They stopped in front of me. If Carlotta’d sold me out, I was in deeper than I wanted. But the person who’d made them knocked on the door across the hall. Shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits: a soft, familiar knock, the kind you’d make if you’d been there lots of times and the person inside expected you again.

  The door opened. “Sweetheart!” a man said. I’d never heard Jonas Schmitt before, but who else was this likely to be?

  “Hello, darling.” Marianne Smalls sounded educated, the same way the husband she was discarding did. There were other noises that weren’t words. Then Marianne giggled and said, “For heaven’s sake, shut the door before you start with that!”

  “Can’t keep my hands off you, baby,” the guy answered. She giggled again. The door closed. I wouldn’t have to break it down with my shoulder, anyway. I hadn’t been looking forward to that. Now I’d have a straight run to the bedroom door, as long as I didn’t trip over the coffee table or the piano bench and fall on my stupid face.

  Next question was, how long should I wait before I went in? I knew how long I’d planned to. Now I revised that down. They hadn’t seemed as if they’d take real long to start doing what came naturally.

  “Crap,” I muttered, there where nobody could hear me. I still hated what I was going to do, and I still knew I was going to do it anyway. Part of the business, I thought, the way I had when Lamont Smalls told me the photos I’d got weren’t juicy enough for him. It hadn’t made me feel much better then. It didn’t now, either.

  I had the key. I had the cameras loaded up and ready to go. I waited till I reckoned the time was ripe. Then I shoved the closet door open. It didn’t have a knob inside, only a flange that pushed against the jamb and held it closed. That made a faint click when I shoved, but I didn’t think Schmitt and Marianne would notice. They’d damn well better not.

  Into the keyhole went the key. I did it as cautiously as I could. He might not be as gentle unlocking her. Another small click and I was inside.

  They’d left a lamp on in the living room. That made things easier. I hotfooted it toward the dark bedroom.

  “Somebody’s in here!” Marianne Smalls exclaimed, just as I got to the door. I fired off the first flashbulb.

  Marianne and Schmitt both screamed. The blaze of light showed me I’d have what I needed. It’d also leave them with green and purple smears that wouldn’t let them see what they were doing for a few seconds. In case the first photo didn’t turn out, I took the second one. Marianne screamed again. I ran like hell. Schmitt wasn’t wearing enough clothes to chase me.

  Implacable as Cerberus, Carlotta Parrott barred the way out. But I had the sorcery I needed to defeat her. The key and a Grant turned the trick just fine. She stood aside. I trotted off towards Angel’s Flight.

  I gave the angel a quarter, the way I had the last time I played shutterbug. I’d been exhilarated then. Now, it felt more as if I were expiating a sin. I thought I saw—imagined I saw—reproach in his eyes as he took hold of me and spread his great wings. All the time we were in the air, I kept thinking he’d drop me … and that I’d have it coming.

  But he didn’t. He never does. He’s flown murderers and kidnappers and rapists up and down. Judging people isn’t his job—and a good thing, too, says I. Most of the time, people need mercy way more than they need justice.

  He looked at me again when he set me on the sidewalk. I didn’t have to meet his eyes, and I didn’t. A man and woman stepped forward together and gave him a penny apiece. He took them in his arms. The downdraft from his wings staggered me. I straightened up and headed for the Red Line stop at the corner of Third and Broadway.

  When I got back to the office, Old Man Mose was curled up on the sofa. “You again,” he said.

  “Yeah, me again. I just brought in enough loot to keep you in cat food a while longer.”

  His yawn showed off needle teeth. “That’s important! You should be happy!” Mose’s world centers on Mose, nowhere else. Yours is bound to center on you, too. I hope you’re less blatant about it than he is.

  The desk chair creaked when I sat down in it. I yanked a drawer open and pulled out the latest fifth of Wild Turkey. I didn’t bother with a glass. I just swigged, trying to get the taste of what I’d done out of my mouth.

