Dawn and Tom followed Ila to Dardo six weeks later. The house was locked—but Dawn had a key. Ila’s room wasn’t locked, and Dawn had brought a heavy bolt and a padlock. She had Tom put the bolt on Ila’s door, at noon, when Ila would be in his deepest sleep. At evening, when she woke, Dawn unfastened Ila’s door and sent Tom into Ila’s room.
Martine had worked out what Dawn was about when Dawn and Tom didn’t appear one night—Tom was, by then, not fit enough for any purposeless excursions. Martine followed them to Dardo and arrived, shortly before sunrise, to find Dawn trying to reason with Ila through the padlocked door. Dawn was talking, saying again and again that Ila owed her. Martine could almost hear Ila’s ferocious silence. “I’m here,” Martine said to him, through the door, then, quietly to Dawn, “Ila might easily have killed him. Did you think of that?”
“Then he’d have done it—not me,” Dawn said, her little lower jaw set and chin dimpled. “Tom was too far gone to think of it himself.”
Martine could hear Tom in the room. He was crying, saying, “I’m sick. I’m sick.”
Then the women heard sounds, cracks and smashes, timber breaking—not the door, oak and oak-framed, or the bolt, steel and two and a half centimeters in diameter.
Ila went out through the ceiling of the room and through the tiled roof—though the tiles were heavy slabs of the local green shist. The women spun around to see big black squares of tile falling past the east-facing window. The sun was barely behind the mountains, and the sky was blue. Tiles rasped down the roof and fell. Dawn shoved the key into the padlock, opened it, shot the bolt, and went into the room shouting at Martine to lock it after her.
Ila swung through the window, just as the sun appeared.
For the next moment he and Martine were busy, standing against the wall on either side of the window frame and gingerly prodding the shutters closed. Their coordinated effort was rewarded, and the sunlight was excluded from the room.
“The door is locked,” Martine told Ila.
“There’s a hole in the roof. She won’t like that at noon,” Ila said.
“I’ll let them out before then,” Martine said.
Ila fixed his eyes on the door.
“This needn’t be farcical,” Martine said. “You made him. He’s yours now, too.”
“He caught his death. He trapped it, and starved it out of its scruples.”
Martine said that desperate times called for desperate measures.
“You’ve said that to me before,” Ila told her. “About the soldiers in the Castel Abelio. I can still see them, and the broken keep full of steam from their opened bodies.” Then Ila told Martine that he’d go to Dawn’s room to sleep. Martine could deal with everything.
Tom was sick; then he got better and grew strong. He became a good vampire—cautious, self-controlled, apparently eager to learn how best to live.
For seven years—’85 to ’92—Tom was a nestling in Ila’s nest. Then, one day, he didn’t come home. He had roamed a little before, so they waited. They waited because the caves at Dardo had flooded and Tom could be trapped somewhere remote and waiting for the water to go down. But after a month they gave him up—Martine and Ila gave him up for dead.
“He was caught out,” Ila said. “It happens.”
Eve began to cry then, because for the first time she could see a terrible possibility, that one day Dawn would fail to come home. That Dawn would be gone again—and without a trace, like Tom, like some unfixed photographic image when the darkroom door is accidentally opened during a delicate part of the development process.
“But Tom was still able to go abroad, wrapped up. He was still quite tolerant of sunlight,” Dawn argued. “He’d be hard to catch out. How could he be?”
They all thought about it for a time. Ila moved to Eve’s side and put his hand lightly on her arm. Eve blew her nose and looked at him, then at Martine, who was staring through the wall of the room—the main room of the house in Dardo. Martine wore the look of a seer, someone seeing some event happening a long way off, in another country, or in the future. Martine said, “He could be caught out in a boat. In a boat far from land.”
On the evening of Martine’s funeral Eve had her dinner. Ila and Dawn kept her company with a glass of wine each.
When Eve was in the kitchen doing her dishes she heard the doorbell. She dried her hands and went to answer it, expecting to see the entrance hall empty, Ila and Dawn having made themselves scarce. But they were both still there. Ila was on the sofa under her mother’s portrait, and Dawn was at the door.
