Sweeter Than Wine

by L. Neil Smith

  I’d have to think it over.

  He changed the subject. “Your wayward secretary made bail this morning.”

  “Charlene? Not my secretary. The very thought gives me the cold shivers.” There are worse things in the world than vampires and she was several of them. “Someone else’s. I knew she would. He bailed her out. He said he would.” I leaned back in my chair and took a sip of coffee.

  Anton chuckled and shook his head. In his job he saw a lot of human folly. I did, too, in mine. What we were really feeling was gratitude that we weren’t under the thrall of that particular siren. We could have been. Live long enough, or read enough history, and you’ll discover that human folly—and the little head’s capacity for it—is infinite. “Yeah, well, he called an hour ago to tell us she’s jumped. He wants us to put out ‘APBs and stuff’, but please don’t hurt her.”

  “I figured that one, too,” I laughed out loud. “The girl has no redeeming qualities whatever—well, maybe a couple of redeeming qualities.”

  He got up and waggled the coffee carafe at me. I nodded, and he poured more for both of us. It was good and it was helping him to talk.

  “Yeah, I watched her being booked last night and couldn’t help noticing those redeeming qualities, both of them.” He changed the subject again. “Look, I’m going out to the range after dark. Want to come?”

  “Sure.” Dark was the only time I could really practice outdoors. And here was something else I could do for my old friend. Like a lot of cops, Anton tends to keep things bottled up. He can let them go amidst loud noises, brilliant muzzle flashes, harsh recoil, and the sweet scent of burned nitrocellulose. I’m like that, too. “Your car or mine?”

  We made our arrangements. My car: an elderly Suburban with a huge rebuilt engine and transmission and heavily smoked windows. I could pass the day in that thing if I had to, it was almost a rolling motel room. I also had an off-white Plymouth PT Cruiser I’d accepted in lieu of payment from an otherwise worthy client who was down on his luck. I’d straightened that out for him easily, but it would take him a long while to recover. I hadn’t been able to resist the car. It had a sun roof.

  I got out of the chair, glanced backward to make sure the door was well shut, looked at Anton and said, “Pocomoco”. Without a word or hesitation, Anton loosened his necktie. We’d been through this ritual about once a week for the past quarter of a century or so. My friend wasn’t really in some kind of trance, he just looked that way. Like I said, I don’t believe it’s hypnosis, but I really don’t know what it is.

  Getting the kit from my coat, I swabbed his neck with an alcohol wipe and sank the needle of a disposable Vacutainer into the artery. It filled quickly. I tucked it away for later. I didn’t need much. The blood feeds the virus, not the vampire. A second needle, hair fine, went into the vein inside my left elbow and withdrew fifty microliters of my own blood, which I injected directly into friend Anton’s pulsing jugular.

  Over the years, I’ve worked out an ethic that guides this part of my life. As long as I don’t drain a victim (I’ve never come anywhere near it), my “bite”, the transfer of a little of my blood, is a good thing, temporarily conveying some of the same attributes to the person “bitten” that I, myself enjoy permanently, without turning them into vampires. I never take advantage of a client, or someone with whom I’m currently intimate. As I said, the latter doesn’t seem to happen very often.

  So no, I wasn’t turning Anton into a vampire. Despite the nonsense you see on TV, it takes a lot more effort than that, several weeks of a more or less constant exchange of bodily fluids. Let him get his own girl for that. But everybody always says that Anton heals remarkably quickly. He is aging with both style and grace, and hasn’t had a cold or flu—or anything else—for...well, for about a quarter of a century.

  I haven’t actually bitten anyone for years.

  Too messy.

  THE TRAVELER: MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

  “I have put before you today, life and good,

  and death and evil.”—The Torah

  Sometimes even monsters encounter monsters.

  The traveler knew well that there were worse things in the world than vampires. Most of them were humans—or had presumably started out that way—that had to be disposed of on one’s journey through life, lest the hue and cry arising on their account threaten one’s own existence.

