The Ruby Tear

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “What? Where?” She sounded alarmed. “Not the Balkans again!”

  “Thereabouts, yes, but don’t worry about me. The war left lots of lame men there,” he said harshly. “I’ll be invisible. I’ll get a chance to go places I never got to before, see things nobody from outside has seen. There’s interest from the New Yorker in anything I write from there.”

  “You could get killed!”

  “The fighting’s over,” he said.

  “The hating isn’t,” she retorted. “War could start again any time.”

  “I’ve made up my mind. I just didn’t want to leave Walter Steinhart the job of telling you.” He chuckled. “He’s not exactly the soul of tact, our Walter.”

  “I wouldn’t say you were a star in that department either,” Jess said in a muffled tone.

  Nick tried again. “I have nothing to do here. The play is shaping up, Walter’s happy without any help from me. I need to get moving. But first I need to get through to you, Jess.”

  He hesitated; but he had no choice but to warn her, at least.

  She was crying, he knew, though it sounded as if she had the mouthpiece partly covered with her hand.

  He swallowed and went on as calmly as he could: “Somebody left some jewelry for you to wear in the play.”

  Silence. Then she said flatly, “God damn it. Walter’s a double agent, isn’t he? He tells me about you, and he tells you about me.”

  “Of course not,” he lied. And she probably knew it. “But I am worried, and that—that present you got is part of the reason. I can’t explain the whole thing now, not over the phone, but it’s a sort of—a sort of danger signal, all right?”

  “No,” she answered irritably. “Not all right. What the hell is this all about?”

  How much did he have to tell her? Tentatively he began, “This will sound strange, but you’ve got to believe me. God, I sound like an actor in a very bad play, don’t I?”

  She snorted. “Yup, a real stinker. I’m going back to bed.”

  “Jess, wait.” Nick took a deep breath and plunged, trusting his instincts to put the proper limits on what he was about to say. “I’ve got an enemy. That is, my family’s had a problem with somebody for a long time. It’s like—think of it as a kind of a feud that crops up every now and then, an old quarrel that just won’t go away.”

  “This sounds like the people in your play. I’ve said the lines often enough: the family fortune comes from ‘an ancient crime that has to be paid for’.”

  God, she knew so much already, without knowing that she knew it! He faltered, realizing that he had somehow included hints of the bailiff’s story in the background plot of the play long before he’d ever heard of the Burch collection.

  He shook himself back into the present (which smelled powerfully of juicy corned beef and chicken soup). “I’m talking about reality, Jess. Listen to me, please. I never thought this old problem would interfere in my own life, and I certainly never imagined you could be involved. My God, if anything happens to you—”

  “Nick, stop! Are you in some kind of trouble with—with the mob, or something?”

  He knew his laughter sounded wild and he choked it off. “No, no, nothing like that. It’s a personal thing. It’s to do with the car crash.”

  He heard the little catch in her breath, and then the forced patience in her voice as she began to recite the old, useless reassurances.

  “The police checked everything at the time, Nick. The brake fluid was low—”

  “No, you don’t understand.” He leaned heavily against the scarred plaster. The odorous kitchen heat was making him sweat under his heavy coat. Leave the crash out of it, that was a mistake—the harbinger at the junction that he had seen but she hadn’t—it was too far fetched for her to believe.

  “Let’s just say, some members of my family have died young and violently. When you look at our history you can’t help noticing a kind of really crappy luck dogging us—something willful and deliberate, even.”

  “Nick,” she answered, “just talk to me; don’t tell me horror stories.”

  “Listen to me!” he shouted over a racket of crockery and silver crashed somewhere in the kitchen, followed by shouts and cursing. “Before my grandfather died—that’s Grampa Griffin, the one who started as a strikebreaker and ended up head of United Electrocom—he found a ring in his coat pocket one morning, a nasty sort of novelty piece. It had a little skeleton etched into the ring stone, laid out as if in a coffin, the most morbid thing—and there are rumors of other tokens like that in earlier generations, presents from our enemy. Warnings. A week later he died in a boating accident.”

