Van Diemen went to a cupboard and took out the lethal-looking Marine Corps dart-shooting, big-bore shotgun. It wasn’t an automatic for the very good reason that sometimes the loader failed to get a proper grip on the less than completely rigid cartridges. It wasn’t semiautomatic—he would have to work the slide to make it work. But when the shotgun worked, it worked well. He had tested it on one of the mastiffs, an enormous beast as heavy as a man, that had come down with the mange. He was no great lover of animals except for wolves and Tasmanian Devils, yet he was reluctant to see one of man’s best friends carted off to the veterinarian.
Truth to tell, Van Diemen would have much preferred to have tested the gun on Sandor, but he didn’t. Where in Hades would he have found another Sandor? So he had tested the gun on the dog. By the time he had fired the last cartridge, the dog had been obliterated. Thinking back to that evening, Van Diemen couldn’t recall ever having seen such destruction of bone and tissue.
Looking at the big shotgun now, Van Diemen felt no need to test it again. He kept it, as he did all his other guns, in a sheepskin case; the lanolin protected it from rust. The gun was as ready as it ever would be. It was a wonderful weapon, but in the end Van Diemen trusted nothing but himself. If the gun failed him, so be it. He’d kill the assassins some other way. It might be all the more pleasurable to show them what a seemingly defenseless vampire could do.
He didn’t know what other weapons he might need; more, he thought, would be overkill. Then he put the shotgun on the floor beside his chair. He returned the Glock and the grenades to the drawer, where they would remain until they were needed.
Busy work had kept his hunger at bay. But it was time to go out and feed.
Fifteen
Down from the castle Van Diemen flew, the icy air lifting but not chilling him. He thought of dropping in on Maggie Connors after he fed. But why not feed on Maggie Connors—feed and kill and be done with her? It wasn’t a bad idea if he could find a liquor store open at that hour. He knew he was lying to himself; it was after 11, but there was a store run by two retired cops that stayed open until midnight. And it was on the next block, just west of Third Avenue. Anyway, why did he have to bring gin to Maggie Connors? That would be like schlepping coals to Newcastle.
He knew he didn’t want to go there, not just yet. He knew he’d go eventually, but this wasn’t the right time for it. He wasn’t prepared to face Maggie Connors again. The truth was, he wouldn’t know what to say to her. If he went to kill her, what would the conversation be like? And if he didn’t arrive with murder in his heart, what in Beelzebub’s name would they talk about? It would be intolerable if Maggie Connors got started on what she thought was his emotional instability. Women like that were always going to shrinks, and no doubt she would have just the right man for him, a caring but tough psychiatric who wouldn’t let him get away with a thing.
Van Diemen suddenly became aware that he was hovering over Maggie Connors’s apartment building. He must have flown there without thinking. He’d been asleep at the switch, a bad thing for locomotive engineers or vampires. He could have kicked himself if a bat were capable of doing such a juvenile thing. For the love of Lucifer, why didn’t he find a victim and go home?
He found one on the rooftop parking lot for the big television building near the old Westside Highway. The young lady, perhaps a production assistant, was unlocking her Mazda when he seized her from behind, fed on her, and left her dying body on the tarry roof. It was an adequate feeding, nothing exciting, strictly routine.
When he got home, Van Diemen settled down at his writing table and picked up his pen. That night he would write about how he had handled the problem of his age. In the end it hadn’t been necessary, but he thought it was when he’d first become a vampire. He had been very thorough about it, as he was painstaking in all things. The reason for all the expense and bother was his suspicion that people must be wondering why William Van Diemen, the Recluse of Riverdale, had lived so long. It turned out to be unfounded suspicion—few people thought about him at all—but he didn’t know that at the time, and for many years later. 1875 was the year of his first deception.
Wanting to do it right, he purchased a swift steam yacht and sailed for the Dutch East Indies. The well-paid crew didn’t question a very old man’s need to rest in his cabin all day any more than they saw through his artful disguise. Not all vampires were natural actors, but Van Diemen was one of the best: He had the quavering voice and the stooped walk down just right. His was a masterful performance.
