The Fifth House of the Heart

by Ben Tripp

  “I’ve been infected since nineteen hundred and sixty-five, mate,” Sax complained. “There’s more vampire junk in me than in Nosferatu’s underpants.”

  Emily arrived two days later, three days before his procedure was to begin. Paolo was conspicuously absent, although he had not returned to Rome.

  “You look awful, Uncle Sax,” she said, and took his cool hand.

  “I like the scar,” he said.

  She had a little half-moon-shaped scar on her cheek, gained at some point during the excitement at Mordstein. It gave her a rakish look, Sax thought.

  “How’s Nilu?” he asked when Emily failed to speak again. Sax had a terrible feeling she was choked with emotion. Even Emily, at last, was letting him down with this sentimental rubbish.

  “She’s good,” Emily said. Her voice was husky, a lot of sadness shoved down inside it. “She’s back in Mumbai and apparently instead of being in trouble, these guys put out some crazy story that got her a lot of good press. Have you seen her?”

  “Not recently,” Sax said. “She was just a skinny green thing when she left here. Why?”

  Emily smiled. “Overnight she’s the most beautiful woman in India, they’re saying. She’s becoming a star. I brought you a magazine with her picture in it, but I left it in the taxi.”

  “I’m glad for her,” Sax said bitterly. Nilu’s fears had proven unfounded. The strange attraction that vampires possessed could be passed on to their victims, if the victims were attractive enough to begin with. People wouldn’t be able to take their eyes off her now. Sax had enjoyed some of that effect himself, once almost getting David Bowie into bed, although Bowie was resolutely heterosexual despite the whole Hunky Dory thing. So Nilu had gotten something from her brush with destruction after all.

  He was glad for her. But Nilu’s plight had nothing to do with Sax. He was responsible for the deaths of his watchman and his team of experts. Abingdon, Gheorghe, Min, Rock. Even to some extent the girl who had failed to win the ormolu clock at auction. The bitterness Sax couldn’t erase came from knowing that he himself had once again survived death, as others had not—others to whom he owed a great deal. He was not at peace with that. An old man sending younger people to die. It was rather too much like being a white-whiskered brigadier in some forgotten war, issuing vainglorious orders to get virgin youths slaughtered before the Turkish guns. And he was bitter for himself as well.

  The thing he cared about most in the world was Emily. But after her, he cared most for what was beautiful and old and rare, the lovely works that time could not defeat (unlike himself, he thought sneeringly). And yet, despite his love, he had personally caused the destruction of more such treasure than his mind could grasp.

  He’d seen everything all at once, in one place, a magnificent collection tens of thousands of years in the making within his grasp. And it had all been wrecked. Destroyed by his own ambition. What was the point of shining up some old bit of seventeenth-century lumber when he had seen before his eyes an Egyptian throne upon which Cleopatra most probably reclined? Nothing could compare to what had been lost.

  “You know, Uncle Sax,” Emily said, breaking into his reverie, “economics is boring after all the excitement. I can’t settle down.”

  “Terrible thing,” Sax said. “I find I’ve lost my interest in antiques, too. Perhaps we could switch careers.”

  Sax smiled at her, but his eyes were dim and full of sorrow and her own smile faded away.

  “Don’t give up,” she said.

  “I’m glad you’re alive,” he said.

  They bled him white, and the horrid, fibrous mess that shot out of his veins was the worst they’d ever seen. It even had some subtle anthropomorphic features—the vampire Corfax had busily been regenerating herself inside Sax’s bloodstream, although he would have died long before she was able to take any useful form. It would have killed him, eventually—not old age or cancer or anything respectable. Fra Giu told Sax there had been a foot-long, slender structure in there that represented the rudiments of a spinal cord in his pulmonary artery. Once they’d run a few rounds of fresh blood through him, they went in with one of those tiny cameras on a fine cable and discovered what looked like a small blister inside the third ventricle of his heart. They went in with another cable and snipped it out. Fra Giu was delighted with this discovery.

