I wanted to stop at the office for a minute before we went on to her apartment. I needed to grab Frank Jethroe’s file so I could check something in it for Wally. He’d already seen the damn thing, of course. And he’d already settled with O’Flannery and Muldoon. But he needed it again, because he hoped he could pry more dough out of the sons of bitches who’d run PERSONAL ASSISTANCE, PERSONAL ASSISTANTS if they were still alive or out of their heirs and assigns if they weren’t. Lawyers.

  And me. Naturally, I’d remembered this in the middle of Slim Gaillar doing “Cement Mixer (Put-Ti, Put-Ti).” Not like remembering it in the middle of one of Lady Day’s songs, but even so … I hadn’t drunk enough to forget it again, either, not at Deacon Washington’s prices I hadn’t.

  So there I was with Dora, mad at myself for stopping but meaning to stop anyway because grabbing the file would only take a minute. We walked across where the alley behind the building opens out on to the street. Something in the alley moved.

  Dora stopped in her tracks. “Who is that?” she asked sharply.

  I peered down the alleyway. I couldn’t see much—not as much as she could, I knew—but I recognized that slow, deliberate shuffle. “It’s just the zombie the guy two doors down leases out,” I said. “I don’t know why it’s there now. He doesn’t usually turn it loose so early.”

  “Who is that?” Dora repeated, as if I hadn’t opened my mouth at all. She started down the alley to find out. I followed in her wake. After a second or two, I was dogtrotting, but still not gaining any ground. She might have flown faster if she’d turned bat, but she might not have, too.

  She came up beside him. He went on sweeping as if she weren’t there. As far as he was concerned, she wasn’t. Sure as hell, he was the same old zombie he’d always been. White guy, no particular age, expressionless face, dead eyes. Kind of a beaky nose, dark hair that looked as if it hadn’t been combed for months. It probably hadn’t. Worn-out coveralls. Push broom. Sweep. Pause. Step. Sweep. Pause. Step …

  “What do you care about—?” I began.

  I stopped, because she still wasn’t paying attention to me. She was paying me even less than she had before, in fact. That wasn’t easy, because she hadn’t been paying me any before, but she managed. Now all the attention she had was focused like a burning glass on the poor, sorry, shambling shape next to her.

  “Rudolf!” she said, and the sorrow she said it with pierced me to the root.

  I was tired. I’d had a bit to drink. All the same, I knew what she was talking about. “This guy here, this guy’s your, uh, half brother?”

  “He is,” she said, and then something in Magyar I of course couldn’t understand. After a few seconds, she realized as much and came back to English: “I never thought to see him in such a sad state.”

  “Are you sure you’re seeing him in such a sad state now?” I asked. “Because I’ve watched this guy pushing his broom in broad daylight.”

  No, she hadn’t been paying attention to me. All of a sudden, she did. I watched her head swing my way. I could see it better now than I would’ve been able to a couple of minutes before. Whether she liked it or not, dawn was moving closer. She couldn’t stick around very long, not if she wanted to do anything after that. Her eyes had the look of a trapped animal’s.

  “You are sure? There can be no possible mistake?” she said.

  “Honey, I’m sure,” I said, and she didn’t even get mad at me for the first word. “I’ve been as close to him as we are now. I’ve had his broom hit my shoe. Nobody’s pulled the old switcheroo on him since.”

  “That is not possible.” Dora caught herself, because it plainly was possible. She tried again. “That should not be possible. How can it be possible?”

  I had no idea. I just said the first thing that popped into my head: “Maybe he found the, the stuff he was looking for. Maybe that’s what does it.” Even tired, even tipsy, even knocked out from finding Rudolf Sebestyen’d been right under my nose all along, I didn’t say vepratoga out loud.

  Neither did Dora. “It could be,” she replied after a few seconds’ thought. “It makes better sense than anything that occurred to me. But what can we do to bring him back to himself, as you did with Frank Jethroe?”

