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Anja and Betty strolled down an aisle of the chemist's shop, picking out some last-minute items they needed for tomorrow's trip to the Romanian capital of Bucharest. Her grandmother's father had led them to the American sector of Germany and then eventually to England. Anja's grandmother had been a renowned beauty, but stayed single a long time, caring for her own grandparents and then parents, before marrying another Romanian refugee.
This bloodline still showed clearly in Anja, with her thick, mahogany hair and full eyebrows over large, expressive eyes. Anja thought Betty had insisted on this late shopping stop to pick up a travel-sized tube of toothpaste or the like, but she should have known better from the buxom blonde.
Who knows where Vlad will want to impale us? Vlad referred to Vlad the Impaler, the notorious Romanian nobleman who had enemy prisoners impaled on wooden stakes on the battlefield to terrify the Ottoman soldiers who were marching north into Wallachia in the 15 th century.
Vlad was also known as Vlad Dracula and is said to have been a partial inspiration for Bram Stoker's famous vampire, four centuries later. When they'd first decided to go to Bucharest, they'd kicked around the idea of making a day trip up to visit Bran Castle, which many people referred to as Dracula's Castle, even though Vlad had never really been there. From then on, Betty had referred to all Romanian men as Vlads. She'd also declared that the Romanian box on her Fuck-Around-the-World list was still blank and she was looking forward to being impaled on Vlad's stake.
