Manitou Blood (19 page)

The man finished frisking me and stood up. “Go on. I'm not stupid. I was with the Rainbow Division in Bosnia. If it's not a disease, what is it?”

“I think it's a spiritual force. Like an evil manifestation from the world beyond.”

The man stared at me for almost ten seconds without saying anything. Then he slowly shook his head and started laughing. One of his friends from across the street called out, “What's so damn funny, Gil?”

“Got me a screwball here,” said Gil.

“Do I
look
like a screwball?” I demanded.

Gil looked me up and down. “Yes, Harry. You definitely do.”

Apart from being moderately drunk, I was still feeling desperately guilty about splashing Clorox all over Ted, and
I was exhausted, and disoriented, and I badly needed to show somebody that I was right about this epidemic. So I said to Gil, “I'll prove it you. I'll damn well prove it you.”

“You'll prove it to me? How are you going to do that?”

“If you escort me to my friend's house, she can show you that I'm telling the truth. We'll hold a séance, and you can see for yourself.”

“A séance? You're inviting me to a
séance?
”

“What's the matter, you got repetitis? That's what I said, a séance. If we can identify the spirit that's causing all of this chaos, we can do something about it. Exorcize it, or banish it, or send it back to wherever it came from.”

Gil smiled, and stepped back to indicate that I could pass. “You just move along, Harry. I think you could do with some strong black coffee and a very cold shower.”

“And supposing I get attacked by ‘one of them'?” I demanded. “Or ‘
two
of them,' even?”

“Harry—”

“Supposing I never get the chance to tell the city authorities why all of these people are cutting other people's throats? Thousands more people could die.
Millions
, even. Listen to me, Gil. Without me, this city is doomed. America is doomed.”

Gil opened and closed his mouth but didn't say anything. A police squad car came howling past us, followed by another, and another. I heard another explosion: a deep, dull thump, somewhere over by the Hudson River waterfront. I could feel the aftershock right through the soles of my feet, as if the sidewalk was a rug, and somebody had tugged it.

“How far is your friend's house?” asked Gil.

“Four blocks. Christopher Street, that's all.”

“Okay, then, I'll come with you to the front door, give you protection, but that's all. I ain't attending no séance.”

He walked with me southward toward Christopher Street. It turned out that his name was Gil Johnson, and he worked for a company on Twenty-fifth Street that moved pianos. Once, when he had been hauling a Bechstein into an apartment building on East Fifty-seventh Street, a steel hawser had snapped and the piano had dropped nine stories into the street below, flattening a man who had been wanted by the police for rape and armed robbery. “Now was that supernatural justice or what?” Gil had a wife and two teenage daughters and he lived and breathed for the N.Y. Jets. “I love those guys.” He had even persuaded Freeman McNeil to be godfather to his oldest daughter.

“We saw the news about people killing people and me and my buddies decided we was going to protect our neighborhood. I'm not having no diseased people cutting my family's throats, no way.”

About twenty men and women came running across Charles Street, howling and screaming, but they didn't pay us any attention. They ran off, their footsteps echoing like applause. God alone knew where they were headed, or what they were planning to do when they got there.

“You understand what's going on, Harry?” Gil asked me. “I don't understand what's going on.”

“I think I know
what
. But don't ask me
why
.”

“I'll tell you something, Harry,” said Gil. He showed me his left forearm, which was tattooed with a grinning skull. “I faced death when I was out in Bosnia. I looked death right in his hollow eye sockets. I saw my buddies get shot, and blown up by RPGs, and it was madness out there. But at least we knew who were fighting. We were fighting the Serbs, and the Romanian mercenaries, and the Muslims, no matter how crazy they were. But this—this is like we're fighting everybody and nobody.”

“I think that just about sums it up, Gil. Everybody and nobody.”

