by Ben Tripp
When she emerged, Nilu was wrapped in a white Turkish-towel robe of hotel caliber—in fact it came from a hotel, one of the small crimes with which Sax spiced his drearier moments while traveling. Standing there in the bulky robe with a sheet of wet hair spilled down her back and her bare brown feet on the tile floor, the girl looked vulnerable and beguiling.
Sax presented her with the clothes—a pink T-shirt with Moominpappa on it, faded overalls of the farmer type, a thick cotton roll-neck sweater, and a pair of frayed espadrilles with straw soles. It wasn’t much of a look, but Nilu almost wept with gratitude.
“Thank you, Uncle,” she said. Sax was well pleased. Uncle was an honorific in India. That she hadn’t been alarmed when he looked in while she soaked was an honor as well. Up to a point. In India, men were forbidden from seeing an unmarried woman in déshabillé, especially in the intimate quarters of a bathroom. That was where Sax’s particular category of man came in. In India, there was a caste of “third gender” people: homosexuals, eunuchs, transvestites, and all the rest of the glam-rock crowd. Hijra was the word, if Sax remembered correctly. Hijras enjoyed special privileges to go along with the abuse, beatings, fear, and rejection that occupied their days. One of these privileges was to be considered harmless around young women.
Then again, perhaps she just didn’t give a damn. Once you were bitten by a vampire, rules of decorum seemed pretty trivial.
At some time between midnight and dawn, in that long, dark period when only the slow turning of the moon reminds one that the night will ever pass, Sax woke up. He hadn’t been sleeping well in any case. The mattress was too soft, the moonlight getting in around the curtains, and besides, his mind was swarming with schemes and outcomes, and he was desperate to get moving—to get to that jail cell in Germany and speak with the hapless burglar. At last he sat up in bed and blinked weary eyes.
There was something in the room with him.
A shape. Dark against the dark wall, something there, human in outline but shrouded, a widow beneath the veil. Sax’s flesh crawled. His heart thumped like it was rolling down a corrugated roof. The shape was alive, swaying ever so slightly, a shadow with a will of its own. Then it began to move. Sax’s bedroom door was ajar, the crack between door and frame a thin black stripe on deepest gray. Someone had come into the room.
He’d been a fool, of course. The vampire knew he was in Europe. It would be searching for him. It might have found his farm in the countryside. Why not? Vampires did have their familiars, and they were always watching. Too late for precautions now.
Sax shifted his weight. His cane was propped up against the nightstand by his head. He might be able to deliver a painful blow to the dark shape that swayed toward him through the gloom. Club it, shout for help, and if Rock was a light sleeper, Sax might be able to fight off the ripping teeth long enough for help to arrive.
Then the shape stepped into a ribbon of moonlight. It was Nilu. Her face was wet with tears, the point of her chin puckered with suppressed grief. What Sax had taken for a black veil was simply her hair, fanned out across her shoulders like the Virgin Mary’s wimple. She was clad in one of Sax’s old Regency nightshirts from his Colin Firth period.
The girl crawled onto the bed next to Sax and shook with silent sobs, her back to him. He said nothing, but threw his side of the coverlet over her quaking body. He kept his hand at the base of her neck for a long while, a chaste sort of reassurance. Eventually she slept. Sax lay on his side of the bed, feeling the sheets grow cold, and did not sleep again.
By dawn, Nilu’s health was failing.
In her sleep, she had begun to shiver, then broke into a sour, cold sweat. She twitched and writhed, murmuring in scraps of argument with imaginary interrogators. Sax saw by first light that her skin had gone from brown to greenish, the difference between “olive skin,” as the phrase is understood, and the actual color olive. He rose without disturbing her further, dressed inattentively, and padded downstairs.
There he found Min asleep in one of the living room chairs facing the stairway, a cleaver across her knees. Her eyes opened the moment he put his weight on the top step. She watched the space behind him. When she didn’t see Nilu, she rose to meet him. Min could have used a bath as well, Sax noticed. Her clothes were positively waxy. Her hair had separated into little flat spikes.
“She’s very ill,” Sax said. “I need you to take care of her until we get back.” He hoped that giving Min nursing duties would help keep her from killing Nilu instead.
