The Hotel Madeleine was a modest four-storied stucco building, ivy-clad and lined with trellises of espalier fruit trees and vines. It wasn’t as palatial as some of the other hotels on the island—the Hotel Lambert or the seventeenth-century Hotel de Lausun down the street—but it was fashionable and served an upper-class clientele. It also overlooked the quai and provided a clear view of the tree-lined Left Bank on the opposite side of the Seine.
As I stood gazing out the window of my room I wondered which of the hundreds of houses and flats that cluttered the Île Saint-Louis might contain a household of vampires. Who had sent the stone hand back to the British Museum? Was there a community of Niccolo’s kind on this speck of land in the middle of the river in the very heart of Paris? Or had Niccolo and Lodovico merely stopped here on their way somewhere else? Question after question spun through my brain as I slipped beneath the flowered Jacquard coverlet of my modest oak bed and fell asleep.
Later that afternoon Lady Dunaway and I went over everything we knew about the vampire that might help us io our search. We pondered the fact that they never ate and never needed medical doctors, but these insights seemed futile. How could one determine which of several hundred households was not buying groceries or visiting physicians? We considered going to the census bureau to investigate the mysterious Daysa, and explore the possibility of his or her having a son, but we resolved that this was ineffectual as well. Not only were there too many Daysas in the city to check on, but also the irregular rules of French names made the number of possible spellings endless. Were we looking for Monsieur or Madame Daysat, Deizad, or Dessat? There were too many possibilities.
At last we resolved that the idiosyncrasy of the vampire that would be the most readily apparent was the hours they kept That evening we began our search. Lady Dunaway kept notes in a small book of red Morocco leather. Beginning at midnight we meticulously strolled down every street of the tiny tie Saint-Louis, carefully noting every house whose lights were burning. It took us an hour and a half to complete the exercise. We repeated the search at three in the morning, and once again at half past five, scarcely an hour before dawn. All those houses whose lights had been turned off in one of the ensuing surveys were marked off our list. After our third and last walk we had a total of thirty-seven homes whose lights had been on all night.
“It’s no use,” I told Lady Dunaway as we sat in a little all-night café and watched the sun rise once again over the Seine. “Everyone in Paris stays up all night.”
“But everyone can’t stay up all night every night,” she said, opening the little red book and surveying the names.
“Don’t be too sure. Throughout most of his career Balzac drank thirty cups of coffee every evening and worked an average of eighteen hours.”
“Surely the Balzacs in this city must be in the minority.”
“As I say, don’t be too sure.”
“But we must continue. Surely if we go out again tonight we will eliminate a few addresses.”
I sighed and began to massage my ankle. “Again tonight! And what if we cross off half a dozen names? Are we going to go out again tomorrow night, and the next night as well? My legs are not going to hold out for too many evenings. I’m afraid this method is much too strenuous.”
She rested her head in her hand and sighed as the waiter brought us two very welcome cups of café noir.
“You’re right,” Lady Dunaway said dejectedly “But we can’t just give up. What are we going to do?”
We both sat thinking, and it was only after absentmindedly downing half of my steaming coffee that I realized I had severely burned my mouth. Balzac be damned, I thought to myself.
Suddenly Lady Dunaway squinted her eyes behind her thick glasses and I realized she had thought of something. “I’ve got it!” she said, sitting up and then leaning closer to me.
I shoved my coffee away and listened.
“We are working on the premise that the vampire is a completely nocturnal creature, correct?”
“Yes.”
“So what we have to do is find those houses whose lights burn all night every night, correct?”
“Yes!”
“The problem is that it’s too much work to discover those houses by looking for them ourselves. So what is the answer?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Gaz...” she said in her most svelte and languorous voice.
“Gaz?”
“Why didn’t we think of that before? Surely a household that is awake all night every night uses their gas jets more than anyone else, more gaz. We just go to the Services en Commun and get a list of the private residences that use an abnormal quantity of gaz every month.”
I was about to congratulate Lady Dunaway, but she had already snapped the little red book shut and was off.
