Vegas. Bright lights, big city. A population large enough to host maybe a dozen vampires reasonably, but the very nature of the town drew thirty times that number. Benedic, prince of the city, didn’t mind, so long as those transient vampires acted in accordance with the traditions. Not that he was any staunch supporter of the Camarilla, but rather, he understood the purpose behind all those old and seemingly arbitrary laws.
Las Vegas claimed perhaps a score or so “permanent” Kindred who made their havens there. The Giovanni were a constant thorn in Benedic’s side, however, for a faction numbering so few. The local branch of the family, the Rothsteins, had claimed a stake in the city ever since Bugsy Siegel had gotten the idea in his head to build a gambling paradise in the middle of the desert. Now, Benedic was no slouch—he had his vast array of contacts keep him constantly apprised of Vegas’s winds of change—but he couldn’t seem to get ahead of the Giovanni. To his credit, he kept the “race” fairly even. Indeed, many of the Las Vegas Kindred suspected that, if Benedic didn’t have to worry about the minor, pressing details of princedom, he would have edged the Rothsteins out years ago.
It was only this sketchy knowledge that Chas Tello took with him to Las Vegas during his trip to “find Milo and Benito.” Frankie Gee had requested that Chas do everything by the book—present himself to the prince upon arrival, state plainly what he planned on doing there, do it, and fly back home. “With any luck,” Frankie Gee maintained, “those Rothstein fucks will never know you’re there, except Milo. Unless you have to talk to them, don’t. Let Victor do all the work. This isn’t any of their business.”
“Gotcha, Frankie. And if things get ugly?” Chas asked.
“Don’t let them get ugly. Get the fuck out of the way. Don’t let them roll over you, but don’t take anybody out of the picture unless it needs to happen. Milo, I don’t give a damn about—if Milo gets hurt, nobody’s going to be upset. But don’t go there thinking you’re going to deal with Milo. You’re just the insurance.”
“You’re the boss, Frankie.”
Chas knew that Frankie had people above even him. He wasn’t quite sure how the hierarchy worked out—apparently the “family affair” the Giovanni had going on went outside the old limits of organized crime. More than once, Chas felt like a very small fish in a very big pond. After all, if vampires—which was tough enough to wrap his mind around, even if he was one—older than Frankie pulled his strings, how far back did the ranks go? He’d spoken before with Giovanni who weren’t part of the American cosa nostra, but he didn’t know who they worked for or what they did.
Chas’s cousin Robert had told him that once you got past the Mafia part of the family, the rules became very different. In fact, most of the family—which wasn’t Mob-connected—looked down upon the “goombahs” who were happy to “waste” their unlives playing gangster. Those old ranks of the family had their own interests and hobbies, for which the Mob branch seemed only to generate income. It worked like the old system always had, with the Giovanni bigshots taking their Irizzu from the guys who ran the rackets themselves in exchange for protection. But Robert had told Chas that the whole thing was more like an investment company, and that “this thing of ours” was only one entry in some old guinea’s ledger somewhere. Neither Chas nor Robert even knew how the Giovanni had become involved with the Mafia, given that the family had its ancestral estate up north in Venice while the wiseguys were still centralized in Sicily.
But such problems weren’t part of Chas’s list of current situations to solve. Do the Benito thing and keep the money rolling in. Easy as pie.
Delta Flight 2065 to Atlanta became Flight 893 to Las Vegas, which arrived a few ticks before midnight. Chas and Victor traveled lightly, intending to stay only two nights, three at the most. Milo Rothstein expected them on the evening of Tuesday, the 29th.
They killed time with plane talk. Hunched over, Chas whispered to the ghoul.
“Frankie Gee makes me fucking cringe, Victor. Me—and I’ve done it all. You see, the thing about Frankie is that he doesn’t just do shit, he makes everything he does an exclamation point. You fuck over Frankie, and he doesn’t just hurt you, he hurts you bad in front of your family or your boys.
“This one time, back when I was just a ghoul sucking blood off the Giovanni family tit, Frankie had me bring in this kid who borrowed money and skipped a few points on the vig when he made his last payment. Just a fucking kid, this guy was, and something like six hundred dollars shy. Fuck it— chump change, right?
