The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  Mio’s relations with humans were not usually based on affection, but in Sato’s case, I think she was genuinely fond of him. She once told me how they had met. It was back in the 1980’s, during Japan’s economic bubble. Mio was walking very late one evening through Tokyo’s Ueno Park. Her path took her towards a solitary man sitting on a bench, staring lifelessly into the darkness. At first, she thought he was one of Japan’s countless salarymen for whom alcohol was the only refuge from the subservient monotony of their lives. But as she passed in front of him, he came out of his reverie and asked her very politely why she was walking alone so late at night. His speech was very precise, not at all slurred by drink. She replied that she was on her way home. He stood up and offered to escort her through the park.

  Mio thought it was considerate of him, but wondered if he had ulterior motives. When they exited the park, rather than pursuing some tedious male perversity, he politely enquired if she would be able to continue safely without his assistance. She assured him she would be fine. He thanked her for the conversation during their walk, and did so with such charm that she asked him for one of his meishi, his business cards. Later, she had one of her associates look into Sato’s situation. As it turned out, Sato’s wife had recently been killed in an automobile accident. He was very attached to her and the shock of her sudden death had been too much for him. He suffered a breakdown, stopped going to work and was eventually given an early retirement. As far as anyone knew, he spent most of his time wandering aimlessly around Tokyo, often sitting all night in parks.

  With her typical perspicacity, Mio saw in Sato someone perfectly suited to her needs. She approached him with an offer to spend his retirement in California, as the caretaker of her house in Sacramento. He accepted the offer with obvious gratitude, and has lived here ever since.

  Mio had lived in the house for a couple of years before deciding that Sacramento was not to her liking. When she had first bought the house, she brought a crew of craftsmen from Japan to make modifications to the interior. There were, in fact, five upstairs rooms. The fifth room was a narrow area between the bedroom and study, about six feet wide, running the full length of the two adjoining rooms. This hidden space was where I routinely spent my daylight hours. If you didn’t know it existed, you would never suspect that the study and bedroom were separated by more than an intervening wall. Access was via a fiendishly clever hidden door in the study.

  Mio referred to it as the shoebox, and for lack of a better name, so did I. It was furnished with a narrow but quite comfortable bed, a small freezer in which I kept an emergency supply of blood, a comfortable lounge chair, a bookcase with a few dozen of my favorite books, and a desk with a computer. There was another computer in the study, equipped with a broadband Internet connection. The two computers were connected via a router, and there was a surveillance camera that allowed me to view the study from inside the shoebox.

  In addition to the hidden entrance, an emergency exit was concealed beneath a throw rug. Lifting the hatch gave access to a ladder leading down a narrow shaft that descended, hidden on the ground floor behind cabinets, to a tunnel under the house. The tunnel led underground about fifty yards to another concealed hatch in the floor of a shed in the back yard.

  When Mio first showed me the house, she explained that the emergency exit had been built mainly in case of fire. I learned later that fire was a particularly sensitive issue for her. Mio was born in 1765, in Edo, now Tokyo, the daughter of a minor government official who had distinguished himself by drinking and gambling away the family’s modest fortune and, along with it, their respectability. When she was fifteen, her father, in financial distress, indentured her to a successful Edo doll merchant. As it turned out, the merchant himself had no personal interest in Mio. He had been acting as a proxy for someone else. That someone else was a rich and eccentric doll maker named Midori.

  Hinamatsuri, the doll festival, dates back to Japan’s Heian period, sometime before the twelfth century. Dolls created by the more celebrated craftsmen were, and still are, prized as works of art and often fetched large sums from collectors. Midori’s dolls were generally regarded as among the very finest. In addition to being a respected artist, she also happened to be a vampire; a lonely vampire in search of someone to relieve her solitude. Mio proved to be the perfect companion. Once turned, Mio understood immediately that Midori had rescued her from the humiliation and drudgery that awaited her as the daughter of a disgraced petty bureaucrat, and she was deeply grateful.

  The psychological life of vampires can be complicated. On the one hand, they are separated from humans by inescapable disparities. Most of what distinguishes a vampire from a human being makes an equitable relationship close to impossible. A vampire has to conceal too much, and the need for secrecy makes the relationship one-sided, emotionally constrained, and unsatisfying. On the other hand, although it is possible for two vampires to form deep and enduring bonds, it rarely happens. We always seem to be too volatile to mix. But there are exceptions. Mio and Midori lived together for seventy years and, to hear Mio tell it, they were absolutely dedicated to one another. When their time together ended, it was not the result of incompatibility.

  In the early 1850s, they were living in a country house on the island of Kyushu. More than anything else, Midori’s untimely end was due to her own carelessness in arousing the superstitious fears of the peasants living in the surrounding villages. For reasons Mio was never clear about, rumors began to circulate through the villages that Midori was some kind of demon, responsible for a variety of local misfortunes. As happens with rumors, they were progressively magnified in the retelling, eventually becoming so outlandish that they either had to be dismissed outright, or taken as true. Dismissal was by far the less interesting option, so it wasn’t long before community consensus took its natural course in the form of a mob.