The visitor was Dawn’s. It was the young man who, a week before, Eve had dispatched to Jean’s house in Nice.
“Eve, I believe you know Bad Phelan?” Dawn said. She drew the young man into the room and helped him unbuckle and shuck his heavy pack.
Bad smiled at Eve and wiggled his eyebrows.
“And here’s Ila, too, Bad,” Dawn said. “I hope you don’t mind turning right around—after another glass of wine perhaps? We were all about to go out and visit Martine’s tomb.” Dawn was leaning against her friend and speaking too quickly.
Bad said to Eve that it turned out that the only coincidence was the poster on the garage pillar, Ares’s portrait of her. The moment he noticed the poster was, for him, so vividly memorable that it was still in his head when something else reminded him of Dawn. Martine’s hair. “Given only those things—the poster and Martine’s hair—I was able to make connections and follow them. I made a rope by splicing other ropes, and I climbed down it. You see, I’d been bitten before.”
“So, here you are,” Eve said.
Dawn turned to face Eve and Ila, her arm around Bad’s waist. She said, more to Ila than Eve, that Bad wasn’t just her friend; he was her candidate.
At dusk Eve parked her car in the turning bay by the gates of Menton’s old cemetery. She had called the caretaker, and he was waiting for her. Bad watched from the back window. He saw money change hands. He saw Eve open the brandy bottle she carried, then produce a glass from the pocket of her swing coat. She poured the caretaker a glass, and he sat down on a low pediment at the foot of the steps to drink it. He left the cemetery gates open and his keys hanging in the lock.
Eve came back to the car and tapped on the window. The others got out and joined her. They went up the steps into the cemetery and the caretaker gave each of them a nod as they went by, even Ila, who had his face turned away.
They went up to the top terrace. The path between the graves was strewn with white peastone, into which Dawn’s heel spikes sank several centimeters deep.
Eve stopped at the door of a large tomb. Its walls were canted slightly, the ground on which it stood subsiding. Its onion dome and walls were covered in faded tiles, set in a black lattice of mildewed grouting. Eve passed the brandy bottle to Dawn and fished two further glasses from her pocket. “We can share,” she said.
Dawn peered at the bottle’s label.
“I got it from the place that carries brandy for every year,” Eve said. “Every birthday.”
“Which birthday, though?” Dawn squinted at the smaller print. “Nineteen twenty-one or nineteen forty-four?” Then she complained that her eyes hadn’t used to play up in this light.
Ila took off the steel-framed aviator glasses with which he’d hidden his eyes and passed them to Dawn. Passed them across Bad, who stood between them. Bad turned and stared at Ila. The vampire might be mistaken for an albino, but his color wasn’t quite right:—more white blond and sand—in hair and skin—than an albino’s sanguine pink and downy white. Ila’s skin, in the cyanotic rose of the twilight, was simply too pale. His movements were quick and deft, but he was worn, looked dehydrated and as leached of living color as a dying man.
“Who am I sharing with?” Dawn asked her sister, then bumped Bad with her hip.
“Bad had nearly a bottle before,” Eve said. “And now he can’t control his big feet.”
“Nothing for Bad,” Dawn said to Bad, and bum
ped him again.
Ila had gone to the door of the tomb and stood with his palms and one cheek pressed to its greened bronze. “Is she really dead, Eve?” he asked again. “I didn’t see her.” He turned his head, swapped cheeks, as though he hoped to cool them on the metal. “I never do see them,” he said.
“Them.” Dawn’s voice was bleak, despite Bad’s ardent nuzzling. “Us,” she said. “Your series of lost loves. Of failed projects.”
“Martine,” Ila whispered, to the woman in the tomb. “My nestling.”
“My friend,” said Eve. She took the bottle from her sister. She filled the two glasses. “Let’s do this properly,” Eve said. She raised a glass. “To my friend Martine, who trusted me, and took me into her family.”
Dawn raised her glass too, her slender arm twisted inward, like Liberty with her torch. “Here’s to Martine, who was kind to me in Corsica, when I was lost.” She put the glass to her mouth, swigged, and handed it to Ila.
