“I’m afraid I have no reservation,” Miriam said to the clerk, who managed to appear affable and also a little concerned at the same time. A blink of his eyes as she approached had told her that he knew exactly how old her suit was. She was travel-weary and hobbling from the broken shoe. Altogether, she could not look to him as if she belonged here. She dared not throw the names of fifty years ago around to impress him, either. Coming from what appeared to be a girl of twenty-five dressed in her grandmother’s old clothes, such an attempt to impress would instead seem like the babbling of a madwoman.
“I am so sorry,” he began.
“I would like a suite. I prefer the fourth floor front, if you don’t mind.” These were among the best rooms in the hotel, and the only ones she would even consider using.
He asked for her credit card. She gave him Sarah’s Visa. It annoyed Sarah for her to use this card, but there was at present no choice. Using her own card was a serious risk, and Marie Tallman was retired forever. She waited while he made a phone call.
“I’m sorry, madame, this is declined.”
Must be crowding its credit limit, she thought. Just like Sarah to have a card like this. Too bad she didn’t have a copy of Sarah’s American Express card, but the only one of those in her possession was her own.
“Perhaps it’s defective, madame. If you have another —”
She turned and faced the doors. She had no desire to push this, even to remain here for another minute. She had to call Sarah. She started to open her cell phone, then hesitated. The call would not be secure.
“Is there a public telephone?”
“But of course, madame.” He directed her to a call box. She took out her AT&T card, which was in Sarah’s name, and dialed the call straight through to their emergency number. This only rang if it was absolutely urgent, so she could be sure that Sarah would pick up right away.
She did not pick up. It was five hours earlier in New York, making it eight o’clock in the morning. Sarah would be home, surely. She tried the other number, the regular one. Only the answering machine came on.
She tried the club. No answer there, not at this hour. Damn the woman, where was she when she was needed?
Maybe she’d fed. Maybe she was in Sleep. Yes, that was it. Of course, that must be it . . . must be. She put the phone down.
She thought matters over. She was effectively broke. But she was never broke; she’d had scads of money, always.
Perhaps she could try another hotel, some lesser place. There must be some credit left on the Visa card. Then she thought — how could she get into any hotel, this one included, without giving them a passport? The answer was that she couldn’t, and the smaller and sleazier the hotel, the more obsessive it would be about identification. The Tallman passport needed to be burned; that’s all it was good for.
She saw that she was still in mortal danger. They would have a description of her, and she hadn’t even a change of clothes. They’d be searching the hotels, of course. It was logical.
She had to go to the Castle of the White Queen. Fifty years ago, Martin had been there. Maybe he still was, and maybe he could help her. Of course he could. He’d been a more worldly sort than Lamia, or even Miriam herself.
She began walking, soon coming into the Place de l’Opéra. She headed for the Métro. On the way, she stopped at a small bureau de change and turned her Thai baht into euros. She got forty of them. As well, she had two hundred U.S. dollars in cash. Not much, not much at all. But she never traveled with cash; she didn’t need to. Being limitlessly wealthy made her sudden poverty especially difficult. She didn’t know how to function.
She went down the steps into the clanging world of the Métro. She remembered it from her last visit, but she’d only used it once, and that was to get around a traffic accident when she’d been hurrying to the opera. There was difficulty with the change booth, then confusion about which direction she wanted. The hurrying crowds made it no easier. But, in the end, she found herself primly seated in a car going in the correct direction.
The Castle of the White Queen had been built on land that the Keepers had reserved for themselves from time immemorial. It was on the Rue des Gobelins, and parts of it had been rented to the Gobelins family and fitted out by them as a tannery. At night, after Gobelins and his people went home; the hides tanned there were not necessarily bovine. The Keepers lived in the upper reaches of the building.
