The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  I could almost hear his mental cash register ringing. “I don’t know, maybe I can find something. Let me get this straight. If I do this, I don’t have to pay you anymore?”

  “Not quite, Ron. You don’t have to pay me for November.”

  “How about November and December?”

  The guy was too much. “I’ll tell you what. You give me something I can use, we’ll cancel the November payment. Depending on how things progress from there, I’ll consider canceling December, too.”

  “All right,” he said, after a long pause. “I’ll see what I can dig up. How can I get in touch with you?”

  “Don’t try to be clever. I’ll call you again on Wednesday evening. That gives you five days. If you can’t come up with anything, you’ll still have time to make your November deposit. And Ron, don’t waste my time.”

  “Anyone ever tell you you’re an asshole?”

  “I’m a lot worse than that. I’ll talk to you on Wednesday, and good luck with Lisa.”

  I removed the SIM card from the phone and tossed everything into the trash, then booted the computer to check my email. Along with the usual spam, there was a note from Mio saying she was going to be in Sacramento on business for a few days in early December, and she was looking forward to seeing me. There was a P.S. informing me that I would be required to take her out dancing at least one evening. This was partly a way of teasing me. She knew I didn’t like the club scene, or dancing, for that matter, but I nevertheless had an obligation to meet her “at least one evening” minimum. Dancing was one of her passions, along with making money and martial arts, and she was extraordinarily talented at all three.

  I had little more than a vague impression of the overall scope of Mio’s finances. I never asked her for specifics, mainly because I wasn’t particularly interested. Money was a topic that quickly bored me. I knew she was wealthy. She had investments all over the world: in digital technologies, in oil and natural gas, in biotech and pharmaceuticals. These were things she’d mentioned in the past, before she realized the true extent of my indifference and stopped talking about it. I also knew that, in addition to the Sacramento house she put at my disposal, she owned other properties in California, as well as in Florida, Quebec, Paris, in several East European and Central Asian countries, and in Japan.

  On the other hand, I was rather fascinated by Mio’s interest in martial arts. I knew it had little, if anything, to do with acquiring the skill to defend herself. She was a vampire. With her vampire’s strength and speed, there was no need for her to train. It was the “art” of martial arts that she was drawn to, expressed primarily in dance. The various martial arts styles are sometimes divided into two general groups: the hard, fighting styles, and what are sometimes disparagingly referred to as the soft, dancing styles. With Mio, the distinction evaporated. She developed her own techniques, mixing hard and soft elements, incorporating all of it into dance. And if there was ever a dance of death, Mio was its ultimate practitioner.

  At the same time, she was thoroughly pragmatic. Aesthetics aside, if martial arts didn’t offer her practical advantages, I don’t think she would have bothered. One important advantage her skills gave her was a way to disguise, at least partially, her vampire powers. Whenever possible, human beings will interpret strange, anomalous, or outlandish events in a way that minimizes the strain on their expectations. If people happen to witness Mio’s astonishing physical prowess, it’s much easier for them to incorporate what they see if they think of it in terms of something familiar, like martial arts. By stylizing her actions, she can predispose witnesses to interpretations that explain away her otherwise implausible abilities.

  Mio and I have talked about it on occasion. The Matrix trilogy, the Blade trilogy, the modern Chinese kung fu fantasies full of flying monks tip-toeing across tree tops, all the super-heroes from the comic books adapted to the screen via computerized special effects technology. After a couple of decades of this kind of visual experience, people today seem almost eager to witness in real life the fantasies they’ve seen so often on the screen. The line between the possible and the impossible, between credibility and incredibility, has shifted slightly in a way that can be made to work to Mio’s advantage. With a touch of the theatrical, she can get away with things that in the past would have jarred people’s sense of reality. She was a true artist at this kind of perceptual subterfuge.

