Al reappeared to ask hopefully if we’d like dessert. Czarny requested cantaloupe a la mode, while Cagey and I said we’d share a fruit and cheese tray. The waiter progressed to a table of new arrivals, and Cagey resumed: “What about this hypnotic fascination draculas are supposed to exert over their victims?”
“Most of the time people can’t really be hypnotized unless they’re willing. Some people can’t be hypnotized at all. And even when hypnotized, they can’t be made to do anything that runs against their own deepest moral or survival instincts. I read up on it when I first became a vampire, and decided it wouldn’t be worth trying to learn even if I wanted to make a pest of myself.”
Cagey brought the talk back to symbols for a while. Czarny made no bones about admitting that evil symbols or symbols that have become identified with evil bothered him even when his conscience was clean. It was natural for Cagey to bring the swastika up, as an example of an ancient symbol of good that in just a few years last century had become desecrated and dirtied for generations to come. Czarny freely admitted that, even though he was aware of the symbol’s original holiness, he reacted as negatively to the “Twisted Cross” as any other 21st century Westerner.
Talking about the “Twisted Cross” made me think of the “Double Cross” logo in Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator.” That made me think of Chaplin’s other talkies, and that made me think of “Monsieur Verdoux,” with its closing scene, where the priest tells Chaplin, as Verdoux, “May God have mercy on your soul,” and Chaplin responds, “Why not? It belongs to Him.” I asked Czarny, “Will you ... How will you ... That is, will you need to make any…er ... special burial arrangements?”
“I think,” he replied, unoffended, “the best way will be to leave instructions to have myself cremated and the ashes scattered in the ocean. Under my peculiar circumstances, that shouldn’t seem irreligious. I hope to get into Heaven or at least Purgatory the first time around, and if I make it, I certainly wouldn’t thank anyone who resurrected me!”
I commented on how often the Reeltime movies show the vampire filled with peace and relief just at the end.
“Following Stoker again,” he agreed. “But I think Stoker was wrong about that, too. His Lucy might have felt spiritual relief when the stake went in, but Count Dracula delighted in being wicked. He had to be headed straight for Hell. He wouldn’t look relieved, even for an instant. He’d looked dismayed, horrified. That’s how I’d like to see the opera staged, in the style of ‘Don Giovanni’ and ‘Faust’ at the end.”
Cagey relaxed and let the conversation take its own course, wandering pleasantly through operas, old movies, and—strangely enough—the best kinds of pets for households with children, for a quarter of an hour.
As we finished our meal, Czarny produced a case of breath mints from his pocket, offered some to us, and consumed two himself. “Stoker makes quite a point of the revolting atmosphere of the count’s residences,” he explained. “I don’t think I’ve ever had that kind of problem, but ...”
“Probably another thing that goes with being Undead,” Cagey replied, “so you shouldn’t have to worry. On the other hand, why deny yourself any of life’s little pleasures?” She helped herself to a mint and went on, “By the way, we’ll have to trouble you for your present home address.”
“Are you going to tell me not to leave town, too?”
“If necessary.” She made it sound like kidding, just part of her fancy game. “So far, your address will be enough.”
“Well ... I had hoped to keep it private for a few nights. Not ‘secret,’ you understand, just ‘private.’”
“We’ll keep it confidential, M. Czarny. Would this desire for privacy have anything to do with why you left the Pi Rho house, or is that getting too close to ...”
“Yes, it is. Solly was my roommate, you see, and to watch somebody else move in, take over ... No offense to the new man! But I had to…go off into the desert and work things through by myself.”
“And the desert is ...?”
“Twenty-one North Parkside. I’d invite you up, but it’s nothing but a semiconverted attic. A real ‘desert.’ The Nelsons hadn’t planned on renting it till next fall, but I talked them into letting me move in for ten tridols a month and a helping hand in the redecorating. And I just moved in last night, so it’s still pretty messy and very stark.”
“Okay, no problem. We’ll keep it confidential. Even from your fraternity?”
