Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  “Martine was hungry when I found her. She’d been being obediently dead. She’d kept still, listening to the voices of her sisters, their prayer vigil. She was waiting for God to get to her—supposing he was busy with the war. She said sometimes she imagined she’d died in the cave, and that the sound of my digging was explorers, in the future. She said she was worried the explorers were in for a nasty surprise.

  “I made a hole, wriggled through it, and took her in my arms. I bit my own wrist and suckled her.”

  Ila stopped speaking again. He looked bleak. Then he took up the oars and began to row. He moved so briskly that Daniel nearly lost his seat. The lamp fell into the bottom of the boat. Daniel retrieved it and hugged it to him. He looked back to see a wake, the boat jumping forward in spurts and the water rushing in behind it. The lights of land were far away. Daniel felt in his jacket for his phone. He wondered who to call, who could help. He decided to call Eve Moskelute, who could at least offer some advice or talk to her friend herself. He produced the phone and pressed a button—its keyboard lit up green.

  Daniel felt the phone leave his hand and heard a splash as it hit the water. He found himself looking at a red afterimage, the phone’s digits overlaying his empty hand. The vampire’s hands were still on the oars. It was as if Daniel had thrown the mobile away himself.

  “Now you’ll have to row back,” Ila said. “You should have kept it hidden.”

  Ila rowed for fifteen minutes, then set one oar in the water, and the boat slewed about, so that Daniel faced the lights of land and Ila was facing east. He shipped his oars.

  Daniel asked how Giesen’s body came to be in Martine’s tomb.

  Ila burst out laughing. Daniel could have sworn he saw the vampire blush. “Well,” Ila said, then laughed some more.

  Daniel told him to please stop it. At once.

  “Well,” Ila said again. “You were so persistent—in a pussyfooting way, Martine said—about the matter of her motherhood. I mean, Raimondi’s motherhood, Dardo’s provenance. You’d managed to get her to promise you a DNA sample, to compare with what you found in the tomb. The tomb was empty, of course. Martine wasn’t running any risk in making you that promise. But—you see—when you got permission to open the tomb, we knew about it. We had a date: March 1991. Giesen was Dawn’s idea. She knew the caves nearly as well as I did by then—and for years she’d been flipping a salute to Giesen’s mummy, in the dry funkhole where I keep things. Jacques Palomba would have seen Giesen if we hadn’t moved him by then.

  “We packed him into one of those big plastic bags with a zipper that people use to carry suits. He was flat enough for that—sunken and desiccated.

  “Dawn and Tom Hilxen and I took Giesen by car to Turin, a couple of weeks before you people opened the tomb. We carried him into Santa Maria della Fiori on a quiet morning when there were only a few tourists in the church. We took the top off the sarcophagus—there were three of us; that was enough—and put him in for you to find.”

  Daniel squeezed out the breath he had been holding. “You’re going to burn,” he said. It was a cold certainty. He held on to the idea; it focused his mind, as certain painful disciplines of the novitiate had—an hour’s kneeling or a spiked chain worn wrapped around one thigh. “You’ll fetch up floating facedown in a slick of your own fat,” Daniel said. “Like Martine.”

  Ila inclined toward Daniel and opened his mouth. No speech came out of it, but Daniel saw a row of thin white spines of cartilage drop from the roof of Ila’s mouth and beads of milky, faintly luminescent substance appear on their tips. The venom dripped onto Ila’s pink tongue. Then Ila shut his mouth and sat back, the muscles of his jaw bunching as he pushed his tongue up to quell the spines.

  “I’m surprised it’s taken you this long,” Daniel went on, “to do the decent thing. To despair, and do the decent thing.” Daniel turned his head and looked at the eastern horizon with an expression of keen anticipation.

  There was a band of lemony light above the sea. Daniel pointed it out to Ila and smirked. For several minutes Daniel sat, with his arms folded, glaring and gloating by turns. Then his curiosity got the better of him and he had to ask Ila how Giesen got into the caves.

