subsided by themselves, as happens eventually in most graves. Moreover, even if someone did move them, it might well have been an unknown traveller who moved the gravestones before perpetrating his hoax to make it look like the dead man had risen from his grave.”

  The deputy listened open-mouthed. He was about to say something, perhaps to raise some objection, but Stres carried on talking.

  “In fact, it is more likely that he did it after leaving Doruntine near the house. It’s possible he came here then and moved the gravestones before he went off.”

  Stres, who now seemed weary, let his gaze wander over the field that stretched before him, as if seeking the direction in which the unknown traveller had ridden off. From where they stood they could see the two-storey Vranaj house, part of the village, and the highway, which disappeared into the horizon. It was here on this ground, between the church and that house of sorrow, that the mysterious event of the night of 11 October had occurred. Go on ahead. I have something to do at the church …

  “That’s how it must have happened,” Stres said. “Unless she’s lying.”

  “‘Unless she is lying?’” his deputy parroted. “And who, sir, might she be?”

  Stres didn’t answer. The sun at their back, though still a little hazy, now drew their shadows on the ground.

  “She … Well, Doruntine herself, or else her mother. Or anybody: you, me … What’s so mysterious about that?” Stres exclaimed.

  His deputy shrugged. Little by little the colour had returned to his cheeks.

  “I will find that man,” Stres said suddenly, raising his voice. The words came harshly through his teeth, with a menacing ring, and his deputy, who had known Stres for years, felt that the passion his chief brought to the search for the unknown man went well beyond the duties of his office. As they walked away, the deputy allowed himself to glance now and again at his boss’s shadow. It revealed more of Stres’s disquiet than the man himself. It even seemed to him that one of the two halves of Stres’s twin characters was standing beside the other, to help him solve the mystery.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Stres issued an order that reached all the inns and some of the relays along the roads and waterways before the day was out. In it he asked that he be informed if anyone had seen a man and woman riding the same horse or two separate mounts, or travelling together by some other means, before midnight on 11 October. If so, he wanted to be informed which roads they had taken, whether they had stayed at an inn, whether they had ordered a meal for themselves or fodder for their horse or horses, and, if possible, what their relationship seemed to be. Finally, he also wanted to know whether anyone had seen a woman travelling alone.

  “They can’t escape us now,” Stres said to his deputy when the chief courier reported that the circular containing the order had been sent to even the most remote outposts. “A man and a woman riding on the same horse. Now that was a sight you wouldn’t forget, would you? For that matter, seeing them on two horses ought to have had more or less the same effect.”

  “That’s right,” his deputy said.

  Stres stood up and began pacing back and forth between his desk and the window.

  “We should certainly find some sign of them, unless they sailed in on a cloud.”

  His deputy looked up.

  “But that’s exactly what this whole affair seems to amount to: a journey in the clouds!”

  “You still believe that?” Stres asked with a smile.

  “That’s what everyone believes,” his aide replied.

  “Other people can believe what they like, but we can’t.”

  A gust of wind suddenly rattled the windows, and a few drops of rain splattered against them.

  “Mid-autumn,” Stres said thoughtfully. “I have always noticed that the strangest things always seem to happen in autumn.”

  The room grew silent. Stres propped his forehead with his right hand and stood for a moment watching the drizzling rain. But of course he could not stay like that for long. In the emptiness of his mind, a pressing question emerged and persisted: Who could that unknown horseman have been? Within a few minutes, dozens of possibilities crossed his mind. Clearly, the man was aware, if not of every detail, at least of the depth of the tragedy that had befallen the Vranaj family. He knew of the death of the brothers, and of Kostandin’s besa. And he knew the way from that central European region to Albania. But why? Stres almost shouted. Why had he done it? Had he hoped for some reward? Stres opened his mouth wide, feeling that the movement would banish his weariness. The notion that the motive had been some expected reward seemed crude, but not wholly out of the question. Everyone knew that, after the death of her sons, the Lady Mother had sent three letters to her daughter, one after the other, imploring her to come to her. Two of the messengers had turned back, claiming that it had been impossible to carry out their mission: the distance was too great, and the road passed through warring lands. In keeping with their agreement with her, they refunded the old woman half the stipulated fee. The third messenger had simply disappeared. Either he was dead or he had reached Doruntine but she had not believed him. More than two years had passed since then, and the possibility that he had brought her back so long after he set out was more than remote. Perhaps the mysterious traveller meant to extort some reward from Doruntine but had been unable to pass himself off to her as Kostandin. No, Stres thought, the reward theory doesn’t stand up. But then why had the unknown man gone to Doruntine in the first place? Was it just a commonplace deception, an attempt to kidnap her and sell her into slavery in some godforsaken land? But that made no sense either, for he had in fact brought her back home. The idea that he had set out with the intention of kidnapping her and had changed his mind en route seemed highly implausible to Stres, who understood the psychology of highwaymen. Unless it was a family feud, some vendetta against her house or her husband’s? But that seemed unlikely as well. Doruntine’s family had been so cruelly stricken by fate that human violence could add nothing to its distress. Nevertheless, a careful consultation of the noble family’s archives – the wills, acts of succession, old court cases – would be wise. Perhaps something could be found that would shed some light on these events. But what if it was only the trick of an adventurer who simply felt like galloping across the plains of Europe with a young woman of twenty-three in the saddle? Stres breathed a deep sigh. His mind’s eye wandered back to the vast expanse he had seen on the one occasion he had crossed it, when his horse’s hooves, as they pounded through puddles, had shattered the image of
the sky, the clouds and the church steeples reflected in them, and the trampling of such things in the mud had struck him as so destructive, so apocalyptic that he had gone as far as to cry out to the Lord for forgiveness. A thousand and one thoughts tumbled through his mind, but he kept returning to the same basic question: Who was the night rider? Doruntine claimed she hadn’t seen him clearly at first; she thought he was Kostandin, but he was covered with dust and almost unrecognisable. He had never dismounted, had declined to meet anyone from his brother-in-law’s family (though they knew each other, for they had met at the wedding) and had wanted to travel only by night. So he was determined to keep himself hidden. Stres had forgotten to ask Doruntine whether she had ever caught a glimpse of the man’s face. It was essential that he ask her that question. In any event, it could not reasonably be doubted that the traveller had been careful to conceal his identity. It was insane to imagine that it could really have been Kostandin, although that was by no means the only issue at stake here. Obviously he wasn’t Kostandin, but by this time Stres was even beginning to doubt that the girl was Doruntine.

