In the Garden of Sin (29 page)

She eyed him as she lifted a cigarette to her mouth. Her hair was loose, and so close in color and gleam to her black satin robe that you couldn’t tell where the hair ended and the robe began. Nor could he discern her expression, since she was backlit by the rising sun, which cast a purplish luminescence through the sheer, UV-blocking fiberglass shades cloaking the wall of glass behind her.

She exhaled his name through a curl of smoke. It was “Anton” this time. He didn’t know whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

“Hey. Galiana.” Turek licked his lips and smiled in a way he hoped looked nonchalant. “You still up?” He set down the shoes and stepped into the cavernous room, lit only by the eerie violet dawn and twelve small halogen picture lights in the ceiling, aimed at the most prized of the scores of paintings that occupied every inch of available wall space.

The most precious of her favored dozen: Jan Vermeer’s
The Concert
, valued at five million dollars and stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on St. Patrick’s Day, 1990, by Turek and a professional art thief Galiana had cured of AIDS via vampiric transfusion, both of them disguised as police officers. In addition to the cop getup, Turek had worn a black mullet wig and the fakest fake moustache you ever saw. That haul had also yielded five drawings by Degas, one oil by Manet, a Chinese bronze vessel, and four Rembrandts—although one of the latter turned out to have been the work of some Rembrantish D-list painter nobody ever heard of. This Galiana had fenced, along with the vessel and three of the Degas that she’d found “unmoving.”

Also bathed in coronas of halogen radiance: Renoir’s
Portrait of Madame Albert Andre
and Bonnard’s
Le Petit Café
, which were among nine paintings that disappeared from the Musée de Bagnols-sur-Cèze in France on November 12, 1972, while Turek and Galiana were staying in a nearby hotel. Next to the Bonnard hung Picasso’s
Portrait of Dora Maar
, swiped in March of 1999 from a Saudi yacht that was docked in Antibes, where Galiana had owned a villa since 1882.

Galiana gestured with her cigarette toward the Le Corbusier chaise longue. Too wound up to recline, Turek sat awkwardly on the dip in the middle of the leather chaise, which was like perching on a low stool or a child’s chair. Perfect. He reached automatically for the pack of Gitanes in his jacket pocket, but of course he wasn’t wearing his jacket.

He thought Galiana might ask what happened to it, but instead, she said, “I didn’t appreciate having to sink that pigeon all by myself, Anton.”

“Did, um, did it go all right, or…?”

“He’s under the Whitestone Bridge, with a hundred feet of water over him.” Tapping her cigarette into the alabaster ashtray on the seat next to her, she said, “I’m a bit perplexed as to why you would run off that way in the middle of a feed.”

“I thought I saw someone I knew walking by on the sidewalk.” Lies generally worked best if they were wrapped around a core of truth.

“Who?”

“You don’t know them.”

“Them? Was it a man or a woman?”

“A man,” he said. “A Follet, actually, an elf, someone I met briefly a long time ago. I followed them for—”

“There’s that nebulous ‘them’ again,” she said with a wintry little smile.

“Him.” Turek wiped his palms on his jeans. “There were
other people with him. And, um, I followed them all over the East Village, but it turned out not to be them after all. Him.”
Fuck
.

“So you missed out on a death feed for nothing,” she said.

“Yeah. I’m such an ass sometimes.”

She offered no polite refutation of that, simply fixed him with that all-too-penetrating Nefertiti gaze. “Your eyes are red and swollen,” she said.

“Yeah, I’m toasted. Time to hit the sheets.” Feigning a yawn, Turek stood and turned to leave, then turned back as if something had just occurred to him. He almost snapped his fingers, but decided that would just be too hokey. “I keep forgetting to mention this, but, uh, I was thinking about spending some time at Gebirgshaus, kick back a little bit, recharge my batteries.” Gebirgshaus was Turek’s home in the Car pathians, where he retreated every once in a while when serving as Galiana’s compliant little minion got to be just a bit much.

“Ugh.” She shuddered as she stubbed out her cigarette. “How can you bear that dank old ruin?”

“You’ve never even seen it. How do you know it’s dank?”

Giving him
that look
, she said, “It’s a six-hundred-year-old stone castle.”

“It’s just a large manor house, actually.” Although it
was
enclosed by stone curtain walls fifteen feet thick and festooned with electrified barbed wire.

“It’s dank,” she said with finality. “And dark and spider-infested, and located a hundred miles from the nearest decent restaurant.”

More than a hundred, actually. When Turek had had Gebirgshaus built back in the late 1400s, he’d visualized it as a sort of safe house for when he was being pursued; in fact, it
was where he’d convalesced after the Post-Fuck-up Makeover back in ’82. To that end, he’d built it not in his Czech homeland but on Romanian soil in the high, craggy southern curve of the Carpathians, which erupted in a thousand-mile-long swath through several eastern European countries. The house and the land it stood on had been bestowed upon him by Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, in return for helping to mete out punishments to those who were foolish enough to oppose the great prince’s rule. The southern Carpathians were vast and desolate. Galiana would have no way of knowing where his refuge was, having refused all of his past invitations to visit it.

“How long do you think you’ll be there?” she asked.

As long as it took to coerce Lili into vampirism once she’d had enough of being chained up and tormented in Gebirgshaus’s dungeon, where so many of Vlad Tepes’s enemies had bled their last. “I thought I’d fly out next Friday and stay a week or two, maybe,” he lied. “I would ask you to join me, but I know what your answer will be.” In fact, if all went as planned, he would never see her again. He would have found a way, at long last, to pry her talons out of his flesh.

