Ad Eternum (5 page)

The concierge did have a message. He was just setting down his pen when the wampyr approached.

“I beg your pardon. I am Jack Prior. Has anyone called for me?”

Wise in the ways of wampyrs, the concierge showed no surprise. “A Dr. Thomas.” He offered the message across his desk.

It was brief and impersonal, amounting to
I hope you will consider our offer seriously, and I look forward to visiting with you again.
The wampyr hid a smile. New Haven was not so far away. The beginnings of a court, already. And in somebody he did not mind talking to.

“Thank you,” he said, and tipped the concierge. As he was turning away, however, he became aware that someone by the front doors, where a little light spilled in despite the awnings, was watching him.

Prince Ragoczy, a light overcoat flapping unbelted atop his suit, had paused there in the fall of light with his arms crossed, and was considering the wampyr.

The wampyr raised a hand and waved sardonically.

Ragoczy dropped his arms to his sides and crossed the lobby, hasty strides billowing the skirt of his coat. As he came within human earshot, he said conversationally, “If that wave was any more sarcastic it would be clapping.”

“Nonsense,” said the wampyr. “Why on earth wouldn’t I be thrilled to see you, when our acquaintanceship goes so far back?”

“You really don’t remember me.” He sighed. “I came to see if I could jog your memory.”

“I did not move in the same circles as you claim to have,” the wampyr said. “But I will allow you to make your case. Come, perhaps you can convince me.”

“And if I do, what do I win?”

“Perhaps you should ask what it is that you lose, if you fail.” The wampyr led Ragoczy around the perimeter of the lobby, to the door of the bar.

“I shudder to think. You’ll…expose me? Tear my throat out? Toss me to your pack of familiar wolves?”

“Familiars,” the wampyr said with a turn of his hand. “Who can afford the vet bills?”

They seated themselves. A self-effacing waitress brought a menu only to Ragoczy, who studied it for a brief moment before ordering a ham sandwich and coffee.

“Well,” said the wampyr. “I guess that puts paid to all that speculation that you might be the Wandering Jew.”

Ragoczy handed his menu back to the waitress, who withdrew. He swirled the ice cubes in his water glass without drinking. “Or maybe I’ve relaxed my feelings about Kashrut over the years.”

The wampyr arched an eyebrow.

Ragoczy laughed.

The wampyr said, “What I don’t understand is what you gain from pretending to immortality.”

“Why assume it’s a pretense?”

“I know a lot of immortals.” The wampyr had a pretty good mastery of the Gallic shrug, even though he was centuries out of practice as a Frenchman. “The majority of them are very invested in keeping the rest of the world from knowing what they are. If you really had the secret of eternal life, you would not advertise—and if you did, the world would be beating a path to your door.”

“Why wouldn’t I advertise?”

“Because if you did,” the wampyr said, “you’d soon have plenty of disgruntled immortals demanding their money back as they discovered how little they liked it. The human spirit, child, is not meant to wear like iron. We are rags, we very old ones, or we are Bodhisattvas, or we are monsters: those are the only outcomes. Be
glad
you are a charlatan!”

It was not the wampyr’s way to lose his temper. But now his voice dropped to a furious whisper, and he had to prevent his hands from clenching on the table-edge.

“And even if you were the St. Germain of yore—he too was a petty confidence man. Even Casanova knew him for such. St. Germain was not even a sorcerer, though he claimed to be an alchemist.”

“There was a woman with whom we were both acquainted,” Ragoczy began. “She spoke of you often. Marie—”

It was the wampyr’s turn to laugh, and he did, aglow with true merriment. “I suppose you think I don’t know how a cold read works? That’s a trick that was old when the Spiritualists relied upon it, Ragoczy. To
think
that I might have been acquainted with a Marie in France. How could you possibly have
known
? Tell me something about myself you could not have learned from books!”

Whatever Ragoczy was about to say next died on his tongue. A newly-familiar scent alerted the wampyr to Damian’s approach a second before he heard his footsteps.

“Oh, good,” said Damian. “I trust you two are behaving yourselves? Solving the problems of Western society?”

“Perhaps creating a few,” the wampyr said. With conscious care, he released the edge of the table and sat back into the stiff embrace of his chair. “Won’t you join us?”

Shouldn’t you be resting
? his expression said.

Damian squeezed his knee under the table as he sat. The waitress was back almost instantly, and she withdrew as unobtrusively as before.

“You know,” Damian said, perusing the menu, “the scandal of this place isn’t that they cater to wampyrs. It’s that they let just anybody come in.”

