The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  He smiled again. “The Privcom Act has been successfully challenged in more than one court case.”

  “Only for individual applications,” said Cagey. “It’s never been set aside as a general guiderule. But for now, just tell us whatever you’d feel easy telling anyone.”

  He glanced again at our client. “To be quite frank, I don’t feel easy saying anything more than I’ve already said about Batory in front of M. Greenhill.”

  “Not even his new address?” M. Greenhill snapped back.

  “Oh, yes, I’d tell that with no hesitation at all, if I knew it. I don’t. I can only assume that it’s somewhere in or near town, since the lad has no personal transportation except his legs. Unless he’s acquired a bike or small motor, which I doubt. Between us, I don’t think he has the money. For the same reason, he’ll probably have chosen cheap housing, maybe even a single room in one of the local rooms-for-rent places. I can’t see him spacing out even temporarily with anyone in a rival Greek house, but he might be doing so with an old chum in one of the residence halls. He probably won’t have been able to find any room there in his own name, not this early in the fall semester while they’re still crowded with new frosh and other students. In fact, it must have taken quite a search to find a room anywhere around here in his price range at this time of year.”

  “No personal transportation except his legs,” Cagey repeated. “Can’t he fly?” She said it so deadpan that for a second I was ready to take her seriously.

  Dr. Fairchild, however, chuckled at once. “No, if the ability to change into a bat is one of Batory’s faults, he’s never said so, and none of us have ever caught him at it. In fact, it’s among the traditional dracula abilities he denies possessing, so if he can do it, he’s lying about that as well. But even if he could get around that way, it’s difficult to see how he could carry his pocket computer, microtext reader, and other class supplies.”

  April said, “If you don’t mind, I think I’d rather leave now. I can wait in the car while Dr. Fairchild tells you all the smut he wants to tell you about M. Czarny.”

  She had never sat down. Now she simply walked out of the room, pausing only to deposit her partly nibbled sandwich on the edge of the tray. She seemed to be quivering a little, and I thought I saw tears in her green eyes.

  Dr. Fairchild watched her go, even got up and stood at the study door quietly looking after her until we heard the front door almost slam; but he never offered her the use of another room in his house to wait in. He might have understood that she’d probably have refused it anyway.

  Cagey felt so abashed—as she later confessed to me—at the callousness of her little joke that she chastised herself by not refilling her coffee mug. Without leaving her seat, she asked only, “Well, Professor?”

  “Well,” he replied, turning back to us, “I feel perfectly free to tell this much, Lieutenant Warrington, seeing that it’s an idea I worked out for myself. Something Batory never has—probably never would—confide in me. I think he may be considerably older than he looks or admits.”

  “How much older?”

  “That,” said Fairchild, “I couldn’t pretend to estimate. My guess would be between one and four centuries.”

  “You’re telling us,” I exclaimed, “that he is a real vampire?”

  “That depends on your definition of ‘a real vampire,’ doesn’t it? In a sense, your mosquito, sometimes called Wisconsin’s state bird, is a real vampire. Enough of them feasting together can even endanger the life of a fairly large mammal. Batory drinks raw blood, so I would call him a real vampire.”

  “Then he can probably fly, too.” For once, Cagey was even more open with her skepticism than I. “Dr. Fairchild,” she went on, “last time I took the Standard Test, my score was fifty-three percent reality perception. Might I ask yours?”

  “Ninety-three point eight five two and so on to thirty-nine decimal places. I could rattle them all off to you, but for practical purposes, it rounds off to ninety-four percent.”

  “Reality or fantasy?”

  “Reality. Like most of the total population, if not most of the New Millennium student enrollment, I’m a registered reality perceiver. So, I might add, could Batory be, with a reality score in the nineties, for all his costuming and posturing and official fancy-class registration. And yes, Lieutenant, I have been reTested in the last five years. In fact, at my age, I take the Test every year, and every year I Test out to within a dozen decimal points of the year before.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Cagey remarked. “Well, can he turn himself into a bat, or not? Sleep upside down, or in a coffin full of unsanctified bone-yard earth? Call up the wolves to his will? How long are his fangs? Does he flinch away from garlic? Don’t keep us in suspense: exactly how much of a dracula is he?”