“Not to Frankie Gee. He sits the kid down and I duct tape the dumb son of a bitch to the chair. Frankie starts talking, and the kid goes ghost white if you know what I’m saying here. Ghost fucking white. I figure he’s seen too many gangster movies, and he thinks Frankie’s gonna go Pulp Fiction on him. Me, I’m thinking Frankie’s gonna slap him around, take whatever money the kid has in his wallet, maybe break a thumb or two and turn the kid loose. It’s kinda funny to me, Victor. I’m laughing at how scared this kid is because I know the shit going on in his mind is way the fuck worse than anything Frankie’s gonna do. It works well like that, from where I stand. You scare the fuck out of the guy who stiffed you and you let him go—he thinks he’s just had the luckiest break in the world and he never fucks with you again.
“Frankie, I guess, doesn’t see things the same way.
“‘Whattaya think I’m gonna do to you, boy?’ Frankie says to this kid. ‘You think I’m gonna break your knees? I’m gonna shoot you in the face?’ Frankie’s all smiling, and I’m laughing a little louder, because he’s really sweating this kid. ‘You owe me six Bens and you try to skip out on it? That’s not so responsible of you.’ The whole place has this weird gasoline smell about it.
“‘Hold his fucking eyes open, Chas,’ he tells me and I do. I have to reach around his head and kind of pinch them open. I guess he knows the shit’s about to get rough and he’s trying like all hell to close them. No good, because I work my finger there beneath his eyelid and pull back, like what’s that movie where they make that criminal kid watch those Nazi movies?
“Anyway, I got his eyes pulled open, right? And we’re in this warehouse. Frankie has this van pull in; somebody in the back opens the door and pushes out this girl. She’s in pretty good shape—they haven’t beat her or anything, but she’s tied up in phone cord or that string you pull your blinds up with, you know? Frankie picks her up and holds her in front of the kid. It’s his girlfriend or his sister—I don’t know. Frankie Gee takes out this survival knife or Bowie knife or whatever and starts waving it around, like he’s about to really put the hurt on the girl.
“Now, see, here’s where it gets really fucked up. Me, I would have stopped by now. The kid’s already shitting bricks just to have been caught up in the whole thing. Then we catch him and tie him up— he’s ready to pay whatever he’s got and sell his ass into slavery for the rest. Then his girl shows up—maximum density, you know? His mind’s going a million miles an hour wondering how—not if, but how—Frankie’s going to kill him and the girl. I would have collected right there and let the kid think a miracle saved his life. But Frankie was pissed at being screwed over. He wanted to get this kid but good. Make a statement, you know?”
Chas paused.
“Victor, Frankie knife-fucked that girl. Stabbed her thirteen times in the pussy. The first time, her eyes bugged almost right out of her fucking head. But that didn’t do it—he got her a dozen more times.
“The kid’s totally out of his mind when this commences to go down. He’s jerking in his chair and crying and his cheeks are all poking out from beneath the duct tape. He tips himself over—I couldn’t even watch the shit and I had to let go. I only knew about the thirteen times because I fucking heard that knife make that sick stabbing sound.
“Then, as soon as he’s done stabbing, Frankie’s through with the whole situation. He cuts the kid loose using the same knife, and me and him get in the van and the mook at the wheel drives us away. Did
n’t even mess with the kid—he put the whole weight of the situation right between that girl’s legs.
“I’m not trying to fuck you up, Victor. I’m just wanting to let you know how this works. What you’re getting into. I don’t mean to get all weepy or sentimental or any of that bullshit, but I’m telling you the God’s honest truth when I say that a part of you dies when you get involved in this.
“Fuck, just yesterday, I had Annie’s boyfriend’s fingers cut off because she talked back to me. How fucked up is that? Now, I wish I wouldn’t have done it, Victor. I can feel something inside that likes that sort of fucked-up shit, like I’m making it happy when I do it.
