Sweeter Than Wine

by L. Neil Smith

  15: DEABRU

  “In battling evil, excess is good; for he who is moderate in announcing the truth is presenting half-truth.”—Kahlil Gibran

  We paid a visit to the library downtown as soon as it opened the next morning. Fortunately, it was an unusually rainy day, so heavily overcast that it almost seemed like night, and we could leave our hats and coats and sunblock—Surica used the stuff, too—locked in the Suburban.

  When the moment of truth arrived, I found that I couldn’t just accost some other guy in a public bathroom. Too much of the middle class midwestern male left in me, I suppose. I was happy to “make do” with one of the assistant librarians in a closet marked “Staff Only”. I drew enough blood, two Vacutainers’ worth, for a couple of days, and the young lady went back to her work, relaxed and clear-headed, the cold symptoms that she’d been exhibiting already starting to diminish.

  She showed me how to erase the surveillance tapes, which I did.

  I met Surica in the fiction section, as we’d previously arranged, somewhere between Colin Wilson and F. Paul Wilson. She’d had a close encounter of the thirst kind with a young female Chinese student. I suppressed a smart-ass remark about Asian food. We went back to the house for real breakfast—after an appetizer consisting of each other.

  “I like this business with the needles,” she told me as I was flipping six eggs over medium. “It is tidier and more...humane, somehow. And returning just a bit, I do not feel so much like a monster.”

  She was sitting on a barstool at the counter in my kitchen, playing with Fiddlestring who had hopped right up there just as if it wasn’t one of the five or six things he was absolutely not allowed to do. He lay on his side, purring, batting at her hand as she touched him quickly on each paw, at random, and on his nose and the tip of his tail.

  I turned to grin at her. “Oh, you’re still a monster, sweetheart. So am I. You’re just a monster who pays her own way.” But suddenly, she came around the counter and her mouth was on me again, and mine on her, our clothes scattering, and we were pretty much silent for a while, absurdly there on the kitchen floor. The cat had made himself scarce.

  Around ten, finishing up my eggs—I’d burnt the first batch—and hashbrowns, I called Anton’s cell phone number, but I got Amber, instead.

  “We’re going home!” she told me. “Dad’s in there helping mom pack up. They can’t find any trace of cancer in her, and they’re chasing each other around in circles about it. They all wanted to do about seventy-five more tests on her, but Dad said no, it’s time to go home.”

  Naturally, I was absolutely elated. Surica saw the look on my face and raised her pretty eyebrows. The dear girl hadn’t gotten entirely dressed again and was a considerable distraction. I hadn’t told her anything yet about what I’d done for (or to) Priscilla. I exchanged a few more happy words with Anton’s daughter, broke the connection, and was about to fill Surica in, figuratively speaking, when the damn phone rang in my hand. I hate it when that happens. It always makes me jump.

  “J Gifford. How may I help you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” replied a familiar voice in a thick New Jersey accent. “I’ve been told I’m pretty much beyond help.” I could hear a little silver laughter tinkling in the background, coming from Quyen. “I think we need to talk to you, J. Some pretty odd things have been happening.”

  “Okay,” I told Quinn. “Does it have to do with that fake fed asking about me that you told me about?” I’d said it that way so Surica could follow me. “My dentist has apparently had a similar experience.”

  “Can we just come over and talk?” Quinn asked, clearly disturbed.

  “Sure you can. Anyway, I have someone special to introduce you to.”

  I heard a hand go over the mouthpiece of the phone at the other end of the line. “He got laid, Quyen! Gifford finally got himself laid!”

  I realized suddenly that Surica could hear Quinn on the phone as clearly as I could. I turned to her, blushing, and she was laughing at me.

  I hung up and said, “Now while we have time, tell me about your problem.”

  ***

  Surica picked up her clothes from the floor and started putting them on. It made me sad to see her do that. To be absolutely fair, I’d gotten dressed. Popping grease is harmful to gonads and other living things.

  As she dressed, she spoke, her accent growing thicker as memory flooded her mind. “Remember that I told you that the Warden of that prison in Romania where I spent a lifetime had fled by the time I escaped.”

