by Ben Tripp
“Quit the job?” Gheorghe said.
“Yes,” Sax said, and hung his hands between his thighs, head down. He felt the tiredness of an old man again. He wanted suddenly to retire to Miami Beach. He wanted to have a pool boy and a pool, in that order, and never purchase or sell another fine object of any description.
“We cannot the job quit, Saxon.” Gheorghe’s voice had lost its laughter.
“Watch me do it,” Sax said. “I quit. So does he. You quit too, right, Rock?”
“Yeah. Fuck it. I quit. I’d rather fight the fuckin’ Red Guard. They can’t move that fast.”
Gheorghe was shaking his head now. The gallows smile came back on his face. “You do not get what it is, gentlemen,” he said. “We cannot quit this game. This vampire, she knows who we are. She has seen us now. We shoot boyfriend in his head some more, probably not happy for that. I think we are, so to say—fucked in our bottoms.”
“One of her minions,” Sax said, amazed he was using the word minions so soon after using the word henchmen, “raided my warehouse, you know. She already knew who I was. And yet she allowed me to live.”
Gheorghe was no longer smiling. “She allow you to live because then she had object. She want clock of yours, got clock. All done. Kill only man between her and clock. Watchman, not you. Now you are make her not safe, you understand? You are the threat. Now the watchman is you.”
He was right. Sax saw it.
“I’m not between her and anything, though, right?” Rock said.
“I think,” Gheorghe said, “boyfriend is problem there. You and me, he not like us anymore.”
“Damn.”
They were silent and the dawn came up and they said nothing and did nothing except watch the light behind the curtains grow brighter.
They couldn’t even turn back now. The fight was on.
Sax wished he had a better plan. Rock’s eyes closed and he breathed deeply, arms crossed on his chest like a dead man at a wake. Sax and Gheorghe stared into the carpet.
“I’ll tell you what,” Sax said, breaking the silence. “I think Paolo is going to get us out of this. He’s got a whole army of his own, you know. These fellows are highly trained. They can come bomb the castle or something. The Vatican. Make itself useful for once.”
Gheorghe snorted. “Why they do not already come? They know where is the vampire now. They only need to make it dead.”
“Well . . . ,” Sax said, not realizing it was a rhetorical question.
“Because,” Gheorghe went on, “is political problem. Catholic Church never invade anybody for many years. They come with bombs and soldiers, all of a sudden, right? Suddenly not neutral. Is at war with Germany. Not good thing.”
“Damn,” Sax said.
Gheorghe was right. The Vatican would never have let an amateur get this far if they had any choice, but they didn’t. It had been the same each time. Sax did the dirty work, or got his people to do it, more accurately, and then Rome came along and mopped up the gravy as a privilege of the Church.
“So we’re just stuck fighting this vampire on our own, is that what you think?” Sax said.
“I think that, yes.”
“Right,” Sax said, trying to think what to do next. His latest plan was to change his name and hide in Venezuela. Then Rock spoke. He had not been asleep.
“I say we get ourselves back to France and hole up in your place for a while and figure out how we’re gonna proceed,” he said. “If this vampire has a grudge, I don’t want to be sitting in a hotel room when she decides to do something about it.”
The camper van was destroyed.
It had been merely damaged the night before. Gheorghe’s door had been dented in, the paint all along the passenger side was ruined, the wing mirror and door handle gone. The roof was buckled. The side window was broken. That was bad enough.
They had made it easy for the vandal, parking the camper behind a rubbish skip to avoid unnecessary questions about what had happened to it—so the working-over had been done unobserved. It was thorough. Now the van sat on four burst tires; every window had been pushed in—not smashed, but crushed, probably to avoid making enough noise to attract attention in the parking lot. Not only were the tires and windows destroyed, the interior was torn to shreds, the seats reduced to twisted wire and chunks of foam, the steering wheel uprooted, the dashboard split and bent. Nothing was left.
