by Ben Tripp
Min had expected him to attempt a feed at the hospital. She had waited for three hours, hidden beneath Nilu’s bed, for him to do just that; then he would have been helpless. Too bad for the victim, but not Min’s concern. When Yeretyik opted to merely murder his quarry instead of draining her blood, things got complicated. That small black sac on the heart, bulging with veins, was the key to the vampire’s survival. It was the reason for the legendary wooden stake: in the old times, they would have sharpened a stout green stick, then split the pointed tip lengthwise until it formed a tight bundle of individual skewers. Driven into the chest of the monster, the skewers would spread apart inside the body, and the odds of piercing the Herzblutkammer were greatly increased. In the early days, the Church organized the killing, and back then the organ was called in Latin quintus domus cordis —“the Fifth House of the Heart.”
Min knew the entire history of vampire hunting back to front. It was all she cared about. Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the Vatican started hiring Swiss mercenaries to do the work, the language of vampire hunting had changed to German. In the modern age, it didn’t matter where you were from. All it took was reflexes, no fear of death, and an insatiable appetite for violence.
Min cursed herself for not making the kill shot in the hospital, and further, failing to cause Yeretyik enough damage to keep him from going out the window; the blow from her silver hammer hadn’t slowed him down, although it had certainly collapsed his lung.
Min kept Nilu at the edge of her attack radius and followed for an hour and twenty minutes. At no point did Nilu suspect she was being tracked. Min had leisure to wonder again at her own squeamishness when it came to things like whether the streets were clean and whether children slept in beds. She wouldn’t hesitate to kill a child if it meant destroying a vampire. In theory, at least. The opportunity had never come up. But here in India, she found herself queasy all the time, afraid to eat the food, afraid to touch things, afraid even to breathe the air. It was a weakness in her and she would have to address it. After all, for the Indian people, this was normal. There were a hell of a lot more of them than Koreans. So on balance, this normal was more normal.
Min’s thoughts took her focus away, so it was a shock to see another figure emerge from the shadows beneath a peepal tree and fall into step directly behind Nilu.
6
* * *
New York
“Asmodeus, my old friend, you’ve gone mad,” said Pillsbury in his hushed, sacerdotal voice.
They sat in Pillsbury’s office on the seventeenth floor of 1011 First Avenue in Manhattan, where most of the New York Archdiocese’s administrative offices were located. It was an ugly brown building that resembled, to Sax’s eye, one of those smoked-glass stereo cabinets from the 1970s.
Pillsbury was attached, due to some flash of gallows wit from a superior in the Catholic hierarchy, to the Calvary & Allied Cemeteries Office, in charge of the maintenance and operation of all Church burial grounds in the local area. In fact, he worked for an entirely different department. Pillsbury was the sole US representative of the Ordine dei Cavalieri Sacri dei Teutonici e dei Fiamminghi, Special Branch, one of those vestigial bits of the Church that had survived for many centuries because they had some obscure, fiddling responsibility that, being sacred, could never be extirpated from the Vatican payroll.
Pillsbury, being an apostolic protonotary diocesan priest, was entitled to a certain measure of respect amongst his peers, if not Sax, who sat opposite him on the laity’s side of the desk. There was a tendency amongst the better sort of priests in the building to attempt to decorate their offices as if they were not located in this geometrical, bureaucratic hive, but rather a five-hundred-year-old building at Oxford, with linen-fold paneling and Italian Baroque furniture. To Pillsbury’s credit, he had made no attempt to tart up his room. It could just as well have been an insurance manager’s office in midtown.
Pillsbury was tall and thin and immaculately hygienic, with a stiff silver finger bowl of hair and a sallow face upon which were engraved lines of caution and concern. He was wearing his prescribed outfit of black cassock with red buttons and trim, a purple sash bound high up around his waist, and the usual white dog collar; he was entitled to wear a dashing purple cape, a ferraiuolo, as well, but was not wearing it now. Sax vaguely recalled there ought to be a fancy-dress hat included with the costume, but he’d never seen Pillsbury in one.
Sax realized that Pillsbury expected some kind of response.