  “You would have become the vampire, you see,” he explained. “You, of all the people!” The portly monk laughed then. Sax couldn’t join in because his chest was a mass of tubes and it wasn’t the least bit funny. He was declared a well man again, if weak, and indeed he felt healthier than he had in ages and ages.

  “That’s how they reproduce,” Paolo had mentioned to Sax in his worst bedside manner one evening. “Infect the heart, my friend. In a hundred or two hundred years, there would be a whole new creature inside your coffin that looked like you but was a vampire. Very striminzito, puny, you know how I say. That is why the ancient Egyptians made the mummies. The cremation and embalming has made vampires almost extinct.”

  “Infection of the heart,” Sax said.

  “Yes,” Palo said, and sighed that melancholy sigh. He hadn’t entirely recovered from his own infection of the heart. The only cure for what Paolo had, Sax thought, was marriage, which also boasted a 50 percent survival rate.

  Sax was abominably weak, and after Emily had gone, he spent another month in the hospital.

  It was three months from the day in December when he’d stumbled out of the castle to the day they stuck him in a wheelchair and let him roll himself around.

  A week later, he was back in New York. It was the beginning of April, and spring hadn’t yet asserted itself. Finally, in mid-May, the winter packed up and went home, and Gramercy Park began to reach for the sunlight again.

  Sax was on his feet after that, stumping around his apartment with the help of an aluminum-frame walker with tennis balls on the bottom of the front legs. Pillsbury paid him a courtesy visit some days later and stayed precisely one hour too long, having been at Sax’s place for one hour and three minutes. The bulk of the conversation was Pillsbury telling Sax how extraordinary it all was, as if he didn’t believe a word of it but was too polite to say it directly. After the visit, it being a pleasant afternoon with the last of the snow gone and all sorts of tulips and daffodils and crocuses bursting out of the flower beds, not to mention the blooming magnolia tree just opposite Sax’s window with the white and pink blossoms, Sax decided to get his key and descend to the street and drag his remains across to the park, where he would sit on a bench until his ass fell asleep. That would occupy half an hour of his time.

  He was approaching the gate when an enormous black man with a beard and an ex-military parka approached him from the opposite side of the street, jaywalking diagonally to intercept him.

  Sax had the usual reaction of a white man of a certain age: at first he was afraid, then ashamed of his fear because it was based upon racist stereotypes, then afraid again because that was just how people got mugged, by trying to pretend there wasn’t a threat; by the time he’d gotten through it the man was before him. It was Rock.

  “I . . . I thought you were dead,” Sax said.

  Rock put an immense arm around Sax’s shoulders and pulled him close. “Glad you made it, old man.” He was laughing.

  Sax was in shock. He had grieved for Rock, as for the others who had died.

  “Still getting over it?” Rock said, and gave the walker a gentle shake that nearly threw Sax into the traffic on East Twentieth Street. “Sorry I couldn’t stick with you to help you out, but that place took some exploding. I guess you saw that.”

  “It was a thorough job,” Sax said. His face felt strange, somehow tight. He realized he was grinning. “By God, it’s good to see you,” he added, and put his hand partway around Rock’s wrist. “A real pleasure.”

  “Listen,” Rock said. “I
gotta go. Things going on as always, right? But I got something for you. I was on my way to the exit in Castle Skeletor with all this fire and shit raining down and I went through that room full of goodies, the ceiling coming down, and I remembered how you were so hot for all that stuff in there, so I took a chance and grabbed a couple things. Had to be portable. Anyway, consider this a memento.”

  Rock reached into his pocket and pressed something hard and cold into Sax’s hand. Sax turned it over and his eyes fell upon a diamond. It was heavy, the largest gem Sax had ever seen in person. But it was not the extraordinary size that struck him. He recognized the stone. It was well known but had been lost for centuries.

  “I had it checked out by a guy,” Rock said. “It’s real.”

