The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Clement Czarny probably does,” I guessed, “to hear Keiko Ko-Ko talk about it. Or at least one Jewish great-grandparent, anyway, somewhere in his family tree.”

  “‘Hath not a vampire eyes?’” Cagey repeated. “‘Hath not a vampire hands ... um ... organs, senses, dimensions, affections, passions? Fed with the same food ...’ No, I guess you can’t quite make it all fit, can you?”

  “‘Warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is,” I went on, remembering the magnificent F. Murray Abraham playing the part in the 1997 screen version.

  “Well, Czarny is a Christian,” Cagey observed. “A Catholic, anyway. Better change that line to read ‘as a human is. If you prick them, do they not bleed?’—I wonder if they do.”

  “I think so,” I replied. “I’m sure I’ve seen Dracula scratch his own chest on purpose in at least one of the movies. And doesn’t he in the original novel as well?”

  “Of course! To make Lucy or Mina or whoever drink his blood in order to finish turning into a vampire herself. That’d explain the taste of blood Gambol says Czarny reported in his mouth after his NDE. ‘If you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them, do they not die?’”

  “No,” I said, “I’m fairly sure they don’t. Unless you use silver.”

  “Thanks. ‘If you poison them with silver, do they not die? And if you wrong them, shall they not revenge?’ Hmmm. Could he have perceived it as being wronged when his best friend got serious about the girl he’s hoping to get for himself someday?”

  I remarked, “M.’s Ko-Ko and Gambol would both shout, ‘No!’ And Aunt Cherky as well. Czarny seems to attract some passionate support from people of our gender, Lieutenant.”

  “Careful, Tommi. Draculas are supposed to be charmers anyway, and susceptible as you’ve always been—”

  “Not since marrying Arlie,” I reminded her. “Anyway, I have never seen the least thing romantic about two fangs in the neck. It would be like having a medic stick two hypodermics in at the same time.”

  “You’ve got a point. Maybe I should say a pair of points. Besides, Mendoza gave him a clean slate, too, so maybe the camps don’t divide exactly along gender lines when it comes to being for Czarny or against him.”

  “Ramon Mendoza y Mendoza,” said I, “handsome and charming though he is, would make a fairly plausible dracula himself. ‘Mendoza y Mendoza.’ If I remember Old Spanish nomenclature, it sounds like incest.”

  “Common enough Spanish family name. When two Smiths or Joneses get married, we don’t jump to the conclusion that they’re blood relations.”

  “But why advertise it? Especially nowadays, when we can all choose any final name we like?”

  Cagey shrugged the question off with, “Maybe the vampire who bit Ramon was a Mendoza. Anyway, Tommi, you’re the Reeltime expert. What kind of old movies might little Peter Black, who grew up into Clement Czarny, have absorbed the image of a friendly vampire from?”

  “I’m not an expert on Reeltime monsters, Lieutenant, only on old movies in general. You sounded back there as if you knew a lot more about this friendly vampire tradition than I’d ever dreamed there was to know. Count Chocolate cereal and all that.”

  “Chocula. Saw an old, framed box front one time in an antique shop, just had to ask about it before I knocked something over and had to pay up and clear out. That’s pretty well the extent of what I know about it. From what Cousin Donna said, Czarny’s the one who could tell us all about your friendly neighborhood chocula. But, also by his cousin’s story, he wasn’t much of a buff on the subject until it happened to him, which means he’d have picked up most of his lore afterward, when it’d have been to his social benefit to bone up on the ‘good’ vampires. What I’d be interested in right now, is if and where he could have absorbed any alternate image before age eleven to the typical monster a la Lugosi and ... what was that Nostrum one?”

  “‘Nosferatu.’” I suppressed a shudder and kept my eyes on the road. I would probably have shut them for a moment, so as to think better, if I hadn’t been driving. “Well,” I offered at length. “there was one called, I think, ‘Love at First Bite.’ A comedy. I only saw it once and don’t remember much about it, but I believe the dracula was reasonably sympathetic. Not saintly, but a fairly good sport, and the romantic lead. But I believe it’s a post-1960 film, so presumably the library wouldn’t have made it automatically available to Czarny and his cousin when they were juveniles. And there’s been more than one serious film that treats the vampire with compassion—but you can say the same about Macbeth and Jack the Ripper and even Hitler. It’s the kind of treatment that Nancy Medved calls ‘the poignant glimpse of original humanity underneath the depravity.’ And I think all those movies would be post-1960, too.”