  She didn’t say anything, but he could hear her breathing.

  “These things turn up, and then one of us gets hurt—” He couldn’t bring himself to say, whichever man is current head of the family gets more than hurt. He gets killed. He hurried on, filling the silence. “You see why I’m worried? I think you’ve been given one of the Griffin warnings.”

  “This is going much too fast for me,” Jess muttered. She paused, then added rather plaintively, “What I got was a lovely thing, really, a sort of filigree locket.”

  “I don’t mean you’re the target,” he added quickly. “The warning is meant for me. The bastard is taunting me through you, because— well, it wouldn’t be hard to find out that you and I were close once. So you have to watch out for yourself, Jess. Don’t take anything for granted, don’t take anyone for granted, do you hear me? Especially people you don’t really know.”

  “I said, hold it!” she yelled into the phone. “Are you seriously warning me not to talk to strangers? What are you, my mother?”

  This was just not going to go right, was it.

  “Jess. I think the jewelry is a token meant for me. I think someone just used you as a kind of message-drop. But I don’t want you in the middle of this—this problem of mine. If you got hurt because of it—Jess. Do you know who sent you that pendant?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You do too, don’t you. You’re trying to warn me off him. Nick, are you jealous? Because you have not right to be, all right? Not anymore.”

  Was he? Yes, a little; but above all, he was afraid for her.

  “Just be really, really careful. I don’t think this guy would try to hurt you—it’s me he’s after. But he’s very dangerous. Please be very, very careful.”

  “Oh, hell, I’m too tired for all this. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “I’ll be gone by then,” he said.

  “What about your dogs?”

  “I’d give them to you if I could, to look out for you while I’m gone.”

  Another pause. Then she said, “Go, Nick, if that’s what you need to do. And you be careful too.”

  Then there was just the dial tone.

  He hung up the phone.

  “About time,” growled a fat little man in a huge tweed coat, shoving past him to get at the phone. “What a town, you can’t even make a phone call without having to listen in on somebody’s crazy soap opera first!”

  Dining Out

  Baron von Craggen went hunting. He tracked a thin, weary prostitute, who wore a false-fur coat spottily trimmed with spangles, until nearly dawn. Then she collected her dole of crack in exchange for her night’s earnings. He darted ahead of her as she hurried home, and called to her from the doorway of a boarded up brownstone slated for gentrification.

  He felt good: .steady, strong, and in control. This was his normal life, with no wild impulses to taste the mouth of his enemy’s woman in a public place, like some rash, love-stricken boy! Kissing, like a suitor, where for generations of his dark life he had only gone for food and where he could commit swift piracy that involved him in no social aftermath.

  What in the name of all his years had happened to him?

  He pushed thoughts of Jessamyn Croft away and instead watched his chosen victim hesitate, trembling in the grip of slavery to the drug in her pocket. Her face was turned toward
him, whiter than salt, and he saw the tip of her tongue nervously moisten her lips.

  She was a child really, but already the stamp of death was plain for one who could see it. Without a doubt, she carried some infection that would kill her before long. He recognized the dull sheen of despair in her eyes and the self-neglect of despair in the droop of the ragged black tights showing below her shabby coat’s hem.

  Keeping silent, he watched her decide to turn one last trick after hours, for a payment she might secretly keep for herself instead of surrendering it to her pimp. Something to buy breakfast with later. Or more drugs.

  Something she wanted enough to make her reckless.

  “What do you like, Mister?” she said finally, moving cautiously nearer. Lank hair straggled from a crooked French knot at the nape of her thin neck.

  “Come closer,” he said. “Twenty dollars—”

  “Twenty-five,” she said, with a spasmodic grin no doubt meant to be a willing smile. Two teeth were missing on the left side of her mouth. Her pimp was obviously not an easy boss. Someday Ivo would get around to him, too, maybe, and return treatment in kind plus a little extra.

