They resumed hunting together, just as they had a century earlier, when Abe was a young man and Henry his mentor.
But that dynamic was gone. We were equals now. Partners, going on “errands” at the behest of our government.
If you needed to know what vampires were up to in Europe or Asia or South America, [Abe and I] were your best option. Our orders came from the War Department, sometimes directly from the White House. And they kept us busy. Between 1922 and 1929, we were dispatched to six continents. But all that changed after the crash.
In October of 1929, the stock market suffered a series of unprecedented losses, kicking off the Great Depression. It marked an end to the “sky’s the limit” economic optimism of the previous decade and left millions of Americans in financial ruin, rich and poor alike. Henry lost more than half his net worth in a single day (though he was still rich by any standard). Suddenly the government had its hands full trying to keep a sputtering economy from falling completely over the cliff’s edge. Keeping tabs on foreign vampires was no longer a priority.
After the crash, we mostly worked on American soil with [director of the FBI, J. Edgar] Hoover—investigating the Osage Indian murders,1 keeping the [Ku Klux] Klan in check, helping out with the Lindbergh kidnapping in ’32.2 [Hoover] didn’t like us much. He thought vampires were “disgusting, amoral creatures.” His exact words, and he said them to our faces. Imagine that, the director of the FBI, looking a former president in the eye and calling him “disgusting.” Tell you the truth, I think he was just embarrassed by how effective we were compared to his golden boys.
Perhaps their most notorious brush with American crime came in 1930, when Abe and Henry were sent to aid a young treasury agent named Eliot Ness.
Ness was surrounded by corruption. Everyone he trusted had turned out to be an incompetent or a fraud—or worse. He needed dependable men willing to go up against Al Capone and his private army, and those men were almost nonexistent in Chicago. Ness had written letter after letter to the Justice Department in Washington, explaining the scope of the problems he faced and begging for reinforcements. He didn’t need more cops; he needed soldiers. This was, after all, a war for the soul of a city, and the good guys were losing.
In 1930, his prayers were suddenly and mysteriously answered when two men arrived from D.C. to aid in his crusade. He didn’t quite know what to make of the pair at first. One was awkwardly tall and melancholy. The other was quiet, intense to the point that Ness thought his dark eyes might pop right out of his skull.
Abe and Henry had been crisscrossing the United States, taking on one public enemy after another, all the while searching for the only enemy who really mattered: Virginia Dare. The revelation that “A. Grander VIII” was actually Dare hadn’t made her any less elusive. After a decade of pursuit, Abe and Henry weren’t any closer to tracking her down.
We couldn’t exactly put out an all-points bulletin for a twentysomething redheaded woman. Not without putting innocent people in danger or arresting half the women in Western Europe. Or worse—without letting Virginia know that we were onto her. Nor could we rely on the Union for help.
The Union’s steady decline had continued in the early twentieth century. During the Civil War, it had boasted nearly five hundred members in America alone. Now the best estimates put the number at barely one hundred members worldwide—an 80 percent drop in just seventy years.
There were a number of reasons, I think. It was becoming harder to kill without recourse, for one. There were fewer nameless immigrants and transients. People had begun to carry identification cards. Police were using fingerprints to match murderers to victims. And where the wealthy had long enjoyed a sort of unspoken immunity from prosecution, the rise of the working class meant that no man was above the law or above suspicion. In other words, it was getting harder to be a vampire. The world was changing faster than ever before, and the relics were struggling to keep up.
When Abe and Henry arrived to reinforce Eliot Ness, Prohibition was dragging into its tenth year. Chicago was a city under siege, on the verge of breaking.
I didn’t care for [Ness] at first. His shoes were too clean, and he had no discernible sense of humor. People as brittle as Ness are what drive other men to drink in the first place. But he was relentless, determined. He was a Boy Scout, sure. But he was a man with a clear sense of justice and purpose. I remember asking him, not long after we got to Chicago, exactly what it was he wanted us to do. Kill Capone?
