"Is it any wonder I fell in love with her that night? And she with me, before she even knew about my wealth. I was in uniform, remember—well tailored, to be sure, but otherwise just another shavetail lieutenant. We had supper at the Morocco that evening, made love that night, and were married within a month. Our son, James, was born the following year, and if there was ever a more blessed union in the world than ours, I've never heard of it."
"How long did you have together?" asked Selene; she had let her sewing fall to her lap as if mesmerized by the tale.
"Her heart started to give out when she was only forty-nine. After we'd been through all the specialists in London, I took her to the best doctors on the Continent, and then back to the States, but it was the same everywhere—there was nothing any of them could do. It was still the Dark Ages as far as her medical options were concerned. No open-heart surgery, no transplants. We came back to London, I surrounded her with the best nurses, round the clock, and tried to keep her quiet and comfortable—any sort of exertion taxed her terribly.
"And as for making love, it was out of the question. She wanted to, for my sake, but it was too much for her. For me, it was another test of character—all I had to do was remain celibate for another year or so. And of course I failed. I couldn't even wait until she died—I had to go off with a woman who picked me up in a bar. A rather expensive bar, but a bar nonetheless.
"Her name was Theresa. Countess Theresa di Voltera. She was from an old Tuscan family—maintained pieds-à-terre in Paris and London, as well as the old homestead in Tuscany. Listened sympathetically while I rattled on about my beloved invalid wife—as if she gave a good goddamn—then dragged me up to her flat, overpowered me as easily as if I'd been a child, and withdrew a pint of blood from my vein while I watched as if in a dream.
"Theresa was delighted to discover I was a vampire as well. She fed us both from one of her earlier conquests, and we began a torrid affair that went on every night for weeks, always with her supplying the blood. And every morning I'd go home to Alice, sometimes napping on the daybed in her bedroom, the picture of the devoted husband.
"Then one evening I let myself into Theresa's flat with my key and found a note on the dining room table—she'd gone off to South America with a donor. Help myself to the blood in the fridge, she informed me, and she'd give me a ring when she was back in town."
"Were you terribly hurt?" cooed Selene.
"It wasn't as if she'd led me down the primrose path," replied Jonas. "She'd never made any bones about how she lived her life. But I was a bit angry—I thought I deserved at least a good-bye. Still, it was rather a nice gesture, her leaving me a milk bottle full of blood. I brought it back home in a paper sack, took a shot glass up to my room, and proceeded to drink myself into a wretched, and quite unexpectedly randy, state. You see, for those first few weeks I'd associated the unbelievable state of lust I was in with the Countess Theresa as much as with blood.
"But that first night I soon learned differently. I wasn't sure what to do—I didn't know any prostitutes myself. Not that finding one would have been a problem—there were a dozen friends I could have called for a reference. It was the embarrassment of making the call that held me up. By the time I decided I had to do something about my state, it was getting on to dawn. My eyes were already exquisitely sensitive to light—I could still get about on a cloudy day, but full sunlight was too painful, so I decided to hold on until the following evening.
"And hold on I did—with both hands, if you get my drift. And when my own fantasies no longer satisfied me, I went digging up in the attic for some pornographic magazines I'd confiscated from Jamey years before. I had them spread out across the bedcovers, and was sitting naked among them with a jar of face cream I'd stolen from Alice's dresser, when suddenly Alice appeared in the door between our adjoining bedrooms: she had come to say good night, because I had quite forgotten to say good night to her. I'd never forgotten before, not even the past few weeks when I was creeping out to see Theresa every night."
By now Selene's interest was quite genuine. "What happened?"
"She burst into tears and sank to the floor. I pulled up my pajamas and carried her in my arms to the bed. I started to call for her nurse, but Alice stopped me. She wasn't horrified or disgusted or any of the reactions one would have expected. Instead she blamed herself. She knew what sex meant to me, she said—she should have seen to me somehow, or freed me to find someone. She said that would have been all right—said she knew how much I loved her. Said she'd rather die than see me reduced to… well, she didn't have the words for what she'd seen."
Not much expression, either on his face or in his voice. "I didn't tell her about Theresa or the blood, of course. Just let her blame herself, and weep, and I held her, and comforted her, and before long—remember I had already drunk more blood that evening than Theresa had ever allowed me at a sitting—before long the comfort turned to caressing, and the caressing to…"
Finally words had failed the old man.
"Is that when she died?" There was no hidden motive behind the question; Selene simply had to know.
He shrugged. "I don't know precisely when. We made love for hours, and the next morning I found her cold in bed beside me."
"May I say something," Selene asked rhetorically, after a deathly long silence. "If it was me? If I was dying slowly, like her? I would pray for somebody to fuck me to death too."
His face was in his hands; he looked up as if he'd forgotten she was in the room. "World's best blow job, you said?"
"So I've heard."
"A drink first."
"Absolutely. Do you have a knife?" asked Selene out of the corner of her mouth—the other corner held the largest pin.
There was an intercom by the door; he pressed the button and spoke into it. "Mrs. Wah?" he called. "Would you bring me my pocketknife from my bedside table."