  I was starting to be able to see her in color. Yeah, sunup was coming on fast. I put my hands on her shoulders. “What you’re going to do is go home and lie down. We’ll talk about it when you wake up tonight, okay? Your half brother isn’t going anywhere till then. It’s Sunday. The guy who leases him won’t be in today, and I don’t know how to get hold of him at home.”

  Of course she could’ve shaken me off. She could’ve knocked me for a loop if she decided to. For a split second, I thought she would. She wanted what she wanted, and she wanted it right now. Then she sighed and nodded. “You are thinking more clearly than I am. Tonight.”

  And then she was gone, at least in human form. A bat flittered south and west, in the direction of Vampire Village. And beside me, Rudolf Sebestyen, the vampire who walked like a zombie, went on with his slow-motion sweeping. I stood there watching him and smoking an Old Gold till the sun had risen, no two ways about it.

  He didn’t fall to ash. He didn’t catch fire and run down the alley screaming till he finished. He just swept. One of the things he swept up was my cigarette butt. I lit another smoke. He swept up my dead match, too. Shaking my head, I started for VV myself.

  I didn’t want to do that, you understand. I wanted to call Izzy Berkowitz or Rob Grau or both of them at once. I made myself hold back. When the phone rings before seven on Sunday morning, even if it doesn’t wake you up the first thing you think is Who died?

  By the time I got back to Dora’s apartment, she’d lain down in her coffin and closed the lid. I realized how tired I was myself. I put on my one and only pair of pajamas and climbed into bed. Back before the war, I would have laughed at the idea of going to sleep while the sun was up. Slogging north toward Milan, though, I’d learned to grab shut-eye wherever and whenever I could. Knowing how to do that is useful. It’s come in handy since.

  I woke up once because I had to take a leak. Staying with another live person, I would’ve worried about waking her, too. But I knew damn well Dora wouldn’t notice anything till the sun went down again. I lay back down and fell straight into slumberland. No more Assyrian-flavored dreams, either. That was nice.

  Next thing I knew, it was getting close to four in the afternoon. I’d made a fair stab at sleeping the clock around. I peed again, then fixed myself some coffee and a can of beef-vegetable soup. I figured I’d get real food later. This would wake me up and keep my belly from growling too much in the meantime.

  I finished cleaning up and sat down with The Naked and the Dead. The guy who wrote it, he’d been through the mill, all right. That was what drew it to me to begin with. And that was what made me want to put it down and forget about it every time I picked it up. I hadn’t yet. It was a big, fat book. I figured I’d get plenty more chances to.

  Before I’d made much headway this time, the coffin lid creaked open. Not creepy—just a lot of weight on the hinges. Dora sat up and ran her hands through her hair. “How do I look?” she asked.

  “Babe, you always look good to me,” I answered.

  How she looked right then was exasperated. Vampires can’t see themselves in the mirror, either, of course. Makes it hard for a pretty woman to stay at the top of her game. Dora said, “In the old days, in the old country, I had servants to keep me looking as I should—and to keep me fed if I required it.”

  “Now you’ve got me,” I said.

  “Yes.” By the way she said that, I wasn’t an ideal replacement for the scared peasant girls she must have ordered around in the good old days. She hadn’t complained when she was hungry, though. Oh, no. And neither had I, not while she was feeding or afterwards. What she did next was gesture imperiously. “Come brush out my hair, anyway.”

  “Okay.” I did my clumsy best. While I ran the brush through that thick, honey-blond mane, I reflected that it probably wasn’t an accident so many vampires had to get out of Hungary in a hurry when the old Empire fell apart after the first war and the Reds took over for a few bloody months.

  “How is my makeup?” she asked.

  “Your mouth’s a little smeared,” I said.

  “Wipe off what does not belong, please,” she told me, so I did, with a Kleenex. She put on fresh lipstick by feel. When she finished, she said, “How is that?”

  “It’s perfect.” I’d watched her put on paint before. It amazed me every time. “If I tried to do that, I’d look like a circus clown. If I was lucky, I would.”

  “I have had rather more practice than you,” she said, and she wasn’t wrong. “Now we will go to your office. You have telephone calls to make.”

