SHADOWS

by Jonathan Nasaw

  "When?"

  "When they understand I want the booth."

  Aldo signaled for another drink for himself; Jo asked for a single-malt Scotch, the oldest they had. "I haven't had a Scotch under twenty years old since the war," he explained to Aldo as they approached the booth, which magically emptied itself at that moment. "Second World, that is." He took a tentative sip as they sat down across from each other at a dark booth. "How do people drink this stuff? Ah well, I suppose I'll just have to rough it. Let's get right to business, shall we?"

  "Which business would that be?"

  "What we discussed over the phone. I'm interested in learning something about… I believe you call them the nosferatu in your country?"

  "Nosferatu? Paah!" Aldo blew an imaginary bubble into the air. "Nosferatu is bullshit. Nosferatu is Dracula, and Dracula is a creation of an Evreu Englese, an English Jew by the name of Abraham Stoker."

  "Are you telling me there are no such things as vampires?"

  "I'm telling you there is not such a thing as nosferatu. What we do have in my former country are legends of creatures known as the strigoi. Strigoi are said to be mortal creatures who drink blood to attain supernormal powers. They are not immortal, neither do they sleep in coffins or fear garlic or crosses."

  The old man took another sip of Scotch. "Not immortal, you say?"

  "Not according to the legends."

  "So if a strigoi, for instance, were diagnosed with some incurable disease, he would be as likely to die as anyone else?"

  "I did not say that, my friend. So long as a strigoi has human blood to drink, he is said to be immune to any form of disease."

  "But if someone, say, wanted a strigoi dead, there are ways to kill them?"

  Aldo tossed off his Stoli at a gulp, then leaned across the table. Sounded like a job might be in the offing, but he needed to be sure. "Before I answer that, Jo, I would have to know in what spirit you are asking the question."

  The old man finished his drink as well, then signaled the bartender for another round. "Let me answer that with a question in return." He leaned forward as well, until their foreheads were nearly touching over the scarred wooden table. "Do you believe in vampires—strigoi, nosferatu, whatever you want to call them. Do you believe in them?"

  "Believe in them?" Aldo said triumphantly, placing both hands flat on the table, and half rising until he was leaning over the old man. "Believe in them? My dear Jo, I've been hunting strigoi for over twenty years, both in the service of my former government, and more recently in the private sector. You might as well ask an exterminator whether he believes in cockroaches."

  "I'll take that for a yes," replied the old man, drawing back. Then, nervously, as he started to slide out of the booth: "Thank you so much for your time."

  Aldo stopped him, reaching across the table and placing a hand on his arm. His improvisation appeared to have backfired. "Please. I seem to have frightened you. Perhaps you misunderstood. I have nothing against strigoi personally. If a man wants to drink blood, as far as I'm concerned, that's his own business. Please, have a seat—see, here comes our next round of drinks."

  The old man sat back down, but Aldo had the feeling he was regarding him warily from behind the black lenses of the sunglasses. "I thought you said you hunt them down like cockr—"

  Aldo raised a hand again to cut him off as the barmaid arrived with their drinks. "Thank you, my dear." Then, when the girl was again out of earshot: "I said I believe in them the way an exterminator believes in cockroaches. But it is true, I hunt them for the same reason: because it is my business."

  "I see," said the old man doubtfully, knocking back his second Scotch of the evening while Aldo sipped at his third Stoli. Neither man was showing much effect from the liquor. "Just out of curiosity, how much do you charge?"

  "For believing in them? Nothing. For exterminating them… ?" With only the briefest hesitation, Aldo picked the first figure that came to mind: "One hundred thousand pounds." The figure had, of course, been an opening gambit. When old Jo evinced no shock at the grandiose sum Aldo had quickly added, "And expenses."

  "Of course."

  It wasn't much fun, dickering with this wealthy nebun—like playing table tennis with an armless man. But haggling was part of the Romanian's nature. Aldo decided to take things a step further, to chance mixing pleasure with business. "And you know, of course," he went on smoothly, "that the only way to be sure a strigoi is truly dead is to burn him alive."

