Vampires Don't Cry: A Mother's Curse

by Hall, Ian

  ~ ~ ~

  We got to Georgie’s restaurant at five thirty, and I introduced Paulina to the Major Domo, who immediately made a great fuss of her, organizing a place to hide out, and a guard to watch over her. As the car pulled up outside, we said our tearless goodbyes, although I did shake my head as she was driven away; I’d never met a person who’d accepted the whole vampire thing as calmly as she’d done.

  When she’d turned the corner from sight, Roberto turned to me, his face suddenly more serious. “Here’s the number,” he handed me a card. “Georgie will be waiting for your call.” Then he walked back inside the restaurant.

  I decided to use a payphone, just in case the call could be traced.

  “Yes?” I recognized Georgie’s accent in the one word.

  “It’s Valérie,” I said.

  “How did the job go?”

  “We had company,” I said carefully. “And we were expected.”

  “Oh, any serious problems?”

  “Nothing worth talking about right now. But I did get separated from my partner in the commotion.”

  “She should return to the restaurant, just like you did. She’ll get instructions from Roberto.”

  “Okay. What do I do? Wait on her?

  “No, make your way to New York, phone me when you get here.”

  “Will do.”

  North to New York

  Theresa Scholes, February 1959, Heading to New York

  I took the train from Miami.

  Yes, I know vampires are meant to be racing through woods in the moonlight, but it just made sense. A whole day later I stepped off the train at Union Station.

  “Georgie?” I said into the dirty phone.

  “1016 Freshman,” I heard the crackled voice say. “Six.”

  “Got it.”

  At Georgie’s restaurant I had been informed by Roberto that Valérie had checked in two days before. Hopefully we’d meet up somewhere in New York. A six o’clock meeting gave me time for a little bit of shopping, and thankfully the first cabbie in line had a nice line in chatter. I kept him on the payroll, promising a good bonus at the end of the day. I hit a few of the bigger stores and replaced some of the basic items I’d lost in the fire. By the time I’d plundered five stores, the trunk had a good pile of shopping bags, and a small suitcase to put them all in.

  Being girlie for an hour or two did me the world of good, it made me feel good about myself again, afterwards, I could take on the world.

  The house on Freshman Street proved to be large and in a pretty nice neighborhood. High hedges circled the driveway, and only one car already sat in place in front, a flashy green thing.

  “Wait here, sweetie,” I said to the cab driver through his open window. I slipped a twenty into his hand, just to prove I wasn’t doing a flit on him; although with the bags in his trunk, I’m certain he felt I was on the level.

  The front door opened as I neared, and I recognized Frankie holding it open, I’d seen him at Georgie’s restaurant. “Straight ahead, then to the left,” I walked through the empty house, wondering how long it had been in the family.

  A wide arch with double doors led to a large room with a huge table covered in papers in the center. Georgie and Valérie stood looking up from the papers and seeing me, Valérie immediately broke away, and crossed to me, giving me a close, warm hug. “Are you okay, dearie?” she asked.

  I hugged her back. “Water under the bridge,” I said, happy to see my direst predictions regarding my partner hadn’t come to fruition. “Good to see you.” I felt the words carried away all my angst.

  “You too,” Valérie and Georgie chorused together.

  I noticed a huge number of papers had been tacked to the wall, maps, pictures, lists of names.

  “What’s the plan, boss?” I asked, focusing my attention on the papers.

  “This,” Georgie tapped his finger hard on a photo in the centre, “is Senator Chuck Eagerson, he’s the one linked with Amos. We need you two to infiltrate his house. I need details of any vampire influence there.” He looked up from the table. “Now when I say every corner, I really mean it. You sniff his underpants, whether they’re clean, dirty or on his ass. You check out his kids, their friends, their servants, everything. I need to know what he eats, who he talks to, what his shits are like.”