"Get it yerself," was the answering squawk.
"Never mind," said Selene. She'd forgotten about the housekeeper momentarily. With her free hand she dumped the contents of the sewing packet into her lap—there was a tiny plastic scissors, far too dull for comfort. But this was no time to be squeamish. "Never mind," she told Jonas, again out of the side of her mouth. "This'll do." Pressing her lips even more firmly together against the pain, she forced herself to snip a little bite out of the tender skin just below the heel of her hand.
Jonas, turning back from the intercom, saw the blood welling and crossed the room in two strides. He dropped to a knee and took her arm, brought it to his mouth, began sucking from the wound at the inside of her wrist. Selene curled her fist, tightened and loosened it a few times as if she were pumping blood to the wound for him. What she was actually doing was bracing the back of the pin more securely against her palm. When it was firmly in place she suddenly rotated her wrist a hundred and eighty degrees: the pin scratched a shallow furrow down the length of his cheek.
The effect was immediate and profound: he toppled over onto his side without so much as a sigh. She dropped the pin, knelt, felt for a pulse. Shallow, as was the respiration, but at least she hadn't killed him.
Thank you, Granny, thought Selene as she applied pressure against her own wound with her other hand. The bleeding had just stopped when the door burst open.
"You bloody bitch," screamed Mrs. Wah, fumbling to open the blade on the pocketknife she'd brought up for her employer. "If you've 'armed 'im—"
But she never finished the sentence. With one motion Selene had grabbed the larger pin out of her mouth and lunged across the room. Her momentum jammed the pin through the other woman's apron and blouse with such force that it lodged in the soft tissue of her breast. Selene drew her hand back in horror: for an instant that seemed more like a frozen slice of eternity, Mrs. Wah remained standing, her dead brown eyes staring into Selene's own. Then the body crumpled to the floor, the knife still clutched in its hand.
CHAPTER 9
« ^ »
Think. Don't pa
nic, think. Selene remembered stepping over Mrs. Wah's corpse—there was no other way out of the atelier—then fleeing down the carpeted hallway. But of racing down three flights of stairs and grabbing her trench coat off the coat rack she had no memory whatsoever. And yet here she was standing shirtless and breathless in the entrance hall of No. 11 Cranwick Square with her Lady Burberry in one hand and her purse in the other.
She forced herself to take a deep breath. First thing to do was figure out how much time she had before the old man came to. She tried to remember how long she'd been out at Granny Weed's. Two, three hours? Minimum. Which meant she had a little time. But for what?
To clean up after yourself.
The answer chilled her. Oh no. No way I'm going back up there. But she had already turned and started up the stairs; she slipped the trench coat on as she climbed, and by the time she reached the door of the atelier she had the inner lining zipped and the outer buttons buttoned. Not much use: the chill was coming from the inside.
The hardest part was stepping over that body again. Once in the room she gritted her teeth and did what she had to do. Just function, dearie, she told herself as she knelt beside old Jonas. He was still breathing so slowly and shallowly it was all but undetectable, and his jaw had dropped at what appeared to be an odd angle until she realized it was only his lower plate protruding crookedly—must have jarred loose when he fell.
It took her a few minutes to find the needle. As she searched the carpet she kept glancing at those stupid false teeth jutting out of his mouth. It was like having a picture hanging crooked on a wall: she just had to straighten it. She couldn't bring herself to stick her bare hand into his mouth, so she used his pocket handkerchief. It was after she had finished adjusting the teeth and was replacing the handkerchief that she finally spotted the needle, which had somehow slipped under the fold of his lapel. Good deed rewarded—for once!
She knew where the second needle was—embedded in Mrs. Wah. Holding the first one carefully between thumb and forefinger, point out, she knee-walked over to the corpse. Selene tried not to look, but her eyes were drawn irresistibly to the dead woman's face. The sight was shocking enough—the Oriental features were still contorted with rage—but even worse was the creepy sensation that came over her as she grasped the blunt end of the pin protruding from the black bodice and began working it free. It was as if her own breast had gone acutely, morbidly sensitive; Selene could feel the needle sliding out, millimeter by millimeter. She had never experienced telepathy with a corpse before. Not a pleasant form of extrasensory perception; she found herself praying unashamedly to powers in whom she no longer believed for the strength to keep her dinner down while she completed the awful task.
* * *
The rest didn't take long. Obviously the first thing to do was to get rid of the needles before she pricked herself accidentally. Had to step over Mrs. Wah again—second time was easier. She found a water closet at the end of the hall and flushed them down; on her return to the atelier she stepped over Mrs. Wah without a moment's hesitation. Jonas still hadn't budged. Selene took off her trench coat long enough to put on her blouse; the torn sleeve she stuffed into her purse. Then, after one last look around, as coolly as if she were checking out of a hotel, she made one final traverse of the dead housekeeper, and a few moments later Selene was striding purposefully through the dark streets of London with her coat collar turned up against an implacable November drizzle.