Locally, there were many legends about why it was called the Castle of the White Queen. Some said that Blanche de Castille had built it, others that it had belonged to Blanche de Navarre. The real builder was Miriam’s dear mother, who had been known among her peers as the White Queen, for her grandeur, her splendid pallor, and the fact that their family had come out of the white sands of the North African desert.
The scent of man that filled the Métro did not make Miriam’s jaws spread, let alone fill. As troubling as all this was, at least she was full, and very satisfactorily so. That had been a healthy little thing she’d eaten. She could easily bear this swim in a sea of food.
An accordionist began to play, and Miriam closed her eyes to listen. Certain things about Paris were almost timeless, it seemed. When she and her mother had been here, the humans had been making similar music, but with different instruments. The music was rougher and wilder then, but they were wilder also, the humans, in times past.
In those days, feeding in a place like Paris had been so easy that some Keepers had overfed, gorging until they bled out through their pores, and their orifices ran with the blood of their victims. The human population had been a seething, helpless, ignorant mass, living in the streets, under the bridges, anywhere there was a bit of shelter. The old cities had been full of nameless, aimless wanderers who could be plucked up like fruits fallen to the ground.
She missed Gobelins and left the Métro at d’Italie instead. Coming up to the street, she looked around her. She experienced a sense of satisfaction: things were really unchanged here.
She quickened her step, eager to get a sight of the castle. If the Keepers had been driven off — well, she’d deal with that problem when she had to.
Ahead was the tiny Rue des Gobelins, hardly an alleyway running off the much wider avenue. She turned into it — and stopped, staring struck with wonder. The Castle of the White Queen was exact, just like the Ritz. Worn, but so precisely the same that she thought it must still be in the hands of Keepers.
Until this moment, she had not realized how afraid she had actually been. She needed her kind now. And she needed, also, to warn them. In the hurly-burly of the past few hours, she had all but lost sight of why she was here and not back in New York.
Ironic indeed that the strongest, most intelligent species on the planet, the very pinnacle of the food chain, was in the same predicament as the frog and the gorilla.
It had crept up on them so easily, the result of a long series of what had, at the time, seemed like brilliant breeding maneuvers.
Back thirty thousand years ago, they had almost lost the entire human stock to a plague. They’d rotted where they stood, the poor things. It had been determined that overeager breeding had been the culprit. Generations of them had been bred for their nutritional value, which meant an imbalance of red over white blood cells. The result? They’d become prone to all sorts of diseases.
To ensure that they would survive and still remain the delicious food source that they’d been made to be, the Keepers had decided in conclave to increase the human population. To accomplish this, sexual seasonality had been bred out of the species entirely. This had been done by breeding for high levels of sexual hormones. As a result, the creatures had bloomed into bizarre sexual parodies of normal animals. Their genitals had moved to the front of their bodies, the penises and mammaries becoming huge. Their body hair had disappeared. They had become sexually obsessed, the females much more retiring than other mammals, and the males far more aggressive.
She moved toward the old castle. T
he last time she had entered this portal, it had been hand-in-hand with her mom. The building had been new then, smelling of beeswax and freshly hewn stone. Inside, the great rooms had glowed with candlelight. Lovely bedchambers had been built high in the structure, behind small windows so that Keepers could linger over their kills, and the cries of pleasure and anguish could not be heard from the streets below.
Just under that garret there, behind the little, arched window was a sumptuous chamber where a Keeper could make sport with his kill for as long as he cared to, flushing it with fear again and again, then calming it and delivering bursts of incapacitating pleasure to it. This would bring the flavor of its blood to an incredibly delicious richness, sweet and sour, reflecting the secret harmonies that sounded between agony and ecstasy.
She had not fed like that in a very long time. Mother Lamia always did. Sometimes her feedings would last for days. But Miriam’s human lovers had not cared for it and had felt awful for the victims when she did it.
Sarah, for example, could only bear to see Miriam do the quickest of kills. She herself struggled to live without killing, taking her nourishment from blood bank goop and pleading with Miriam for frequent transfusions that left both of them dizzy and bitchy.