Gil turned around and showed me his right bicep. It was tattooed with the number 10, all wrapped around with razor-wire, and dripping with blood. “That was us, Number 10 Special Detail. One of the toughest details ever. Our job was to penetrate the enemy's positions and grab their senior officers—alive, if we could. Mostly it all went to shit and we ended up blowing their heads off. But that's who I am. I may shift pianos now, but up here in my head I'm still a grunt, and I think like a grunt.”

At that moment we were passing a liquor store, and as we did so, a red-and-blue Michelob sign flickered and jumped. I looked into the store window and saw that the number “10” appeared to be dancing on his arm—only it was backward, so that it looked like the letters “OI”. A fraction of a second later a great multi-branched tree of lightning crackled over Battery Park, and there was a deafening collision of thunder,
kabooommmmm!
right over our heads.

“
Holy shit
,” said Gil.

It shook me, too—but I believed I knew what had caused it. “O” and “I”—two new letters. And, judging by that thunderous punctuation mark, maybe they were the
last
two letters, and I was now in possession of the whole word. I stopped, my face lifted to the sky, turning around and around on the sidewalk. “Singing Rock!
Singing Rock
! Is that you again?”

Gil waited for me, with his hands on his hips.

“You're definitely a screwball, Harry, no doubt about that.”

“I wish. Singing Rock is my spirit guide. He's been trying to tell me who started this epidemic.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really. The problem is, he has to give me the name in individual letters, a couple at a time. He can't tell me the entire name outright, because if I say it outright, the thing will come after me, whatever it is, and rip my throat out, or something equally undesirable.”

“If you say so, Harry.”

“Gil, will you just trust me? So far, he's given me five letters—‘s' and ‘t' and ‘r' and ‘i' and ‘g'. Now I looked at your tattoo just then and there was a damn great rumble of thunder which really emphasized what I was looking at, the letters ‘o' and ‘i.'

I held up my hand and counted the letters off on my fingers. “So far we have S-T-R-I-G-O-I which spells—”

“
Don't say it!
” Gil screamed at me. It was so unexpected that he made me jump.

I stared at him, shocked. “What? I was only trying to—”

“Don't say it, man! I
know
that word! I know what it means!”

“What do you mean you know what it means?”

“They were always using it in Bosnia, the Romanian mercenaries. It was like an insult, only it was worse than an insult. It was what they called somebody they were really scared of.”

“You mean
stri
—”

“
Don't say it!
For Christ's sake, it's too much of a coincidence! If people have been killing people and drinking their blood—that's like vampires, man, and that's what it means. It means
vampire
.”

“You're pulling my chain.”

“I'm not, Harry, I swear it. You can check it out. That word means vampire and that's what your spirit guide didn't want you to say it out loud. Even in Bosnia they never said it loud, not unless they were all hyped up, and even then it wasn't like they were talking about
real
vampires.”

“
Vampires?
” I repeated. “Come on, Gil, is this likely? I know they keep calling it a ‘vampire epidemic' on the news, but that's only because people have been drinking blood.”

“But why not?” said Gil. “You said yourself that this epidemic was caused by some kind of evil spirits, didn't you? Maybe this is what they are. Real, genuine vampires.”

“Gil, I'm not at all sure that I believe in real, genuine
vampires.” I put on my Bela Lugosi accent. “ ‘
The children of the night . . . what music they make!
'”

“You believe in spirits, though, don't you?” Gil persisted. “You believe in all of that
Twilight Zone
stuff? Come on, man, you've just told me you have a spirit guide called Singing Rock.”

“Listen, Gil, you're supposed to be the skeptic around here.”

“Yes, but that
word
, man! Jesus, I haven't heard that word in eleven years but when you spelled it out—that really made my hair stand on end.”

“Okay,” I said. “I guess it's worth looking into. We can ask my friend about it when she holds her séance.”

“You mean
you
can ask her. I told you, I ain't going to no séance, especially if you're going to start talking about vampires.”

“You fought in Bosnia and you're scared of vampires?”

“Are you kidding me? I fought in Bosnia and that's
exactly
why I'm scared of vampires.”