  The old man in the pajamas swallowed that too without choking, so Aldo hurriedly ad-libbed: "And all his dwellings as well." Ambitious—but ah, to be out torching again! And at that point he hadn't even known about Selene. Didn't find out about her until later that evening. They'd both had a few more drinks, and Aldo was riffing on Romanian folklore when he happened to mention that the word strigoi was derived from striga, the Romanian word for witch, because so many strigoi were thought to have witches for companions.

  The old man almost choked on his Scotch. "This is astounding!"

  "Oh?"

  "The very strigoi I want you to take care of told me he'd once been engaged to marry a witch. I believe they're still close—in fact, if I remember correctly, she lives in one of his houses."

  "Then we'll have to burn her as well," replied Aldo without missing a beat. He'd given the old man a break, though: he'd thrown in the striga for half price. Practically lagniappe…

  * * *

  And now, six weeks later he'd fulfilled his part of the bargain to the letter—the strigoi and all his dwellings were burnt to ashes. The striga as well—it wasn't Aldo's fault she was dead when he got there. Besides, nobody could say he hadn't burned her. So the question remained: was the old man nebun enough to turn Aldo in to the authorities just to avoid paying the piper his hundred and fifty thousand pounds? Aldo was still trying to decide when the door to the holding room opened.

  "Mr. Yardley? Can you explain what you were doing with this in your luggage, sir?"

  When Aldo turned and saw that the Customs official was holding—of all things—his oversized veterinary syringe, it was all that he could do to keep from breaking into a grin. "Of course," he said in American. "It's for my old football knee." He bent over and rolled up his left pant leg to the knee, revealing a ragged scar from a childhood soccer injury. "Here, let me show you." Aldo took the syringe from the astonished official, jabbed the needle into his knee (which hadn't given him any trouble in thirty years), worked it around, and managed to withdraw a few cc's of cloudy fluid. The customs man almost tossed his scones, the bloody fool, and then, quick as you please, it was, "Welcome back to the UK, Mr. Yardley, and have a lovely stay."

  "Oh, that I will," replied Aldo, thinking of the hundred and fifty thousand pounds that would be transferred into his bank account on Monday morning.

  CHAPTER 7

  « ^ »

  The daylong drizzle had let up a bit by Sunday evening, but the streets of London still gleamed darkly and a fine pearly mist hung in the air around No. 11 Cranwick Square. Selene paused at the bottom of the steps leading up to the modest-looking row house. The cream-colored facade of No. 11 was as genteelly grimy as the rest of the row, but unlike most of the other town houses, which had been chopped into flats decades ago, No. 11 was intact. Between two Tuscan columns, four shallow tiled steps led up to a stucco entrance portico; there was one ornate brass letter slot to the left of the door, one doorbell to the right, attached to a whitewashed, metal-grilled speaker. Selene paused under the dripping portico with her finger on the buzzer; she could feel her heart pounding as she jabbed at the button.

  "You're early," squawked the intercom. "Entrez-vous."

  "Mr. Whistler?"

  "I said entrez-vous. That means let yourself in, you ignorant trollop," was the tinny reply. "I'm upstairs."

  Selene pushed open the heavy door. "Hello?"

  No answer—only the stouthearted ticking of the grandfather clock in the dark entrance hall. She closed the
door behind her and stepped back into the nineteenth century. Parquet floor strewn with densely patterned Oriental rugs. Dusty oak baseboards. Dado panels overlayed with leathery anaglypta. Between the dado rail and the elaborate plasterwork of the cornice, the walls and friezes were covered with green and gold flocked Morris paper; a converted Beethoven gasolier hung from a gilded ceiling rose.

  Selene hung her damp trenchcoat, a Lady Burberry she'd purchased at Heathrow, on a towering mahogany coat rack, and made her way down the narrow hall and up the staircase, taking note of the curious state of neglect into which the old house had fallen. A layer of dust had settled over the woodwork and furniture, from the Prussian clock to the walnut hall table with flanking side chairs, from the coat rack to the smooth banister and spindled balusters of the staircase. But when her fingers brushed the staircase railing, Selene saw that beneath the dust the wood retained a dark polished luster, and overhead the cobwebs clinging to the corniced ceiling were intact and confined to the corners. Up until a few months ago, she decided, there must have been servants, else the state of disrepair of the venerable furnishings would have been a good deal more advanced.

