Immortal (10 page)

I dumped the contents out on the bed. It wasn’t much: a change of clothes, the seven passports (they were each good for another two years), a shaving kit, about twenty grand in cash, and the passbook for my Swiss bank account.

“Wow!” Brenda exclaimed, specifically regarding the cash.

“It’s just walking-around money.”

“Forget walking, why don’t you buy a car!”

“It’d use up most of the cash,” I explained. “Plus I haven’t driven one since 1965, and that was a disaster. And if you think I’m going to drive in
this
city . . .”

“What’s this?” she asked, her eyes drifting across other items.

“That’s a bank book.”

“Cool.” She flipped it open and frowned at the handwritten notes inside. “What language is this?”

“It’s a code I invented a long time ago,” I said, “so nobody else could read it.” By the way, thank God for the Swiss. I gave up on everyone else’s banking system long ago, but they’re still going strong. Plus, nobody there seems to have a problem with the fact that I should have died fifty years ago.

“How much do you have?” she asked.

“A lot.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know how much. I haven’t asked for a balance in a very long time.”

“So, you could be, like, a billionaire or something.”

“Could be, but I doubt it.”

She actually had a point. My last directive was made in 1957 and it was to allocate a portion of my money toward the purchase of U.S. tech stock. This was after I’d gotten drunk with an English mathematician who spent the evening prattling on about the Manhattan Project. About ninety percent of what he told me was top secret, but he was really, really drunk. I think I even told the Swiss to pick up some IBM stock. I don’t remember. (I was mad drunk myself when I made the call.) It wasn’t the first time I made a snap decision like that, and while this one may have worked out okay—provided I actually made that phone call and wasn’t imagining the whole thing—most of them didn’t. For example, I once put a load of money down on commercial zeppelin travel. And don’t even get me started about perpetual motion machines.

“I wish I were rich,” Brenda said wistfully.

“You will be,” I said.

“Yeah? Can you see the future?”

What have the other vampires been saying about me? “No. But if you want to be rich, you can. It’s just a matter of patience and discipline and finding a bank that’s open at night. You’ll figure it out.” I picked up the cash. “No, I don’t think I need a car. But I definitely need to do some shopping, and maybe a shower and a shave. You don’t happen to know where the nearest Y is, do you?”

*
 
*
 
*

Brenda did me one better. It turned out there was a community bathroom, with a real shower, down the hall from her almost-apartment. It was perhaps the filthiest place I’d spent time in since nineteenth century London, but it did have hot water and a mirror. An hour later I emerged into Chinatown, clean-shaven and less odorous, although my clothes were still as crappy as ever, hence the need to shop. My plan was to hit the nearest big bank, set up an account for myself here in the States, transfer some money into it and live the high life for a little while, or at least until winter was over. But to do that I had to show up dressed somewhat better than a guy who just woke up in a gutter somewhere.

I headed for the nearest subway station, my bag over my shoulder and my coat tightly wrapped. (It wasn’t a whole lot warmer than it had been the night before. Why couldn’t I winter in the tropics?)

My path to the train took me past a news vendor who looked nearly as cold as I was. Ordinarily I pass newsstands without pausing to examine headlines, because only rarely do any of them make sense to me. The last time I sat down to read a paper was in 1992.

But on this particular day something made me look up. Don’t know what it was. Fate, I suppose. And this time the first headline I saw did mean something to me.

STUDENTS
BRUTALLY
SLAIN
, it read.

It was about Gary and Nate.

I skimmed the first two paragraphs, just enough to discover that I was a prime suspect.

The longer I sit here running through everything, the more aggravated I get. I was so stupid. I should have cut and run the minute I read that headline. It’s what I’d have done a hundred years ago, and exactly what I did do in response to the Whitechapel murders. I fled to the States before someone decided to point a finger at me. I knew two of the victims then, too. Did I stick around to catch their killer? No, I did not.

   
But then nobody ever did catch their killer, so far as I’m aware. Maybe that was my motivation this time around, delayed Jack the Ripper guilt.

Anyway, that was my shot. That was when I should have left town. Or the country. Instead I waited until New York, and by then it was too late.

*
 
*
 
*

According to the full story—I went and bought the paper—Nate and Gary were assaulted with a blunt object. This told me hardly anything, as there are a whole mess of blunt objects one could use to kill a person, starting with an automobile and working down. (I didn’t think they were run over in their living room but you get my point.) The place was also ransacked, and the police were speculating that robbery might have been a motive. And then there was this sentence, “Police are looking for a local drifter who may have spent some time in the victims’ apartment.”

That wasn’t much, but I knew tomorrow it would be “a drifter named Adam” and the day after that, one of Gary and Nate’s party friends would cough up a description and I’d be looking at a composite sketch of my face on the front page. They’d say it was just for questioning, but I didn’t have one of the most well developed alibis on the planet. If you start digging deep enough into any of the names on my passport, you’ll quickly find that none are genuine. And Adam isn’t even one of those names. That couldn’t help. Worst of all, the only person who could possibly prove I wasn’t in the apartment when they were killed, was a teenage vampire hooker.

In my favor, I was probably the only “drifter” in town with twenty grand on hand to work with, so I could get out of Boston pretty fast and be done with it whenever I wanted to. It was a much better option than jail. (Astonishingly, I’d managed to avoid long-term imprisonment for most of my life. Good thing. Can you imagine me under a life sentence?)

But there was a nagging little voice in the back of my head that wanted to know who had killed Gary and Nate. I hate that little voice. It always gets me in trouble.

