“Unfortunately, the young man who called the hotline was also found dead, early this morning,” Levitsky said slowly. “I don’t suppose you know anything about that, either?” It wasn’t exactly a question.
I turned to Uncle Dmitri. “Uncle Dmitri, do you wish to make a statement to this police officer?”
“Politzai?” Uncle Dmitri made a spitting noise. “Pfui! I state that he should geh in drerd!”
“Cursing us won’t help, Mr. Ionescu,” Levitsky said gently. “Maybe if you tell me what you saw, you won’t have to go to court, and we could overlook your lack of immigration papers.”
“Papers! Papers!” Uncle Dmitri muttered to himself. “All the time these days, papers! Used to be, you didn’t need papers. Vlad Tepes’ seal was enough to go from Vienna to Istanbul, and no one would bar your way.”
“Vlad Tepes? As in…. Dracula?” Levitsky’s eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to tell me, sir, that you were around during the reign of Vlad Tepes Dracula? Roughly six hundred years ago?”
Uncle Dmitri didn’t seem to hear him. He was off in some world of his own. “Vlad Tepes! Now there was a man, a mensch! He asked no questions, just could I drive a coach. I could drive a wagon, why not a coach? I didn’t have to take care of the horses, just the carriage. He had to have the carriage, all the boyars, the nobility had carriages, but only old men and women would be carried in a wagon. A man rides! So I drove the coach into Vienna, and Vlad Tepes rode beside it.”
Levitsky swallowed hard. “Mr. Ionescu, are you telling me that you are six hundred years old?”
Uncle Dmitri was jolted out of his reverie and back into the present. “I’m not telling you nothing, politzai pisher!” he snapped out. “You found the paskudiaks who killed my sister’s son and his wife, and then you let them live in luxury, in a nice warm prison. This I learned from the American newspaper around some car parts in Bucharest. I saw the picture and I got someone to read the English. It took another two years to get onto the boat and get to America.”
“How did you find Ms. Johnson?” Levitsky asked, his fingers working on the BlackBerry, recording everything.
“The American newspaper said my sister’s son had a daughter, and that she had the name of Johnson. Stupid American name!”
“Papa changed it from Ionescu because he wanted to be American!” I finally found my voice. “Joseph Johnson instead of Iosip Ionescu. It means the same thing in English.”
“He was ashamed of being Romanian!” Uncle Dmitri looked fierce. For just a minute I was afraid he was going to attack me or Detective Levitsky. I’d never seen him so worked up about my father’s name. If this was an act, who was he playing to? “Why not? All Americans know of Romania is what that writer put in his book, and then, who do they get to play Vlad Tepes? A Hungarian!” Uncle Dmitri couldn’t have been more scornful if they’d recruited Hitler.
Levitsky took a deep breath, and tried to stop the flood of invective. “Sir,” he began. He looked at me as if to ask, Do you believe this old geezer? I gave him my best Lawyer Look, honed in the courts of Brooklyn: Humor him, he’s an old man. So what if he thinks he’s a vampire? I didn’t know whether it would work on a Litvak, but I gave it my best shot.
“Sir?” Uncle Dmitri gave a short bark of a laugh. “Sir? Since when is a Jew ‘sir’? I was ‘Coachman’ or ‘Driver,’ or just, ‘Hey, Jew!’ Once Vlad Tepes was gone, there was war, lots of it. Plenty of work for someone who could drive a coach, repair a wagon, learn to handle a cannon.”
“Plenty of bodies, too,” Levitsky murmured. “I suppose you helped that part along?”
Uncle Dmitri wagged his head. “You don’t kill your own food,” he commented. “Why go to the bother? I’m not a butcher, young man.”
“Just a vampire,” Levitsky commented dryly. I could smell the doubt on him. Then he shook his head. “I’m a Litvak. There are no vampires, only old men who have some kind of medical problem, or want to take the Law into their own hands. So, Mr. Ionescu, what can you tell me about the murder of Jaime Rodriguez?”
“I get a call, I’m to pick up this Rodriguez. I pick him up, I take him where he says, I leave him there. I don’t see no one else.” Uncle Dmitri stuck to his story.
“Not even the person he was supposed to meet?”
“How do you know he was supposed to meet anyone?” I asked sharply.