“No,” said Ness. “If we kill him, another man’ll just pop up in his place. We’re in the justice business, men—not the execution business. If we resort to killing in cold blood, well… then we’re no better than the men we’re fighting.”
Abe and Henry shared a look. Whatever you say, pal.
“So if you don’t want to kill them,” asked Henry, “what do you want to do?”
Ness thought a moment.
“I want to scare them,” he said.”
Ellington’s “Sweet Jazz o’ Mine” was playing as they walked in, brought to life by black musicians on a stage barely big enough for an upright piano and drum kit. A trumpet player rounded out the trio, the crisp notes of his horn splitting the smoke-filled air and rising above the din of drunken conversation.
Abe was wearing a long coat, his ax concealed beneath it, and a black fedora, the brim pulled low above his eyes. Henry also wore a hat, an expensive black suit, and a wide, short tie—the style of the day. Ness, as always, looked every bit the Boy Scout, with his cheap gray suit and naked head of close-cropped hair.
The room was packed to the gills with gangsters and their girlfriends. Music blaring. There were no uniformed cops with us, no other agents. Ness had insisted on keeping it quiet. He didn’t want any of Capone’s men getting tipped off.
Ness stepped onto the small, crowded stage and stood beside the bewildered musicians. Abe and Henry stood on either side of him.
Ness yelled something to the speakeasy crowd.
No one heard him over the band. I turned toward the musicians and held up a hand: stop. They did. Heads started to turn toward the stage, everybody wondering what happened to the music. In a low voice, I told [the musicians] it might be a good time to go have a smoke.
“This is a raid!” yelled Ness to the bewildered crowd. “You’re all under arr—”
Bullets started flying. I knew immediately that they came from a [Thompson submachine gun] because there were a lot of them, and none of them hit us. Somewhere a woman started screaming—a deep-throated and masculine affair that seemed entirely incongruous with her painted face and sequined party dress. The screaming stopped abruptly when the top of her skull was torn off by the tommy gun.
Abe pulled his ax from his coat and charged at the gunman, swinging his blade and cutting clean though the man’s rib cage and into his heart. Ness took cover behind the upright piano and started firing with his service revolver.
Henry dove behind the bar as a second machine gun opened up, then a third. He unsheathed his claws and crept beneath gin-soaked tables until he came to the nearest of the men shooting at him. With a brutal swipe, he relieved the man of both his kneecaps. And when the man bent over to investigate the sudden agony below his thighs, Henry relieved him of his face.
He grabbed the tommy gun from its previous owner, slapped in a new drum, and started firing.
It was exhilarating, I admit it. This wasn’t the old Springfield I’d used in [World War I]; this was a big, fat, flesh-ripping, kill-’em-all-and-let-God-sort-’em-out death sprayer. Even better than Tesla’s ray gun. I swung the barrel from side to side like I’d seen the screen actors do. Fifty rounds gone in a blink, and without another magazine I chucked the gun aside. I surveyed the room, expecting to see the bullet-riddled corpses of bad guys sprawled over tables and hanging from chandeliers.
I hadn’t hit a single person. Not even a bartender. I dove for cover again.
Ness stood up in Henry’s wake and began to fire. Abe leapt over the tables, wh
irling his ax and leaving a trail of blood and body parts behind him.
With his size, when Abe had his claws and fangs out, he looked like a lanky demon. Gangsters—thieves and professional murderers—pissed themselves as he approached.
A bodyguard with a tommy gun aimed his weapon at Henry and fired, screaming. Henry slid across the wooden floor, narrowly dodging bullets, and buried his claws in the man’s groin, severing the great saphenous vein, the longest in the human body. Blood burst forth like water from a ruptured main. He bled out in seconds.
As Henry drained Capone’s men of their blood, Abe drained the barrels that lined the walls of their contents. He split them open with his ax, Canadian whiskey pouring out in a brown froth.