  I couldn’t help the immediate thought that we’d been side-lined again, I mean, they could have got a dime-a-day gumshoe to do this.

  He lifted one sheet clear of the pile. “Here’s his major itinerary, don’t follow him out of the house, we’ve got that under control. It goes without saying that you’ll need to remember every part of your Căluşari training here, if there are vampires inside his house, they’ll be on their guard.” He gave me a wry look. “Valérie has already told me about your problems down in Orlando, so don’t underestimate this one. I need to know if we’re the only vampire group who have guys like you.”

  “Ivan would know that.” I said.

  “Ivan’s not the only vampire who knows that stuff.” He crossed to the wall, and indicated we should follow. “This man has been photographed in town.” He pointed to a very grainy picture of a bald man in a dark trench coat, standing near a subway entrance.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “His name is Tomas Lucescu. As far as we know, this is the only photograph of him that exists in the world.”

  I heard the import of Georgie’s words, but I couldn’t make out much detail, other than he probably had a big nose.

  “Is he important?” I asked, then saw Valérie turn to me making a ‘shush’ pout with her lips. I took her cue, and fell silent.

  “Ivan’s told us some stuff, but even he held back, so we don’t now all that much about him. He’s old, that’s the main thing, older than you, Valérie. If Amos has support from higher up, we have to be careful.”

  “Higher up?” Valérie asked the question on my own lips.

  “Yes, girls, higher up. Just like you have me as a boss, we answer to further up the chain.”

  He sat on the edge of the table, staring at the picture. “If you come across Tomas, you run like fuck away… got it?” I don’t think I’d ever seen him look so serious. “Report back here when you’ve got the scoop on Senator Eagerson.” He made a brushing off motion with his hand, his thoughts obviously elsewhere. “Get gone.”

  “Got it, boss,” Valérie grabbed my hand and I let her pull me from the room. “How’d you get here Finch?”

  “I’ve got a cab outside,” I answered, keeping my questions to myself for the moment.

  “I’ve got my own car,” she said as Frankie opened the door for us. “That one’s mine,” Valérie pointed at a shiny new Buick. “I’ll drive.”

  “Okay,” I replied, happy to be back together again. I got my bags from the cab, and gave the cabbie a nice tip on top of his fare. Once we’d settled in, and gotten out of the driveway, I leaned back in my seat. “Spill the beans.”

  She gave me a cheeky look mixed with a shit-eating grin. “What?”

  “You know damn well what,” I flashed back. “What didn’t get said back there?”

  “Ah.” She turned her head to the wheel, and drove for a moment. “For a while I thought we were getting the little jobs, the crappy end of the stick. After today, I’m pretty sure of it.”

  I could feel the folds of flesh on my forehead as I frowned. “How come?”

  “Because I’ve seen Tomas Lucescu before… and he’s big.”

  I let the concept settle. “How big?”

  “If I’m correct, they don’t come much bigger.”

  Valérie Lidowitz, February 1959, Driving to New York

  The drive up from Miami to New York proved much better with a nice shiny new car under my ass. I walked into the Miami dealership and gave the dealer the whole vampire works, he crumbled in seconds.

  A brand new Buick Roadmaster Riviera, finished in an appealing pea green. The ton of chrome work sparkled like blazes, but I didn�
��t mind. Yes, I paid a pretty hefty deposit, and signed the appropriate papers, but in a trance he took the plates from his own car, even screwed them in place on my new baby. I gave him a huge wet kiss, and drove it out of the lot, a new peach scarf waving out the window.

  I got onto the main road north, and settled down in the line of traffic doing a pretty steady fifty.

  You have emerged as a butterfly, just as I said you would.

  I jerked the steering wheel so much I almost drove the car off the road, the thought had been so vivid in my head. Mother’s voice, her French accent, a slight hiss on her ‘s’, her now-familiar rising and falling tone, an almost song-like quality. I waited on her next statement, but for ages nothing came.