We reached Amelia's apartment on Christopher Street. She and Bertie lived in a second-floor studio in one of those elegant nineteenth-century apartment blocks that were originally built for the clothing industry, with high windows and decorative columns. The first floor was taken up by Christopher Street Cashmere, which sold strawberry-colored men's sweaters to the kind of men who would pay $400 for a strawberry-colored sweater. And lemon-colored sweaters, too. And pink.

I climbed the steps at the side of the building to the shiny olive-green front door and pressed the shiny brass doorbell marked
Carlsson
. I waited and waited, and eventually Bertie said, “Hello?” through the intercom.

“Bertie? It's me, Harry Erskine.”

“For God's sake, Harry, what are you doing here? Don't you know what time it is?”

“Bertie, I have to talk to Amelia. It's incredibly urgent.”

“I told you earlier, Harry, I don't want you involving Amelia in any of your problems, whatever they are. Now please go away.”

“Believe me, Bertie, I wouldn't bother you if this wasn't critical. But we're talking about thousands of people's lives here. Your life too, and Amelia's, and mine.”

“I'm sorry, Harry. I have to think about Amelia's best interests.”

But then Gil leaned forward and said, “Excuse me, sir? This is Gil Johnson, Forty-second infantry division, New York National Guard. I believe that we need to give Harry some assistance here.”

“National Guard? What do you want from us? I don't understand.”

“This epidemic, sir. This gentleman believes that he knows what's causing it, and he needs your good lady's assistance.”

“And what if I say no?”

Gil looked at me and winked. “I'm authorized under martial law to arrest you for obstructing the military, sir, and to require your good lady to assist us in any way that she can.”

There was a very long silence, and then the door release buzzed. I pushed open the door and we walked into the darkened hallway.

“Are you coming up?” I asked Gil.

Gil pulled a face. “I don't know. I'm not too sure I want to get involved in this.”

“Come on, Gil, think about your family, too. I need your authority. If you don't come up, he's not going to believe this martial law thing, is he?”

The two of us squashed together into the tiny elevator and went up one floor. When the door slid back Bertie was waiting for us—a tall, thin man with gray, brushed-back hair and rimless spectacles, wearing a loose beige shirt and baggy beige pants and sandals. I grudgingly had to admit that he was reasonably handsome, even if he looked as
if he drank nothing but carbonated spring water and ate nothing but Swedish crispbread.

“So here you are, then, Harry,” he said, making no effort to hide his annoyance. “You and your companion had better come in.” We stepped out of the elevator and into the living area. The apartment was very Scandinavian, with blond wooden floors and furniture that gave you a serious ache in your butt just to look at it. On the walls hung several huge paintings of blue Scandinavian blobs, and in one corner stood an abstract sculpture of a triangular thing dangling from a skinny rectangular thing. It wasn't easy to reconcile all of this carefully arranged emptiness with Amelia's old apartment in the Village, which had been heaped up with books and armchairs and rolled-up carpets and reading lamps and blotchy old engravings, not to mention a few dirty dinner plates.

“Tasteful,” I remarked, looking around.

But then Amelia appeared, crossing the floor in a gauzy, white dreamlike dress. She seemed taller, until I realized that she was wearing wedge-heeled sandals, but she was certainly thinner, and freshly suntanned, and her curly hair was cropped very short. She was no longer wearing glasses, either.

She looked extraordinary, at least ten years younger than the last time I saw her. Her face was still sharply featured, and her cheekbones were still prominent, but she didn't seem to have any wrinkles at all. Her breasts had always been noticeable but now they looked bigger than ever, and firmer, too. She was wearing about two thousand gold bangles on her wrists and a modern necklace made of big lumpy pieces of gold.

“
Harry
,” she said. “How wonderful to see you again.” She flowed right up to me and put her arms around me, and kissed me, and kissed me again, and again. God, she smelled good. All woman and Chanel. Meanwhile Bertie
was pursing up his mouth as if he were trying to suck battery acid through a blocked straw.