Miriam went to the door. The way she felt now, she’d like to take a big, blood-packed human straight up to that chamber. Full or not, she’d spend a couple of days on it, using all of mother’s old techniques.
They were the Keepers, not the kept. No matter how brilliant, how numerous, or how violent, mankind remained first and foremost, their damned property!
She pushed at the door. Locked. She shook it three times, making the very precise movements that were designed to dislodge the tumblers, in the event you had no key. Keepers did not have private property. All belonged to all.
It opened. She stepped in, treading softly in the footsteps of her lost past. A profound silence fell, a Keeper silence. Overhead, the great beams that had been so rich a brown in mother’s day now were glowing black, as if they had turned into iron. The tanning vats were empty.
She went across the echoing floor of the factory to the narrow stair. Mother had hauled their victims up these very treads, Miriam following along to watch and learn.
How silent it was here, more silent than any human place. This was still a lair, oh, yes. But where was its inhabitant? Would he not be at least a little curious about the stealthy noises down below, the unmistakable sounds of another Keeper entering the sanctum?
“Hello,” she said, her voice uttering the sibilant, infinitely subtle sound of Prime for the first time in many a long year.
He was much smaller than she remembered, and as dirty as a coal-scuttle, a creature that had not bathed since the French court had filled its tubs with milk. His eyes were tiny and narrow, and he had the pinched face of a bat. He came forward wearing the tattered remains of a hundred-year-old frock coat, otherwise as naked as at his ancient birth. He was hungry, hissing hungry, as shadowy and insubstantial as a ghost.
A wound opened in his ghastly face, bright red and dripping. He uttered a sound, horribly eager, and she realized that he thought her human. She was so radically different looking from other Keepers that he believed her one of the kept.
His skeletal hands snatched her wrists, enclosed them in a Keeper’s iron grip. Then his eyes met hers. The bright glow of eagerness flickered, faded. He had realized his mistake.
He dropped his hands to his sides, then slumped at her feet. “M’aidez,” he whispered, not in Prime but in French.
As she looked down at this filthy, groveling, helpless creature, she stuffed her fist in her mouth. But he was not deceived. He knew that he revolted her. Because he laughed, bitterly, angrily, laughed to cover her screams.
FIVE
The Skylights of Paris
Paul had missed the traveler by ten seconds. He’d glimpsed the creature — tall, wearing normal clothes (an old-fashioned-looking woman’s suit), a blond spray of hair, that was all he’d seen.
Rain roared against the skylight; thunder echoed across the roofs of Paris. He shouted into the phone, “Your people lost her. You and the French.”
He listened to Sam Mazur’s whining, complicated reply. He was CIA station chief at the U.S. embassy. Cupping his hand over the mouthpiece, Paul whispered to Becky Driver, “That’s a paper cup. I said bucket.”
“A paper cup is what we have.”
Sam continued whining away about how the French had not cooperated and were not going to cooperate, that unless they knew chapter and verse exactly what the operation was about, it would absolutely not unfold on French soil.
“Tell me this, Sam. I’m curious. Why the hardening of the heart? I mean, the French don’t like U.S. intelligence. But we aren’t the enemy. They’ve always recognized that in the past.”
“Cold War’s over, my friend. Europe is sick of us, and France is sickest of all. They hate the way we and the Brits use the Echelon system to spy on them electronically. U.S. intelligence has had it here, man. Time to pack up our silencers and go home.”
The paper cup into which the entire thunderstorm appeared to be dripping had filled up. “Becky, do you think you could empty this? These are Burmese shoes. I can’t risk getting them wet.”
She cast her big brown eyes down toward his feet. “You got those in Myanmar?”
“Had them made. I’m suspicious that there’s cardboard involved.”
“They look like funeral shoes.”
“What the hell are ‘funeral shoes’?”