The wampyr’s head was not bowed over a printed card, so he saw the wrestle of expressions that crossed Ragoczy’s face before it settled into perfect bland amusement. Jealousy, sharp and true.

Without raising his gaze, Damian said, “Sarah wanted to let you both know that she wants to talk over some draft ideas for the university charter. She’s also got an investor or two lined up.”

“I can help with the finances,” the wampyr said. “
Only
the finances.”

“We’ll see.”

“We will not.”
How easily you commit yourself.
Well, the money was no object, and while he had done many things in all his centuries, he had never founded a university before. He still had no intention of tying himself to this place forever. Or even for a dozen years.

A teacher—what could be more ridiculous? He said so. “I am no sorcerer. Nor teacher of magics.”

“You are magical enough for me. Maybe you can teach history.”

“Ouch,” the wampyr said.

Damian grinned devilishly. He stretched his tall frame against the back of the chair. As if by accident, his legs brushed the wampyr’s. “We’re meeting tonight at her place. After sundown, of course.”

Mercifully, the waitress brought back Ragoczy’s sandwich when she returned to take Damian’s order. The food gave Ragoczy something to do with his hands and mouth without having to support a conversation—a task that Damian took up quite cheerfully until he, too, was fed. Then it fell to the wampyr, who resorted to the gossip of Prague, six centuries out of date, to keep talk flowing.

Shortly thereafter, Ragoczy excused himself—before Damian had even quite finished eating, and in such haste that he left his newspaper folded beside his napkin. Damian sighed and set his fork across the edge of his plate. He tilted his head to one side and regarded the wampyr with frank appraisal.

“I’ve realized,” he said, “That I need to know what this is.”

The wampyr folded his hands. There was really no way to handle this delicately. “You know my kind cannot support…monogamy. It equates to slow murder.”

“You’ll have other lovers.” Damian shrugged. “So may I. I had guessed it was…club rules.”

“Love,” the wampyr said, “is not always the word for it.”

Damian said, “That looked like an uncomfortable conversation I was intruding on. So, even if he’s not some immortal Baltic nobleman, what does it harm for him to say so?”

The wampyr realized a moment too late that a mortal man would have shrugged. But he had left it too long, and so he said simply, “He envies you. You should be careful.”

“Envies me?”

“He’s realized we have an agreement—”

“Jack.”

It was that, the wampyr realized—hearing a sound repeated in the voices of people one respected—that made it a name. Otherwise, it was just a dog barking for attention.

“I believe we just established that it is not an exclusive agreement—”

The wampyr cleared his throat, for punctuation rather than of any need. “I fear I am considered somewhat peculiar among my kind. I prefer to limit my depredations to those whose company I enjoy.”

Damian straightened his silverware. “I think I’m flattered.” But the mind behind his direct, amused gazed was patently aware that
prefer to limit
was not the same thing as simply
limit
.

“He wants to be immortal,” the wampyr said as if he were not changing the subject. “Wants it so badly he’s convinced himself that he is. And now he wants to convince me.”

“So that you will
make
him immortal?” Damian drank water. A crease between his eyebrows deepened, and the wampyr apprehended the shadow of ancient heartbreak as he continued. “Wait. Are you suggesting that you would make me a va—one of the blood? Because, no offense, but we’ve only just met.”

“No,” the wampyr said. “But Ragoczy might have convinced himself so.”

“Oh,” Damian said. He glanced towards the door.

“We’re not immortal. We are just unputrefying—at least, until it all gets too much for us.” The wampyr snapped his fingers by way of illustration. “Then, fzzt!”

“It’s not possible he’s really St. Germain?”

The wampyr smiled sadly. “Do you know how many St. Germains I have met? Every one of them wants to be someone he is not.”

“And he did not know you?”

“I lied,” the wampyr said. “There was a Monsieur Gosselin in Paris contemporaneous with Giacomo Casanova and the alleged St. Germain, who claimed to be a son of the famous wampyr hero of Louis Quatorze’s court. But it was not me. It was…” he waved a hand in the direction that Ragoczy had taken “…an impersonator, if you will.”

“Huh,” said Damian. “I never before fully appreciated the drawbacks of being a culture hero.” He ate a few more bites of pasta. “I don’t care what Ragoczy thinks. Am I being too forward for
you
?”

The wampyr steepled his fingers. “Anyone you shock in the Hotel Aphatos came here to be shocked.”

While Damian finished his dinner, the wampyr reached across the table to retrieve Ragoczy’s abandoned copy of the
Manhattanite
. It was a full-sized paper, not the tabloid he had anticipated. When he flipped it open, though, his fingers stuck against the surface as if it were printed on fly paper.