  Myself, I tended not to bother. In this respect, Mio and I were exact opposites. She adapted to the human milieu by immersing herself in human affairs, using their social dynamics to her own advantage. Her interest in martial arts was a good example of this. But I didn’t work that way. I preferred to minimize my need to adapt by having as little as possible to do with people. Where Mio might be conspicuous, even theatrical, I did my best to blend in. Mio could perform in public, artfully nudging witnesses toward interpretations that squared with their imaginations. I found it much simpler to avoid public performance. Maybe I just wasn’t subtle enough. Or maybe I knew, intuitively, that the safest place for me was outside of the human imagination.

  Chapter 15

  I called Richardson the following Wednesday from a pay phone in the university library.

  “What have you got for me, Ron?”

  “I want to make something clear first,” he said. “I didn’t have anything to do with killing that cop. All I did was set up a buy.”

  “For the Russians Danny mentioned?”

  “Danny was full of shit.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I set up the buy for Arnaud but I didn’t tell Danny anything about any Russians. Or anything the fuck else, for that matter.”

  “Maybe Arnaud told him.”

  “Arnaud was definitely stupid enough. But it didn’t happen. He didn’t know who the customer was, and neither did Danny. I told Arnaud where and when to meet the buyer. That’s it. The Russians were Danny’s bullshit.”

  “He said you mentioned the Russians being in town for a Kings game.”

  “That’s bullshit! You could ask the little prick, but... oh yeah, you killed him. So I guess you’ll have to take my word for it.”

  “If you keep lying to me, Ron, I’m going to take a lot more than your word.”

  “Goddamnit! I’m not lying.”

  “If neither of them knew who the buyer was, why did Danny say it was two Russians, one with a 404 tattoo on his hand? That’s a fairly specific description of someone he didn’t know.”

  After a protracted silence, I asked, “Who was buying the dope from Arnaud?”

  After another protracted silence, Richardson said, “That’s the funny part.”

  “Amuse me, Ron.”

  “I don’t know where the fuck you’re going with this, but wherever it is, you’ve got to leave my name out of it.”

  “Talk, Ron.”

  “It was for a guy named Stephen Yavorsky. He’s not Russian, he’s Ukrainian.”

  “This isn’t helping your credibility.”

  “Look, I don’t know why Danny told you about Russians. The little prick. Knowing you, he was probably scared shitless and told you the first thing that came into his head.”

  “So, who’s Yavorsky?” I asked.

  “He lives in San Francisco. I don’t know that much about him. He likes to party. He sends his guys up to Sac now and then to buy coke from Danny. Or he used to.”

  “So why’d you hook him up with Arnaud instead of Danny? Why drag a dirty cop into the picture?”

  “That was Yavorsky’s idea.”

  “He asked you to set up the buy specifically from Arnaud?”

  “Yeah. I know it sounds suspicious. I asked him what the fuck was going on. He said some shit about wanting the connection to the cops. The guy’s a little weird. He thinks he’s still in the fucking Ukraine, or something.”

  “Sounds like Arnaud was being set up, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “You don’t know why?” I asked.

&nbs
p; “No fucking idea.”

  Richardson was only telling me enough to make his story plausible. For the time being, anyway, I agreed that he had earned a reprieve on his November deposit.

  Later that night, I did some research on Stephen Yavorsky. The guy made a lot of money in the early 90s, after the breakup of the Soviet Union. He was well positioned to benefit from Ukraine’s independence, and sufficiently independent himself to leave his homeland as soon as his newly-acquired wealth made it possible. He landed in San Francisco in 1996, made a few solid investments and blended into the Bay Area business community. Among other things, he owned a nightclub in North Beach called Satellite. That was the surface picture. His extra-legal activities, whatever they were, apparently required muscle on his payroll. Still, there was a big difference between recreational drug use and murder. And none of it explained how the missing niece was involved, if in fact she was.

  There were a number of ways I could pursue it, but since Mio would be in town soon, I decided to wait until she arrived. I was going to have to take her dancing anyway, and Yavorsky’s club was as good a place as any. There was no reason to think dropping into Satellite would tell me anything about Dean Arnaud, but I might learn something useful about Yavorsky.

