The Perdition Score (18 page)

I lean back and cross my legs.

“Like they say, sharing is caring.”

They're drunk enough to find that funny too.

“Excuse me for a moment,” says Liliane, and she heads for the bathroom.

When she's gone I look at Vidocq. He grins like a lovestruck twelve-year-old.

I say, “What's going on here, man? Did you invite me over to show me some work or to be your alibi?”

He frowns. Starts to pour me more wine. I put my hand over the glass and he sets down the bottle.

“James, believe me. Nothing untoward has happened.”

“Yet.”

He turns the glass around in his hands.

“I was hoping that you'd better comprehend the thrill I feel being with Liliane. We have a common bond experienced by no one else. Eternal life. Yes, I've spent time with ancient vampires and alchemists who have extended their lives, but those are not the same things as immortality,” he says. Then, “Think of it this way. Imagine if you met another person, man or woman, with whom you shared the experience of Hell. Wouldn't you be drawn to that person? The moments of trauma. The moments of beauty. I know you understand what I'm talking about.”

He's right, of course. All those years I spent alive Downtown. And then there's the nephilim thing. There's no one in the universe like me, but I never really thought of it that way before. I've always known I was a freak, so it never occurred to me what it might be like to meet someone who'd been through the same shit, someone I could talk to about it. My old girlfriend, Alice, was dead when I came back to L.A., so I
never got a chance to talk to her about anything. Even Candy, with as much as she's been though, still has a community. There are thousands of Jades in the world. Plenty of monsters too, but only one of me.

But there's only one Allegra too and Vidocq better remember that or I'll remind him. Hard.

“I get your point. I'd like to have a war buddy too. But just reel it in a little. Okay?”

“Perhaps you're right,” he says. “I've been overcome since meeting her. You know how much I love Allegra, but until I met Liliane again, I never knew how truly lonely I was.”

“Then see a shrink. Until then, cool it with the prom-night stuff.”

“You have a point.”

Liliane comes back into the room.

“What have you gentlemen been discussing while I was gone?”

I reach into my pocket and take out the vial of black milk.

“This.”

“You found more,” says Vidocq, a little more focused than before.

“What is it?” says Liliane.

“We're not sure yet,” Vidocq says. “It's a substance James calls black milk. Believe it or not, it was a gift from a—”

“A friend from out of town. Neither of us was supposed to have it and she never got the chance to tell me what it's for.”

“May I see it?” Liliane says.

Vidocq gives her the vial and she holds it up to the light. Shakes it a little.

“It is dangerous,” he says.

“Is it all right to open?”

I politely take it back from her and set it on the table.

“You might want to hold off while you have a belly full of wine.”

She gives me a loose-necked shake of her head.

“I work with a lot of odd chemicals in my lab all the time. Some of them don't smell like roses either, but I manage.”

“I wasn't calling you a lightweight.”

“Good, because you should have seen some of the things that were in Eugène's little dungeon in Paris. The most god-awful smells you can imagine.”

“What was it you used to call it?”

“Your perfumed abattoir.”

He chuckles lightly.

“That's it. I once experimented with a Hand of Glory, subjecting it to an array of chemicals, potions, even electrical stimulation. All in hopes of reviving it.”

I look at him.

“You tried to bring a hand back to life? What the hell for?”

He shrugs.

“To see if I could. I was more reckless and ambitious in those days. We all were. They were exciting times.”

Liliane nudges him with her shoulder.

“They certainly were.”

He gives me a sheepish smile.

Liliane turns to me.

“Speaking of hands, James, what's wrong with yours? If you don't mind me asking?”

I give Vidocq a look. He nods.

“It's all right. She's seen much in two hundred years. She can handle it.”

I shrug off my coat and glove. Roll up my shirtsleeve, giving her a full-frontal look at my biomechanical flipper.

Her eyes widen. Liliane puts a hand to her mouth. She looks at me, then Vidocq.

She says, “Would it be all right if I touched it?”

“Sure. I suppose so.”

She comes around the table and runs her fingers down the length of my arm, from shoulder to fingertip. She examines my wrist and flexes my elbow, watching the weird gearlike growths and the flat gray-black bands that do the job of muscles.

“Thank you,” she says. She goes back and sits near Vidocq. “Wherever did you get it?”

I roll down my sleeve and put on my coat.

“Another out-of-town friend.”

“You get so many interesting visitors.”

“That he does,” says Vidocq.

I get an idea, and take the drill out of my pocket and hold it up to them.

“You've both been around a lot of weird gear. You ever see something like that before?”

They take the drill and look it over together. Liliane finds the button on the end and pushes it. Both smile when the mechanism retracts and closes again.

Vidocq shrugs and Liliane shakes her head.

“No. I'm sorry,” she says.

“Neither have I. Do you have any idea what it's for?” says Vidocq.

“A friend who knows about these things thinks it's some kind of precision drill for making delicate objects. Or maybe it belongs to a high-rent Tick Tock Man.”

“A Tick Tock Man?” says Liliane.

“They make expensive windup toys for people burdened by too much money.”

“That's a burden I wouldn't mind trying.”

“You and me both.”

Liliane looks at her watch and makes a face.

“Look at the time. I have to get back to work.”

She and Vidocq stand. They say something French to each other and both laugh. She kisses him on both cheeks and comes around to my side of the table. Everyone else is standing, so I do too. She gives me a couple of quick air kisses and says, “It was lovely spending more time with you, James. I hope we get to do it again sometime.”

“Sure. Sometime.”

Vidocq shows her to the door, then drops back down onto the sofa.

He looks at me.

“Are you going to continue your lecture? If so, I'm going to need more wine.”

