Dracula Lives Page 13

  Next came an iconic mask. “Is that…?” Quinn asked.

  “Yes. Lon Chaney’s mask from The Phantom of the Opera.”

  “That would have to be one of the most sought-after pieces of movie memorabilia ever. How were you able to obtain it?”

  “I got many of my pieces through connections I had at the time, but not this one. This and several others I got through a rather ghoulish system I developed. I would trace the provenance of artifacts I coveted until I found the person who had ended up with it—usually someone associated with the production, or a collector. I would call and make an offer. Sometimes they needed money and a deal was made quickly. If they refused, I would keep tabs on them until I saw their obituary. I knew that family members often sold off collections when the owner died, so I would wait a respectful amount of time—not too long, I didn’t want to be beaten out—and make a generous offer they were usually eager to accept.”

  He led Quinn to the next case, where a prosthetic arm ended in a black-gloved fist.

  “Don’t tell me,” Quinn said. “The arm the Monster ripped off Lionel Atwill in Son of Frankenstein?”

  “The very same.”

  “That was a great touch. Son of Frankenstein is my favorite of all the Frankenstein movies.”

  In the next case, a large butcher knife was perched on a stand at a 45-degree angle. “From the shower scene in Psycho,” Markov said.

  If this was genuine, Quinn was looking at a prop that had attained its own screen immortality by terrifying a generation. He had to ask the inevitable question. “How can you be sure this is the one?”

  “Psycho was a Universal picture, and I knew a man from the old days who had worked his way up to being the head of the property department. The moment I walked out of the theater after watching it, I knew I was going to do everything possible to get that knife. The prop man told me it was a common kitchen knife available at stores. He had come to Universal in the ’30s, a humble young man just starting out. But in 1960 he had two children reaching college age and mentioned that tuition was going to be a problem. For fifty thousand dollars, I persuaded him to buy a duplicate knife to put in storage and sell me the original. Of course, one can be absolutely certain about very little in this life—particularly the honesty of human beings—but one thing about this knife convinced me that the prop man had indeed sold me the original. Some dark substance had gotten into the crevice where the blade joined the hilt. I had it tested.”

  A dramatic pause. “Chocolate syrup.”

  Quinn had seen it coming. “Hitchcock’s substitute for blood.”

  “It would have been an easy thing to fake, but this man was very salt of the earth. I am convinced the knife is genuine.”

  Bernard Hermann’s classic screeching violin sound track came into Quinn’s head as he continued to stare at the knife. Markov got his attention and they moved to the life-sized figures in the middle of the room. Front and center, hands outstretched, was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It had been played by a man in a suit, so there had to be some kind of internal framework for it to stand like this without any visible support.

  “The Creature is one of the all-time great man-in-a-suit monsters,” Quinn said. “Your collection wouldn’t be complete without it. Is this the original?”

  “In a sense, yes, although it was not used in the movie. Prior to shooting, they were testing it underwater and it got snagged and torn.” He pointed to the calf of the left leg. A lighter-colored, veinlike line zigzagged across a few of the otherwise smooth and uniform large scales that covered the Creature’s body. “The suit in the movie was actually the second one. They kept this one in wardrobe for backup, but it was never used. Their loss turned out to be my gain.”

  After an admiring stroll through the others, they moved to the showcases along the opposite wall. The first several held props from films that were lesser known but fondly remembered by buffs. The next-to-last case contained another horror movie icon.

  It was an exact replica of Regan’s head from The Exorcist, in the throes of satanic possession.

  “This was a mock-up they used to see how the makeup would look before they began shooting,” Markov said.

  Eyes frozen open in that soul-chilling demonic stare, the head slowly began a three hundred and sixty degree turn. When it faced front again, the eyes shifted focus to lock onto Quinn. A black forked tongue lolled out, then flicked at him.

  Markov held out his hand. In the palm was a small remote. “A parlor trick,” he said.

  “Very effective.”

