The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  We reached my lodgings with only seconds to spare. Once safely inside, it was all I could do to breathe. When my heart finally stopped pounding, I realized Mio was crouching naked across the room, watching me silently through the narrow slits of her eyes. That was to be the first time I would have sex since 1908. It was also the first of many times I would witness the gymnastic precision Mio was capable of. She sprang across the room like she’d been shot from a cannon and hit me chest to chest. Her legs locked around my waist, she wrapped her left arm around my neck and pressed her mouth hard against mine, while simultaneously her right hand had unzipped my fly and grasped my cock. I felt myself swell in her hand as she guided me into her.

  She stopped kissing me long enough to say the only words she would speak for some time. “Don’t do anything. Just stand still.”

  She pressed her mouth back to mine and began slowly raising and lowering herself on me. I stood obediently, my back braced against the wall, amazed once again by what it meant to be a vampire.

  And now, in the quiet of the shoebox, Mio stood before me again, naked, her expression betraying no emotion. I moved the book aside and let it fall to the floor, unbuckled my belt, unfastened and unzipped my pants, raised myself enough to push my pants down below my knees, then relaxed back into the lounge chair. I had not seen Mio for almost six months, an absence made unmistakably salient by my erection. Mio stood as if frozen for an eternity that must have lasted two or three minutes. Almost clinically, she reached between her legs and slipped a finger into her vagina. Without looking at her hand, she let it fall back to her side, rubbing the moisture between finger and thumb. Apparently satisfied, she walked forward, climbed into the chair, her knees straddling my hips, and once again guided me inside her.

  •

  Later in the day, after we’d slept, I told Mio about Arnaud; everything from the night I drank Francine’s blood to the information I’d gotten from Richardson about Yavorsky.

  “And all of this,” Mio asked, stretched out on the bed, “because the word ‘bloodsucker’ was printed on a photograph in a trunk in a dead woman’s closet?”

  “Well, no. It’s a little more complicated than that.” I said. “For one thing, it wasn’t just any photograph, but one of a man I already had a certain interest in. It wasn’t just the word ‘bloodsucker.’ That was just a detail that initially caught my attention.”

  “Okay. I can see how you might have been intrigued by the photo popping up in the dead woman’s closet. I don’t share your fascination with coincidence, but that’s me. The photo reminded you of your previous interest in Richardson and then you decided to go after him for financial reasons. Fine. What I don’t get is what any of this has to do with Arnaud’s murder, or why you would care about that.”

  “There may not be any connection, and I don’t pretend to care who killed Dean Arnaud, or why. I’m just curious about how it all fits together, if in fact it does fit together. Most likely, nothing will come of it. I’ll have wasted a little time. On the other hand, life is full of surprises. And it’s not like I don’t have the spare time.”

  Mio signed audibly.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s so like you, Shake. For all of your plans and schedules and precautions and all the routines you structure your daily life around, it’s adventure you’re really after. You’re like a wild animal sitting quietly in a room, patiently waiting for an excuse to leap out the window.”

  It was my turn to sigh. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I am right. It’s one of the things I like about you. One of your most endearing qualities. We both know you’re wearing a mask, and I like you just fine when you’re wearing it. We also both know you have to take it off now and then, and that’s when the fun begins.”

  “Then why do I get the impression you’re trying to talk me out of something?”

  “I’m not, Shake. I’m just expressing an opinion. I agree, the world is full of surprises. But the unexpected connections between mundane events are usually just as mundane as the events they connect. As they say, shit happens. It just seems to me that the life you’ve carved out for yourself here in suburbia is your way of not stepping in human shit. So I’m a little confused when you go off looking for something to step in.”

  “Aren’t you the one who thinks I’m too domesticated?” I asked.

  “For my tastes, Shake. What works for you is your business. And I’m not cautioning you about taking chances. I know you can take care of yourself and I know you could get along just fine without all these domestic props. I just don’t understand why, if your stability is important to you, you would incur the risk. This Arnaud business seems like the perfect way to stumble into a mess that will end up blowing your quiet life all to hell. The murder of a crooked cop, no less. Really, Shake, isn’t this something you ought to avoid?”

  “I don’t think there’s much risk involved.”

  Mio waved her hand impatiently. “Well, it’s your time. You can fill it however you want. Personally, I think you’d be better off doing crossword puzzles. At least then you could improve your vocabulary.”

  It was unusual for Mio to be glib. Unless she simply wanted to change the subject. My expression must have betrayed my feelings.

  “I’m not really serious, Shake,” she said. “I know as well as you do that the world tends to surprise us in all kinds of ways. Who knows what little treasures you might find?”

  “The world isn’t just surprising, Mio. It’s deeply mysterious. It may look to you like I’m chasing intangibles. And maybe I am. But either way, my curiosity is all I really have. If I stumble across some apparently chance convergence, like Richardson’s photo in Francine’s closet, I don’t just assume there’s a deeper significance, and then go chasing after it. At least not with the expectation of finding anything. But I can’t let that stop me from looking.”

  “You like to chase coincidence?”