  “Did he tell you its name?” Sax asked in a dismal croak.

  “Nah,” Rock said.

  “Let’s sit down. Just for a minute.”

  Sax let Rock into the park, where there were some children playing and fiercely attractive mothers watching them. The martinet who oversaw the place must have been out of town, Sax thought, or she’d have run everyone out by now. The sun was low in the sky and the warm day would soon give way to a cool evening. But the last of the daylight was ideal for basking in. The two men went slowly along to an unoccupied bench and sat down. The stone was in Sax’s pocket now; it seemed to give off radiation, exciting his nerves.

  “Did your chap offer you a price for it?” Sax said.

  “Yeah. A million bucks.”

  “You could get sixty million from the right collector. Minimum.”

  “Thought you’d know something about it,” Rock said, and laughed. “Man, you know some shit.”

  “As do you, though it’s different shit. More useful, certainly. Look, Rock, can we get a coffee somewhere? I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you alive.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You didn’t see me alive.”

  “Are you on a secret mission or something?” Sax was intrigued.

  “I’m working for some people, let’s just say that. All anonymous. If they saw me hanging with anybody—”

  “Understood. Let’s just talk about this little bit of stone, then,” Sax said.

  “I thought you’d like it,” Rock said.

  The diamond was back in Sax’s hand, although he shielded it from curious eyes. He felt an enormous greed well up inside him. A familiar greed. He had missed it.

  “I must tell you,” Sax said, “this appears to be the Great Mogul Diamond, young man. Uniquely shaped like a beehive. Mined in 1650, stolen in Persia in 1747, its owner assassinated—Persia is where that witch in the castle happens to be from, incidentally. Coincidence, I’m sure. The real Great Mogul has a couple of documented flaws visible with the naked eye, which I can’t help but notice are in this object here.”

  Sax had this single, precious object, this glittering eye torn from the monster’s lair, worth more than everything he’d ever bought and sold all together at once, worth ten times more than the entire château of the vampire Corfax, alias Madame Magnat-l’Étrange, including buildings, grounds, contents, and all.

  He felt that burning desire, the acquisitive Gollum-like lust for precious things, and even as it rose up in him, it was fulfilled, his great thirst quenched with a single chunk of shining, water-clear carbon. He had forgotten the thrill of avarice, living as he had lately been without that eternal want that had driven him his entire life, even to the brink of destruction. It was as if Rock had handed him his purpose again. His reason to exist.

  “Anyway, a little something to remember me by,” Rock said. He had his arms stretched along the back of the bench. They spanned it. In that moment, as clearly as if a bell had rung, Sax had an epiphany.

  “Keep it,” Sax said.

  Sax tucked the enormous diamond into the breast pocket of Rock’s jacket.

  “No, I can’t, seriously,” Rock said. “Don’t be modest. I got a few little things for myself out of the same box. I’m hooked up for retirement, let’s say.”

  “Do you remember,” Sax said, “you said that great hall in the Castle Mordstein looked like somebody’s crib?”

  “Jay Z’s crib,” Rock said. “Yeah.”

  “I procured most of the antiques for Jay Z’s crib.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I shit you not.”

  They sat in companionable stillness for a few minutes, watching life unwind before them in the park. The mothers called their skylarking children; the shadows were long. It would be time for everyone to go home and eat and be together. Sax was himself looking forward to a dinner with Emily that evening. They saw each other more often since the curious events of December, both of them grappling with the uneasy, shared feeling that their ambitions in life had been false, and everything they had accomplished was of little meaning—antiques and economics were cultured trades, comfortably respectable ways of frittering away the few decades that were theirs to spend in a world of cruelty and hidden wonders that could only be found outside the bounds of civilization.

  When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you.

  Sax thought he understood that better now. He’d gone out into the darkness and fought monsters on the edge of the abyss, or at least he’d been near to the fighting, with the abyss exceedingly close at hand as well. Either way, he’d stared into the abyss, and it had looked back at him, and he had seen himself with the eyes of a creature that might have come into being before man discovered fire. What he had seen was a vain, fleeting, grasping little person, ruthless in pursuit of his petty ambition, but ultimately pathetic. And that was how he had been able to defeat the vampires.