  “I think I’ve already answered the bat question,” Dr. Fairchild said a little stiffly, “to the best of my ability. His dogteeth are scarcely noticeable, though in his ten percent or thereabouts fantasy perception he considers them inconveniently long. To the rest of your questions, if you happen to be serious in asking them, no. As far as I know, he sleeps in a bed, like everybody else. I don’t base my estimate of his age on his vampirism, Lieutenant. There’s a sound, if little-known, scientific basis for the theory.”

  I asked, “Is he from that little country in Russia or somewhere where people live to two or three hundred and still have to get their parents’ permission to get married at sixty, or something?”

  Fairchild treated me to the look he’d given Cagey a moment earlier: the kind of expression Enrico Fermi might have used on someone who’d just stated that the Periodic Table was all nonsense. “All through recorded history,” he said, “scientists and others have been on the trail of the secret of youth. There’s a respectable body of scholarly opinion that last century’s Nazi researchers found it, but weren’t able to promulgate it because of losing the war. Another one who may have found it was Countess Batory, sometimes called ‘the female Dracula.’ Even after adjusting the traditions for folkloric exaggeration, her secret seems to have involved bathing in human blood, not merely drinking it. Wilson, Meadows, and Sondergaard suggest that the Nazis may have been working with certain obscure Batorian manuscripts that have since been lost.”

  “And Countess Batory,” Cagey guessed, “was an ancestress of M. Czarny’s?”

  Fairchild said, “He doesn’t claim it. But the family name is the same.”

  “Maybe Batory is the original Countess herself,” Cagey suggested, so dryly that for a second I wasn’t quite sure whether she was serious, or still playing the extreme skeptic to draw the interviewee out. “Maybe her Undying Youthfulship decided to get a sex change and try life from the other side.”

  “I doubt that,” said Fairchild. “Although it is possible that the youth renewal process involves some kind of forgetfulness or clinical amnesia about the earlier centuries of life, either as a side effect or an integral factor. Meadows, Taplinger, Matsumo, and Forzt would all suggest that if someone such as Batory had been through such a renewal, he might not be aware of it himself.”

  Cagey clucked her tongue. “Poor Batory! What’d be the point of having lived before, if you couldn’t remember it?”

  VI

  (From the Memoirs of Sylvia Tomlinson Marlene)

  We spent ten more minutes with Dr. Fairchild. The rest of the interview went much more sanely, and it might be doing the professor emeritus a bit of an injustice not to transcribe it all—he was really quite an intelligent, well-read man, and could be a charming host—but he told us nothing else that we hadn’t already learned either from our client or the people at the Pi Rho house. About the Pi Rho pledge rites and other ceremonies he pled fraternity secrecy, and Cagey respected it; but he assured us there was never any dangerous hazing. “No,” he volunteered, anticipating our repetition of a question he must already have heard elsewhere
, “I promise you, the Purple Rose ritual had nothing to do with the deaths of either Tallpines or Barghoothi. A very unfortunate coincidence, but not completely outside the realm of mathematical possibility.” Asked about the use of M. Greenhill’s name in pledge rites, he denied any knowledge of it. “I suppose it’s possible, of course. Boys will always talk about girls, especially girls of a certain ...” He cut himself off, to resume, “Always out of my earshot, of course. But in any event, even assuming that some of the brothers sometimes use…the names of ... nonGreek friends to tease pledges and initiates, there is no way that she or anyone else so used should ever find out about it, unless someone has broken the code of fraternal secrecy. Did she mention where she got such data?”

  “Imagination, maybe,” my lieutenant suggested smoothly. “Or rumor, or somebody teasing her a little with false information about the ceremonies.”

