Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  When he was done, Ness was wearing an incredulous expression. “Well, it matches your partner’s story.”

  “But?”

  “But what?” Ness looked at Stefan with a penetrating stare. “Do you need to be told that it’s so much bushwa? Have you been listening to yourself?”

  “It’s what happened.”

  “I don’t know what happened, but it didn’t involve animate corpses.” Ness shook his head. “If it weren’t for some witnesses, I’d have trouble believing you were there at all.”

  “What?” Stefan sat up. He didn’t expect any part of the story to be believed. He would have expected Ness to assume that he and Nuri were just two more dirty cops who’d conspired on a crazy story to cover something up. That’s what he’d think in Ness’ position.

  Ness pulled a chair up to the side of the bed and sat down. “A longshoreman saw some men empty out the warehouse. They were the crates you describe.” Ness shook his head slowly. “You and Nuri spooked somebody.”

  “But you don’t believe what we saw?”

  “What do you think?” Ness looked down at Stefan’s leg. “The doctor confirmed that’s a bite wound. But in his words, ‘probably from a large dog.’ ” Ness looked up into Stefan’s eyes. “I would never abide my people lying to me. If not for your record, I’d fire you right now. As it is, I’m sure you told me things as you remember them.”

  “What about Nuri?”

  “He’s new to the department. I hoped that the corruption hadn’t gotten to him yet.” Ness looked thoughtful for a moment. “You two stumbled onto something. It was dark and confused ...”

  “But what happened in there?” Stefan asked, mostly to himself.

  Ness stood up. “I don’t know.” He walked toward the door and turned. “I’m spread thin with the department investigation, so I’m keeping you two on Dietrich, for now. Despite all this.”

  “Yes sir,” Stefan whispered. He closed his eyes and tried to forget the voices.

  “But I don’t want to hear another thing about walking corpses.”

  Even after two days, the smell was rank to Iago. It hung in the air around the docks, over the smells of the lake and industry. Iago squatted across the street from the unmarked warehouse, sensing the smell of death, like old smoke around a dead bonfire. The smell was little more than the psychic vapors of one of the blood, the remnants of the emotion as the spirit was torn from the flesh.

  Iago crouched on the roof across the street and watched the warehouse. He knew it was empty now. He had come here two nights ago, when he had first sensed the death within. He had arrived in time to see the trucks loading their cargo. He had felt the presence of the others within, agitated inside their boxes, death fresh in their senses as it had been in Iago’s.

  He had followed the thrall convoy as far as he could into the city, but he had been on foot. That plus caution had made him lose them within the city.

  Now all that was left was the scene of death here, and the sense of blood. Iago contemplated the blood-smell for a long time. He was not as good at reading as some, but he could tell that it was a thrall’s blood, someone bound to Melchior—someone bound to the same being that had been binding Florence Polillo—another of Melchior’s followers, purged for betrayal.

  What worried Iago more than the death was the presence of all those crates. Melchior wasn’t just collecting thralls here, he was bringing them over from wherever he had been hiding the past millennia. A single vampire as old as Melchior flouting the Covenant was frightening. The possibility of him having a whole circle of followers, all raised outside the Covenant, made Iago’s heart cold with terror. There might not be enough of the blood within the Covenant here to stop him.

  After a long time of watching, Iago felt the warehouse was truly empty. He jumped off the roof and darted across to the entrance next to the loading bays. The door hung open on its hinges, the doorjamb splintered. He paused to examine the door. It had not been like this when the thralls left with their cargo. Someone had broken the door in.

  Iago slipped through the damaged entrance and paused.

  Who had broken in? Not Melchior’s thralls, nor anyone in a circle known to him. That left the humans. If so, it wasn’t thievery. The break-in was too blatant for the docks, which never truly slept. Also who would steal what had been contained within?

  No, Iago thought as he ran a finger along the edge of the splintered wood, where the lock had gone. Police or the Mafia ...