At the Services en Commun she once again utilized the lack of timidity and the ability to think on her feet that she had demonstrated at the British Museum. It was through bribery that we obtained a list of the several hundred abnormal gaz consumers in the city and chose the twenty most extravagant of those to begin our search. To our dismay, none of them were on the Île Saint-Louis.
As we traveled around the city it was easy to eliminate most of the extravagant gaz consumers. Quite a few of the “abnormal” private residences were immense seventeenth- and eighteenth-century homes. We didn’t exclude the possibility (indeed, probability) that beings who were several centuries old might have accrued great wealth, but there were other reasons to mark such households off our list. The foremost reason was that our cab driver, a very knowledgeable chap, was familiar with the vast majority of those residences, and could tell us about their owners. Usually they were remnants of royalty or political figures, well known throughout Paris, and not known for their exclusively nocturnal habits. However, there were a few residences that our driver could not identify, and those we eliminated by another method. Using figures provided by the Services en Commun we were able to determine how much gaz a household of the size in question should use through normal consumption, and thus leave them off our list as well. By late afternoon we had narrowed the possibilities down to four households. The first two of these we crossed off because when we knocked at their doors, their owners answered, albeit in their evening robes, but squinting and grumbling in the full of the afternoon sun, nonetheless.
It was at the second-to-the-last residence that we had some luck. Lady Dunaway knocked at the door.
It opened slowly.
“Oui?” answered a tall and emaciated butler with an ivory complexion and sunken eyes.
“Is Madame de Beauseant at home?” asked Lady Dunaway.
“Madame sleeps during the day,” he replied and began to shut the door.
Lady Dunaway planted her foot firmly across the threshold. “Wait, I am one of Madame de Beauseant’s relatives. Could you tell me when I could visit her?”
The butler looked highly skeptical. “Madame de Beauseant hasn’t mentioned any relatives.”
_ “Yes, but she’ll want to see me,” Lady Dunaway returned.
“Madame de Beauseant never receives guests,” the butler returned and once again struggled to close the door.
Lady Dunaway stood firm. “Not even if the guests have information that is crucial to Madame de Beauseant’s safety?” she asked.
Suddenly the butler became frightened and agitated. “What do you know?” he asked, gripping her arm with his skeletal hand.
“That is between Madame de Beauseant and me alone. Now will you arrange a meeting between us?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said when suddenly a police carriage pulled up behind our cab and several policemen rushed up the steps. The butler violently pushed Lady Dunaway back, slamming the door, and her plaid cape and ulster billowed out as she fell backward into my arms. Ignoring us, the policemen broke down the door and within several minutes, amid screams and curses, they dragged a very fat woman with intense red hair and a burgeoning cleavage, dress
ed haphazardly in night clothing and evening coat, into the street.
“Voilá le collier!” she screeched as she reached into her cleavage and flung a sparkling diamond necklace in the face of one of the policemen. “Voilá le collier!” She fell heavily upon the pavement and tried to crawl away but one of the officers grabbed her small white foot, and amid a flurry of arms and legs she was loaded into the police wagon.
“Merci, en tout cas,” the butler said, shrugging as he propped the broken door back up in its frame.
Lady Dunaway straightened herself and frowned as she squinted at the sun. “Elle n’était pas vampire,” she murmured.
The last address on the list was a large gray stone house on the Avenue Victor Hugo with oriental wrought-iron grates in the windows, pink granite keystones, and a number of short and luxuriant lime trees in front of it. The lime trees were in full blossom and rained down their white fluff like snow, an incongruous sight in the balmy June afternoon.
“You handle this one,” Lady Dunaway said as we stepped down from the carriage.
I gingerly lifted the knocker, a large ring in the mouth of a brass Ming lion, and waited.
Nothing.
I knocked again and finally a short, plump maid with rosy cheeks answered the door. Her eyes were brown and her dark brown hair was drawn back in a chignon. She was in uniform and wore a fine ivory comb in her hair and a white silk scarf around her neck.
