Dora recognized it, too. “That is not good. That cannot be good. Those people, they do not come out for nothing.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” I said. We both started putting on clothes. The emergency wizards, we wanted to see why they’d shown up. She could’ve turned bat and flown to find out, but she stayed with me instead. I’ve had smaller compliments.

  I grabbed my umbrella. She didn’t have one; she huddled close to me, which was nice. After we’d gone half a block, I realized she and her dress hadn’t been wet when she came in. I wondered again whether she’d flown from my apartment building to the office. If she hadn’t, she really had dodged all the raindrops.

  My apartment building …. A pillar of smoke rose into the dark gray sky, lit from below by what must have been one hell of a blaze. The direction was about right. So was the distance. Something in my midsection clenched, as if trying to make a kick in the belly hurt less. I went into a half trot.

  Dora kept up without breathing hard. Well, of course she did. I knew she didn’t show up in a mirror. I didn’t think she’d fog one, either.

  “That is not natural fire,” she said.

  “You’re reading my mind again.” I hurried on for a few more steps. Then I said the thing I didn’t want to say: “I think it’s a salamander.”

  She didn’t try to tell me I was wrong, no matter how much I wished she would. I’d run into salamanders in Italy a couple of times—at a good distance, or I wouldn’t be here now to spin this yarn. The fylfot boys did everything they knew how to do to hold us back, but even wizards with the Lightning Runes on their collar tabs didn’t mess with fire elementals unless they were desperate. They remembered Do not call up that which you cannot put down almost till the very end. By that time, some of them didn’t care any more.

  So I recognized the color lighting up the smoke column, too. Red. Redder than red. Red beyond red. Red so red, you shouldn’t be able to see it at all. A lot of filthy things happen in Los Angeles. More of them happen to you if you aren’t as rich or as white as you ought to be.

  But nobody deserves salamandering. Nobody. Yes, I know what happened to the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, I know it made the Knights of Bushido say uncle at last. Even so.

  And I remembered that the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn’t been white, either.

  This one wouldn’t be anywhere near so big as those city-roasters, of course. One more time, though, even so …

  “How much do your clever thaumaturges know about quieting a salamander once it begins to burn?” Dora asked. By then, we were only a block and a half from the blaze. I smelled smoke through the rain.

  “Army wizards always said the best thing you could do was stay away. If you couldn’t stay away, water wouldn’t help. Sand and prayer might do a little something. Not much, but a little.”

  “That was also my understanding. I wondered if they knew more now.”

  “If they do, they never told me. I know the ones we used against the Knights of Bushido are still burning. You want hell on earth, there you are.”

  We rounded the last corner. We couldn’t go any farther after that. Jumpy cops, harried-looking firemen, shell-shocked wizards, reporters, people in soggy pajamas who seemed amazed to be alive, I don’t know what all.

  Yes, my building had got the salamander. Three or four other apartment houses around it were burning, too, but they’d caught fire from mine. I could see the salamander blazing in midair. Even a block away, even through the steady rain, the heat that came off it made me shield my face with my free hand.

  They tried spraying the salamander with a stream from a fire hose. I could have told ’em it wouldn’t work. Somebody probably had. They tried anyway. They added steam to the smoke. That was all.

  Something about where the fire elemental hung caught my eye. “You know,” I said, “that’s about where my apartment would be. If the building were still there, I mean.” Which it wasn’t. The nearby ones were still on fire. Nothing much was left of mine. As best I could make out, nothing at all was left of my apartment.

  Nothing at all would’ve been left of me, either, if I’d been in there when the salamander started incinerating things. I would’ve been, too, if Dora hadn’t come by and given me something more interesting to do than going home. My knees didn’t want to hold me up for a few seconds. You come that close to getting killed, you feel it all the way down.

  She gave me the time to pull myself together. Not many live people would have thought to do that. Then she said, “You are right. I noticed it, too, and wondered whether you did. Who wants you dead?”