  Jack the Ripper had been one of those.

  There were vampires, ranging from the merely indiscreet to the suicidally flamboyant, that had to be disposed of, too, for similar reasons.

  It was annoying, especially in that it served to benefit humanity, natural prey for whom the traveler felt a certain understandable...well the proper expression was not contempt, exactly. The traveler tried to think of it as an act of animal husbandry—the way a shepherd might kill a wolf to keep it out of the fold—but it still rankled.

  Not that the occasional Erzsebet Bathory, Jack the Ripper, H.H. Holmes, Albert Fish, Ted Bundy—no, not even Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot—endangered the human species in any way. There were almost seven billion of the organisms in the world now. The expression “breed like rabbits” should be amended to “breed like Homo sapiens”, instead.

  The driver who had been persuaded to offer the traveler a ride outside of Atlanta had turned out to be one such human monster, revealing himself as the miles flew by the windows either side of the truck.

  Slowly working his way up to it, the man had eventually regaled the traveler with one lurid, hideous story after another about victims he’d abducted over the past twenty years—most of them young female prostitutes he’d picked up at a series of truck stops—used in a variety of obscene or disgusting ways, and then murdered and discarded along the nation’s interstate highways, keeping a few small objects, jewelry, even body parts, as mementos, carefully hidden away in his truck.

  At one point, he even displayed some of his terrible trophies to the traveler who came closer to being sickened by them than might have been imagined. It had quickly, graphically, become apparent that the maniac had murdered men, as well as well as women, and boys as well as girls.

  Unlike the unfortunates on the man’s long list of victims, the traveler had sought the driver out, virtually coerced him to provide transportation. But the traveler suffered no illusion that the killer was not preparing to broaden his modus operandi. No doubt he told these gory tales to all of his victims as a grisly substitute for foreplay.

  In the end, the traveler had offered to compensate the driver for the ride by paying for an inexpensive room in their destination city, Memphis, which they could share for the night before they parted company the next morning. The driver hesitated, well outside of his “comfort zone”. This was not going at all the way he had planned. But in the end, he had accepted. Adding to his collection of keepsakes—and his memories—was his highest priority, and this one should be easy.

  Entering the city, the traveler had been interested by the number of signs directing tourists to many places historically associated with a variety of mysterious entities: Muddy Waters, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, W.C. Handy, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Isaac Hayes. Yet even the traveler knew enough about Elvis Presley to realize that this place could be even worse—if that was possible—than Salzburg or Vienna.

  The driver had dropped his container load off at a distribution center on the outskirts of town, and they had taken the tractor with them into downtown Memphis. The grandly-named Imperial Arms was a rundown transient men’s hotel in a seedy area of the city. Parking in the alley—at the insistence of the management—they had walked up two flights of rickety, whitewashed, exterior stairs and found their room.

  The key was turned in an obsolescent non-electronic lock.

  The traveler had entered behind the driver. The instant the lock snapped, the man whirled without words, or any other preliminary, and struck out with a large knife. The traveler decided to teach the man a lesson of sorts and allowed the long, straig
ht, double-edged dagger blade to sink deeply into the abdomen, fully to the hilt, which the traveler noticed resembled a large set of old-fashioned cast brass knuckledusters.

  First World War, the traveler thought, if I recall correctly. The American army. It burned where it penetrated almost to the spine, but the traveler had felt far worse in the past, and almost enjoyed the sensation.

  The man’s eyes widened with astonishment and fear, especially after he twisted the knife and sawed it back and forth, from side to side in the wound, producing no visible effect on the part of the traveler, who casually seized his wrist in a crushing, painful grip, pushed the hand and knife away, and then seized the driver by the throat.

  With casual effort, the traveler turned the truck driver ninety degrees, then walked him backwards into the tiny, badly-lit bathroom, where he stumbled over the edge of the tub and fell—held up only by the traveler’s grip on his throat—pulling the plastic curtains down from their rod as he landed on his back on the musty-smelling non-slip mat.