Levitsky said slowly, “Rodriguez was in a program, like I said. He was supposed to make amends to the people he’d harmed. He was looking for them, Ms. Johnson, and one of them happened to be you.”
“Well, Detective, he did not contact me at my office. You can question the staff on that one.” That much was true. He found me at home, and told me he wanted to make amends. As if that could bring back my Papa and Mama!
“And where were you two nights ago, Ms. Johnson?” Now Levitsky was in full Cop Mode.
“I went for a walk. I sometimes do, when I can’t sleep. But I don’t think you’ll find anyone who saw me in Coney Island. I was back home here by midnight. There was no way I could get from here to Coney and back in time to kill anyone.” Not unless I was running really, really fast, on four feet, not two.
“You leave Yelena alone!” Uncle Dmitri came to my rescue. “She’s a good girl.”
I decided to give Levitsky something, anything to get him away. “There is one thing, Detective. One of my clients told me that were feral dogs seen at the murder scene.”
“Feral dogs?” Levitsky frowned. “That wasn’t given to the newspapers.”
“Neither was the fact that there was a witness, Detective. I suggest you stop looking for a vampire, and start looking for a werewolf. Or maybe, check out the rival gangs. But stop looking at me or my uncle, because you’d be wasting your time.”
Uncle Dmitri showed those perfect, white teeth. “You want to go to the Politzai Chieftain and say, ‘I found a vampire and a werewolf, and they’re taking down the lowlifes in Brooklyn.’? I don’t think so, boychik.”
Levitsky looked at Uncle Dmitri, then at the BlackBerry. He pushed the delete button. “You’re right, of course,” he said sadly. “No one would believe me.” His voice and his expression hardened. “But, Mr. Ionescu, I would strongly advise you to tell any vampires or werewolves you might know to let the police handle criminals. It’s our job. This is America, not Romania, and we don’t like private feuds and vigilante justice.” He snapped the BlackBerry case shut, and smiled at me. “I’ll see you in court, Ms. Johnson.”
Then he went back to his partner, probably to explain that we had nothing to do with the murders, and there was no point in pursuing this lead since it was a dead one.
Uncle Dmitri and I were left alone in the kitchen.
I spoke first. “You might have told me,” I said, reproachfully.
“Yelena,” he said, wagging a finger under my nose. “You were careless. That boy under the bridge. He saw you. I had to deal with him myself. Feh! The chazzerai those kids put into their blood, it’s enough to make a man vomit.”
“It’s over,” I told him. “Rodriguez was the one who killed my papa. He may have fooled the others into thinking he’d changed, but he couldn’t fool me. I could smell the lie on him when he said how sorry he was and how he’d changed from the stupid, drunken boy who’d shot up the liquor store. He wasn’t sorry, he just said he was.” I frowned at Uncle Dmitri. “You’re a fine one to talk about being careless! Taking that boy, and then letting the pack get the blame for it.”
Uncle Dmitri snorted derisively. “Hmph! I take a little here, a little there, it’s not missed. Maybe a little note in the back pages of the newspapers. But you…what about the others?”
I tried to look innocent. “What others? I go out once a month and have a little fun with the rest of the pack, howl at the moon, that sort of thing. Of course, I sometimes see things, things that no one thinks are being seen, so I can sometimes help my clients, and sometimes help the police. Hey, they don’t call me the Bitch of Brooklyn for nothing!
” I allowed myself a little smile, then got serious again. “But I don’t want any more attention on either of us, Uncle Dmitri. Levitsky will be watching, and I am an officer of the Court, at least in the daytime.”
Uncle Dmitri grinned at me. “What about at night?”
I shrugged. “Well, like my Mama said, it’s in the blood.”
About Roberta Rogow
Roberta Rogow got her start as a published author in Star Trek fanzines in the mid-1970s. Since then, she has contributed to the Merovingen Nights “shared universe” anthologies, edited by C. J. Cherryh, written Sherlock Holmes pastiche stories for anthologies edited by Marvin Kaye; and appeared in anthologies sponsored by chapters of Sisters in Crime. She wrote four novels in which The Reverend Mr. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and young Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle meet from time to time and solve mysteries when the police either can’t, don’t, or won’t. Her most recent fiction has been a series of novels in which a team of lawyers in Post-Civil War New York fight for Justice in a chaotic city.