  Iago shook his head. He suspected that if it had been the Mafia that had struck this place, it would no longer be standing. It had been the police. Fortunately for those officers, they had arrived after the thralls had left.

  There would be nothing inside now, Iago knew. However Melchior flouted the Covenant, Iago knew he would leave nothing of importance for the humans to uncover.

  Even so, to come this close to having human law enforcement discover the nature of those of the blood, that was itself an egregious violation that demanded punishment, if not execution—if the council could ever admit it had happened.

  Iago’s hand tightened into a fist. He was tired of being powerless. He was tired of the blindness of those more powerful than he. All of them, everyone who sat on that council, had been created by the Covenant, were protected by it. The threat was aimed at their own hearts, and they would not see it.

  Laila would have seen it. Anacreon had been about to.

  Raphael was the one left who might ...

  Iago stepped into the warehouse. His footsteps echoed through a space that was large and completely empty. The thralls had taken everything but the smell of blood and death.

  He walked to the center of the floor, under the high ceiling, and stood under a shaft of blue moonlight that filtered from the unpainted windows far above him. He closed his eyes, spread his arms, and took a deep breath.

  The impression slammed into him: a hideous hunger; the smell of fresh blood; hammer-blows to the chest; still moving toward the blood; the taste of it fills his mouth as the final blow slams into his neck. The vision, the sensation, slammed into Iago like an ice pick to the brain. He dropped to his knees.

  The dead one. He’d been feeding.

  Iago shook off the remnants of the dead soul, and pushed himself shaking to his feet. It hadn’t been ritual. It hadn’t been retribution. It hadn’t been Melchior at all. It was the first time that Iago had considered that the death inside the warehouse might not have been like that of Andrassy, or Polillo. He had assumed that Melchior had disposed of another of his chosen.

  He’d been wrong. It was in the ghost-taste on his lips, and the phantom ache of bullet holes in his chest. Humans had killed one of Melchior’s thralls.

  Humans.

  That explained why the cops had broken in, and why Melchior had abandoned this place. Iago had been wrong. He had thought Melchior had avoided revealing those of the blood.

  Humans had seen, had felt, and had lived to tell others. Human policemen.

  As the blood-taste faded from his tongue, Iago realized that the taste-smell was familiar. He knew at least one of the policemen who had been here.

  What remained for him was to decide what to do about it.

  “Wake up, policeman.”

  Stefan was pulled out of a drugged slumber by a cold presence. He felt it in a paralyzing panic that gripped him—a panic, like drowning in quicksand, leaving him unable to move.

  A familiar panic.

  “Wake up, policeman.” The voice came from outside, but Stefan could feel an echo that seemed to come from the depths of his chest, as if he was hearing half the voice from inside himself.

  A familiar voice. It took all of Stefan’s willpower to open his eyes and look at the speaker.

  It was the man he remembered: Iago of the train tracks. He wore the same overalls, the same pointed beard, the same cold gray eyes. He wore a different porkpie hat, but otherwise he was the same anonymous figure he’d been before. There was still nothing in his
appearance that could account for the racing of Stefan’s heart.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You ask a troubling question.” Iago paced around the foot of Stefan’s bed. His dull clothing seemed to fade into the shadows, emphasizing his pale face and hands. Iago seemed ghostly, almost insubstantial. “I came here before I knew myself what I would do with you.”

  Stefan struggled to sit up, against his injury, and against the weight of his fear. He wished he had his gun, even if he was unsure what good it would do him. He was beginning to recognize the cold presence that Iago had in common with the thing in the box, especially in the eyes.

  Especially in the eyes.

  “God help us all,” Stefan whispered.

  Iago took a step back and smiled. “Hold on to your faith, my dear policeman. It may be the only thing you have that is worth anything.”

  For some reason that comment wounded Stefan more than the fear. His memory locked on to his wife and still-born son.

  Faith? What Faith?