  “I carried him off from his hotel. I got into his room by breaking through the tiles on its roof. He was unconscious when I left him in the caves. I went to Turin to find Martine. When I thought of him again and went looking I found his corpse. I’d forgotten to take his gun.” The vampire pressed the tips of two fingers to his temple, then made the sound of a gunshot. He said, “Giesen woke in the cold, muffling dark. No one came when he called.”

  Daniel had come to an end. He had wandered in his maze, or followed the thread of his suspicion. He had dropped down a dark shaft, had released the rope’s end, and had fallen free. He’d found out, finally. There were no miracles. And he was sitting in a boat opposite the monster at the heart of the maze—his Minotaur.

  But, because he was thorough, Daniel finished checking his facts. He said, “You rescued Jacques Palomba, too?”

  “Dawn did. She was injured. He helped her recover. She kept him warm and hydrated. I left him where he’d be found. But Jacques had been bitten, and had an unfulfilled longing. When he met a vampire again he knew he’d found what he felt he lacked.”

  “Jacques found Martine and she infected him?” Daniel said.

  “Yes. Jacques found Tom and Grazide, who told him about Martine. Jacques went looking for her. She’d finally become infectious. Tom says she infected Jacques and killed him, and then herself.”

  Daniel nodded. He said she’d mentioned finally infecting someone as a reason for casting herself adrift. “She called me on the phone she gave me. The phone you just threw into the sea. She called shortly before the sun came up. When the sun came up she broke the connection. She said she’d finally infected someone—infected, and killed.”

  Ila was looking at Daniel with amazement. “You were there.”

  Daniel said yes, in a way. But he hadn’t known what to say or what he was being told. He only understood that she’d done something that was intolerable to her. Then he said, “Row back, Ila. Do it now. You might make it.”

  Ila shrugged this off. “That’s why Tom was so angry—Jacques was Tom’s candidate. As Bad was Dawn’s.”

  “Was?”

  “Bad’s gone. He saw enough.” Ila said that when he and Martine were nesting in the space between the double-walled dome of Santa Maria della Fiori she said to him, “I prayed to God for courage and God has given me a life that requires courage.” Martine had imagination, Ila said. After all, she’d only seen him saving people, not gorged, dangerous, and indiscriminate, as Bad had seen Dawn.

  “You came and got her out of her grave,” Daniel said. “Imagine what she imagined.”

  “Martine and Dawn.” Ila half-closed his eyes and stared past Daniel at the purple, orange, and browns of the east. The few clouds had fanned rays of shadow rising from them into the pale sky. Ila’s skin and hair were clear, reflective surfaces, and he glowed with the colors of twilight. “Tom still has his credit cards and his zip code,” Ila said. “He didn’t give everything up.”

  “He gave up daylight and kept his credit cards.” Daniel laughed and shook his head.

  Ila was still looking east. He said he wondered how it had happened. Had the burning killed Martine? Or had she drowned herself because of the pain? She shouldn’t have been alone. He was here now, but it was too late.

  “Don’t die,” Daniel said.

  But Ila didn’t hear him. He was saying, “I miss Martine. We were together for so long. I can’t wait for her. I can’t live waiting.”

  “Look at me,” Daniel said. He had an idea or feeling or an itch. He felt he was being pushed to do something he couldn’t fully comprehend, something foreign to his nature. So, he was being pushed; it was outside him. He was its instrument. He wanted Ila to tell him about Chambord. About 1771 and everything since, even if everything amounted to gli
mpses through a window at night, of a living room, figures in a frame, like an illumination: people, their apparel, their artifacts.

  Daniel must have said something—asked for a story—because Ila answered him. He said, “There isn’t time.” His voice was mild and wondering. He was shining, a screen; his refined pallor had turned transparent. He was a frosted glass into which someone had poured the twilit air. Yes—Daniel thought—Ila was a mark that showed how high the flood came, an unlit match in a reliquary; he was something put by, something for later, for an unforeseen contingency. He was God knew what. All the apparent coincidences had led Daniel to a nest, a conference of vampires. A conference like the one Daniel had inferred from the fourth albino he met on his walk through the Marais. But this vampire—long-lived, contemplative, feeling—didn’t belong finally to any conference. This one was a sign, like Daniel’s third albino, and so belonged to God. God knew what Ila was, and what he was for.

