The Fifth House of the Heart

by Ben Tripp

  “Four of them?” Sax thought she might be too competent for his purposes. He didn’t want a mass murderer to deal with.

  “Miss Hee-Jin is on her way back from India, where she has been hunting down a Russian vampire. There were complications. In fact, she may not arrive. She didn’t say what the complications were, you see. The last time we were informed of complications, the individual involved turned out to be infected. Not Min Hee-Jin, of course.”

  This sounded inauspicious to Sax. “Has she killed anybody else? Other than vampires?”

  “One or two have died, but it was not her fault.”

  “What a relief. Who’s this brooding fellow?”

  The man in the next file was Gheorghe Vladimirescu, a Romanian burglar who also did bank heists, conducted strong-arm work for the Russian Mafia, and occasionally performed as a street acrobat. He was available because he happened to be in Italy under an assumed name, avoiding a conversation the Romanian authorities wished to have with him. The Vatican had better contacts than the police. Gheorghe was rough carved, pale, and black haired, with dark circles around deep-set black eyes that had the cold gleam of porcelain electrical insulators.

  The next candidate was the paramilitary sort.

  “Did you find this chap at Central Casting?” Sax asked. The photograph revealed an umber-skinned man with immense muscles. His head was shaven and his skull had a rippled surface that telegraphed the convolutions of his brain. Manfield K. Rocksaw was his name, which Sax assumed had to be some kind of joke, and he had been with Special Forces in the United States Army. He was a Green Beret, or had been. Then he went freelance, following a disciplinary action when an examination of the details of the recent unpleasantness in the Middle East revealed he’d made some decisions contrary to the word, if not the spirit, of certain international treaties and conventions. He made no attempt to defend himself during the proceedings except to say, as was noted in the file, Shit rolls downhill.

  The only person missing from the equation, at this point, was the bait. Sax hadn’t mentioned the bait. It could be anybody attractive with a fair amount of blood inside them. It was difficult to sort out this aspect of the plan ahead of time, because vampires generally hunted by gender: males killed males, females killed females. There was a biological reason for this. Vampires did not themselves have fixed genders, or even anatomies, for that matter, and gradually took on the form of their prey. The transitional period between male and female could be awkward. The transition from human to beast (or vice versa) was worse; witness the early-medieval period when so many loups-garous were slain as they made the transition from wolf to human prey, wolves having grown scarcer than men. These days, the lower order of vampires ate mostly dogs, and so weren’t werewolves but hundings—essentially were-dogs.

  Sax thought his bait should be female for this reason: assuming the vampire was female, the odds of attracting it would be better. They tended to drain the blood of the gender they occupied, to avoid slowly metamorphosing into the other. Unless they wished to switch. Vampires sometimes did. For this purpose a female victim offered better odds.

  Of course, the bait might not be required at all. Sax didn’t want any more innocent people hurt. Forty years earlier, he had fervently believed there were no innocent people, only those before whom opportunity had not yet appeared. Since then he had come to know there were genuine innocents in the world, and they ought to be protected. Paolo, unfortunately, was probably one of them.

  Sax wondered if there would soon be even more blood on his hands.

  11

  * * *

  Paris

  Sax and Paolo took the train to Milan, then the Frecciarossa night train from Milan to Paris—a seven-hundred-mile journey. The overnight was interrupted only by the customs check in Switzerland, which was not a member of the European Union. They passed through the Alps and some of the world’s most ravishing scenery in the dark. Sax had booked a private compartment, which they shared. Paolo, accustomed to the constant company of men, was unashamed to march around the compartment in his briefs while he prepared himself for sleep, although he donned a modest muslin nightshirt before retiring. Sax had thought he would suffer an embolism if the man bent over the washstand one more moment performing his ablutions with his latissimus dorsi catching the light just so, but the crisis passed and the lights went out and there was only the deep rattling metronomy of wheels on track, surging through the darkness.

