“C’mon through. It’s around the back.”

  The hallway had some of that old-cabbage-and-rat-piss smell that marks a place on the way down, but not too much. You could see the yard out back had been nice once upon a time. Now it was junk and weeds. I opened up the fuse box and unscrewed the one marked 4-B BACK. And I caught a break. There was a penny behind the fuse. “Well, Jesus God!” I said. “No wonder he’s got trouble with the lights!”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about that,” the manager lady said. A half-witted poodle would’ve known she was lying. She brightened. “Now you don’t hafta go into his apartment.”

  “Like fun I don’t. Who knows what else is messed up?”

  She sent me a look that shoulda knocked me over. When I stayed standing, she started to sigh, coughed, and then finished it. “Well, come on, then, if you gotta.”

  Around the corner and down another hall to the left. The door there had a brass 4 and a B screwed onto it. She reached into her housecoat pocket and extracted a key ring. The master key went into the lock. She jiggled it a little and the door opened. The key ring clinked as she put it back in her pocket.

  If I were a private eye in a book, I’d’ve lifted it without her ever noticing. But if I were a private eye in a book, I’d be better-looking than I am. And richer. And I’d get laid a lot more often than I do. I wouldn’t need to sop up menudo after too much Wild Turkey the night before, either.

  So instead of playing pickpocket, I walked into Jonas Schmitt’s apartment. It was severely neat: neat the way a veteran would keep it, not the way a woman would. An upright piano had pride of place next to the window. Beside it, under the panes of glass, sat a wooden crate filled with three piles of sheet music. He brought his work home. Or what he did for work, he did for fun, too. Most people aren’t that lucky.

  No photo of Marianne Smalls on the piano or the coffee table. No photos anywhere in the front room I could see. A couple of Rembrandt prints on the walls, some ashtrays, a cut-glass bowl with mints wrapped in cellophane, and that was about it.

  I went into the bedroom. A bed made the way they teach you in boot camp. A nightstand. A dresser. A photo on the dresser: a blond woman and two short-pants boys in a town square that looked like Europe. I wondered what Marianne Smalls thought of that. Then I noticed the frame had a black border. It was a past-tense photo.

  I shoved the dresser away from the wall and bent down to look at the plug behind it. Sure as hell, it was a plug. So was the one near the nightstand.

  “They okay?” the manager lady asked.

  “I think so.” I didn’t sound like I believed it. “Put a real working fuse in the box and maybe it’ll be all right. Schmitt’ll spit rivets when I tell him about the penny. You can start a fire with a stunt like that, y’know?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, which meant Shut up. Then she went on, “How’s about this? You keep quiet about the penny, I won’t say nothin’ about him callin’ you before he talked to me. Izzat a deal?”

  I scrunched up my face to show I didn’t like it—and to hide a grin. “I shouldn’t oughta,” I said, lying through my teeth, “but okay.” We were both happy when I left.

  I hadn’t been back in the office longer than five minutes before Old Man Mose came in. He said something to me, but I couldn’t make out what it was. He was trying to talk with his mouth full. He had his pointy little teeth clamped at the nape of a dead rat’s neck.

  He brought it over to my desk, walking spraddle-legged because the rat’s body was between his front legs. The rat bled on the rug as he dragged it along. He’d ripped its guts out with the claws on his hind feet, the way they do. Oh, well. That rug was already pretty ratty.

  He dropped the rat at my feet. I moved them in a hurry. I didn’t want blood on my shoes. He peered up into my eyes, as proud as if he’d just given me a fancy gold watch. “Are you going to eat it?” he asked.

  “That’s all right, Mose,” I said quickly. “Be my guest.” Cats don’t get people’s eating habits. You should see the faces he pulls when I eat an orange. He hates those even worse than cigarettes.

  Now he stared at me as if I were even dumber than he’d given me credit for, which was really saying something. “I don’t want it,” he said. “It’s got that undead bleah to it.” He stuck out his rough little pink tongue to make the disgusted noise, and didn’t quite reel it all back in. He looked silly, is what I’m telling you. Then he went on, “I figured you wouldn’t care, what with your sorry excuse for a nose and taster.”