“I don’t know,” she said, choosing another cigarette from the lacquered box on her glass-topped Noguchi coffee table. “Perhaps it’s time I finally saw this place for myself. I’ve always been a bit curious as to why it holds such allure for you.”

Oh, fuck me
. Leaning over to lift her gold lighter off the table—he’d never once seen her light her own cigarette in the presence of a male—Turek said, “You’re more than welcome to come, of course. You should know, though, that it’s one of the most remote and inhospitable places on the face of the earth, and very sparsely populated. You’ll go stir-crazy, for sure. And when it comes to feeding… well, I’ve had to make do with bears, lynxes, wolves…”

“I haven’t tasted the blood of game in quite some time,” she mused, leaning back to savor her cigarette with a contemplative expression.

“It’s nowhere near as nourishing as human blood,” he said, thinking
Sheisse!
“And it can taste pretty goddamned funky, depending on the animal. And these animals are usually crawling with fleas and ticks, and—”

“I am well aware of the downsides, Anton. I think you forget sometimes how much older I am than you, how much more experienced in, well, everything. More than once I’ve been forced into hiding in unpopulated areas where I had to feed on wild animals. The novelty wears thin very quickly.”

“Then, um, are you sure you want to be stuck at Gebirgshaus for weeks, with little or no access to human pigeons?”

“Weeks? I thought you said a week or two.”

“Oh. Yeah, well, um, I’m kind of viewing it as a sort of open-ended—”

“You wouldn’t be playing me, would you, Anton?”

“Playing you?”

“Keeping something from me.”

“Whoa.” He took a step back, raising his hands—which he quickly lowered when he saw how they were shaking. “How— how could you say that? How could you even think it?”

Galiana studied him through a haze of smoke for about ten seconds, during which he didn’t draw a breath. She shrugged, tapped her cigarette into the ashtray, and said, “You seem unusually tense tonight. Wired up.”

“I’m… I’m… not wired up, just—”

“If you’re stressed out, you probably
should
take a couple of weeks to yourself. Go to your nasty old castle, chill out a bit. I think I’ll take a pass, though. Fleas and ticks, for Christ’s sake.” She shuddered.

“Right. Yeah. Good. That’s good,” he said, dizzy with relief. “I mean, it’s for the best, all things considered. You really wouldn’t be happy there. I really think you made the right—”

“Sleep well,
marish,”
she said.

Grateful for the dismissal, Turek bid her good night and headed off to his bedroom, a Victorian-style enclave with blackout shades and heavily lined drapes on all the windows. They’d always kept separate rooms; Galiana shared her gray-walled, Bauhaus-furnished royal chamber with no one. When she was horny and wanted him to service her—for such was how he’d come to think of it in recent decades—she came to his room, used him, and left. Sometimes he dreamed that he was smothering; invariably he would awaken with her crouching over his face, rubbing her snatch against his mouth.

After hiding the card of entrée in a secret drawer of his dresser, Turek stripped, showered, and crawled between two layers of cool, sleek Egyptian cotton, only to lie awake, his mind whirring.

Hell
yeah, he was wired up. He was getting ready to deceive and betray a three-thousand-year-old vampiress who would toast him to cinders—after dining on deep-fried cock with Chianti and fava beans—if she caught wind of his scheme. That kind of thing tended to focus the senses.

Marish
. She’d started calling him that after they hooked up together again in Paris during the Terror. He’d asked her what it meant, and she’d told him it was an endearment in the old Etruscan tongue, and that it meant something like “lover.”

About fifty years ago, he’d gotten curious and tried to look up the exact definition. He’d checked a few libraries and well-stocked bookstores, looking for an Etruscan glossary, but it was an obscure dead language, and he came up empty. Maybe if he were to look in one of those big university libraries, he’d have better luck. Or maybe…

He actually smacked his forehead when it came to him.
“Oberarsch.”

Throwing back the covers, he crossed to his writing desk and opened his laptop. Within seconds, he was scrolling down a web page titled “Etruscan-English Dictionary.”

He homed in on the Ms:
Malena, Malstri, Man…

“Bingo,” Turek whispered when he found the entry for
Marish
.

His grin faded when he read the definition. He stared at it, searing it into his mind lest he falter in his resolve to extricate himself, at long last, from the clutches of Galiana Solsa.

Marish:
servant; slave

LUTU-LILI SMILED to herself when she saw Elle accidentally-on-purpose spill a little grog onto “Lord Dragoneye”—a square-jawed, prematurely gray New York trial attorney named Blaine something—while serving preprandial drinks to the costumed “barons and baronesses” lounging in the castle courtyard.

Blaine leapt up, wiping at his rented doublet. “What the fuck…Clumsy wench!”

“I’m so sorry, my lord,” Elle said with bowed head. “Pray forgive me.”

“Forgive you? You ruined my fucking jacket.” Some of the attendees liked to throw around the “thees” and “thous,” but Blaine wasn’t one of them. “It isn’t forgiveness you need, it’s a goddamned lesson.”

Grabbing her by the arm, he strode to the Correction Table
standing next to the central fountain. The hefty antique held a place of honor among the various furnishings set up around the courtyard—spanking benches, fisting slings, even a whipping post—all of which had been used at least once since the official D and D kick-off luncheon at noon.

The stone benches were also popular for disciplinary purposes; a pretty little wench was bent over the back of one at that very moment, being fucked by one baron while another looked on, casually masturbating as he sipped from his tankard. Frequent use was made of the courtyard’s hundred-eighty-year-old cherry trees, as well. A baron had chained a strapping, gold-clad footman to one and was tormenting the poor bastard by slapping his cock very lightly but persistently with a cat-o’-nine-tails while he moaned and shuddered.