  At nine a.m., they reached Paris, where Sax saw a striking redhead step down from the train, one car farther back from the engine, at the same moment he did. The redhead, in a slim white sweater and green kilt, looked around as if she’d lost someone, caught Sax’s eyes, and stopped looking. That she went from interest to disinterest so suddenly aroused Sax’s suspicions, but he dismissed the concern. There were plenty of redheads on trains. Twenty minutes later, he and Paolo arrived at Sax’s latest favorite hotel in the city, a place so narrow it had only two rooms per floor.

  It was vertically constrained by the Haussmannian height restriction of twenty meters to six floors, thus yielding a total of a dozen guest rooms, including the retrofitted pair in the attic. Sax secured the two rooms on the third floor for himself and Paolo, informing the concierge that if Paolo got lucky he would need the privacy. Paolo empurpled, and the concierge was scandalized. Paolo was, after all, dressed as a priest.

  Sax himself opted for a pale gray suit, combined in a fit of daring with a mauve shirt, sea-foam-green ascot, and yellow lisle socks in buckskin oxfords. A dotted pocket square in yellow and purple completed the look. The overall intent, spiteful as it might have been, was to inform passersby in no uncertain terms that he was unaffiliated with the Church, despite his companion.

  Their first stop was the Louvre. Their second was rather mysterious; they were to collect the Korean vampire killer, but Paolo was evasive on the subject of why they had to meet her at some abandoned hospital on the outskirts of Paris.

  At the great museum, which itself had once been a palace, Sax and Paolo crossed the featureless pavement of the Cour Napoléon, which led to the glass pyramid in the forecourt, and then, instead of descending into the pyramid beneath the ground to the museum entrance, they continued on past it to the original entrance of the palace—Pavillon Richelieu, a grand pile in the style of the Italian Renaissance. While not on the scale of St. Peter’s, its architecture was muscular enough to support a freight of allegorical stone figures and an oxide-streaked mansard roof of lead and slate. They crossed under the arched portico and passed along the Passage Richelieu, once a coach entrance for grand events to keep the wigs out of the weather, and turned to the right.

  They went up some steps, Sax plying his cane with vigor on the stone, and passed through one of four doors of oak and ironwork pierced with great oval oeil-de-boeuf openings. On the other side of the doors, a guard in complete camouflage fatigues, black beret, and scowl stepped toward them; Sax produced from his breast pocket a laminated card. The guard lowered his submachine gun and shone an ultraviolet penlight on the identification, then nodded, mollified, and spoke into his radio. Sax made a campy little salute. The guard took a second look at Paolo, decided he was a real celibate and not a freak in a costume, and waved them on down a long, echoing stone hallway.

  Sax was preoccupied, but not so much that he couldn’t observe from the edge of his eye that Paolo was impressed. That’s right, young man: the old girl knows people, Sax thought. A door halfway along the passage opened, and a gentleman with white hair in a dark blue pullover beckoned them inside the room from which he had just emerged. He was smiling.

  “Saxon,” he said in a Cambridge accent. “Quel plaisir.”

  They entered a communal office space that had needed refurbishment in 1940. The radiators clanged like competition blacksmiths. The white-haired gentleman was Eric Rohmer—the curator, not the film director, as he was quick to point out to Paolo, who h
ad never heard of either one. Sax owed Eric a long luncheon soon, he asserted. Sax felt free to promise the event would happen without fail; given what they were about to face, he didn’t expect to live long enough to have to endure the occasion. Eric was a kindhearted, enthusiastic, and conscientious fellow, in love with life and his occupation—consequently, a crashing bore.

  It was Sax’s donation of half the contents of the château owned by the vampire Madame Magnat-l’Étrange (or Corfax, as she was known in the ancient annals) that had secured Eric a position at the Louvre. Sax had been looking for a youngish, naïve sort of person who wouldn’t think too much about provenance and would think a great deal about pedigree when it came to an enormous haul of questionably secured antiques. Eric Rohmer was ideal because he was also new to the French system of museums, being at the time a mere teaching assistant on loan from the history department at Cambridge. He managed the paperwork and documentation of the sound articles, made a name for himself as a “good egg,” or bonne oeuf, and continued to believe he owed Sax quite a lot.

