Sweeter Than Wine

by L. Neil Smith

  Colorado Bureau of Investigation. By no means number one on my hit parade for competence or freedom from political influence. I didn’t say so. Anton knew my opinion on the subject and to a certain extent even shared it. But he had to work with these people, and I didn’t. All of a sudden, I was wondering why we were talking about this.

  “So how come we’re talking about this, all of a sudden?” I asked.

  Anton sat up and put his glass down on the coffee table. “Because the task force concerns what they believe is an interstate serial killer. Given the nature of the killings, I thought you might have some insights.”

  He took in a huge breath of air and let it out. “Also, owing to peculiar circumstances, I have to do something I don’t want to do, Giff. I have to ask Surica where she was the week before she got here.”

  24: SUSPICION

  “The function of wisdom is to discriminate between

  good and evil.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Nobody cried “Anton!”

  Priscilla bowed her head and put a hand over her eyes.

  Surica sat serenely where she was, next to me, looking at the fire.

  “A few days ago,” Anton told us, “the mutilated body of a young groundskeeper was discovered in a public restroom in a park or county fairground in Leoti, Kansas. His throat been torn open and he had bled out completely. Or he had been bled out. In any case the stuff was everywhere. Absolutely the worst crime scene photos I ever had to look at.”

  I’d just told him that vampires don’t need a lot of blood to get along.

  “Something about that killing triggered fresh looks into similar deaths across the country. Our subject apparently likes dumpsters, and the body of an elderly dockyard security guard was found in one at the seaport of Charleston, South Carolina. The victim had been bled out completely, and his revolver was found nearby with all six chambers fired.”

  “You’d think he’d have taken the gun with him,” I said.

  Anton nodded. “You’d think. No bullets were recovered from the scene.”

  “As if the killer did take those with him,” said Priscilla.

  “As if,” her husband agreed. “In Wichita, they found a dog in a dumpster, complete with collar, leash, and license tags that told them who its owner was. No one had seen her in a day or two. A broader search led the police to the body of a college coed in the basement of an abandoned downtown motel. Her dog’s neck had been broken like a chicken’s, and the girl had been bitten for her blood twice in twelve hours.”

  Interesting, I thought. “Had she been sexually assaulted?”

  He shook his head. “The report was specific. No sign of it.”

  “Interesting,” I said it aloud that time.

  Anton said, “Apparently our perp departed from his M.O. in Tulsa.”

  I said, “Provided that’s what it was, an M.O. Disposing of the bodies after he had fed on them may just have been governed by convenience. That’s the very thing that dumpsters are designed for, right?”

  “This is true,” Surica agreed. “I freely confess that I preyed on German soldiers—they were my enemies, after all. I had shot them out of the skies with a song in my heart, and bombed and strafed them on the ground, before I lost my little airplane. Retreating from France after I left J there. I fed on their stragglers and, to the best of my recollection, got rid of the bodies in no single particular way.”

  Anton looked at Surica with an odd expression on his face, as if seeing her for the first time. Oddly, Priscilla was actually smiling. At the very bottom line, women can teach men a great deal about being fierce.

  Surica touched him on the arm. “Yes, Detective Varick,” she told him, “I am a vampire. But, exactly like J, here, over the years I have learned to be a moral vampire. At least as moral as I can be, in the circumstances.”

  “You have a point,” he said. “About getting rid of the bodies. They found the one in Oklahoma half floating in the Arkansas River. It would have washed all the way down to the Mississippi if it hadn’t hit a snag. That’s when they decided to organize this federal task force and—”

  “Let me guess,” I interrupted. “They broadened their search criteria to take in the Arkansas River body and came up with...what?”

  “A missing waitress in a culvert under a highway near one of those big truck stops outside of Atlanta. Throat torn out, no sign of sexual assault.”

  I said, “Almost as if the murderer were impotent.” It was fairly common to kill out of sheer rage at not being able to do anything else.

  “Or a woman,” said Surica.

