“That’s right, you can’t have her,” he said, laughing under his breath. “I watched you slip into it like the fly into the honey. I loved it. Her taking you so unawares, oh yes, your tasting that kernel of evil with your oh-so-refined senses, kisses in the shadows, yes, and falling so blithely in love with her, so tenderly for you with all your loathsome powers. And you cannot have her. No, never. Not Rowan Mayfair. Never ever. Not the Magnate, not the Creator of the greatest family enterprise, not the champion of the family’s public dreams, the family’s philanthropic wonder, the family’s guiding star! You can’t ever have her. And you shall have all the fun of watching her from afar and never knowing what might happen to her. Old age, sickness, accident, tragedy. Won’t it be something to behold! And you can’t ever interfere. You don’t dare!”
There stood beside him little Stella, aged eight or nine, in a lovely white dress, drop waist style, a white bow in her black hair.
“Don’t be so mean to him, Oncle Julien!” she said. “Poor darling.”
“Oh, but he is a mean creature, Stella dearest,” said Julien. “He took our beloved Mona. He deserves nothing but the worst.”
“Listen to me, you cheap backstairs ghost,” I said. “I’m no sentimental rake out of a bad Byronic poem. I’m not in love with your precious Rowan Mayfair. The love I feel for her is something you can’t know in your shallow wanderings. And Rowan’s in more trouble than you can ever imagine. Now why don’t you tell me what disastrous mistake you made with all your clever machinations and visitations? Or shall I get it out of Mona or Rowan or Michael? You haven’t been an angelic success, have you? Take your little girl in your arms and get out of my sight. Is God giving you the power to writhe and spit with anger?”
Pounding on the door. Mona calling my name over and over again.
They were gone, the ghosts.
She came into my arms. “But I can’t bear it if you’re angry with me, tell me you’re not, I love you with my whole soul.”
“No, no, never angry,” I said. “Let me hold you tight, my fledgling, my darling, my newborn one. I adore you. We’ll fix everything. We’ll make everything perfect for everyone. Somehow.”
13
H
OTEL CORRIDORS
. Muffled voices. On and on. Dark blue carpet. Candle flame electric lights. Door after door. That’s a pretty table. Oh, you rank materialist, be done with tables, and be gone on your filthy errand. What if some ruthless enterprising individual did a catalog of all the furniture you have personally described in your Vampire Chronicles, then what, I’ll tell you what, that would put you to shame, you avaricious, shameless, hoarding, ever-hungry Seven Deadly Sin Committing fiend, what did Louis once say to you, that you made a junk shop of eternity? Move it!
Bedroom interior. Mirrors and mahogany. Wreckage of room service. (Look Ma, no tables!) Olive-skinned woman, dark of hair, half conscious on the pillows. Smell of gin. Drapes open on the crowded sparkling high-rise night. Tumbler full of ice cubes and gin and tonic, catching light in frozen bubbles.
She turned on her back, rose up on her elbows. Beige satin nightgown, lank, nipples brown.
“So they sent you, did they?” she asked, lids half closed, eyes scornful, painted mouth hard. “So how will you do it? Hmmm. Get a load of that blond hair.”
I lay down on the bed beside her, on my left elbow. Bed thick with her sweet human perfume. Luxurious hotel sheets and pillows.
“You’re some hit man,” she said, sneering. She picked up the beautiful tumbler. “You don’t mind if I have a drink before I die, do you?” She drained the gin and tonic out of it. It smelled like poison to me.
Ahhhhh, gambling debts, millions, how does one do that, but it was only the tip of it, she’d been in much deeper, flying back and forth to Europe, stashing the wealth for the wrong man. When she fired a gun she emptied it. Making a living. Her partner had vanished. She knew she was next. Didn’t care anymore. All that money gone to waste. Drunk all the time now. Sick of waiting. Black hair oily and fine. One of those faces completely transformed by maturity. Lots of there there but who cares?
She fell back on the pillow.
“So kill me, you bastard,” she purred. I mean slurred.
“You got it, sweetheart,” I said. I covered her, and kissed her throat. Hmmm. Fragrance of nobody.
“What is this, Rape?” Snickering laughter. “Can’t you find a two hundred dollar ho in this hellhole city? You know how old I am? You have to put a spin on the job, a guy with your looks?”
I covered her mouth. She gave just a little to the press of my lips.
“And kissy face on top of it,” she drawled. “Stick to the pelvic moves, fancy man.”
“I have something better, honey, you underestimate me.”
I nuzzled against her neck, kissed the artery, heard the blood surging, opened my mouth slowly, tasting skin again, sank my teeth and drew fast so that she swooned before the pinprick pain could catch up. Oh, Lord God, this is from Somebody’s Heaven.