  “Palming the shoddy merchandise off on me, huh?” When he jabs, I always jab back—gotta keep him in his place. But after a second, I actually heard what he’d said ahead of the jab. “What do you mean, that undead bleah?”

  “See? I knew you couldn’t tell. That’s why I gave the thing to you,” Mose said. “But the bleah, it’s there, all right.”

  I believed him. Even if I couldn’t tell, he could. And no matter how dumb the cat thinks I am, I can add two and two if you hit me over the head often enough. You don’t have to be Bram Stoker to know rats and vampires go together like ham and eggs.

  “It was spying for Dora Urban!” I said.

  “Sure smells that way to me.” Old Man Mose leaned over and started to lick the inside of his leg. I was afraid he’d got nipped—cornered rats fight like, well, cornered rats—but no. He was just neatening up ruffled fur.

  “Did it say anything before you killed it?” I asked. Even if rats get along with vampires, they don’t talk so people can follow. But Mose is no people. If I weren’t, he’d be the first one to tell you that.

  “It’s a rat,” he said dismissively. “Stupid rat, too. Smart rats don’t hang around with vampires. But yeah, it was supposed to listen and to go poking around with its ratty little paws.”

  He sniffed again. I didn’t. Rats have clever front paws, more clever if less pincushiony than cats’. I wasn’t sure what all it could have stolen or got a look at, especially if it gnawed its way into my desk. I looked down at it. Its beady little black eyes stared blankly up at the ceiling.

  “Any chance you can get the other cats in the neighborhood to look out for rats for a while?” I asked. It was worth a shot. Mose is the toughest kitty in Dodge, even if his Dodge is only a block or two wide.

  But he curled that thing he has instead of an upper lip, whatever it’s called. “They don’t do what I tell ’em. They just run away from me.” He sounded proud of that. It goes with being the toughest kitty in Dodge. Then he added, “Besides, even if they did listen, you’d have to feed ’em to pay ’em off, and you ain’t feedin’ anybody but me, Jack.”

  “You know I don’t do that,” I said. I scritched him under the chin and by the side of his jaw to remind him he’s the A-number-one cat as far as I’m concerned. He’s always nervous about that, nervous like a dame who worries her old man is stepping out on her. After a minute or two, though, he started to purr. He believed me … this time. Sooner or later—probably sooner—we’d have to go through the same rigmarole again.

  Cats. What can I tell you?

  I went on scritching Mose while my little gray cells—if that Belgian with the hairnet doesn’t swish, I’ve never seen anybody who does—rubbed against each other and tried to make fire. All right, Marianne Smalls was doing the dirty with Schmitt. But was Lamont getting some on the side, too? Plenty of broads’d be interested in what he could do for them, and he wasn’t ugly even if he could’ve dropped a few pounds. So was sweet Marianne getting even, or what?

  Lamont didn’t say anything about a girlfriend. Which proved what? Nothing? Yeah, nothing, or maybe less. You pile what your clients don’t tell you alongside of what they do, guess which makes a taller stack. A big part of my job is finding out what the folks who pay me don’t want me to know.

  Old Man Mose turned his head and kinda nipped at my fingers. “If I’m the one you feed, why don’t you feed me?” he said.

  So I opened a can of cat food. It smelled too much like fish to me, but not to Mose. Since it was for him, that was fine. He sure thought so. He buried his nose in it.

  I took the front page of the Times and grabbed the rat with it. I carried the little carcass out to the alley and dropped it there along with the newspaper page. Picking up dead rodents and lining birdcages, that’s about what the Times is good for. Horrible rag. The Times doesn’t like anybody but rich white people, and even then only if they vote the right way. But it’s the biggest paper in town, and that’s not even close. I don’t know what that says. Nothing good, for sure.

  After I came back in, I paid a few more bills. Having money again was nice. I’d turned the double eagles Dora Urban gave me into cash. Chances are I got gypped doing it, but so it goes. And I had Lamont Smalls’ first payment. I felt flush, which I seriously wasn’t used to. All the same, watching money go out was even less fun than disposing of a dead rat.