Down the east coast of the United States we went, putting in at some port, big or small, every twenty-four hours. Far from wondering about this, the officers and crew were only too glad to have a night ashore. They had a jolly time of it, and so did 1.1 chose my victims with discretion, and there was never any trouble with the police. Every morning, we sailed away, the crew returning to their work, I to my cabin.
I must say the crew behaved admirably under the stem eye of Capt. Ferguson, an Aberdeen man who neither drank nor smoked. If he wondered privately about me, he kept his questions to himself He was a Scot, after all, and the money I paid him came first. The crew, for their part, simply didn’t care; this was the job of a lifetime, the cushy berth every sailor dreams about.
Day after day, the coast of Central and South America slid past. No Panama Canal then, so we had to go round the Horn. The Bluebird was a fast ship, a sturdy vessel, and we reached the calm waters of the Pacific without incident.
From Santiago, Chile, we sailed to the Juan Fernandez Islands, and from there to Easter Island, and so on across the wide Pacific, stopping at Pitcairn, Tahiti, Samoa, until at last we reached Jakarta, on Java, in the Dutch East Indies. There had been a few bad days between the islands when I had to go without feeding, but I made up for it as soon as we sighted land.
My ostensible reason for the voyage was to see my brothers great-grandson, Willem Van Diemen, a young lad recently come to the Indies from Holland. One night, taking the air on deck, I told Capt. Ferguson of my plans for the boy. I was going to leave him everything; my will was among my papers in my cabin. Capt. Ferguson said my heir was a very lucky young lad and hoped he’d be prudent in money matters, with such a large fortune at his disposal. I said he was a Van Diemen, which was all that needed to be said.
As soon as we docked, I went ashore to find my heir, and I let it be known that he lived on a rubber plantation in wild country some distance from the city. Capt. Ferguson showed some concern for my safety—Jakarta was a dangerous place, in spite of the Dutch police, and the back country was even more so—but I told the captain I would be all right. I had been in worse places in my youth. Faced with my old man’s irascibility, the captain ceased to argue.
Into the jungle I went and promptly disappeared. My heir appeared in my place—I had shed my disguise—and though he told Capt. Ferguson that he had reported my disappearance to the police, he had done no such thing. After a decent interval, during which I searched for my supposedly missing relative, I told the captain to get up steam. Since there was nothing more to be done, we were sailing for America. I have often wondered if Capt. Ferguson suspected that I had murdered the old gentleman, as he called my elderly disguise. If he did, nothing in his manner betrayed his misgivings. Money talks, then and now.
We island hopped back across the Pacific. My reason for staying in my cabin so much was that I had just recovered from a bout of malaria and I was still weak. Capt. Ferguson looked at me with his stony Presbyterian face and said nothing. We reached New York, and I was never happier to see the brawling old place. The will I sent to my lawyer, one of the Wilcoxes with the numbers after his name, along with a letter informing him of the changed situation. I instructed him to inform the newspapers of my venerable benefactor’s demise. I also suggested that he add a note to the effect that I intended to carry on William Van Diemens monumental history of the Dutch people.
As it turned out, I need not have gone through such an elabora
te and costly charade. Only the Times gave the death of William Van Diemen any real space, and even then, they were hampered by lack of information. The writer of the obituary harked back to the building of the castle on the Hudson, and he made reference to the great historical work that the supposedly deceased Van Diemen had been writing for most of his life. There wasn’t much more he could say, though he tried hard enough.
Still, old William Van Diemen was dead; a new young Van Diemen had taken his place. I decided the whole venture had been worth it. No prying reporter or nosey Parker could come along and say, “This old geezer is a hundred years old. How come he ain’t dead? Let’s go up there and ask him what he attributes his longevity to.” There would be none of that, for which I was grateful. I could continue to live my eternal life in an orderly tranquil manner.
I died again in 1935 without leaving my castle, and as before, a new heir took possession of my property. After that I gave the ruse up. Nobody remembered me, nobody cared except the Times which didn’t care all that much. All they gave me in 1935 was an inch-long obituary. It was wonderful to be unmounted, unremarked, so uninteresting.