  “I suppose I do. It allows me to act as if the world made sense. For me, coincidence is like a little peephole in a wall. I can pass by without looking and miss whatever might be on the other side. Or I can put my eye up to the hole and satisfy my curiosity. If I choose to look, I may not be able to see much. And most of the time it’s as you say: trivial and mundane. But not always. And either way, the peephole gives me something to focus on.”

  “I understand, Shake. Really, I do. The world doesn’t supply us with reasons to do anything other than drink blood. For everything else, we have to come up with our own reasons, our own incentives. I wasn’t criticizing your choices. I just forget sometimes how different you and I are.”

  After several minutes, Mio said, “I know you’ve thought about this a lot, Shake. And regardless of what you may think, so have I. No matter how different we might be, we want the same thing. We want to feel like there is some meaning in what we do. I make money by beating humans at their own games. It entertains me, and at the same time, it provides me with effective and efficient strategies for acquiring what I need most from people: their blood. But in the end, the games are just games. I know there isn’t any deeper meaning to them, no more than the coincidences you chase have some deeper meaning. You want to penetrate the world’s mystery because you’re alone and you think you might discover something that will reduce the pain of your solitude. And maybe you will. I don’t know.”

  “Aren’t you alone, too, Mio?”

  “I am. But not like you. My life keeps me busy. It may only give me an illusion of purpose, but it’s a comforting illusion. That doesn’t seem to work for you. I wonder sometimes if absolute solitude isn’t what you’re really after.”

  Mio knew well enough why I lived such a solitary life. She had the same choices I had. Vampires can band together, create their own little communities, where people only enter the picture at mealtime. Most vampires attempt to live this way, attempt to find what solace they can in the relationships they cultivate with each other. But in the long run, it rarely works. The
so-called community is contrived, the relationships are forced, and the solace they provide isn’t enough to hold it all together for long.

  On the other hand, there are a few vampires who attempt to accomplish the same thing by aligning themselves with human society. They don’t pretend to be human. Rather, they immerse themselves in human affairs, try to feed on human purpose at the same time they feed on human blood. But this strategy, too, almost never works. It requires too fine a balance between emotional involvement and ruthless detachment. The fundamental relationship of eater to eaten constantly upsets the balance. Mio was the only vampire I’d ever known who could maintain that balance for any length of time. I couldn’t do it. It required an affinity for contradictions that I simply lacked.

  The problem was really deeper than that. Everything a human being does is ultimately driven by mortality. The motivations that feed human ambition draw their energy from impending death. All the paraphernalia of human life—wanting a family, a career, success, fame, fortune, security, the longing to make something of themselves—all of it draws its urgency from the fact that death is just around the corner. Human civilization is a complex web of rationalizations, not only to aid survival, but also to create the illusion that there is some pressing reason why they ought to survive.

  None of this computes for a vampire, for the simple reason that death is not around the corner, at least not on a human scale of time. The human agenda—get an education, choose a career, find a mate, make more little humans, work like a slave, retire, lapse into a second childhood, die—is an itinerary for a journey vampires don’t take. As far as I was concerned, if I wasn’t going to take the journey, there wasn’t any reason to carry the baggage.

  All of which for me came down to a life of solitude, punctuated intermittently by brief periods of intimacy with Mio—the only vampire I’d met in a hundred years who offered even the slightest possibility of companionship. The others, if I’d had to associate with them on any regular basis, would have quickly driven me to take a short mid-afternoon stroll. But Mio and I were not emotionally dependent on one another. We were always conscious of moderating our involvement, knowing as we both did that our compatibility was inversely proportionate to the amount of time we spent in one another’s company.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Mio said. “Maybe you don’t have a choice. Maybe solitude is the only realistic option for you.”

  “Solitude doesn’t recommend itself to you because you actually like people,” I said.

  “So do you, sometimes. Your new driver, for instance. The way you talk about her, it’s obvious you like her.”

  “I do like her,” I admitted. “And that’s a problem for me in a way that it wouldn’t be a problem for you. You can socialize with humans, be with people you like, people whose company you enjoy. You can work with them, employ them, entertain and be entertained by them, and turn around and kill them at the drop of a hat. It’s not easy for me to do that.”

  “So kill the ones you don’t like. There are plenty of those, especially in your case.”

  I grew silent.

  “Look, Shake, the big difference between us is that you think human beings should be divided into two groups: those whose lives are less important than your dinner, and those who, for some arbitrary reason of your own, deserve to be taken off the menu. I don’t make that distinction. If I choose not to drink someone’s blood today, that doesn’t mean they won’t be the soup du jour tomorrow. Either way, I really don’t care about the reasons. Whatever they are, they’re good enough for me. Because no matter what they are, they’re my reasons. They’re always my reasons. And that’s what counts for me.”

  “I understand what you’re saying, Mio, and it’s not so much that I disagree with you. It’s just that when I decide to let someone live, my reasons for doing so tend to take on a life of their own. I suppose because I want them to. I want the reasons to endure. I want the reasons to be there for me in the future.”