  “You don’t pour that smelly stuff down like this when you’re happy,” Old Man Mose said suspiciously.

  “How about that?” I said, and drank some more.

  ​IX

  Allums was still open by the time I got back to the neighborhood, but Terence would have gone home hours earlier. So I didn’t take in my film till the next morning. Late the next morning, in fact, because I woke up feeling as happy as a vampire five minutes before sunrise. Aspirins, coffee, and menudo helped, but I still wasn’t at my best when I walked into the drugstore.

  “Hey, ace. Waddaya know for sure?” Terence said as I came back to the photography counter.

  “I know there’s something extra in it for you with these. I know you’d better not let anybody else get a look at the prints or the negatives. I know you’d better make like you never saw ’em, too.” Unless I’d messed up, Al Harris could have sold these photos—especially the first one—from under the counter at his place.

  “Like that, huh?”

  “ ’Fraid so. All part of the job.” I kept saying that to myself, and to anyone else who would listen. Myself kept not believing me. I hoped Terence would.

  He pursed his lips. “How many exposures are there? When will you want ’em by?”

  Exposures was the word, all right. “Just two. How soon can you do them?”

  “If I start now, I can give ’em to you after lunch. Two o’clock okay? I’m guessing these have something to do with the last set you gave me?”

  “Don’t guess. You never saw nothin’, remember? But you’re a lifesaver.” I reached over the glass case that separated us to punch him on the shoulder.

  More aspirins, more java, and more time left me amazingly lifelike when the afternoon rolled around. Terence greeted me with, “You weren’t kidding, man. I oughta give you these in a plain brown wrapper, not one of our envelopes.”

  “Did they both turn out?” I asked. He nodded. I handed him five bucks over the change they cost.

  He tried to give the fin back. “Too much!”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m playing with house money.” You’d best believe I was going to put that five on my expenses report for Lamont Smalls. If the photos were what Terence said they were, they’d make the editor happy—and make him unhappy a different way. They’d save him a pile of money, but who’d want to see his wife doing that with a man who wasn’t him?

  Back to the office I went. I didn’t look till then. Somebody might’ve seen me if I had. Nobody’s supposed to see you when you look at pictures like that. And Smalls, I found, wouldn’t have anything to grouse about this time.

  Forty-five minutes later, he walked into the office. I gave him the photographs: again, not in an envelope that showed where they’d been developed—Terence’s plain brown wrapper would have been fine. He stared at them for a long time, first one, then the other. I watched him bite down on the inside of his lower lip, trying not to let out what he was feeling.

  He couldn’t do it. “That goddamn needle-dicked ofay son of a bitch!”

  He wasn’t quite fair to Jonas Schmitt, who hadn’t been caught at his best. I didn’t say so. I also didn’t tell him it wasn’t what you had but what you did with it. He wouldn’t have been in a mood to listen. I did say, “These are what you were after?”—the kind of question that means, If they are, pay me the rest of what you owe me.

  “What?” Smalls needed a few seconds to come back to the here-and-now from whatever dark place the photos had taken him to. Who could blame him for that? Then he nodded—jerkily, but he did. “Oh, yes, Mister Mitchell. These are exactly what I was looking for.” He took out his wallet and gave me my balance. No fuss, no muss, no bother, not about that. I wish it were always so easy. “Have you written up your expenses yet?” he asked. Yeah, he was working hard to stay professional.

  “Not yet. Sorry,” I said. “Shall I mail them to you?”

  “Do you have an idea of what they’ll come to?”

  “Nothing real big. Twenty-five or thirty bucks.”

  He nodded again, more smoothly this time. “That seems reasonable.” He laid one more twenty and a ten on my desk. Then he left. Every line of his body said he hoped he never laid eyes on me again as long as he lived.

  One more time, who could blame him? I just hoped he wouldn’t go out and kill his unloving wife or her white lover or himself. When somebody who holds stuff in breaks, he’s liable to break all the way.