He nodded. “Not that I’m trying to cut free! I’m planning to go back to the house for most of my meals. It’s just that I’d like to be able to get away somewhere where I can depend on not being broken in on.”
“How about your cousin Donna?”
“Oh, right! I’d better let the family know right away.” He stood up, then turned uncertainly and asked, “Do you mind? I mean, with many thanks for the dinner, and if that was a police grilling, you’re welcome to another one anytime, but if you’ll excuse—”
“Batory!” A muscular youth in dark tunic and trousers came up to our table from somewhere and put a hand on Czarny’s shoulder. “If you’re finally done—”
“Hello, Clearwater,” said Cagey. “Fancy meeting you here.”
A lot of realizers assume that fanciers have trouble recognizing other people by face; but Cagey remembered Stallion Clearwater Drinkwater more quickly than I from our morning’s visit to the Pi Rho house.
He looked taken aback, but covered it with grumpiness. “Good evening, ladies,” he acknowledged, in a tone that bordered on insolence. “If you’ve finally finished wining and dining our fratty brother, we need him back for an hour.”
“What’s up?” said Czarny. I couldn’t tell whether he was reluctant or eager.
“Fraternity business. For brothers’ ears only. Coming?”
By now Czarny’s reluctance was obvious. As he held back, Stallion added grudgingly, with a defiant glance at Cagey,
“It’s about that new pledge of ours.”
“Abernathy? What—”
“Private!” Stallion took a grip on Czarny’s arm. “Coming?”
“Go on, go on,” Cagey said easily. “Oh, wait a minute! Sergeant Tomlinson, let M. Czarny have our personal phone numbers.”
After a brief hesitation, Stallion released Czarny’s arm, so that both young men could take down Cagey’s and my phone numbers as I gave them. After that, they finished saying goodbye, Czarny with considerably more mannerliness than Stallion, and left.
Cagey sat looking after them and drumming her fingers on the table. “I wish to heck Al would hurry up with our check.”
“Well ...” I observed, “we know that he’ll be with his fraternity brothers for the next hour or so. That ought to keep him perfectly safe ...” I paused, reexamining my own words. They seemed rude, now that I had met the dracula of the Purple Rose. Even as I sympathized with why he preferred not to let his Greek house know where he had moved to, I wondered if I could indeed have fallen under that hypnotic dracula spell he claimed he had no idea how to cast.
“Hmmm,” my lieutenant was saying. “Was it just my imagination, or did Clearwater take a quick look to make sure Czarny wasn’t wearing a wristphone before he let him take our numbers? ... And do you see that table over there, Sergeant? The one in the corner near the window, the one with a single place set? One dinner ... some kind of burger, I think…and it looks only half eaten. Could that be the table our friend Clearwater Drinkwater got up from just now?”
XIX
(The Pi Rho basement)
When Stallion brought Clement down through the stormcellar doors, Dr. Fairchild was already in the basement, seated at one end of the meeting table, with Fred Fletcher at his right and Spuds next to Fred. No one else was in sight, and the door at the top of the stairs to the rest of the house was bolted to signal that solemn business was going on in the basement and nobody, not
even another Pi brother, would be permitted to intrude.
Clement eyed the door to the middle sideroom along the north wall, the “stall” or “cell,” the small chamber in which he had been “resurrected from ashes” as part of his pledging ceremony long ago. Its door was shut and the bolt in place, but there was no way of seeing at a distance whether the speaker system was turned “On” to enable anyone inside to hear what went on in the rest of the basement and vice versa, or “Off” to shut a “prisoner”—when there was one—inside the cubicle’s new sound-soaking.
Having locked the stormcellar doors from the inside, Stallion came on down the stairs and took his place at Dr. Fairchild’s left. The only remaining chair was at the opposite end of the table from the faculty father. A little uncertainly, Clement took that chair, allowing his cloak to drape itself as it would, and folding his hands on the table in front of him.
After a moment, Dr. Fairchild picked up the real mahogany gavel and gave the table a single rap. “This meeting will come to order. Batory, you look puzzled.”
“I am, sir. About what, exactly, I’m doing here.”