“I suppose I have gone mad,” he said. “But let us recall which one of us has made an entire career of this kind of thing. I merely dabble in it.” Sax was referring to vampire hunting, which was the secret responsibility of the Ordine dei Cavalieri Sacri dei Teutonici e dei Fiamminghi, Special Branch. There weren’t many Teutons or Flemings in the order any longer, and Pillsbury had never actually seen a vampire, let alone stuck anything in amongst its ribs. Sax suspected the man didn’t believe in them at all, despite all the evidence to which he was privy. Generations of such men, perhaps afraid of looking foolish, had failed to sound the alarm to the world at large. Consequently, the general public hadn’t the first clue what peril it was in.
Sax, on the other hand, fervently believed in vampires but not in Pillsbury or the Catholic Church. The opinion of the vampires about either one had not so far been discovered, so it all came out even.
“This will be what, the third such dispensation for which you have begged my petition?” Pillsbury said, the pomposity welling up in beads and dripping from his voice.
“The second,” Sax said. “Strictly speaking, I didn’t ask for the first one, as you may recall, sir. You sort of laid that on me, as it were.” Pillsbury was entitled by his rank to the honorific monsignor, but Sax would be damned before he used it. It would only encourage the man. It was sir or nothing.
“That was an indult after the fact, Asmodeus,” Pillsbury said. “You had violated canonical law. The Roman Curia forgave you.”
Sax rolled his eyes. “I didn’t require forgiveness, though. Have I also been forgiven for being an unrepentant old sodomite?”
“What you do with your eternal soul is otherwise entirely your own business,” Pillsbury said, his brows raised like a pair of hands praying over his nose. What Sax found most peculiar was that Pillsbury seemed to genuinely like him, in spite of everything. All the condescension and disapproval in the world couldn’t hide it. Sax wondered, not for the first time, if Pillsbury was secretly light in his loafers.
“Yes, well, God forbid, if I may use that expression in this most sacred of office buildings, that somebody should do in a vampire without the Pope’s permission. Leave it to you lot to come up with paperwork for a thing like that.”
“The vampire,” Pillsbury said with an implied sniff of disdain, “is an emissary of evil. That makes it Church business. As you very well know, there are matters of cleansing and so forth. Disposition of remains.”
“You took my vampire hammer,” Sax said.
Pillsbury delicately pulled his right earlobe as if it contained a switch to trigger his memory. “You’re not still upset about that, are you? It was what, forty years ago?”
“Blink of an eye for a vampire,” Sax grumbled. The real reason he’d given half of the contents of that château on the Loire to the Musée du Louvre, other than sheer largesse, was so the Vatican wouldn’t get its hands on the stuff.
The Church had a fairly self-enriching policy when it came to the property of vampires, as he learned shortly after the events at the château. His Holiness’s emissaries, a couple of ordained lawyers, had visited him in the hospital with the details of the Church’s monopoly on vampire hoards. In order to hang on to as much loot as possible, Sax had been forced to generate some favors in the Catholic-dominated French government, and fast. Did the Louvre need a few bits and bobs?
It worked, and while the little rubber s
tamps were coming out, he was able to get a large quantity of the remaining furnishings out of the country through notorious dealers such as the Wildensteins. The silver hammer called Thaddeus was not so easily retained. It might as well have had Property of the Vatican engraved upon it.
“So you’ve found another one,” Pillsbury said, steepling his hands in prayerful imitation of his eyebrows. “Where?”
“I don’t know,” Sax said. “That is to say, I know there is one, and I think I can find it, but I haven’t found it. So I thought it best to come ’round here right away, rather than . . .”
Sax batted his hand vaguely in front of his face. He had no interest in the spiritual aspect of an ecclesiastical warrant. Vampires lived or died according to man’s deeds, not God’s decree. But it would save him a great deal of official difficulty afterward, should he chance to survive the escapade.
However, there was something else Sax would need. In the past he’d been young and hale. These days he could hardly get out of bed.
He was going to need assistance.
“Very wise,” Pillsbury agreed. “So. Is that it? I think we can handle the matter within a week or two.”