  “I caught one years ago, probably totally obscure, called ‘Uncle Was a Vam—’ Look out!” Cagey exclaimed.

  A dark plaid station wagon sped past us at well over a hundred klicks an hour.

  “Idiots!” said Cagey. “Did you get their license plate, Sergeant? Wisconsin AVERTZ-something, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said, “AVERTZ-9. Another rental car. Ours is AVERTZ-14. But it’s all right—”

  “All right? Dodblast it, you don’t go like bats out of hell unless you’ve got flashing lights and sirens!” Her enthusiasm for cops and robbers twentieth-century style no longer extended to high-speed auto chases since she’d been in two accidents and sworn off personal driving forever.

  “We were perfectly all right, Cagey,” I assured her. “I’d seen them coming up behind us—at first I thought it was that little red Sparrowhawk that kept playing peekaboo with us all the way down, finally picking up the kind of speed you expect out of Sparrowhawk drivers—and they passed with a wide margin.”

  “They shook our AVERTZ-19.”

  “AVERTZ-fourteen. Just the air current of their passing.”

  “Um,” Cagey commented. “Well, better keep us down to the limit, Tommi. Enough car accidents mixed up in this case already.”

  She obviously assumed I was following her earlier directive and going five klicks over the limit. I reset the cruise control for two klicks slower and we cruised on, both of us reasonably satisfied.

  XIV

  (AVERTZ-9)

  “Hey!” said Jason Maklowski, turning for another look. A quick look, at the rate they were leaving the dark blue AVERTZ-14 Windbreaker behind. “Did you catch who that looked like?”

  “One very lovely blond. The kind of lady you wouldn’t mind dying to save,” Hartwick replied.

  “Not the one at the wheel, and she wasn’t all that gorgeous, anyway. Just pretty. Nothing special. Not even especially blond.” Sometimes Maklowski got tired of his partner’s fancy tendency to see every passably presentable female as a potential distressed heroine to be rescued from death-or-worse. “I meant the one on the rider’s side.”

  “Student type, wasn’t he? Lord! What if she picked up some sicknik pretending to be a student thumbing a lift back to New Millennium? Think we should—”

  “Some sherlock you are,” Maklowski grumbled. “Eight to two it was another woman—short black curly hair, little round granny glasses, round face, snub nose ... Who comes to mind that fits the description?”

  “Any number of floaters.”

  “Think, Sir Lancelot, think! Once in a while try using that finely tuned organic computer between your ears. Cagey Warrington, that’s who I’m talking about! It looked like Cagey Warrington Thursday in that car we just passed.”

  Hartwick glanced at his partner, returned his eyes to the road, and shook his head. “Naw. What would she be doing up here in this part of the continent? Operation Bloodline is so classified it’s never been discussed via any computer link or phonewave. Nothing but signals. Musical signals, yet!”

  “There are other things still going on in the world besides O
peration Bloodline, ‘Masked Man.’ She could just have noticed the coincidence of two students dying in similar smashups within about a year in the same little flyspeck on the map.”

  “Or it could just have been one of the couple million other people who meet her same general description. Lord, Mak, and you call me a fancy dan!”

  XV

  (From the Memoirs of Sylvia Tomlinson Marlene)

  It was about 16:45 when we arrived back in Hodag Crossing, and clouds were gathering for what promised to be an interesting sunset, if they didn’t gather too thick and fast before the sun met the horizon.

  We phoned Aunt Cherky Zigabarra, learned that she hadn’t had a call from April yet but expected one anytime between now and 17:30, depending on when April could find a considerate time to pull away from her grandfather’s reminiscences. Sometimes she didn’t phone at all; whenever she wasn’t back by 18:00, Aunt Cherky knew she was staying at the rest home for supper.