  •

  I called Karla the next day and asked her to meet me at the footbridge at 9:00 p.m. It was November 30th, payday. She was waiting when I arrived. I got in the car and closed the door. “Good evening, Karla.”

  She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, tennis shoes and her black leather jacket. “Good evening, Shake.”

  I handed her a manila envelope. “It’s payday.”

  She smiled and took the envelope. “Are we going somewhere?”

  “Not tonight. I just wanted to pay you for November.”

  She opened the envelope and looked inside, then at me. “It looks like a lot.”

  “Twelve thousand dollars. Five thousand is your base salary for November. There’s five hundred for driving me to Richardson’s on the first, five hundred for taking me to the movie on the sixteenth, a thousand for talking to Hamilton on the twenty-first. That’s seven thousand. The other five thousand is for that little episode out in Sloughhouse on the sixth. Is that acceptable?”

  She held the envelope open in her lap, staring at the money inside. “You’re paying me an extra five thousand dollars for fucking up? I was afraid you were going to fire me.”

  “It’s not for fucking up,” I said. “It’s for coping with a difficult situation.”

  “I don’t think I coped all that well,” she said, with obvious sincerity. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d probably still be there, in the bushes somewhere, dead.”

  “You were only there in the first place because I had you take me there. The thought of firing you never crossed my mind. In fact, I was worried you might quit.”

  She was still staring into the envelope.

  “You thought about quitting, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “I thought about it,” she admitted. “I think if you would have let that guy walk away, I would have quit. I know there are lots of guys like him in the world. I mean, I know they’re out there. I’m not naive. But if he’d walked away, there wouldn’t have been anything to balance out the fear. Does that make any sense?”

  “I think I understand. And that’s why I want to pay you. For your courage. Not so much the courage you showed facing some vicious shit who got pleasure out of hurting people. That wasn’t the main thing.”

  She looked at me questioningly. “It wasn’t?”

  “No, the main thing was the courage you showed in coping with what I did to him. That may sound odd to you, but I appreciate the fact that you didn’t lose your grip, or come back later and ask me to justify what I’d done. For that, I have no problem paying you.”

  Karla folded the envelope and stuck it in her jacket pocket.

  “By the way,” I said, “do you remember when you picked up the car from Tony’s garage and he mentioned a friend of mine named Mio?”

  “Yeah, I remember asking you if she was your wife and you didn’t answer.”

  “She’s not my wife. Just a friend. She’s going to be in Sacramento for a few days, sometime in the next week or so. I was wondering if you like to dance?”

  “Yes,” she said, tentatively. “I love dancing.”

  “That’s good. So does Mio. If you don’t mind, I’d like you to go out with us one night. We’ll probably drive down to San Francisco.”

  “Okay. I take it I’m not going just as the driver?”

  “Correct. I’m not much of a dancer. I was hoping you could provide some company for Mio. She may invite Tony, too. If so, he’ll also be glad you came. He’s rather shy and he gets a lot of startled attention on a dance floor, surrounded by regular-sized people.”

  Karla laughed. “Isn’t Tony married?”

  “Yes, happily. His relationship with Mio is strictly business.”

  “I thought he was a mechanic.”

  I wasn’t sure how much of Tony’s relationship with Mio I wanted to discuss. There wasn’t anything secret about it. I simply preferred to let them both do their own PR work. “He is a mechanic. You can ask them about it yourself, if you’re interested.”

  I also wasn’t sure if I should try to somehow prepare Karla for meeting Mio. Of course, there wasn’t any way to do that. With Mio, it was always trial by fire. I decided there wasn’t any point.

  “I’m not sure yet what Mio’s plans are, but I’ll be in touch.”

