Budayeen Nights

by George Alec Effinger

  I sighed. I wasn’t happy about this. “Tell him I’m going to catch his vampire for him.”

  “Vampire! Audran, what are you, crazy?”

  I hung up instead of replying.

  Kmuzu’s expression was difficult to read. I didn’t know if he approved or not. I don’t know why I cared. “One piece of advice, yaa Sidi, if you’ll permit me: It would be a mistake to begin your investigation of this woman Sheba tonight.”

  “Uh-huh. Why do you say that?”

  He shrugged again. “If I had to hunt a vampire, I’d do it during the daylight.”

  Good point. The next day I arose at dawn, made my ritual ablutions and prayed, then set out to begin serious investigations. If Kmuzu wasn’t planning to offer any direct assistance—meaning that he wouldn’t even drive me over to the Budayeen—then I’d have to rely on Bill the cab driver. Now, if you know Bill, you know how amusing the concept of relying on him is. He’s as dependable as a two-legged footstool.

  I phoned him from the bathroom because I didn’t want Kmuzu to overhear me. I told Bill to pick me up just outside the high walls that surrounded Friedlander Bey’s estate. Bill didn’t remember who I was for a while, but that’s usual. Bill’s about as aware as a sleeping skink. He chose that for himself years ago, buying an expensive bodmod that constantly braised his brain in a very frightening high-tech hallucinogen. It would have driven most people to suicide within a handful of days; in Bill’s case, I understand it sort of settled him down.

  On the way from Papa’s mansion to the eastern gate of the Budayeen, Bill and I had a disjointed conversation about the imminent war with the state of Gadsden. I eventually figured out that he was having some kind of flashback. Before he came to the city he’d lived in America, in the part now called Sovereign Deseret. His skink brain let him believe he was still there.

  It was all right because he found the Budayeen easily enough. I gave him enough money so that he’d wait for me and drive me home after I finished the morning’s legwork. I started up the Street in the direction of the cemetery. I didn’t know yet what I wanted to do first. What did I have to go on? Two homicide victims, that’s all, with nothing tangible connecting them except the similarity of method. I had, on one hand, my employees’ overheated warning that a vampire was loose around here, and, on the other hand, my absolute disbelief in the supernatural.

  There was nothing to do but call Chiri. I knew I’d be waking her up. I heard her pick up her phone and say, “Uh. Yeah?”

  “Chiri, it’s Marîd. I’m not waking you up, am I?”

  “No.” Her voice was real damn cold.

  “Sorry. Listen, do you know where Sheba lives?”

  “No, and I don’t care, either.”

  “Then who do we know who could give me the address? I think I need to just drop by and ask Sheba a couple of things.”

  There was a pause: Chiri was being angry. “Yasmin would know. Or Lily.”

  “Yasmin or Lily. I probably should’ve called them first.”

  Another pause. “Probably.”

  I grimaced. “Sorry, Chiri. Go back to sleep. I’ll see you later.” She didn’t say anything before she slammed the phone down.

  I called Yasmin next, but I didn’t get an answer. That didn’t surprise me. I remembered from the days when Yasmin and I lived together that she was one of the best little sleepers that Allah ever invented. She could sleep through any major catastrophe except a missed meal. I gave up after listening to the phone ring a dozen and a half times, and then I called Lily. She was just as unhappy to be roused as Chiri, but her tone changed when she found out it was me. Lily has been waiting for me to call for a long time. She’s a gorgeous sexchange, and she was well aware that I’ve never had much success with real women.

  She was less happy when I told her I just wanted another girl’s address and commcode. I heard ice through the ether again, but she finally gave me the information. It turned out that Sheba didn’t live too far from my club.

  “And one other thing,” Lily said. “We checked by the Red Light Lounge. Sheba couldn’t have been late to supper on account of some guy buying her drinks. She doesn’t work daytimes, she’s never worked daytimes—just like we said. So she lied. You just don’t see her around when the sun is up.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  “So why you want to get next to that for? If you’re spending too much time all by yourself, honey, I’ll help you out.”

