The Fifth House of the Heart

by Ben Tripp

  The broken glass of the entrance doors crunched beneath the ferrule of the cane. They stepped into the darkness gathered under the portico and entered the lobby, where the fixtures had been stripped from the walls and what remained had been smashed.

  He remembered the château of decades before, the darkness inside that place with its shutters and windowless halls. Now the same icy lizards stole down his spine. His brief fit of good spirits had decisively fled.

  On their way out of the Louvre, following extended hand-wringing farewells from the faithful Eric, Sax had purchased a souvenir flashlight adorned with a decal depicting the Mona Lisa. Its light was strong and blue—even the cheapest flashlight was powerful these days, now that LED technology was ubiquitous. Paolo followed its beam through the hospital. Sax stayed by the entrance to the lobby. He simply hadn’t the courage to penetrate the gloom inside that decaying place. It reminded him too much of his past adventures in vampire hunting—and too much of what might lie ahead. He told Paolo he would stay there and rest his old legs, but it sounded like bluffing, even to himself.

  He stood in the lobby and listened to the hooligans, or keupons, as they called themselves in their durable Verlan slang, turning words inside out to obscure them. Apache, they would have been called a century earlier. Their lives revolved around drugs, antiestablishment sentiments, and music, and in that way, though they considered themselves self-invented outcasts, a force new to the world, in fact they represented the most venerable of all traditions. They were conservatives, their outlandish style and manners notwithstanding. They adhered to rigid codes of speech and behavior that precluded any true originality. Sax had been no different, in his youth. His rebellion was identical to that of his peers, if slightly more interesting only because, as a homosexual, he was part of a subculture within the subculture. It would never change.

  Sax was sunk in thought along these lines, and so was startled to discover that others had almost reached him, their footsteps zinging off the naked concrete walls. He rose from his seat on the edge of an overturned steel cabinet, pressing his weight into his cane. He didn’t feel so alive now. He felt very old and tired.

  “They were in the cafeteria,” Paolo explained. “Way down that end.”

  Two figures resolved themselves out of the gloom behind him, one propelling the other into the reluctant light, and Sax’s plans went awry.

  Min was immediately recognizable from her photograph, although she had aged five years since it was taken. She was long bodied, strong, her center of gravity low. She had a way of settling into a stance with one shoulder dropped, arms slightly bent, her brows creased in evaluation, as if she was a climber studying a difficult face of rock—the attitude of Michelangelo’s sculpture David. There was a stream of blood running out of her left arm.

  The woman beside her was taller, classically proportioned, a Hindustani with dark, ripe features and sleek limbs. Her hair flowed like black oil. There was something in her face that Sax was not happy to see. The shadows around her eyes were tinted with green and the highlights on her cheeks and jaw had a bloodless, stretched look. She might have been a junkie, except there was no hunger in her eyes, no calculation. Only fear. And one other detail: her mouth was thickly finger-painted with smears of blood.

  “Did she bite you?” Sax asked of Min. “Who is she, for that matter?”

  “Nilu,” Min said. Sax couldn’t tell which question this was supposed to answer. She spoke it like an obscenity.

  Nilu stared into the light, distant and hopeless, pupils failing to properly contract.

  Paolo cleared his throat, seeking words. “You see . . . ,” he said, and stopped as if that would do it. Sax waited. Paolo continued, “I asked the same question. She—that is, Min—thought she could do an experiment to see if Nilu, that young lady, was interested in drinking blood. She made a hole in her arm and blood came out, but Nilu did not show interest. When I got there she was trying . . . Min was trying to make her drink the blood.”

  Sax ran his fingers through his hair, a futile gesture given the scant plumage.

  “Young lady,” he said, addressing Min. “This will not do. You’re here because of me, at my behest, if you will. In my endeavors, as a matter of policy, I absolutely forbid anyone involved to force anyone else to drink their blood. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Min said, shielding her eyes against Paolo’s light with her bloody arm.

  “We observe the Geneva Conventions, particularly the fourth.”

  “Go-ja,” Min said, impatient with the lecture. That was clearly an obscenity.