  We will go. Yes, she was used to being obeyed. But I also knew we needed to do it, so away we went. After sunset, Vampire Village comes to life …. Mm, no. Let me try again. It gets livelier …. Hmm. No again. A lot more goes on there when the sun isn’t in the sky. That works.

  I wondered whether Rudolf Sebestyen would still be sweeping the alley—sweeping it again?—when we got to the office, but he wasn’t. He was probably standing in a closet, or else propped against the wall like his broom. I winced, remembering my own time in the closet across from Jonas Schmitt’s place. Sebestyen wouldn’t remember his.

  Dr. Berkowitz was at the County General blood bank when I called. He spent a lot of time there. I wondered how his family liked that. None of my beeswax, of course. I stuck to what was: “I found that vampire I was looking for.”

  “Is that good news or bad news?” Izzy asked. I was sure Dora could hear what he was saying. Since her half brother’d wanted to knock over the blood bank, though, she couldn’t very well get offended.

  “Probably,” I said, and Berkowitz chuckled. I went on, “The interesting thing is, he’s not just a vampire these days. He’s a zombie, too, and I’ve seen him working in broad daylight.”

  “Really?” He sounded the way a pointer looks when it sees a goose. “I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.”

  “You aren’t the only one who’s had trouble believing it,” I replied. On the sofa, Dora nodded. I said, “I was wondering if it could have something to do with the stuff I still don’t want to name. I know for a fact he was looking for that stuff.”

  “Yes, you said so before.” Berkowitz paused. I imagined the faint sounds on the phone line were gears spinning and meshing inside his head. “I don’t know that we’ve made any experiments along those lines. I don’t know that the fylfot boys did, either. But this is another one of those places where I don’t know how much I don’t know.”

  Dora gestured for the phone. I gave it to her. She said, “Doctor Berkowitz, this could be important to my folk. If we find a way to face the sun without finishing, it would change so much for us.”

  I leaned across the desk so I could hear Izzy’s response: “If the stuff does to vampires what it does to live people, getting a dose of it may cause more problems than it solves.”

  I took the phone back then. “They gave Frank Jethroe some before they took him over to the zombie dealership for unsouling, remember. It left him goofy so he couldn’t do anything about that, but he’s pretty much his old self now that Rob reversed the spell.”

  “Interesting. Interesting,” Berkowitz said. “A low dosage, maybe. Or something else with it, to modify the original effect. When will you try to bring Sebestyen back to himself? I’d like to be there when you do.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that—it’s why I called you,” I answered. “I’ll talk to Rob next. Then I have to deal with the guy who leases the zombie. Once everything’s fixed up, I’ll get back to you.” We said goodbye to each other and hung up.

  Before I could find Rob Grau’s number, Dora said, “We will revive my half brother regardless of whether the person who leases his carcass agrees. We will, do you understand?”

  That left no room for argument. “Do you want me not to talk to him, then? My thought was, he wouldn’t mind if we paid him something. But if you just want to lift Sebestyen next time he’s out in the alley with nobody around to spot us when we do, we can go that route, too.”

  “Yes. We should do that,” she said. “I cannot bear the thought that this live person might tell us no. One of my kind should not be demeaned in such a way.”

  But it’s all right for live people? I wondered. Some of my ladylove’s attitudes were … interesting. That I am what I am didn’t bother her. She didn’t have much of a chance to get attitudes about Negroes before she came over here. To be fair, if she had one about Jews, she didn’t let Berkowitz see it.

  When I called Rob at O’Flannery and Muldoon, they told me he’d gone home for the day. I waited till it got past seven thirty before I used that number, to give the poor guy a chance to eat dinner in peace.

  He answered the phone himself. There were squeals and yells while he said, “Hello?”—little-kid noises. He shushed the younger shades of Grau as I was telling him who I was. Then he went on, “What’s up, Jack?”

  I told him about Rudolf Sebestyen. “So I was wondering if you wanted to help turn another one loose. It’ll probably be one more middle-of-the-night job.” I explained why.