  Mio was giving me what I took to be a quizzical look, which, since her face rarely betrayed any emotion, consisted of tilting her head slightly to the side. “My dear Shake, you’re thinking like a human. A hundred years from now, the people you’ve let live will all be long dead, and your reasons for having let them live will be forgotten. You however, will be just as you are now. Or very nearly so. Perhaps in another hundred years you will have given up your search for good humans.”

  “I know you don’t agree,” I said. “But some people deserve to be taken off the menu.”

  “If you say so, Shake. But I think that’s your own self-interest talking. For some reason, you want there to be good humans. But what you aren’t willing to admit is that what makes them good is your own interest. As I see it, the good human is one who has a diminished capacity to do me harm. But all that really means is that they are people of diminished capacity. Give them power and you’ll see what their goodness is worth.”

  I didn’t exactly disagree, but I couldn’t get around the feeling that Mio’s point of view was just too simplistic. The world isn’t that black and white. As important as Mio was to me, I knew that her world was governed by self-interest because she was governed by self-interest. She wasn’t burdened by the choices she made because everything else was secondary to her own needs and desires. Of course, according to her, I was the same. But even if she was right, even if we were the same, our interests were not the same. I knew this was why, as important as Mio was to me, she was not, nor would she ever be, enough. And if she was not enough, I doubted that any vampire ever would be. It was not a comforting thought.

  Chapter 17

  We drove to San Francisco on Saturday. I wasn’t ready to tell Karla where I lived, so Mio and I took a cab downtown to the Hyatt Regency on L Street. I’d given Karla a call on Friday instructing her to meet us in the lobby at 8:00 p.m. I’d also given her directions to Tony’s house so she could pick him up on the way downtown.

  During our cab ride, Mio showed me her new handbag. She asked me to examine it and see if I noticed anything unusual about it. It was small, only about eight by six inches, made of a very fine, soft leather. There was a long, thin strap, also leather, connected by jade rings at the two upper corners. The bag opened at the top by a clasping mechanism made of what looked like a high grade of burnished steel. The clasp consisted of four steel rings. At first, the four rings appeared to be a single piece, but on closer examination I saw there were two sections, one of three rings, the other of the remaining single ring. There wasn’t anything novel about the mechanism itself, aside from its exceptional workmanship. By pressing in opposite directions, the fourth ring snapped briskly apart from the other three, allowing the bag to open.

  The opening was straight and rigid, the two sections of steel spreading apart at each end by expanding accordion-like folds of leather. The inside consisted of a single compartment containing a small makeup kit, two keys on a key ring set with a very large emerald, a California driver’s license giving Mio’s age as twenty-three, and what looked like about three thousand dollars in hundreds in a money clip. I removed everything and placed it on the seat between us. The bag was lined with a patterned silk of exceptional quality and didn’t appear to have any secret compartments. The only thing that struck me as curious was its weight; it was heavier than I expected it to be. The weight was all at the top, which, given the thickness of steel used in the clasp, was what one would expect.

  I knew Mio had a reason for showing me the bag, and given enough time, I probably would have figured it out. But whatever I was supposed to be looking for was not obvious. I replaced the bag’s contents and handed it back to her. She took it, casually sliding three fingers of her right hand into the three connected rings of the clasp. I heard a faint click and the bag dropped to her lap. Still in her hand was a very mean looking weapon, something like a combination knife and brass knuckles. Sized to fit Mio’s fingers, the three rings served as a grip. What would otherwise have been the brass knuckle
s part was machined into a blade running the width of the rings. When attached to the bag, the weapon was cleverly concealed as part of the bag’s construction. Being punched by someone wearing this on their hand would be like getting hit with a razor sharp axe.

  “Taka-san made it for me,” Mio said. “The workmanship is quite impressive, don’t you think?”

  Among other things, Taka-san was famous for his custom made knives. I only knew this because Mio had once shown me some of his creations. “Very impressive,” I admitted. “Did he make the whole thing? The bag, too?”

  “Everything. I gave him a Fendi handbag as a model, but he made this one from scratch. When it was finished, I had one of my gallery employees deliver it to me. I wanted her to carry it through airport security, to see if it aroused any suspicion. Of course, it didn’t.”

  “So, who are you planning to cut?” I asked.

  “No one in particular. The main reason I had him make it for me was so I could pay him. His daughter isn’t healthy, and he’s spent most of his money sending her to various clinics in the U.S. and Europe. I’d give him the money, but he’s very proud. This way, he earns it. His fees are a bit extravagant, but in another twenty or thirty years, after he’s been dead for a while, everything he’s ever made will have increased in value many times. Commissioning the bag helps him now and it’s a good investment for me.”

  I was sure these were practical considerations that weighed in her commissioning the bag, but it was obvious she had given Taka-san the assignment at least partly out of fondness. With Mio, it was difficult to know what the admixture might be. “He must be getting pretty old,” I said.

  “He’s seventy-nine. He still has the hands of a brain surgeon, but his eyesight is going.”

  “What’s wrong with his daughter?”

  “Multiple sclerosis, for one. She’s also an insufferable bitch, but I suppose that’s beside the point.”