  I decided to ignore the event, and turned the radio on. It took a second to find the local station, but soon it filled the car, Doris day’s voice, as clear as she sat beside me. I drove for a while, then, cresting a rise in the road, mother’s voice carried over the smooth golden tones of Bing Crosby.

  Beware of the bald man. He carries danger with him.

  “What bald man?” I asked, but my question had been in vain, I only heard the dull infantile lyrics from the radio. It took until the next morning for her follow-up message to arrive.

  The bald man has a vengeance to perform, and getting in his way will lead to your death.

  I gave up trying to talk to her and tried to ‘think’ my reply.

  “Who is the man? What is his name?”

  But it took me another ten hours of driving for me to get my answer, not that it gave me much of anything else to go on.

  Beware of the bald man. His thirst for vengeance endangers us all.

  As loud as if she’d said it inside the car.

  ~ ~ ~

  I got to the house on Freshman about half an hour before Finch, and had time to fill Georgie in about Ramirez. He looked very concerned about both the vampire guards and poor Paulina the drugged vampire sex-toy.

  Then we turned to the stuff on the table. “Most of this is irrelevant. But we’ve got a lot of information, and we’ve already pieced most of it together. Senator Chuck Eagerson is starting his third term, and we know he’s in contact with Amos, but we don’t yet know at what level. Chuck’s also involved with this guy,” Georgie pressed his forefinger hard on the picture of a man, maybe thirty. “Holloway Grant, prospective Senator for the state of New York.”

  “Grant’s ten points behind the incumbent, but he’s gaining ground fast. Having one Senator ruled by Amos is a problem, but two could be the start of real influence in the U.S. Senate. Maybe Amos has finally gotten over the idea of a vampire army, and he’s taking power through political means. We have to nip this in the bud.”

  We studied the layout of the Senator’s house. We looked at maps of the area, and motels and such.

  Then I heard the outer door open and close, and Finch walked in.

  We’d separated under dire circumstances, and she looked none the worse for it.

  Following our rather half-hearted attitude to our last mission, I concentrated hard on the details of this one.

  I took a note of the senator’s address and the rough details of the layout of the house. Three floors.

  Then Georgie walked to the wall, and the picture stopped me in my tracks.

  Beware of the bald man. His thirst for vengeance endangers us all.

  I stood for a moment, considering telling Georgie of my mother’s warning, but decided to keep it to myself for the time being. But I did study the man, and I did remember seeing him before, twice in fact, and both times in the last few years.

  And now I had a name to put to the face, Tomas Lucescu.

  Once Finch and I had got in my new car, I had to unburden myself regarding Mother’s warnings. If we were to undertake missions together, she had to know what I did. So I took a deep breath, and told her. “I think I’m hearing from my Mother.”

  I kept my eyes to the front, waiting for her reply.

  “That sounds kinda weird,”

  “I know.” I said. “But over the last hundred years, her voice comes into my head from time to time, usually when I’m upset or something.”

  “So, like a presence?”

  “Sometimes,” I swallowed, “but today and yesterday were different. The voice seemed almost audible.”

  Silence.

  “Like she was actually talking to me,” I added, trying to re-start the awkward conversation.

  “And she said what exactly?” Irritation started to break into her tone.

  “She said to beware of the bald man, that he carries danger with him. He somehow has a vengeance to perform, and getting in his way will lead to our death, well my death, she never mentioned you.”

  “That’s quite incredible,” she gasped. “Did this happen before seeing the photograph?”

  “Yes,” I nodded my head, caught her worried expression, “it puts a different light on Georgie’s mission.”

  “It sure does,”

  “Not only that, I’ve seen this Tomas fellow before.”

  “Where?” Finch was instantly animated.

  “Twice, a few years back, at Amos’s.” I nudged the car across a lane, getting into the right turn-off. “It’s difficult to describe it, but both times he just oozed evil.”

  “And Georgie said he was older than you.”