  Who wants you dead? That is the question, and to hell with To be or not to be? The list was longer than I wished it would have been. “I can think of a few people,” I managed.

  The salamander went on blazing as if it had not a care in the world. I’m sure it didn’t. It was doing what it wanted to do, doing what salamanders did. And it was doing it twenty-five or thirty feet up in the air. Sand does bother salamanders some—not much, but some. But the cops and firemen would have needed a young mountain of it to make this one notice.

  Prayer? In my part of town, you’ve got storefront churches and storefront preachers on every block. The police might not have understood—the LAPD doesn’t understand one hell of a lot about the Negro Belt—but the Emergency Thaumaturgical Response Team did. A disheveled-looking fellow in a bathrobe did his damnedest to pray the salamander down to the infernal regions. An ETRT man held an umbrella over his head to keep off the rain. He didn’t look to be having much luck.

  Then I stopped caring about him, because Dora said, “Your home is gone. What will you do now?”

  I banged into that one head-on. It hadn’t crossed my mind till then. It wasn’t as if I kept a lot of stuff in the apartment. I didn’t have a lot of stuff to keep. I’d miss some books. I’d miss my clothes. But getting burned out mattered less to me than it would have to most people.

  “I’ll live in the office for a while, I guess,” I said. “I’ve got some clothes there, and I can buy some more. Buy a hot plate, too, so I can cook a little. That’s cheaper than eating out all the time.”

  “If this were an ordinary fire, I would say yes, do that,” she replied. “But if you stay in another known place all the time, how long until the next salamander tries to make your acquaintance?”

  “Urk.” I hadn’t thought about that, either, but she wasn’t wrong. The more I stayed away from the office, in fact, the better off I was liable to be. But find another apartment? Comedians’ve been joking about the housing shortage since right after the war, but it still ain’t funny, McGee. I’d been lucky to land one place. Getting another would take something more like a miracle. I spelled that out for her.

  “A point,” she said when I finished. She thought for a moment. “I would not say this to many, but to you I will. You may stay with me for a time, until you sort out your own troubles.”

  And that’s how I spent a while living in Vampire Village.

  ​XIII

  I missed my books less than I thought I would. Dora’s place was full of them, in English, Magyar, French, German, Russian, Latin (I may be missing a language or two). Books? Yes. A refrigerator? No. When someone like her wanted a snack, she wanted it warm. No stove, either, for the same kind of reason. I bought a hot plate after all.

  Only in VV are you likely to find a coffin in the living room. Existing room? Undead room? What do you call it when a vampire’s in the apartment? The coffin was carefully placed and screened so no sunlight could fall on it. If I was in there, too, though, how much did that matter?

  “You see? I make myself vulnerable to you. You can betray me,” she said as we lay in bed a couple of days after my place went up in fire. Yes, she had a bed along with the coffin. Who’d been in it with her before she knew me … I told myself that was none of my business.

  “If you don’t trust me, throw me out,” I answered. “You know I’ll get along some kind of way.”

  “If I did not trust you, you would not be here,” she said. “But it makes me anxious even so. I can do nothing about what happens in the brightness. My kind have many tales of those who were finished because they put their faith in live people. They are not all tales, either. It happened to someone I once knew.”

  “Oh.” I gave her a little squeeze. “This must be love, then.”

  She made a noise that couldn’t have come from a live person’s throat. “You keep saying that word. You keep not believing it has no meaning for those like me. What is love, anyhow?” I’d thought of Pontius Pilate when I was talking with Dr. Berkowitz. Now I did again.

  Pilate, of course, didn’t stay for an answer. I gave Dora one. It wasn’t mine, but the fellow who came up with it had his head on pretty straight: “Love is when you care more about someone else’s happiness than about your own.”

  I slowed her up. I made her think. After half a minute or so, she said, “I do not believe we are capable of that.”

  “No? Then why are you trying to find out what happened to Rudolf Sebestyen?”