  Chapter 16

  Mio arrived the following Thursday, about an hour before dawn. I was in the shoebox reading Extinction, a novel by Thomas Bernhard, when I heard a noise coming from my office. I’d been surfing some history sites earlier and my computer was still on, so I woke it up and clicked the icon that opened the office surveillance camera. Mio was standing next to the desk, removing her earrings. The lights in the office had been off earlier, but now the desk lamp was on. This provided enough light for the camera, which, as the next couple of minutes left no doubt, was the reason she’d turned on the lamp. She knew I would be watching.

  She dropped her earrings into her handbag lying on the desk, then proceeded to remove several long pointed needles, about the size of chopsticks, from the mass of hair collected in a bun at the back of her head. With each needle the bun became less compact, finally falling in a thick black wave that reached below mid-thigh. She unbuttoned her blouse, took it off, folded it neatly and laid it on the desk, then did the same with her skirt. I had never known Mio to wear a bra. She paused briefly, as if considering, then lowered her panties until they fell to the floor. Her pubic hair was thick, luxurious and black as night. She scratched it vigorously, fluffing up the matted hair, then stepped gracefully out of her shoes and walked toward the secret panel leading to the shoebox.

  At this point, I was as beside myself as a vampire is likely to get. I dashed back to my lounge chair and picked up the novel, pretending to be absorbed. When the panel slid open and Mio stepped through, I looked up in mock surprise, using the book to conceal the bulge in my pants. No matter how precise my memory of Mio might be, it always failed to prepare me for seeing her in the flesh. Mio’s face was not, in any conventional sense, beautiful. She had what might be described as a horse face: long and narrow, with a high forehead, a long, broad, flat nose, and a wide mouth with narrow lips. She also had very pronounced epicanthic folds and extraordinarily narrow slits for eyes. Nevertheless, these features somehow managed to harmonize with the most unexpected charm.

  Just under five feet tall and an eternal ninety-one pounds, she was an incarnation of feminine animal vitality: slender, narrow-hipped, densely muscular, but without any suggestion of either adolescence or masculinity. Her body exuded a formidable prowess, tangible in predators like leopards and other big cats, but rare in a creature possessing self-consciousness. Her simple presence could be deeply unsettling, even for another vampire. Especially for another vampire. She was
, in her own way, magnificently beautiful. However, saying this did not convey anything fundamental. It only concealed something much more profound. There was something about her: a force, an energy, something spooky and invisible, like radiation, that burned into everything around her.

  I first met Mio in Mexico in 1976. Many parts of the country were in a state of civil unrest, and I was there taking advantage of the chaotic conditions, using them to mask my feeding on humans. By that time in my life as a vampire, I was very much a loner, having given up any wish to associate with others of my kind. So I was not all that pleased to be interrupted one evening by another vampire. In truth, we were both initially put off by the presence of the other, but we were both also curious, intrigued by the improbability of our encounter. As the night passed, we found ourselves unexpectedly comfortable together. The novelty made us careless and we lost track of the time. As dawn approached, we realized we would have to push ourselves in order to make it back to my lodging, which was closer than hers, before the sun put an unpleasant end to the evening.

  If you’ve ever watched a world-class sprinter compete, you may be able to imagine the driving intensity required to propel a two-legged animal at forty-plus miles per hour. Then consider that I’m a head taller than Mio and for every two strides of mine, she had to take three to keep up. But she did keep up. She was like some incredible machine driven by her own velocity. Her arms and legs churned in a blur of absolute and precise physical determination. With a few hundred yards to go, the sun was starting to peak above the horizon. The threat of death along with the all-out exertion to reach cover, produced in me a kind of euphoria. I would have laughed if I’d had any breath to spare. It was then that I witnessed something I did not expect. Mio began to pull ahead of me. With all my strength, I could not keep up with her. Witnessing her under those extreme conditions, seeing her terrifying will to survive manifest itself in the physical perfection of her body pushed to its absolute limit, was for me the single most pure and intense moment of beauty I have ever experienced.