  Anton nodded, “Or a woman.”

  Which brought us back around, full circle.

  “They’re still arguing about a body they found in a fleabag hotel in Memphis. Very, very messy, but the throat was cut, not bitten. A knife with two different bloodtypes, one of them anomalous and unreadable for some technical reason. Interstate truck driver who’d dropped a container at a distribution center that day. Some witnesses say he wasn’t alone. Multiple stab wounds, each of them potentially fatal.”

  “And no consistent description of the other person,” I guessed.

  “The oddest thing is that, while the anomalous blood evidence is consistent with traces discovered in the other killings we’ve been talking about—they think the murderer was shot at contact range by the dock watchman; the whole front of his uniform was covered with blood, not his own—the Memphis victim’s blood is a DNA match for fingernail scrapings linked with an altogether different series of killings: truckstop prostitutes, three dozen over the last twenty years.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Serial killer meets serial killer?”

  He nodded. “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Why does this news fail to fill me with rapture?” I asked.

  “What sparked the task force meeting tonight was the discovery of more bodies—eleven of them—in Colorado Springs yesterday in a bombed-out shopping mall. They’d been dead for around four days. Each and every one of them, six males and five females, had their throats torn out in the way that we’ve come to expect. Nothing stolen. They haven’t found any physical evidence, blood or skin parings, that it was the perp we’re interested in, but with help from the DHS, they’re keeping a lid on it until they’ve exhausted what forensics they do have.”

  Perfect: an entire federal agency dedicated to thwarting the free press and nullifying the First Amendment—or maybe just preventing a run on the country’s precious and dwindling supplies of garlic. Still, I could imagine the joy with which the authorities and city fathers looked forward to announcing a serial killer who appeared to be a vampire.

  I saw the pattern, and, of course, Anton—and his task force—would have, too. No matter what order the bodies had been discovered in, they mapped out an only slightly squiggly line from an east coast seaport straight to the state we lived in. According to Rand McNally it was 106 miles from Colorado Springs to New Prospect. Anton would be a fool not to be interested in when Surica got here and how she’d come.

  It took me a surprisingly short time to come to a decision, and I was confident it was the big head making it, not the little head. I’ve probably seen five hundred XY types completely taken in by women they thought loved them. Men are idiots that way, but it’s how evolution has designed them. Their job is to spread it around as far and wide as possible. It’s the women who are the conservators of the human gene pool.

  Of course I realized that I could be the five hundred and first idiot, that I could be completely wrong about Surica. It wouldn’t make me the first fool for love in human history. I’d loved her—mostly from afar—for sixty-five years, ever since that wine cellar in France. The person I’d constructed in my imagination since then, out of little scraps of memory and lingering traces of ecstasy, could be someone altogether different from the person she actually was then, or the person sitting beside me on the sofa tonight. But she was right here, right now, and I believed, both in my mind and he
art, I knew her.

  And although neither of us had said a word so far about anything more lasting than a kiss at twilight, mentally, morally—yes, and emotionally—I’d thrown in with Surica Fieraru, as the cowboys say, for good. Sometimes an individual has no choice but to decide where his loyalties lie, well in advance of any useful information about how wise that decision may be. I wanted to get laid on a regular basis, that much is true. But I also wanted a partner. I was tired of living life alone, and it made me absurdly happy just to look at Surica’s face.

  Fiddlestring seconded the motion, crossing the rug and hopping into Surica’s lap. She was ours and no matter what, we’d stick up for her.

  Or perhaps a better choice of phrase was called for.

  “Surica is a vampire,” I told Anton. I reached over scratched the cat behind the ears. “Just like me. And just like me, she isn’t a murderer.”

  He turned to me, his face lined with pain. “I don’t think she is, either, Giff. I like her. My kids like her. Priscilla likes her. She’s already as good as family. But I’m a policeman, and I’m obligated to ask.”

  I opened my mouth—to say what, I don’t know.