Selene headed toward a faint glow in the sky, and found a cab on the Belgrave Road. And if the veddy British night clerk at her Park Lane hotel was surprised to find a guest desirous of having her luggage brought down from her room shortly before midnight, he gave no indication beyond an infinitesimal lift of one eyebrow.
The bellman, however, was West Indian, and curious as hell. She told him her daughter had been in an accident back in the States, then repeated the fib to the doorman who hailed her taxi, and to the Pakistani who drove her to the airport, and to the first uniformed airline employee she saw behind a lighted counter at Heathrow. There were no seats available on the first flight out the next morning, destination JFK, but the ticket agent, who had a daughter of her own about the same age as the distraught woman's in front of her (for in the telling and retelling of the tale, Selene's phantom daughter had taken on an identity—guess whose?), promptly bumped Selene to the top of the standby list.
Which should have justified injecting a dash of verisimilitude into her scenario. All the same Selene felt uncomfortable, as if by casting Martha as her unfortunate, if imaginary, daughter she'd somehow put her in harm's way. Oh well, one more thing to obsess over during the long wait; obviously sitting on a bench in Heathrow for six or seven hours expecting a tap on the shoulder at any moment from either the police or Jonas Whistler or Aldo, her roadshow devil, wasn't stressful enough.
The cost of her ticket to the States, on top of all her other air travel, and her shopping binges, meant that for the first time in years she'd have to draw upon her principal in order to pay her American Express bill next month, but she figured it would be worth it just to be out of England.
Tired as she was, she found it impossible to sleep. It wasn't just the horror she'd been through, or the fear, but rather a sense of being somehow outside her life. It was as if the life she had come to take for granted was still going on back in Bolinas, as if some other Selene was waking up in her A-frame, throwing the runes, gardening, planning the next Sabbat.
She reviewed what she knew for certain. One, it was definitely Whistler's Father who had sent Aldo after both her and Jamey. Two, Jonas and Aldo might or might not know that Jamey was still alive, but they certainly knew she was—and where she lived.
So wherever she went next, it couldn't be home—not right away. Whatever reason Whistler's Father had for wanting her dead before, he had double or triple the motive now. But within a few hours she'd be landing at JFK. Can't go home, can't go back, don't know a soul in New York after all these years. Then it occurred to her that that wasn't precisely true. She did know someone—or at least someone who'd been in New York exactly one week earlier—on Halloween.
* * *
Once through Customs—she had only her new trench coat to declare—Selene stopped at the first wall of public phones she saw and dialed 411, then slid a few quarters through the slot and punched in the number the information operator had given her.
"A-Mature Productions."
"I'm trying to reach Moll Montana."
"Who's calling, please?"
"Just tell her Selene."
"Oh, hi! Sorry dear, din' recognize your voice. Loved your spread last month. I'll tell her you're on the line."
"Wait—" But a digitized rendition of Erne Kleine Nacht Muzak was deedling in Selene's ear.
A few seconds later Moll was on the line. "Is this my plump 'n' pretty centerfold?" The purr was perhaps a pitch or two lower, but there was no mistaking the lioness.
"Neither plump, pretty, nor a centerfold, I'm afraid."
"That Selene! Oh my dear Goddess, that Selene! It's so wonderful to hear your voice." Then, alarmed: "Martha? Is Martha all right?"
"Martha's fine. She's not mixed up in this—yet."
"Mixed up in what?"
"Long story. I'd rather tell you in person."
* * *
The address Moll gave Selene over the phone proved to be a three-story brick-faced building in an ill-defined neighborhood that was not quite SoHo, Greenwich Village, or Tribeca. Selene tipped the driver and carried her suitcases up the steps and through the glass entrance door, feeling desperately grungy, wishing she'd been able to catch a quick shower—and about ten hours' sleep.
It was impossible to tell from the lobby whether the building had originally been a warehouse, a lodging house, or a private dwelling. Behind the low, peach-colored reception desk, a matronly Hispanic woman was engaged in conversation with a blue-shirted security guard, also Hispanic. When they were done she turned to Selene. "Can I hel
p you?"
"I'm Selene."
Chuckling, the receptionist—Mrs. Torres, according to the nameplate on the desk—said something in Spanish to the security guard; then, in what for New York was an unwonted show of good manners, she translated her comment for Selene. "I tole him abou my mistake over the phone—how I thaw you were the other Selene." She chuckled as she punched a button on her console. "Funny thin is, your voices sound alike. Hi, Ms. Montana. Selene is here… No, your frien Selene… Okay."
Mrs. Torres smiled up at Selene and, turning to her right, indicated a modern-looking, open-treaded, spiral staircase. "She says go on up."
Selene climbed the stairs warily, hauling her suitcases in both hands, with her purse slung over her shoulder. Moll was waiting for her at the first landing, looking considerably more soignee in her long-waisted, cream-colored linen pantsuit than she had looked on Halloween, stark naked on her hands and knees. If Selene hadn't overflown her old friend a week before, she might have been more shocked at Moll's weight gain. But then it occurred to her that Moll was probably just as stunned to see her. It had been nearly eighteen years: they had each aged an entire generation.
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