He had anticipated a grainy, flare-daubed, underexposed print from his flight from the cameras on the previous morning. Instead, his fingertips brushed the stark, exquisite jaw of a young woman whose pallor and stern bearing made her seem a heroic, martial statue hewn of ice. She did not look a day over seventeen.

She wore a plain traveling suit in some fabric that read grey on film, but it might as well have been a uniform. In the photograph, her hair seemed white where it bounced against broad shoulders. The wampyr knew it was ice-blonde, though. As his fingertips traced those pale waves, he felt the stillness of the hunt steal over him. Expression dropped from his face; he felt the effort it took to maintain the semblance of humanity slip away.

Gently, he turned the paper, and read the caption that lay above the fold.

Above her face, the headline screamed across three columns:

He flipped to below the fold and read of the controversial—nay,
notorious
—Captain Grell, an English Jew who some said had gone into the service of the enemy, and who some said had infiltrated their innermost ranks until she became a member of the Prussian Chancellor’s personal guard—whereupon she had led a successful assassination plot against him and several of his top advisors.

She had stood trial in Prussia, and been condemned to an extermination camp as a traitor, a Jew, and a Lesbian—but the sentence had not come to its inevitable fruition before the end of the war. Whereupon she had stood trial in Nuremburg, and been acquitted, in large part because of testimony recorded against her in her Prussian trial by a woman the wampyr knew had been her lover, Sturmwolfstaffel Obersturmführerin Adele Kneeland. Grell had never said as much to anyone, even as Lieutenant Kneeland condemned her—and Kneeland had refused to testify at the second trial. She’d been sentenced to a prison term for her service to the Prussians, but had only served a half-year of it before she was deemed a conscript under new rules and pardoned for her not particularly serious crimes. She’d spent her war in Berlin, and had taken no part in the storied atrocities of the Prussian horde.

As far as the wampyr had heard, Kneeland was living out a quiet retirement in Tsarist Germany, which was Prussia no longer. He had lost track of Captain Grell, as she must have intended, despite an offer he had once left with her to come and find him when the war was done.

The court of public opinion was still divided, as far as the wampyr knew. Captain Grell was a Mata Hari; Captain Grell was a war hero; Captain Grell was no better than she should be—and perhaps a Hell of a lot worse. But the wampyr knew a few old soldiers—ones who had fought the front lines on both sides of the Great War, enduring mustard gas and artillery and the thunder of armored cavalry rolling across battlefields strewn with broken men.

He rather thought those men would have sent her white roses every day, if they knew where to find her.

There were no quotations from Captain Grell in the paper. Apparently she had met the reporters at dockside with a thousand-yard stare in her pale blue eyes and a battle-honed “No comment.”

“Oh, Ruth,” he said.

The story was continued inside. Seeking the rest of it—hoping and dreading another photo—the wampyr flipped the first page. Only to find a different story, albeit one of equal concern, at the top of page three.

Apparently Abby Irene’s obituary was running in the society pages because there was a note to that effect below a much clearer photograph of himself than he would have anticipated, annotating a story about his arrival in New Amsterdam that was only a little less sensationalistic than the one featuring Ruth. The wampyr had underestimated the state of the art in telephoto lenses.

Damian could not have missed his distraction. “Jack?”

“Once we moved quietly,” the wampyr said. He turned the paper so Damian could read the article about his arrival. He let the article about Ruth stay hidden.

“Now the paparazzi follow you.” Damian gave him an encouraging smile. “Look, I have some errands—”

“Go,” said the wampyr. “I will meet you at Sarah’s home tonight.”

“Yes,” said Damian. He stood, and was gone before the wampyr noticed that he had left money to cover the cost of his meal.

Ragoczy, of course, had not done so. But the newspaper would suffice.

One of the delights of modern life, the wampyr decided, was that he did not need to wait for a rainy day to take care of the sort of inquiries normally handled during business hours. Instead, he availed himself of one of the hotel’s telephones and made a few calls.

His new status as a public figure was a mixed blessing in his old profession. It would be a challenge to create the sort of network of informants and acquaintances so essential to a private detective’s work. And there were those in law enforcement and its associated disciplines who were not…sanguine…about wampyrs. But in general, the police were more educated than general society when it came to the existence and habits of the blood.

Prejudice aside—and they had plenty—they had a vested interest in knowing who the killers were.