  It occurred to Quinn that the knife from Psycho and Regan’s spinning head had left two of the deepest scars on audiences in cinema history.

  They moved to the last showcase. “The pièce de résistance,” Markov said.

  On a rotating pedestal sat a small leather carrying case, open to display its contents: nose putty, face paint, eyebrow pencils, brushes. Gold lettering on the lid had the name of the owner:

  LON F. CHANEY

  HOLLYWOOD, CAL.

  “This can’t possibly be the original,” Quinn said. “Lon Chaney’s makeup kit would have been guarded like Fort Knox—especially after he died. It had already become legendary.”

  “I can say with absolute certainty that it is. I know, because … once again, my obsessions overtook me and … I took it.”

  Quinn remembered Irving Thalberg’s memo to Tod Browning, cautioning him about his assistant, who had been seen rummaging around in Lon Chaney’s makeup kit during the shooting of London After Midnight. “How?” he said.

  “I had planned it for months. I waited until everybody was occupied with shooting one of his scenes, then slipped into his dressing room with a camera to get shots of his makeup kit from every angle. I bought an exact duplicate of the carrying case, had it engraved, and used the photos to match every scuff, every scratch. Then, when I was ready to make the switch, I took more pictures of the contents to make sure that the replacement makeup would be the exact same. I filled the case with pencils that were worn to the same length, tubes squeezed the right amount, and arranged everything in its exact same position. No forger was ever more meticulous. I checked the photos one last time before I made the switch. It was impossible to tell the difference.

  “So here it is: the prize possession of a good man whom I betrayed.”

  Thoughts of this level of betrayal, and what it said about Markov’s obsessiveness, tempered Quinn’s awe at being the first outsider to see movie treasures that included this, the Holy Grail.

  “Is this your ‘darkest secret’?”

  “Not quite.”

  Markov gestured for them to continue to the far corner of the room. He flicked a switch and a recessed overhead light revealed an armchair and small table facing a large wooden panel, held in place by grooved rails along both sides. This time Markov showed him the remote so there would be no surprise.

  “The figure who, in a sense, started the whole Dracula/vampire mythos. Tod would have been proud.”

  He pressed a button and the panel slid up to reveal a shadowy outline in the glass-enclosed showcase. He pushed another button and a spotlight shone on the very lifelike sculpture of a head resting on a pedestal. It was a famous historical figure Quinn recognized at once. Anyone researching the origins of the Dracula story had seen the painting of this man, with his large mustache, aquiline nose, and intense eyes. Markov had even gone to the trouble of duplicating the ceremonial headdress and royal garb the man wore in the famous portrait. Unlike the portrait, however, the eyes on the sculpture were closed, as in death. Another, more drastic difference was that Markov had chosen to display the head as having been severed. Ragged flesh ran along the neck. On the velvet cloth that lined the bottom of the display case was an area a shade lighter than the rest, in the shape of a sword.

  Markov stated the obvious. “Vlad the Impaler.”

  Quinn nodded. “The original Dracula. Son of Dracul. Very realistic sculpture. Is it wax? If it is, M
adame Toussaud would have loved to have it for her museum.”

  Markov gave him the Lugosi stare.

  “It is not a sculpture. It is real.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Quinn understood but couldn’t accept it. “What? What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying this is the actual head of Vlad Dracula III. Vlad the Impaler. I’m sure a folklorist with your love of the macabre knows the story.”

  Quinn nodded and looked back at the severed head, recalling the exhaustive research he’d done into the Dracula legend. Years of dealing with murders prompted by the most outrageous superstitions had conditioned him never to rush to judgment, but the notion that a five-hundred-year-old severed head could still exist, in this pristine condition, was preposterous. Nevertheless, he quelled that thought and recited what he knew of the legend with scholarly objectivity.