  He laughed. “Do you ever do anything ordinary?”

  “Once in a while, I guess.” For a private eye, getting nasty photos of Marianne Smalls and Jonas Schmitt was pretty ordinary. I went on, “This kind of stuff is more fun, though. Are you in?”

  “Paying work?” he asked.

  I looked a question to Dora, who was listening in. She nodded. “You bet,” I told Rob.

  “I’m in. If I call in sick the next day at my downtown job, they’ll have people to cover for me.” He paused. “This call’ll come out of the blue, right? The phone’ll ring and you’ll want me there in twenty minutes.”

  “ ’Fraid so. You and Izzy both. He knows more about the stuff than anybody else I hang around with. And he’s interested in something that might let vampires stand sunlight. So is Dora.”

  “I can see that. We done?” When I didn’t deny it, he continued, “Okay, I’m gonna go read the kids The Churkendoose before they tear this place down around my ears.”

  “The what? Do I want to know?”

  “You don’t have children, do you? You may find out one of these days. Talk with you later.” He hung up. Before he did, I heard those shrill voices going, Churkendoose! Churkendoose!

  “Now we have to find a night when Rudolf is in the alley. Then we will restore him to himself,” Dora said.

  “I guess,” I said. She looked at me. If we hadn’t been lovers, that look would have scared the kapok out of me. It scared me some anyhow. Even so, I went on, “Remember, he wanted the stuff. He was looking for a way to turn into something like a zombie. How happy will he be after we bring him back?”

  Dora started to say something. I could tell it would be something like Of course he will be glad we rescued him. She stopped herself before it came out, though. “I had not thought of that,” she admitted, her voice troubled. “He may not be grateful. Even for my folk, he is not one to whom gratitude comes naturally.”

  From everything I’d ever heard about Sebestyen, she had that right. “Still want to go on?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said after no more than the barest hesitation. “If he resents me, I will bear it. And if he wants to crawl back into the kind of oblivion he found once, I am sure he can find it again.”

  She had that right, too. Junkies who got clean but not clean enough can always score a hypo full of horse when the craving’s bigger than they are. Has to be the same way for vepratoga. It may be harder to come by than H, but anything you can find once, you can find twice.

  “You’re the boss,” I said. I meant it, too; she knew more about being a vampire in general and about Rudolf Sebestyen in particular than I ever would or could. Only after the words were out of my mouth did I realize I’d said the same thing in the same tone of voice a couple of times to the lieutenant running my platoon as we got close to the Po. Back then, it meant I hope like hell you know what you’re doing.

  It meant the same thing here. I got lucky. Dora didn’t call me on it.

  We visited the alley every night after that, usually between eleven and midnight. When we hadn’t had any idea Sebestyen was there, we found him. When we were looking for him? Forget about it. Night after night, nothing after nothing.

  “Maybe I should talk to the guy who leases him after all,” I said.

  “Only if you are sure he will say yes,” Dora answered. “If he says no and we take Rudolf anyhow, he will understand exactly what has happened. And we are going to take Rudolf anyhow.”

  I shut up. Night by night, we kept going out to the alley. Night by night, we kept finding nothing. Well, one night, a possum toddled away from us. Good Lord, but possums are ugly! Another night, we surprised a raccoon climbing out of a trash can with half a sandwich in one handlike front foot. He surprised us, too. But no Rudolf Sebestyen.

  And then, just past eleven on a slow Tuesday night, there he was, dead face, tattered coveralls, push broom, and all. Dora had everything figured out. “Go call Grau and Berkowitz,” she told me. “I will wait here and make sure there is no trouble before they arrive.”

  I had to stop myself from saluting and going Yessir! The Army does strange things to you. “I’ll do it,” I said. “Then I’ll come back out and stay here with you.” She nodded absently. She needed me the way a salamander needs a Zippo, and we both knew it.

  Luckily, neither Izzy nor Rob had hit the sack yet. They both said they were on their way. “I didn’t want to sleep tonight anyhow,” Izzy said gaily. With his work habits, I was inclined to believe him.