Sweeter Than Wine

by L. Neil Smith

  I suppose it’s fair to say that if I were to stop working for a living, I wouldn’t exactly go hungry. When you get over that first thrill of discovering that you’re going to live more or less forever, you begin to realize—or at least I did—that time really is money.

  I had some early help in this. The elementary school I attended in my home town participated in the “Bank Day System”, invented, odd as it may seem, by the murder mystery writer Rex Stout. Every Thursday (in my school, anyway) the kids would all hand over whatever pennies they had to their teacher, who made entries in a book for them and let the resulting envelope full of coins be taken to the bank to draw interest.

  I reckon that if I still had that account, it would be worth about half a billion dollars, but it would be hard to get at, with my being missing in action and presumed dead. Happily, I cleared the account out the day I graduated from high school, and when I got to England, preparatory to D-Day, bought a little bar of gold—illegal in the good old U.S. of A.—I carried with me through was left of the war.

  As soon after the war as I could manage, and before I worked my way back to the States, I left that gold bar in an interest-bearing account in Switzerland. Later on, I split the account, then split it again, and now have fifty or sixty accounts spread all over the planet.

  All it takes is time.

  I have some other investments, too—I put every dime I can into whatever company is leading the pack in battery design and I was lucky to see transistors for what they would eventually become—but most of my money comes from slow and steady sources. The same thing would work for shorter-lived people, too, if their governments didn’t get so greedy.

  Surica provided for herself in pretty much the same way, except that she didn’t have much time immediately following the war. Instead, she started investing in the 18th century and truly is a billionaire now.

  A really quiet billionaire.

  By now, I had a lot of money of various kinds stashed, hidden, or right out in plain sight in a lot of different places, but you have to keep the momentum going, and if you don’t work in some way—or maybe this is the small town boy thinking—then in some way you start to die.

  So I answer the telephone, I read my e-mail, and I examine what the U.S. Snail brings to me every day, exactly as if I were only a paycheck and a half away from bankruptcy, just like everybody else in America.

  And that’s how I happened to be sitting at my desk now, listening to this woman on the other side of it complaining that she had been guaranteed freedom from having to earn a living, just like everybody else, by a magistrate who had generously bestowed upon her about a hundred and twenty percent of her soon-to-be ex-husband’s future income. Some of it was alimony. A whole lot more of it was child support.

  “Look, Mr....” She consulted an envelope she had written on.

  “Gifford,” I said. “J Gifford.”

  “Mr. Gifford, do you want this job or not?”

  I leaned back in my chair. “No, Mrs. Gumbeiner, I do not want this job. And if you have any sense at all, neither do you. Your ex-husband has just lost everything that means anything to a man, his home, his family, and his job, I presume. The guy’s become a fugitive, living in hiding, sort of a one-man Witness Protection Program. You divorced him, that’s what it says here in these papers, anyway. It was pretty clearly your choice. Whatever it was he did or failed to do, he’s being punished. Why attempt to continue a relationship that you’ve rejected?”

  “Well, I never!” She was wrong about that. She had at least once. Now she got up, stiff all over with anger, slung her big purse over her shoulder like an M1 Garand, and headed for the front door. “This isn’t over, not by a long shot. I’m going to talk to my attorney about you!”

  I had arisen, too. Chivalrous reflex established in childhood. “Good idea. I’m planning to talk to him myself, in just a minute or two.”

  There are worse bloodsuckers in the world than vampires.

  19: A LITTLE KNIFE MUSIC

  “Right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than

  evil triumphant.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.

  “So this is what you do for a living,” Surica said. She meant the would-be client earlier that afternoon. She’d been listening from my study.

  I said, “I’ve dealt with worse. If I waited until Mary Poppins showed up to hire me, or Mother Theresa, I’d be living in a cardboard box.”

  “This is definitely not a cardboard box,” she observed. The bedroom was large, well-lit in the daytime—more special glass—but very private at the same time, thanks to good architecture. Ordinarily I didn’t spend much time here, but I enjoyed having it nonetheless.