“She was in your room,” Min said.
“Yes, and she didn’t bite me,” Sax said. “Don’t let her die.”
“Where are you going?” Min gnawed the side of her thumb, scowling up at Sax. She looked taller than she really was, probably because she gave off such ferocious vibrations. Sax saw her knuckles were pale with scar tissue, presumably from punching anvils or whatever it was martial artists did instead of developing meaningful relationships. Sax observed her and considered his answer.
“Germany,” he said at last. “Not far. Paolo and myself. We shall return this evening, late. I can’t tell you more than that, but I will once we get back.”
Min nodded and returned to her chair and closed her eyes. Sax put the kettle on, judged it was too early to make phone calls, and went to wake up Paolo instead. Despite his checking on Nilu, getting Paolo moving around, making tea, and looking at e-mail on the tiny smartphone Sax had never properly mastered, it was still too early when he started making his calls. The sky was washed pink and yellow over slate. The horizon glimmered white, turning the trees along the hills into inky ciphers.
Abingdon answered the phone on the fifth ring, his voice muddy with sleep.
“Oozat?” He coughed into the phone.
“Asmodeus Saxon-Tang,” Sax said, and waited. There was a long pause.
“Fuck me, mate, what dost this fucking ringaling portend?” Abingdon was delighted. Sax could hear it in his voice, genuine pleasure. Gratifying, of course, especially at 6:53 in the morning. There was a muffled female voice in the background on Abingdon’s end of the line. Abingdon said something back that Sax couldn’t make out, and then his attention was back on Sax.
“Abingdon,” Sax began, as if to remind his listener who he was. “Still bucketing about on horses, shoving bits of wood at your enemies, and so forth?”
“Living fucking history, that is, princess.” Abingdon was a rugged, active man. A professional jouster and blacksmith, he worked the circuit of European history–themed events. Sax had seen him in action, clad in jingling hauberk and plate and a great heavy helmet on the back of a big, wild-eyed horse, charging down the muddy tilt. He could handle a twelve-foot lance like it was a pencil. Biceps like pumpkins. He didn’t just shatter lances and hack his way through exhibition swordsmanship, either: when he wasn’t in the arena, he was making iron candlesticks and swords and flails in his portable forge. Tourists loved it. Steel weapons for the gents, huge sweating muscles in a leather apron for the ladies.
Abingdon and Sax had met some years earlier when Sax needed someone who could replicate metal alloys no longer manufactured in the modern world. Abingdon, in addition to being a drunken, sword-swinging medieval womanizer, was also in possession of a doctorate in archaeometallurgy. He could duplicate, in somewhat safer conditions than the original artisans, authentic mercury-vapor ormolu. He could craft wrought iron, rich in manganese, to precisely duplicate late-Roman artifacts, or make ingots of the strange metals developed quite by chance while alchemists pursued their dream of turning base metals into gold. Sax called him every couple of years to repair or duplicate some damaged piece that would otherwise have little place in the world, for all its antiquity.
“The thing is, I wonder if you’re free the next week or so?” Sax said.
“I’m on the job, mate,” Abingdon whispered into the phone. “Got a bird here.”
“You can�
�t shag all week, though, can you?” Even as Sax said it he knew it was a stupid statement. Of course Abingdon could shag all week.
“Been reading my diary, me old ginger beer. Right,” Abingdon said, resigning himself. “Your stuff’s always interesting. I could use a few quid, it being the off-season for the old pleasure fairs, and my tackle could likely use a drying out. What, pray tell, ’ave you fucking got?”
Sax got off the phone grinning. He liked Abingdon. A hale fellow such as they didn’t often make anymore. He would have been a rock star, back in the day. Gotten into fistfights with Roger Daltrey and run fancy automobiles into hotel swimming pools. He did pretty well regardless. Abingdon was probably the only metallurgist with groupies.
Sax handed the phone to Paolo, who was still groggy.
“Ring up your chaps back in Rome and tell them we need access to this prisoner in Germany. Tell them it’s a matter of his immortal soul or whatever you need to do. No later than three this afternoon.”
