by Mel Nicolai
The garage was separated from the house by a passageway giving access to the back yard. As I passed through the gate, I knew I had company and I knew who it was. When I rounded the corner into the back yard, Calvin was on the upstairs landing, leaning against the banister. He seemed to be preoccupied with his thoughts, remaining motionless as I started up the stairs. Only as I neared the top did he turn and face me. He had changed very little in the hundred years since we had last stood so close. His eyes were still cold, piercing, indifferent; the gaze of a well-fed predator. Or maybe it was just the gaze of someone who had seen most of what there was to see in this world. In Sicily, he had been dressed like one of the local shopkeepers. Now he was wearing khaki slacks with oversized pockets on the thighs, hiking boots, and a wrinkled cotton shirt.
“You let the girl go,” he said, with the hint of a smile. It wasn’t a question so much as a request to confirm what he assumed to be the case.
“Yes,” I said.
Having gotten confirmation, he seemed to be considering his next words, then added, with the low, whispery tranquility I remembered first hearing under the rubble in Sicily, “It will be inconvenient for me, if she leads the police back to my house.”
“I don’t think that will happen. She has no idea where she was, and I put her on a bus to Texas.”
There was an unexpected sparkle in his eyes. “You’re either more heartless than I am, or you’ve never been to Texas.”
His comment was funny, but I wasn’t in the mood. “It seemed like the thing to do under the circumstances.”
“Circumstances?” he asked.
That was when it suddenly became clear to me. I’d done the same thing to Calvin as he had done to me. I had taken him for granted. For a hundred years, I had satisfied myself with an idea of him that was mostly my own invention, one that I’d formed while still under the sway of my human emotions. My first impressions hadn’t been entirely wrong. Calvin was indifferent to my fate, but no more so than I was to his. What I couldn’t see in Sicily was the practicality behind his lack of emotional involvement. I couldn’t understand his detachment from the devastation all around him, because at the time I lacked that detachment myself. But a century had now passed.
Be that as it may, I still wasn’t inclined to explain myself to him. I wasn’t particularly uncomfortable about finding him at my house. I didn’t care that he knew where I lived. I wasn’t afraid of him. But something was changing for me, something I wasn’t very clear about in my own mind, and Calvin, what he represented, was from a past I was trying to move away from, or at least trying to reevaluate. But then it occurred to me that if I wanted to take a fresh look at my past, Calvin might be the best place to start.
“You’re not still upset about Sicily, are you?” he asked. Then, when I didn’t respond, he said, “Look, I know what happened there was hard for you. I admit I might have been more helpful.”
“You think?”
“You say that like it’s obvious I could have made things easier for you. But it isn’t. It’s far from obvious. Being turned can be positively chaotic. I wasn’t in any better position to predict what you would do, how well or poorly you would handle the situation, than you were.”
I had to admit, Calvin had a point. There was no way he could have known what I might do those first few weeks. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said. “But I am curious. Why did you walk away like that?”
Calvin raised his right hand, as if examining something resting in his palm. “I had no intention of turning you that night. If not for the earthquake, you would have died along with your wife. But once it was done, I had no real choice but to accept it. However, that didn’t make me responsible for you. I’m not your daddy. I had no more obligation to you then than you have to me now. As it was, my situation in Messina was getting precarious. I didn’t want you blundering along behind me. As things turned out, I left the island shortly after the quake.”
I knew well enough from my own experience how precarious the situation with humans could become. “I can accept that. We agree, then, that I have no obligation to you?”
“None that makes any sense to me.”
“Then why come here asking questions?”
For the first time, his gaze seemed to soften slightly. “Are you always this inhospitable?” he asked.
Again, I realized I was acting like I had a grudge against him. “Not always,” I said, trying to be more accommodating.
Calvin scanned the night sky. “It’s going to be light soon. If you don’t invite me inside, I’ll have to be on my way.”
There wasn’t any reason not to invite him in, and I was curious about why he was there, so I unlocked the door and ushered him in.
“Nice place,” Calvin said, looking around before making himself comfortable on the sofa. “How’s this working out for you?”
“It works well enough.”
“Do those curtains keep out the sunlight?”
“Most of it, and the window glass is polarized.”
“And the guy downstairs is a friend of Mio’s, I take it?”
“If that was a question, it sounds like you already know the answer.”
“Just a guess. I’m also guessing Mio never mentioned to you that we’ve met?”
“No, she didn’t,” I admitted.
“Just once. About two years ago. I was up at Lake Tahoe. I saw her get out of a limo and go into one of the casinos. I knew immediately she was one of us. Humans don’t move like that. And I was pretty sure who she was. After all, there aren’t many Japanese vampires her size who dress like royalty and ride around in a limousine. So I followed her into the casino.”
“You talked to her?” I asked.
“She was waiting for me. That surprised me. Apparently she’d noticed me watching her when she arrived. I don’t mean to brag, but I’m pretty good at not being noticed.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Not much, really. She wasn’t exactly friendly when I told her who I was. I suspect that if we hadn’t been in the casino she would have practiced her kung fu on me.”