  I didn’t need this now. “Yasmin would scratch your eyes out, Lily. I’ve only been protecting you.”

  “Huh, Yasmin don’t remember how to spell your name, Marîd.” She slammed the phone down, too. I decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to set foot in my own business today. I’d probably be slashed to ribbons.

  I found Sheba’s apartment building and went up to the second floor. It was an old place with a thin, worn carpet runner on the stairs. The paint on the walls hung down in grimy, blowzy strips. Sheba’s front door was painted a dark reddish brown, the color of a bloodstain on clothing. I knocked. There was no response. Well, Sheba was a Budayeen hustler, she was probably asleep. I knocked louder and called her name. Finally I unclipped my phone again and murmured her commcode into it; I could hear the ringing from within the apartment.

  It took me perhaps a minute and a half to get past her lock. The first thing I learned was that Sheba wasn’t home. The second was that it appeared she hadn’t been around for a while—several envelopes had been pushed beneath her door. One had been closed only with a rubber band. I opened it; it contained a hundred kiam in ten-kiam bills, and a note from some admirer. Clothes, jewelry, stuffed animals, all sorts of things were strewn across the floor of the apartment’s large room.

  There was a mattress with a single sheet lying tipped up against a wall. The room’s only window was standing open, water-stained yellow curtains blowing in on a warm breeze. Below the window was another heap of clothing and personal articles. I brushed the curtains aside and looked out. Below me was a narrow alley leading crookedly in the direction of Ninth Street.

  A light was on in the bathroom; when I looked in there, it was as much a mess as the other room. It seemed to me that Sheba had been in a hell of a hurry, had grabbed up a few things, and had gotten out of the apartment as fast as she could. I couldn’t guess why.

  I looked more closely at what she’d left behind. Near the bathroom was a pile of cellophane and cardboard scraps that Sheba had kicked together. I sorted through the stuff and saw quickly that it was mostly packaging material ripped from several personality modules. I was familiar enough with the blazebrain field to know that some of the moddies Sheba had collected were not your regular commercial releases.

  Sheba fancied black-market titles, and very dangerous ones, too. She liked illegal underground moddies that fed her feelings of superiority and power; while she was wearing them she’d become these programmed people, and her behavior could range from the merely vicious to the downright sinister and deadly. She could almost certainly become capable of murder.

  I recalled that months ago, when she worked for me at Chiri’s, she was almost always chipped in to some moddy or other. That wasn’t unusual among the dancers though. I was sure that Sheba wasn’t using these hardcore moddies back then, at least not at work. Something had happened in the meantime, something that had drastically changed her, and not for the better.

  I put some of the wrappers in my pocket and went back to the window. A niggling thought had been bothering me, and I looked outside again. My attention was drawn to the four trash cans below. They weren’t just any trash cans. Safiyya the Lamb Lady had brought me here. She had found all her silver jewelry in Sheba’s alley.

  I took another look around Sheba’s shabby apartment. There were dead flowers shoved into one corner, several books thrown together on the floor, and shattered glass everywhere. I found another double handful of abandoned jewelry, a heap of pendants and necklaces, cheap stuff. Most were decorated with
familiar symbols, all jumbled together—there were a couple of Christian crosses; Islamic crescents and items with Qur’ânic inscriptions; a Star of David; an ankh; Buddhist, Hindu, and other Asiatic religious tokens; occult designs; Native American figures; and others I wasn’t able to identify. These were the only things I saw that might have had some connection to the vampire mythology, but I still discounted them—the things might just have been left behind like the rest of the jewelry. I couldn’t be sure there was any particular significance to them.

  Nothing else set off a bell in my highly perceptive crime-solving mind. The moddies were the best clue, and so my next stop was Laila’s modshop on Fourth Street. I was surprised that Laila herself wasn’t in when I got there, but I was relieved, too. Laila is almost impossible to deal with. Instead, there was a young woman standing behind the counter.

  She smiled at me. She didn’t seem crazy at all. She was either wearing a moddy that force-fed her a pleasant personality, or something was definitely not right here. This was not a shop where you met people under the control of their own unaugmented selves.