  Paolo and Eric got along splendidly, both being entirely decent, well-meaning human beings with snowy consciences who hadn’t done anything shameful in their lives. This irritated Sax.

  At the Louvre, Eric had at his command most of the shared resources of the European museum world, from the smallest private collections to the panthemic hoards found in such places as here and the British Museum. Sax described what he was looking for to Eric, scrupulously avoiding the strong tea with which they were provided, as it would render him incontinent. Eric nodded, deeply interested if mystified.

  When he began to suspect Sax’s request was slightly immoral, possibly even a whiff illegal, Sax mentioned coincidentally that his latest junket might result in a bounty similar to his first for the museum. This seemed to calm Eric’s conscience. Besides, with a priest along for the ride, how bad could it possibly be?

  Sax had within his calfskin notebook the list of items he knew had been purchased by his mysterious antagonist’s female proxies. He had an additional list of antiques once in the possession of the deceased American diplomat. Further, he had indexed which items fit into both categories. The ormolu clock was one of these. There were others as well. A silver samovar with gold fittings, for example. A harpsichord. A figurative candelabra. A painting by Jacob van Walscapelle from around 1700. A few other things.

  What Sax was looking for couldn’t be determined just through auction houses and sales listings. He needed the authority of the great cosmos of museums with their permanent collections—always ebbing and flowing, permanent merely referring to a state of ownership at any given moment, as opposed to loaned items and temporary exhibitions. Not everything the vampire wanted would be for sale or in private hands. Some of it would have found its way into museums. That is what he claimed to be after to Paolo and Eric.

  It would be useful to know what was out of circulation, of course. But Sax was hunting for something else, about which Eric would resist telling him if he knew that Sax was interested. Sax hoped to identify objects that seemed to come from nowhere, entering history as if out of the clear blue sky. Those items, Sax thought, were the ones the vampire would have acquired firsthand. A Rembrandt that had been in the continuous possession of a single individual since the paint was still wet would have no provenance at all.

  Determine what such mystery objects had in common—country of origin, age, style, circumstances of discovery—and he could guess quite closely where the vampire had lived just before the war. If he could do that, he knew he could find where it had gone to ground afterward. Then the game was afoot. That was one of the few disadvantages vampires had: all the muck they collected was very hard to move.

  It was a bit of a ruse, but he didn’t want Eric or some similar well-meaning dupe to give away what he was up to. Even Paolo could be a liability. They both argued Sax’s approach was confusing and roundabout, but they weren’t looking in the correct direction, just as Sax had intended.

  No mention was made of the ultimate purpose of Sax’s mission: Eric had not been informed of the vampire aspect of things and thought the whole project was an attempt to consolidate some objects that would be worth more together than in disunion. A fair enough objective, had it been even remotely true.

  There was a great deal of file carrying from distant paper archives, and Eric’s latest intern spent an hour typing at her computer keyboard. The conference table became too small and the effort migrated up on top of the flat files, where they could spread things out, after empty cups and staplers and heaps of museum memos on blue and pink paper were shoved out of the way.

  Things were proceeding at a satisfactory pace. Sax luxuriated in not being too involved in this boring part of the project that looked uncomfortably like work. Instead he examined some of the museum catalogs and gazed out the window at the handsome camouflage-clad guards who sauntered cocksure and hard-eyed through the tourists, like bulls amongst sheep.

  The research was not halfway to completion when Paolo called Sax over to his pile of documents. He’d been working on the provenance of the samovar with Eric’s gentle guidance. Now Paolo spoke softly, removing any excitement from his voice. Eric was across the room with his assistant, poring.

  “There was a candelabra on your list,” Paolo said.

  “Silver gilt, figure of Neptune holding a hydra above his head, one of a pair,” Sax confirmed.

