“You strike me as lucky enough,” he said, looking from me to Dora and back again. “And now, if you’ll excuse me ….” Off he went. Pretty soon, he’d startle somebody else at Deacon’s.

  “The magic of … no magic?” Dora said.

  “That’s about the size of it,” I agreed.

  Our drinks showed up then. The Deacon brought them himself, which didn’t happen every day. Taller than Tom Rivers and twice as wide, he plowed through the crush in the club like an icebreaker pushing floes aside. “I heard you were here,” he rumbled.

  “Not yet. I expect to get here pretty soon, though,” I answered.

  He eyed me as if wondering whether to break me in half. After a moment, he contented himself with saying, “You aren’t funny enough for me to put you up on stage.”

  “I guess not.” I raised my glass in salute and drank. He didn’t water the bourbon, anyhow. At his prices, he could afford not to.

  Dora drank, too. “Where do you get the blood for the Bloody Marys you serve to folk like me?” she asked the Deacon.

  Deacon Washington looked sheepish, an expression I’d never seen on his face before. “I know a man who makes dog food,” he said. “He sells me some.”

  “You may thank him for his hospitality,” she said. “And, of course, I thank you for yours.”

  “I appreciate that,” he said gravely. “Have you had any luck finding your half brother?”

  “No,” she said, and not another word.

  “I had the good luck to meet Elmer V. Jackson, though,” I said.

  Deacon Washington hoisted an eyebrow. Everything he did was theatrical. For him, life wasn’t to be lived; it was to be performed. That would wear me to a nub in nothing flat, but he couldn’t act any other way. “With good luck like that, who needs bad?” he said.

  “I’m going to steal that line,” I told him.

  “Fair enough. I did,” he said. “Was he trying to shake you down on account of the stuff Master Sebestyen was looking for?” He remembered not to name vepratoga. He might have overacted—or that’s how it seemed to me—but there were no flies on him.

  I made as if to clap my hands. “Right the first time!”

  “Do you know yet what it is? Do you know what it does?”

  I thought for a moment. Then I told him. Izzy Berkowitz hadn’t told me to keep it under my hat or anything. And stuff that acted the way the blood-bank doc said vepratoga did wasn’t likely to be up the Deacon’s alley. Benzedrine, now, he might use that so he didn’t miss anything.

  He listened gravely. When I got done, he asked Dora, “Why would your half brother want stuff like that?”

  “You would have to ask him to know for certain. At the moment, no one can do that,” she replied. “I will say, though, that he often felt the world was too much with him. He might have been looking for something that made it seem to press in on him less unbearably.”

  “An interesting thing for a vampire to feel,” the Deacon remarked. I didn’t know whether Dora heard the words behind the words. Deacon Washington was a black man. If he walked down the street, the world—or at least the LAPD—was liable to press in on him. And he was a queer black man who threw being queer in people’s faces instead of hiding it. When the world pressed in on him, he pushed right back.

  “We are all of us different, live people and vampires alike,” she said, so she did understand him, sure enough. “With us, I imagine you can blame our once having been live people ourselves.”

  “That might do it.” The Deacon wasn’t about to let anybody out-sangfroid him, even if vampires have a natural edge when it comes to cold blood.

  The lights dimmed, not that they’d been any too bright to begin with. Curtains whisked this way and that. A spot hit the stage. The house combo started playing. I didn’t need to look to know they’d found themselves a new piano player. Sure enough, a broad-shouldered black fella with a konked pompadour was tickling the ivories. He was good, too. He played boogie-woogie like nobody’s business.

  “What happened to Schmitt?” I asked.

  Washington shrugged a massive shrug. “I can’t tell you. He said he had some kind of trouble, but he didn’t say what.” His gaze sharpened. No, no flies on the Deacon. “Why do you even know who he is?”

  “Because I do,” I said. If he wanted to make something of it, he could. But he just shrugged again. I didn’t see Marianne Smalls, either. It might not have proved anything, of course. You can’t see far at Deacon’s any old time.