  “Can I help you?” she asked me in English. I don’t speak much English, but I have an electronic add-on that takes care of that for me. I kept the language daddy chipped in almost all the time, because there are a lot of important English-speaking people in the city.

  I took the wrappers from my pocket. “Sell any of these lately?”

  She shuffled the cellophane around on the counter for a few seconds. “Nope,” she said brightly. I was positive now that I wasn’t dealing with her real personality. She was just too goddamn perky.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “This shop and its owner are much too concerned about upholding local ordinances to sell illegal bootleg moddies.”

  I almost choked. “Yeah, you right,” was all I said.

  “Anything else I can help you with?” She was deeply concerned, I could tell. That was some moddy Laila had found for her.

  “I’ll just browse a bit.” I went toward the bins of moddies based on characters from old books and holoshows. For some dumb reason, I couldn’t come up with the name of the villain I was looking for. “You know what a vampire is?”

  “Sure,” she said. “We had to watch that movie in a class in high school.” She made a scornful expression. “Twentieth Century Literature.”

  “What was the vampire’s name again?”

  “Lestat. They made us watch that movie and another classic. Airport, it was. None of us could figure out what they had to do with the real world. I like modern literature better.”

  I’ll bet she did. Lestat wasn’t who I was searching for. I browsed through the bins for half an hour before I came across a set of vampire-character moddies. The package had been torn open. I took it to the counter and showed it to the young woman. “Know anything about this?” I asked.

  She was upset. “We don’t break sets open,” she said. “We wouldn’t have done that.” The Dracula moddy was missing, leaving the Jonathan Harker, Lucy Westenra, Dr. Van Helsing, and Renfield moddies. I gave a little involuntary shudder. I didn’t want to meet the person who’d be eager to chip in Renfield.

  “Do you suppose someone could have shoplifted the missing moddy?” I asked.

  I almost wished I hadn’t said it. The young woman paled. I could see how abhorrent the entire idea was to her. “Perhaps,” she murmured. The word she used was “perhaps,” not “maybe.” That had to be the software talking.

  “Forget it,” I said, coming to a decision. “I’ll buy the rest of the package.”

  “Even though part of it’s been stolen? You know I’m not authorized to offer you a discount.”

  It took me a little while longer to persuade her to sell me the things, and I was already chipping in Dr. Van Helsing, that fearless old vampire hunter, as I left the shop and headed back toward the eastern gate.

  The first thing Audran noticed was that he was somewhat taller and a good deal older. There was a painful twinge in his left shoulder, but he decided it wouldn’t hinder him too much. He also felt very Dutch; he—Van Helsing—was from Amsterdam, after all.

  Audran’s own consciousness lurked in a tiny, hidden-away area submerged beneath the overlay of Van Helsing. There he wondered what “feeling Dutch” meant. It was probably just some programmer’s laziness. That person had known that Van Helsing was Dutch, but had not bothered to include specific dutchnesses. It was a weakness that Audran despised in poorly written commercial moddies.

  It did not take long for Audran’s muscles and nerves to compensate for the differences between his own physical body and the one the moddy’s manufacturer imagined. As long as the moddy was chipped in, Audran would move, feel, and respond as Van Helsing. There was also an annoying nervous flutter in his right eyelid, and Audran sincerely hoped it would go away as soon as he popped the moddy out.

  Van Helsing was still heading east, on the sidewalk; Audran preferred walking in the middle of the street. As he approached the arched gate of the Budayeen, Van Helsing considered the things they had found in Sheba’s apartment. Now, with his special knowledge, the evidence took on new significance.

  How could Audran be expected to appreciate the absolute horror of what he’d discovered in the abandoned apartment? How could Audran know that the dead flowers, roses, were shunned by all vampires; that the broken glass came from shattered mirrors around the room; that the sacred symbols were powerful weapons against the Undead?