“The kind guys wear to funerals. Shiny, black, and from about 1974.”
Charlie Frater snickered. Paul glared at them both. He’d brought dumpy, bespeckled Charlie and lithe, lovely Becky because they were the most ferocious close-in workers he had. Charlie was one of those people who just did not stop, not ever. He walked into danger like a priest walking into his church. The wonder of it was he looked like a guy who lived behind a desk deep in some civil service nowhere.
Becky, on the other hand, fancied herself a lady spy from the movies. She cultivated the effect with her dark, flowing hair and her long coats. She was only twenty-three, but she was the most cheerful and fearless warrior he had. And quick. So breathtakingly quick.
Not a man on the team hadn’t thought about Becky, probably dreamed about her. Paul had. But she kept to herself emotionally. Paul didn’t pry.
The rest of the team would assemble in the States. Paul’s highest priority was to eradicate the vampires there, always had been. Asia had been done first because it was available. Now he had to stop this traveler, lest she get to the U.S. and organize opposition. He had to stop her here.
He returned to Sam. “Bottom line is this: We lost that damn thing and it is now running around Paris telling all of it’s fuckin’ friends that somebody’s onto them. I regard that as your fault. I’m sorry.”
“May I hang up?”
“You may not.”
“’Cause I have something to do. Important. Secret.”
“Tell me, does a ritual chewing out always make you need to take a dump?”
“Yes, it does.”
Paul carefully replaced the receiver in the cradle.
Becky and Charlie were staring at him.
“What?”
“What do you mean, what? What the hell did he say?”
“He’s a CIA bureaucrat. He said nothing.”
The skylight was now leaking in five places. As night fell, the immense skyscraper across the street began to light up. Whatever slight sense of privacy the room might have afforded was gone. Worse, there was no way to curtain off the skylight. At least two thousand office workers could look directly down into what was supposed to be a secret CIA safe house.
Paul stared up at the office building. “Let’s put together some dance numbers,” he said.
Charlie, who was, for some reason, practicing rolling cigarettes with a little machine, responded. “Stick a hat up there and maybe they’ll
throw change.”
“Goddamnit, how are we gonna use this sty? Do either of you have a room that has a little privacy for us to work in, at least?”
“They’re way too small, boss,” Becky responded.
“Bullshit. We can manage.”
“More than one person in my cell and the zipper gets stuck.”
Paul thought, sounds like fun. He said, “Goddamnit!”
“Is this the cheapest hotel in Paris?” Charlie asked.
“Our employer is not in the habit of billeting its personnel in the cheapest anything. The Sans Douche is the cheapest inconveniently located piece-of-shit hotel in Paris. It’s conceivable, although just barely, that there exists another hotel with a marginally lower price. But it will not be as bad as the dear ol’ S.D. Would you care for some cat hair?” He slapped the bed, which was making him break out. “I’ve got plenty more than I need.”
“What we need is a plan of action,” Becky said, stating what was painfully obvious.
“What we need is a way to prevent the minister of the interior from calling in the ambassador and asking him why there are CIA personnel in Paris searching for the goddamn Bride of Dracula!”
“There was no Bride of Dracula, boss.”
“There damn well was a Bride of Dracula.”
“No, I don’t believe there was, actually.” Becky clicked the keys on her laptop a few times. “Nope. No Bride of Dracula, says the Internet Movie Database.”
“Take a letter. Steven Spielberg: ‘Stevie! Have I got an idea for you. It’s Dracula, except she’s a woman!’ Ladies and gentlemen, I will now retire.”
“Thing is, boss, how’re we gonna find her?”
“To fuck around with the French or not to fuck around with the French, that is the question.”
Charlie began to shuffle along beneath the skylight. “The problem is, we need to get this done.” He started singing, and that was terribly sad.
“ ’Cause she’s spreadin’ the news, she’s doin’ it today, ’cause she wants to be a part of it — ”
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