  This time, she hesitated not a bit. “That has nothing to do with love. That is only an obligation. And we are not happy. We have satisfactions. We have sensual pleasures. When the sun is down, all our senses work. But happiness is for the living, who know no better.”

  So there, I thought. She wasn’t about to admit anything that gave my teasing legs. But was she right not to, or was she only stubborn and proud?

  I didn’t know then. I still don’t.

  By that time, stories in the Times, the Herald-Express, the Examiner, and the Mirror had all said I was missing. Not presumed dead, but missing. When I bought some razor blades at Allums, Terence waved to me and called, “Good to see you got found, buddy.”

  “Who, me?” I looked around behind myself, as if I thought he was talking to somebody else. He laughed.

  If I stayed missing for other people, it was because they didn’t look for me very hard, no different reason. That didn’t break my heart. If they presumed I was already dead, they wouldn’t try to kill me again. Or they might not.

  When I went back to the office, Old Man Mose curled that thing cats have instead of a real upper lip. “You stink like a bloodsucker,” he told me.

  “Get used to it,” I answered. “Otherwise I’d stink like a charcoal briquette. And who’d keep you in cat food then?”

  “I’d manage,” he said loftily. He sounded the way I did when I told Dora I’d get by if she threw me out. I’d do it somehow. Mose would, too.

  I called Hilda to see if there were any messages for me. “You have one,” she said. “It’s Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson. When I told him you weren’t in, he asked you to call him back.” She gave me the phone number.

  After I’d dialed the two letters and one number after them, I hung up instead of finishing. What better way for Jackson to find out I’d lived through the salamandering than for me to show him myself? I didn’t know the cops had had anything to do with that, you understand, but they sure could have.

  Of course, so could US Rubber. Or their law firm—anybody who figures lawyers don’t know how to play dirty never dealt with any. Or the vampire dealer down by the factory. Or any of the other dealers I’d visited. Or all of them at once, working in cahoots.

  A few seconds after I hung up the phone, I looked at it again. By my own logic, I shouldn’t answer it at all if it rang. Which was fine in a way: if I didn’t answer it, nobody would hear my voice and realize I hadn’t got incinerated after all. How much work would I be throwing away if I didn’t answer, though?

  More than I could afford to. I was sure of that. I wasn’t out of the woods when it came to dough, only better off than I had been. If I hadn’t paid off people I owed, I’d have more myself. But I had, so I didn’t.

  Somebody chose that moment to knock on the door. I sat there, trying to decide what to do. Before I could, Old Man Mose called, “Come in. It’s not locked.” Then he disappeared under the sofa so he wouldn’t be the one who got hurt in case he’d made a mistake. Yeah, he was a cat.

  Turned out he hadn’t goofed. The door opened, and in came Clarice Jethroe. She smiled from ear to ear when she saw me, which is not anything a lot of people do. “Oh, Mister Mitchell, I’m so glad you’re all right!” she said. “I saw in the papers you were missin’ on account of the fire.”

  “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” I answered gravely. As with the line about love, I wasn’t smart enough to have said it first, but I sure was smart enough to steal it once I heard it.

  It went to waste, because she kept on with what she’d been about to say anyhow: “I’ve been comin’ in every day, hopin’ I’d find you—I got the money you said you needed from me.” She took an envelope out of her purse and set it on the desk. It had my name on it. “The whole hundred’s there. You can look.”

  “I believe you, Missus Jethroe. And thank you very much. Most people wouldn’t have bothered,” I said. If I didn’t need the cash myself, I would’ve told her to keep it. She made me want to cry.

  And then she drew herself up straight, proud in the way people who don’t have much but pride can get. “Don’t want to owe nobody nothin’,” she said, quietly but with great determination.

  “There are other people like me!” I blurted. If I hadn’t been sitting down, I would have fallen over.

  “My mama raised me right. Reckon yours did the same with you,” she said. “Now I better go. Got me a white lady’s house to clean. Good to see you back.” She didn’t waste any more time. She had a job to do, and she was going to do it.