  “Yes, I remember that.” I put stuff in the dishwasher and started it. Ingredients went away, into cabinets and my enormous double-sided refrigerator. My kitchen was absolutely spotless and I could cook, too.

  Someday I was going to make somebody a wonderful wife.

  “I never understood,” she told me, “while I was in that prison ten times longer than I imagined, how much time had actually passed. If I had, I might well have gone mad. So I never noticed, even though others all around us were aging and dying, that the Warden himself never aged a day more than I did in all of those 45 years that I was there.”

  I nodded. “Another vampire, then.”

  “Another vampire, perhaps, watching me, observing everything I did and didn’t do for nearly half a century. I have often heard stories of other immortals walking the Earth, who are not vampires. I have never encountered one such, myself. Nonetheless, I have no idea what the man expected of me, J, nor whether I fulfilled his expectations of me or not.”

  “How could you?” I shrugged.

  “I also didn’t know, at the time, that he had served as Warden of that tiny, isolated prison under the Nazis, as well as the Communists, possibly back to before the time of King Carol II. Search though I may, by whatever means, I can find no record of his ever not being there.”

  “I wonder how he swung that,” I said quietly.

  She smiled. “The same way you ‘swing’ not having a driver’s license, I suppose. The same way we both fed at the library this morning.”

  “Damn.” I shook my head. “I never thought of using it for job security. I could be the mayor of this town—the governor of this state.”

  “A mayor or a governor,” she asked, putting in her earrings, “who can never come out on a bright, sunny day to cut a ribbon and make a speech?”

  “I never thought of that, either. You have a point—in fact, you’ve got a couple of points, but we’ll explore that later. If the guy took it on the lam during the revolution in 1989, then what’s the problem?”

  She mused. “’On the lam’—I never heard that one. No doubt from the Icelandic, lemja. ‘Beating feet’, as the vernacular would have it.”

  I laughed, but looked it up later and she was right.

  “The problem—my problem—is that he stayed behind, this Warden, to intercept me, although what he wants from me, I have never learned.”

  “Look at yourself,” I told her. She was, without question, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. “What would any man want from you? What do I want from you, just as soon as we can get rid of our guests?”

  “Our guests.” She grinned, but waved away what I’d just said with a very eastern European gesture. “He is apparently not just any man, this Warden, but something different. We have met, on occasion we have even conversed. Never did I see in his eyes, my love, what I see in yours.”

  “Geez—a eunuch vampire. Dickless for all eternity. What a cruel fate!”

  She laughed out loud that time. It was one of the nicest sounds I’d ever heard in my life. “But there can be no eunuch vampires. We heal.”

  “Indeed, we do.” And I had a second appendix to prove it. “What do you think he wants?” It was by far the longest stalking case I’d heard of.

  “I don’t know, my love, and that’s what frightens me. He has followed me everywhere—what do you say, ‘dogging my steps’—for decades. Now I learn that he’s followed me to North America, and I am afraid.”
>
  I’d taken care of more than one stalker during my career as an unlicensed private investigator and equalizer. Just how different could this be? I asked her, “So what’s this guy’s name when he’s at home?”

  “What an odd turn of phrase. I do not know what name he goes by, but I have heard, from scholars of the occult, that, in the Ancient Language, the Oldest Language, he is called ‘Deabru’, which means ‘Nightmare’.”

  16: COUNCIL OF WAR

  “Hypocrisy, the lie, is the true sister of evil, intolerance,

  and cruelty.”—Raisa Gorbachev

  New Prospect, it says here in this Japanese tourist brochure, has more restaurants, per capita, than any other city in the world. Why this should be so (I’ve never figured it out, myself), the brochure declines to vouchsafe. It’s not why I moved here, but it’s a reason I stay.

  Among those restaurants, we’re fortunate to have several good barbecue places and a couple of great ones. The oldest of these is Brother Lem’s. Brother Lem is an oldtime Baptist preacher, and if he’s as good at that as he is at barbecue, this whole damn town is going to heaven.

