Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (21 page)

“I knew it,” Paul said.

“Just a second.” She turned to him. “Give me that.” He held the phone away, but she took it. “Okay, George, what’s the situation?”

“It’s a felony count of Ecstasy possession. He had a tab.”

“That’s a felony?”

“Class C, but it’ll put him in Rikers overnight unless you get him out. And if he goes in there—well, you can’t allow that.”

“We’ll be there in an hour.” She would do the driving. He was good, but she was damn good. She hung up the phone. “He’s in on an X charge. They’re gonna ship him to Rikers.”

“We gotta post bail. I’ll call—”

“You’ll call Morris Wheeler from the car. I have a feeling that somebody’s gonna have to talk the night court judge into dropping charges, and a lawyer can’t do that. That’s a job for parents.”

“You’re gonna drive us down to the city in one hour? It’s a two-hour drive, even with me behind the wheel.”

“But you won’t be behind the wheel.”

She hung out her blue light and made sure her credentials were in her purse. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t official business, but it was hard to tell that to the mother in her. Her boy was not going to go spend the night getting raped, for the love of all that was holy.

Rounding the first curve, Paul grabbed the handle above the passenger side window. “We gotta get there alive,” he muttered.

“Never you mind.”

When they reached the parkway, she accelerated to 120, then settled in at 115. This would give her just enough anticipation time to cope with traffic ahead. Any faster, and her reflexes wouldn’t make it. Hopefully, no trooper would be dumb enough to try to pull a blue light over, not when he saw the plates and knew this was a federal car.

Not five minutes later, she had a siren on her tail. She left it there for a while, hoping he’d read the plate and peel off. But she could see the rigid face under the Smokey the Bear hat. This guy was steamed. He was not going to peel off.

“Goddammit!”

Paul said nothing.

She pulled over so fast the cop practically overshot her. He came out, walked up to the window.

“This is official business,” she barked.

“Driver’s license and registration.”

She pulled out her credentials.

“Driver’s license and registration!”

“Are you nuts? This is an official vehicle, and I’m an officer of the law! Get the hell out of my face, and do it NOW!”

“Lady, you were doing a hundred and twenty.”

“And if you don’t move your hiney outa here, I’m gonna have to do a hundred and forty, and if I have to do that, I’m putting you up on charges, buster, and those charges will be serious.”

“An Audi won’t do a hundred and forty.”

Oh. An asshole. Now she understood. “This one will,” she said as she rolled up the window. She accelerated into traffic. He did not follow—surprisingly, given that he was a complete prick.

“You scared him. Impressive.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Becky knew damn well that he wouldn’t have come near them if she hadn’t been a woman.

Fifty-two minutes later, they were in front of the municipal building in lower Manhattan. The place was a maze, but they finally found Part 176, Judge S. Gutfriend presiding. As soon as she threw the swinging glass door open, she saw the back of Morris Wheeler’s head, and beside him, sitting tall, her son. She strode past the lounging cops, the miserable families, the sullen defendants—or defen
dants,
as they were called here—and put her hand on Ian’s shoulder.

He turned. How young he looked—just a damn baby. Salt trenches gleamed on his cheeks, where tears had flowed and dried.

Morris shook their hands. “I was afraid we were gonna go it alone,” he said. “I think you guys can figure out what to say—honor student, made a mistake, don’t give him a record. Momma, you say, ‘He’s a good boy.’ You use those words.”

“The judge must hear that fifty times a night.”

“You’d be surprised at how little he hears it. There are sixteen other kids on this docket, and exactly two parents have shown up. You two. And Paul, you say how proud you are of him.”

“He’s not proud of me,” Ian muttered.

Becky squeezed Paul’s hand, but she felt like wringing his damn neck. This absolutely would not be happening if Paul Ward would just let himself trust his own son. A trusted Ian would have followed his dad to Choate. He would not have been left to rot and fester and fill with hate for his own father.

Then suddenly Becky was being called. There was a little podium to stand before. “He’s a good boy,” she intoned into the microphone, her voice echoing oddly. She told how he was an honor student, how they’d just moved to Manhattan, and he’d gotten overexcited and made a mistake. She defended him, she thought, eloquently, before the dead eyes of Judge Gutfriend.