“I know you’re not one of us yet, Victor, but that may come up after we come back from Vegas. You need to think long and hard about this shit. The world doesn’t need any more of this, but Frankie might try to put it on your shoulders. Just remember that you won’t be able to stay who you are. You’ll be something else altogether, and the only hope you’ll have is to hang on to the memory of what you were before. And that’s a hard fucking thing to do.
“I know, I know. I’m talking in circles here. I’m being—what is it?—cryptic. But we got secrets we have to keep. Just remember that you don’t want to know those secrets, no matter how good a deal it sounds like. I promise you.”
Victor swallowed, not wanting to speak. Chas waved down a flight attendant and ordered a whiskey and water for him.
Tuesday, 22 June 1999, 11:43 PM
The Mausoleum loggia
Venice, Italy
Isabel peered down the vertiginous airwell, from which no cooling gust or stale exhalation issued. This house, the loggia, the ancestral home of vampires of Clan Giovanni, had stood for a literal millennium. Over the intervening centuries the house had grown—burrowed, rather, twisting in upon itself and crawling beneath its old basements and sub-basements in a gruesome parody of the Giovanni family’s own genealogical tree. By the time Isabel stood at the top of the stair that descended into the bowels of the house, the family had added no fewer than thirty floors, and indeed, far more of the manse rested below ground than above.
The excavations had been made to accommodate not only the swelling ranks of active clan members (from a mere handful at their inception during the—Renaissance?), but also the corpses, ashes, and other legacies of Giovanni both dead and undead who deserved no harbor other than a memorial enshrinement. Failed Giovanni Kindred and fallen scions of the clan alike occupied their final resting place beneath the Mausoleum, which had a complex code of categorization understandable only by the keepers of the crypt. The ashes of Catherine Giovanni, who had masterminded the family’s immensely profitable role during the Babylonian Captivity and the following schism of Roman popes and Avignonese popes of the fourteenth century, occupied an urn in an alcove next to the preserved tongue and genitals of Marco Gracchus Giovanni, who had deserted his critical alliance with the Desert Fox and fled the sands of northern Africa. Only the keepers understood the placement of the remains, but almost all Giovanni understood the circumstances of their fallen forebears. Ancestor worship (and, as often, revilement) played a very important role in the nightly affairs of the clan’s members. Even ghouls and mortals of the Giovanni, who might very well be ignorant as to the blood-sucking nature of the family’s darkest secret, knew at least some small degree of the Giovanni’s history. From their humble beginnings as harbingers of Western Europe’s emerging post-medieval middle class through the affluence brought about by Crusade war profiteering, from their tenuous relations with the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions to the glory of the Age of Exploration, the Giovanni family claimed a broad and grandiose history, of which little was wasted on its young.
That very history concerned Isabel Giovanni on this very night. Since their rise to prominence, the Giovanni had been haunted, oftentimes literally, by the ghosts of its past. For with the Giovanni’s prominence had come depravity, the most obvious symptom of which was their study of the Black Art, nigromancy. As the story went, as the Giovanni amassed more and more wealth, their tastes became more and more jaded. On the road to their debauchery, the Giovanni took pleasure in acts scorned by society at large. Giovanni annals were rife with litanies of sodomites, pederasts, incest enthusiasts, coprophiles, corpse-fuckers, snuffers, slave masters, kidnappers, and practitioners of veritably every other deviance on the list. These practices had carried on into the modern nights, so great was the Giovanni wealth and so ingrained was their ennui that could be challenged only by flouting grave social mores. Isabel herself had, in life, borne her brother’s child, pleasured her father and her aunts and uncles, smoked Oriental opium with the gigolos of Milan before fucking them to exhaustion, and severed the tendons of those among Garibaldi’s Red Shirts who earned her displeasure. And the family annals didn’t record every deed perpetrated in the name of Giovanni debasement or ambition—Isabel’s daughter’s death was not truly the result of chronic colic, and anyone inspecting that tiniest of white coffins would find only the bones of a sheep. But even these aberrant tastes could quell the insatiable lust of the Giovanni for so long before nigromancy took a firm root. As the family tree grew ever more upon itself, so too did the family’s mastery of Dead Magic grow. What had started with the summoning of simple shades had become a cottage industry and then blossomed into a full-fledged aptitude.
