The Last Vampire (10 page)

“Do you think we’ve won? Is that why you’re so damn smug, with your goddamn toys —” He swept the cigarette making machine out of Charlie’s hands. Charlie, who was wound tight by training and had a hair trigger, just barely managed to restrain himself, stopping his flying fist with a sudden jerk of effort. Paul looked at him. “Do it,” he said with an easy smile that he did not feel, “and I’ll lay you out.”

“Paul?”

“And as for you —” He grabbed her purse, which had been on the floor beside a chair. He held it up to the desk lamp. “What the fuck is this made out of?” He knew damn well. They all had this stuff — purses and wallets and belts, God only knew what else. The skin of the vampire was more delicate even than calfskin . . . probably than human, for that matter.

He emptied the purse on the desk and stuffed the damn thing into the trash can. “If they saw this skin, God only knows what they’d do.”

“I’m not exactly planning to take it with me into some fucking lair. I’m not
that
stupid.”

“Don’t you understand? Even yet?” He looked from one surprised face to the other. “No. You don’t. So you listen up, children, and you listen close. Something has changed. Big time. We’ve been dealing with something that’s very old and very slow to react, and so far it’s been easy. Like killing big bugs. You surprised ’em all, didn’t you? Token resistance — gnashing teeth, hissing. It was fun! It got to be, anyway. The professionals. Fuck! Fuck us, we’re assholes.”

“Not me,” Charlie said. His face was burning up. His eyes were beads. He was not trained to take abuse, and he did not take it well.

“Not you, little boy. Little, innocent boy. Lemme see your wallet.”

“What the hell for?”

“Lemme see the goddamn thing!”

Charlie held it out. “They use human skin,” he muttered.

Paul emptied it and threw it away with the purse. “Belts, shoes, anything?”

“That stuff is valuable!”

“If they see you with their goddamn
skins
in your hands, they’re gonna know exactly who you are.”

“They are not going to see us.”

“Listen to me. One of them has gone up to the fifth floor of a hotel, killed one of your peers, and then flown from Bangkok to Paris on a god-for-damned
airplane!
I’ve seen it and it looked like some damn lady.
Very
human! So they don’t all spend all their time hiding in lairs, do they? We’re up against something new! Something we know not one damn thing about! They may be as old as damn Methuselah and they may be slow to respond, but they’ve taken a blow to the gut, and they are now responding! So you better watch your backs, because they are strong and they are smart and
now they know!”

In the silence that followed, he became acutely aware of the humming of the little electric clock that stood on the table beside the bed. Charlie went to the window. Becky sat staring at her hands. Then she looked up. He saw tears gleaming in the edges of her eyes. He saw, also, that they were not tears of pain or embarrassment, but tears of rage. That was good. He liked that. Let her burn.

Dad was calling him from the back porch, “Paulie, Paulie let’s make ice cream!” Dad smelled of the raw earth that was his livelihood. He smelled of the leaves of summer.

After Dad had disappeared, Paulie had walked on his knees all the way down the pasture road to the river and all the way back. He had done that while begging God that if Dad was found, he would never stop praying forever.

Mom had worked the farm until her bones stuck out, and been scared all the time, because if she did not get her crop in, she said, this family was gonna hit the road. There was no bank in North Carolina, and probably not anywhere, that would give her a crop loan.

“What’re we supposed to do?” Becky asked.

“Your jobs!”

“I mean right now, Paul. Right this goddamn
second,
Paul! Because I don’t see one damn thing we can do. We got a vague description of a woman who apparently looks nothing — not one thing — like the creatures we’ve been killing. I mean, I wouldn’t make a damn handbag outa some
lady
. I saw little, shriveled monsters coated with dirt. I didn’t see anything that looked even remotely like a tall, blond woman.”

“We’ve known about these creatures for just a few years. They’ve been around for centuries and centuries. They’ve had a lotta time to think up a lotta things —”

“Not my point. My point is, you’re having a goddamn hissy fit because Charlie and I — who happen to have been risking our lives in a filthy, horrible, and completely thankless job for three hellish years — wanted to sneak a couple of hours of downtime when there wasn’t another goddamn thing we
could
do!” She folded her arms. “Explain yourself.”