  I wasn’t doing anything he didn’t want me to do. I wasn’t doing anything he hadn’t paid me to do. I wasn’t doing anything I didn’t wish like hell I weren’t doing. Whatever Lamont Smalls did on account of what I’d done, it wouldn’t be my fault.

  I said that to myself several times, too. Myself didn’t believe me any more than he had before.

  After I put the expenses money in with the rest, my wallet felt nice and fat and sleek. I wasn’t used to a wallet that felt like that. I could pay some more bills, keep climbing out of the hole I’d dug for myself. One of these days, I might not owe anybody anything. Not so long ago, I would’ve told myself I was nuts to imagine such a thing. Myself would have believed me then, by God!

  It got dark early. Daylight Savings Time had ended the Sunday before, so it got dark even earlier than it would have otherwise. It couldn’t have been much past five when somebody knocked on the door.

  “Come on in. It’s not locked,” I said.

  It wouldn’t have mattered if the door had been locked, or it might not have, anyway. Dora Urban did open it, though we both knew she didn’t have to. “Good evening,” she said, sounding not a bit like the fellow in the movie vampires love so much.

  “Hi.” I can’t say Good evening without sounding pompous, so I don’t. I smiled, though. I was glad to see her.

  She was all business. “Do you have anything new to tell me about what may have happened to my half brother?”

  “Not much,” I answered, but then I caught myself. “Or maybe I do.” I told her about the sorcerous dragnet trawling for the word vepratoga, and about how the cops were shaking down people who used it—or sometimes people who happened to be where somebody else had just used it. I did all my explaining without once using the word myself.

  She listened intently. Not many things more flattering than an attractive woman hanging on your every word. When I finished, she said, “But you may have made a mistake by calling that lawyer a second time. If he talks with the police, he can cause you trouble you do not want.”

  Dora wasn’t only an attractive woman. She was a damn smart attractive woman. That would’ve been plenty to scare off a lot of men even if she weren’t a vampire. A lot of high-powered women hide their brains so they don’t alarm the so-called stronger sex. I liked her better because she didn’t waste time on those games.

  “That crossed my mind about ten seconds after I hung up,” I said ruefully. “Too late is too late, though. And it really crossed my mind when the cops pulled up and hauled that poor woman out of the phone booth. I hope they finally realized she didn’t do anything.” After a moment, I added, “I hope they care.”

  “She was a Negro, this woman?” Dora asked.

  “Sure she was. They wouldn’t have treated her like that if she were white.” Was I bitter or simply stating the obvious? Is there a difference?

  Her nod was somber. “Before I crossed the ocean, I saw only a handful of Negroes. No one over there hated them—they were too few to hate. People over there hated Jews instead. They treated them the way Americans treat Negroes. People always need someone to hate. Who the someone is will change. How they treat the someone is always the same.”

  “What do vampires do about it?” I asked.

  She didn’t misunderstand what I meant. Her eyes flashed, the way a cat’s will when light hits them right. Human eyes don’t do that, but then she wasn’t exactly human herself. “We hate the living, of course. You always hate what you depend on. But we cannot do to them what the police did to that woman or the fylfot followers did to the Jews they could catch. There are not enough of us.”

  “You’ve got that right,” I said. Jews in Europe and Negroes right here at home can hate their oppressors till everything turns blue, but they’ll never be able to take revenge. There aren’t enough of them.

  Do Jews hate themselves because so many outsiders do? Wouldn’t surprise me at all. Some Negroes sure do. In different ways, Lamont Smalls and Marianne both might’ve had a dose of that.

  With all those cheerful thoughts in my head, I felt like killing the latest bottle of Wild Turkey. It wasn’t as if I had no reasons to hate myself, either.

  And Dora picked that precise moment to ask me, “The thing you did not want to do, did you do it?”