  Cagey thanked M. Zigabarra and told her not to worry about feeding us, because we wanted to case out one of Hodag Crossing’s culinary palaces. Aunt Cherky suggested the Viking as April’s favorite, adding that she sometimes went there with Clement. My lieutenant thanked her and signed off. That left us with a “lead” on where to eat dinner; but after M. Gambol’s hospitality, neither of us felt like facing a menu yet.

  Saturday mass time at Our Lady of Peace was 17:30, if they had found another priest to fill in for Mother Pedersen; and 16:45 probably wouldn’t have been very much too early for starting a stakeout on the church in hopes of spotting Czarny on his way in; but Cagey was too restless to sit still in the car for half an hour. I think she’d actually consumed even more coffee that day than usual. Around home, she generally left her mugs only partly drunk. Here, she’d politely drained every cup she was served.

  “Well,” she decided, “let’s try the madre.”

  I phoned the hospital. A male desk attendant with a remarkably pleasant voice took a moment to check for us and then reported that Mother Elizabeth Pedersen was making a beautiful recovery, had just been served her supper, and had indicated that visitors would be welcome. “Our open visiting hours are from oh-nine hundred to twenty-one hundred,” he added. “In nostalgic notation, nine a.m. to nine p.m. Other times by prearrangement.”

  The madre was still eating when we entered her room. The crown and sides of her head were neatly bandaged down to the clavicle. Her arms were bandaged, too, but there were no IV tubes. She was a thin and thin-faced middle-aged woman who looked as though she could have made a career of playing sinister housekeepers, if make-up would cover the smile lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her meal looked light, but generous in iron-rich foods.

  “Good afternoon, Madre,” said Cagey.

  “Good afternoon, Daughters. Have a seat.” Mother Pedersen gave a token wave around the room with her empty fork before refilling it.

  Cagey dropped into the nagahide armchair, while I moved one of the two light plastic molded chairs into place near the foot of the bed.

  “By the way,” Mother Pedersen went on, a twinkle in her eye, “have we met, or am I hallucinating again?”

  “Sure, you’ve met us,” Cagey told her easily. “Right now as of this minute. I’m Lieutenant Cagey Thursday, and this is my partner, Sergeant Tomlinson.”

  “Oh, dear. The pollies. Well, you have me, Officers. I wasn’t aware of any legal obligation to report simple household accidents, but I know ‘ignorance is no excuse.’”

  “Just stopped in out of friendly concern,” Cagey replied. “We understand your simple household accident could have been fatal.”

  “Yes. I could have bled to death. As you see, the wonders of modern medicine. A few transfusions, bandages, painblankers, and I’m almost ready for a homily.” She paused. Actually, her speech was sprinkled with pauses and hesitations, like that of anyone soon after major hospital attention. “To hear one, anyway,” she added. “Though some of my flock will be accusing me next week of just wanting this weekend off.”

  Cagey said, “I’m something of a connoisseur when it comes to accidents, Madre. Think you can tell me about yours?”

  “Oh, it was stupid. Like most household accidents. The hazards of trying to keep an elegant bathroom in crowded quarters. It’s still got an old-fashioned mock candelabra, probably the original fixture. Virtually an antique by now, and a bulb burned out. I got up on the bathtub to replace it. Slipped and fell. My arm went through the medicine cabinet door. The doors on the medicine cabinet are sliding mirrors ... were sliding mirrors, on plain old glass. Have to be replaced now. Too bad, antiques. Also, somehow my realglass drinking tumbler got broken on the sink. Cut up my arm and a piece hit my neck, too. Hope the good light bulb landed in the carpet. Getting hard to find that kind of bulb. Sorry I can’t say exactly how all of it happened. Went by too fast. Also, I knocked myself unconscious, falling like that. Must have cost me a few hundred thousand brain cells. That I couldn’t very well afford to lose, huh? Good thing a couple of students happened to come around for emergency counseling. And came on in when nobody answered the doorchime, and had a look around. I understand they found me just in time.”

  “Who are they?” Cagey prompted her.

  “Linda Du ... Maybe I shouldn’t say. They came for counseling. Well, I understand they didn’t make any secret out of it, why they were at the rectory, when they gave the hospital people their names, checking me in. Linda Dukas and Larry Aldebaran. Good kids. Wonderful young people. Poor kids, I guess they had to go grab their counseling somewhere else. Think I steered them on to Eloise or Dave, but maybe I just hallucinated that. I was pretty groggy.”