In obscurity lay peace.
Van Diemen put down his pen when he heard the mastiffs howling outside. Great Satan, it couldn’t be more of the Simonellis’ henchmen. Somehow Van Diemen didn’t think so; the dogs were in a frenzy that suggested a threat more ominous than vandals scattering rubbish from a truck. Van Diemen took the pistol from the drawer, covered it with a sheet of paper, then stayed where he was, continuing to write.
He raised his head when the library door opened and a man came in. He was a short, dark Hispanic; the long-barreled semiautomatic dangling from his right hand was fitted with a silencer. He wore a black jump suit, black sneakers, and tinted glasses.
“Don’t move,” the man said in heavily accented English. “Just sit.” He started across the room and stopped when he was about ten feet from the desk. Then he shot Van Diemen with every bullet in the gun. He shot Van Diemen three times in the head; the rest of the bullets tore into the vampire’s body. Then Van Diemen smiled at him.
“Oh, Jesus!” The hitman crossed himself and tried to run. Van Diemen shot him five times with the pistol; the hitman was dead before he hit the floor. Van Diemen wondered if there were any more. Since the mastiffs were still howling and barking, he called Sandor on the interior phone. Drina answered and said Sandor was outside checking on the dogs.
Van Diemen turned the dead man over on his back and went through his pockets: nothing except money, and not a lot of that. Van Diemen found no wallet or identification. The hitman was a real pro. Van Diemen smiled. It had turned into a shooting war, but he’d done the shooting that counted.
Sandor knocked on the side of the open door, and Van Diemen told him to come in. Sandor glanced at the dead man without interest and waited for permission to speak.
“What’s going on out there?” Van Diemen asked.
“Dis time dey trow a man over the wall,” Sandor said, “an’ de dogs tear him to pieces. I have put de body in the garden shed. You want to see it?”
Van Diemen followed his servant out to the neglected gardens, where the shed was. The huge dogs were trying to tear down the door. Sandor kicked and snarled at the dogs, and they ran away, still barking. The dead man lay on his back among leaking bags of fertilizer and rusty gardening implements. Sandor hadn’t exaggerated: The dogs had torn him to pieces. His soiled blue parka and chino pants were in tatters, the dogs had savaged his face as well as the rest of his body. One of his worn sneakers was missing; he hadn’t been wearing socks. Blood still leaked from the body, and he had fouled his pants.
The smell was awful, but Van Diemen forced himself to search the dead man’s pockets. He found more or less what he expected to find: food stamps, a photo ID for cashing welfare payment vouchers, a dollar bill and small change, a carpet knife. The dead man’s name was Royal T. Flowers, and his address was the New Plaza Hotel on Webster Avenue. A plastic ID bracelet on his wrist showed that he had recently been a patient at Union Hospital.
Van Diemen stood up, wiping his hands with the handkerchief he carried in his sleeve, British style. When he finished, he threw the handkerchief atop the body.
“Get rid of him,” he told Sandor. “Don’t bury him here. Put him in the truck and dump him far from here. First look for the missing sneaker. Clean up this place when you get back.”
Sandor nodded. He was of low intelligence, but some things he did very well.
Van Diemen went back to the library. While putting his manuscript pages in order and fixing them with a paperweight, he wondered at the ferocity of the Simonellis, but perhaps the idea of throwing a man over the wall had originated with Hector Benitez, the Colombian drug lord. But it hardly mattered, did it? They had seized the derelict on some street corner, plied him with liquor perhaps, and thrown him over the wall in the dark hours. The assassin had been waiting, ready to climb over the wall as soon as the dogs had the distraction of a live victim. It was a pretty good idea, and it would have worked like a charm if Van Diemen had been human.
He looked at the dead hitman and chuckled. Boy had he been surprised when all his bullets failed to make as much as a scratch. But how surprised would old Simonelli be to find his hitman’s corpse in his front yard?