  More compelling yet were the books and papers left with seeming carelessness on the floor. They had looked harmless enough to Audran, but Van Helsing knew that within their pages were terrible, evil passages describing rituals through which a living human being could become a vampire, and others that gave instructions for inviting demons to invade and possess one’s immortal soul.

  Through Audran’s inaction, the situation had become dire and deadly; more than human lives were at stake now. An unholy monster was loose among the unsuspecting people of the Budayeen. Once again, it was left to Dr. Van Helsing to restore peace and sanctity, if he could.

  Cursing Audran for a fool, Van Helsing quickened his pace. Audran should’ve guessed the truth when the young boy had been attacked. Dracula’s victim, Lucy, had preyed largely upon children. Van Helsing felt an uncomfortable stirring of his emotions. Although he’d never admit the fact to anyone, he was aware of his barely sublimated lust toward female vampires. And now he’d been called upon to battle a new one. He shook his head; at the ultimate moment, he knew, he would be strong enough. He passed through the arch and onto the beautiful Boulevard il-Jameel.

  Bill the cab driver was still waiting for him. He tapped Van Helsing on the shoulder. “Ready to go?” he asked.

  “Gott im Himmel!” Van Helsing exclaimed.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Bill said. “Get in.”

  Van Helsing and Audran glanced at the taxi. Together they reached up and popped the moddy out.

  “The guy’s a total loon,” I muttered as I slid into the cab’s backseat.

  “Got a complaint about me, pal?” Bill asked.

  “No,” I said, “I’m talking about this Van Helsing jerk. He sees deadly gruesome creatures everywhere he looks.”

  Bill shrugged. “Well, hell, so do I, but I just steer around ‘em.” I thought that was a pretty sensible attitude.

  Bill delivered me to the front gate of Friedlander Bey’s estate. I hurried inside and up to my suite just in time for Kmuzu to remind me about the important luncheon meeting scheduled with Papa and the political representatives of some damn place. I showered again, feeling just a little sullied after letting that repressed Van Helsing character occupy my mind and body. I put on my best gallebeya and keffiya, going so far as to belt a gorgeous jeweled ceremonial dagger in front at the waist. I looked good, and I knew Papa would be pleased.

  The luncheon itself was fine, just fine. I don’t even remember what we ate, but there was tons of it
and the delegation from Parthia was appropriately impressed. More important, though, was that they were appropriately intimidated. I sat in my chair and looked thoughtful, while Friedlander Bey explained to them the facts of life here in the early years of the twenty-third century of the Christian Era.

  What it all amounted to was that the Parthians pretended to be grateful after being denied the help they’d come for. They even tried to bribe Papa further by guaranteeing him exclusive influence with the victorious side in the brand-new Silesian revolt. Since no one at that moment could predict which party would end up in power, and since Papa had little interest in nations beyond the Islamic realm, and since everyone in the room including Habib and Labib knew that the Parthians couldn’t deliver on their promise in the first place, we acted as if they hadn’t said a word. It was an embarrassing blunder on their part, but Friedlander Bey handled it all with grace and assurance. He just waved to have the coffee and kataifi brought in. Papa’s extremely fond of kataifi, a Greek dessert something like baklava, except it looks like shredded wheat. It may be his only worldly weakness.

  With all the formal greetings and salutations and invitations and flatteries and thank-yous and blessings and leave-takings, it was about five o’clock before I was able to return to my rooms. I started to tell Kmuzu what had gone on, but naturally he already knew all about it. He even had a little advice for me concerning the people of Kush, who no doubt would soon strike back against the weakened Parthians.

  “Fine,” I said impatiently. “Thank you, Kmuzu, I don’t know what I’d do without you. If you’ll just excuse me—“

  “The family of the young murdered boy said they were sorry you couldn’t come to the funeral. They know how fond of you he’d been. I explained that you’d been detained by the master of the house.”

  I regretted missing the service. I wished I could have at least been at the cemetery to offer my condolences.

  “I think I’ll just relax now,” I said. “I’m going to rest for a while, and then I’m going to see how my nightclub is doing without me. That is all right, isn’t it? I mean, I’m allowed to go down there this evening, aren’t I?”