  I nodded, seeing no reason to tattle on the late Solly Barghoothi Goldfein, and considering the whole business of fraternity secrecy rather silly and outmoded anyway.

  When we got back out to the car, April wasn’t there.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  Cagey suggested, “See if she left a message.”

  “She couldn’t have. We’ve got the car keys.” At that time, all the automated car accessories still depended on the ignition key. It wasn’t until a few years later that a separate on/off button for such things as radio, windows, and message screen became standard equipment on all North American makes and models. Since I had one of the keys we’d been given when renting the car, and Cagey had the other, there was no way our client could have activated the screen to leave us a message.

  “We should have thought to give her a key, anyway,” I went on, conscience-stricken. “She couldn’t even unlock the car door to get in.” It was a convertible, and we’d left the top down; but car locks that could be operated only with the key had been standard in convertibles since the 2020s.

  “She could have climbed over easily enough.” Cagey started to demonstrate.

  “Don’t,” I begged her. Three accidents in a single morning would have been abnormal even for Cagey Thursday, but as she flung one knee up to hook over the top of the door and prepared to hop with the other leg, she seemed to be issuing an open invitation to her own patron goddess, Misfortune. I added, “Besides, M. Greenhill might not have wanted to look undignified.”

  “Undignified?” Cagey repeated, looking puzzled, a little silly, and sublimely lacking in self-consciousness as she balanced precariously on the car door. “Well, if you say so. I guess at that age people are either completely uninhibited or way too much on their dignity. Especially with this new generation. Back in the Twenties—oh, Lordy, listen to me! You aren’t supposed to start talking like this till you’re a senior citizen. Tommi, we’re in the betwixt and between years—too old to be hailed as the Future, too young to come in for coddling as Senior Citizens—just the dull, bland old Middle Agers nobody gives a hoot about as an age group. How’d we ever reach this time of life?”

  “I did it by quiet living,” I replied. “I don’t have the least idea how you managed it, doing things like philosophizing on car doors with one foot off the ground.”

  She grinned, said, “Well, must have something to do with the immediate influence of a scholar and a gentleman on the ol’ motor-thought behavioral patterns,” and, using an elaborate precaution that would have looked exhibitionist in itself, to anyone who didn’t know her, she managed to get herself back to a safe standing position outside the car. “This wouldn’t have happened,” she opined, “back in the good old days when everybody carried ballpoints or lead pencils and little paper notebooks you could tear leaves out of.” As if she were old enough to remember those days.

  “Aren’t you at all worried about her, Lieutenant?”

  “She’s just gone for a little walk, that’s all. What could happen to her out here in the middle of a sunny day in a little college burg that probably doesn’t even have a slum district? In fact,” Cagey added, looking around at the old, occasionally slightly seedy houses in their large, occasionally unmanicured lawns, “this is probably the closest thing to a slum neighborhood Hodag Crossing has ever seen. You go north, Sergeant, and I’ll go south. Better leave her a message on the screen before you start out, in case she’s gone west.”

  North looked as if it led deeper into the residential area, along a gracefully winding, if much cracked, old sidewalk. To the west lay a similar sidewalk which should eventually lead back to Greektown, as I knew from the morning’s drive. To the south, what looked like a small, old shopping or restaurant district seemed to begin just at the far end of the curve. East, of course, lay the lake and the single row of lawns and houses that fronted it.

  I turned on the ignition to activate the accessories, took a few minutes to figure out the workings of a strange and elderly rental car’s message screen, filled in a short message to update our client, punched what I thought was the permosave key, turned off the engine, and watched the screen go blank. By the time I’d restarted the car, rekeyed my message (which was probably faster than figuring out how to call it back from permosave on this model of car message screen), and figured out how to get it to freeze the letters onscreen when the motor was off, Cagey and April were back.

  “She thought she saw our boy Czarny,” said Cagey, “and went after him.”

