But no friendly contact. After waking up Sunday at sunset he let her have another sip of water and a pee, tied her up again, wrapped her in a blanket, stuffed her into the trunk of the Toyota, then drove her back through the night to San Francisco, where he found a motel on Lombard Street that would meet his new requirements—a parking space right outside the door, and the door facing a blank wall, in this case the back of a neighboring motel.
Even better, the Emperor Norton Motor Hotel had two adjoining rooms available. Not that Martha would be getting a room of her own, but this would solve a potential problem: he could transfer the girl into the second room while the maid cleaned the first, and then back again without anybody getting suspicious, as sometimes happened if you stayed someplace more than two days without allowing the room to be made up.
And while Aldo had no idea how long he might need to stay, he figured that two days was the absolute minimum. So once he had Martha safely installed he loosened her bonds, and even had pizza and soda delivered to the other room. By the time they reached an understanding—that she was not to scream, strike out, or even raise her voice—the pizza was cold. But she was a smart girl; she only had to see the lit match, not feel it.
He let her good behavior earn her other privileges during the course of the night: as long as Aldo was in the room, Martha could have her bonds and gag loosened; he even let her handle the remote control for the TV. And while he wouldn't let her close the door to the bathroom when she had to pee, he promised not to peek.
He called housekeeping and had the rooms made up early Monday morning. Martha was most cooperative during the necessary room switching, and understanding when Aldo explained that he had to bind and gag her again while he slept in the other room. But he did allow her to lie on her back again, with her arms tied in front of her and the remote control in her hand. She seemed suitably grateful; another few days and the dynamic that binds victim to kidnapper would be fully in force: the kid would be eating out of his hand. And perhaps vice versa.
Aldo slept through the day, shared a Chinese dinner with the girl that was really quite good for take-out food, then tied her up on her back again, after allowing her to use the bathroom. "Unfortunately," he explained, expertly adjusting her gag, "I can't let you keep the remote control."
She growled something unintelligible; he answered her confidently. "What do I think you might do with it? Why, you might turn up the volume until someone came to complain. You're a clever girl, you know—just not quite as clever as Len Patch. Tell you what I will do, though—I'll let you choose a channel before I leave. Blink for the channel you want… one, two… Channel two? Are you sure?" He clicked the channel select. The Simpsons was on.
"Ah, cartoons," said Aldo, adjusting the volume, then slipping the remote into his pocket on his way out. "How delightful." He meant it, too: in cartoons when you strangled somebody their eyeballs popped out on springs; then they recovered and you got to do it all over again.
* * *
Aldo had no way of knowing in advance that Selene was back. In fact, he hadn't expected much of this first night; he figured he'd set up a decent blind somewhere where he could watch the place, then set a few booby traps before he left—nothing she'd notice—just enough to tell him the next night whether she'd arrived during the day.
But for a man who'd arrived without much expectation, Aldo was frightfully upset when he discovered (after parking the Toyota down the hill and hiking all the way around through the woods again) that not only had she been there, but that he'd just missed her—the bulb over the back door was still warm. He stalked angrily into the kitchen, glanced around. It looked about the same as it had the last time he'd left it, except for…
Ah, but this was going to be almost too easy. The message pad next to the answering machine bore the faint imprint of a note that had been jotted on the previous sheet. All he could make out was a capital N—if he had to he might be able to bring up the rest with a graphite rubbing. But perhaps she hadn't erased the phone message yet. He tried to remember how this particular device worked. Last time it had been blinking; he recalled the red light in the darkness. Now the light was steady, and the counter was sit 12 where previously it had read 10. He pushed rewind, then fast-forwarded through the first ten messages, gritting his teeth when Whistler's voice came over the machine sounding like a chipmunk—just what he needed, a cartoon reminder of his earlier failure. But then he reached the last two messages, and… how did they say it here? Ah yes: Bingo!