Then Paul took the stand. “Ian got hijacked by hype,” he growled, his voice rumbling with such power through the courtroom’s speakers that every single soul there fell silent. Even the judge’s eyes seemed to spark a little. “He’s got a midnight curfew, which he’s busted for the last time. You don’t wanna give this boy an adult felony record. He has the makings of a good lawyer, among other things. But you and I both know the licensing requirements. No felonies need apply. Let me take my son home and give him what he needs.”

“What’s that, Mr. Ward?”

“I think—to be frank, Your Honor—I think that he needs more of my time. He’s been getting shortchanged.”

“And so you’re here.”

“We’re here.”

The lawyer for the state read the charge but offered no argument. A mumbled couple of words and a snap of the gavel later, and the case was dismissed.

They were in the hall before Becky threw her arms around Ian.

“Does this mean I have to go back?” he asked.

She looked around for Paul. He should be here. He should help her make this decision. But he was standing at the end of the corridor like a statue. Of all the damn things, he was reading a newspaper. Becky thanked Morris for getting out of bed for them. Then she marched down the hall with Ian.

“Paul Ward—”

But he was pale. His face was frozen. He looked like he’d had a stroke. In his hands was the early edition of the
New York Daily News.
Wordlessly, he handed it to her.

Under the headline “Dried Body Apparent Accident” was the following story: “The body of fishing boat captain Jacob Siegel was found in the hold of his boat, the
Sea Bream,
after a search at the Fulton Fish Market today. Siegel’s crew had reported him missing and presumed overboard when he disappeared from the boat at approximately 5:15 A.M. while it was unloading its cargo at the market.

“Mr. Siegel’s body had been completely exsanguinated and was reduced almost to a skeleton in what police believe was a freak accident. ‘I never saw anything like it,’ said police superintendent B. J. Harlow. A coroner’s report on the death is expected to be filed today.”

Long before she had finished reading it, the world around Becky had slipped into silence, Ian and Paul and the corridor had slid away, and her mind had gone back again to the terrible times under these streets.

“Mom? Dad?”

She looked at him as if across a gulf of shadows. “Ian,” she said, “the apartment isn’t going to work.”

He slumped down on the bench. But what could she do? She would never, ever leave him here to wander these streets, knowing that the vampires had returned.

T
he Music Room was the hottest intimate club in New York. Monty Sauder had put millions into it, banishing the awful hugeness that made so many faux café gigs so unpleasant. Who wanted to sing to an ocean of a thousand little tables, each one with its dinky little lamp? The only way you were going to sing like you were in a café was if you were. Monty had solved this problem. There were just sixty tables on his floor. The rest of the place was all balconies, so there might be a thousand people there, but you felt like you were in this really intimate space.

She stood on the bandbox stage looking out over the floor and contemplated a larger question: Why did she do this at all? She had a ridiculous amount of money, three houses she hardly ever lived in, her own plane, cars at every house just sitting there being maintained by a faceless horde of people who quietly kept everything just right—she literally had it all.

So, therefore, she was going to come out here on this stage in a few nights and bare her soul to a bunch of fat-faced rich people and reviewers whose talentless, disappointed lives and insupportable arrogance required them to dump on her. Was it really because she cared about the Environment Fund? Well, she did care, but not enough to risk all that you risked in front of an audience—smoke in your throat, nasty reviews in the
Times
or
Rolling Stone,
or even some kind of weird embarrassment, like nobody shows up. Or some asshole with a gun.

She watched Hillyard doing the lights, watched Sam Hitchens fooling with the sound. She didn’t need to watch them—they’d do everything perfectly. She could afford the best.

Monty came sailing in with the presells, which mostly consisted of ten-thousand-dollar checks made out to the Environment Fund. He looked terrible, Monty did, but he always looked terrible. He smoked constantly, and his daily rest consisted of a downer at four in the morning. “Two million dollars,” he said, handing her a blue packet of checks. She gave him his own check, a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. The show would ultimately net the Environment Fund $3 million. As for Leo Patterson, she would just about break even.

“How many are really coming?” she asked.

“That’s an interesting question, actually.” He shuffled his papers. “The issue is who’s seated—” He nodded toward the floor. “And who’s consigned to the dustbin of history. I seated Jewel and her truck driver and put Kitty Hart in the balcony. Ain’t I bad?”

“Jewel’s friend is one of the world’s great bull riders, not a truck driver, and do I really want to put Kitty Carlisle Hart in the
balcony?”

“She’d be ancient history if she wasn’t so old, my dear.”

“Bring me the seating chart.”