“Simple. I’m a field supervisor and you’re not.”

“So, what do we do, boss? Right now?” Charlie was trying to put his smashed cigarette machine back together.

“Whatever you damn well please. Go to Tour d’Argent and blow a month’s pay. Moulin Rouge. The Slow Bar. Paint the goddamn town red, that’s what Paris is for.”

“I just want a good bouillabaisse.”

“I’d like a nice
steak frites.”

Charlie and Becky went out into the rain. Paul listened to it hammering the damn skylight for about five minutes. And he began to think that maybe he should’ve gone with them. Maybe he could find a liquor store open somewhere; who the hell knew? He’d buy himself a quart of Stoli and toast himself into a stupor. Do him a world of good to wake up tomorrow with a hangover.

He went down in the tiny elevator, jammed his hat over his head, and set out into what might as well become an all night bar crawl. Maybe he’d even break up the tedium with a few fights. He loved to use his fists, always had. Just loved it. Probably be pretty easy to pick a fight with a frog. Hopefully, he’d find somebody with good enough moves to make it fun. Guys who liked to fight, they could spot each other in a bar. There were signals — some heavyset asshole glares at you for no damn reason, that’s an invitation. Practiced bar fighters lived in their own secret world, and he was very much part of it. Nothing like beating the shit out of each other to make a couple of guys friends for life.

He set out along the Boulevard Montparnasse. There were lots of theaters, more than he remembered from when he was last here. Too bad it was night; he could have slipped over to the Orangerie and seen some fuckin’ Monets.

Maybe the thing to do was go to a movie and brush up on his French. But there were also lots of bars. He went into one. Fulla damn tourists, wouldn’t you know. Nervous Arabs sipping glasses of wine; Americans loudly demanding martinis.

There were a few Frenchies at the bar huddling over drinks or coffee. He slid up and managed, with some effort, to get a Stoli.

It was small and overpriced, but it worked okay, so he ordered another. He wondered if the whores around here were as overpriced as the liquor. He’d been spoiled by the Asians, who worked their asses off for a few bucks, massaging, blowing, sucking, fucking, combing, tickling, licking, and then handing you off to the social director for another round with a fresh face.

He said to nobody in particular, “You know why the predator is always smarter than the prey?” Nobody answered.

“He has to be. The prey lives by work — crop the grass, till the field, whatever. The predator lives by his wits. That’s why the gazelle hardly ever sees the lion. It’s why the damn deer doesn’t see us.” He paused, then raised his glass. The barkeep did him. He knocked it back.

He’d come in here to fight, let’s face it. But he was damn forty-eight years old; what was he gonna do? Also, you couldn’t insult people who didn’t understand your goddamn lingo.

He left. Rain hit him in the face. Striding along, he wished to God he had something to do that mattered. Why hadn’t anybody taken a picture of the woman? Why hadn’t they confiscated the damn passport? You couldn’t even dragnet for her!

He was going so fast that he was practically running. The rain came down in sheets, in torrents. He watched the droplets sailing through the streetlights out of a low, rushing sky. He realized that he was running because he was scared. How must it feel to be eaten alive that way? They were parasites. Big, filthy suckerfish.

How
the fuck
had she eluded them? You don’t sneak past customs when they have you caught. You can’t! But she had.

Intelligence, of course. She was brilliant, obviously. So what did that mean? How many steps ahead was she? Ten? Fifty? A thousand? “Goddamnit!”

Then he thought, what if she knows about me? He couldn’t see how, but he didn’t have any two hundred and fifty IQ, either. She could be three feet away right now and he would have no way of knowing.

He found a little shop where they had some wine stuck in the window along with the displays of Orange Crush and Evian water. There was what looked like it might be a nice muscatel for about nine bucks. He shelled out and took it home under his arm.

Back in the hotel, he realized that he had no corkscrew. So he busted the neck and lay back on the bed drinking out of the jagged hole and staring up at the office building. All those dark windows and not a single human figure anywhere.

It wasn’t muscatel, not by a long shot, but the wine did him okay, especially on top of the vodka. Maybe toward dawn he slept, and maybe not.