“There’s one more thing, now you mention it.”
“I see.”
“Your head office is in Rome, is it not?”
Pillsbury sat back in his chair, wary now, the lines around his mouth forming a parenthetical moue. “At the office of the church Santa Maria in Campo Santo Teutonico,” he confessed.
“I rather wonder,” Sax said, “if I might get an introduction.”
7
* * *
Rome
It was a dry November in Rome as well. It should have rained. The nights were cool, the days hot. Sax arrived at the very end of the month, having secured permission to leave the United States from the assorted police agencies connected with the case of his murdered night watchman.
Alberto Robledo had been stabbed in the heart with a woodworking chisel, according to Detective Jackson. A single blow. The coroner thought it might have been delivered from behind, by someone reaching around Alberto’s shoulder. The intruder, Sax realized, must have been waiting behind that handsome mahogany escritoire for Alberto to walk past. Definitely not the work of the vampire. It would have been a familiar, doing the work of immortal evil in much the same way lickspittles from celebrity entourages did all the car-parking and cocaine-purchasing their idols couldn’t be bothered to do themselves.
To murder someone for an overpriced clock, however, was beyond the pale. Sax wished he had opened the damned thing immediately upon receipt, but there was no key, and for twenty grand he wasn’t going to pop the clock’s lock with a butter knife. Whatever had been inside it, he wasn’t going to find out unless he found the creature that had ordered it stolen. There had to be something concealed inside, he was absolutely sure of that. He’d racked his brains (and his archives) for evidence that such a timepiece had some other intrinsic value. A fine clock, certainly. Beautiful craftsmanship. Not inherently worth killing for.
Ormolu, from or moulu, French for “pulverized gold,” was a beautiful material but obsolete. It was deadly stuff to make: the gold was mixed into a mercury amalgam and applied to a metal foundation, and then the mercury was cooked off, leaving the gold thermoplated to the surface of the object. It was electroplating before there was electricity. Sax’s lost clock wasn’t ormolu in the strictest sense; the true ormolu process was discontinued in the first half of the nineteenth century, as the mercury vapor killed all the craftsmen. By the time Sax’s clock was manufactured, all the mounts were plated by electricity, but the use of gilded bronze mounts continued to be called ormolu. Had the thing been older, created by some workshop where all the artisans suffered from phossy jaw and mercury poisoning, perhaps its value might have been a trifle greater. But there was no other rationale that would increase its worth more than a fraction. Even sentimental value could not extend desire as far as murder, Sax thought. Not even for a vampire.
Those ancient creatures, it was understood, wished more than anything to dwell in their exquisite pasts, gazing upon some object their lover touched and remembering those glorious days. That much was true. Madame Magnat-l’Étrange had been doing it for centuries in that dusty museum-home of hers, even going so far as to keep her lover’s remains in that stinking coffin, neither dead nor alive, as a token of history. But then again, it was usually the vampires that killed each other. For all their romanticism and yearning for past glories, they were worse than black widow spiders when it came to slaughtering their mates. It was always a matter of territory and food supply. When things got tight, out came the razor-edged teeth or the heart-bursting weapon thrust home in the dark.
Sax’s taxi stopped in front of the hotel and he allowed himself and his luggage to be handed into the lobby in a flutter of euros. It was a good hotel, not an interesting one; it had once been the palace of a cardinal and was located within steps of Vatican City. The room was small in the European way, and the bathroom microscopic. The service was suitably obsequious. Furnishings all contract stuff in imitation of the original. Sax took a shower, then attempted to get his cell phone service working; it was one of those SIM card things that was supposed to operate in any location at all, requiring only the insertion of a small bit of gold-printed plastic—a modern-day version of ormolu—into the phone. He had done something wrong, apparently, or more likely, it was Italy’s fault. There was probably another strike.