  He’d seen it then, as the castle fell in flames. He had somehow made his hunger for acquisition into the entire meaning of his life, of more value even than life itself. So when the vampires looked out from the abyss and saw Asmodeus Saxon-Tang, they saw a wretched, insignificant mammal with the hoarding instinct of a hamster and the plumage of a bullfinch, and underestimated him—not Sax personally, for it would be difficult to underestimate him as a human being, he thought. What they had underestimated was the epoch-making greatness of his greed.

  It was the greed that made him formidable, Sax now understood, and it had died when the vampire’s treasure was destroyed along with the monster. It had died because he would never again come near so vast a fortune in material things. Nothing could ever fill that void. Without his all-consuming avarice, Sax was just another ordinary old man.

  Sax and Rock left the park, and Rock went his way up the street with his hands in his pockets and, no doubt, a large diamond in one of them.

  Sax inched his walker down the sidewalk past the park, along the fence of iron staves, and was sorry to have discovered his life had no meaning anymore. On the other hand, now he could come up with a new meaning to put into it. Something he chose. A refreshing thought, and one he would share with Emily. She would think he was terribly clever for having come up with it.

  As Sax made his way to the corner, he saw an attractive platinum-haired gentleman in trench coat and homburg hat, very chic, on the opposite side of the street. The man looked vaguely familiar and seemed to take an interest in him, smiling slightly. But that couldn’t be right; Sax was eminently uninteresting now. So he glanced over his shoulder, to see if the man was looking at someone else, and there was no one. When he turned back, the man was gone—nowhere to be seen.

  A brief chill slithered over Sax’s bones.

  He had been wondering lately if the reason no other vampire had attacked him in the intervening forty years was because of the infection he carried from the vampire Corfax. If that was true, now he was fair game.

  Sometimes, he thought, as he hobbled across the empty street, the cure is worse than the disease.

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

 
I am indebted to many people who directly or indirectly assisted in the creation of this work. Here are just a few of them. To my ofttimes wife, Corinne Marrinan Tripp, I owe the greatest thanks, in this and all things. Mr. Buz Carter lent his ear, and Dr. Paolo Focardi his accent; I am indebted to Nirmitha Iyangar for help with Hindi, Cris Oprea for the Romanian obscenities, and Prathima Bangalooru for her research assistance in London. New Yorker supreme Mr. Harry Segal, as always, was my key to that great city.

  Many thanks to the tireless Ed Schlesinger for editing this one, our third together (more than a quarter of a million words combined), and to my glamorous agent, Kirby Kim, for selling it to Ed, and for selling all my manuscripts, despite my constant efforts to write unsalable books. And let us not forget the folks who make novels seem like professional work, at least to the casual reader: the jacket designed by Jason Gabbert; the whole thing art directed by Lisa Litwack; the proofing, queries, fact-checking, and general right-making by Sarah Wright. Let us not forget the publishers—Louise Burke and Jennifer Bergstrom—and the people who market and do publicity: Liz Psaltis and Stephanie DeLuca, respectively. It takes a village to make a novel. I’m the village idiot.

  I also humbly thank the research staff of the New York Public Library and the staff of the Archivio Segreto Vaticano at the Città del Vaticano, who clearly thought I was pulling their legs with some of my questions. To them I confess I lied about having the PhD. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa and all that.

  Ben Tripp

  Prague

  February 2015

  About the Author

  * * *

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY TANYA MCCLURE

  BEN TRIPP is an artist, writer, and designer who has worked with major entertainment companies and motion picture studios for more than two decades. He is also one of the world’s leading conceptualists of public experiences, with a global portfolio of projects ranging from urban master planning to theme parks. He lives with his wife and dogs in Europe and California.