  Somehow, the bloodied knife changed hands.

  “Noooooo!” the driver screamed, only to be stifled by a cruel and implacable hand. Methodically, and without visible emotion of any kind, the traveler cut him—the knife was so dull it hurt terribly—either side of his neck, into each armpit, up through the abdomen where a heavy artery hides behind the stomach, and then twice more at the femoral arteries in the groin. Before he lost consciousness and expired, the driver understood exactly what the traveler had done to him.

  He had done it himself, to so many others.

  There would be no blood feast here, thought the traveler, washing up in the sink. The victim was tainted—morally—and the idea was repulsive.

  Instead, the traveler would rest until dusk—this sunblock was becoming a burdensome annoyance but cleaning up was impossible now, the shower was occupied and the curtains had been torn down—feed, obtain some other form of transportation (perhaps it would be pleasant to drive an automobile on these highways) and continue on to the next destination.

  Another step closer to closure, after all these years.

  5: “ALLONS ENFANTS...”

  “Evil to him who thinks evil of it.”—King Edward III of England

  Motto of the Order of the Garter

  The blood feeds the virus, not the vampire.

  Not without a fight, the Germans were finally driven out of our little village. For a couple of days it was very noisy outside, and a wine cellar was a good place even if it hadn’t contained a beautiful, willing girl and all the wine in the world. Artillery tends to be like that.

  I felt like a coward and a fool for not doing anything, well, military, until Surica asked me what I thought I could accomplish against a couple of thousand Nazis, with a .45 caliber pistol and twenty-two rounds of ammunition. Her service piece was even sillier, a Romanian-issue .380 caliber Beretta Model 1934 with two seven-round magazines and one up the spout, a badge of rank more than anything else.

  Still don’t feel quite right about it, though. Who died because I wasn’t there to plug a Nazi in the back, the guy who might have cured Alzheimer’s?

  She told me that her full name was Surica Fieraru, and that she was a fighter pilot from the Free Romania movement, the Smaranda Braescu squadron (whatever that meant), flying escort out of England for the enormous fleets of B-17s and B-24s that were bringing the war back to Hitler. She’d taken severe anti-aircraft fire coming back from her latest mission and screwed her little purloined IAR 80A into the ground in a forest a few miles away from the town we were now hiding in.

  Any landing you walk away from, as the saying goes. She walked pretty well, I thought, once I could see her. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  All those weeks together, Surica and I didn’t have much to speak of in the way of food—a little canvas shoulder bag of dreaded K-rations, two days’ worth, six little waxed cardboard boxes exactly the size of a Cracker Jack package, was all that I’d brought to the picnic and she had even less—but we certainly did have plenty of wine.

  And each other.

  We had a couple of different buzzes going all the time—at least I did—one alcoholic, the other sexual. I never really noticed when all of the usual stuff—and some pretty damned unusual stuff, as well: 24-year-old farm kids from east central Illinois (and their temporary send-off girlfriends) didn’t have a clue about sex in 1944—began to be supplemented with some provocative and exciting biting and bloodletting. A lot less of the latter than you’d think. Like I said, the blood is for the virus. By the time it all started, it only seemed right and proper—logical, somehow, and sexy as hell—and it didn’t hurt even a little. Before long, I got as good at it as she was.

  There is no taste in the world like that of fresh blood to a vampire. The blood is for the virus, but the virus makes the effort worthwhile.

  One thing that bothered me, at first, was the absolute darkness. Because it was uncomfortable to ride with it on my pistol belt, I’d left my flashlight in the Jeep that had taken off without me when the Wehrmacht made their appearance in the little town. We had felt around for candles. No joy. My rations had contained matches, but I didn’t smoke, and I’d foolishly traded them off, along with all of the little four-cigarette packages that came with each meal, for more chocolate.

  “You need to see my face that badly?” Surica would ask, pretending (or maybe not pretending) to be hurt. “But what will you do if I am ugly?”