  Daniel stood up in the boat. He was saying, “Look at me.” The boat rocked. The bilgewater had a skin of light on it, the white dawn sky in a tilting reflection. Ila looked past Daniel at the east. He opened his mouth and screamed with rage and terror. He howled at the sun, the igniting daylight.

  Ila leapt to his feet and flipped the boat. Daniel was thrown into the water, its cool glassiness turning from gray-bronze to green as Daniel went down. The lamp drifted up past him. Submerged, it was no longer an unpoetic object. It rolled upward, casting rays of light through the water, a lighthouse rotating on an odd axis in a green fog. Daniel followed it up, the life vest apparently plucking him up into the air. The sky had regained its high dome; the back of every wave was burning; the sun, halved by the horizon, was coming up in an audible chorus. Daniel shook water out of his ears. He was sure there was a sound he should hear. An oar tapped against his back, then floated away. Daniel swam, pushed past the floating light. He saw the sleek plastic skin of the upturned boat. Daniel swam to it. He grabbed its side and pushed himself down under the water—with the vest it was like lifting a weight.

  Ila was curled into the carapace of the boat. Daniel came up beside him, in the narrow space between the hull and the water, where the tackle box floated, bumping.

  Ila opened his eyes and looked at Daniel. “Get out of my air,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  A SEA RESCUE

  Gino had been home for some time. He had just come off his shift, the graveyard.

  Bad sat on the air mattress, his hands hanging between his knees. He heard Gino come in and watched lights come and go on the polished marble floor, the yellow light from the landing as the apartment door opened, a faint lightening of no color as Gino opened the shutters, a white fluorescent from the fridge interior. Gino came and offered Bad a bottle, a genie of grainy vapor creeping out of its uncapped top. “Still not sleeping?” Gino said.

  Bad had imagined that leaving Dawn would be like a withdrawal. He’d been so deeply immersed in the experience of being with her, so lost to the life and values he understood, that he’d thought that leaving her would be like giving up a highly addictive drug and a life formed around feeding a drug habit. Bad had little experience of withdrawal from the inside. His experience was confined to the low dose of amitriptyline he’d been on after the bomb blast, to ease his neck injury and help him sleep. He hadn’t liked it; it made him feel—he told Gabrielle—like a Glaswegian looking for a fight on Saturday night. When he took himself off it he was awake, night after night, awake and in pain till exhaustion reasserted his normal sleep cycle. Leaving Dawn should have been like coming off a very effective drug. He’d expected insomnia, agitation, indigestion, general pain. He’d made a bad choice, had been entrapped; he’d got into something he wasn’t able to handle. Bad represented his predicament to himself in this way, in language he’d learned in high school health lessons and at a rudimentary counseling skills course he’d attended at the police college.

  For five days Bad had abstained. He’d thought that his suffering should be the pain of enforced abstinence. He took walks to keep fit. He set out to get on top of his longing. But he discovered that what he felt was less longing than loss.

  Bad took the bottle from Gino, swigged, and said, “I have to go home.”

  Gino said yes, he’d looked at Bad’s itinerary and had talked to Bad’s mother and grandfather. He put Bad’s phone down on the bed between them. “You should check your messages.”

  Gino began to talk about knowing your limits. He said that there were some experiences that were too big. Those ones would, you’d think, stretch a person, make him bigger, if all out of shape. But instead, he said, they made a person get smaller. Gino measured out a centimeter of air between thumb and forefinger, then found the word: “Shrink,” he said.