  “Documentation confirms that Vlad Dracula was indeed beheaded after a battle against Ottoman Turks in 1476. Most likely near the monastery at Snagov. Some accounts say that monks found the body, but not the head. One legend has it that the sultan had ordered for the head to be brought to him in Constantinople. It was dipped in honey to preserve it, then put on display to prove that the Ottomans’ evil archenemy had been vanquished. That may or may not be true, but the fact is that no one knows what happened to the head.”

  “Until I tracked it down in 1945.”

  “Markov. Come on.”

  “I completely understand your skepticism. I’m asking you to believe something—many things—that are far beyond the laws of nature. But there are two things you need to factor into your thinking: My obsession with the Dracula legend, and the fact that I had access to a trailblazer no one else had: Lugosi. He was born and raised in a land steeped in the Dracula legend, going back centuries, to Vlad’s days as Prince of Wallachia—the region that included Transylvania.

  “Lugosi was born in 1884, and Bram Stoker’s book came out in 1897. Until then Vlad Dracula III was merely a ruler Lugosi had learned about in history class. To some, Dracula was seen as a hero for repelling the Turkish invasion. But then Stoker’s novel came out, giving Vlad’s name to the infamous vampire, and the legend began.

  “Lugosi told me what a sensation it caused in Transylvania. He and his teen-aged friends devoured the book. It affected him deeply, to the point where he wondered if the original Dracula might have ever engaged in vampirism. Lugosi researched it off and on for years, even more intensely when he got cast in the part in the stage production that preceded the film. He was a serious actor who always did his homework, and he poured himself into that role, feeling it was the one he had been born to play. He combed the records, looking for descendants. He went to the town where Dracula had spent five years in prison and sought out the local historian. This historian had collected every shred of information he could find about their most infamous prisoner, which included the prison log with the names of Dracula’s visitors.

  “The name of one particular woman kept appearing that didn’t appear in any of the other documents. The historian had traced her to a remote village some distance from the prison. Romanian oral tradition is very strong. Often it is all we have to go on in the centuries before records were well kept.”

  “Welcome to the world of a folklorist,” Quinn said.

  “Indeed. So we can imagine this historian talking to the villagers, armed with only the name of this woman and her apparent connection to Vlad Dracula. Eventually he found someone who recognized her name. The scandalous story had been passed down for generations. She’d had a son but never gotten married. The father was said to be Vlad Dracula. According to the villager, legend had it that, years later, the son was at the battle where his father was beheaded with his own sword. He had somehow retrieved the head and sword and escaped to England.

  “Lugosi had to abandon his search at that point, because after Dracula came out, his career took off. And that could have been the end of it. But Lugosi’s fateful path had brought him to someone far more obsessive about the Dracula legend—me. The chance, however remote, to actually possess the head of Vlad Dracula himself took my obsession to a whole new level.”

  At first Quinn had considered Markov’s talk of Dracula and dark secrets to be simply manifestations of his movie-influenced tendency toward melodrama. But now Quinn was beginning to see the aptness of his references. Whether or not he was staring at the actual head of Vlad the Impaler, he felt himself being pulled into Markov’s “infernal miasma.”

  “I told Bela I would follow the trail he had blazed. He let me copy the records he had kept, and gave me his blessing. His research had uncovered the illegitimate son’s name: Viktor Flaviu.”

  In the quick glance Markov cast at the severed head before going on, Quinn thought he saw a trace of affection.

  “And so began a quest that took nearly fifteen years. Since the villager had told the historian that the son had escaped to England, I went to London and scoured the records: births, deaths, marriages, passenger lists, military records, land records—everything. Viktor had gotten married in 1502 and had two sons. He died in 1521. I won’t bore you with the countless dead ends, but this is where—some would say luck, I would say destiny—plays a part. Finally, after following a bloodline that had trickled down to a few drops, in 1945 I found a Romanian man who had the head. He was living in a rundown flat in Manhattan. Irony of ironies, only a few miles from where Lugosi had starred in the stage version of Dracula. I was awestruck at having succeeded on such a far-fetched quest, but the scene was not one for rejoicing.