  Luckily for Mio, the prevailing opinion was that she was an innocent victim ensnared in Midori’s evil web. The village where they lived was about a half day’s journey from the city of Fukuoka. Mio and/or Midori made periodic trips to the city to deliver dolls to the merchant who handled their sales. The trip, of necessity taken at night, required a one day layover. Whoever made the journey would spend the intervening day at a house owned by Midori on the outskirts of Fukuoka.

  Wishing to spare Mio, the vigilantes waited for her to make one of those periodic trips. On a sunny August afternoon, about two hundred villagers surrounded and set fire to their house. Midori was sleeping in a specially darkened upstairs room. The house, old and made entirely of wood, was quickly engulfed in flames. According to what Mio was later told by witnesses, Midori had thrown a blanket over herself and run out of the house into the sunlight. Once outside, she found herself surrounded by angry villagers armed with long spikes and other weapons. Having escaped the fire, she was now exposed to the even more deadly sun. She tried to get through the mob and make a break for the surrounding woods, but in the confusion she couldn’t find a way through. Desperate to get out of the sun, she retreated back into the burning house.

  Vampires don’t die easily. Her screams could be heard for so long that many of the villagers fell into a kind of mass hysteria, screaming and wailing, terrified that Midori might emerge from the flames and take vengeance on them.

  Midori’s fate exemplified an ever-present danger. Over time, there is a tendency to become complacent, a natural tendency to tempt fate by pushing your luck. The more you get away with, the more you feel you can get away with. But sooner or later, your carelessness catches up with you. When it does, you pay the price in one lump sum, at the point where you’ve gone too far. You get away with it until you don’t, and then it’s too late. Vampires are not, in fact, immortal. Caught in the wrong circumstances, we are much weaker and more vulnerable than humans. Which was a large part of why I cultivated a life of quiet anonymity, why I was so cautious about moderating and disguising my culinary activities. My vampire blood may not have pulsed in rhythm
with my domesticity—prudence, discretion, patience, and the like, may be rather tepid virtues, more appropriate for a work-a-day family man than for a vampire—but the routines gave my life a certain stability that was preferable to the alternatives.

  Chapter 9

  As Richardson had said, Danny Weiss was in the phone book. He lived on Cummins Drive, near the Lighthouse Golf Course. There were a lot of new homes being built in the general area, but most of the older houses were small and rather run down.

  I wasn’t comfortable yet involving Karla in anything too potentially compromising, and since I had no idea what might transpire during my visit with Danny, I decided to ride my bike. I liked riding a bicycle. I could make good time without drawing attention to myself. A cyclist doing twenty-five miles per hour is well within the realm of human expectation. Also, a bike was fairly easy to hide if I needed to leave it somewhere.

  A little after midnight, I rode through town, crossed the river at the old I Street Bridge, and made my way to Cummins Drive. There were two cars in Danny’s driveway: a late model BMW and a classic Ford Mustang. A faint glow from inside suggested lights further back in the house. The street was quiet, so I leaned my bike against the side of his house, behind some shrubs.

  The backyard was fenced with the ubiquitous six-foot redwood. Twin gates shared the space between Danny’s and his neighbor’s house. I put my hands on top of Danny’s gate, jumped, swung my feet over the top and landed quietly on the other side. Of course, there was a dog—drug dealer standard issue—a big male Doberman. It came around the corner of the house, alert and pointy-eared, snorting with fearless disdain. It paused for about half a second and then charged. Two strides and it was airborne with unquestionably carnivorous intent. I let its head get a couple of feet from my face before I snapped my right hand up and grabbed it by the throat. The dog’s forward movement stopped like it had hit a wall, but the momentum carried its tail end forward. I side-stepped and let the momentum flip the dog belly up, then slammed the back of its head down hard onto the concrete walkway. So much for fearless disdain.

  I walked around to the back of the house. A roofed patio with a sliding glass door gave entry to a dimly lit family room. The right side of the room was occupied by a makeshift entertainment center: a wide-screen TV and stereo components flanked by two massive speakers. Danny’s neighbors must have loved him. On the left side of the family room, instead of a family, a young girl slouched unconscious on the sofa. A guy, Danny no doubt, was kneeling in front of her knees, in the process of removing her panties.

  The door wasn’t locked. I slid it open quietly and stepped inside. “Are you familiar with the term, ‘consenting adult’?”

  The guy spun around so fast he lost his balance and ended up on his butt between the girl’s knees.

  “Because I don’t think she qualifies as either,” I added.

  The coffee table, pushed aside, was littered with drug paraphernalia. The guy’s eyes flicked over the tabletop, reflexively evaluating the extent of incrimination, then moved to the open back door.

  “Your puppy is napping,” I said.

  Danny stared at me, but with unfocused eyes, like he was trying to remember something useful from all those hours he’d spent imagining how he would handle an intruder.

  “Take a breath, Danny, before you pass out.”

  Saying his name brought him back into focus. “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  An ottoman sat against the wall, next to a bookcase. I walked over and casually examined some of the titles before sitting down. I had my back to Danny while I was looking at the books, curious to see if he would try something heroic. He didn’t budge.