In the field of non-fiction, Roberta has written book reviews for Mystery Scene magazine and The Bookbreeze. She also writes and records songs with a science fiction or fantasy theme (filk).
Roberta recently retired from a 37-year career as Children’s Librarian in various public libraries in New Jersey. Before going pro, Roberta spent fifteen years writing, editing and publishing Star Trek/media fanzines.
FARMER, by Nan Dibble
1
Horses didn’t like him, which was too bad for the horse. Sliding down from the animal, he gave it a stern look with a flash of yellow in it; the dun showed the whites of its eyes and sidled away as far as the reins allowed. Mostly he and the dun gelding had an understanding, but it didn’t do to turn his back on it: had already had a piece of him, a time or two.
Pretty much like the humans. Pretty much like everybody he dealt with nowadays, he reflected, walking slowly across the furrows toward the man behind the mule.
Hunkering down a decent distance off, he traded looks with the man. He knew he was big and looked intimidating. He’d fed well only a couple days back, leaving the new, building Center. Hubs, they were calling ’em now, he reminded himself. Whereas the steadholder was barely more than bones, like most humans he’d seen in the past few decades. Their food was thin, too. Like the sunlight. So weak that even the usual light overcast let him be abroad at all hours, the burn continually healing itself so long as he kept fed up well. Hadn’t been close to kindling…since he didn’t even remember when.
“Howdy,” he said to the man. Considering the stooped woman and two gangly young-uns, all hung with sacks, working the completed furrows.
“Howdy,” the man replied, shifting a strap and showing a big corn knife sheathed across his back. Wouldn’t have had a chance to use it, but he still respected a man who’d stand up for himself and what was his.
“Turnips,” he observed peaceably, then spun on his heels to slam the dun on the forehead, right between the eyes. It had its teeth bared, ready for a bite at his shoulder or his neck. The blow knocked the horse to its knees for a second. It staggered up, again spook-eyed, then whuffed and bent to graze, flipping a casual ear as though nothing had happened. Which it really hadn’t. Not between him and the horse, anyway. Just the usual.
It was the man who was spooked. He knew nothing human could move that fast. He’d backed off to the far side of his hipshot mule and had the corn knife in his hands. “Mother,” he called over his shoulder, “get to the house. Now!”
The horseman made no threatening moves and occupied himself with rolling a cigarette. Still a viable crop, tobacco, though nobody could eat it. Mostly trade goods, between one Center and the next. Hubs. They were calling them Hubs now. When he was done he laid the little sack of makings on top of the nearest furrow: an invitation the ploughman presently took up.
“Don’t see many of your kind,” the ploughman commented cautiously. “Not out here. Not for years. Not in broad daylight.”
The horseman smiled, lighting his smoke with an ancient lighter he laid on the furrow, too. But the ploughman had never seen such and didn’t know how to use it, so the horseman passed over his cigarette for the man to take a light from and then leaned, all wary, to pass back. “Sunlight ain’t what it used to be. Which is pretty much the problem, right there. For your kind. Good thing you ain’t got your whole crop in yet. Or you’d lose it.”
“And why is that?”
“My kind, they’ll be here. Another couple of days. Tried to overrun the Center, the Hub, at Kings Ford. Beat ’em off, so they’ll be coming on—this direction. And they’d have the reaping of it. All that’s here.”
The ploughman scowled, surveying his furrows and the well-tended fences that mostly kept out the deer, with young trees for the corner-posts that might someday moderate the fierce plains winds. “You’re just trying to scare me,” the ploughman challenged.
“Right you are,” agreed the horseman amiably. “Want you and yours to live and thrive. Try to hold out here, though, you won’t none of you do neither. The Wildings’ll have you. And then they’ll move on, and won’t be nothing left, except what’s left to rot in the ground. I come to bring you word. Leave this and come to the Center. The Hub. There’s one being built now, about two days ride north, at the crossing there. Looks to be a fine place, with a school and all. Good land roundabout, floods out a couple times a year, but that just brings the good soil down from the hills. I’ll help you load up, see you safe there. Horse can draw a travois, though he’s a mean sumbitch and been known to kick. Your fencing, over yonder, that’d serve for a travois. Take most of your goods along, and all you ain’t planted yet. Still time to get it in the ground, have a harvest before the snow comes.”