He ran off, his shirttail flying behind him. Idly, she picked up the paper he’d had under his arm and left on a chair. Monty read the
Post.
Okay. Personally, she preferred the
Times.
Except for page 6, of course. The celeb gossip page of the
Post
was required reading for anybody doing the public-eye thing in New York.

She would have turned straight to it, but she dropped the paper. When she’d gathered it up, she found herself staring at something that was horribly, darkly familiar to her. For a moment her mind was blank; it was something she could not be seeing in a newspaper. But the picture could not have been more clear: it was of a man who had been consumed by a vampire—not one like her, who left a lot of the blood, but a real, natural-born vampire with an
ebius
powerful enough to suck a human being absolutely dry.

She realized simultaneously that she was no longer alone, and that this vampire—so heedless that it would leave a kill right out in the open—was in mortal danger. She crumpled the paper. Involuntarily, she moaned. Monty, George, and Monty’s assistant, Fred Camp, all turned toward her. They’d been huddling together, frantically plotting how to keep the seating chart out of her hands.

“Leo?”

“I’m okay.” She plastered a smile on her face. She had to get out of here immediately. She needed something, anything—a drink, a toke, a tab of Special K—to put her down.
Way
down.

“I’ve got some coke left over from last night,” Monty suggested confidentially, seeming to sense her need.

George, who was far more perceptive, realized that something in the paper had shocked her. He picked it up. “Jesus Christ,” he said. He looked at her, his eyebrows raised. Then he showed the paper to the others. “Look at this. They shouldn’t print shit like this.”

“Oh, our poor baby,” Monty said, enclosing Leo in a long, thin arm. “This must have really shocked us.” Then, sotto voce, “She’s so sensitive, Georgie, I don’t know how you manage her.”

George said nothing. He knew well that Leo could probably have watched gladiators slicing each other up without batting an eye. So he simply stared quietly at her, his face betraying fascination and a little curiosity.

Leo fought for composure, but the walls were throbbing, the place felt like the interior of a coffin, the air was dense and foul, and she wanted only one thing: find and save that vampire.

Or no. No! God, what was she thinking? She couldn’t become part of that world again. It was dead, and the vampire that had blundered into New York was doomed.

She sucked in breath, twisted her hands together, tearing at them until her knuckles sounded like snapping twigs.

She had to go into the tunnels. That’s where the vampire would be, imagining itself safe in that charnel hell where Paul Ward ruled.

“If you’d rather do this another time—”

“We’ll be back tomorrow,” she heard George saying.

“Okay, that’s good. It’s fine.”

If she didn’t want to think about anything—and she really, really did not, not just now—well, she didn’t have to. “Take me home,” she said vaguely.

“To the Sherry?” George asked as they left the club.

Oh, God. This was an incredible moment. In her mind’s eye, she saw the iron door to the tunnel. She could not go down there, dared not. But there was somebody needful, and she had to at least try. “My house,” she said. “I’m going to spend the day at the piano.”

“Beautiful,” George said.

“Alone. No kibitzers.”

They got in the limo and rode silently uptown. Leo closed her eyes. What if it was a man, a beautiful male of the vampire species? One of her deep night fantasies was that a male vampire, tall and powerful, showed up in her bedroom, and was so strong he made her feel like a leaf.

“Hon, do you have any food in there? Do you want me to send Bobby over from the hotel with lunch?”

“Lunch?”

She realized that the strange jittering she was feeling wasn’t the car, it was her. She felt like she had a fever. George looked carefully, professionally concerned. She knew that he was thinking about what he’d do on the day off he’d just been granted.

“I want Kitty Carlisle Hart down in front. And Jewel and her boyfriend. Monty’s too contemptuous. All he’s ever done is throw around Daddy’s money.”

George remained silent.

“But it’s a beautiful club, I have to agree with that.”

“It’s beautiful. Also good acoustically. You’ll barely have to whisper.”

“You know how long it’s been since I sang in front of an audience?”

“Twenty-one months, including two missed informal dates. Except if you count the time at Katz’s.”

She’d burst into song one night at Katz’s Delicatessen on Houston Street. It had quickly become a bizarre media thing, with camera crews coming in from all sides. They ruined that fun fast.

The car turned onto First Avenue and headed uptown. “Get me a
Daily News
and a
Newsday,”
she said.

She held the papers tightly, not reading them, forcing herself not to think about what might be happening right now beneath the streets. Because you could bet that Paul Ward had read the paper, and he would be down there right now, an expert hunter in a territory he knew well.