  “To see this eighty-nine-year-old shell of a man, sitting in his ratty armchair with the stuffing coming out … faithfully executing a duty he probably had never really wanted or understood, doing whatever needed doing to preserve the five-hundred-year-old remains of Vlad the Impaler. I pictured his whole world just sitting in that room, tending to what was left of Dracula: a severed head in a glass case, showing no sign of life, yet still powerful enough to command his one remaining loyal subject to do his bidding.”

  The same thing could be said about you, Quinn thought.

  “Looking at the man’s cadaverous frame,” Markov continued, “I couldn’t help but think that, if not literally, certainly figuratively, Dracula had sucked the life out of him.”

  As he has done to you.

  “I asked for proof, and he gave me a letter establishing provenance and giving instructions to each custodian on what must be done to preserve Vlad’s head. The letter had been written by the first caretaker. His son Viktor.”

  “You have the letter?”

  “Yes. And one thing more had been passed down along with the head and the letter. The sword that had supposedly been used to behead Vlad Dracula. His prized sword that had belonged to his father. It had the Dracula crest on the hilt, but even so, I knew this could all be a hoax. The sword could be an imitation. The letter could be a forgery, the head a fake. But the scene of the withered custodian watching over these relics had me in no mood to argue, and on some visceral level I was convinced. Technically I owed this man nothing, but I already had more money than I could spend in several lifetimes, and wanted to do something to ease whatever days the poor wretch had left. He almost went into shock when I wrote him a check for fifty thousand dollars—a fortune in those days. I promised to follow the prescribed treatment and perpetuate the legacy.” Markov nodded toward the head that, if genuine, had deteriorated very little since posing for that famous portrait five hundred years ago. “And here he is.”

  “An astounding tale, to say the least,” Quinn said. “I see a bare spot on the lining at the bottom of the case in the shape of the sword. Did you remove it for some reason?”

  “No. Max absconded with it.” Markov’s face sagged under a weary regret. “My son. He knew it was my most precious possession. It had traveled with the head all those centuries. An expert confirmed that it was a Toledo sword from the 1400s. It is a matter of record that after Vlad Dracul was slain, hi
s sword was retrieved from the battlefield and given to his son. Dracula—which means ‘son of Dracul’—treasured it and used it for the rest of his life. When DNA testing became reliable, I scraped a small sample of dried-up blood from the sword and collected a vial of blood from the head. I had them tested and they were identical. The blood on the sword was the blood of Vlad the Impaler.”

  Quinn remained skeptical, but let it pass.

  Markov went on. “The final irony was that the sword Dracula used to behead so many was used to behead him in the end.”

  “Why would your son take the sword?”

  “Because he despises me.” He made an impatient wave. “Another twisted branch in my family tree. I’m not in the mood for that particular story right now. Perhaps later.”

  Quinn added it to the growing pile of questions pummeling to get out and gestured at the head. “How can tissue that’s been dead for over five hundred years not have decomposed? The only deterioration I see is those bumps, or ridges, where the skin has apparently sagged or drooped.”

  “We cannot possibly know everything that has happened in the passing along of this head for five hundred years. We can only hypothesize.”

  “So what is your hypothesis?”

  “When I first gained possession, I carefully removed one of those bumps and had it examined. It was not flesh. It was dried-up honey. With a trace of formaldehyde.” Markov took a beat to let that sink in. “Honey was a common preservative in Dracula’s time. Even today it is still used in some of the more primitive cultures. I believe the early custodians continually replenished the honey until formaldehyde became the scientifically accepted alternative.

  “Whatever the case, to fully answer your question I must first show you the letter from Viktor. It is his eyewitness account of how this came to be, and his instructions on the proper care. Only after reading that can you fully understand the things I will tell you. Even then credibility will be stretched to the breaking point. I would not believe these things myself if I had not experienced them firsthand.”