In all, eight Capone associates died that day, and many more escaped to spread the word. These agents, whoever they were, had moved so quickly—so unnaturally—that the surviving gangsters thought they were fighting ghosts. As one gangster told Capone, “I’d take a swing at the guy’s face, only to see him halfway across the room by the time my fist came around. I couldn’t get a hand on him, and none of the other fellas could put any lead on ’em, either.”
The word was out. Eliot Ness had a private army of his own. And they weren’t just fast…
They were untouchable.
In 1937, after five years of painfully slow recovery, America was hit with a severe recession, erasing most of the gains in employment and stocks and plunging America back into the depths of economic ruin. And it wasn’t just money (or the lack thereof) making America miserable. Everywhere you turned in 1937, it seemed that something bad was happening: dustbowl conditions in the heartland. The mysterious disappearance of Amelia Earhart, aged thirty-nine, and the death of beloved composer George Gershwin, aged thirty-eight. For the first time in the nation’s history, natural-born American citizens were leaving and returning to the countries of their ancestors. In New York, Henry’s old friend Tesla—then eighty years old—was hit by a cab while crossing the street and nearly killed. He would never fully recover from his injuries.3
It was almost supernatural how bad things were. As if there was a curse on America. It might sound crazy, but that’s how it felt at the time. The country couldn’t catch a break.
But as bad as things were at home, they were even worse overseas. Spain was in the midst of a bloody civil war. The Gestapo was arresting political enemies in Germany. Mussolini had Italy in his fascist grasp. England had signed a treaty with Germany allowing an expansion of the German navy (a decision it would deeply regret). War had broken out between China and Japan, with Japanese soldiers slaughtering three hundred thousand Chinese soldiers, women, and children in a six-week period that would be known as the Rape of Nanking. Whether in America or abroad, it seemed a shroud of darkness had encircled the earth.
If it had been left to Abe, they would have meted out bloody justice with the same year-round, rain-or-shine regularity of the postal service, but at Henry’s insistence they occasionally took a break.
I told him that we had to see more of the country, see the people, to help us remember why it was worth saving. He’d mumble something about not needing a reminder, but he’d usually give in. Murder—even righteous murder—is exhausting work.
It was on one of these brief interludes that they found themselves on the way to South Dakota, to see firsthand the nearly finished head of Abraham Lincoln on Mount Rushmore.
Personally I thought it was hilarious, but Abe was dead set against it. Just as he hadn’t wanted to go to the dedication of the memorial in ’22, or the rededication of the tomb in ’31, he wasn’t interested in seeing himself in stone. It struck him as vain and a little perverse to—as he called it—“attend your own funerals.”
He could be a bit of a downer, truth be told. He still had that melancholy streak. And on top of that, he’d become paranoid about being recognized, especially after they’d slapped his face on the five [dollar bill] in 1914. I told him, “Calm down. First of all, even if someone thought you looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln, why on earth would they think you were the Abraham Lincoln? Second of all, you look about twenty years younger than the man in those portraits. Different hair, no beard, new glasses…”
During their stopover in Minneapolis, Abe happened to glance at an item buried deep in the pages of the Minneapolis Star.
A teenage boy had been lynched in a small town a couple of hours outside the city. A black boy who’d forced himself on a sixteen-year-old white girl down the road. Of course, no suspects were named. No witnesses had come forward. It all happened in the dark, you see. Such a shame. But of course, the boy shouldn’t have done what he did. Neighbors described him as “simple,” or “slow.” A “gentle soul” who’d never done anything like this before. “What a shame, what a shame, but then it just goes to show you they can’t be trusted,” and so on.
Abe and Henry decided to extend their stay. They made their way to the town4 in question, purporting to be derrick workers on their way south after working a season in Canada. Just a couple of able-bodied white men looking for an honest wage.