  Surica said, “Of course he is, my love. Of course you are, dear Anton.” She composed herself on the sofa, giving the cat a pat or two. “I am one of these illegal aliens that everybody seems so concerned about. I arrived in North America at Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the hold of a Lithuanian cargo vessel. I had bribed an officer to let me do so. I had also purchased many false identification documents before I left Europe.”

  Anton ran a hand over his face and listened.

  “I came across to Halifax myself,” I said, “in May of 1945 after the end of the war in Europe. And on a Lithuanian ship.” I looked directly at Surica. “I don’t suppose any of this is a coincidence, is it?”

  “It is not,” Surica answered. “I was following you, in a way. Of course the trail had grown as cold as can be imagined, and yet it is not so cold for someone who can ask questions that must be answered. You were new to this life, then. And yet you were unwilling to kill in order to feed. I was able to follow your path from France up to the Baltic, going from one family legend and nightmarish memory to the next.”

  “Sounds like we could use you downtown,” Anton told her, trying to smile.

  “It was difficult,” she said, “not only because I longed to find J—perhaps he has told you of my confinement by the Communists in Romania—but because I, too, was being followed. I think it possible that this follower, the Warden, Deabru, as he is known in the most ancient of European languages, may be the serial killer that you seek.”

  Of course the same thing had occurred to all of us.

  25: THE GOLD STANDARD

  “Goodness alone is never enough. A hard cold wisdom is required, too, for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil.”—Robert A. Heinlein

  “Having driven a rented car by night from Halifax, resting during the day, I crossed the United States border on foot and by canoe, in the vicinity of Magnetic Lake, Minnesota, somewhere near County Road 12.”

  Cross-country travel is difficult if you’re a vampire, but no more so than it was in decades past for black people whose situation I often thought about back in the 1950s. I agreed with Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe that if I had been born black, by then I’d have been in jail or dead.

  Surica continued. “That country is cold, let me tell you, even in summer. The insects are terrible, and about two thirds of it is open water. From where I crossed, I hitchhiked to the little town of Ely. My American passport reads “Sophie Freelander”, which I felt was appropriate, a real person who was born in Hibbing, in 1984, and died, unfortunately, at the tragic age of eighteen days. The birth date made me twenty-five years old, somewhat less than one tenth of my actual age.”

  Never able to resist a straight-line, I stifled a clownish urge to say she didn’t look a day over a hundred. Truth was, she didn’t even look twenty-five.

  “Here is the silliest part of the story. At least it seems silly, now. I don’t know whether because of what I am or what I went through after the war, I am able to place myself in a state of rest whenever I wish, consuming little oxygen and no food or water—or blood—for days at a time. From Ely, I drove a rented car to Duluth, where I had myself shipped by air in a sturdy wood box to a warehouse in Cheyenne, Wyoming.”

  That got everyone’s attention. Priscilla, with a mother’s concern, wanted to know if the box had been padded on the inside or had air holes drilled in it. Yes to the former, no to the latter. Anton wanted to know how she’d nailed herself in. She’d done it from the inside with a staple gun, she explained, called for pickup by cell phone from inside the crate, and nodded off to sleep. Once again, I nobly suppressed an almost irresistible urge to ask about frequent flyer miles.

  “When I arrived at the warehouse in Wyoming, the alarm in my telephone awoke me. I broke out of the crate, found a place in the warehouse to change into the dress I wore to meet J in, and here I am.”

  She leaned toward Anton and gave him a humorously serious glare. “I have the invoice and other documents if you would care to see them, Detective.”

  “That I would,” he glared back for an instant and then grinned. “As soon as possible. And thanks. You’ve taken a great weight off my shoulders.”

  “I am so sorry to have put it there to begin with. As I said, it is no coincidence if the Warden is headed this way. He is following me.”

  “Which means,” I said, “that some preparations are called for.”

  Varick and his wife nodded.

  ***

  “Mr. Gifford? I’m Jessica Lake.”