  Gino told Bad why he didn’t go cave diving anymore. Gino said that if he was asked why, he’d just say that it wasn’t an acceptable risk. But it wasn’t only that. Cave diving was like having your heart stopped just to see what would happen next. On Gino’s last dive he’d been with two others. The three men were very deep, in a system they thought hadn’t been explored. The man in the lead was the most experienced. Gino and the other man were just following the rope. As they fiddled with the gas mix and performed mental tests, making different demands on themselves, he and the other man moved farther apart. The man moved ahead of Gino, perhaps trying to catch up to the leader. The man was confused, cold, disoriented by mild nitrogen narcosis—but he went on, faithfully following the rope. The duplicitous rope—for there were two in the passage. Other divers had been there on an earlier occasion. The man would have been able to see the light from the leader’s lamp, for although the passage branched, the wall where it branched was honeycombed with holes for a further thirty meters. He could see the leader’s light, so he didn’t notice that he’d strayed. The current was stronger in the passage he was carried into, he was tired, and it was easy to drift along the length of the wrong rope. He wouldn’t have known till he reached its frayed end.

  Gino eventually came within sight of the man and, from his vantage point in the passage above the branch, saw his friends reaching out to hold hands through a hole in a wall of rock. He saw the waving fronds of the frayed rope. Gino took the old rope and braced his feet to reel his friend up. But the man wasn’t holding the rope, only the leader’s hand. Gino saw the leader urging the man to grab the rope, to let Gino pull him up. And he saw the man would not, was holding to his friend’s hand stubbornly, his grip the last task his exhausted, baffled brain could grasp. He could do only that, hold on. But he was too tired to do that for long and eventually let go, and Gino watched him drop away, down, illuminating the clear water as he went. Gino saw the man’s face through his mask, his eyes, and knew that the man knew he was going. The man looked back, but he didn’t struggle. The current carried him away and down. “Beyond assistance,” Gino said. “And beyond imagination.”

  Gino told Bad he’d realized that, whenever he told that story, he told part of it from the point of view of the man who’d died. “That moment he reaches the frayed end and realizes he’s on the wrong rope.” Gino had wondered why he did that, then came to understand that he was following his friend as far as he was able. Gino said, “We imagine how they felt because they can’t tell us. We go with them, as far as we can.”

  Bad bumped Gino’s shoulder with his own—to say thanks.

  Gino bumped back and touched the top of his bottle to Bad’s to encourage Bad to drink.

  On the bed between them, the mobile began to ring.

  Eve had been woken by her phone. Or she thought it might have been the phone. She’d become conscious and listened to the silence where some alarm had just finished sounding. She got up, went to get a glass of water. The light was on in the kitchen, and there was a drawing on the table. A black-and-white ink sketch. It was of an empty boat, a lamp on its stern seat, and the sun, its disk halved by a sea horizon. The sketch was Ila’s, his picture of what Martine may have left
behind her when she left the world.

  Eve thought, This is a suicide note.

  The phone call was Eve for Bad. “I need your help,” she said.

  It was two hours by the autostrada to Menton, where Gino had a friend with a good boat—a diving instructor at the Centre de Plongée. Gino called ahead. He didn’t launch into any exhaustive explanations, didn’t have to, any more than Bad had had to when he came off the phone to say that Eve’s other friend—who had the same problems as the woman they had fished out of the sea cave at Riomaggiore—seemed set to follow that woman’s example. “Eve thinks it’s too late to call the police,” Bad told Gino. “She thinks she knows where we can find him. She just wants him found.”

  Gino said all right, a recovery, not a rescue. And Bad could see Gino didn’t quite believe it—thought that Bad’s new friend Eve was being pessimistic or private, was just trying to save her friend the trouble of a police prosecution and the shame of a psychiatric referral.

  But Gino went along with Bad.

  It was still dark when they left Genoa. The sun came up when they were in one of the tunnels between Bordighera and Ventimiglia. Gino’s car came out of the tunnel and Bad looked to his right at the terraced foothills, which a moment before had loomed dark and immediate and now receded in intricate sunlit detail. The phone was ringing when they left the tunnel. Bad answered it.