  “As for you,” Sax said, turning to Nilu. He didn’t say anything else because he was at a loss. Paolo was frankly staring at the woman. She was extraordinarily beautiful; Sax could see that much. It occurred to him he could still, even now, revert to pleasantries.

  “I’m Asmodeus Saxon-Tang, but you can call me Sax,” he said. “And your name is?”

  “Neelina Chandra,” Nilu said in a small voice. “Nilu.”

  “And you are Min Hee-Jin, and this is Paolo,” Sax said. “He’s a monk, in fact, not a priest as his costume suggests. The, ah, Ordine dei Cavalieri Sacri dei Teutonici e dei Fiamminghi, which I assume I have horribly mispronounced, Special Branch. He’s with the Vatican—he works for God.”

  Paolo bowed but did not offer his hand.

  “So,” Sax added. “So.”

  Nobody volunteered to speak. Sax tapped his cane on the floor. He framed his questions.

  “Young lady,” he said, addressing Min. “You come highly recommended, of course. And you’re welcome to bring friends along. It’s a free country, if expensive. However, I suspect there’s more to this”—here he gestured in Nilu’s general direction with the cane—“than meets the proverbial eye.”

  Min nodded. “She got bite from a Russian in Mumbai. The vampire got away and”—here Min switched her attention to Paolo—“I want know if we kill or not kill.”

  “Che cosa—” Paolo was flabbergasted. Sax put a hand on the Italian’s arm.

  “How did you get her here?” Sax asked.

  Min pointed at Paolo. “The Catholic people arrange everything.”

  Sax fixed a most murderous hairy eyeball on Paolo, who took it badly.

  “We arranged to get this girl on a hospital plane,” Paolo said defensively. “She was supposed to go to our hospice in Nimes, not this disgusting place. She changed the plan.” He pointed at Min.

  Sax shook his head. This was his problem now. “So she was kidnapped. I see. And drugged, by the look of her pupils. Happens to the best of us. Has she shown any hunger? For blood, I mean?”

  “He was only feed, not recruit,” Min said. Now she was comfortable. Shop talk for her.

  “And you interrupted him in the sort of feeding routine.”

  “I almost kill him but I did not.”

  “And you have personally,” Sax said, in the tone of a doctor discussing a patient’s medical history, “the usual story of a family savagely murdered before your eyes, you sworn to vengeance, and so forth.”

  Min dropped her gaze and nodded at the floor, agreeing with it.

  “Yes.”

  “Condoglianze,” Paolo said.

  Sax pushed his face at him, irritated. “You mustn’t start speaking Italian every time you’re the least bit upset, or we’ll have to carry phrase books around.”

  “I am sorry for you,” Paolo amended.

  “We have,” Sax said, “a problem. Paolo, you shiftless bastard, you must have known Ms. Hee-Jin had whatever Nilu is, a hostage, a prisoner. And you didn’t tell me. Here you’ve been splashing your virtue around like holy water, and meanwhile keeping an important secret from me. I’m the only one allowed to have secrets on this mission.”

  “I am sorry,” Paolo said. “I’ll see she’s taken into the care of our people here.”

 
“You will not,” Min said.

  “They are experts,” Paolo said, smoothing the air between them with his hands. “You brought her this far. Now I take her to our hospice where we look after such people, and we proceed with Mr. Saxon-Tang’s mission.”

  “She doesn’t leave my eyes,” Min said. “You tell me bring her, I bring her. But she is not safe. You don’t ever let one with bite away from your eyes. That is a rule in stone.”

  Throughout this conversation, Nilu stood beside Min, her eyes moving from one speaker to the next, but otherwise without reaction. Sax couldn’t tell if she was even following the words. She might not have spoken English, for all the response this discussion of her fate aroused. Though, of course, she’d been drugged as well. The drugs were so much better now than in his heyday, when it was all grass, amphetamines, Valium, or LSD—or in other words, up, down, or chaos. Now you could go sideways, backward and forward, do spirals—maybe it was time to start taking drugs again.

  It was chilly inside the abandoned hospital, but Nilu didn’t seem to feel it despite her bare arms.