  I didn’t even notice it get dark outside. It did, though, whether I noticed or not. Shows how much the universe cares about one Jack Mitchell. The telephone rang. I picked it up. “Mitchell here.”

  “This is Dora Urban,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Do you have anything new to tell me?”

  “Only that it’s not nice to set spies on somebody you hire to do a job for you,” I answered. “But you already knew that, huh?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes, just as you must know how pointless discussing niceties with a vampire is.” She was a cool customer. I expect she would have been even if she were still alive.

  “I was doing some other stuff today,” I said. “I’ll be back on your business tomorrow.”

  “Do not let the trail fade,” was all she said. A human woman would have pitched a bigger fit. But the undead do have time on their side—till they finish, anyhow. Then it’s all over for them. People go on … or at least we hope we do.

  ​III

  What I needed to do was go to Deacon’s. I could have done it that night, but I didn’t feel like watching the sun come up through the smog the next morning. I went home instead, and slept. I was even a good boy. I didn’t get toasted before I left the office.

  When I say I slept, I mean I slept. I didn’t get back to the office till almost eleven. I called my answering service to see if anybody new had a problem only I could fix.

  “No new messages, Mister Mitchell,” the operator said.

  “Thanks, Hilda.” I hung up, thinking Thanks for nothing. The world is full of trouble. My trouble was, other folks didn’t want me to take care of theirs.

  Well, I did have a couple of clients. Old Man Mose had already curled up on the sofa and gone to sleep. That meant I couldn’t, not unless I felt like booting him off. It was tempting. I was gonna be up all night. But he looked too comfortable, with his tail draped over his nose. So I twiddled my thumbs at my desk for a little while, then went out with the notion that I’d do something useful.

  I walked around to the alley in back of the building where the office is. No rats scurrying around, not where I could see them. Hadn’t really expected any, not out in plain sight, but you never can tell. Daylight doesn’t finish rats the way it does vampires. You need somebody like Mose for that, Mose or …. I told myself to put down some traps by the trash cans. Might not do any good, but it couldn’t hurt.

  Then I took the trolley up to County General. I wouldn’t run into Rudolf Sebestyen, not at that time of day, but I might come across his buddies who could go out in the noonday sun. They’d have to be crazy, as crazy as I was. It was one of those end-of-summer days we get where being out in the open dries up your eyeballs and breathing scorches your lungs worse than a pack of Camels. The sun blazes down on your noggin as if it’s no more than six inches away; everything looks all washed out, like overexposed color film.

  I had to change from the Red Line to the Yellow Line to get to the hospital. The Pacific Railway station where you do that has air conditioning. All of a sudden, I wasn’t sweating any more. I was freezing. Air conditioning is always too damn cold. One of these days, they say they’ll get the ice elementals properly trained. They sure haven’t done it yet.

  And when we set out again, the heat just felt more brutal. I wasn’t the only one in the car who made a noise halfway between a sigh and a sizzle when the sun smacked us again.

  I saw the hospital on the hill through the trolley’s front window—and through shimmering heat. It really does tower as you get close. It’s up there, and it’s something like twenty stories tall. That has to make it the second-highest building in town, after City Hall. The earth elementals here are so bouncy, most places have to top out at thirteen stories (even if the elevators say fourteen) or 150 feet. Eventually, we may have more skyscrapers. People have been making journeys to the center of the earth to talk—or bribe—the elementals into behaving themselves. So far, nobody’s come back from any of those journeys, and we’ve still got earthquakes.

  You don’t realize how big the County General complex is till you’ve got to go somewhere in it. Sweat poured off me as soon as I got down from the Yellow Car and started walking. It’s a dry heat, people say. It’s not so bad. And when it’s in the nineties, say, that may even be true. Get over the century mark and it just means you roast instead of stewing. Had to be 103, 104 that afternoon.