“Monsieur?” she said, looking quite shocked and surprised.
“Is Madame Villehardouin at home?” I asked.
“No, monsieur. May I ask who calls?”
“My name is Gladstone, Dr. Gladstone. Could you tell me when you are expecting your mistress home?”
“Later this evening, monsieur. Do you have business with Madame Villehardouin?”
“Yes, you might say that. I’m looking for my daughter, a little blind girl named Camille. You might have seen her yourself. She plays piano?”
“You would have to ask Madame, monsieur.”
“Ahh, yes... would it be possible to come in and wait?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m just on my way out to do the dinner shopping.”
“Very well. Perhaps we’ll wait a while out here then.”
“As you wish, monsieur,” she said, closing the door “Well, what do you think?” I asked Lady Dunaway as we walked down the steps.
“I don’t know,” she said, biting her lip nervously and staring at the house.
“She is going shopping for dinner.”
“She’s obviously mortal. The servants must eat, you know.”
“Well, the maid seemed very cool and collected, but I have to admit, something about her bothered me.”
“I agree,” Lady Dunaway said. “Shall we wait in the carriage a little bit?”
I looked at her inquisitively.
“She told us she’s about to go shopping. Let’s call her bluff,” she said.
We had sat in the cab for about fifteen minutes when the young woman, wrapped in a light black shawl, came out of the door carrying a wire vegetable basket. She completely ignored our presence as she strolled briskly down the avenue. “Let’s follow,” Lady Dunaway suggested as we paid the cab driver.
We walked a safe distance behind her, trying to keep enough people between us so that she wouldn’t notice we were trailing her. She strolled from vegetable stand to vegetable stand, casually examining the produce.
“What is this telling us?” I asked Lady Dunaway as we stood behind a vendor.
“Sshhh,” she hushed quietly. She looked around until she spotted several young boys playing in the street. As we watched one of them, a boy with short black hair and an oversized sweater sneaked up to one of the vendors and slipped a pear in his pocket. The old shopkeeper never saw a thing.
Lady Dunaway stole up behind the boy and placed a gloved hand firmly on his shoulder. He jerked and tried to run, but she held on. “My little monsieur,” she said, “would you like to make ten francs?”
He looked at her with wide and amazed eyes. “Oui, madame.”
She withdrew several coins from her pocket. “Then you see that young woman over there in the black shawl and wearing a white silk scarf around her neck?”
“Oui.”
“Do you think you could steal her scarf?”
He looked at the scarf. “It is fastened with a stickpin?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, it would be easy, madame.” He clutched greedily at the coins.
“No, no,” Lady Dunaway returned. “You get half now and half after you have succeeded.”
The boy slipped five of the francs into his pocket and nodded excitedly as he melted into the crowd. He moved with the swiftness of a cat, past the shopkeepers and old women, and finally up behind the maid. His hand darted out, the scarf flashed through the air, and he was gone. The woman gave a slight cry, but then quickly composed herself.
The young boy slipped up behind Lady Dunaway and exchanged the scarf for his coins. “Here,” she said, holding the cloth out. “Now go be a gentleman and return that young woman’s scarf.”
I accepted the square of silk and made my way through the crowd. I tapped the young woman on the shoulder and she turned around. As she stood there I noticed she was breathing heavily and looked a little anxious, even frightened. And then I noticed the discoloration on her neck. The smooth white flesh was bruised and a little swollen, not unlike the touch of an overly passionate lover. On either side of the elongated swelling were two festered holes, very red and scabbed with darkened blood.
The young woman glared at me as she snatched her scarf back and quickly strode off.
I excitedly returned to Lady Dunaway. “Did you see? Did you see her neck?”
“Yes, I saw,” she said, happily clenching my hands in hers. “We have found the vampire.”
“So what do we do now?”
“I think the first thing we should do is watch our Madame Villehardouin’s home tonight and see if she goes anywhere.”
“You think that’s better than insisting she see us?”