Ila—the Island—came away from the tomb door to take the glass but said nothing.
Bad took the glass from Eve. “Me, too,” he said. He was exultant. “Here’s to Martine! I didn’t know her, but I was able to do something for her. And I was repaid, ten times over.”
“Is it ten times?” said Dawn. “Are you counting?”
Bad giggled. He put his mouth to the glass, sipped, and spluttered.
Ila tasted his brandy and then set the glass on the lintel of the tomb door. It fell off and broke.
“I bet you could have caught that,” Bad said. He was disappointed. He gave his own glass back to Eve and stooped to collect the shards.
Ila turned his head down sharply. He inhaled and said, “You’ve cut yourself,” to Bad—the first time he’d addressed him.
Eve wiped her eyes on the back of one hand, swung her shoulder bag before her, and raised its flap to take out a box. Bad saw silver, gold, and glass: it was the reliquary Dawn had stolen from St. Barthelemy’s. Eve fumbled at the box. She sniffed and then sobbed.
“Oh, Eve.” Dawn put her arms around her sister, then removed the reliquary from Eve’s grasp. She, too, tried to open it, with no more success.
“In case of fire, break glass,” said Bad.
Dawn passed the reliquary to him and he carried it across the path and struck the crystal front against an arrowhead spike on the iron railing. The crystal cracked and Bad inverted the box, then fished inside. He held out his hand to Dawn, the match sulphur end up between his thumb and index finger. Dawn took it and gave it to Ila. Ila stepped up to the tomb, braced the brittle aged splinter with his finger, and struck its head against the door. He held the flame there, bright, in a halo of verdigris. He said, very softly, “When you stopped in the cave, you should have looked at this light, and not at me. I should have left you to God.”
The match was old and dry. Its flame ran swiftly down into the valley between Ila’s desiccated fingertips, where it flared, a bright point under its blackened stem’s interrogative curl. Then it flared, shrank, turned blue, and went out.
Chapter 12
DANIEL IS GROOMED
Daniel missed Martine’s funeral because Jacques Palomba’s uncle, who was answering the phones at the family’s Monaco apartment, was of the opinion that Father Octave should stop in that morning. It was not a suggestion.
Daniel caught an early train. When he got off at Monaco the dew of the 4:00 A.M. sprinklers hadn’t yet evaporated from the flawless cut-pile lawns and flower beds of parks that were really only road islands. The municipal workers were out in force, and the streets looked scoured, then—as the sunlight reached them—steam-cleaned, as though fresh from a sterilizing machine.
Palomba’s father and uncle were in a car, waiting to turn into traffic, paused at the nearly perpendicular entrance to the underground garage of the Palombas’ apartment building. The uncle recognized Daniel and let his window down. They were on their way to Genoa, he said, where they had an appointment with the police. Jacques’s father tried to get out of the car but couldn’t open the door against gravity. Daniel helped him; he held the door, and let it down when the man was clear. Palomba’s father looked ill, waxy and sweating. His hair gel had deposited a milky tidemark at his hairline. He shook Daniel’s hand. He said that his wife was asleep, finally. She would want to see Daniel, but …
“I can come back.”
“… but the girls are up.”
“The girls” were Palomba’s daughters. One was in her late twenties, the other in her mid-teens.
“Well … you’re here,” said Jacques’s father. “You should see them.” His eyes grew red. His brow remained serene, his eyes wide open in their baby’s-palm surrounds of cushiony pink skin. The man’s face was frozen by some cosmetic procedure, but his voice seesawed with grief. “You should go up,” he said. He turned back to the car. Daniel lifted its bank-vault door and Jacques’s father dropped himself into it. Before the door closed, Daniel was caught in a frigid gust of leather-scented air—the Mercedes’s big-pore pigskin seats. The car revved and moved, fell forward and upright, and swung into the traffic.
Daniel followed the building’s curved facade and found its main door. He buzzed and gave his name and was admitted.
The elder sister sat with Daniel on a sofa, clutched his hand, and wept. The younger perched on a chair facing them, tilted forward as though ready for flight, or a high-impact embrace.