I hold up my hands.

“No more lectures. Just this: if you break Allegra's heart, I'm going to kick your ass.”

“And I would deserve it.”

“I'm glad you understand. Now—what the hell is the story with you two? What happened back in Paris?”

He sighs and picks up his wineglass, settling against the back of the sofa, looking exhausted.

“I don't think I have the energy for a long tale right now.”

“Then give me the TV-pitch version.”

He smiles, but he still looks tired. Not tired. More like deflated. He was high on Liliane and the past and now they're both gone.

“She murdered me,” he says finally. “In the spring of—if memory serves—1857.”

I look at him, waiting for him to go on. But he doesn't.

“That's it? She murdered you and now you're best friends. What the hell happened back then?”

“It's not something I'm proud of,” he says. “I don't really want to talk about it.”

“I've killed pretty much everything in this world and the next that can be killed. I'm all out of judgment.”

He sits up with a wan smile on his face.

“Liliane and I lived and worked together for many years and were happy. But in the end, she suspected me of an infidelity.”

“Was she right?”

He nods.

“With the wife of a police official. She was lovely. And I didn't much care for the police of that time. You must understand that.”

“I do. So, what happened?”

“I was old. I felt the years acutely. People died early and often badly back then. There were dozens of patent medicines at the time that promised revivification. But they were all frauds. I experimented with mesmerism. Electricity was all the rage. I experimented with animals. Old ones. Sick ones. To see if I could reenergize them. I experimented on myself
with repeated shocks of different voltages to different parts of my body.”

“Did any of it help?”

“A few things. In small ways and not for very long. Finally I came across a formula in an obscure British pamphlet on folk medicine. I recognized some of the formulae as coming from ancient alchemical texts. They had been disguised to appear as simple nostrums. One in particular caught my eye. I'd never seen anything like it before, but I recognized most of the ingredients and thought it might make the basis of what I was looking for.”

“And here you are. I guess it worked.”

He wags a finger at me.

“No. It didn't. But I kept working with it. Modifying it to increase its potency. One particular batch demonstrated a dramatic effect. Overnight, the spots on my hands disappeared. My vision improved and I felt my old strength restored. But, as with my other successes, the effects wore off quickly.”

“Something like that could drive a person a little crazy.”

“It did. I think that's what prompted my affair. The fear of death. The scent of the grave.”

“But you obviously came up with something that worked.”

“Never. I was a complete failure. Nothing I tried worked for more than a few hours. A day at most. I was despondent. And the more despondent I became, the more the affair intensified.”

“So, who figured out the secret?”

“Liliane. Just before she poisoned me.”

He leaves that floating in the air while he pours more wine.

“I had prepared a new potion from my most promising experiments. But it wasn't a fast process. The potion had to age for a few days in a cool, darkened cabinet. I believe it was during those few days that Liliane learned of the affair.”

I try to picture him old and dying. I don't like it.

“She spiked your formula, didn't she?”

“Yes,” he says. “And created a miracle. I died. Or seemed to. I was immobile for two days. In one stroke of luck, Liliane regretted what she'd done and kept my body at home, not telling anyone what had happened. But I remained dead. Or so it seemed. Finally, on the third day—and this part of the story she just told me today—she wrote a note confessing what she had done and took the potion herself.”

“At which point you woke up.”

“
Exactement
. And I found her dead. I was heartbroken. But I was also young again. Well, as young as you see me now. My hair was still gray. The lines around my eyes remained. I was no spring chicken, but I felt strong and alive. I was also frightened and my mind remained fogged for a long time. I was afraid people would think that I had killed Liliane in revenge. And if they didn't, what would they make of my transformation? We were long past the legal persecution of witches, but ordinary people had never lost their fear of the unexplained. So, I packed a few bags and disappeared.”

“What happened to Liliane?”

“Like me, she woke up. In her case, during her funeral preparations. Her revival caused the exact uproar I had avoided. The police were called. François Grillet, the police
official with whose wife I had conducted my affair, arrived first at poor Liliane's resurrection. Unfortunately, he knew about the affair by this time and recognized Liliane as the lover of his greatest enemy. So, he took this woman who shouldn't have been alive and stabbed her in the heart.”

“And because she'd popped out of the casket, he could claim anything he wanted.”

“You understand these monstrosities so well, James,” he says before settling back against the sofa. “Well, after that, no respectable mortician would have anything to do with Liliane's apparently dead body. She was taken to a paupers' cemetery to be interred in a mass grave with the lost and forgotten. But, like me, on the third day she awoke before she could be put into the ground. She understood what had happened and knew that she could never live in normal Parisian society again. She escaped and crossed the continent for decades, using the alchemical techniques she learned from me to pay her way. In fact, she only went back to France as a refugee when Herr Hitler breathed his last. She's been living there ever since.”

I flex my Kissi hand, feeling the sheer strangeness of it for the first time in a year.

“It's a nice story, but you're leaving out something.”

“Am I?”

“The part where you kill François Grillet.”

He laughs.

“See? You do understand.”

He takes a long breath.

“The story of
la femme revenante
was everywhere. When I heard about what Grillet had done to Liliane, I surmised what had really happened. So, one night while the gentle
man was in bed, I crept in and cut his throat. When I was recognized and men came for me, I killed them too. I'd seen the grave once, thought that I had lost my great love to it, and was not about to be sent to the next world by such curs.”

I watch him, sprawled on the sofa, half drunk and with tears in his eyes.

“You're still in love with her, aren't you?”

“Who can say?” he mumbles.

“I do. You're in love with the woman who murdered you.”

“It sounds strange when you say it like that. But it was so long ago. Time has healed so much of what happened between us.”