“How much has Clearwater explained to you?”
Clement hesitated, looking again toward the bolted cell. “That it concerns the pledge Valentino Abernathy Saladin, sir.”
Dr. Fairchild exchanged a glance with Stallion, whimsical on the professor’s side, glowering on the brother’s. “You may speak freely, Batory,” said the faculty father.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, Pater. Uh ... Might I ask what he’s done?”
Again a look went round the table, this time from the faculty father to each of the three senior brothers in turn, beginning and ending with Stallion, who slouched in his chair, glanced away from Dr. Fairchild to the ceiling, and said, “More of the usual pledge nonsense, Pater.”
“Yes,” said Fairchild. “It will be made clear to you as the meeting progresses, Batory.”
“Well ... Then may I ask what, exactly, I’m doing on this committee?” A hopeful note entered the vampire’s voice: “Has Abernathy requested me for his ‘big brother’?”
“That, too, should become apparent as the meeting wears down,” Fairchild replied sternly.
Clement sighed and removed the miniature crucifix from his left ear.
“What are you doing, Batory?” the faculty father asked him.
“I ... uh ... never like discipline duty, Pater.”
“To such an extent that it bothers your conscience? How do you expect to parent a child one of these years?”
“Well, sir, my conscience feels a little…crowded just now anyway. I wasn’t able to be Reconciled this afternoon, you see.”
Dr. Fairchild smiled slightly and looked on without further comment until the vampire had entrusted his piece of jewelry to Spuds for safekeeping. Then the faculty father went on:
“Well, now, Batory, if you’ve blunted your conscience sufficiently for the time being, may I ask if you’ve gone any farther in the ‘Lest We Forget’ program I gave you some time ago?”
“Well…actually, sir, I’ve spent most of the day catching up on my sleep and ... uh ... in the rush of packing, I’m afraid it got ...” Clement’s right hand, straying up toward the cross at his throat, suddenly jerked away as if from a stinging insect. “And I’m afraid I left it upstairs in my trunk, sir,” he went on. “With the things I’m going to move later.”
Now Dr. Fairchild sighed. “I see. In other words, you’ve gone no farther than you had when last we spoke of it. Level Two, I believe?”
Clement nodded. “That was it, sir.”
“Unfortunate. You might have understood the rest of this meeting much better if you had been through the whole program. Like Fletcher, Clearwater, and Bartlett. Am I right, sons?” He beamed around at them.
All three nodded. Fletcher smirked a little along with his nod.
Clement said, “Reprimand accepted, sir.”
“Let this be a lesson, Batory. Never postpone doing what truly matters. It’s all too easy to wake up and find you’ve left it until too late.”
“I said, reprimand accepted, sir. Now if you don’t mind letting me in on ... Who’s being disciplined here, anyway?” the vampire demanded, his tone changing. “Abernathy, or me? And why? Just for quitting residence in the house?”
Fairchild smiled and toyed with his gavel, half unscrewing its head from the handle and then twisting it back again. “All in good time, Batory. All in good time. But first, before we go any farther ...” His gaze traveled slowly around the table, resting a moment on each of them in turn. “To get down to brass tacks, which of you killed Solomon Barghoothi Goldfein?”
Clement started as if hit by an electric jolt. So did Spuds, though less violently. He was a little slower by nature, except on the football field. Fred Fletcher looked unsurprised, Stallion indifferent. A stifled sound might have come from the bolted cell, or it might have been just another of the noises aging houses make.
“What do you mean,” Clement said in a tense voice, “who killed Solly?”
“I meant exactly what I said, Batory. Well, perhaps ‘killed’ wasn’t the best choice of words. It might have been clearer if I’d said, ‘murdered.’”
The vampire stood up, trembling, the heavy wooden chair crashing over backwards behind him.
“Murdered?” said Spuds.
Fairchild pointed the handle of his gavel at the dracula. “Was it you, Batory?”
Clement started to speak, choked off his own words, and bent over to hit the table with his open hand. “Pater,” he said at last, “this is…this is ...” He straightened up and got some visible control of his anger. “This isn’t something to…to use in fraternity business. Not for any reason!”