The finishing touch was a spray of reeking, semifrozen liquid shit that spattered the detritus on the floor. It looked like the vehicle had been abandoned for six months in the worst neighborhood in Detroit.
“Man,” Rock said.
“Vampire, you mean,” Sax said. “Yeretyik did this, mark my words. That’s vampire poo.”
“The rental is on your credit card, right?” Gheorghe said.
The towing service arrived swiftly. They decided to say the vehicle had been stolen. No sense trying to explain they had partially wrecked it in the night and someone else had finished the job. Sax and Rock got a lift with the tow truck driver to the rental car place, where they recognized Sax—he had been their best customer all week.
For Sax’s part, he hoped the people at the rental place were impressed by the variety and quality of his lovers. He’d shown up with the gorgeous Italian dressed as a priest, then the desperate-eyed Romanian, and now this enormous black American who looked like a professional athlete.
They didn’t remark upon it, but handled the paperwork and insurance and provided a new vehicle with consummate professionalism, and assured Sax there was no difficulty with the stolen and destroyed van. These things occur. He couldn’t believe they were letting him off the hook.
Rock drove Sax back to the hotel in the newly rented sport-utility vehicle and they loaded their gear into the back. Then Rock started driving to nowhere in particular, as long as they were moving. There was some argument as to what to do next. Sax’s authority was thoroughly undermined. He wasn’t the boss anymore, now that the job was off the track he had intended. The impetus was on the vampire’s side. Whether Sax or Rock decided what to do next, it hardly mattered. Even if he knew what he wanted done, there wasn’t any reason to accept his authority.
He’d known there was a danger of this. The team was necessarily composed of loners, brought together for a purpose interesting enough to keep them working in concert. Now that things had gone wrong, they were loners again, each scheming to ensure their own best outcome. Gheorghe was all for melting into the scenery. Give up their old lives and find something else to do that wouldn’t attract attention. They could just slip away, one at a time, in some busy place.
“They can smell you, man,” Rock said. “You can lose a human tail. Get lost in a crowd. But you can’t shake a thing that just has to put its nose up in the air.”
“So I will change my smell,” Gheorghe said.
“I been wanting to suggest that for days,” Rock said.
“It doesn’t work, Gheorghe,” Sax said. “Perhaps for you, but not for me. Without the life I have waiting for me back in New York, I’m nothing. I’m already dead. And as for you, I was told by Paolo that there was a plea bargain involved in your participation on this mission, set up by his people with the cooperation of the international courts. So you would be going back on a deal with one of the most powerful and extensive organizations in human history. That would take some very serious disappearing, vampire or no vampire.”
Rock had his own idea, also shaped by his way of getting through life. He was a soldier, a man who balanced strategy with direct action. “What I’m thinking is we got this vampire’s attention, right? So maybe we’re the bait in the tiger trap. We get Paolo and them to hook up with some serious firepower—I know some people that would kick ass in this situation—and kind of ease on over here with us and hide in the woods. We make ourselves obvious, they come after us, and our backup lights them u
p. Vampires may be immortal, but they’re not invulnerable, you dig the distinction there? Can’t die, but if you’re in little inch-long pieces, it don’t matter.”
“That was exactly what I did last time,” Sax said. “It’s a lovely way of dealing with a single monster. You just have to make sure you collect all the bits and dispose of them properly so they don’t grow back. We have a different circumstance here. This vampire is not going to do its own attacking. It’s a thinker. It will use its understudies to attack from behind. What happens when we have an army hidden in the trees and it goes ’round one at a time and kills everybody and we’re standing there with our trousers down waiting for the gunfire to begin? We’ll feel pretty foolish, is what, and then we’ll still die.”
Sax realized they hadn’t heard his original, terrible plan.
“I didn’t tell you this before, because I was not altogether convinced I could go through with it. But I have had, in my longanimous way, a scheme that has been brewing. It is not a good scheme, because it involves me being anywhere near the danger zone. I confess that was my primary reservation.”