  “What are you—”

  Stefan’s question was interrupted when Iago made an inhuman leap, landing on the bed as lightly as a cat, feet to either side of Stefan’s torso. Iago squatted above him, laying a finger on Stefan’s lips. “Shh, be quiet. Ask no questions I cannot answer, policeman.”

  Iago looked into Stefan’s eyes, and Stefan felt as if his soul was under assault by the stare. “We have a common enemy. I know you were in his storehouse. I know what you found there.”

  “What?” The question forced itself through Stefan’s lips.

  “I shall not tell you what you already know. Prepare yourself, policeman. Polillo and Andrassy are incidental to what’s going on. Dietrich must be stopped.”

  Iago leaped off the bed.

  “I will help you if I can, policeman.”

  Stefan tried to ask a question, but his visitor had already slipped back into the shadows, disappearing. All that remained was the sense of anxiety he left behind him.

  21

  Friday, April 3-Friday, April 17

  Somehow, Stefan’s wound began healing without becoming septic. The hospital sent him home with a pair of crutches. It would be weeks before he’d be fully healed, so he stayed at his apartment while Nuri kept an eye on Dietrich.

  All though the warming days of April, Stefan’s apartment became a repository of information on Dietrich. Nuri would take photographs, research, bring documents, and Stefan would spend the days studying them.

  Dietrich wasn’t the only thing Stefan investigated. Every few days Stefan would send Nuri afield to a number of university libraries to find books on the occult, demonology, and finally—almost reluctantly—vampirism.

  Nuri had seen the same things that Stefan had, but he had the same reaction as Ness—the “Dracula stuff” was so much bushwa.

  Stefan was less sure, and he carried on his house-bound investigation on two parallel tracks; Dietrich—and the creatures of the night.

  Dietrich was nominally in the import-export business. The most specific record anywhere about what he actually handled was from customs, and all that said was “European antiquities.” The customs officers who had signed off on the paperwork, clearing a half dozen loads of “antiquities” into the country, all had the ominous characteristic of no longer working at customs. None of the officers were reachable by the time Nuri traced the paperwork. They were gone, and the hotel manager was gone—it was too reminiscent of Edward Mullen, the suicide.

  After the confrontation in the warehouse, Stefan had some idea of what those “European antiquities” might be.

  There had been six loads of them since April, 1934.

  The first arrival of the Ragnarok, five months before part of a human torso washed up on Euclid Beach, seemed now more than a coincidence. The victim could have easily been thrown overboard, floating for months before the current let the pieces drift ashore.

  Other records, from the State Department, confirmed the fact that Florence Polillo could have met Eric Dietrich in Washington, D.C., that same year. Dietrich went there shortly after first coming to this country, demanding and receiving political asylum.

  If he was a Nazi, he was an out-of-favor one. The German government wanted his deportation. Dietrich was wanted by the SS for crimes of vague and unspecified nature. Apparently, someone in the State Department thought Dietrich enough of an asset to the United States for it to thumb its nose at the Germans and allow Dietrich to stay in this country.

  It was about the time Dietrich cleared his way through the State Department when Florence Polillo returned from D.C. with her new “husband,” the one the missing hotel manager had identified as Dietrich.

  After that point, around the end of 1934, the paper trail began to vanish. Dietrich had formed a corporation around himself, but little of that corporation’s transactions made it into the public record. The warehouse, the Ragnarok, and the dusty old mansion on Euclid were all the concrete assets that could be traced to Dietrich’s corporation.

  But there was little question that Dietrich’s corporation was something major. He’d been seen with the likes of the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Van Sweringens. Aside from a handful of political donations, Dietrich’s business dealings were invisible.

  Dietrich, fortunately, wasn’t. Only a few days into the investigation, Nuri had managed to compile an extensive photo album on their quarry. One of the first things that Stefan picked up on was the driver of Dietrich’s limousine. He recognized the man as Carlo Pasquale, a small-time member of the Mayfield Road Mob. At first it seemed that Dietrich might be working with the local Mafia.