  Surica and I were sitting in the kitchen again, freshly showered and in my case shaved, brewing up iced tea and making sure there was plenty of beer in the refrigerator. Fiddlestring’s ears perked up when noise at the back door told us both that we had guests. Since it was still rainy and dark, I didn’t have to duck and flinch as I let them in.

  Before he was quite in the door, Quinn said, “I think we got the right thing, here, for the kind of day it is.” He was carrying a big box of foil-covered containers, with styrofoam corners poking up here and there. I could have told from across the yard where it had come from.

  Quyen followed him with a big old-fashioned leather briefcase. They took their jackets off and hung them up on pegs by the door to dry. She reached down and scratched the cat between the ears as he purred.

  As we entered the kitchen, I could see that Surica had caught the wonderful scent and that she liked it. I hadn’t asked her how long she’d been in the States, or whether she’d ever had barbecue before. Somehow, it hadn’t come up. I have a theory that vampires might be especially fond of the stuff (basing my conclusions on a field of one) because it reminds them of...well, of something else deep red and sweet.

  “Surica Fieraru,” I stood beside her. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, had her hair pulled back into a ponytail, and looked just swell. “These are my friends Tran Thi Thu-Quyen (we call her ‘Quyen’) and Quinlan Kowalski (we call him ‘Quinn’, too). I know that sounds confusing, but don’t worry, it’ll only get more confusing as you go along.”

  Everybody chuckled politely. The cat turned and left the room.

  “They know what I am,” I added. “They figured it out all by themselves.”

  Handshakes were offered and accepted. “Quinn and Quyen are freelance scientific consultants. Usually I’m the one who asks them questions. I gather from Quinn that that’s going to be different today.”

  “Lunch before questions,” Quinn insisted, pouring himself a glass of tea from a carafe on the counter. He took containers from the box and set them out. “Pulled pork, ribs, chicken, brisket, sausage,” he said as he did so, adding, “Hushpuppies, beans, cole slaw, and dill pickles.”

  I grinned. “All the basic food groups.”

  “Most of the time, he’s a devout atheist,” Quyen explained. “But he’s very religious about food, especially when it comes from Brother Lem’s.”

  “Hallelujah!” Quinn exclaimed.

  I turned to get plates and silverware, but Surica had beaten me to it.

  ***

  “So there’s you,” Quinn pointed a dill spear at me, “and your delightful new friend, here.” He indicated Surica, who was just finishing off the last of the hushpuppies and pulled pork, and was licking barbecue sauce from her fingers like a veteran. “And suddenly the vampire population seems to have tripled.” They hadn’t had to guess this time; Surica had told them. “What’s next, a pack of werewolves?”

  I said, “There’s no such thing as a werewolf, Quinn. There never was.”

  Surica nodded. “He’s right.” The two of us had agreed we wouldn’t talk about Surica’s life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To my two friends, for now, she was the girl I’d met in France, in 1944.

  “How’s that?” Quinn and Quyen said it at the same time.

  I explained. “In some cultures, people who contracted the virus were thought to be like bats for some reason. I don’t see it, myself. In others, they seemed to have the attributes of wolves, rabid wolves, at that. In reality, there’s only one virus and only one set of symptoms.”

  “How do you know all this stuff,” Quyen looked skeptical, “if you’ve never met another vampire...well, that is, excepting Surica, here?”

  “Because I’ve spent most of the last 65 years researching it.”

  Quinn: “Okay, so what you’re saying is, you’re a werewolf.”

  In a way, he was right. “What I’m saying is that I’m no more like a bat than I am like a wolf. Take a look at the constellations at night.”

  Quinn pretended to reel. “Whoa! Sudden change of subject!” He looked around at the others. “Damn good thing I had my seatbelt fastened!”

  “Not a change of subject. Just consider: how much do any of the classic constellations really look like the things they’re supposed to be: a club-wielding super hero, a pair of twins, a lady sitting in a chair...”

  “There’s the Big Dipper...” Quinn offered.

  I nodded. “Some observers see it as a wagon or a bear. What I’m saying is that to some, people like me seem like bats—I don’t know why—and to others, they seem more like wolves, although neither is true.”