So, I stuck with my original plan, which was to get to Newbury Street and shop for a decent set of clothes, plus a few other goodies, like a watch. For good measure, I stopped in a hair salon. When I returned to Brenda’s hole in the wall a few hours later she almost didn’t recognize me.

*
 
*
 
*

“You’re bald!”

“What do you think?” I asked. “Do you like it?”

“It’s . . . I don’t know . . .” she circled around me, examining the damage. I’d also gotten my ear pierced. With the Armani suit thrown in, I looked like a pimp.

“Hang on.” I slipped on a pair of Ray-Bans. “Now?”

“Yeaaah, that’s better. Jesus, you look completely different.”

“That’s what I was shooting for.”

“What, are you on the lam now?”

I thrust the newspaper into her hands. “Apparently, yes.” She read the article while I explained who the mysterious drifter was.

“You didn’t do this, though, right?” she asked. I guess this is a polite question to ask when you’re a vampire.

“Of course not.”

“Had to ask.”

“Well, I didn’t,” I repeated.

“Okay,” she said. “I wouldn’t have minded, you know. I think if you were, like this big killer or something . . . that’d be sorta sexy, actually.”

I snatched the paper from her. “Boy, did you make the right career choice.”

“Hooking?”

“Bloodsucking.” I dropped my new leather satchel onto the bed (the duffel didn’t work with the suit) and zipped it open.

“What is that smell?” Brenda of the hypersensitive nose asked.

I pulled out the bag of goods. “Oh, sorry about that. It’s diced garlic.” Garlic doesn’t fend off vampires, by the way. They just really hate the smell. “Also mushrooms, fennel seed, balsamic vinegar, and this . . .”

“Molasses?”

“It’s the critical ingredient.”

“You know, there’s a McDonald’s right down the street.”

“It isn’t for me. You don’t by any chance have a hot plate, do you?”

*
 
*
 
*

She didn’t, but the old Asian lady down the hall did. She wasn’t initially all that interested in helping us, up until I sweet-talked to her in Mandarin. She even loaned us a saucepan.

An hour later I had a deeply foul-smelling dish that no human would ever consider eating, even on a dare.

“Ugh, God, I’m gonna be sick,” Brenda declared.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have done this in the apartment,” I said.

“I may have to move.”

“Sorry. Are you ready to go?”

“Go where?”

“The alley down the street. Come on, the sun’s down already.”

“Is this some sort of immortal trick or something?”

“Yeah. Hurry up.”

*
 
*
 
*

I set the saucepan on the ground at one end of the alley and then joined Brenda behind the dumpster at the other end.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Shh. Now you watch for me. Your eyes are better from here.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Focus on the top of the pan,” I said. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

“Is this magic? Did you cast a spell or something?”

“Of course not,” I said. “There’s no such thing as magic.”

She looked at me with the kind of disbelieving expression only a vampire can give to an immortal man who doesn’t believe in magic.

“Honest,” I added.

“Whatever.” She refocused on the pan. And we waited.

About an hour passed, and I was still crouched uncomfortably behind the dumpster watching the back of Brenda’s head while she stared down the alley. She stood dead still the entire time, and I swear she didn’t blink once. Police would do themselves a service by hiring vampires specifically for stakeouts.

Finally . . . “What the hell?”

“What do you see?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Something flew into the pot, right?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Did it fly out?”

“No. What the hell was that?”

“That is what we’re here to catch.”

I led her back to the saucepan, and crouched down to say hello to my new friend. Stuck in the molasses about knee deep was a tiny naked woman with mosquito wings.

“Hello,” I said to her.

“Iza stuck,” she said back.

“Yes, you are,” I said, picking up the saucepan.

Brenda stared at our prize with naked astonishment. “What
is
it?”

“This,” I said proudly, “is a pixie.”

*
 
*
 
*

Back in the room, I placed the ensnared pixie on the bed while Brenda lit a few candles. The pixie just pouted, which is something they’re very good at. They are, unfortunately for this particular pixie, very bad at resisting the smell of mushrooms, garlic, and fennel. (The part they eat is the mushrooms. It is possible to tame a wild pixie with just raw mushrooms, but very difficult to catch one that way, and we were under the clock.)

The average pixie is somewhere between three and four inches tall, with gossamer wings and, scale-wise, simply fantastic bodies. Most every one I’ve ever met was a blonde, and I mean that both literally and in the intellectual sense, although calling them stupid isn’t really fair. They’re simply innocent. If Jerry the iffrit is the devil on your shoulder, a pixie is the angel on your other shoulder. Not that either species is particularly good at advice, but you get my point.

You may have encountered a pixie once or twice in your life and not known it. And since they move faster than anything else I’ve ever seen with wings, if you did see one it was for the merest of seconds, just enough time for you to convince yourself your eyes were playing tricks on you.

“Hello,” I said to my new friend.

“H’lo,” she said back, then repeated, “Iza stuck.” She wasn’t afraid, just annoyed at being stuck. It’s not that I’m naturally non-threatening; it’s that it would never occur to her to be afraid. Think Adam and Eve before The Fall, if that helps.

“It’s a little tiny girl!” Brenda observed. She was still dealing with this.

“Yes, as far as I know, they’re all girls,” I said.

“Then how do they . . . you know.”

“I never figured out how to ask one. They don’t seem to understand the concept.”

“Iza stuck!” the pixie repeated.

“Right, sorry,” I said. “What’s your name?”

She looked at me blankly. “Iza. Iza stuck.”

“Oh.” Silly me. “Iza? Would you like me to help you get unstuck?”