Would she be able to find this vampire at all, let alone first? What if he or she didn’t know anything about what Miri had done to her? Could they tell, or would he simply take her?

“Who is Miri?”

“Miri?”

“You just said a name: Miri.”

She shook her head. Now she was talking to herself. That was all she needed. “Got a cigarette, George?”

“We’re quitting, remember.”

“Which means you haven’t got one, or you’re holding back?”

He held out a pack of Galoises. She took one, and he lit it. She dragged in the smoke gratefully. As far as she knew, smoking couldn’t hurt her, not with Miri’s blood flowing in her veins, but she was convinced that it was reducing her vocal range. Something was. But no matter, she needed this now.

“Gimme,” she said.

He held the pack away from her, but she took it, and the lighter. “You quit,” she said.

When the car arrived at the house, she got out and went up the steps without another word to George. She knew that she ought to be more careful, that Paul Ward and his team of murderers could be watching, but she couldn’t deal with that right now. The first thing she had to do was to try to rescue that vampire. Maybe he was sick. Did they get sick? Or hurt. They could certainly be hurt—she knew that too, too well.

She unlocked the door and stepped into the house. Waving at George, she closed it behind her. God, how quiet could a house be? It was as if the very air of this place absorbed sound. There was a timelessness to it that was just awesome, as if you were floating in eternity as soon as you crossed the threshold.

It was a very wide house, seventy feet, a true mansion rather than an expanded row house. Silvers Phillipot had told her that it was worth $15 million, maybe more, and that was unfurnished. She didn’t know what the furnishings might be worth. She dared not have them appraised. How could she explain chairs from ancient Egypt and Rome, or the Greek krater that stood against the far wall of the sitting room, or the Delft and the Dresden and the nameless wonders from across the length and breadth of the world? There were Titians and Canalettos on the walls, a Reubens and a Rembrandt, all portraits of the same person spanning centuries. It would be completely inexplicable to an art historian. And upstairs in the sun room, the mystery would deepen. There was an Alice Neel of the same woman sitting naked, with that same grave, infinitely noble face. How could Leo explain the fact that the great artists of the world had painted the same woman over a period of seven hundred years?

No, the house remained closed, its collections secret. But she had always wanted to make a grand entrance down the central staircase, before the assembled cream of the world. When she was just a girl here, running along behind Sarah and Miri, serving them and hoping to be blooded, she had dreamed of the dress she would wear—she thought a Hardy Aimes would be fitting—and of just how she would walk, casually but grandly, as she descended into this wide foyer, with its pink marble columns and gold-inlaid marble floor.

She went through the dining room with its fabulous Tiffany glass ceiling, of doves in clouds floating on an azure sky. The table was so impossibly wonderful that she’d longed to have it identified and appraised. It was not of recent manufacture—not, that is, from the past three or four centuries. The teak actually glowed, it had been so deeply and lovingly rubbed. And yet it seemed light, almost as if it would float. She thought that it might be from some unknown culture, perhaps an ancient Indian civilization that had been entirely lost.

When you gazed into its surface, it sometimes seemed as if memories or dreams might flutter there, slipping in and out of visibility as you watched. Had she not seen a city in that reflection once, rising like a memory and then gone? Or maybe it had been just her imagination.

She climbed the back stairs into the long, narrow serving corridor that opened into the various second-floor rooms. Then she went into Miri’s magnificent bedroom. This was untouched, waiting for Miri to return. As far as Leo was concerned, it would wait another thousand years, or forever. She went to the Roman cedar cupboard that stood against one of the eggshell blue walls and opened it. She slid back a drawer and put her hand into the place where a Roman senator had kept his most precious documents. From this hidden cranny she withdrew a black pistol, a weapon that Sarah had commissioned especially from the High Standard Custom Shop in Montana. She’d fired it, they all had, back when it had still seemed possible to survive. They had brought in a master gunsmith from the manufacturer especially to teach them, so that they would be the equal of their adversaries.

It had never been used. There hadn’t been the chance. She hefted it, opened and inspected the ten-bullet magazine. The pistol was fully loaded. She chambered a round and turned off the safety. The trigger pull was tuned to four pounds, so she would have to be careful. She liked guns, truth to tell. Loved this one, because it was just so superbly made. They should have all had them and kept them on their persons all the time. Then they would have had a chance. Too bad Miri hadn’t been able to believe in the danger, not really, not until he started firing.