  “Now, look,” Sax said, aiming for a reasonable tone of voice, which came out petulant. “I don’t care what you do with this girl. It’s none of my business.” Even as he said the words, he knew they weren’t true. If she was in Paris, Nilu was his business, no less than avenging Alberto the watchman or keeping Emily from harm. “Paolo here has a great big organization at his back that I’m sure can deal competently with this kind of thing. But let’s be clear. Vampire bites lead to four outcomes, am I right? I mean, nothing has changed in the last few decades.”

  “Recovery, death, infection, or false vampirism,” Min said, bobbing her head with each careful word.

  “I was infected myself,” Sax said. “I recovered. She’s not well, but she needn’t die. So false vampirism is the main problem before us, yes? She can’t turn into a proper vampire or anything like that. They’re another species.”

  “My family—” Min said.

  “I’m talking about here and now. This young lady beside you. She didn’t attack your family, is that correct? She hasn’t attacked anybody else. So the question is, will she develop the hunger and start killing people, and that’s why you don’t want to let her out of your sight.”

  “I did not kill the one that got her,” Min added.

  “And?” Sax said, feeling rather thickheaded.

  Paolo was looking thoughtful, an index finger curled around the point of his chin, elbow supported by the opposite hand. “I see what the problem is,” he said. “The vampire, the Russian she said, is still out there. They can always come to their prey, yes? So he will come to this one. No matter how far she runs, he can find her. If he came to the hospice at Nimes—”

  Min struck the air with the edge of her hand. “I did not tell you the bad part,” she said, and began to pace through the broken ceiling tiles that littered the floor. “The reason I not kill the Russian is because a second vampire come and take him away.”

  “But vampires hunt alone,” Paolo said. “Even mates hunt separately. They can’t share prey.”

  “You see why I am worry,” Min said. “The second vampire not want the victim. She want the Russian.”

  “She?” Sax said, the icicles once again forming on his vertebrae.

  “It was a female,” Min said, and shrugged. It meant nothing to her. Sax, however, had a terrible feeling it might mean something to him.

  There was no time to waste. To conceal his alarm, he started toward the front doors, where the streetlights cast pale stripes across the floor. “We need to get moving. Paolo and myself have discovered something of interest that will require a day or two of our time.”

  “We have?” Paolo said, brightening.

  “That Interpol bulletin was a stroke of genius.”

  “I knew it,” Paolo said, then quickly added, “It was all your doing,” because he heard the pride in his own voice and pride was sinful.

  “In the meanwhile,” Sax said, “you ladies will please repair with us to the headquarters I have established in the countryside for this operation. I want no further bloodshed, self-inflicted or otherwise, and if you, Min, kill this young lady, no excuse will prevent me turning you over to the authorities. Are we clear?”

  Sax was half-wild with the urgency of their mission by the time they left Paris. He had a near-magical key to the vampire’s location, in the form of some petty criminal sitting in a German cell. It was a miracle the man hadn’t yet been found with his neck mysteriously broken. Every minute might mean the difference between a dead end and the true beginning of the adventure.

  On the other hand, once the vampire’s location was discovered, the bullet was out of the gun. There was no calling it back. Whether it was aimed at the monster’s black five-chambered heart or Sax’s own more typical specimen would be a matter for fate to decide.

  Sax had purchased the farm in Petit-Grünenwald in the 1980s, when French real estate was nearly worthless and the American dollar had some buying power. He owned a dozen properties around the country from the same period of his life. They were all good holiday rentals and he never lost money on them. He had found this property during a whimsical trip with his boyfriend at the time, a handsome Nigerian doctor, to see what a nearby town called Bitche looked like. Sax fancied having an address in Bitche, if only so he could forward all his mail there. Asmodeus Saxon-Tang, Bitche, France. He liked the sound of it. In the end, it was tiny Petit-Grünenwald that caught his eye. The village had been part of both France and Germany at various times in history, and the local culture offered a fascinating blend of both heritages. Best of all, his farm was precisely in the midst of the Maginot Line.