  Dora and I found hassocks to perch on and listened to the music for a while. Tom Rivers drifted through the crowd, doing magic that wasn’t sorcery. I could half track him by the startled squeaks that followed in his wake.

  When he came by us, he winked and said, “I’ve already annoyed you folks.” With a flourish of that topper, he went on to presti his digits at someone else.

  “He has a finely honed skill that is of no use whatever,” Dora said once he was out of earshot.

  If that’s not a metaphor for mankind in general, I don’t know what would be. But I said, “Don’t be too sure. I bet he’s the best pickpocket you never saw.”

  She started to say something, then stopped. When she resumed, what came out was, “I do admire your turn of phrase.”

  That made me feel so good, my cheeks got hot. All the same, I answered, “Another finely honed, useless skill.” I wasn’t wrong, either. Even in the movies, a wisecracking gumshoe gets killed in the second reel.

  After a while, the combo took a break. A girl wearing more than she’d been born in but not a whole lot more brought them drinks. The piano man’s tumbler was full of what had to be either straight scotch or straight bourbon. The way he tossed it back reminded me there were people who drank more than I did. It also probably told me why I didn’t know who he was when anybody who could play like that should’ve had a name from coast to coast.

  I whispered something in Dora’s ear. She nodded. We stood up and stretched and walked around. Somebody giggled when I bent down to peer into the first dark little nook we found. I backed away in a hurry. Everything was quiet at the next one, though. When we slipped into it, we had it to ourselves.

  What happened after that’s none of your damn business.

  Downtown is pretty quiet on Sunday. City Hall is closed, and the Federal building and the county offices, too. Most businesses also shut down for the Sabbath. They give the people who work in them a chance to rest, a chance to go to church, or a chance to listen to football or baseball on the radio.

  Of course, some places stay open. Bars, for instance. And Al Harris’s little bookstore. For one thing, since Al’s Jewish, his Sabbath is Saturday. For another, odds are he does half his business from good Christians who’re remembering their Sabbath and keeping it holy.

  The place smelled of tobacco smoke and of old paper getting older, the way it always does. A blond young man was glancing at a deathless piece of literature called Cruising Sailors. The book might have appealed to Deacon Washington. The young man might have, too, though the Deacon and Acolyte Adams have been a couple for years and years.

  You notice such things out of the corner of your eye, of course. I found a magazine to look at while I waited for a chance to talk to Al. It was educational, but I don’t expect it to show up at the library down the block from your house.

  Guys kept coming in and looking over Al’s stock, or whichever part of it interested them most. Sunday was the only free day a lot of them had, of course. Every so often, somebody would leave after getting an eyeful or would go up to the counter, buy something, and then leave. Al wasn’t going to get rich, but I didn’t think he and Margie and Skeeter would be out on the street any time soon, either.

  After a while, there was a lull. I made my way over to him. “How ya doin’?” he said. “See anything you like?”

  “One of the brunettes,” I answered honestly, and he laughed. I asked him, “How much do you look at what you sell?”

  “Not a whole lot,” he said. “I been doin’ this a while now, y’know. Ain’t like I never seen it before. Y’ask me, it’s like using a picture of a steak dinner to make somebody hungry. But nobody asked me.”

  Right after I got out of the service, I did something—never mind what—for a gynecologist. I asked him if he got tired of looking at pussy all the damn time. He rolled his eyes and went Do I ever! Of course, he’d already been divorced twice, and he was in hot water with number three. He wasn’t even forty, either. So don’t believe everything people tell you, which is a good rule most of the time.

  Al’s mind went somewhere else. “What’s with your neck? Looks like you got yourself shaving, only twice.”

  “Yeah, I’m practicing for when I finally cut my own throat,” I answered, straight-faced. He laughed some more. Because I didn’t make a fuss over it, he forgot about it. I did wish Dora wouldn’t do that every time we messed around, but she seemed to need to. Things I hadn’t known before I found myself with a vampire girlfriend …

  A guy who wanted to spend money came up with a magazine called Werewolf Women—Wild in Las Vegas. Not what floats my boat, but I wasn’t laying down a fin for it. “Plus another thirteen cents,” Al told him. “Sales tax.”