He awoke to gray, sad light and music coming up from the street — some kind of wild Arabic tune. The office building towered like a monster ghost above his skylight. He got up, wanted a cigarette, and went through the goddamn motions with the goddamn gum. He chewed it brutally, stuffed in another piece, and bore down until his jaws hummed.

He’d been rough on the kids last night. But that was nothing new. They’d gotten their frogs’ legs anyway. Thing was, he loved his kids. He wanted them to get their fucking frogs’ legs whenever they could.

The phone went
brrt-brrt brrt-brrt
. Neat sound, he thought.

“Yeah?”

“We got three places, boss. Three
arrondissements.”

“Beck?”

“Yeah, boss.”

“Where are you?”

“Prefecture of Police Department of Records.”

“Am I wrong, or is it six-fifteen in the morning?”

“Shit, they’re gonna be opening this place up in an hour. We gotta get moving.”

“But how the hell did you get in there? That’s what I want to know.”

“They got a lotta skylights in this town.”

M
iriam had done her screaming and her weeping, and now sat in a little café seeking with increasing urgency for a victim for Martin. She had called Sarah again and again, and still had not gotten an answer. But she could not let this problem, as disturbing as it was becoming, intrude on her urgent mission. She did not know exactly what had happened to Martin, except that he was starving, and it was the most horrible thing she had ever seen.

Patience was essential on the hunt, no matter whether you were in a hurry or not. The trouble was, you could not easily imagine the prey to be dangerous, and in an emergency like this, your instincts screamed at you to just grab one, drag it off by the hair, and give it to the poor sufferer immediately.

She forced herself to sit still, to appear seductive. The waiter was admiring her and so were some of the male customers. But nobody moved, nobody
did
anything.

She sucked in warm smoke from her cigarette, drew it deep into her lungs, then blew it out with a carefully manufactured seductive pout. At least they had reasonably good cigarettes here. This Gitanes reminded her of a Bon-Ton. American cigarettes were awful now.

Why were these stupid men ignoring her? Had customs changed so much? When she had last taken a victim in Europe, everything had been different. There had been an immediate flirting response, a quick seduction. That had happened on a quiet day in Clichy, in a little bar full of bums and Americans.

She was contacting men’s eyes, but they wouldn’t take it farther. She did not intend to let Martin starve, or any Keeper she could help, for that matter. As to why this had happened to him, she did not yet know. She could well imagine, though — something awful that had to do with human oppression of the Keeper. She sucked the cigarette hard, blew out a furious stream of smoke.

The temptation was growing ever stronger to just go off down the street and do what instinct urged. To some Keepers, the finest of all meals came from a sudden, spontaneous impulse to just snatch a victim, tear it open, and drink. That was her instinct, always. She’d been drawn to America in the first place by the easy, rambling life it offered her kind. She’d guzzled her way across the wild frontier. You could go a few miles on horseback and pluck your fruit along the trail without the slightest worry. People disappeared out there all the time.

She’d finished her cigarette and was just starting another when she realized that a young male was heading her way. She said in French, “Can you help me? May I have a light?”

He moved past her toward the loo. Could this be a homosexual bar? No. Clearly not. Owning a club in New York as she did, she could tell the sexual orientation of a place at a glance.

From the bar, another man said,“You speak the French of Voltaire, lady. All those ‘thees’ and ‘thous.’ ”He raised his voice, mocking her,“ ‘Cans’t thou render me assistance? Mays’t I take a flame?’ We call it a ‘match,’ now. New word! Where are you from?”

“The past,” she snapped. She got to her feet. To hell with the French, if they were no longer interested in a pretty girl.

“Oh, mademoiselle, please, I am just making conversation! Don’t be so quick.You must be an American.You learned your French in school.Well, you had an old teacher. Damned old, I’d say! But that can’t be held against you.”

He was plump. The back of his hands revealed the telltale blue streaks that suggested that the drinking veins would be nice and big. The flow of the carotid would be delightfully powerful.

She gave him a slow, careful smile, the kind that made the males pant. She had practiced smiling for years, and she considered herself an artiste. As soon as she showed her rows of perfectly believable but entirely artifi-cial human teeth, he came to her table.