  The staircase turned, and turned again. The second story was dark, the open drawing room deserted. The stairway narrowed as she continued climbing; she began to hear a faint, rhythmic squeaking from overhead. When she reached the third floor she saw yellow light spilling from an open door across the green and cream hallway rug. It was from this room that the squeaking emerged. Bedsprings, judging by the high-pitched, breathy squeals that accompanied them in perfect time. Selene waited in the hall for a few minutes, but the squeaking and squealing neither slowed nor accelerated. Finally she peeked in.

  The bedroom was decorated in higgledy-piggledy High Victorian. A massive, elaborately carved, double-fronted, ebony-inlaid wardrobe took up most of one wall, its leaded central mirror reflecting the matching ebony bedstead across the room. As she peered around the corner of the doorjamb, Selene saw the source of the noise revealed in the mirror: a nude Asian girl squatting on the bed, bouncing up and down, squealing at the bottom of eveiy bounce.

  She couldn't see the girl's face, only her determined, wide-waisted torso rising and falling, and her long black hair bouncing. How long could she keep it up? Selene wondered admiringly. Must have been hell on the thigh muscles.

  But she had leaned too far into the doorway. "Come on in," said a querulous old voice. "If you're waiting for me to finish, you'll be standing out there all night."

  Selene approached the bed as the old man shoved the Chinese woman off him. She had a brief glimpse of the ancient but still impressive penis, heavy and substantial enough to have filled the woman, but not hard enough to stand on its own, as it plopped out of her like an elongated, partially filled water balloon, falling across the old man's thigh with a fat slapping sound.

  In its youth the thing must have been truly imposing, Selene reckoned, before turning her attention to the Chinese woman, who had fallen back against the high footboard. She saw before the woman turned her back and climbed wearily off the bed that the slim girlish figure in the mirror had been an illusion—the face was lined, the slack belly and small breasts sagged softly.

  "Where do you think you're going?" snapped the old man.

  "To 'ave a pee, guv," was the response as the Chinese woman trudged off—Cockney, not pidgin, to Selene's mild surprise.

  The old man stuck his tongue out at her retreating back, then turned his attention to Selene. The only light in the room came from a small lamp on the bedside table. His face was in shadow, his fine hair tufted up into a white corona around his head. "Damn, you're an old one, aren't you? How long have you been in the business?"

  Selene, though she'd been attending orgies of one sort or another for over thirty years now, found herself blushing and stammering. "I'm afraid there's been some mistake. I'm not"—she nodded in the direction the Chinese woman had gone—"one of those."

  "You mean Chinese? That's rather obvious."

  "I mean a prostitute," said Selene.

  "Neither was she." As he lay back against a mound of pillows Selene saw his eyes for the first time. They were gray, like Jamey's, but so bloodshot and debauched they looked like pearl onions floating in tomato sauce. "She was my housekeeper before all this happened. Best I ever had. Never occurred to me to lay a finger on her. Now instead of a crackerjack charwoman, I've got an indifferent whore, and my house is falling down around my ears. As for you, if you're not a whore, who the bloody hell are you and what are you doing in my bedroom?"

  At the sight of those eyes Selene understood instantly that everything had changed. "My name is Sarah Stone. I'm in your bedroom because you insisted I come into your bedroom. Believe me, I would have been just as happy to meet with you down in the parlor."

  "On what business?" replied the old man, leisurely tugging his nightshirt down over his lap.

  "I'm trying to locate your son, James. He owes me a rather large sum of money."

  "If you took all the information I have as to my son's whereabouts and stuffed it up a flea's arse, Miss Stone, you'd still have room up there for how much I care. I have neither seen nor spoken to Jamey in thirty years. And if you think you're going to get a brass farthing out of me, you're sadly mistaken." But as he spoke, his glance was slithering down her body—her outfit, a sheer white silk blouse over an ankle-length beige skirt, was a souvenir of her second tour of the duty-free shops of Charlotte Amalie, this time stoned on the Rastaman's righteous weed. There seemed to be little doubt that although Selene was nearing fifty, and Whistler's father would never see eighty again, the old boy was definitely checking her out. And apparently liked what he saw, for he quickly added: "But I'm being rude. Obviously you've come a long way. Have you had supper yet?"