The old mobster lived in a big pink house on Arthur Avenue, between Fordham Road and One-Hundred Eighty-seventh Street. It was three stories high and looked something like an Italian seaside villa. Set back from the street, with a front yard of multicolored tiles dotted with miniature trees in cedar tubs, it was protected by a high steel fence. Since Van Diemen had flown over it, he knew what it looked like.
During the day, two men posing as gardeners were on duty at all times; when they weren’t walking around, they sat in a tiny summerhouse in the middle of the yard. Two other men were on guard at night.
Van Diemen could only guess about the construction of the little house. It appeared to be made of gaily painted wood, but he was fairly sure there would be steel plate behind the wood. If so, the windows would be bulletproof.
Van Diemen had seen the guards in the early morning. They had walked around, with the sun still coming up, trying to look tough. The gate would be controlled electronically from the little house. The main house had shutters painted to look like wood, but they were probably steel. The windows of the main house would be bulletproof; no expense would have been spared to make old Simonelli’s house as secure as possible. But all his precautions, all his wariness and cunning, weren’t going to save his life.
Van Diemen dialed Maggie Connors number, and she picked up the phone on the first ring.
“Connors here,” she said, sounding sober.
“This is Anton,” he said, waiting for her reaction.
“I was hoping you’d call.”
“Would you like to cover a most unusual story? Do you know where Arthur Avenue is?”
“I know it. I’m a Bronx girl. What is this about?”
“A man will fall from the sky in exactly one hour from now. He’s going to land on the spiked fence in front of a big pink house on Arthur Avenue. Does that shock you?”
“Not much, but can’t you explain?”
“No, I can’t. Do you want the story? I’d like to see photos in the News or the Post. If you do come, take your pictures and get out of there as fast as you can.”
“I’ll be there,” Maggie Connors said. “I wish you’d explain.”
“It’s going to happen with or without you,” Van Diemen said, then he gave her the address and hung up.
The sun would be coming up in an hour, but an hour was enough time for her to get there. He wanted her to have sufficient light to photograph the body as it plummeted from the sky. That would have shock value, but photographs of the body impaled on the fence were even more important. Photographs of the skewered corpse would prove beyond doubt that it had fallen from the sky.
There was no hurry. Maggie Conno
rs might take most of an hour to get to the Bronx. Van Diemen could get to the Simonelli house in less than a minute. A few of the flyers lay on his desk, and he stuffed one in the dead man’s mouth. He closed the dead man’s teeth, allowing about an inch of paper to show. Rigor mortis would be setting in by the time he flew the body to the target; there was no danger of the flyer being whipped away by the speed of his flight.
While waiting. Van Diemen hoped Maggie Connors wouldn’t give in to fear, but he didn’t think it likely. She was a tough woman, she had seen death in many forms. A complete professional, she would want this story no matter what the danger to herself. She was in no danger if she followed his instructions. The police would want to ask her about the pictures after they appeared in one of the tabloid rags. She would have an easy answer for that: She could say that an anonymous tipster had called her on the phone.
Van Diemen hoped she appreciated what .he was doing for her in giving her an exclusive. Actually, he was doing it more for himself than for her. Old Simonelli would be all over the newspapers, and he wouldn’t like that. What he’d like even less was the mysterious death of his hired gun. So he’d call his son, Landau, and Benitez. Old Simonelli would be as busy as a bee.
The clock gonged the quarter hour, and five minutes later, Van Diemen carried the stiffening body to the tower. He laid the corpse down, and a second later, he was a giant bat. He seized the hitman in his cruel beak and streaked across the lightening sky at incredible speed. He swooped down over Arthur Avenue until he spotted the Land Rover he’d seen that first night with Maggie Connors. As he flew over a second time, he saw her getting out of the vehicle.
Up he flew, and when he was high enough not to be seen, he hovered. The spiked fence was directly below him, but he had to be sure the body would fall just right. He wasn’t absolutely sure he could impale the body on the fence, but he had to give it a try. He released the body from his beak, and it fell, gathering speed on the way down. Van Diemen was up too high to hear any sound when the body landed. A flash popped and then another and another. Immediately after the last flash went off, he swooped down just time to see the Land Rover driving away fast.
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