  My arm started to go to the drawer pull where the bourbon lived. I had to yank it back. I lit a cigarette instead. That’s poison, too—they don’t call ’em coffin nails for nothing—but it’s slow poison. “Yeah, I did,” I said, staring down at the worn, ink-stained green blotter on my desk. “I got paid for it, too. I’m closer to not being broke than I have been since before the war.”

  “This does not make you happy.” It could have been a question. It wasn’t, not the way she said it.

  “Too damn right it doesn’t. I did it anyway, and I got the money.”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute or two. Then, slowly, she did: “You may, in a very small way, begin to understand what vampires feel, looking back on the moment that made them what they are. I would not say this to many of the living, but I think it is so with you.”

  “What … do you do about that?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Nothing is to be done. It is forever there, till the moment of finishing.” She shrugged.

  I wanted to ask her how she lived with that. But she didn’t, or not exactly. Instead, I recited, “ ‘Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.’ ”

  “Just so. Just so, Jack.” I think that was the first time she ever used my first—my Christian, if you’ll forgive me—name. She went on, “For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, he is a wise man, Eliot.” Her nose wrinkled. It made her look like a kid, no matter how many years she carried. She’d done that before, dammit. She knew it, too. “That horrible film! I hate it, and I cannot escape it.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. So did she. Whatever was funny could only be superficial to her. I understood that, in my head if not in my gut. But even superficial relief might help a little. And, speaking of superficial relief, I hauled out the Wild Turkey after all, now without oblivion on my mind.

  “Want some with me?” I asked. “I remember you had those Bloody Marys at Deacon’s.”

  “Yes, give me some, please,” she said. “It does not do for me what it does for the living, but I will drink it anyhow.”

  I had to rummage around for glasses. Most of the time, I don’t bother with one. I just drink straight from the bottle. I didn’t tell her that. The bourbon’d kill germs, and vampires probably don’t need to worry about them anyway. Damned if I didn’t find a couple of cocktail glasses, too, in a file cabinet top drawer. They’d been there so long, I’d forgotten about ’em. I poured for her and for me.

  Instead of going back behind my desk, I parked on the couch beside her. Raising my glass, I asked her, “What shall we drink to?”

  “To learning the truth about my half brother,” she said.

  We clinked. We drank. I could see why she made that toast, but it wasn’t what I’d hoped for. Well, she had her … not her own life to live, but her existence to continue. To her, I was nothing but a buzzing bug.

  And what do bugs do when they’re buzzing? They find a mate, and then pretty soon they die. Here I was, next to this gorgeous dame who seemed to like me well enough. If I made a pass at her, I might find as much heaven on earth as people are ever likely to. Or, if she happened not to care for it, I’d discover what going in the other direction was all about. I wasn’t the big strong man here. If I wasn’t welcome, I’d find out about it.

  As experimentally as I ever had since I started shaving, I put an arm around her. Then I waited to see if the sky would fall. Sounding dryly amused, she said, “I know what is on your mind.”

  “Do you?” I said.

  “Of course I do. For one thing, I would have to be an idiot not to. For another, even if I were an idiot, your odor would tell me.”

  “Oh. Sure.” I’d used my Mitchum that morning. If I wrote to the company to complain, what would they tell me? That it wasn’t made for situations like this. They’d be right, too. So I said, “And?”

  “We can see what happens,” she answered. “You have the sense to ask, not to try to take. And—” She said a few words that weren’t English. Before I could ask what they meant, she leaned toward me, and I quit worrying about it.

  First times are always strange. You don’t know just what your partner wants or likes. With Dora, there was an added strangeness. She was warmer than room temperature, but she wasn’t people-warm. It put me off a bit the first few times I touched her, no matter how perfectly shaped she was. Then I quit worrying about that, too. She might be chilly, but she sure didn’t act cold.

  She did act as if I were the big strong man. Maybe she thought I needed that, and maybe she was right. Or maybe it sprang from what vampires use for a sense of humor. But if she was laughing at me, she had the manners not to let on.