And the wampyr
did
still have an extensive network of contacts in London, in Moscow, and elsewhere. These included the grandson of a Moscow homicide detective to whom the wampyr had once been very close indeed.

The long-distance bill would be substantial. But in the end, and far more easily than anticipated, the wampyr had the information he required.

The wampyr left the Aphatos at sunset, while red banners still crept from behind the buildings concealing the western sky.

It must have been shift change for the protestors, because there seemed to be about twice as many as there had before. Perhaps, like their prey, they turned out at nightfall.

Their prey.
Hah.

The young wampyr he’d met earlier, the lovely Elizabeth, loitered against a lamppost clad in blue jeans and a black cowhide jacket, stiff with age and scuffed at the elbows so the rich dry scent still rose from the leather. Heavy boots encased her calves, and the faint smell of gasoline surrounding her hinted that she’d arrived on a motorcycle. She was not smoking a cigarette, but she held one theatrically. The wampyr understood that it was a part of her costume.

He had nothing but approval for this modern phenomenon of women in trousers…and tight ones at that. She caught his eye. He nodded, aware as he did so that she would cultivate him for his age—his experience, his status, his power—as much as for anything about him that might genuinely interest her. But friends were precious, friends were rare—so he nodded as she walked towards him, her hair tossed down her back.

One of the protestors stopped to catcall, and she turned and gave him the finger. The wampyr would have warned her against giving them any notice, inviting them into the circle of her attention. But he was too late, and then there was a crest of noise like a breaking wave—

He saw just the one escort, and the doorman in red, and there were perhaps ten of the young men with signs. Worse, two or three girls had joined them, and men with women watching were not prone to back down. He and Elizabeth were the only blood outside, and as the thud of her hard rubber soles came closer, he saw her bitten lip as she realized her error. Someone shouted something vile; he held her gaze, willing her not to turn. Willing her to come to him. If he could reach her, bring her inside—

They could survive a mob scene, and probably even protect the doorman and the escort. But the Hotel Aphatos might not survive the publicity that would follow if any of the protestors were hurt. And the legal status of the blood in America was always precarious.

Elizabeth covered the last three steps between them. He reached out to take her shoulder—

His left hand rose reflexively. When it descended, his fingers were curled around a broken chunk of pink granite cobblestone. A souvenir, no doubt, wrested from one of New Amsterdam’s ancient side streets. And hurled with pathetically inadequate but lethal intent by one of those clean-cut young men.

The wampyr weighed it in his hand. Rounded on one side, jagged on the other. About the size of a cricket ball, and heavier. He ran a thumb against one of the facets; the dry ridges of his skin caught.

The noise of the jeering crowd redoubled as he raised his eyes and his left hand.

“Your aim,” he said, “is poor.”

The stone cracked in his hand. Cleanly in two, with a little sifting of sand. He let the smaller part fall before the larger, so they hit
one-TWO
.

In the silence that followed, he took Elizabeth’s elbow and escorted her inside. She walked boldly until the door shut behind them, but he could feel her leaning against him. As soon as they were concealed by the screens, she turned to him and said, “Even for one of the blood—”

“The stone,” he said calmly, “was flawed. A crack, probably from when it was broken with the hammer.
You
could have shattered it.”

Her eyes widened. Her lips tightened.

She began to laugh, one hand on a pillar for support, just as if she really needed the breath she was wasting.

Discretion and valor being what they are, the wampyr asked to be shown a more discreet exit from the hotel. He considered hailing a cab, but given how lucky he’d gotten the previous morning it seemed like presuming upon the fates, especially since cabdrivers appeared from his limited sample to favor the
Manhattanite
. So he hid his face behind a scarf he did not need and ventured into the subways.

They were quick and efficient and none too clean, and having misread the map, he found himself on the wrong line—ascending the western edge of Jardinstraat rather than the east. It was easily enough remedied: he alighted, ascended, then transected the park along the route 89
^th
Street would have followed had it been permitted to continue.

He did not trouble himself with paths, but merely skirted the southern edge of the reservoir. He knew the location of the house. And he was starting to get the lay of the land in this strange New Amsterdam.

Whoever was following him stayed downwind and moved quietly, but the wampyr’s hearing was keen. It wasn’t the patter or crunch of footsteps that revealed a stalker, but the pattern of silences in the cries of night birds, newly returned to the city with the onrushing spring.

So he played the game through the dark, waiting for the eddy that would carry him a scent. At first, the wampyr wondered if the stalker thought he in turn was hunting, like some storybook fiend, and meant to stop him—but then the scent came, familiar, the musk of a beast and the sweetness of a girl, and he relaxed.