  Selene smiled flirtatiously. "Why no. No, I haven't."

  "Excellent. Then perhaps you'll do me the honor of dining with me." Without waiting for an answer, the old man called in the direction of the bathroom: "Mrs. Wah. I'll be having a guest for dinner this evening."

  "Wot?" came the reply. "Oi let you stick 'at fing in me all afternoon, now you fink Oi'm cookin' bleedin' supper for you and your 'ore? Bloody 'ell Oi am!"

  "Servants," said the old man, shrugging apologetically. "Perhaps you'd be more comfortable waiting down in the drawing room."

  * * *

  The drawing room was in no better condition than the rest of the house. Selene looked around for a dust cloth; finding none, she used a tissue from her purse to dust off a yellow wing chair as best she could. She perched gingerly on the edge of the chair, mindful of her light-colored skirt, and began trying to evaluate this new piece of information: judging by both his eyes and his behavior, Whistler's father was almost certainly a full-blown, degenerate, balls-to-the-wall blood drinker. And if she had to make a guess, he was definitely off his antipsychotic medications.

  Whether this meant he was more or less likely to have been involved in the attempts on her and Jamey's lives, however, was not at all clear. On the one hand, there didn't seem to be much chance he was still pissed off at Jamey for having drunk blood thirty years ago, if he was now drinking himself; on the other hand, if he was as far gone as he appeared to be, there was no point looking for rational explanations for his actions. It occurred to her that perhaps her best move would be to get the hell out of Dodge. But then what? Call Scotland Yard? Fly back home and wait around for the road-show devil to return? Or perhaps he knew that Jamey had survived, and was out looking for him. She decided instead to stick around, act flattered at the old man's attentions, even flirt with him a little, and find out what he knew about Jamey—if indeed he knew anything. She also decided to keep the news that Jamey was still alive to herself for at least a while longer.

  Fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Wah, clad now in a circumspect housedress, but reeking of gin and sex, appeared at the door of the parlor to inform her that dinner would be served downstairs in twenty minutes or so, and that if she wa
nted to wash up, there was a bathroom at the end of the hall. The woman then waited in the doorway for her, and as Selene brushed by her the housekeeper hissed into her ear, "Keep yer 'ands orf, 'e's mine."

  Selene spent a few minutes in the bathroom trying to repair the damage the rain had done to her mane; when she emerged she found the old man waiting for her by the landing, dressed in a dark suit cut from an expensive-looking black wool fabric with a subdued gray pinstripe. The coat bagged on him, as if he'd recently lost weight; his white shirt was loose as a horse collar around his neck and his striped tie was wrinkled just below the knot, as if he had slipped it over his head already tied. But his shave was impeccable, his thin white hair combed back with care, and there was no sign of the stiffness of age in his movements as he stooped to give her his arm.

  Thus cleaned up, he was a much taller Jamey—or Jamey in thirty years, at any rate. Same long jaw, same long, sardonic upper lip. His eyes were gray like Jamey's, but unamused and of a steelier metal; the worst of the red-eye had been washed out by Visine, or whatever they used in this country.

  They descended the staircase together, turned left at the bottom, and he led her into an overdecorated, high-ceilinged formal dining room. Two places were laid at one end of a heavy-legged mahogany table; the place settings were Wedgwood and Sterling, but the serving dishes were white cardboard cartons with red pagodas printed on the sides.

  He shrugged another apology. "Cook's night off. Hope you like Chinese. Never recognize any of the damn dishes, myself."

  Selene had already determined to select food out of cartons from which her host had already eaten—this occasioned a brief Alphonse and Gaston after you; no, after you duel that Selene won with the age before beauty ploy, an unanswerable card when played by a woman. She watched his hands as he served himself. His long fingers were so like Jamey's. She thought of something: "Do you still paint, Jo?" By now they were on a first-name basis.