Deliberately, he was using ideas a landsman would put weight in and understand. Travel and goods and crops in the ground. He’d said pretty much the same thing a thousand times. Maybe a thousand thousand, he’d never kept count. What didn’t work had been discarded long since. He dealt well with landsmen.
“I got my old Ma to think of,” mentioned the landsman worriedly, which meant he’d at least started thinking it out. “And my missus, she’ll drop another one ’fore the harvest, though we’d thought she was past the age for it. Won’t neither of ’em take to leaving this place, starting over someplace else.”
“A good dozen women already at the Hub that’s building. Company for your missus, when it’s her time, and help with the woman things. And more’n one has her letters an’ a small stock of books to begin the copying. A school, like I said. Not yet a library, but that’ll come in time. No school here. No company. Might help persuade your missus. Reconcile her to it.”
“Maybe. Thisun’s surely her last, she’s nigh onto thirty. Be something, to have a child that’s lettered. Might incline her to be more peaceable about it…. Never thought the Wildings’d come this far out, this side of the river. Thought we’d kept ahead of ’em.”
“There’s more. They’re…recruiting. And they’re living off the land more than they used to. More than they could, at the first. They can run down a deer, if they have to. Don’t prefer it, but they can. And now that there’s more deer….” The horseman waggled his hand, figuring the thing explained itself.
The wild things were recovering, reclaiming the empty spaces. The most adaptable ones, anyway. Deer could live on bark when they couldn’t get grass or moss. Deer were plentiful again, enough to be a danger to planted crops. And with the deer came packs of coydog hybrids filling the predator’s role vacated by the wolves hunted to extinction centuries ago. East of the mountains, at least. More and more, they looked like wolves, too, with the neutral camouflage coats and sharp muzzles, but also the heavier shoulders and wider heads from the tamer side of their heritage. Predators and prey coming into balance, filling the old roles, doing the spiral dance of survival in the thinner sunlight. And terrible to isolated farmsteads like this one.
“I’m McKenzie,” offe
red the landsman abruptly, pinching out his cigarette when there was too little of it left to hold. “McKenzie Fanshaw. And my boys, here, are Dicken and Morton.”
“I mostly go by ‘Farmer,’ these days,” the horseman replied, smiling his easy, meaningless smile. Though he’d given no sign, he’d noticed the boys coming up to support their daddy against the stranger, all nervous, fiddling with their digging sticks that might have served for weapons if they’d known how to use them on anything besides dirt.
The dun was looking at them wicked-eyed, ready to lean out and take a bite, which was just plain meanness since their blood couldn’t do it a scrap of good. The horseman who called himself Farmer jerked on the reins and changed aspect fully, showing the eyes kindled golden, the ridged brow, and the fangs that actually didn’t change his smile all that much, or so he’d been told, a time or two. Had to go by that, since not even a still pool would show him back to himself, to know how he was changed, if at all, from the passing centuries.
Probably not much. Probably still the same big, broad-shouldered, grey-eyed, moon-faced, stupid looking lunk as ever. There’d been a woman claimed to be able to see the moon in his eyes and called him Mooncalf, but that was a long time ago and likely just funning him anyway. He’d never gone by that name anyway except with her and would have answered to “Idiot” if he’d thought it would please her. Starved on the thin food, she had, not on account of him at all, though it’d taken him some time to be easy in his mind about that. So many thousands, gone in the dark time before the twilight that was now when sustaining crops could be grown again.
“How come you’re out in the light?” asked the taller of the two boys—green-eyed, with a shock of dark hair plainly trimmed with a knife, all raggedy. “Everybody says your kind burn in the light.”
“Well, seems everybody’s wrong, don’t it?” Farmer shaped another cigarette and wrapped the reins a different way around his hands, a habit he seemed to have inherited: always had to be doing something with his hands. Made him smile to notice it. He let his demon aspect retreat. Wanted everybody to know where they stood but didn’t want to frighten them more than what would get them going. “Comes with time, I expect. My sire, he stood one time in the full of the noonday sun and didn’t burn and wasn’t but a century and a little at the time. Before the Change. So maybe I have it from him. Don’t mind the sun specially these days. Lets me keep ahead of the Wildings, mostly. And you folks, you have the good of that, if you’re willing to take warning.”
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