We’d become pretty adept at investigating these sorts of things. There were two general rules: one, ask as few questions as possible. These were tight-knit communities. They were inclined to be distrustful of outsiders, and if they got a whiff of suspicion, that was it. You were done. Two, you had to be willing to spend the time. If you waited around long enough and people got the sense that you were “all right,” someone usually slipped up sooner or later.
While lynching was more prevalent in the Jim Crow South, it was present all over America, even as late as 1937, and even as far north as Minnesota.
There are dozens of pictures—you’ve probably seen some of them; everyone should see them: black bodies hanging from trees, from telegraph poles, bridges. Broken necks. Blood running from their noses. And in almost every one of these pictures, you’ll see a group of white faces staring back at the camera defiantly. Faces smiling, pointing, even laughing at the dangling bodies. And you realize, This is their keepsake of the moment. This is their community, coming together to right a wrong—no judge, no jury, no consequences. Just some townsfolk and a rope. They don’t see anything wrong with it. They’re proud of it. The majority of their victims were young black men, some of them tortured before they were hanged. Some with fingers, limbs, genitals, missing. Almost all were savagely beaten before their deaths. In one picture, no less than ten young black men—some of them just boys—are hanging from the same tree. What their alleged crimes were, I had no idea. It didn’t matter to their murderers, and it didn’t matter to me.
Abe and Henry found lodging at a boardinghouse and spent the next two weeks minding their own business. They found work—hauling scrap away from a demolished mill (they didn’t need the money, but it was important that they keep up appearances—people were undoubtedly watching). They went to church on Sunday and pushed food around their plates at the local dinette. They kept to themselves.
It’s amazing what people will tell you when you shut up and let them talk. We hadn’t been there two weeks when one of the waitresses at the dinette asked us if we’d heard about “the incident.” It was still big news in town, in the sense that nobody wanted to be caught dead talking about it but it was all anyone wanted to talk about. She told us the name of the so-called white “victim,” which they hadn’t published in the newspaper. She told us the names of a few of the men who “done justice to the boy.” I mean, it was incredible. She didn’t know us from the next guys, and here she is giving up half the people in town, thinking we’re just going to nod and forget about it.
“Boy should’a known not to mess around like that,” she said. “He lived here his whole life. He knows what kind’a men we got around here. What kind’a groups.”
Abe and I pieced it together pretty quickly: a teenage white girl stumbles in the front door after curfew with liquor on her breath and dried semen down the front of her dress. Her mother cries. H
er daddy pulls off his belt and threatens to beat her senseless, so the girl does the only thing she can. She cries rape and tells her daddy that it was the black boy who lives down the road, only she doesn’t use the word “black.” He’d forced her to get drunk, she tells him. And then he forced himself on her, honest, Daddy. May God strike her down, Daddy. And so what’s Daddy do? He has to believe her. He has to, or his little girl—his little angel—is nothing but a whore. He calls the sheriff, whom he’s known since the two of them were kids. “Come on out to the house,” he says. “Bring some of the boys with you, and leave your badge at home.”
Meanwhile the black boy’s asleep in his bed, unaware that any of this is going on. Unaware that a dozen angry Klansmen are on their way over. They barge in, tie his hands behind his back, and drag him off while his mother and sisters scream. They throw him in a car, caravan out into the woods. They beat him, make him a noose, and string him up, yelling every epithet you can imagine. Cheering as he thrashes like a fish on a hook. Cheering when the front of his trousers darkens as he pisses himself. And when he finally dies, they cut him down, douse him with kerosene, and burn him down to bone and ash, just to make sure there’s nothing left of him for his mother to bury.
The boy never knew why, you see. Why he was dragged from his bed. Why those men were so cross with him. He’d gone to his death confused, and that, more than anything, was what got under my skin. Every time an innocent is murdered, it’s a tragedy. But when it’s a child or someone of feeble mind, as this boy was—someone who doesn’t understand—my fists ball up and my teeth clench at the thought of that fear. That confusion. That look a dog gives its owner after it’s been kicked. What did I do? I don’t understand.
The Last American Vampire Page 28