  Paolo slid an Interpol bulletin across the work surface to Sax. It was in French, English, German, and Spanish, repeated in sections.

  “Theft of articles from a significant collection . . . Museum of . . . Ah, I see.” Sax maintained his composure with a skill that had been earned at a thousand hammer sales. Even poker players could not compete with the stone face required to win auctions, Sax believed. He could be bidding on an object of incredible worth, an unrecognized gem that would net him the kind of profits that drove competitors to suicide, and yet he would betray no more excitement than the corpse at a Calvinist funeral. It was this same detachment he summoned now.

  According to Interpol, the thief that had stolen a variety of objects from a museum in Chemnitz, Germany, had been apprehended in Schönbrunn only fifteen days ago, and was currently being held in a Chemnitz jail. The stolen goods had all been recovered except for a silver gilt candelabra depicting Neptune holding the hydra aloft; further description of the object and its hallmarks was provided, along with a very poor photograph from the museum. The candlestick was grotesque, the proportions unbalanced. Early nineteenth-century En­­glish. More money than taste back then, Sax thought.

  But although he amused himself with his prejudices against the silversmiths of George IV’s brief reign, his real thoughts, deeper down where they couldn’t cast any influence upon his features, were racing along the rails at top speed, billowing steam and coal smoke. Sax maintained his cool to such a degree that Paolo, having watched Sax read the bulletin from Interpol, was crestfallen.

  “I thought it was a clue,” he said. “So it’s not important?”

  “Nothing to speak of,” Sax said—and meant it.

  They were to appear at l’Hôpital Poulenc in the Eighteenth Arrondissement around seven o’clock in the evening. Sax was not fond of the banlieue area. Quite aside from the gangs, drugs, and poverty that ruled the streets, it was also unattractive: home to ugly municipal apartment gulags, near the commercial docks, and seamed through with train tracks.

  Sax felt something peculiar, despite the surroundings. He was almost euphoric. Things seemed vivid, his senses alert to sounds and scents. Colors leapt out at him. His mind was working well. He remembered things, details of conversations, items he’d seen or bought forty years before. Names, faces, what he ate, what he did on days he’d forgotten he ever lived. He wondered at this.

  Paolo sat beside him in the dark backseat of the cab with blocks of yellow light sliding across him from the streetligh
ts moving past the windows, slipping across his face, around the back of his head, then darkness until the next one came along. Sax could smell the clean male scent of his companion. He could smell the ghosts of cigarettes in the headliner of the cab, too, and his own stale old-man smell masked with a bay lime cologne he ordered handmade in a shop in Manhattan, because he always thought that is what old men ought to smell like, even when he was young.

  What was this feeling he had? It was even in his veins. His limbs and skin felt nourished somehow, as if his very blood had gotten sweeter. He mused on this, and as the great idiot hulk of the abandoned hospital rolled into view down the avenue, he thought he knew the answer.

  It was just life paying him a rare visit. He felt alive for the first time in years.

  Several tracksuited youths shouted vulgarities at them as they exited the taxi and walked the last couple of blocks; the thrust of their imputations revolved around the relationship of the two men, speculations insulting to Paolo and flattering to Sax. Paolo walked through the unsafe streets with the ease of a beachcomber, without an apparent care in the world. He was simply too unconcerned with worldly dangers, smiling at every young brute who scowled in their direction. Sax wondered if Paolo thought there was protection in that dog collar of his.

  Paolo shrugged. “The French,” he said, as if heckling was merely a national custom.

  The hospital was a huge carcass rotting in the flotsam of the neighborhood: it had been abandoned for over ten years. There was a tall hurricane fence around the weedy, trash-deep lot. The structure was a relic of the postwar period, a way station for the wounded. It had no role to play in wellness. Pollution, vandalism, and cheap materials had conspired to make it a blight in an already blighted place. Sax felt as if he were in the presence of a vast, blind, mindless thing that had been forgotten but still lived. His grip on his cane was tight enough that he had to switch it from one hand to the other to rest his fingers.