  One of the pictures changed that assumption. Nuri had caught Dietrich visiting the scene of a warehouse fire. The fire was long over, and Dietrich looked over the ruins with an ugly expression. Nuri explained that the warehouse was apparently one of Dietrich’s holdings, two or three companies removed from him. The fire was apparently arson.

  Dietrich was at odds with the local mob, perhaps even at war.

  Other photographs seemed to suggest the range of Dietrich’s interests. He was at the Union Terminal downtown. He was at the East Ohio Gas Company. He showed up at banks and at factories. Nuri could follow him all the way across town in a single day.

  Stefan’s research on vampires was just as earnest, if less informative. All the traditional folktales were different and, in some cases, contradictory. The only common theme seemed to be a dead thing that fed on the blood of the living. There wasn’t even any common thread that agreed on how a vampire was created. The folk causes ranged from being born with a caul, to having a cat jump over the grave.

  However, most accounts agreed that decapitation was an element in the destruction of a vampire. That made Stefan think about the unknown victims again. Decapitated, mutilated, and drained of blood. In both cases, the flesh had undergone some chemical process. It had possibly been a preservative, but what if it had been something else?

  That didn’t explain why Andrassy and Polillo suffered the same fate. As far as Stefan could tell, they’d only been creatures of the night in the mundane sense.

  Then there was Iago, who might be the unknown Italian that had been seen with both Andrassy and Polillo. Someone who spoke of a Covenant that the deaths broke, who spoke as if some Sicilian omerta was at stake. Someone who knew what happened at the warehouse, and who believed Dietrich was involved in the murders. It was as if Dietrich and Iago were on opposite sides of a gang war.

  Was Iago an undead thing, like the creature in the warehouse? Stefan thought he could feel it in Iago’s eyes, in the way his psyche seemed to press against his own.

  What foiled all his wild speculations about Eric Dietrich was the fact that almost all the pictures Nuri brought him were of Dietrich abroad in daylight. That seemed to argue against such thoughts.

  Near the end of Stefan’s convalescence, Nuri brought in a picture that Stefan hadn’t expected. In retrospect, though, it made a perverse sort of sen
se. It was a nighttime picture of Dietrich walking with a Negro. Stefan recognized the man. He was Samson Fairfax, the man he had found bloody and crazed the night Andrassy’s body had been dumped. The man who had been declared dead.

  The memory came back, the last time he had seen him. The feeling of an evil presence, and the fragments of a shattered mirror outside his tenement building. Samson Fairfax had seen the devil on the tracks that night. Stefan wondered if it had been Dietrich.

  Edward Mullen, who had allowed Samson’s body to escape, had lied for the devil, according to his suicide note.

  They needed to talk to Samson Fairfax.

  Stefan still limped as the two of them stepped out into the tenement-lined brick dead-end where the Fairfaxes lived. They stepped out of the car in broad daylight. People watched them suspiciously from the stoops, and from a few open windows. Children yelled at each other across the street.

  Nuri looked at their destination and said, “You know, you’re making me nervous with this supernatural crap.”

  Stefan fingered a rosary he held in his pocket and said, “If you forget about all that, Samson Fairfax is the best bet for a witness we have.”

  Nuri nodded, but his expression showed that he was still uncomfortable with Stefan’s thinking about the undead. Stefan couldn’t understand it. Nuri had been at the warehouse, too. He had killed the thing.

  They both entered the building, which had stayed just as Stefan remembered it. It was as dark in the narrow hallways as it had been the night he had first come here. They passed a few open doors, and occasionally a face would look out from the crack in the door and ease it shut as they passed.

  When they reached the door to the Fairfaxes’ apartment, Stefan knocked. Nuri stood next to the door, hand on the butt of his revolver.

  There was no answer. Stefan hadn’t expected any, not at this time of day. He knocked again, as his other hand fingered the rosary.

  “Police, open up.”