  “Arts and Crafts, from the 1920s,” I told her. “I like it, too.” It was the main reason I’d chosen to stop wandering and put down roots in New Prospect. That and the fact that it was near Denver, but not in Denver.

  “You never told me about Sava Savanovic,” I observed. We had just made love for the third time in an hour. It may be good to be the king, as Mel Brooks tells us, but it’s a hell of a lot better to be a vampire.

  Surica said, “Who?” We were smoking cigarettes that she’d brought with her. I’d never tried it before, although most guys back in the 40s did, but I was giving it a try now. What was it going to do, kill me?

  “Or maybe what,” I said. “Or where. I won’t actually know until you tell me. It’s the name you made our reservation for at Boiling Oil.”

  The good thing about being a smoking vampire is that the virus protects you from needing to cough or feeling sick the way you’re supposed to the first time you smoke. The bad thing is that it wasn’t doing anything for me, either, any more than cannabis or opiates do. I wondered why Surica stuck with such a dirty habit, but I didn’t ask her.

  Not then, anyway.

  “Oh, that! It is a joke, darling, a vampire joke, like ‘Joe sent me’ or ‘Killroy was here’—as if you made a reservation for Sam Marlowe.”

  “Who?” I knew what she meant but I wanted to hear her explain it. I loved to listen to her talk, like Boris’s Natasha, but a prettier voice.

  She frowned. “Philip Spade, then. This is right?”

  “About as close as Nero Goodwin or Archie Wolfe.” Momentarily I wondered if there had ever been vampires in Montenegro. “But you were saying...”

  “Sava Savanovic is most famous vampire in Serbian folklore. More in his own time than Romania’s Vlad Tepes.” Whenever she talked about the old country, her accent became noticeably thicker. “He is said to have dwelt in old mill on river Rogacica in village of Zarozje, municipality of Bajina Basta. Is said he used to kill millers coming to mill their grain so as to drink their blood. Look it up. Is on Wikipedia.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “So is the Loch Ness Monster.”

  She ignored me. “Although Savanovic is usually said to have been first Serbian vampire, there are claims of earlier vampire in Serbian folklore, a man, Petar Blagojevic from Veliko Gradiste, who died in 1724.”

  “Only four years before you were turned. How truly strange. Or maybe he faked his death and lived to become the fortieth governor of Illinois.”

  She ignored me. “Thirteen years after I was born—is sounding more sinister that way. Petar Blagojevic and everything about him came to popular European attention at that time, only under name Peter Plogojowitz, for some reason. Is earliest example of vampire hysteria. I believe it was his...call them successors who sired me, or perhaps some collateral ‘relation’ of Sava Savanovic. I myself have been to that watermill upon two occasions, once before war with Hitler and once again just before I was captured and imprisoned by Communists. Is property of Jagodic family these days and is usually called Jagodica vodenica.”

  “Let me guess: Jagodic’s watermill. I go to see the meteor crater at Winslow, Arizona every year, myself. It takes a hell of a lot of sunblock.”

  “Very good, lovely man. I shall put gold star on your foreskin.”

  I
barely stifled a laugh. “Unh...I believe you mean forehead, Surica.”

  “I shall reward whatever parts of you I feel may merit it, my love. Where was I? Oh, yes: famous watermill was functional until late 1950s, when it was closed by government. Tourists come, sometimes, to see authentic ‘vampire mill’. Their numbers slowly dwindle every year.”

  ***

  I am perfectly willing to work during the daytime, given certain precautions, but nobody seems to want me to. People do what they’re ashamed to have other people seeing them do in the night, and people who need to defend themselves from the first kind of people need people like me, night people, to defend them. It isn’t so much that the night belongs to a private eye, as a private eye belongs to the night.