  But for tonight: “Twenty-five,” he agreed. “Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you.”

  If she had been a little stronger, a little less sick, she might have had the spirit to divert him with a wisecrack, something like, “If anybody could still hurt me, mister, I wouldn’t be in this line of work.”

  And then he might have given her the money for the simple feel of her thin breasts under his hands, so she would have cash in her pocket for a cup of coffee, and maybe that would lead her to something else, something better. It was a fancy he sometimes indulged in about these thrown-away ones.

  But she was too far gone, he could see that; and it decided him. He was a skilled practitioner of his own form of triage.

  She came nearer, her thin face blank with resignation. So he turned her back against the boarded up door, took her bony frame in his arms, drew down the matted collar of the coat, and pressed his lips to her throat.

  A pinch on her cheek distracted her—she never felt his fangs break her skin. Then he sucked in such a powerful draught of her blood that she lost consciousness immediately, collapsing against him.

  He drank what he needed as fast as he could; her blood was no vintage to linger over. Then, seeing no one at hand to observe, he hefted her cooling corpse in his arms and carried it across the street to the ratty little park on the other side, where he set her down on a half-broken bench. He tucked her old coat modestly about her skinny legs and left her there, pale and lifeless.

  Once again safe in his own apartment, he sat in the light of the special bulbs he had installed in his kitchen and examined three trays of jewelry. These were the fruits of his labors in Europe, on his last trip. He picked up each piece and studied it, matching it tentatively to a selection of names from a list of dealers and collectors on a long yellow legal pad at his elbow.

  While he worked, he drank red wine. His hardy digestive system had already cleansed the girl’s drug-tainted blood, but the taste of it had been foul.

  Dark Mother, he called in his mind after a while, are you with me tonight?

  Every night, the answer came. You have fed on illness again, Baron.

  An addict. I ended her misery and filled my belly at the same time. Isn’t that what you intended for me? That I should become a public benefactor?

  I intended to help you find your property and take your revenge.

  Well, I am close, I think. He scurries about, searching for salvation from me, and I wouldn’t dream of interrupting his progress beforetime. Let it play itself out, that is always the best way. Meanwhile I must nourish myself, as you well know. Do you disapprove of my hunting?

  Silence.

  He wondered if she had withdrawn, as she sometimes did for weeks at a time lately. He studied a handsome silver belt-buckle inlaid with jet, searching for cracks or chips in the stones. Often he obtained pieces under circumstances that didn’t permit close and careful examination on the spot—in shadowy bomb sites, makeshift cafes, and gloomy alleyways.

  The setting needed polishing, just enough to give sculptural depth to the silver work. But he didn’t feel like laying out his cleaning kit.

  He sat back and toyed with his wineglass, turning it on its round base and idly wondering how steep an angle he could hold it at without losing a drop of the dregs.

  What I disapprove of is not your hunting, the answer came at last, but as to that, with a little effort you could have taken sweeter blood.

  I want no sweeter blood! I want no blood at all, and when my work is finished here I will starve for lack of it without complaint. I have seen enough of addiction by now to swear that the last Baron von Craggen will not be bound to this world by an addiction to anyone’s blood!

  So you deliberately choose to drink filth?

  I drink filth so that I will not drink more, or more often, than I must. And because for such creatures, the rejected people of this society, no one else has any use that is not foul. These castaways sustain me, though, and for that I love them, in my own way.

  Who else is there to love them at all? What the world of men has become bewilders me. At least in my time there was the Church. The helping orders of monks and nuns, worldly and corrupt as they often were, did at least offer a little charitable love, even to lepers.

  Again, a pause, and he could hear the faint pounding of mindless modern music vibrating in the building’s walls.

  Was she blonde, your prey of tonight?