  The fellow rummaged in his pocket for change, then took off. “Sales tax,” I said.

  “I mind my P’s and Q’s,” Al said. “They’ve jugged me for what I sell a couple-three times, but I always beat the rap. Taxes, though, they get you for taxes and you’re screwed. They sent Scarface Al up the river for dodging taxes.”

  “You going to deduct what Elmer V. shook you down for?” I asked.

  “Him? He can go take a crap on the ocean, that one. I’d like to deduct him, not what he squeezed outa me. Lousy shmuck.” He lit a cigar.

  “He’s a piece of work, all right,” I agreed.

  “Jackson? He’s a piece o’ somethin’ else,” Al said.

  I couldn’t argue with that, either. “He sure is,” I said. “I’ve met him now, over the same stuff he was interested in with you.”

  “Oh, yeah? How much did he wanna steal from you?”

  “He didn’t get anything. He didn’t have enough on me to make that work. But he was in there swinging.”

  “He should alevai swing—by the neck. He won’t, though. Bastards like him never do. In a clean city, he wouldn’t get away with the dreck he pulls.”

  “A clean city? What kind funny foreign language you talk, Meester?” I put on a silly accent, the way comics used to. It worked for them then, and it worked for me now. I chuckled myself; it was chuckle or bang my head against the wall. Then I asked him, “You ever have vampires come in here?”

  “This time of year, every now and then. In the summer, the sun’s still up when I go home. I don’t think I ever saw that Sebestyen item you’re looking for, though. I just heard about him.” By the way his mouth twisted, he liked none of what he’d heard.

  I also didn’t like what I knew about Dora’s half brother. But that wasn’t quite where I was going. “What gets a vampire all excited?” I asked.

  Al Harris’s mouth twisted again, in a different way this time. “Whips. Switches like the one your old man used to smack you with when you were bad.”

  “My old man just used his belt,” I said.

  “Lucky you. But you’re younger’n I am. They don’t switch kids so much any more, huh? Anyway, that stuff, on account of the blood. Oh!” He looked to be reminding himself of something—something he wished he could go on forgetting. When he lowered his voice, he explained why: “And girls with their monthlies.”

  I said, “Oh,” myself, and then, “They print that kind of stuff?”

  “They print everything,” he said with great conviction. “You gotta be careful who you sell it to, though. Vampires, they’re pretty safe.”

  He didn’t bother hiding he’d gone to the hoosegow a few times. I knew he’d always got out fast, too. Now more than ever, I wondered how. Some of the things in there, you might make a case they were art. Not great art, but plenty of art that isn’t dirty also isn’t great. Still, how would you go about making a case for that?

  How? I wondered what Victor Howe would say. Probably something like, Pay me a stack of cash and I’ll see what I can do. There are times when lawyers make crooked cops seem honest.

  My face must’ve shown some of what I was thinking—one reason I didn’t come home rich from Army poker games. Al snorted. “Remember, you asked me.”

  “I know, but why did you have to go and tell me?” I answered. He thought that was the funniest thing I’d come out with yet. Then I asked him, “Where do you have … those? I’ve been in here enough to know they aren’t on your racks.”

  “What, you think I’m meshiggeh? They’re put away. You want ’em bad enough to ask for ’em, I’ll scratch your itch. Unless you smell like a Vice cop, I mean. I got a decent nose for them.”

  Him talking about decent after something like that? You never know. I wondered who made those magazines, and why. For money? You wouldn’t make much, off vampires or live people. Because it got them excited? Somebody could write a novel about that. Some strange fish crazy enough to want to, I mean.

  “Listen,” I said, “you hear anything about Sebestyen, pass it along to me. Anything about the other stuff, too. If it’s important enough for Jackson to be interested, it’s important.”