Paolo dialed the number. “Ciao, Fabrizio . . . ,” he began.
Sax went out to check that the barn was arranged for Abingdon’s arrival.
The weather remained overcast and grim across all of northern Europe. It was getting chillier each day. Paolo steered the rental car through a colorless landscape from the farmhouse to the private airfield at Lemberg; the plane Paolo had chartered for them was waiting on the tarmac. It would have been a six-hour drive to their destination, and the flight took less than two, so it was well worth the Vatican’s money, in Sax’s opinion. He disliked small aircraft and wore earplugs to reduce the din of the engine.
The Cessna made its way across the tip of the Vosges Mountains, then over the Rhine Valley and through rough air above the Odenwald range. Then they descended, Sax feeling bilious with airsickness, along the top of the Ore Mountains to an airstrip outside Chemnitz, Germany. Sax had forgotten just how lumpy Germany could be, a mass of mountains and valleys in the southern half. It was only the north that was flat, those vast plains draining into the North Sea.
They hired a taxi to take them to the Stadtgef ängnis. The taxi driver beguiled his passengers for the entire trip, complaining that Mercedes’s quality had gone down so much he was now driving Opel cars exclusively. Paolo seemed interested in the conversation and the two Europeans discussed cars until they reached the street that ran along the frontage of the prison. Then the driver became serious, all but doffing his cap. He might even have done so if he had been wearing one. A man in the habiliments of a priest arriving at the gates of a prison spoke of bad luck for someone on the inside.
There was a delay of almost an hour inside the facility, which had the crisp, prefabricated ambiance of a modern airport, only with fewer windows. Guards in severe uniforms marched in and out of the waiting area armed with paperwork to be filled out in triplicate. Phone calls were made. Superiors summoned. Throughout all this, a man in urban camouflage sat at a desk and ignored Sax and Paolo with a display of total indifference that must have been agony to keep up. An Italian priest and a mid-Atlantic schwuler: Was this evidence of the new liberality of the Church, or could this be a gleichgeschlechtliche Partnerschaft?
A guard in black trousers and white shirt emerged from the secure part of the building and, having checked their identification, ushered Sax and Paolo within.
They walked down noisy, echoing corridors with bright light and not a single fleck of dirt or chipped paint or any other evidence of use; they passed through an armored door, then a slightly less sterile corridor, and finally entered the place of imprisonment. Here the cell blocks looked far more like those everywhere else in the world: built to withstand constant abuse, and constantly abused. The acoustics were terrible.
The guard led them along a passageway with a clear acrylic partition that divided it from the cell blocks, on two levels, to the left; on the right was a wall of concrete block with slit windows high up near the ceiling. At the end of the passage was a further heavy door, but this one stood open, and another guard sat on a folding chair on the threshold. This one stood up and took over escorting duties, while the first guard returned the way they had come.
Beyond the door were six cells. Two of these cells were occupied. The guard led his charges to the one on the right, opened a small grille set into the porthole in the door, clicked his heels, and returned to his folding chair.
“Right,” said Sax. “You speak better German than me, Paolo, so you do the talking.” There was a terrible stink coming through the window from the cell. It smelled like human dung. Inside the cell was a man wearing hospital-style scrubs. His red face was a mindless blank, eyes bulging and yellowish with bright blue centers. His pupils were constricted to pinpoints. This was Jakob Bächtold.
Paolo spoke to the inmate. It took some time to get the man’s attention, as he was studying the surface of the cell wall, tracing imaginary routes with a fingertip along the seams of the concrete. Sometimes he would look around the room, wonderingly, like an infant. His mouth was constantly working, chewing on unintelligible words.
Eventually Bächtold turned to the cell door and, seeing Paolo in the window, lunged forward. Paolo involuntarily jerked backward. The guard stood up. Sax shook his head: it’s all fine. Bächtold’s breath huffed through the porthole; it stank of ulcerated teeth. He pressed his face to the wire.
Paolo translated Sax’s questions into German. Who hired him to steal the candelabra? Where was he to bring it? Why were the other things found but not the candelabra? Again, who hired him to steal the candelabra? Why? The same questions, over and over, all with the same result: vacant mumbling.