  “At least two hundred years old at my recollection.” I said.

  We turned into the drive of a nondescript motel.

  “Are we close to the Senator’s house?” Finch asked.

  “Four or five miles.”

  “Close enough.”

  Senator Chuck Eagerson

  Theresa Scholes, March 1959, New York

  “So there are three reasons to feel unsafe right now?” I looked over my plastic cup of wine.

  “Precisely,” Valérie nodded, “And each one is a Lulu on its own.”

  “We’re both pretty sure Georgie’s operation has a leak somewhere,” I recapped, “you think we’re being held back from the main mission, and now we’ve not been told everything about Tomas Lucescu.”

  “Precisely,” Valérie lay back on one of the room’s twin beds. “There was far more on the board about Tomas, but most of it was turned the other way.”

  “Maybe we just don’t need to know, you know, like the spy movies?” I ventured.

  “I don’t know, but putting two and two together just made three, and I’ve been shot twice in two weeks.”

  The conversation hadn’t left me as we prepared to start our latest mission.

  In the evening shade the Senator’s house stood imposing before us, three floors of opulence, lights on in every room, and a bucket load of security, all very modern technology, and the obligatory beefcake chunky men in dark suits. Barring the driveway stood black grilled double gates, obviously with some form of mechanized opening.

  We waited outside for only fifteen minutes before a car pulled up, buzzed at the gate and got allowed inside. We jogged invisibly behind the car, hand in hand. I mean, we could have just jumped the fence, but we didn’t want to set off any perimeter alarms, so we kept it simple.

  “We follow the passengers to the door,” Valérie said, her voice just heard above the vehicle’s exhaust.

  The car pulled round to the side of the house where a door opened. A man stood in the doorway, his body lit from inside.

  Two men got out of the car, and we followed them to the door, and yup, the guy said ‘come in’. I must admit, I did half expect the invisible “not invited inside” vampire barrier to hit me when I crossed the threshold, but as I scooted close behind the guys, nothing happened. The door closed behind us, and we waited for the men to trot off down the passageway.

  “We’re in,” I said quietly.

  “Yes we are.” Valérie shook my clammy hand.

  “Basement?” I asked.

  “Just like we planned,”

  We methodically checked every floor, every room, and sniffed every cl
oset in the house. No vampires, nothing.

  We listened to phone conversations, we listened to actual conversations, heck I think I even imagined conversations.

  Boring. No vampires and no mention of them. No bald guy, and no Amos.

  But we settled in for a whole two days, shimmering visible for a lot of the time, hiding out in the basement, or in the guest rooms.

  We ear-wigged telephone conversations, we rummaged through diaries until there was nothing new to read. On day three, we left the home of Chuck Eagerson and reported our findings to Georgie, who just shook his head, pacing the floor. “Okay, it’s time to up the ante a little bit.” He turned to us. “Do you remember the picture of Holloway Grant, the prospective Senator for New York?”

  I nodded.

  “Sure” Valérie said.

  “Then take him out of the public eye for an hour. Keep it discrete. Use your feminine wiles on him. I want to know everything he does.”

  “Sure thing,” I said, feeling a little excited at the prospect. I mean, we’d been invisible for most of the last three days, and I hadn’t fed for a while. The idea of sitting on top of a man, asking him questions actually appealed to me quite a bit.

  “Where is he right now?” Valérie asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Georgie seemed irritated. “Check the papers, his itinerary will be somewhere; you can’t run for Senator in secret.”

  We caught a few of the local rags on the streets, and sure enough, Holloway Grant would be in Ithaca New York, in three days.

  Ithaca.

  “Where is Ithaca?” I asked, shaking my head.

  Valérie laughed. “Obviously in the sticks somewhere.”

  “So that means a road-trip.” I sighed. “I’m not sure I could last that long.” I gave her a mournful look. “You know, I’ve got an itch to scratch.”