  My mama …. My mama was maybe even a shade lighter’n I am. Looking back, I have a pretty good notion she would have liked to pass. But she’d married a brown man, so she couldn’t even try. They died within a few months of each other right before the war: first her of consumption, then my pa. The doctor called it a heart attack, but I think it was a broken heart. He loved her like you wouldn’t believe. She loved him and looked down on him at the same time.

  Me? I don’t know if I got raised right, but somehow I got raised.

  I opened the envelope. Two twenties, some sawbucks, some fins, and a bunch of singles. It came to a hundred bucks. I’d known it would. A hundred bucks the hard way, the way somebody who has a tough time scraping a hundred together finally does.

  Old Man Mose came out. “It’s all right?” he asked.

  “It’s all right,” I told him. “Hey—how did your mother raise you?”

  His pupils widened; I’d surprised him. “She had milk,” he said after a beat. “She showed me how to hunt—you know, with bugs and little lizards and things. She smacked me when I bit my brother and sisters too hard.”

  I thought for a couple of seconds myself. Then I nodded. “Sounds about right.”

  Pretty soon, I’d met all the Shabbas-goy Jews who kept a daylight eye on things around Dora’s building. One of them hardly spoke any English. Rivke hadn’t been here long. She had a number and a fylfot branded on her arm. I suspected she watched extra carefully.

  That brand … I’d known the fylfot boys were bad news before I went overseas. Things I saw in Italy sure didn’t make me want to change my mind. I didn’t know how bad they were, though, till after I came home myself. Even they tried to hide some of what they were doing. Just the idea makes me want to heave.

  Rivke was one of the lucky ones, if you want to call it luck. She’d lived. There are still some old folks, darker than me, with whip marks on their backs because their masters got sore at them. People are horrible to people who aren’t like them. That’s one of the things people who aren’t like them are for.

  I met some of the other vampires in the building, too. Not all of them knew much English, either. One who did was called Bedford Tyler. I’d met him in that bar. By the way he talked, his family owned slaves once upon a time. For all I knew, he might have himself. With vampires, how can you be sure? Once when he was over at Dora’s place, he told me, “It’s a good thing you belong to her. You’d get sucked dry in nothin’ flat if you didn’t.”

  “Heh,” I said. I didn’t like to think I belonged to Dora, especially not with slaves already on my mind.

  His grin showed off his fangs. He knew he was riding me, poking me. Speaking of blood, he knew I had the one drop, too, the drop that made sure I’d have to pass if I wanted to be white. “You understand what I mean,” he said.

  I did, too. I not only understood him, I wanted to punch him in the nose because I understood him. That wasn’t a good idea. Dora had shown me it wasn’t. Breaking into his apartment, now, and setting up his coffin so he could get a nice suntan when morning came …

  No, I didn’t do it, regardless of how tempted I was. But whenever he started going on about the good old days and how wonderful things had been when everybody knew his place and stayed in it, I thought, That’s the same kind of nonsense the fylfot boys spouted. No place for it here.

  I never called him on it. I wasn’t there to quarrel. Mm, I did once. He kept trying to see how far he could push me. This time I’m talking about, he said, “You’ll agree, I’m sure, that the ways history prescribes work better than the ones we have in these sorry times, the ones we make up as we go along.” He gave me another one of those fang-filled smiles.

  “Well, that depends,” I answered.

  He blinked, the way a frog might when a grasshopper it was about to snap up twitches an antenna in a way it doesn’t expect. “On what?” he said, sure I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything.

  But I did. “On your point of view, of course.” I enjoyed talking to him as if he were an imbecile. When you’re on top, you don’t even think you have a point of view. You take looking down on everybody else for granted. I went on, “If history prescribes that you’re a master, chances are you have yourself a swell old time. If it prescribes that you’re a slave, your odds don’t look so great.”