Finally. She responded with practiced indifference. Smile too eagerly, and he would back off . . . at least, that used to be their way.

“You are not telling me to go?”

She shrugged.

In a lower voice, he asked, “Is this going to cost me?”

“A little.” Meaning everything you value the most — your breath, your blood, your very life.

“Then you’re for real — a whore staking out the rear table in a café. It’s so — I don’t know —
charmant
. So ‘old Paris!’ And that language and the ancient suit. You
are
from the past. Look, I don’t mean to spoil the effect, but I have only a couple hundred francs.”

“How sad.”

“Do you take credit cards?”

How could he ask something so profoundly stupid? A whore who took credit cards, indeed. She sucked in smoke, let it drift slowly out.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“Excuse me, my sir?”

“I gave it up. Bad for the chest.” He tapped his breast, expanded his lungs, let the breath out. “Bet you couldn’t manage that.”

She could hold her breath for an hour. Keepers could drown, but it was not an easy death. For them, in fact, there were no easy deaths. The very body, every bone and sinew, was fanatically devoted to life. Man had the immortal soul, not his Keepers. Man could afford to die. Keepers had to stay alive forever, if possible.

Miriam put out her cigarette.

“You have the loveliest hands,” he said, watching her.

She lifted a hand, bending her wrist delicately. When he kissed it, somebody over at the bar went, “Oh, my.”

“Be quiet, you fucking gorilla!” the victim roared. “Never mind him, he has the manners of an animal.”

She lowered her hand, touching his with the tips of her fingers: possession. “Good sir, I cannot stop with you the day long.”

“Your French is advancing. Now you sound like somebody from about 1896.”

“I have a pleasant room, and two hundred francs will be a good price.”

She strolled with him down the Rue de Bobbilo, then crossed the Place d’Italie into the Avenue des Gobelins. It was raining, and she leaned in toward him to be under his umbrella. As they crossed the street, she stumbled against him. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, frowning slightly.

It had been a costly slip: he’d noticed her weight. Keepers had dense bones and muscles like rock. Inch for inch, they were twice as heavy as the prey.

The smallest slip would sometimes be all it took to spook a victim. Like most predators, Keepers were successful only about a third of the time. The myth of the vampire as a creeping, unstoppable supernatural force was just that, a myth.

They were passing a small hotel. He started in.

“No, not here.”

“Where the hell is it, then? This is the only hotel around here.”

“Just a little farther, good sir.”

His pace slowed. She could feel him glancing at her again. Archaic language, excessive weight for her shape and size — he was not understanding, and that was making him nervous. She had to brush up on her damn French. Back in 1956, nobody had commented. But then, she hadn’t fed here, either, only gone to Chanel for a thorough reoutfitting. She’d spent thousands. They would never have commented on her French.

She gave him a carefully rehearsed look — eyebrows raised, gray eyes gleaming — that was meant to disarm him with a combination of girlish sweetness and womanly experience. This look had worked since she had first developed it, back in the days when one’s only mirror was a pond.

He went,
“hmpf,”
like a slightly shocked horse. Then he grew silent. His tread became determined, even dogged.

She had him, by heaven! That was a wonderfully effective look. It had set the hook along the Via Appia and Watling Street, in Ur and Athens, in Venezia and ancient Granada.

“This isn’t — oh, Christ — what the hell do you want to go in here for?”

“You’ll see.”

“Not for two hundred francs I won’t. A blanket on the floor of an old wreck like this rates no more than fifty, sweetheart. No way you’re gonna cheat Jean-Jacques. No damn way at all.”

If she accepted his offer, he’d decide that she was probably diseased and that would be that. She had to waste time bargaining.

“Upstairs is very nice. You must pay a hundred and fifty.” “The hell —”

“But only when I conduct you to the chamber, and if you are pleased.” She lowered her eyes.

“If I ain’t pleased?”

“Then I am desolated. I will do it for your fifty, and fulfill your pleasure, for one hour of the clock.”