Rock pulled the vehicle off the road into a petrol station and turned all the way around in his seat to face Sax. His height was so great that his head nearly touched the ceiling; a shadow from the light reflected off the ground outside had formed above him, narrowing to a dark point that hung above his head so that he became a glowering exclamation point looking at Sax.
“If you got a plan, old man, now would be a goddamn good time to mention it,” Rock said.
“Three days ago would have been a good time to mention also this plan,” Gheorghe added, all but fingering an invisible dagger.
“It’s not a good plan,” Sax observed. “Stupid, in fact. This was my earliest idea, from when I first won the loathsome clock and suspected I was up against something inhuman. I was thinking I would get the Vatican’s help to determine who the vampire was and where she is, and more or less give her a ring on the telephone to offer her my services as an expert in securing sound articles.”
“You’d offer to work for the vampire?” Rock said, his voice flat.
“Precisely. I offer to procure for the vampire any further articles of furniture or objets d’art she might require. Get better prices than she was, at a modest commission. And I was going to offer to sell her a particular ormolu clock, which was an item I know she greatly desired.”
“That’s the worst plan I ever heard,” Rock observed. “Bullshit, even.”
“Yes. I’m not finished,” Sax said. “A bullshit plan. But you see, that was only part one. In the second part, I collect a few items for her, pack them up, and send my removals experts to deliver them. These experts would in fact be a crack team of vampire killers—yourselves—who kill the vampire while it’s cackling over the clock and so forth, and once that’s done, in we go to loot the place. You know the way vampires are—they gloat terribly. You can often get them while they’re gloating.”
“We were the delivery people?” Gheorghe said.
“You didn’t think I’d risk showing up in person, did you?” Sax said, indignant. “But as I said, that was only the first version of my plan. It gets worse.”
Rock shook his head. “Now, hold on. That sounds like a pretty damn good plan. Why don’t we—”
“Because she had her people steal the beastly clock before I could make the offer, is why. There went my leverage, and my night watchman, a fellow named Alberto. Her hired burglar killed him.”
“She should have used me,” Gheorghe said. “I would only stun him on the head.”
“Very humane,” Sax said. “Stop talking nonsense. Plan B was no better than plan A. It was plan B we were here to explore. I didn’t mention the details because unfortunately it involved my personal participation. I was going to go up to the castle—”
“You personally?” Rock said.
“Me personally, yes. I told you it wasn’t a good plan. Hence the B. I was going to toddle on up to the gates, knock knock knock, hello, I’m Asmodeus Saxon-Tang the antiques dealer whose night watchman you slew and whose ormolu clock you absconded with, and I would like the clock back, please.”
There was a silence that curled up like cigarette smoke into the air between them. Traffic rumbled past on the road. Motorists came and went, rubbing their arms as they dashed through the cold to their cars. It was ordinary life in Germany outside the windows of the SUV, but it had the quality of a movie projected on a screen. Nothing seemed real.
“And?” Rock said.
“And,” said Sax, “while I’m talking to the vampire, you lot set off the explosives, rush in, and kill it.”
“You make the joke,” Gheorghe said.
“No,” Sax said.
“What explosives?” Rock said.
“The details weren’t fully formed in my mind. I was thinking some sort of mixture of TNT; liquid diallyl disulfide, which of course is a distillate of garlic . . . and roofing nails.”
They had no plan, and therefore, no purpose in Germany any longer.
They didn’t know how to keep safe. Staying in hotels seemed like suicide, after the destruction of the camper. The vampire had either hunted them down by smell or somehow gotten hold of their itinerary. The latter possibility worried Sax the most. He had been calling the farmhouse at intervals, spelling out what they were doing to keep that blasted Emily from worrying about him.
This vampire was clever, and not the recluse Sax was expecting. She had something like a social life, what with all the hundings, the human familiars, and the Russian Yeretyik hanging about. She clearly knew about Sax and had been several steps ahead of him the entire time. He’d been played, in fact, for a fool. The creature must have been allowing him to get close, poke around her lair, just for the sheer sport of it. Something to occupy her time. It was not at all out of the question that she had put a tap on the telephone at the farmhouse and was listening to everything Sax said.