Easy.
Weightless, timeless, apocalyptic. Oh, baby, you’re no liar, don’t expect me to give a hoot about the things I’ve done, never, how could I, I’m not God, honey bunch, well, then, who, the Devil, oh, sweet, I told you, didn’t I, I don’t believe in you, I hate you, keep it going, I am, I am, as much as I can bother to despise anyone, I love this! hmmm, yeah, tell me about it, and then what was it? I almost, if you want to give it up, do it, but if you don’t, I don’t need it, it’s what you need, sidewalk hopscotch, colored chalk, I hate them, lemme go, jump rope, screen door bang shut, never could, kids crying, I just need the blood, oh, but wait, I see it, I never knew it could be so—back down that hallway, no, well, guess what? it isn’t. Laughter, light and laughter, I should have—.
Her heart couldn’t pump it any longer. I lifted her, drew harder, the heart stopped, arteries burst, blood blind, body slowly filling with weight, slipslide of satin, shock of downtown lights, the sparkle in the ice cubes, the Miracle of the Ice Cubes.
Blood to the brain, My Lord and My God, I’m out of here. Thou shalt not lie beside the corpse of thy victim, for the Deadly Sin of Pride I shattered the huge window, arms out, glass flying in all directions, Take me, Oh Twinkling Downtown Lights, Take me!—glass falling on the airwell gravel roof and the mighty modern unromantic ever-churning air machines.
Won’t the hit man be surprised?
14
T
HE NEXT NIGHT
I
AWOKE
to discover the
National Catholic Reporter
had arrived in the mail, and I tore it open for news of Saint Juan Diego.
There was great coverage, including a wonderful black and white photograph of the Pope in his white mitre, listing badly to the right proper but doing fine otherwise, watching “indigenous dancers” at the canonization Mass in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Huge crowd. Of course the article HAD to mention the fact that some people doubted that Juan Diego had ever existed!
But what did that matter to the faithful like me?
Only after I had devoured all the articles on the Pope’s travels did I realize there was a note lying on the desk from one of the guards, saying that Michael Curry had come by in the afternoon and asked if I might call him. No one was answering the phone.
I’d come back so late last night that I had not seen Mona and Quinn, and they had not yet risen.
The flat was ominously quiet. Apparently it was too early for Julien and Stella as well. Or maybe my last speech had routed Julien for a while. But I didn’t think so. He was, if anything, probably more energized and waiting for a moment in which to strike.
I was about to pick up the phone and call the number which Michael had given to the guard when I realized that Michael had just come to the carriageway below.
I went down to meet him. The evening was all aglow and full of the scent of the kitchens of the Quarter.
I motioned for the guards to let Michael come on back.
He was in a frantic state. He was wearing the same three-piece white suit as yesterday, shirt now open and tie gone, and he was all rumpled and smudged with dirt and his hair was mussed.
“What’s the matter, man?” I asked, as I reached to take his arm.
He shook his head. He was choking on the words he wanted to say. His thoughts were scrambled. On some unconscious level he blocked me from reading him, while appealing to me at the same time.
I led him into the courtyard. He was sweating badly. The garden was just too hot. I had to take him in where the artificial winds blow.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Mona appeared in the doorway just as we reached the back parlor, pretty blue silk dress, heels strapped at the ankles, just her hair tousled from bed.
“Uncle Michael, what’s wrong!” She was instantly distraught.
“Hey, baby,” Michael said weakly. “You’re sure looking fine.” He collapsed on the velvet sofa and he put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
“What is it, Uncle Michael?” she said, obviously shy of touching him, settling uncertainly on the edge of a nearby chair.
“It’s Rowan,” he said. “She’s gone out of her mind, and I don’t know if we can bring her back this time. It’s worse than it ever was before.”
He looked at me. “I came here to ask you point blank if you’d help. You have a power over her. You calmed her last night. You might be able to do it again.”
“But what’s happening to her?” Mona asked. “Is she catatonic like before?”
I caught only jumbled images from Michael’s mind. He didn’t appear to register Mona’s question. I had to settle for his words.
“Stirling’s with her now,” Michael said, “but he’s not getting through. This morning she insisted she wanted to go to Confession. I called Fr. Kevin. They were alone for about an hour. Of course he can’t tell anybody what she said. You ask me, I think Fr. Kevin’s on the brink too. You can’t take a regular priest like Fr. Kevin and plunge him into a family like ours, and expect him to survive, expect him to represent something, expect him to exercise his priestly functions. It’s not fair.”