  “You going to college?” I asked.

  Danny puffed disdainfully through his nose. I wondered if that was something he’d learned from his dog.

  “Man, what do you want from me? Why are you in my house?”

  Danny was a fashionable little rodent. It looked like he spent most of his spare time shining his very expensive Italian shoes, and the rest of his time experimenting with his hair and glasses, trying to look less like a hamster.

  “Don’t be so touchy,” I said, pointing to the girl. “I see you’re a connoisseur of the arts of seduction. I was just wondering if you’re a scholar, as well.”

  Danny remembered the girl’s knees flanking his shoulders. “Shit!” he said, as if he thought I had been paying him a compliment, “This bitch is too stupid to seduce.”

  I couldn’t deny the possibility that Danny was right. “She’s what, about sixteen, seventeen?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, dismissing the question. “She’s old enough.”

  “Old enough to be drugged and raped?”

  “Hey! I didn’t drug her. She did that herself.”

  “You just sold her the drugs and then decided to take advantage of the situation?”

  “What are you, like, her dad, or something?”

  Danny didn’t appear to be suffering from any moral dilemmas. If I wanted to do a service to humanity, drinking this little prick’s blood would probably qualify.

  “Nothing like that. I’m just trying to get a sense of who I’m dealing with.”

  “Anyway, who says I sold her anything?”

  “I know who you work for, Danny.” I said, casually examining the paraphernalia on the coffee table.

  “You here to score?” he asked.

  “Just information, Danny. Tonight I want to get high on information.”

  I heard the faint hiss and smelled it before Danny realized what was happening. Finally, with a funny, inquisitive expression on his face, he cranked his head around, staring between the girl’s legs. “You little bitch!” he screeched, then jumped up, grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her off the sofa. She hit the carpet with a thud but didn’t wake up. “The cunt pissed on my new sofa!”

  Gawking at the wet stain, Danny started to shift his weight like he was going to kick the girl.

  “Don’t,” I said, with enough force to stop him.

  He looked at me, trying to decide if he had to obey. “Whatever, man!” he said, stepping back. “This little bitch just ruined my new sofa.”

  “Danny!” I said, “Forget the sofa.”

  His eyes jumped back and forth several times between me and the girl before it sank in that maybe his sofa cushion wasn’t his most pressing concern.

  “Here’s what I want you to do,” I said, pausing for a little dramatic effect. “I want you to sit in her pee.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Sit down in her pee.”

  “No fucking way, man. What the fuck?”

  “I’m not asking, Danny. And I’m not going to say it again.”

  We looked at each other while the seconds ticked by. In the end, Danny shrugged his shoulders as if to imply that there was nothing he’d enjoy more than to relax in her urine. He tried to be sneaky at first and sit on the edge of the wet spot. I motioned him over with a wag of my finger, and Danny scooted obediently into the dark stain. A sick expression clouded his face as the dampness soaked through his pants.

  “Now that we’re comfortable,” I said, “about a year ago you sold some cocaine to a cop named Dean Arnaud, who subsequently got himself killed. Do you remember that?”

  “How do you know about that?” Danny asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Let’s not get sidetracked. Who was Arnaud going to sell the dope to?”

  Forgetting about the pee, Danny put his hand on the cushion, then jerked it off again like he’d been burned. “Fuck!” he said, wiping his hand on his pants. “I don’t know shit like that. He pays for the product, it’s his. I don’t give a shit what he does with it.”

  “How long were you dealing to Arnaud, before he was killed?”

  “I don’t know. A couple years.”

  “So you knew each other pretty well?”

  “No, we didn’t fucking know each other. He wa
s a customer. That’s all.”

  “He never talked to you about what he was doing? Who he sold to? Nothing like that?”

  “Hey! The guy was a cop. Dirty or not, I didn’t trust him and I didn’t like him. I wouldn’t have gotten near him if Richardson hadn’t sent him to me in the first place.”

  “Richardson sent him to you?”

  “The first time, yeah.”

  “And the last time?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Now that I think about it, I guess he did say Richardson had set him up with a buyer. But he didn’t say who exactly. Just some Russian guys in town for a Kings game, or some shit like that. Fuck, man! I can’t remember all the shit I hear.”

  Richardson had lied about how much he knew, and Danny may have been making a lot of it up as he went along.

  “Let me see if I’m following you, Danny. At first you didn’t know anything, and now that you think about it, you just happen to remember that Arnaud mentioned some Russians?”

  Danny performed a brief routine of innocent exasperation, as if to show me how little it all had to do with him. “Man, you know I can’t just throw names around, even if I knew who they were. And I don’t. Arnaud was always running his mouth about some shit or other. I got the impression he was selling the powder to these two Russian guys that used to come to town once in a while, that’s all.”

  “How do you know them?”

  “They used to by from me sometimes, back before Arnaud started playing middleman.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Like Russians, I guess. Big Russian dudes. One of them had a number tattooed on the back of his hand.” Danny held up his right hand as he said this. “404. Except the second four was backwards, like a mirror image.”