“It is fraternity business, Batory, whether we like it or not. And I am not joking or using the matter lightly. I am deadly serious, and I intend to find out tonight. Which one of you murdered Barghoothi?”
“It wasn’t murder,” said Stallion.
They all turned to him. He had spoken without changing position in his chair.
“Explain yourself, Clearwater,” said Fairchild.
Still slouched in his chair, Stallion replied, “It was a necessary move, sir. Sweetheart Greenhill had her hooks into him. We couldn’t risk her marrying an Israelite, could we?”
Clement yanked the silver cross from around his neck, dropped it—broken chain and all—on the table, and went for Stallion’s throat with both hands.
“Hold him!” shouted Fairchild. Spuds, acting with his gridiron instincts, jumped up and pulled while Stallion pushed.
Stallion’s chair fell over. Breaking free, Stallion followed it, while Spuds pinned the vampire’s arms behind him with a wrestle hold below the shoulders. They stood panting, Clement visibly struggling for control over his feelings, Spuds looking dazedly from Dr. Fairchild to Stallion, who was picking himself up off the floor. Fred Fletcher got up and went around the table to lift both Clement’s chair and Stallion’s back into place.
“All right, Clearwater,” said Fairchild. “Understood.”
“Un—der—stood?” the vampire echoed incredulously.
Turning to him, Dr. Fairchild explained, “That isn’t what it may sound like to the uninitiated, Batory. If you’d been through ‘Lest We Forget,’ you’d know that in a war, there are unavoidable collateral casualties. We are in a war against pure evil, here ...”
The vampire stared at his faculty father.
“... and the woman known as April Baxter Greenhill is an intrinsic part of that pure evil. It was better for Barghoothi to die than to be trapped with her on the side of Satan.”
Clement kicked back viciously at the shin of the man holding him. “Hey!” said Spuds, wincing but keeping his hold. “I didn’t know anything about this, either!”
“How much did you know about?” Cle
ment shouted. “You knew something, or you wouldn’t be fighting me! You’d be after them, too!”
“Yeah ...” Spuds muttered. “Yeah, I think maybe I see ... But, cripes, Pater, did we have to kill him? Couldn’t we have just—”
“And let him step forward and speak for her at the trial?” said Stallion. “How would that have looked to the world, huh? Pretty nice, huh?”
“What the hell is going on?” Clement demanded. “Are you all crazy?”
Spuds said, “Hey, what about Tony Tallpines, then?”
“Tallpines,” Fletcher replied, “hinted too hard that he had the data we need, and turned out to be a little too much of the stalwart Indian brave to reveal it.”
Spuds exclaimed, “Lord!” and dropped his grip on Clement’s arm. Pulling free, the vampire wrenched off his fraternity ring and hurled it straight at the professor’s face. It struck Fairchild’s left cheek hard enough to bring blood to the surface. Clement turned to spring at Stallion. Spuds caught him again.
Dr. Fairchild felt his cheek, glanced at the blood on his fingertip, and smiled broadly. He opened the table drawer and brought out a forty-centimeter silver crucifix with the Christ in gold. Stepping rapidly around the table toward Clement, he thrust the crucifix at his face. The vampire flinched back—almost jerking out of his captor’s grip—and gave a sound like a hiss, though it could have been a sucking in of his breath.
The faculty father smiled and nodded. “Yes. Bartlett, bring him over. Clearwater, give Bartlett a hand.”
Fletcher was unbolting the cell door. Spuds and Stallion, between the two of them, hauled and wrestled the vampire over, Fairchild following with the crucifix. Fletcher swung the door open.
“Hey!” said Spuds.
April Greenhill lay spreadeagled stark naked on the bare wood table that filled half the cell, her long red hair loose and dangling down over the edge. She was staring at them with wide, horrified eyes, but her lips were pressed tightly together. Her wrists and ankles were tied fast to the table legs. There was nothing else to be seen in the room except her, the table, and the ropes.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 142