Paolo was starting to sweat. He did not like being so close to the eye-rolling imbecile on the other side of the door. Bächtold was gazing around at invisible flies. Just like Renfield, Sax thought. This gave Sax an idea.
“You’re going to ask him some different questions,” Sax said quietly, twisting his eyes toward the guard to indicate Paolo should be discreet. “This may get a reaction. Keep with it if it does.”
“As long as we can get away from here,” Paolo said.
“I thought you Christian-charity types loved going to these sorts of places,” Sax said.
“I get claustrophobia,” Paolo said. He made the admission sound like a confession.
“Ask him this. Ask him what the vampire did.”
Sax heard Paolo’s Italian-accented German clunking along for a few words, then the word vampir, and in the next instant, Bächtold went berserk.
He screamed, gobbets of saliva spraying through the window. “Blutsauger kommen f ür mich!” Then he leapt into the air and began hurling himself around the cell, clawing at the walls. Amid his high-pitched shouting Sax caught a few words he recognized, stein being one of them, but most of it was such a cacophony it was all he could do not to run away. The guard rushed to the cell, pressed a button on a small electronic box on his belt, and flung the cell door open. Seconds later, he was joined by four more guards, two of whom grabbed Sax and Paolo. The rest rushed into the cell and the shrieking, struggling Bächtold went down beneath them, flailing with such mad strength the guards had to beat him into submission. Then the scene was out of view to Sax, and he was trotting down the hall after Paolo with hard guardsman’s fingers dug into his shoulder. Two minutes later, they were back in the waiting area, panting with fear and exertion.
Blutsauger kommen f ür mich! Bächtold had cried. Sax knew what that meant, more or less.
The bloodsucker is coming for me.
Once out on the street again, following a reprimand from a senior administrator of the prison with no neck, Sax’s hands began to tremble uncontrollably. Paolo sucked in deep drafts of cold air, letting them out in white plumes that drifted halfway down the block before they faded from sight.
“Quickly,” Sax said. “Before you forget. What was he saying?”
“The warden? He’s very u
pset with us disturbing his prisoners. He says a man of the cloth—”
“Yes yes yes. No. The madman, Bächtold.”
“Oh,” Paolo said, and for a terrifying moment his face went Bächtold-blank and Sax thought he actually had forgotten. But Paolo was only organizing his jumbled thoughts.
“He said the blood drinker was coming to get him—” Paolo began.
“I got that bit. Then he said something about stein?”
“Ah. That’s ‘stone’ in German,” Paolo said. “He said, ‘She will come down from the stone of murder.’ She is the master or mistress, and he is the slave, and she will come down for him from the stone of murder and suck his blood.”
“And?” Sax said when Paolo failed to continue.
“I don’t know! I was very frightened when he started to shout. I am the weakest servant of God, an unworthy man only,” Paolo added. Then, to Sax’s astonishment, Paolo dashed a tear from his eye with the sleeve of his black jacket.
“You’re a berk and an idiot,” Sax seethed. “A cretin. He did all that shouting and you can’t remember it? What a balls-up. This is what comes of trusting a priest.”
“I am not really a priest.”
“Worse yet. Let us proceed to plan B, because you are certainly a fool.”
Plan B was a terrible waste of time and wasn’t much of a plan at all. Sax wished to go through with it primarily because it was a way of punishing Paolo, which wasn’t really anything to do with Paolo but rather was a way for Sax to channel his own frustration that the magic bullet had turned out to be a squib.
They found with difficulty a place to rent yet another car, put it on the Vatican tab, and left Chemnitz approximately four hours after they’d arrived. The city was one of those places that had been bombed unrelentingly during the war, and consequently the entire core of the town was overtaken by slabs of dull concrete architecture, steel-and-glass office boxes, and all the aesthetic ills to which East German territory had been heir, relieved by outlying neighborhoods of red-roofed or slated structures from a time before explosives could be dropped from the sky. The landscape was bitter, leafless, and sere with frost, but attractive in its forms. There were low, wooded hills and distant gray pastures and a broad, flat river not yet frozen.