  “Just a cape like his,” April explained. “But it couldn’t have been Clement. I called his name loudly enough, but he never even turned around. Maybe the cape wasn’t even black—it could have been navy blue or flooding brown or even midnight crimson. Anyway, when I saw it couldn’t be him, I ducked into the directory booth at the corner of LaFollette and Derleth and looked up Mother Pedersen’s numbers.”

  “Very timewise.” Cagey nodded approvingly. “Think we might be able to interest M. Greenhill in trying for your old job, Sergeant?”

  April gave her a grateful smile. I guessed that our client had been more hurt than she tried to let on by Dr. Fairchild’s strained attitude toward her. “It turns out that Mother Pedersen has five phone numbers listed to her name,” she reported. “The local Catholic church—Our Lady of Peace—the parish center, the rectory, the Newman Club office of the Student Ecumenical Center, and her own personal phone. I tried her personal number first, and got a temporarily out of use signal. Then I remembered that Saturday can be a busy day for Catholic priests, so I tried the church number, hoping to get her schedule, and found out she’s in the hospital.”

  “In the hospital?” I echoed.

  Cagey asked, “They tell you why?”

  “Not really. Something about a fall late last night, and needing a blood transfusion, but I couldn’t tell whether it was a pure accident or some kind of seizure. She’s right here at Hodag Crossing General. It’s a really good hospital for a population this size. It was a joint town-and-gown community project. My father served on the original funding committee.”

  “A blood transfusion ...” Cagey repeated thoughtfully.

  April looked at her with a frown that turned from puzzled to angry. “Oh, no! No, it can’t be what you’re thinking, it’s got to be another coincidence! Besides, Clement’s a very good Catholic. He goes to confession every week. We could have caught up with him there this afternoon, but I don’t know what he’ll do now. They said they might not even be able to get a priest in for mass this evening.”

  “Okay, okay, point taken,” said Cagey. “Well, chances are they won’t be letting anyone in to see the madre yet, so I guess that brings M. Keiko Ko-Ko up to the top of our list.”

  “She might be at lunch,” said April.

  “Where you should be.” Cagey nodded. “Right! You didn’t tank up worth talking about at Prof Fairchild’s.”

  I said, “Can you blame her?”

  “Now you mention it, no. Maybe I ought to apologize for making you face
him, M. Greenhill. Any idea why there should be this bad blood between you two?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I look like somebody who was cruel and unusual to him when he was a child.”

  When I saw that Cagey had no intention of saying anything to April about our asking and being told by Dr. Fairchild that he had never heard his fraternity boys misuse her name, I said, “You didn’t eat enough yourself to call it a meal, Lieutenant.”

  “I don’t need a big lunch.” Cagey opened her car door, plumped down in her seat, and pulled the door shut, yanking her right foot all the way inside just in time to keep from crushing her ankle. “I had a big breakfast, and I’m on a case,” she added, sounding as if she hadn’t even noticed her ankle’s close call. She probably hadn’t. “As for M. Ko-Ko ... What’s Saturday lunchtime in the dorms these years?”

  “I’m not quite sure, but I think eleven thirty to thirteen hundred,” April replied.

  Cagey glanced at her watch. “Well, let us treat you to lunch. I can always keep you company over a cup of coffee. Where’s your favorite place?”

  “Home.” Our client glanced down almost bashfully, looked up again, and gave us a grin. “Aunt Cherky’s expecting us anyway. I called her just before looking up Mother Pedersen’s numbers.”

  VII

  (Various parts of Hodag Crossing)

  He stood sandwiched between the outer wall of the old Muskie Tavern—now Hogebloom’s Software and Party Shop—and the evergreen bush that had grown almost three meters tall. It was going brown in five or six spots, but he knew it could still hide him very conveniently, as long as he didn’t rustle the branches.

  Easier said than done. It was a tightish squeeze, and he didn’t much care for the evergreen nubs in his face. Still, he was a good undercover agent, not prone to sneezing at ticklish moments. Any towner or even fellow gowner who happened to stroll by on the sidewalk and notice him standing here would think, “Just another crazy caped fancier out roleplaying again,” and walk on.