  France had reinforced its border with Germany between the world wars with a mighty rampart of gun emplacements, walls, minefields, and antitank barricades, naming the whole thing after the minister of defense, André Maginot. The gauntlet was as much as twenty kilometers deep and ran five hundred kilometers in length, from Switzerland to the Belgian border, where Belgium had its own fortified line. The whole thing turned out to be a bust, but it was a valiant enterprise. Germany had simply bombed the Belgian bit of the line from the air and gone around the back way into France.

  Besides lending its name to any military defense that didn’t work at all, the Maginot Line had also left behind masses of impressive fortifications of concrete and steel that still studded the landscape in the region. Sax’s farm, in addition to its attractive riverside cottage, main house, and barns, had a petit ouvrage located on the hilltop above the fields. This was a small, bunker-style fort, its bulk sunken beneath the ground, from which protruded a concrete eyebrow of gun emplacements surmounted with steel turrets. The guns were long gone, but the fortification remained, and would be there for another few centuries. Children loved the petit ouvrage and, despite halfhearted signboards forbidding entrance, spent all their playtime there, making shooting noises while they gunned down the Germans and punctured themselves on rusty bits of metal. For this reason, Sax called it Château le Tétanos—Castle Tetanus.

  Min liked the farm accommodations at once. The cottage had heavy doors and small windows. Easily defended. However when Sax pointed out the petit ouvrage, Min was in heaven. She took her bedroll up to the hilltop fortress, towing Nilu along. Nilu had regained her ability to think independently, but Sax had not yet seen any indication of her personality. She was still in a daze. The vampire infection was probably working on her as powerfully as the drugs Min had administered; Sax well remembered the feeling. It was like living inside an old-fashioned diving suit. Sensations all registered in the brain at a slight remove, almost secondhand, muffled and narrow. He hoped she would live, despite Min’s nursing.

  Sax aired out the cottage and the big house beside it, the maison de maître, with its four good bedrooms. Paolo went off to one of the bedrooms and spent some time in prayer, then more time
on the phone with his masters in Rome. A van arrived to deliver groceries at two o’clock in the afternoon, exactly in accordance with Sax’s instructions. At three o’clock, a second rental car joined the first in the yard. It was a small vehicle, which magnified the scale of the enormous man who emerged from it.

  This was Manfield K. Rocksaw. He had with him an ex-military duffel bag and was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. He was enormous, three inches taller than Paolo and a hundred pounds heavier. He spoke always in a whisper, but the depth of his voice allowed it to carry without projection.

  “Nice tie,” were his first words to Sax. As it happened to be Sax’s favorite, a Dior paisley on cream, Sax instantly liked the man.

  “Mr. Rocksaw,” he said.

  “Call me Rock.”

  At 5:50, an hour after the long, slow sunset of a northern winter, Gheorghe Vladimirescu arrived in a cloud of smoke astride an old Ural motorcycle, his worldly goods in a canvas backpack strapped to the seat behind him. He was two hours and fifty minutes late. Rocksaw had been on time to within the margin of error of the various watches involved. Five points for him, five points off for Mr. Vladimirescu, Sax thought.

  “I must piss as racehorse,” were Gheorghe’s first words.

  The farm, nestled at the dark foot of the hill with its mellow lamps and cheerful cotton-print curtains at every window, looked like the sort of place hobbits might turn up. How many peasant weddings and holidays had it seen, ringing with glad voices as the red-cheeked farmers set barn doors on trestles to make tables and the women in aprons and kerchiefs came bustling out of the kitchen door, laden with country cooking in stoneware dishes and crocks?

  Sax savored the nostalgic charm of the place. For him, nostalgia was nothing more than a fondness for a past one didn’t have to suffer through oneself. In truth, on such a simple farm in times past, Sax himself would have been beaten from the dooryard the first time he was caught with another country boy. He could imagine that scene just as well as the merry times, guilty youths tumbling down the hayrick ladder and out the door, dragging up their homespun trousers. And then of course there were the Germans, twice in the last hundred years marching through this peaceful landscape across the fields and lanes, leaving thousands of homesteads like Sax’s empty because everyone who had lived there was killed.