“Why would she do that?”
“To tell you the truth, I think it had something to do with you. I think she was warning me.”
Calvin seemed to be waiting for a response, but there wasn’t much to say. If he was right, I was pleased to know that Mio had my interests at heart. But I wasn’t going to tell Calvin that.
“Do the two of you get together often?” he asked.
“Only when she’s in town. Why?”
“I suppose I’m impressed. We only spoke for a few minutes, but Mio strikes me as capable of being either graciously accommodating or viciously unpleasant, depending on her own private whims.”
“That impresses you?”
“What impresses me is how different the two of you are, and yet you seem to have a durable relationship. One that evidently works for both of you. That isn’t easy to come by. You and I are a lot alike in that regard. We both find most of our fellow vampires disappointing. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“‘Disappointing’ is a generous way to put it.”
“Yes,” he said, as if distracted again examining his empty hand. “I suppose it is.”
“You were going to tell me why you’re here.”
“For one thing, as I already mentioned, I was concerned that your good deed with the girl might have put my living arrangements in jeopardy.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it.
“Would you mind telling me what you were doing in Pollock Pines?”
“I was looking for someone. A girl, but not the one that ran out of your house.”
“So, you didn’t know I lived there?”
“The possibility had never crossed my mind.”
“You must have been surprised. I certainly was, when I saw you in the woods. I knew you lived here in Sacramento, but I never expected to see you up there in the mountains.”
Calvin seemed to
know a lot more about me than I knew about him.
“So, why were you looking for this other girl?” he asked, as if there were no conceivable reason why I wouldn’t tell him.
“It’s complicated. Let’s just say I’d started something and I wanted to finish it.”
“And it was this something you wanted to finish, trying to find this other girl, that led you to my door.”
“Yes.”
“Did the path to Pollock Pines lead through Yavorsky?” he asked.
“Not directly. One of Yavorsky’s employees. A guy named Levko. The one who delivered the girls to your house.”
Calvin was thoughtful for a minute before speaking again. “I’m sure you can appreciate my concern, Shake. Yavorsky has his uses, but he’s not very bright and that makes him unreliable. If any of this is going to be a problem for me, I’d like to know before it gets out of hand.”
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about from Levko. All he did was show me your house. I’ve never laid eyes on Yavorsky and he doesn’t know who I am or that Levko met with me. Levko seems to be genuinely afraid of him. Or at any rate, afraid for his family back in Ukraine.”
“He should be. Yavorsky is a real piece of work.”
“Levko seems to have a similar opinion of you.”
“Yes, well, he knew where to deliver the girls. I wanted it to be clear to him that that was all he needed to know.”
“About that... having people delivered like pizzas. Why would you do that?”
“I realize it must seem a little foolish. Kidnapping humans is so much more complicated than killing them, as I suspect you may have figured out for yourself over the years. Unfortunately, keeping them on hand was necessary at times.”
“And you used someone like Yavorsky to get them?”
“Who else would I use? People who market in young girls aren’t driven by ethical principles. It was risky, I admit. I did my own procuring, as much as I could. That’s what I was doing in Tahoe when I ran into Mio, looking for a body to snatch.”
We both seemed to be dancing around the obvious question. “Why would you need to keep them on hand?”
“I needed their blood for something other than drinking.”
“You didn’t drink their blood?” I asked, genuinely curious where this was headed.
“Well, I drank a little, on occasion. A sip now and then. But I needed it for something else. Which brings me to the other reason for paying you a visit.” Calvin stretched his legs and settled himself more comfortably into the sofa cushions. “A while back, in the early part of the twentieth century, I started looking into the possibility of a cure for our intolerance to sunlight. Initially, my efforts were rather farcical, as you might imagine. Given the state of medical science at the time, not to mention my own complete ignorance of biochemistry, the chances of success weren’t very good. I’m sure you’d get a kick out of some of the harebrained concoctions I came up with. You’ve probably seen some of those old film clips of man’s early attempts to build flying machines—you know, men jumping off cliffs with goofy mechanical bird wings strapped to their arms, that sort of thing. My early efforts were more or less comparable. The only reason I survived my experiments was because my vampire metabolism was impregnable to my own half-baked determination to poison myself.
“I’d pretty much given up after a few decades of using myself as a lab rat. Then, in the fifties, Crick and Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA and I began to think maybe a cure wasn’t so far-fetched. I spent a few years getting myself up to speed in the related sciences. But as the decades passed, the more I learned, the more difficult it became to pursue research in the directions that seemed the most promising.”
“Facilities?”
“Among other things. There is a serious technology barrier. The tools get harder and harder to procure. The laboratories are in a constant state of technological evolution. Much of the research consists of inventing and developing the research tools, themselves. Everything tends to be shrouded behind patents. And even if you have access to the equipment, it’s so expensive, you need a mountain of venture capital to afford it.”
“I can see where being a vampire might not encourage investors,” I said.