The sisters were not coherent. They would sob for long moments, then rush into speech together. Questions mostly: “Do you …?” Or: “Why does …?” They’d get no further.
The elder said, “Jacques was better.” She said, “He did this,” and touched the top of her head, lifted her tousled gold curls so that the skin on her throat slid upward and the angle between her jaw and neck grew shallow. Daniel watched her gesture and looked for injuries. Then he realized she meant her hair. “He was working,” she said. “We didn’t talk. The music was loud, and he was dancing about behind my chair.”
The younger girl asked Daniel if they could pray. They stacked their hands, and Daniel prayed. He couldn’t speak to measure, so spoke to form. He was deaf to himself. He didn’t know who his prayer was for. Seven years earlier he had interviewed Jacques Palomba but had only heard and looked on Jacques through the one-way glass of his story.
As Daniel was on his way out he asked Jacques’s older sister if she recalled the name of the place Jacques worked—the salon where he’d cut her hair.
“It was a spa, Father,” she said.
“Where is it?”
“Genoa,” she said, and gave him the name of the street. “It has a white facade and gilded ironwork.”
The following day Daniel caught the same early train and, with a change at Ventimiglia, he was in Genoa by noon. The spa was called Paradiso, and the woman at the reception desk wouldn’t let Daniel into its salon—Inferno—without an appointment. She said that lunch was a bad time and did Daniel know what he wanted? What in the way of a haircut?
Daniel shook his head. He was wearing a crew-necked shirt, not his collar. He kept his hand over his lapel pin—his little gold cross. “I’ll wait,” he said. He took a seat. The receptionist fetched him a coffee and gave him the spa’s current catalog. She sat back down at her glass-topped desk, a devotional figure between two candles, the tea lights under oil burners.
Paradiso was really too steep for Daniel’s purse. He didn’t have to account for everything but had already overspent on train fares. This was the second trip he’d taken without the bishop’s permission. He hadn’t been able to ask, hadn’t even been able to say, The boy Blessed Martine saved has been murdered. His head was cut off.
Daniel removed his lapel pin and put it in his pocket. He counted his money.
The receptionist answered her phone. She touched the tiny bead of the microphone before her mouth. She looked at Daniel, her irises human within the zone of her outlined, diagrammatic eyes. She told Daniel that the stylist could take him at 12:40.
They were playing trance on the sound system in the salon—an endless slippery chute of music.
The stylist slipped his fingers into Daniel’s neat, wet-combed hair, pulled it up, and dropped it. The stylist listened to Daniel for a moment, then scowled and said he didn’t do dry cuts. He wheeled Daniel over to a sink, positioned him, then tilted his chair. Daniel’s head balanced on a point at the base of his skull, on the lip of the black porcelain sink. The stylist waved his apprentice away. He said he’d wash Daniel’s hair himself. He leaned over Daniel. The stylist wore a sleeveless Lycra shirt and Daniel could see the man’s armpits and hair like smooth weeds in a watercourse.
The stylist shielded Daniel’s forehead with the blade of his hand. He aimed the warm stream of the shower behind it. Daniel felt heat cup his scalp. Drops ran into one of his ears, pooled, and cooled. A cap clicked, and the stylist poured a syrup of raspberry-scented shampoo into one palm, put his hands together, and lathered Daniel’s hair. He leaned down, put his mouth by Daniel’s ear. “You asked about Jacques,” he said. “Are you the police?”
“No,” said Daniel.
The stylist straightened; he went to work with his fingertips, and Daniel’s scalp slipped about over his skull. The man inclined closer again, his thumbs busy above Daniel’s temples. “Are you another of Jacques’s spooky friends?” the stylist asked.
“Tell me about them,” Daniel said.
The man met Daniel’s eyes, then picked up the showerhead again to rinse Daniel’s hair. “Do you ever condition it?” he asked.
“My hair? No. I use whatever I find.”
“In the supermarket?”
“In the shower.”
The stylist clicked his tongue against his palate. He toweled Daniel’s hair, then sat him up to apply an aromatic treatment. He stood behind Daniel and massaged his scalp.
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