  He pushed the table away violently, stood up and left in haste, striding across the field. The rain had stopped. Here and there the weeping trees were shaking off the last shining drops. Stres walked with his head down. He reached the door of the Vranaj house in less time than he thought possible, strode through the long corridor where he found even more women attending the afflicted mother and daughter, and entered the room where they both languished. From the door he saw Doruntine’s pale face and her staring eyes, now with blue-black crescents beneath them. How could he have doubted it? Of course it was her, with that look and those same features that her distant marriage hadn’t altered, except perhaps to sprinkle them with the dust of foreignness.

  “How do you feel?” he asked softly as he sat down beside her, already regretting the doubts he had harboured.

  Doruntine’s eyes were riveted on him. There was something unbearable about that ice-cold stare into the abyss, and Stres was the first to look away.

  “I’m sorry to have to ask you this question,” he said, “but it’s very important. Please understand me, Doruntine, it’s important for you, for your mother, for all of us. I want to ask you whether you ever saw the face of the man who brought you back.”

  Doruntine carried on staring at him.

  “No,” she finally answered, in a tiny voice.

  Stres sensed a sudden rift in the delicate relations between them. He had a mad desire to seize her by the shoulders and shout, “Why aren’t you telling me the truth? How could you have travelled for days and nights with a man you believed was your brother without ever looking at his face? Didn’t you want to see him again? To kiss him?”

  “How can that be?” he asked instead.

  “When he said that he was Kostandin and that he had come to get me I was so confused that a terrible dread seized me.”

  “You thought something bad had happened?”

  “Of course. The worst thing. Death.”

  “First that your mother was dead, then that it was one of your brothers?”

  “Yes, each of them in turn, including Kostandin.”

  “Is that why you asked him why he had mud in his hair and smelled of sodden earth?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Poor woman, thought Stres. He imagined the horror she must have felt if she thought, even for an instant, that she was riding with a dead man. For it seemed she must have spent a good part of the journey haunted by just that fear.

  “There were times,” she went on, “when I drove the idea from my mind. I told myself that it really was my brother, and that he was alive. But …”

  She stopped.

  “But …” Stres repeated. “What were you going to say?”

  “Something stopped me from kissing him,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I don’t know what.”

  Stres stared at the curve of her eyelashes, which fell now to the ridge of her cheekbones.

  “I wanted so much to take him in my arms, yet I never had the courage, not even once.”

  “Not even once,” Stres repeated.

  “I feel such terrible remorse about that, especially now that I know he is no longer of this world.”

  Her voice was more animated now, her breathing more rapid.

  “If only I could make that journey again,” she sighed, “if only I could see him just once more!”

  She was absolutely convinced that she had travelled in the company of her dead brother. Stres wondered whether he ought to let her believe that or tell her his own suspicions.

  “So, you never saw his face,” he said. “Not even when you parted and he said, ‘Go on ahead, I have something to do at the church’?”

  “No, not even then,” she said. “It was very dark and I couldn’t see a thing. And throughout the journey I was always behind him.”

  “But didn’t you ever stop? Didn’t you stop to rest anywhere?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t remember.”

  Stres waited until she was once again looking him straight in the eyes.

  “But didn’t you wonder if he was hiding something from you?” Stres asked. “He didn’t want to set foot on the ground, even when he came to get you; he never so much as turned his head during the whole journey; and judging by what you’ve told me, he wanted to travel only by night. Wasn’t he hiding something?”