When Sax relayed this line of thinking, all three men were of one mind: they were damn well not getting back into a small airplane destined for a known airfield where an ambush could be arranged. Sax had the brilliant idea that they might drive all the way back to France. It would take the rest of the day, and they could come up with a new plan while they drove. Rather than sit at a restaurant where they might be observed, gripped by paranoia as they were, the men decided to grab lunch at a Nordsee restaurant, specializing in take-out fish items; Rock and Gheorghe had been happy to go to the McDonald’s down the street because then they didn’t have to get out of the vehicle, but Sax could not stoop so low. He made Rock go inside to pick up the Nordsee order, however. The entire world was swarming with hidden Russian vampires with ruined, purple-scarred skulls waiting to get him. He didn’t dare get out of the vehicle.
They ate and drove and the air in the SUV was overheated and stale and Gheorghe began a campaign of silent, aggressive flatulence, after each episode of which he would laugh his hahahaha mechanical laugh, and then Sax and Rock would smell it a few seconds later and there would be much complaining and rolling down of windows to let the freezing air blast the stench out. So they were never entirely warm. The trip would take them five hours at a good pace. They were heading back to the farm in Petit-Grünenwald, tails firmly between their legs.
15
* * *
France
Paolo was in love with Emily.
He didn’t want to admit it to himself. There was too much going on—the world had crowded in upon him too suddenly. He knew what he was experiencing was simply temptation wrapping itself around his cerebral cortex and squeezing—the devil, if one wished to put it in those terms, using the tools at his disposal to capitalize on Paolo’s weakened state. Paolo didn’t entirely buy the concept of the devil as a cloven-hoofed entity that personally moved in people’s lives; God was that way, but God was the creator. The devil
was just a character, a personification of certain immutable problems in human nature.
It had been easier for Paolo to ignore the sudden blooming of this emotion inside him while he was in charge of Nilu’s care. He had focused on that project with desperate attention, keeping the poor suffering girl drinking water, and when that failed, melting ice into her mouth. At last, overriding Sax’s orders in the name of saving a life, Paolo had called Fra Giuseppe in Rome and begged him to come at once. Now that brother Giu was in the maison de maître with his thin, pimply assistant, Fra Dinckel, tending to the victim, Paolo had been consigned to ice-fetching duty. He had time to think about his emotional state again. Fra Dinckel was an officious youth, evidently delighted at the opportunity to stand over someone on death’s doorstep and look pious and disappointed. His job was to read from the Bible in Latin, which he did in a high, reedy voice with a German accent. It was like listening to a fly trapped in a bottle. Paolo couldn’t stand to be in the room for long.
Fra Giu was tireless. He was plump, silver haired, with a nose that looked like something to be stored in a root cellar for winter stews. His hands worked swiftly, feeling for the hidden wounds upon Nilu’s neck. Paolo had not been able to find them, but Giu did. At the base of the throat, on the right side. He had asked Paolo if by any chance the girl was baptized; Paolo did not think so. Fra Giu had frowned with his short, thick eyebrows folded in half over his eyes. He was trying to save someone at a great disadvantage, as her soul was already in hock. That was how he put it: dato in pegno. He assembled a breathing apparatus, regulator, tubes, and mask, and installed them on a tall oxygen tank that was parked on a trolley by the bedside.
Satisfied Nilu was getting some proper air, Giu rummaged in his doctor’s bag, an orange nylon thing with a hundred compartments filled with modern medical supplies as well as stoppered jars of ancient remedies, herbs, and poultices. He took out a black pouch containing four small vials and one large one. He began mixing these powders in a saucer, dropping in small measures of water to make the stuff into a paste. Paolo knew what that was: a silver acetate solution in the big bottle, assorted sulfides and salts in the others. Some combination of them would soften the vampire’s adhesive saliva seal on the neck wound.