  Cagey looked at me, and I replied with a very slight headshake. My pocketcom was confirming my organic memory that the names Linda Dukas and Larry Aldebaran didn’t tie in with anything else we had learned so far. That being the case, we let them drop. One rainy afternoon months later, Cagey ran the two names through the public newsmedia datamorgue indexes on a curiosity check and found that Mother Pedersen and the Reverend Eloise Lundquist of Trinity Lutheran had given them a joint religious wedding ceremony at the student chapel that Christmas season—a few months after our Hodag Crossing adventure. As far as I know, they are still living happily ever after somewhere. They do not come back into this case at all.

  Meanwhile, Mother Pedersen was saying, “Dave Horowitz, Elly Lundquist, and me ... we’re like the rabbi, the minister, and the priest in all those old jokes. Well. To what do I owe the pleasure, Officers? Are you friends, family maybe, of anyone in my flock?”

  Cagey said, “You might call us friends of April Baxter Greenhill.”

  Mother Pedersen shut her eyes. For a moment I thought she had finally drifted off. Then she started to shake her head, winced slightly, and opened her eyes. “That’d be Elly Lundquist’s flock. I know April by sight, of course. Lovely young woman.”

  “And Solly Goldfein would have been one of Rabbi Horowitz’s flock?” Cagey asked.

  “Yes. Poor Solly. They would have made a nice couple.”

  I mused briefly on how different the clerical response to interfaith marriages seemed today, compared with the way Reeltime movies show it. Maybe when the Reformed Constitution abolished marriage as a civil form, it united the various clergies behind every kind of religious marriage they could promote.

  Cagey coughed and said, “All right, Madre, here’s one from your flock. How can a dracula be a practicing Catholic?”

  “Oh. The same way anyone else can. Why the interest?”

  Cagey looked at me again. She looked back at Mother Pedersen, sat forward, and said tentatively, “Well, I don’t like to risk worrying you, but we may have reason to think there could be a question of bodily safety involved.”

  “Whose? Not Clement’s?”

  Cagey shook her head. “April Greenhill’s.”

  “Oh, no,” the
madre remarked dismissively. “Not from Clement, anyway. You’re ... uh…barking up the wrong tree ... Sergeant Thursday? Clement Czarny would never hurt April Greenhill. Or anyone else. Have you met him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “No. I didn’t think so. Look there.” She pointed to the flower arrangements on her window ledge. “See that one? Three red rosebuds in a dozen white carnations?”

  “Yes,” said Cagey.

  “It’s beautiful,” said I. It was.

  “Clement’s. He’ll probably have slept most of the day, wouldn’t have heard about me being here until late this afternoon. But then he takes time to order those for me. They came with my supper tray. Church computer has a direct link to the hospital florist. Roses…even three…but three that perfect…too extravagant for his budget. But that’s our Clement.”

  Cagey rubbed her chin. “He’d have found out where you were when he showed up to make his weekly confession, huh?”

  “‘Reconciliation,’ we call it nowadays.”

  “Look, Madre, I understand about the seal of the confessional ... uh, the reconciliational?”

  “That’s good.”

  “But could you maybe tell us what he hasn’t confessed?”

  “No, I couldn’t. That would be a form of revealing what he had. Or worse. Anything I forgot to exclude ... specifically ... you might assume he had. When he hadn’t.”

  “If we just ran down the list of what we need to know?”

  “No. Even worse. You know, Serge ... Lieutenant? you aren’t supposed to upset me. Or make me angry. Another time, I might enjoy sparring with your tough detective fantasy. Explaining how once breaking the Seal…even to save a life ... would undermine the whole sacrament, destroy the confidence all our people can put in its strict privacy forever ... All that guilt backlogging up unreconciled as people became afraid to clear it out with their priests ... Explaining how we madres have to be especially careful. Not having had the priesthood that many years. Right now, I’m too groggy. Sorry, maybe you’d better go. Thanks for the visit and all that ...”