Once again Aldo had been blessed with the luck of the devil. And sheer luck it was—Aldo was well aware that he'd screwed up nearly every aspect of the job. First Whistler had somehow escaped the holocaust at the Greathouse, then Selene and the A-frame had both survived essentially intact; now a Chinese dinner had caused him to miss the striga by minutes. And yet here he was cruising back across the Golden Gate Bridge with La Divina's voice soaring from the Toyota's six speakers, and things were definitely looking up. Whistler père was in Aldo's debt (or under his thumb, as circumstances dictated), and might not have to learn that Whistler fils was still alive; Whistler petite fille was safely stashed away; Godmother Selene, to whom Aldo owed so much (and none of it good), would be waiting for him at the other end of this enchanting span; and best of all, so would the one man in the world who apparently knew how to contact Jamey Whistler.
Aldo grinned. It was enough to shake the Dalai Lama's belief in karma.
* * *
For all his air force intelligence training, the truth was that the former Captain Santos was now nearly fifty, perpetually stoned to the gills not only on blood but on whatever other drugs struck his fancy (and his was an easily stricken fancy), and hadn't actually worked in Intelligence since the sixties.
So it wasn't surprising that his tradecraft was a little rusty. For instance, while it was true that the Prince Albert was a private club, it was also true that to qualify for membership all one needed was the sponsorship of a current member, a hundred a year in dues, and a cover charge of ten bucks a night. Nor was the sponsorship a major obstacle: the doorman was a member. A needy member—Aldo slipped him fifty and was in like Flynn, with the sneaking suspicion that a twenty probably would have done the job just as well.
Having finished the last of the unfortunate Mt. Tarn hitchhiker's blood in the car before entering the club, Aldo was high enough that neither the dimness nor the crowded dance floor was more than a momentary distraction. He spotted Selene almost immediately at the table by the far wall, conversing with a brown-haired man he took to be Nick. The brown hair he took to be Grecian Formula.
As far as he knew, Selene had never actually seen Aldo. He could have sworn she'd never opened her eyes Halloween evening. But then, he also could have sworn she was dead, so although he was now the darker-haired, goateeless (and much better looking, in his opinion) Len Patch, he didn't want to take a chance on her spotting him. Slowly he began working his way across the dance floor, taking such pains to keep his back turned that when he was finally close enough to eavesdrop he saw that Nick was now sitting alone. Selene had slipped away from the table. He looked around wildly, and caught a glimpse of graying hair descending the staircase by the entrance. "Goddamn it to hell!"
"Something wrong?" The brown-haired man was staring up at him with mild concern.
Aldo was torn. His gut instinct was to follow Selene, but his gut had been unreliable lately. The book said that when two subjects diverge, the operative goes with the one he knows to be closer to the source. He knew for sure Nick knew how to contact Whistler; the man might or might not have informed Selene. And it might or might not be a very unprofessional thirst for revenge that was urging Aldo to follow her.
He smiled down at Nick; the decision had all but been made for him. "Wrong? Nothing a little good company couldn't cure."
Nick laughed and gestured to the empty chair. "Have a seat."
Aldo sat down. "I thought you were with the lady."
"Just an o
ld friend." He offered Aldo a cigarette.
"I also thought you could get strung up for smoking in this town," said Aldo in the regionless, accentless diction of the television. He didn't want to pretend to be a Californian; he had the accent down, but not all the contexts—good enough for social, but not prolonged, contact. On the other hand a British accent might sound an alarm with the man, especially if he had Whistler on the brain.
"Private club," Nick replied. "Of course, if somebody complained…"
"Not this somebody." Aldo leaned over to light Nick's cigarette with his vintage Zippo. "By the way, I'm Len."
"Nick."
A waiter with a chromed-steel replica of a Fiji Island nose bone arrived while they 'were shaking hands, placed a fresh Absolut in front of Nick without being asked, and returned with Aldo's Stoli and a clean ashtray before they had finished their cigarettes. It didn't take Aldo long to figure out why the service was so snappy: Nick paid the fellow with a ten, then tipped him another five.
"So where you from?" asked Aldo. It was always best to be the first to ask that question, at least if you weren't planning to tell the truth in return.
"Detroit. You?"