“Now we’re back to the ancien régime. Your French is fascinating.” He looked up at Mother Lamia’s old palace, the gray limestone, the sharp peak of the roof, the tiny windows in the tower. She knew what he was thinking:
Dare I go in there with such a strange woman?

“I have my domicile within. It isn’t as it appears.”

He smirked, but followed her through the door into the cavernous space. He stopped, looked up into the high shadows. “My God, what a place!”

“Come with me.” She moved deeper within, toward the stairs at the back of the enormous, dark room.

“That stairway’s a deathtrap!”

She thought,
Don’t make it hard, not when I am so frantic!
She said, “But, my sir, this is the way to my chamber.” She moved toward the stairs, swinging her hips.

“‘My sir!’ ‘My chamber!’ you’re weird, and I’m not going up there with you no matter how pretty you are. Anyway, you probably taste like a damn ashtray, you smoke so much.”

Then the damn thing turned and strode toward the door. She sucked in her breath, turned also.

It had moved fast. It put its hand in the ring, started pulling it. She leaped with all her might across the space between them. At the last instant, it saw her, raised a hand. For the split of a second, their eyes met. She fisted the crown of its head, doing it in precisely the right place and with the exact force necessary to knock the thing senseless. It dropped with a sodden thud.

“Martin,” she said. “My dear, look what I’ve brought you.” He’d been watching from behind one of the old tanning vats. He came out, moving with the slow, dragging gait of a very weak Keeper. He smelled like dry, old flesh and rotted blood. His eyes were glimmers inside their sunken sockets.

She watched him lay his long gray form upon the cushioning body of his prey, watched him stretch like a lounging panther. Some of the old Martin could be seen in those easy movements, his grace, even a little of his power.

He laid his jaws on the neck, in the traditional spot. Keepers sometimes took their food from under the leg, or even, if they were particularly hungry and had really strong suction, from the main artery itself, which could be reached by a ferocious penetration of the small of the back.

It was decadent and cruel to take the blood from a small vein, but this was done as well. The victim knew, then, for it would remain conscious for most of the feeding. Awful, mad fun that was. Children did it, and Miriam could remember a few Egyptians she’d tormented that way, when she was still a little slip of a thing. She and that boy Sothis, the son of Amma, had experimented with all sorts of ghastly and peculiar ways of consuming their prey. Playing the role of child prostitutes in the seedy backstreets of Thebes, they’d often sucked their customers dry right through their erect penises, leaving nothing but a skeleton tented by skin ready for the tanner. Children can be so awful.

Martin’s body began to undulate. His esophageal peristalsis was quite strong. The prey woke up and shouted out something, “Oh, shit,” or some such thing. He began to toss and turn, and Martin, who was far from a normal weight and strength, started to slip off.

He needed all the nutrition he could get, so she most certainly could not kill the prey to prevent it struggling. Dead blood made a poor meal.

The thing heaved. There was a pop and a gooey, declining hiss. Martin’s suction had broken. It heaved again, and this time he slid completely off. The creature sat up. Its neck was red, but there was no blood flowing. Miriam had the awful thought that Martin might be too weak to feed.

“What in the name of God is this?” The creature looked down at Martin, who was sliding across the floor, looking very much like a great beetle. “What in the name of
God!
” It scrambled to its feet.

Martin grabbed an ankle. The creature shrieked, its eyes practically popping out of its head. It kicked him away.

“Jesus in heaven, what’s the matter with that guy?”

This creature was surprisingly self-possessed. Miriam did not like this. She stepped forward, grabbed one of its wrists.

It kicked upward with its knee, directing the blow expertly toward her forearm. That was well done; that would have shattered a human bone. She didn’t know what she had here. Stars forbid it was another damn cop.

Its free fist came plunging straight toward her face. She caught it, stopping its forward motion so suddenly that the animal’s jaws snapped with the shock. She began to squeeze the wrists. It writhed and kicked again, this time getting her right in the midriff. Her muscles were far too hard for the blow to be painful, but it pushed her off her feet, forcing her to let go her grip. Instantly the creature recoiled from her.

“What are you?” it shrieked. “Aliens?”

That again. That was a recent bit of human myth that the Keepers ought to start using. They hadn’t been aliens to the earth for fifty thousand years.