The Last Vampire (27 page)

“Why did you? We’ve got to endure her now forever and ever! And she’s — oh, Miri, she’s tacky and she’s quite stupid.”

Miriam shrugged. “You want to do pipe later, child?”

“I thought you were mad at me.”

“I’m not mad now. In fact, I’m going to do celebration pipe. The two-hundred-year-old opium.”

“What possible occasion could there be now?”

“I’m going to take that man downstairs with you and me and Leo, and we are going to spend a very long time with him. We’re to feed Leo with him. Her first pabulum. Do you think she can handle it, Doctor?”

She was instantly excited, instantly appalled. A “very long time” would mean hell for the poor man. “Miri, I hate for them to suffer.”

“What if I told you that he’s the one who assaulted me?”

She stopped counting. In fact, lost the count. “You mean — ”

Miri smiled slow. “I snared him, Sarah, in my very fine net. Anticipated his moves correctly. He is, at present, our prisoner.”

“He’s the one from Paris?”

“Yes.”

Sarah looked at him again. “If we kill him, is that it? You’re out of danger?”

“They’ll be set back, because that man out there is a very powerful weapon. That man is the reason they win.”

“Who, Miri?”

“There are people killing the Keepers, Sarah. Making carnage of us all over the world.”

“People?”

“And that man is their leader.”

Sarah found a chair. “And we’re going to feed him to Leo?”

“She needs to eat, dear, just like us. She has a right to her food, too.”

Paul wanted his clothes. Everybody else was already dressed. This was becoming not fun. “Excuse me,” he said again, “I think that’s my — ” But it wasn’t his. Nothing was his. “Look, hey, I’m missing a wallet, here.” He really didn’t need to lose
that,
for Chrissakes. There was six hundred bucks in there. The rest was safe enough inside the springs of the bed at the Terminal Hotel, except for the three c’s he’d spent on the also-gone magnum.

“Hey, ladies!” he called out to no one in particular. “I got no clothes, here! Is there somebody in charge?”

They were purposely ignoring him, all of them. That was obvious. It was some kind of joke, apparently. He was now the only person naked. The lights were so bright they might as well be on a beach. Goddamnit, this was like one of those dreams — you’re naked in a department store or something.

He spotted some guy giving him the eye and flopped his dick at him. “Like to look at it, doncha?”

“It’s pretty.”

Oh, Jesus, and he’d been having so damn much fun. Normally, he had very little fun. Getting blown and then sick drunk in whorehouses was not fun; it was a job, servicing your urges.

The management was undoubtedly back there watching the New York sophisticates having their vicious fun at his expense.
Lemme put one of you turds in a vampire lair sometime,
he thought,
see if you find that fun.

He glared around him. Female laughter bubbled up from somewhere in the crowd, was instantly extinguished.

He went over to the food table. Little dead eyes stared at him. But there was also caviar, and his guess was that this was the most expensive thing on the menu. So he cupped his hands and got a great big glob of it, causing all the cognoscenti to gasp. Then he threw the caviar at the damn one-way mirror.

“Gimme my damn clothes,” he said quietly. “Or I’m gonna tear this place apart.” He spoke with the kind of gentle intensity that suggested that immediate compliance was essential.

Leo, who had had enough of this jerk for this evening and the rest of what might be a very long life if things went her way, said,“I’ll get your clothes.”

“Wise girl.”

The delay was because Miriam had decided that she didn’t want him to get back into his rags. She wanted him properly dressed, so she had sent Luis up to the house to get some of John’s clothes. He had just reappeared with a black silk Donna Karan suit and a bloodred shirt, also of silk. Miriam would not allow John’s things to be put into storage, not even yet. Maybe Sarah would come up with some new process someday, that would work for him. His body was still fairly intact, after all. So his things waited for him.

“It’s crazy to have this guy here,” Leo said.

Sarah, who was counting again and could not interrupt herself, did no more than glare. Now that she shared a secret with Miri that the bitch wasn’t party to, she felt better, less threatened.

Miriam put Paul’s wallet in the breast pocket of the superb jacket. The magnum, which was on her desk under some piles of money, stayed there.

“You’re to bring him to my room,” Miriam told Leo.

Leo knew that people who went in there did not come out. “Am I invited?”

“You are indeed,” Sarah said.

A chair hit the one-way mirror, bouncing off with a distant thud. He was getting physical about his nudity.

Miriam shook her head. “My, my.”

“He’s out there naked in a fully dressed crowd,” Sarah said. “I’d be pissed off, too.”

Miriam chuckled. “Show him the club, Leo. Let him play with you a little. But don’t you dare fuck him dry. Is that a promise?”

Leo came around behind the desk and kissed Miriam’s cheek. Sarah couldn’t watch it. She stared down at the magnum. She picked it up and pointed it at Leo. “Remember this,” she said. “He’s dangerous.”

Another chair thudded into the window.

“Arrange to be at the door to my room with him in half an hour,” Miriam said as Leo hurried out. Then she turned to Sarah, “Don’t point guns at her.”

“She’s rude to you.”

“She’s as she is. Accept her.”

“You want her instead of me!”

Miriam went close to Sarah, cradled her face in her hands. “Control yourself,” she said, pressing harder, compressing the jaw and cheeks until the eyes almost popped out of the head. “Will you?”

Sarah nodded. She could not speak.

Miriam could crush a human skull. She pressed harder. “Are you certain?”

Sarah nodded again. Mucus began dribbling from her nose. Her feet stomped and scuffled, her hands came up and fluttered along Miriam’s arms.

Miriam let her go. Sarah gagged, sucked air, pitched forward out of her chair. Then she came to her feet. Her cheeks were flaming.

“No jealousy,” Miriam said.

Tears pouring from her eyes, Sarah threw herself against Miriam. “Please don’t abandon me!”