"Know anything about the Miami area?" Aldo had spent enough time there to fake it if the answer was yes. (Ceausescu and Castro had formed a short-lived alliance after Romania distanced itself from Russia and briefly became the darling of the Western democracies. The Cubans helped the Romanians inside the USSR; the Third Branch sent Aldo to Miami, which was too hot for most of the known Cuban operatives. On the international scene it was the equivalent of two paupers trading favors, but not so for the Cuban exiles Aldo dispatched during his several visits.)
"Not really."
"Lucky you."
"I hear the weather's nice."
"Sure. If you can tolerate sunlight." Aldo could sense the shift in the intensity of Nick's concentration. He wasn't sure whether he wanted Nick to turn out to be a blood drinker—it would make the pickup easier but the rest of the job more difficult—but it was something he would need to know in advance. Unfortunately there was no vampire equivalent of a Masonic handshake through which one blood drinker might identify himself to another—just this clumsy mutual feeling-out process.
"Not me," replied Nick. "Hurts my eyes."
"Me too, depending on what I've been drinking the night before—other than vodka, that is."
"What you've been drinking?" asked Nick. "Or who?"
Their eyes met across the table. "Who," replied Aldo. "Or is it whom?"
And the deal was done.
* * *
Aldo was a tourist; Nick lived nearby. Aldo had little blood, Nick had a fridge full. Your place or mine, therefore, was not a question that needed to be asked. They walked the six blocks to Nick's apartment on Folsom Street. It was a cold night, but neither man wore a coat. As soon as they were inside the apartment they embraced; Aldo reached up and felt Nick's nipple rings through the thin fabric of his designer T-shirt. "Where else are you pierced?" he whispered throatily. It would have been better, he knew, to get started right away—tie him up first, before he was high on blood—but sometimes a dude just had to listen to his dick, especially here in California.
"You'll find out," replied Nick, turning away and making straight for the kitchen. Aldo took off his black pullover—he too was wearing a black T-shirt under it—and tossed the sweater over the back of the chrome-and-leather sling couch. The apartment itself may have been a dive, but the furnishings were expensive; the overall effect was an amalgam of Art Deco and nostalgie de la boue, slapped together with a little too much money and not quite enough panache.
Aldo followed Nick into the kitchen and watched him pouring blood from a Clamato jar into two fluted champagne glasses. He took the glass Nick handed him and perched on one of the two high stools over by the counter. Silently they raised their glasses to each other before they drank; afterward they chatted while they waited for the stuff to come on. "To tell you the truth," said Aldo, "I don't know much about piercing. I've seen a few nipple and navel rings in my time, but as for the more extreme, er, extremities, I—"
Nick interrupted. "Before you say anything you're going to regret, I should inform you that I have a gold Prince Albert."
"I was about to say, I'd love to see some," said Aldo, reaching toward Nick's crotch. He had no idea what a Prince Albert was, but was willing to hazard a guess as to where one might be found.
* * *
There was nothing quite like sex between—or among—vampires. Gay, straight, lesbian—all the customary sexual self-identifications blurred on blood, or overlapped, or succeeded one another, until all that was left was pure lust, mental, physical, and emotional. At one point they even had a round of consensual strangulation sex, during which Aldo achieved his only orgasm of the evening.
As for the Prince Albert contraption that pierced Nick's glans, Aldo found it interesting but not compelling. Gradually he steered their lovemaking toward the bondage domain. First he let Nick bind him with velvet ropes from the bottom drawer of his bedside table, which had proved to be a veritable treasure chest of sexual paraphernalia. And after Nick had finished having his way with Aldo, he was more than willing to trade roles. The rest was embarrassingly easy. Aldo rolled Nick over onto his stomach and bound his wrists securely with the velvet rope—or as securely as velvet can bind a man on blood. Then came the blindfold, and as soon as that was in place it was but the work of a moment to yank the handy extension cord out of the wall and whip it several times around Nick's wrists. Nick started to shout and buck, but Aldo was on the man's back in an instant; throwing a forearm choke hold around Nick's throat from behind, he rendered him unconscious in seconds, then stripped the coaxial cable from the TV and used it to bind his victim securely.