“Indeed. But being a vampire isn’t the real problem. Seventy or eighty years ago, my research consisted mainly of concocting ingestible or injectable chemical compounds. My efforts may have been poorly understood and misguided, but they weren’t incommensurate with the scientific procedures of their day. But as biology progressed deeper and deeper into molecular-level mysteries, and as the various specialized disciplines branched and multiplied, it became more and more difficult for me to keep pace. My so-called research inevitably grew more and more fanciful. Eventually I had to accept the fact that I was a dilettante, at best, dabbling in something that was way beyond me.”
“But you’ve continued to dabble?”
“Yes, but that’s all it is. All it has been for quite a few years, now. Just a hobby.”
“So the people you were keeping at your house,” I asked, for some reason wanting to have it spelled out. “Their blood was for your hobby?”
Calvin only looked at me, as if the answer to my question was obvious enough not to require an actual response.
“And you haven’t made any progress?” I asked.
“Nothing substantial, I’m afraid. A few ideas that might be worth looking into. But I’ve gone as far as I can on my resources.”
“But you think a cure is still worth pursuing?”
“I really don’t know. I’m not convinced it isn’t.”
Calvin leaned his head back against the sofa cushion and closed his eyes. I was thinking about what he’d told me when it dawned on me why he was there. “Mio’s financial resources,” I said.
Calvin smiled and then opened his eyes. “Mio is preposterously wealthy, plus she owns a controlling interest in several companies that are already invested in biological and genetic research. She could easily incorporate my work into existing programs.”
"I don’t get it. Why not talk to Mio yourself?”
“I would have when we met at Tahoe. But she was too busy making sure I wasn’t going to bother you. So I dropped it. Then you showed up at my house in Pollock Pines and... well, put a bug in the program.”
Calvin said this as if the consequences of what had happened were of no real concern to him, but the girl’s escape had clearly been a potential problem.
“The truth is,” he continued, “I’m not worried about it. In fact, I’m half glad things turned out this way. I’ve been putting something off, something that requires my attention elsewhere. Your visit was just the little nudge I needed.” As Calvin said this, he took a CD jewel case out of his shirt pocket. “I’d like you to give this to Mio,” he said, laying it on the sofa cushion. “As I said, I’ve pretty much hit the limit of what I can accomplish on my own. The DVD is all my notes, everything that might possibly be useful, should Mio be interested in continuing my research.”
Calvin leaned back and closed his eyes again. The dissonance between the idea of Calvin that I had retained for so long, and the thoughtfully calm, half-whispered modulations of his voice was slightly unnerving. I looked at the disc in its jewel case, wondering how many hours of work, over how many decades, were encoded on that piece of plastic.
“If she is interested, do you want her to get in touch with you?”
“Not really. I’d prefer to be done with it,” he said, not opening his eyes.
“What if she finds a cure?”
“If that happens, I’ll hear about it, sooner or later.”
The contents of the disc represented years of work looking for something that had finally eluded Calvin. By giving the disc to Mio, was he hoping to salvage something? Or could he simply open his hand and let go of a piece of himself, like dropping a book that no longer held his interest? His reasons for visiting may have been more complicated than he was letti
ng on, but they may not have been. Either way, I found myself feeling there was something admirable in his actions; something larger in spirit than I had granted him a century ago in Sicily.
“I’ll give her the disc,” I said.
“Thank you. I’m glad that’s settled.”
“There’s something you might be able to settle for me, if you don’t mind.”
Calvin opened his eyes and waited.
“Miriam Moore,” I said.
Several seconds passed before his expression betrayed a hint of recognition. “The girl you were looking for?”
“Yes.”
“She was one of Yavorsky’s.”
“She’s dead, then?” I asked.
“About a year ago. What was she to you?”
“Just a piece in a puzzle. I didn’t know her.”
Calvin seemed to consider my words. “Is this something you often do?” he asked.
“Is what something I often do?”
“Meddle in the affairs of people?”
“When it serves my purposes. You do the same.”
“I know it’s none of my business. I’m just curious about how you get along in the world. From the looks of things—this house, for example, your relationship with Mio—you seem to be able to cope well enough. I’m impressed, to tell the truth. Very few vampires can pull it off.”
“You seem to do all right,” I said.
Calvin stood up and began pacing around the room. Several times he seemed about to say something, then changed his mind and continued pacing. This went on for a good ten minutes before he finally spoke again.
“Let me ask you a question, Shake. Why is it that you don’t associate with other vampires? And before you answer, let me say that we’re very similar in this regard. I may be even more reclusive than you are.”
The question wasn’t difficult. “I simply don’t like them,” I said. “The ones I’ve met, anyway. Their idiosyncrasies are too exaggerated. They’re repulsive as individuals and even worse in groups.”
Calvin nodded. “I feel pretty much the same way. I’ve often asked myself why congeniality or simple cooperation is so rare among us. There are exceptions, of course. You and Mio, for example. But the exceptions are just that. Exceptional. On the face of it, you wouldn’t think it would be any more difficult for vampires to get along than it is for people. But the fact is, we don’t.”