  I knew that she wasn’t ugly, although I’m not entirely certain that it would have mattered. By then, my fingers knew her face as well as they knew the rest of her. She had a lovely broad, smooth forehead, flawless velvet skin, slightly arched symmetrical brows, eyes that somehow felt eastern European—hard to tell by touch, potentially painful—high, prominent cheekbones, a good, straight nose, not quite turned up, lush, full lips, especially the lower one, and a little squared-off chin. Not a single scar, wart, or hairy mole to be counted. Surica’s teeth were perfect, nice and straight, punctuated by that pair of elongated upper canine incisors that no longer surprised me.

  I could feel my own beginning to grow.

  As for the rest of her, Surica was everything that any 24-year-old kid from east central Illinois could have wished for, and more: long-legged, slender-waisted, with narrow hips—my mother, a farm wife ever mindful of the importance of baby-making, would probably have disapproved—a rather small backside shaped like a perfect upside-down heart, and those amazing baubles below her collarbones. Surica made me feel like it was my birthday and Christmas all at the same time.

  About the way she smelled: she didn’t really have a scent, it just felt wonderful inhaling close to the hollow of her neck, maybe like extra oxygen. A couple of decades from now they would start calling it pheromones. For now, it just added to the amazing rush of being with her.

  Then, after a week or so had gone by, I woke up (you can’t really say “one morning” when you don’t have a clue what time it is) to discover that I didn’t need candles or matches or flashlights any more. It no longer seemed dark in our wine cellar (I realized, of course, that Surica had been able to see me from the very beginning) but just as brightly lit as my mother’s kitchen on a school day morning.

  She was more beautiful than my fingers had told me she was, though by then, it may have been the virus talking. She had red hair, deep red, almost maroon. I never knew eastern Europeans could have red hair.

  “So you can finally see, my love,” she breathed. “Welcome to a new world.”

  A bleak moment. I’d probably seen more than my share of vampire movies, although there were a lot fewer then than there seem to be these days. Aside from worrying about becoming a sniveling Renfield (was I getting hungry enough to scrounge around for bugs?), I had another concern. “How many others have you done this to?” We had been sort of squatting on the floor, side by side, backs to one of the many wine racks. I rose, now, not really knowing what I wanted to hear her say.

  “I
think I recall that you did it to yourself, my love, and with considerable enthusiasm. As to how many before you...a lady doesn’t tell, and I assure you, I am a lady. I am of a passionate disposition, to be sure, but I am selective. I have had time to learn discretion, restraint. I was born in Romania, you see, not far from the Serbian border, in the year 1711, and I was ‘bought over’ when I was only seventeen.”

  My new girlfiend was older than me. Two hundred nine years older.

  Still crouching, she looked up at me from under lowered eyelashes. I was looking straight down into her open collar, and it was a hell of a sight. “Would you believe me if I said you are the first person I have ever brought over?” She reached seductively for the fly of my trousers.

  I grinned, nodding my head. “I will, dear Surica, if you want me to.

  “Do you want me to?”

  But by then, of course, she couldn’t answer.

  6: SHOTS IN THE DARK

  “Among the other causes of evil that being unarmed brings you, it makes you contemptible.”—Niccolo Machiavelli

  The Hamilton County shooting range northwest of town consists of half a dozen lanes that accommodate six or eight shooters, separated by barrows, or berms pushed up out of the Bentonite soil with a bladed caterpillar. The gate locks, and civilians aren’t allowed to use it in the dark. I once asked a county commissioner about that, and I think I saw his hair turn white right there on the spot, just thinking about liability.

  The New Prospect police are required to practice under low light conditions, since that’s when most violent crime happens to get committed.

  I picked Anton up at his home at eight o’clock, wondering about how things had turned out with his wife. As he loaded a couple of cased long guns and his shooting bag into the back of the car, he told me without being asked, that Priscilla was being held over at the hospital for another night. Their son Patrick was home from the Air Force Academy, owing to his mother’s illness, and was keeping her company. Their daughter was coming back from Vermont as quickly as she could.