* * *
Nick opened his eyes. The blindfold had been removed. He was lying on his back looking up at Aldo; it took him only a few seconds of straining against the cable that bound him to understand that further struggle was pointless. He opened his mouth to scream, and Aldo, as if waiting for a cue, quickly jammed a handkerchief into it.
"Let's not waste time, shall we?" said Aldo, who was dressed again. "I'm here about Jamey Whistler."
Nick's eyes widened; he tried unsuccessfully to speak.
"Don't try to talk—just listen. I intercepted your message to Selene this evening, so I already know that you know how to contact the man. I tell you this just in case you were planning to try to bullshit me. Now what I need to know is how I can contact him myself. This you will tell me."
Aldo was vaguely aware as he spoke that his speech patterns were degenerating now that there was no further need for pretense. "The only question is, how much pain will you wish to endure before telling me? Personally, I'm quite sated sexually, so I have no particular interest in prolonging your agony. What do you say you make this easy on yourself?"
Nick took a minute to think about it, then nodded slowly and rolled his eyes down toward the wadded handkerchief stuffed into his mouth. Aldo reached in and pulled it out. Nick spat and coughed while Aldo waited patiently.
"Well?"
"I just wanted—" But Nick's voice was a hoarse croak. Aldo held a glass of water to his lips; Nick took a sip, then tried again. "I just wanted to let you know that you were absolutely the worst lay I ever had. You're hung like a gerbil and you kiss like a flounder."
"Are you quite through?" asked Aldo.
"Not quite," said Nick; then he opened his mouth as wide as he could and began to scream.
The rest happened fast. Aldo jammed the handkerchief back into Nick's mouth; with a desperate gulp and a sudden convulsive intake of breath Nick managed to swallow the wadded-up cloth deep enough to completely block his breathing passage. Aldo quickly thrust his right hand as far as he could into Nick's mouth in an attempt to remove the handkerchief; he'd just gotten hold of it with the tips of his three middle fingers when Nick bit down as hard as he could. Now it was Aldo'
s turn to scream; he smashed down on the bridge of Nick's nose with his other fist, and kept smashing until Nick's jaws loosened.
Aldo yanked his hand free. His fingers had been bitten through to the bone both front and back just above the bottom knuckle; blood was spurting all over the bed. With an oath he grabbed the sheet from Nick and quickly tied a tourniquet around his wrist. Not an easy job, one-handed; he used his teeth to tighten the knot until the bleeding had stopped.
Nick's body, meanwhile, was flopping like a fish as he choked on the handkerchief. He was already unconscious from Aldo's pounding, but his penis had gone erect all the same, sending Prince Albert bobbing into the air one last time as the dying man achieved a final ejaculation before flopping over onto his side.
A heroic death, all things considered. Nick must have known it, too, because barely discernible beneath the bloody pulp into which Aldo had smashed Nick's face was the faint suggestion of a victorious smile.
CHAPTER 8
« ^ »
Selene spent the night in a comfortable, if somewhat fussily decorated, room at Balkis's bed-and-breakfast on Russian Hill. Buoyed by the prospect of hooking up with Jamey, she slept soundly for a change, untroubled by dreams, and awoke at nine on Tuesday. The morning crawled by. At noon precisely she dialed Nick's number and reached his answering machine. She hid her annoyance with a joke. "Nick, this is Selene. It's twelve o'clock—do you know where you are? I'll call again in twenty minutes."
And twenty minutes after that, and twenty minutes after that, and then every hour until Nick's machine was no longer accepting messages. Shortly after four Selene packed her suitcases, loaded up the Jag, and drove back to the Prince Albert. The street door was locked; eventually she heard a "Hold on, hold on," from the top of the stairs, and the door was opened by a thoroughly pierced janitor-type young man who announced that he didn't know Nick from dick, but if she came back at seven when the club opened maybe the doorman or the bartender would be able to help her.
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