  Which is why I was lying on the roof of a client’s garage, just below the peak, keeping both of my private eyes on the back of a house very nearly as nice as my own. I did envy them their location just a little, a classy, inconspicuous neighborhood on Tanfoglio Lane, just off Bicentennial, on the placid shore of the thoroughly artificial Lake Nottingham. The father of the family who lived there was an extremely well-paid “executive engineer” (that’s what it said on his card, anyway) for an international electronic outfit whose name you’d recognize.

  The trouble was with his daughter, sixteen, physically precocious, sweet-smelling, with pale blond hair, eyes the color of well-washed denim, and the peaches and cream face of an angel. She was actually a pretty nice kid, despite being aware that she was beautiful. I was tempted to bite her myself; I understood the guy they were all upset about.

  To a degree, anyway.

  Precious daughter, it developed, had gone to an innocuous-sounding teenage party at a school friend’s house a week ago, a party that she probably shouldn’t have gone to. Wearing a dress that she probably shouldn’t have worn, she had had a couple of drinks that she probably shouldn’t have had. But the “probably shouldn’t haves” didn’t end there.

  In her state of alcohol-induced amiability, she’d ended up on a broken-down couch in the middle of the party for a couple of hours, playing what we used to call “tonsil hockey” and assorted similar games with a dropout from Von Mises U. seven years older than she was. It turned out that his name was Wayne, he was well known to the local police—mostly as the son of a city councilman who owned a business that employed several hundred New Prospectians and fed their families—and he made a bad habit of cruising high school parties like this one.

  Wayne’s next move would have been to drag her off to a bedroom or, better yet, to his car, and give her something other than his tongue to suck on. We found out later that he’d done exactly that with many another high school girl. But, accidentally in the nick of time, a couple of the daughter’s best friends forever had done the dragging, driving her home with certain tips on how to fool your folks about what you drank, as well as a number of classical high school hangover remedies.

  I’m certainly no wimp, but I will never be able to look at a bottle of butterscotch ice cream topping in quite the same way, ever again.

  Or leeks.

  Later that night, the guy had shown up on the second-story balcony of the house, through a tragic miscalculation on his part, at her folks’ enormous bedroom picture window that ordinarily looked out at the mountains. What Romeo had seen, instead of the teenager of his dreams in her babydoll negligee, was the double muzzle of her father’s custom Browning Superposed 12 gauge trap and skeet gun—purely for sporting purposes, don’t you know old chap, pip pip—just as it went off.

  The police, who could find no trace of the guy—principally because they hadn’t looked—had decided to end this threat to peace and civil order by confiscating the father’s shotgun. Twenty-four hours later, after a second midnight visitation, warded off with a putter this time, dear old Dad had gone straight to his golfing buddy Anton Varick. Anton had sent him to me. I persuaded the properties and evidence guy to give me the shotgun, leaving him with the distinct impression that the confiscating cops had come to claim it for their very own. With any luck they’d spend the rest of their lives guarding empty parking lots in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan—or working for the F.B.I.

  My real job was to catch the mad midnight masher in the act and encourage him to modify his undesirable behavior—with prejudice. I could do that, with bells on. But the first thing I was sure to do was to inconspicuously sniff around the balcony and the place on the patio below where the guy had fallen. (How the client had missed him at that range with a shotgun, I had no idea.) I not only have a better sense of smell than many a dog—not necessarily a good thing; the vast majority of odors in the world are bad—I have an olfactory memory so acute that, if I ran into this guy fifty years from now in a shopping mall in DeFuniak Springs, Florida, I’d know who it was I was smelling.

  Now, here I lay on the garage roof, just below the ridge line, waiting. There were raccoons in this neighborhood, and a female fox with her young. At some distance I could smell mule deer and a big old owl.

  In due course, I heard him in the alley behind the house, making noises like a steam locomotive with gravel in its hubcaps. He’d been hurt pretty bad in the fall, and hadn’t been in great shape to begin with. He probably thought he was running on silent. Taking a peek—it was a moonless night, but like broad daylight to me—over the crest of the garage roof, I could see that he was a little worse for wear. He had a broad bandage holding his nose on his face (or his eyes together) and a cast on his left arm, probably from the fall he’d taken.