Sax left the hotel and walked toward the vast bulk of St. Peter’s Basilica, majestic seat of the Church on Earth, but hooked a left through the sweeping colonnade that reached out from the basilica to cradle the ellipse of the piazza. He reached a narrow street, crossed a parking lot, and arrived at an undistinguished ochre-plastered villa with a red clay roof. Sax paused to dab the moisture from his brow; even a brief walk would wear him out these days. And it was damnably hot for this time of year. He had brought a silver-headed cane on this trip and was glad to lean on it until his heart stopped thumping.
He was standing before Santa Maria della Pietà, a modest church (especially compared to its gargantuan neighbor) by Roman standards. There was a high wall around the patch of grounds attached to the building; this enclosed the cemetery that had lent Pillsbury’s order its name. It was a burial ground for Germanic people, dedicated by Charlemagne for that purpose. Ordine dei Cavalieri Sacri dei Teutonici e dei Fiamminghi translated to “the Sacred Order of Teutonic and Flemish Knights”; a fair number of those fellows were buried here, and quite a few of them had died fighting vampires.
Sax went in through the familiar public lobby, where a butch young Italian in a well-fitted cassock sat behind the desk. Sax identified himself, then sat on the long bench opposite, where he could keep an eye on the young man’s strong Roman profile and clean, brown hands with the thick black hair along the metacarpals. A potted palm tree nodded by the doors, tousled by a fan bolted to the cornice below the ceiling. There was an electric wall clock that ticked and hummed. Sax felt jet lag soaking into his brain like opium fumes. He struggled to not fall asleep and failed, his cheek resting on his hands, which were folded across the handle of his cane. He awoke in confusion when, half an hour later, Fra Paolo Muscarnera, canon of the order, gently shook him by the arm.
Sax was mortified to discover he’d been drooling. He creaked to his feet, rubbed his moist sleeve on his other sleeve, straightened his jacket, and harrumphed.
The man before him wore a black cassock as well, unrelieved by any other color, and his hair was closely cropped in the monastic way. He was a dark, handsome fellow, over six feet tall, with a strong, shining, blue-black jaw and a single black brow above serious eyes the color of ripe green olives. If Sax had been a younger man, he would have done everything in his power to get this handsome piece of classical statuary into his bedchamber; as it was, he merely experienced a stab of greed, which was wha
t he had left of lust.
Fra Paolo unexpectedly embraced him and Sax nearly dropped his cane.
“Good heavens,” Sax said.
“The famous Asmodeus Saxon-Tang,” Fra Paolo said. “Welcome to our humble home.”
The clerk at the desk, who had essentially ignored Sax until now, except to smile patronizingly at him once while he was falling asleep, was now on his feet, hands clasped in front of him. He came around the desk and spoke to Fra Paolo in Italian, of which Sax knew only a very little. But Fra Paolo answered, “Yes, he is,” and the young man curtsied and touched his brow, head lowered.
“Oh, come on,” Sax said.
“We seldom get to meet the old vampire hunters,” Fra Paolo said, without guile. Sax was offended anyway, but he knew what the man meant to say.
“That’s because most of us don’t get old,” Sax replied. It was a standard kind of exchange: fatalistic, macho, and heroic by turns, and entirely false in Sax’s case. “I’ve only done it twice,” he added. Falling off a bicycle twice didn’t make one a stunt man, after all. And on the second occasion, the creature had been debased, mindless.
“Most do it only once,” Fra Paolo said, and to Sax’s amazement he actually cast his eyes heavenward and pressed his fingers together in a brief gesture of prayer. This canon was either the most honest and faithful servant of Christ in Rome, or an unutterable charlatan. Sax hoped it was the latter. True believers could get you killed.
Fra Paolo took Sax gently by the arm and steered him past the marble stairs that dominated the lobby, toward a deep architrave with a black-painted door set into it. The clerk resumed his post behind the desk. On the other side of the black door there was another desk, this one manned by another handsome youth in cassock and wooden beads; he was lean as venison, with yellow hair, blue eyes, and a nose like the nasal of a Viking helmet. If everyone who worked for the Ordine dei Cavalieri Sacri dei Teutonici e dei Fiamminghi, Special Branch, was this good-looking, Sax thought, maybe he should take divine orders himself. He might look well in one of those little red hats and a lacy surplice.