  The blood bank was in a two-story building away from the big, towering tower. It stood right next to another two-story building with bars on the windows and the label PSYCHOPATHIC AND ACCURSED WARD. Somebody in there let out a shriek as I walked by. He sounded like hell, whether his own demons or some from outside drove him there.

  A nurse in starched whites looked up from a crossword puzzle when I came in. “Yes?” she said.

  “I’d like to donate blood,” I told her. As soon as the door closed behind me, I couldn’t hear the moonstruck guy howling any more. They had themselves some good soundproofing there.

  She brightened. Till then, she’d been at least as starchy as her uniform. “That’s wonderful!” she said. “I have some papers for you to fill out, and you’ll need a quick, simple blood test before we can draw a pint from you.” If I had VD, they didn’t want my warm muscatel. But she wouldn’t have come out and said that if I’d put her on the rack.

  I filled out the papers. Yes, I was doing this of my own free will. Yes, I was over twenty-one. No, to the best of my knowledge I had no infectious diseases. The blood test was in case the best of my knowledge wasn’t good enough. I gave them my name and address—I used the office’s—and my autograph.

  I wasn’t thrilled about doing this. I don’t like needles. But it gave me an in, and I could talk easier while I was getting stuck than if I just strolled in and started grilling folks.

  In a few minutes, the medical wizard said I’d been a good boy, or at least a careful one. They put me in a reclining chair and reclined it. The doc who aimed the needle at my vein was a cheery redhead with a name badge that said BERKOWITZ. “Just look away,” he told me. “It’ll hardly hurt a bit.”

  I didn’t want to watch anyway. I’ve lost blood before a time or three, but not on purpose. It makes a difference. Not looking at him, I said, “Go ahead. You’re the vampire.”

  “Not me.” He laughed. While he was laughing, he jabbed the needle home, the sneaky so-and-so. I felt it, but it wasn’t … too … bad. He went on, “I wouldn’t have these hours if I were.”

  “Yeah, you’d be a regular fly-by-night,” I said. He laughed some more. Why not? He wasn’t getting stuck. But I’d made myself an opening, or I hoped I had. I asked him, “How much of what you collect goes to people who get hurt or need operations and how much to vampires?”

  “It’s about seventy-thirty,” Berkowitz answered. “Sometimes the vampires get a little more. We don’t fargin them …”

  “You don’t what?”

  He thought about what he’d just said and laughed one more time. “We don’t begrudge ’em, I mean. Sorry. Sometimes the mamaloshen comes out and I don’t even notice. We don’t, though, ’cause if they’re not getting their blood here they’ll be out biting people and doing real harm.”

  I filed fargin away. I could hardly wait to see Al Harris’ face when I trotted it out. I’d never heard him use it, but I figured he’d understand it if somebody, even a goy like me, threw it his way. Meanwhile, still eyes left, I asked Berkowitz, “Ever have vampires try to make, um, unauthorized withdrawals?”

  “It happened once, right after we opened. It was during the war, when everybody was kinda meshuggeh ….” He broke off, but I nodded. I know that one, even if Al says meshiggeh. Berkowitz picked up again: “Crazy times, uh-huh. Zoot suits and sailors duking it out, the demon that tore up a mile of Broadway before they could exorcise it, the fun and games the Negroes went through so they could work at war plants …”

  Uncle Sam was already paying my wages when the demon manifested. I read about that in the papers. The other stuff he was talking about, I knew firsthand. I said, “If the war was about anything, it was about treating people like human beings.”

  “Hey, you get no beef from me,” Berkowitz said. “My old man was a kid when his father got him out of Russia. The stories Pop and Grandpa told me …. And they’d be dead for sure, and me with ’em, if they’d stuck around till the New Order came through.”

  “There is that, yeah,” I said. Some things are even harder than being a Negro in America. Some people don’t wanna hear it, but it’s true. They screw you here, but most of the time they don’t just go ahead and kill you. Places the New Order overran …. If the fylfot boys didn’t make a clean sweep, it wasn’t ’cause they didn’t try. I didn’t want to think about that, so I asked something else: “Can I smoke a cigarette while you’re bleeding me?”