“Michael,” I said. “What is Rowan doing?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. He went on.
“Mayfair Medical, all her work on it has been frenetic, you know that, or at least you did know that—” he looked at Mona—“but nobody else really realizes it, that she works to the point of exhaustion so that there will be no inner life, no quiet life, no life of the mind other than that which is locked to Mayfair Medical, it’s a complete vocation, yeah, marvelous, but it’s also a complete escape.”
“A mania,” said Mona quietly. She was badly shaken.
“Right,” said Michael. “Her public persona is the only persona she really has. The interior Rowan has utterly disintegrated. Or it has to do with the secrets of Mayfair Medical. And now this breakdown, this complete disconnection, this madness. Do you realize how many people are riding on her energy? Her example? She’s created a world that’s dependent upon her—members of the family from all over come here to study medicine, the new wing is under way at the hospital, there’s the Brain Study Program, she’s monitoring four research projects, I don’t even know the half of it. You chuck my own selfish needs, and then there’s all that—.”
“What actually happened?” I pushed.
“Last night she lay on the bed for hours. She was whispering things. I couldn’t hear her. She wouldn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t come out of it. She wouldn’t dress for bed, or take anything to eat or drink. I lay beside her—what you told me to do. I held her. I even sang to her. Irish people do that, you know. We sing when we’re melancholy. It’s the strangest thing. I thought I was the only one. Then I realized all Mayfairs do it. That’s the Tyrone McNamara blood down through Oncle Julien. I sang these melancholy songs to her. I fell asleep. When I woke up, she was gone.
“I found her in the back garden on the lawn under the oak. She was barefoot out there, in her pretty silk suit, digging, digging where the remains were.” He looked at Mona. “She was in her bare feet and she was digging with one of the gardener’s big shovels. She was talking to herself about Emaleth and Lasher and she was cursing herself. When I tried to stop her, she hit me. I tried to remind her she’d had the remains removed. As soon as Mayfair Medical was complete, she had had a team out to scour for the remains.”
“Emaleth and Lasher?” I asked.
“I remember,” said Mona. “I was there when it happened.”
“She was crazy that day,” Michael said. “She kept repeating herself. She said that she belonged in the Talamasca. They sifted through that dirt like a pack of archaeologists. Yeah, you saw them, and that fragrance, it was so strong.”
Mona was fighting back her usual tears. My heart went out to both of them. They were prisoners of these secrets.
“Go on,” said Mona.
“I tried to tell her. They’d excavated the entire area. They’d brought everything to Mayfair Medical. She didn’t seem to understand. I told her what she’d told me at the time. It was cartilage, cartilage of an infinitely more elastic species . . . that it wasn’t even the scene of a crime! But she wasn’t listening. She keeps pacing and talking to herself. She says I don’t know who she is. She’s always told me that. She started talking again about joining the Talamasca, retiring into the Order. As if it was a convent. She said she belonged there. In the Talamasca. In the old days, when women had done evil things they could be sent to monasteries. She said she would make a bequest to the Talamasca, and they would take her, they would take the Mad Scientist, because that’s who she really was. Mona, she doesn’t believe in my understanding. She doesn’t believe in my power to forgive.”
“I know, Uncle Michael.”
“I’m a moral child in her mind,” Michael said, his voice shaky. “And then she said the worst thing.”
“What?” asked Mona.
“She said that you were . . . you were dead.”
Mona didn’t reply.
“I kept telling her you were fine. We’d just seen you. You were all right, you were cured. She kept shaking her head. ‘Mona’s not alive anymore.’ That’s what she said.”
Michael looked at me. “Lestat, will you come?” he asked.
I was vaguely amazed. This man was highly intuitive, but he was seeing in me only what he wanted to see.
“Will you talk to her?” he asked. “You had such a soothing effect on her. I saw it with my own eyes. If you and Mona could come. Bring Quinn. Rowan loves Quinn. Rowan doesn’t notice many people. But she’s always loved Quinn. Maybe because Quinn can see spirits, I don’t know. Maybe because Quinn and Mona love each other, I don’t know. She loved Quinn from the first time he came to call on Mona years ago. She’s always trusted in Quinn. But Lestat, if you could talk to her . . . and Mona, if you could come and show her that you’re alive, show her that you’re fine, just hold her. . . .”
“Michael, listen to me,” I said. “I want you to go home. Quinn and Mona and I have to talk this over. We’ll come to you or call you as soon as we can. Be assured, we’re very concerned about Rowan. There’s no other concern on our minds right now except Rowan.”
He sat back on the couch, closed his eyes and took a long breath. He looked defeated. “I was hoping you’d come back with me,” he said.