  Did she resemble my lost Magda? No, she did not. I think not, anyway; I do not remember anymore what Magda looked like, you know that. But if Magda lived in this world instead of that one, she might have ended on the streets like this girl, after my enemies were done with her.

  This is an old pattern with you, Baron, sighed the voice in his mind. Are you not tired of it? Your pity, your love, your feelings of any kind have no effect one way or the other on these bits of human garbage that you release from their wretched lives. I like to see you take more pleasure in your food. Perhaps this other one, this woman of the stage—

  He didn’t answer, but turned and turned his glass and thought about a certain man he knew who would pay a pretty penny for that delicate intaglioed watch-fob in red carnelian, lying in the middle tray.

  I see in your mind that she is beautiful, although marked by injury and suffering. Not like Magda, of course—

  Nothing like Magda.

  That wasn’t quite true, but he didn’t want to discuss it further with the Dark One, who might—how could he tell?—feel jealous.

  Jessamyn Croft had a touch of what he remembered as a certain purity in Magda, not in the limited sense of chastity but the wider one, the quality of the soul. In Magda this had been the result of her devotion to God and all His saints and His angels; she had been aggressively pious, even for those days. But in those rough times piety had been a necessary defense for a young woman.

  Sometimes he wondered if Magda had come to accept her abduction as simply God’s will. She would have loved this dainty golden rosary cross with a saint—good God, he forgot which was which sometimes!—painted in the center in beautifully detailed enamel.

  In Jessamyn Croft he also read a sort of purifying dedication. He couldn’t tell what it was, but that it attracted him was undeniable.

  This actress loves the enemy of the house of Craggen, the Other said, interrupting his restless musing. You do know that she loves your enemy, do you not?

  He shook his head like a horse shaking off flies. Of course I know it! That is why she is of use to me: she will be my path to him, one way or another. As it is, I would only have to twist her hair in my fingers to have him come running to save her, right into my waiting hands. And when the time is right, I will.

  Are you so sure? came the reply. I think you call her image to mind more often than befits a mere tool of your design.

  He chu
ckled unpleasantly. So I should enjoy my feeding but not enjoy the hunt, is that your instruction? Why should I not toy with the woman who is the beloved of my enemy, before I attack that enemy himself? His cursed ancestor used, abused, and destroyed the sweet one of my own heart, long ago. I take what is owed me plus some small interest, bit by bit; that is all.

  Silence, broken by the distant wail of a siren that he could hear right through the windowpanes. He took another sip of wine and began turning the glass again.

  You are not on your home ground now, Baron. There are so many distractions, and too few reminders of your task. Take care that you are not drawn off your path, or it may be you who needs the pity and—the love, if that is what it is, of others.

  Well, he responded lightly, that would be a new experience, at least.

  But in his mind he saw the face of Jessamyn Croft, with its frank intelligence and its beauty subtly tempered by suffering.

  The wineglass tilted in his grip, and the last drops shot out and spattered a fine necklace of inlaid silver, so that it looked as it had when he had bought it from a weeping old man in the ruins of what had once been a music shop. Then, the necklace had still been stained with the blood of the old man’s wife, shot by a chetnik sniper in the hills above Sarajevo.

  Accidents

  Jess found Marie in the costume shop, huddled in a chair in the corner with a battered tin box in her lap. Half-hidden amid the hanging racks of clothing basted and glued and velcroed for quick changes, the dresser was quietly crying.

  It’s happened again, Jess thought with a clutch of dread; the prankster has struck. She pushed past the worn worktable with its aged sewing machines and bent over the woman.

  “Marie, what’s wrong?”

  The dresser mutely held out the box and pulled off the lid: it was the old lozenge-tin she had used to put the Berlin iron pendant and earrings in, to lock them inside the drawer in Nell Clausen’s desk that served as the Edwardian’s “safe.” Now the jewelry lay tangled into a bizarre knot, held together as if by invisible welds, a useless lump of intricately worked metal.