“Yes, we should see if she leads us to other households of vampire before we scare her away. It increases our chances.”
I agreed and that evening we passed the night sitting in a little square a safe distance down the street, watching the gray and pink stone house through opera glasses. It was a Friday night and the Avenue Victor Hugo was crowded with many hansoms and one-horse cabriolets. Occasionally I was eyed suspiciously by ladies of the evening, who wondered if I were a prospective client Lady Dunaway regarded them coldly. From a little bistro down the street came the smell of café noir, and every once in a while a waft of cheap perfume and black cigarettes.
The lights in the gray and pink atone house were put on at sunset and continued to burn brightly all the while we watched. At one o’clock in the morning the thoroughfare was still going strong. It wasn’t until three o’clock that the crowd began to fade. I was yawning a great deal by then, and getting very tired of sitting on park benches, pacing, and holding the tiny hard lenses of the opera glasses against my eyes.
“Look!” Lady Dunaway whispered at last as a young man in livery brought a black hansom drawn by two gray horses out of the mews beside the house. He tied them loosely to the herma and then stood at the side of the door, waiting.
The door opened.
For a moment it was impossible to see who the driver was talking to. He nodded several times, and returned to the mews, and at last the figure of a woman came into sight. Even though she was standing several hundred feet from us I could see her features clearly through the opera glasses. To my slight surprise she was an Oriental, of medium height, and wearing a long black pelerine or hooded cape. My first impression was that she was a mature woman, in her late forties. Her delicate, rounded face was starkly white; her lips, small but full, were quiescent, like the lips of a porcelain mask. Her petal eyes were scarcely more than slits. Two cherry wood combs kept her hair draw
n tightly from her temples, allowing a few locks to fall about her ears in a manner that suggested erotic disarray.
I say she was mature because her visage possessed the linear definition and stunning dignity that can only be wrought by advancing years. However, as I gazed at her, her face changed, seemed to flicker in my mind, and I began to perceive another face. It was a youthful face, the countenance of a young girl scarcely more than a child. None of the woman’s features actually seemed to have changed. All the dignity and linear definition were still there. But the youthful presence faded in like a ghost, exuded a glow, a sensuality, silent but heaving, like the breath of lovers. It was an injustice to say she was beautiful, for she was a caliber above most beautiful women. A sublimity of human perfection born only once every hundred years. Standing in the surreal snow of the lime trees she seemed unreal—ink-brushed, like an ancient watercolor, a Lady of the Willow World.
She stood very motionless on the steps, listening.
“Do you think she’s a vampire?” I blurted out half under my breath. Lady Dunaway tried to hush me, but it was too late. The Oriental woman turned and looked in our direction. I felt a chill—it was too uncanny for her to hear at such a great distance. Her gaze cut quickly through the sparse crowd and came to rest on the opera glasses in my hand. She squinted, scrutinizing my face, and then Lady Dunaway’s, before the woman stepped up into the driver’s seat and cracked the whip at the horses.
Lady Dunaway turned about madly to hail a cab and we were off. Our adversary had gotten quite a lead on us, and it wasn’t until we reached the square, and paused before the Arc de Triomphe that we spotted the black hansom with the gray horses in the distance. “Catch her and I’ll double the fare!” I screamed at the squat little driver.
“Pardon, mes amis,” he said apologetically to his horses as he snapped them soundly and we ripped through the city.
We chased the carriage down avenue after avenue. In the dim glow of the paraffin lamps it was miraculous that we were able to keep an eye on her at all. It was the sound that usually tipped us off—down narrow streets and busy boulevards—the clatter of frenzied carriage wheels upon the cobbles. We lost sight of her for several minutes as we rode by the river. Then we saw her, crossing one of the most beautiful bridges in Paris, the Pont Alexandre, with its gold-plated ornaments and stylish lanterns. The hood of her carriage had snapped down and the black cape swept out in a flurry behind her. The wheels screamed against the stone as she crossed the summit of the hill beyond the bridge. Then there was silence.
The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life Page 17