Clan Giovanni had no qualms with this. Its rude Epicurean tastes accommodated such things as the handling of entrails and intercourse with corpses. Indeed, nigromancy even had a purpose beyond simple indulgence—by provoking the ghosts of the dead, the Giovanni could master them. Their invisible tormentors-turned-servants proved the ultimate boon in their transactions. Whether gleaning secrets from supposedly secure back offices or plaguing their contacts with nightmares and more physical haunts, the dead spirits offered a myriad of possibilities to the Giovanni that those with whom they did business (or conducted other affairs) could not harvest. When one trafficked with Giovanni, like as not, one also trafficked with a host of his unseen allies.
But those unseen allies had become capricious of late, which upset the prominent members of the clan. And rightly so! Their previously reliable and ubiquitous aces-in-the-hole had suddenly become peevish or, more frequently, simply gone missing. It was as if a convocation of ghosts had been convened…elsewhere. While once the Giovanni could have easily called upon a host of wraithly spirits, their powers had suffered some sort of unexplained limitation that now allowed them to call upon only one at a time, if that. Thanatologists among the clan speculated that an enormous upheaval was taking place in the Underworld, the chthonic spirit-world of the dead. Others postulated that in the frenzied final nights, as the Gehenna foretold by other, older families of Kindred approached, the Giovanni ancestors had turned against them. Still others surmised, somewhat fancifully, that magic was changing or eroding completely, and that the old ways had simply become too dated or ineffectual in the modern world: In a faithless age, mysticism lost its potency.
Whatever the case, Isabel Giovanni numbered herself among the Kindred concerned with the sudden impotence of necromantic power. In less than a month, she was supposed to serve as liaison between the Boston branch of the Giovanni empire and a few important representatives of the Camarilla, a vampiric organization from which the Giovanni cordially abstained. It simply wouldn’t do to go without her resources. And so, in search of answers to this particular mystery, Isabel had come to the one place where she knew she could count on the dead magic working. Ever since the mausoleum had been built—ever since its first crypt had been scraped from the silty rock of the ground beneath sodden Venice—the spirits of the family had watched over the family, and later, the clan. And so it was that Isabel Giovanni descended a score or more flights of stairs, to prostrate herself before the bones of her grandmother Giulia. Giulia had never been Kindred herself, which was why her bones still existed, but she had been “sensitive” to the spirit world.
On her knees, dressed
in a light wool robe and bent before the alcove in which Giulia Giovanni Abruzzina’s remains rested, Isabel whispered her grandmother’s name.
And again.
And once again.
Had the damnable, secret affairs of the wraiths not taken precedence, Giulia would have come. As it was, however, something more pressing must surely be occupying her. Isabel needed her insight, though, and she had no choice.
When the spirits failed to heed a necromancer’s call, the only alternative was to force them to manifest. The surest way to do so was to anger the ghost, who could later be placated and dealt with constructively. Isabel had some reservations, but as always in the mind of the Giovanni, the end justified the means.
Isabel gathered Giulia’s bones from the niche and made a pile of them on the floor. Torches in the sepulchre flickered, leaving momentary trails of black smoke. Atop the pile, Isabel placed the lower mandible of the skull. Walking thrice counterclockwise around the pile, she made the sign of the cross with her left hand and whispered Giulia’s name three times again.
Still nothing.
Growing frustrated, Isabel knocked over the pile of bones, gathered them once again and placed them in an incorrect alcove. Turning her back on the niche, she opened the folds of her robe to expose herself, adding, hopefully, an appropriately lewd touch that would attract the wraith’s attention with its vulgarity.
It worked.
A cold breeze wafted strongly into the room, extinguishing a torch and coalescing the smoke into a long, thin face with drooping eyes. “Slatternly child!” the face’s mouth cried, with a voice that sounded as if it came from the bottom of a chasm. “I have ignored your call with reason! How dare you assume that your selfish wants take precedence over my cold purpose?”
Clan Novel Giovanni: Book 10 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 2