  The first of those preparations arrived bright and early the next morning on my front porch steps with an oversized sketchpad under one arm, and a laptop case swinging from the other hand. She couldn’t extend a hand, so I held the door, beckoning her into the vampire’s lair.

  “Thank you. I work for Priscilla Varick. She sent me.”

  “I know. Call me J. I just got off the phone with Priscilla. You work for her husband Anton sometimes, too.” New Prospect was too small a town for somebody of Jessica’s talents to be on the city payroll full time. I took her jacket and placed it on a hook. It was beaded with drizzle. The “bright” part of that “bright and early” was only an expression.

  Jessica (“Call me Jess.”) was young, early twenties at a guess, not very tall, with pale, Celtic skin which went perfectly with the Irish sunshine coming down outside, and a shock of thick red hair, not quite shoulder length. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose. She wore jeans, sandals, and a man’s light blue denim work shirt.

  I introduced her to Surica, who was sitting on the living room floor with Fiddlestring in her lap, mentally preparing, I supposed, for what we both reckoned was going to be something of an ordeal. Jess plonked down beside her, opened up and booted her little computer. Instead of a mouse, she used an electronic drawing pad of some kind, the same width and depth as her computer, and a matching electronic stylus.

  Apparently, though, she’d decided to start with paper and pencil. She cradled a big tablet in the crook of one arm and looked up at Surica.

  “Ready to begin? Great. I take it that we’re dealing with a man, right?”

  Surica nodded. I could see this was already costing her something.

  “Do you know his name? I find that sometimes helps me get the personality.”

  Surica began, but had to clear her throat and start again. I could see her hands shaking, but my chair was too far away to anything constructive about it without being awkward. “Deabru,” she answered. “When they spoke of him they called him Deabru—also known as the Warden.”

  Jess didn’t bat an eye at that, where many another might have. “Deabru,” she rolled the name around on her tongue. “Isn’t that Basque?”

  Surica and I both blinked. She nodded and said, “It means nightmare.”


  “And the shape of this Deabru’s face: round, square, triangular, diamond...? Close your eyes. Imagine you’re seeing him. Listen to him—”

  “Round,” Surica said suddenly. “Squarish or round. He looks young—early thirties, but he’s older than that. His hair is dark but not black. He wears it close-cropped, not shaven or...what is the word, love?”

  She’d looked to me. “Buzzed,” I supplied.

  “Yes, not buzzed.” She went on, with only a little prompting from the artist, to describe the man of whom she’d been terrified for sixty years.

  The man I was going to kill, if I could.

  After a while, the women had achieved a degree of understanding, and I headed downstairs to the basement to make preparations of my own. I took a brand new box of .45 Automatic Colt Pistol ammunition with me, and a box of .38 Smith & Wesson Special. I’d bought both earlier that morning. They were not my usual brand, but had been chosen for the unusually wide and deep hollow points in their front ends.

  For the next hour, I contented myself with hand-work that was almost as pleasant and satisfying as cleaning a gun. From a drawer in my loading bench, I took a pair of what’s known as “hollow pointers”, a relic of the bad old days when most factory bullets didn’t come that way.

  Never say “bullet” when what you mean is “cartridge”. Understand that the “cartridge” is the whole thing that you put into the gun. The “bullet” is the part in front that gets pushed out of the barrel by the pressure of burning powder and, hopefully, finds its way to the badguy. What’s left behind in a revolver like my .38, or gets kicked out the side of an autopistol like my .45, is the empty cartridge “case”.

  Learn that, and you won’t sound like an east coast cop (that includes California), an idiot actor playing a cop on TV, or a TV newsie whose hairspray has soaked through his scalp and into his brain.

  The device I was using is hand-held and very simple. Insert a cartridge into the back of a small, knurled cylinder, holding it there with your thumb. Insert the other part—a little chuck that holds a drill bit that you can adjust for depth—into a small hole in front and turn until it bottoms. Pull out the drill, drop the cartridge into your palm and you’ve got yourself a nice, deep, wide-mouthed hollow point.