“Believe me,” I said, “our little consultation won’t take long. We have strong obligations. We’ll call or come just as quickly as we can.” I hesitated. “We love Rowan,” I said.
He stood up, heaved a sigh and headed for the door. I asked if he needed a ride back home and he murmured that his car had brought him downtown.
He looked back at Mona. She’d stood up but she was afraid to embrace him, that was plain.
“Uncle Michael, I love you,” she whispered.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he said, “if I had my life to live over again and could just erase that one night.”
“Don’t think about it, Uncle Michael,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you? I climbed in the back window, for God’s sakes. It was all my fault, from start to finish.”
He was unconvinced. “I took advantage of you, baby,” he whispered.
I was stunned.
“Michael, it was Oncle Julien too,” Mona said. “It was Oncle Julien’s spell. He made a big mistake. Besides, it doesn’t matter now, don’t you see?”
I was stunned again.
He stared at her, narrowing his eyes. I couldn’t figure whether he wanted a blurred focus or a fine one. It was as though he saw her loveliness afresh.
“Oh, you do look so good,” he sighed. “My sweetheart.” He closed the gap between them and embraced her totally, a bear of a man enfolding her. “My darling girl,” he said.
I was afraid.
They rocked together, his arms completely enclosing her. He suspected nothing. He drifted in a dream. And she, newborn thing that she was, felt like a peach.
At last he broke away and said wearily that he had to return to Rowan, and I told him again that we would call him very soon.
He looked at me for a long moment, as though he was seeing me with new eyes, but it was only his weariness. He was seeing what he wanted to see in me, and he thanked me again.
“She called you Rasputin when she was angry,” he said. “Well, I tell you, Lestat, you do have that sort of power and it’s a good thing. I can sense the good in you.”
“How in the world can you do that?” I asked. To ask that honest question felt extraordinarily sweet. This was truly one of the most baffling mortals I’d ever met. And to think, he was
her
husband, and I’d thought him the perfect husband for her when we’d first met.
He reached out and took my hand before I could stop him. Couldn’t he feel how hard it was? Only the thinnest layer of flesh was permeable. I was a monster. Yet he peered into my eyes as though plumbing for something separate from the Deadly Sins that prevailed within me.
“You’re good,” he said, confirming it for himself. “You think I’d let you hold my wife in your arms if I didn’t sense it? You think I’d let you kiss her cheek? You think I’d come to plead with you to calm my wife when I couldn’t if I didn’t know you were good? I don’t make mistakes of that order. I’ve been with the dead. The dead have come to me and surrounded me. They’ve talked to me. They’ve taught me things. I know.”
I held fast. I nodded. “I’ve been with the dead too,” I said. “They left me in confusion.”
“Maybe you asked too much of them,” he said gently. “I think when the dead come to us they are crippled creatures. They look to us for their completion.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think that’s true. And without a doubt I failed them. But I was with angels too and they asked too much of me and I refused them.”
A look of quiet shock passed over his face. “Yes, you said it before. Angels. I can’t imagine being with angels.”
“Never mind my words,” I said. “I talk too much of my own wounds and failures. With Rowan, something can be done, and I promise you, we will see to it.”
He nodded. “Just come to the house, please, all of you.”
“Are you and Rowan alone there?” I asked.
“Stirling Oliver is there, but—,” he said.
“That’s fine. He can stay,” I replied. “We’ll be there very soon. Wait there for us.”
He nodded with a half smile that was trusting and grateful and kind.
He went on out the door.
I stood trembling, listening to him make the stairs, and then the carriageway. I shut my eyes.
A solemn silence fell over the room. I knew Quinn had come to the door. I struggled to gain control of my heart. I struggled. Mona cried softly into her handkerchief.
“Mona of a Thousand Tears,” I said. I fought them myself. I won. “How could he have so totally misunderstood me?”
“But he didn’t,” said Quinn.
“Oh, yes, he did,” I insisted. “Sometimes I think the theologians have got it backwards. The big problem is not How to explain the existence of evil in this world. It’s How to explain the existence of good.”
“You don’t believe that,” said Quinn.
“Yes, I do,” I said.
I fell into a sudden trance, thinking of the Pope in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City with the “Indigenous people” dancing in their feathered headdresses. I wondered if the Spaniards would have murdered those Indians in their feathered headdresses for doing that on consecrated ground two centuries ago or three or four. Well, Hell, it didn’t matter. Saint Juan Diego would protect everyone now.
I shuddered in order to clear my mind.
I sat on the couch. I had to ponder what I’d learnt.
“So it was Michael who fathered your child,” I said to Mona as gently as I could.