  I had smelled him before I’d seen or heard him.

  He was the guy.

  He was wearing jeans, an old gray sweatshirt, and a watchcap. He also had a fairly big knife hanging in a scabbard from his belt, a Buck “General”, at one time, about the only large knife made in America. He got in through the back gate and stealthed his way up to the house. By now he knew where daughter’s bedroom window was. What he didn’t know is that she was sleeping snugly in her Disney’s Pocahontas sleeping bag in her mother’s sewing room at the front of the big house.

  “Thinking of committing a felony?” I asked conversationally as I alighted silently on the balcony beside him. It had been a sixty foot jump. And no, it isn’t flying. He let out a little “yip!” and tried to turn and draw his knife at the same time, a trick difficult enough with both arms working. I kept him turning past the point where he’d intended to stop, taking the Buck from his hand as that part of him went by. With my other hand, I grabbed him by the seat of his baggies, bunching them good and hard at the crotch so he wouldn’t slip out of them.

  I lifted him over the two-by-four rail like a crane and held him, head down, over the patio where he’d already broken his arm and nose. “Would you rather talk,” I pretended to ask, “or should I let you go? It’s only a dozen feet, but that concrete down there looks really hard.”

  “Talk! Talk!” he tried to yell and whisper at the same time.

  “Good idea to be quiet. I gave her father back his shotgun.” The words sounded almost as sweet to me as, “Oh good! My dog found the chainsaw!”

  Swinging him back in, I set him on his feet and made him unfasten his belt. I could see and smell that he’d wet himself. What I wanted was the scabbard; I meant to keep the knife. I also took the belt so that he had to stand there, holding up his pants with his one good hand. The knife was okay. I sheathed it and stuck it in the back of my waistband.

  “Now here’s the way it is, Wayne. You appear to have a problem respecting the personal space—not to mention the virginity—of others. There are a lot of places I could send you for that. The state prison at Canyon City, for example, where you’ll learn about personal space the hard way, and find out how you’ve been making the girls feel.”

  If his whimper had any semantic content, I couldn’t tell.

  I went on, “I could make you kill yourself—with this knife, say—but then it would be evidence, and I’m planning to add it to my collection.”

  “Oh,
God! Please don’t kill me!”

  “I didn’t say I would kill you. I said I might make you kill yourself.”

  “That’s no improvement!”

  “No, it isn’t, is it? So here’s what we’ll do, instead...”

  20: BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND

  “The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as

  well as of the greatest virtues.”—Rene Descartes

  “You let him go?” Both men said the same thing at once.

  Before I could answer, the waitress brought our order. Gigantic cinnamon rolls swimming in buttery icing for them. Chicken fried steak and hashbrowns for me, four eggs over medium. Maybe a cinnamon roll after that. It had been a long night, and now it was another of the cold, blustery rainy days we’d been having. Strong, hot coffee all around.

  Anton drinks his black like me. You can’t drink station house coffee all night, the way you have to, sometimes, if you load it up with sugar and fat—which is exactly what the client happened to be doing now: two spoons of sugar and three little cups of “mouse milk”—what the Varick kids had called restaurant servings of half and half.

  “No, I didn’t exactly let him go,” I told Anton and his golfing friend. It was the next morning. The three of us were having coffee and accessories at Uneeda Lunch Cafe, Est. 1912. The place was old, with hardwood floors and its original tin ceilings. “Believe it or not, there is this real, live, actual monastery up in Snowmass, near Aspen.”

  The client nodded. He cut himself a bit of cinnamon roll, mopping icing off the plate. “I think I’ve heard about that. Something on TV. Trappists?”

  “No, that’s in Colorado Springs,” Anton told him. “I had to go down there once, years ago, to take custody of a perpetrator who erroneously believed that the law couldn’t touch him in a place like that.”