  Qyuen lit up. “I get it—just look at all the things different cultures think a rooster is hollering in the morning. Americans say ‘cock-a-doodle-doo!’ while the French would say, ‘keekeerikee!’ or something.”

  I grinned at Surica. “By george, I think they’ve got it.”

  Qyuen said, “So you could be a chupacabra.”

  “Or a Sasquatch,” Quinn answered.

  Quyen looked doubtful. “He’s a little small for a Sasquatch.”

  “Not where it counts, dear,” said Surica.

  ***

  “If nobody objects, I’m going to hypothesize that the guy asking people questions about J might be this ‘Deabru’ we’ve been talking about,” Quinn told Surica. “Sure you don’t know the guy by any other name?”

  “I have tried to remember.” She shook her head. “I know he must have had one, if only to be issued salary checks as Warden of that prison.”

  “Possibly going back as far as the 1890s,” I said. “I’ll bet those records have all been destroyed, along with all the Nazi and Communist records.”

  Surica seemed to stare into space. “There is a great deal that those who have ruled my country, usually against the will of the people, have to be ashamed of—and to greatly fear being punished for.”

  “Let’s see.” Quinn stood his old-fashioned briefcase upright on the counter, popped the brass fastener, and lifted the strap passing under the double handle. Reaching in, he pulled out what I recognized as a fairly large zippered pistol rug, and a square ballistic nylon envelope. He opened the latter and pulled out a small Toshiba laptop computer.

  As we waited for it to boot, I asked, “What’s in the pistol rug?” I’m not really much of a gun guy, but I’ve never failed to find them interesting.

  Quinn unzipped the container and pulled out something that looked like it had come straight out of a western movie, all blued steel (although I learned later that the grip frame is made of aluminum) and dark, figured walnut grips. Not putting a finger on the trigger, he thumbed the hammer back until it clicked twice, then opened a little curved door on the right side of the frame, and rolled the cylinder until, click by click, five big cartridges, twice the length of one of my .45 ACPs and very ne
arly as big around, fell out into his waiting palm.

  I’d probably seen the same thing done in a dozen horse operas.

  “I know it’s not the likeliest combat piece,” he explained. “Slow to load and unload, slow to fire. But it’ll stop a car, and it’s what I’ve got, a Ruger Blackhawk .44 Magnum. You might say it’s a first edition, the model known as the ‘Flattop’. “ It looked tiny in his big hand, like a kid’s toy six-shooter. “With a six and a half inch barrel.”

  Surica asked, “Is it old?” It certainly didn’t look particularly new. Both the muzzle and the cylinder seemed to have a lot of holster wear.

  Quinn shook his head. “Not by the standards you’re used to—as a European, I mean, not a vampire. The story is that, hounded by gun magazine writers and reloading experimenters, Smith & Wesson, a famous maker of double-action police revolvers, along with the ammunition side of Remington (who also made rifles and shotguns) were working on a powerful new pistol cartridge in 1956, based on an older, weaker .44 Special.”

  “1956,” she mused. She’d been a prisoner then, for more than twelve years, and would be for another thirty-three. I still have no idea how she survived it. It was hard to fathom, even for another vampire.

  “The new offering,” Quinn continued, “to be called ‘.44 Magnum’, would be longer than the parent case, and run at higher pressures, even outperforming quite a number of rifle cartridges. The funny thing is that neither of the cartridges is actually a .44, but has an actual diameter of 0.429”—a true .43. Somehow hearing Dirty Harry whisper, ‘But seein’ as this here is a .43 Magnum, the world’s most powerful handgun, and could blow your head clean off’ wouldn’t have been the same.”

  “Dirty Harry?” Surica’s brow wrinkled.

  “I’ll explain later,” I told her.

  “Clint Eastwood,” Qyuen added, as if it explained everything.

  “Ah!” responded Surica. Perhaps it did.

  “The legend holds that an employee of Sturm-Ruger, who made a very different kind of revolver, single-action cowboy guns, is said to have found some fired cartridges in Remington’s trash—although what he was doing in their trash is beyond me—and took them back to his company.”