Miriam had heard that cry from every one of them, and it went straight to her heart. They were tragic beings, her humans. She was ashamed of them. But she enjoyed them a great deal, and that, ultimately, was what mattered to her. Keepers caused human suffering. That was simply the nature of nature.

She kissed Sarah. “Better?”

“I’m sorry, Miri. It’s just that you’re so precious to me. I can’t live without you.”

“My love, I have a task of great importance that I need you to do.” She held out a brass key. “This is the key to his hotel room.” She tossed it onto the desk, told Sarah the address. “Go up there, take Bill or somebody with you. Go through the room, take every trace of him out with you. And especially, if you find a small, black book, very old — ”

“He has a Book of Names?”

“If we’re lucky.”

Sarah was shocked. “What use would it be to him?”

“They can read Prime. Some of it.”

Sarah was truly amazed. She had counted a hundred and eighty different symbols in a single glyph. It was the most complex written language by a factor of a thousand. Who could possibly manage to crack a code like that?

“You’re sure of this?”

“I imagine they used National Security Agency cryptographers.”

Sarah felt a coldness within her, as if her heart had been pierced with a knife of ice. “Your name is there. Your holdings. Oh, Miri!”

The Keepers were in terrible trouble if these people were able to read such records. “Where would he get a Book of Names? How?”

“When you get the book — if you do — bring it straight here.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then we’ll just have to get him to tell us where it is, won’t we, dear?”

Sarah managed a smile. Sometimes Miri made them scream, which Sarah normally hated. She would not hate it if this man screamed.

“We’ll make him tell us,” she said. She put her arms around Miri. “Thank you for trusting me again.”

“Now go, child. Go like the wind.”

Paul pulled on the pants, got them sort of closed. “This guy must be thin as a rail,” he said. He managed to get into the shoes, too, which were of leather so soft it made his skin crawl. Could these people have somehow gotten something from a vampire? From what he’d seen in Paris, the vampires were much more capable of mixing with humans than he’d believed. His sense of it was that the Asians were more ancient than the Europeans and far less able to be seen on the streets. Maybe the Americans were younger and more humanlike still. Hell, maybe they would even fit into a hip crowd like this.

He looked more carefully at the shoe. Gucci sure as hell didn’t make them out of human skin, so that theory was out.

The clothes actually fit pretty well, although they seemed decades out of date. The jacket had a wide collar, and the trousers were subtly flared. They belonged to a man with big shoulders like Paul’s, a tall man and a strong man. But a slimmer one.

He regarded himself in the mirror. “Jesus,” he said, “I look like a million bucks.”

Leo decided that she utterly loathed him. “You look just fabulous,” she lied.

“Whose clothes are these, anyway?”

“A friend of ours. Listen, I’ve got an idea. The next set doesn’t come up until after dinner. Want to see the rest of the club?”

A guided tour from this babe? “You better believe it.”

She walked through another wall. Expecting to be blasted by music again, he followed her. But he was not blasted. In fact, he wasn’t in a room at all. He was in a Japanese garden, outside — at least it seemed like outside. The sky was velvet swarming with stars, a sickle moon just turning yellow as it slid toward the horizon. Bamboo chimes made restful sounds; water hurried over stones. Crickets chirped; a bat whispered past his face. Here and there in the dark, he could see pale bodies. There were at least a dozen people here, all covered by black cloaks, lounging on benches or on the grass. A guy with glasses and an old-fashioned doctor’s kit went among them like a waiter, discussing in quiet tones, then ministering to them out of his case.

Paul smelled opium . . . real good opium. He was already contact high and passive-smoke high, and maybe high on something he’d ingested in the food or those damn drinks he’d been given a million years ago. But he really loved opium, and it was one hard drug to come by these days. It took him back to quiet times in the Cambodian jungle, those magical times when they were more-or-less safe, and they could sweetly indulge.

They weren’t outside, of course, not really. They were under a deep country “sky,” and this was the middle of Manhattan. Leo took his hand, led him around the edge of the garden.

“Hey, wait, I could do some pipe.”

“Um, if you stay in here, it’s a thousand dollars an hour.”

You could probably drop ten grand on this place in a single goddamn night. “Let’s see the rest of it.”

“This next room is rather unusual. But please remember, our credo is no limits and no restrictions.”

“Sounds like fun.” Paul followed her through another veil and into a completely mirrored foyer. There was a tunnel entrance. He hesitated. “Where does that go?”

“Just downstairs. And it only looks like a tunnel. There’s a stairway when you get past the veil.”

It was not easy to walk into what looked exactly like one of the Paris tunnels, but he followed her. He found himself in a stairway, dimly lit with recessed bulbs, its walls and ceiling black. The rubber treads on the steps gave it an institutional feel. He thought that it must be like this in certain prisons.

There was a thick iron door here. “What is this place?”

“We call it Foggy Bottom,” she said with a laugh. “It’s full of politicians.” She drew the door open.

The first thing he saw was a red butt. Leonore went in, giving it a spank as she passed. “Thank you,” a male voice said.

Paul followed her. “Should I? A guy?”

“He doesn’t care.”

Paul gave him a whack, and not a light one.

“Thank you, sir!”

Paul looked down, trying to see the face of the guy who was trussed up there.

“No, honey, we don’t pry. Not in here.”

But he had seen, and he knew the face. “Um, are these people all from Washington?”

“Washington, the Kremlin, Downing Street, the Vatican. You name it.”

Not all the whipees were men. There was a woman hanging naked from the ceiling, with what looked like heavy chains hooked to her nipples. “Ouch!” Paul said to Leonore, who kept walking. Another woman was encased in spectacular bondage, tied up like some kind of a ball, with what looked like a pair of underpants stuffed in her mouth.