  “I’ll do it. And anything else I run across,” Al said. “You play straight. One o’ these days, you’ll pay me back some kinda way.”

  “Thanks.” I don’t always operate like that. I wish I did, but I don’t. I do try, though. Nice to see somebody notice once in a while.

  We said our goodbyes. I got out of there. Most of the time, I don’t think about walking out of Al’s emporium any more than I think about walking out of, say, Allums. Although lately I haven’t been sorry to escape the drugstore, either. Dirty pictures both ways.

  Dora and I lay in each other’s arms—all tangled up with each other, if you want to know the truth. We pretty much had to: the bed in my apartment unfolds from the sofa, and it’s narrow for one, let alone two. It was dark in there, darker than dark. I couldn’t see much of anything. She could, I’m sure—one more way vampires differ from live people.

  I wiggled my left hand till I could touch my neck. Had she got me again? I thought so, though saying I’d been distracted when it happened is putting things mildly. I tasted my fingertips. Yes, blood. Enough to notice, not enough to worry about.

  “Why do you do that?” I whispered. Our heads were no farther away from each other than any other parts.

  “Because I do,” she said, as if that were all the answer I deserved. For a second or two, I thought it was all the answer I’d get. But then she added, “Why do you do this?” She slid her smooth leg along mine so I’d know just what she meant by this.

  “Why? Because you’re fascinating. And because you’re beautiful.” I hadn’t known which of those I’d put first till I heard myself talk. I got it right, though. She was smart to begin with, and she’d got more experience (take that how you will) than any live person could.

  “I thank you,” she said, and I think she meant it, but she shook her head at the same time. “I thank you, yes, but it is not enough. Nothing that lasts can come of this. I will not bear your children.” She laughed; that was the kind of thing that struck a vampire funny. “I have not needed to concern myself over such things for many long years now.”

  How many long years? I didn’t know then. I don’t know now. I shrugged. “I wasn’t worrying about anything that lasts. I’m enjoying it now, that’s all.” I squeezed her to me, as if I were the strong one, not she. And I hoped I’d be able to enjoy it again in a little while.

  She let me pretend I could master her. She knew how live men worked, sure as hell. But she said, “Your now is so sadly short. It flickers like a guttering candle and, like a guttering candle, it is gone. How can you afford to waste time when you have so little of it?”

  If I looked at it straight on, that had no answer. Well, it had one: me looking down into my waiting grave and watching the wiggling worms the diggers had cut in half. You can’t do that for very long and keep your marbles.

  “We’ll last as long as we do, the two of us,” I said roughly. “I don’t know what to tell you. One of these days, they’ll figure out how to go to the moon or to Mars. Where live people go, vampires will, too. It may even be easier for you folk. Maybe you’ll look up at the Earth in the sky and remember me.”

  “That is very pretty,” she said. “What happens six months from now, though, when you meet a live woman you might want to spend some of your handful of years with? Will you tell her about your vampire lover? Will you tell her all about me? Will you tell her about this?” Her teeth touched my neck again. She didn’t draw blood this time, but I knew she could have.

  I stared, not that that did me any good. “Are you jealous?” I asked. In another tone of voice, it would have been disbelief. In another one yet, it would have fired a lovers’ quarrel. But I only wanted to know; I hadn’t imagined anything like that.

  Dora must have heard as much, because she answered seriously: “Of course I am jealous. The undead know pleasure, but not love. Never love. I remember love, from the days before I became what I am. I remember it, but as if it happened to someone else. In every way that matters, it did.”

  “Oh.” I paused. “Should I tell you I’m sorry?”

  “I know you are. I can smell it. I am not insulted or angry to know. We are different, though. We would both do well to remember it.”

  “Most of the time, sure. Not now,” I said. We started again. I didn’t know if I’d get where I wanted to go. I didn’t know if I’d get her where she wanted to go, either. There are ways to do that even if you don’t get there yourself. Some people call them perversions. The ones who don’t, though, they have happier lady friends.