  “It did occur to me,” she replied. “But since he was dead, it was only natural for him to hide his face from me.”

  “Or maybe it wasn’t Kostandin,” he said suddenly.

  Doruntine looked at him a long while.

  “It amounts to the same thing,” she said calmly.

  “What do you mean, the same thing?”

  “If he was not alive, then it’s as if it wasn’t him.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Did it ever occur to you that this man may not have been your brother, alive or dead, but an impostor, a false Kostandin?”

  Doruntine gestured no.

  “Never,” she said.

  “Never?” Stres repeated. “Try to remember.”

  “I might think so now,” she said, “but that night I never had any such doubt, not for a moment.”

  “But now you might?”

  As she stared deeply into his eyes once more, he tried to decide just what the main ingredient in her expression was: grief, terror, doubt, or some painful longing. All these were present, but there was more; there was still room for something more, some unknown feeling, or seemingly unknowable, perhaps because it was a combination of all the others.

  “Maybe it wasn’t him,” Stres said again, moving his head closer to hers and looking into her eyes as though into the depths of a well. A wetness of tears rose up.

  Stres tried to fathom an image in them. At times he thought that from deep down something like a ghost – the face of the night rider – would come into focus. But his impatient desire to grasp it was bound up with a no less acute feeling of fear.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said between sobs.

  He let her cry in silence for a while, then took her hand, pressed it gently and, after glancing at her mother in the other bed, where she seemed to be asleep, left noiselessly.

  Reports from innkeepers soon began to come in. From long experience Stres was sure that by the end of the week their numbers would double. That would be due not just to greater awareness among innkeepers, but because travellers, knowing they were under surveillance, in spite of themselves, would start behaving in an increasingly suspicious manner.

  The reports referred to all manner of comings and goings, from the most mundane, such as those of the Saturdaners, the peasants who, unlike others, went to market on Saturdays, to the wobbly gait of the simple-minded, the only ones who could make Stres smile even when he was in a bad mood. Two or three of the reports sounded like descriptions of his own movements on his last trip back home. “On 7 October,
in the evening, someone who was hard to make out in the half-light, was riding along on the Count’s Road, about a mile from the Franciscan monastery. All that could be seen for sure was that he was holding some heavy burden in his arms, it could have been a person or a cross.”

  Stres shook his head. On the evening of 7 October, he had indeed crossed the Count’s Bridge on horseback, about a mile from the Franciscan monastery. But he hadn’t been clutching a living being or a cross. He scratched “No” across the top of each report. No, nowhere had anyone seen a man and woman riding on the same horse or on two horses, nor a woman travelling alone, either on horseback or in a carriage. Although no reports had yet arrived from the most distant inns, Stres was irritated. He had been sure that he would find some trace of them. Is it possible, he wondered, as he read the reports. Could it be that no human eye had spotted them? Was everyone asleep as they rode through the night? No, impossible, he told himself in an effort to boost his own morale. Tomorrow someone would surely come forward and say that he had seen them. If not tomorrow, then the next day. He was sure he would find some seeing eye.

  In the meantime, acting on Stres’s orders, his deputy was sifting carefully through the family archives, seeking some thread that might lead to the solution to the puzzle. At the end of his first day’s work, his eyes swollen from going through a great pile of documents, he reported to his chief that the task was damnable and that he would have preferred to have been sent out on the road, from inn to inn, seeking the trail of the fugitives rather than torturing himself with those archives. The Vranaj were one of the oldest families in Albania and had kept documents for two hundred, and sometimes three hundred, years. These were written in a variety of languages and alphabets, from Latin to Albanian, in characters ranging from Cyrillic to Gothic. There were old deeds, wills, legal judgments, notes on the chain of blood, as they called the family tree, that went back as far as the year 881, citations, decorations. The documents included correspondence about marriages. There were dozens of letters, and Stres’s deputy set aside the ones dealing with Doruntine’s marriage, intending to examine them at his leisure. Some of them had been drafted in Gothic characters, apparently in German, and sent to Bohemia. Others, and these seemed to him even more noteworthy, were copies of letters sent by the Lady Mother to her old friend Count Thopia, lord of the neighbouring principality, from whom, it seemed, she requested advice about various family matters. The Count’s answers were in the archives too. In two or three letters over which Stres’s aide cast a rapid eye, the Lady Mother had in fact confessed to the Count her reservations about Doruntine’s marriage to a husband from so far away, soliciting his view on the matter. In one of them – it must have been among the most recent – she complained about her terrible loneliness, the words barely legible (one felt that it had been written in a shaky hand, at an advanced age). The brides of her sons had departed one by one, taking their children with them and leaving her alone in the world. They had promised to come back to visit her, but none had done so, and in some sense she felt she could hardly blame them. What young woman would want to return to a house that was more ruin than home and on which, it was said, the seal of death had been fixed?