A Drop of Scarlet, page 23
part #4 of Voice of Blood Series
“He can?”
“That is more his style. He hit the place on his way out of town, knowing he wouldn’t be back here. They’ll never find him. Even I don’t know where he’s gone—he’s hiding himself now.”
“It’s the Orchid,” I said. “He can just wipe himself off the map.” I had the feeling that my buyers in L.A. would not be receiving their full shipment, if they got anything at all. I’d been played.
The Russians stared at the floor. Alex cleared his throat and spoke up. “Yes. We shall attempt to disappear as well. It’s not as though we’re not happy to be moving on, since that has always been our plan, and we’ve already been here for much longer than we’d initially thought. I would like for us to part as friends. On good terms.”
I looked at El and remembered how much I’d idolized her when I first met her, before I’d changed, and she was just so lovely and spunky and free that she made being a vampire seem to be a wonderful thing, an elegant, no-compromise way of life. Of course, with my tiny, dull senses, and my naiveté, I couldn’t possibly know what she was actually like. “I just wish that you’d been more considerate of John,” I said at last, words I’d been hoarding for weeks, swamped with sudden nauseous relief.
“Yes . . .” El said vaguely, “but I think it’s pointless to apologize any more for it. It’s up to you, now, to come to a final judgment of me—well, final for the moment. I don’t think you’re that rigidly dogmatic. You are still so young. You have barely thirty-five years of experience altogether—”
“Let’s not discuss my limitations right now,” I came back, my voice mild. “We have business to attend to, and we’ll all have plenty of decades to quantify all the things that I am still so ignorant about.”
I pulled out a sleek little briefcase from where I’d stashed it behind the chair, and handed it to Alex. “This contains five two hundred milliliter bottles, and twelve milliliters in a twenty-five milliliter bottle. The twelve is for your personal use.”
“Only twelve?” El protested. “That’s not enough for both of us.”
“Sure it is,” I said, ice cold. “That’s six effective doses, three each. You really don’t need any more than that. This is not a medically necessary drug for you, and I have no idea what the long-term effects are. But I’ve gotten an eyeful of the short-term effects, and I’m not enthusiastic about ’em.”
“That’s ridiculous,” El scoffed. “Just because Samuel—”
I looked at Alex, who nodded once, lowering his eyes. El took a deep breath, and struggled to smile. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You didn’t have to give us any at all. I appreciate it.”
“Thank you for your help,” I said. “Have a nice trip. It’s a beautiful train ride, I’ve heard—a great view of the northern plains and the Rocky Mountains.”
“With snow on the ground, it will look like Russia,” El replied, her voice ringing in a thin and twisted version of cheerfulness. “Won’t that be splendid, Alexander Vassilyevich?” She spoke the last sentence in Russian, but I understood it perfectly well. “Well, it’s time for us to go,” El said, in English again. “Good luck, and thank you for your hospitality. It is a beautiful city.”
Like I owned the place, or built it myself. “Thanks,” I said. “It was good to see you again.”
“And you.”
I don’t know why we hugged; I don’t know if I enjoyed it. More than being embraced it felt like I was having an internal organ ripped out. I suddenly loved them both so much, despaired of changing them, and regretted having ever met them. Now I was burdened with this love, whether or not I wanted it. When they broke away I knew they felt the anguish and distaste in my bond to them. I hadn’t thought that their faces could get sadder, but I was mistaken. They looked old, brittle, and hollow.
They both kissed me on both cheeks and the lips, then hoisted the briefcase and departed through the front door of the house. The path between the driveway and the front door was almost cleared now, with so many footsteps having trampled and kicked aside the layer of fallen leaves.
XVI
EMPIRE BUILDER
ELISABETA REVIKOFF
A drop like an icicle’s tear fell off the rim of my coat hood and ran down the front of my dress. “Doesn’t it ever stop raining here?” I said to the taxi driver.
“Sure,” he said lightly. “In May.”
I groaned, and Alex glanced at me. “We choose the right time to depart, it seems,” he said, making his accent particularly thick. “We travel to Las Vegas.”
I almost snickered before I caught myself. He knew good and well that Las Vegas hadn’t been worth going to since Sinatra married Mia Farrow. Alexander Vassilyevich gently squeezed my hand, and continued, “It is still very warm and sunny there even in December.”
“Oh, hey, that’s great. That does sound nice, because the weatherman said we might get some snow here this weekend.”
I squeezed back, so hard that Alex yelped and flinched. I patted his hand apologetically. “We never did go to the mountains,” I said, and my chest felt heavy.
“We’ll see mountains on the way there,” Alex said to me in Russian, “magnificent, wild, snow-capped mountains.” I stared out the window of the taxi as it slowed on approach to the train station, and tried to envision what this wet city would look like under a heavy layer of snow. It would be beautiful, of course, but damp and melancholy because the sun would never come out and dance on the surface of the snow. It would be an enfolding cold whiteness like a wet, rough cotton blanket.
I secured my hood so that it cast a shadow over my face, climbed out of the taxi, and mentally called for a porter to assist us. Two slim young men in uniform, one pale and one dark, exchanging slightly baffled looks, moved immediately to place our luggage onto wheeled carts. I stood staring at them until I felt my skin begin to sting and itch from exposure to the cloud-veiled evening sunlight. Alexander joined me on the curving concrete walkway in front of the station, and I grabbed for his hand, wishing that I could make contact with his skin instead of feeling our gloves slide together. My eyes felt very wide open. It might have been excitement or dread.
We would go by train across the top of America to Chicago and then to New York. Ariane was slightly taken aback that we would travel by rail, but I had no need to explain to her why we had never taken an airplane trip, nor would we ever. Driving was an equally distasteful idea; after stripping the license plates from the town car, and then ensuring that the car itself was stolen, the last thing we wanted was to be burdened with acquiring and maintaining another car. Besides, it had been decades since we had gone on a train journey together. It would be romantic.
The clock inside the marble-lined lobby read 4:30; boarding had already begun. The pudding-faced Asian woman behind the counter checked our luggage and pointed us in the direction of the doors that led out to the platform, then wrinkled her eyebrows in concern. “Were you skiing? That sunburn looks kinda painful.”
I stared back at her until she averted her eyes. “Forget about it,” I whispered, and turned away before I burned a hole through her mind. Alexander was already hurrying toward the doors, as nimble as a goat, the suitcases held in his hands as effortlessly as though they were empty.
Suddenly I felt giddy, and I sprinted after him, catching up and jumping playfully against his back, using his shoulders as a springboard. A normal man would have been flung to the ground from the force of it, but he just laughed at me. “Knock it off, you silly bitch,” he said, and when we had climbed up the aluminum stairs into the train car, he set down the cases and gave me a deep and passionate kiss.
We could barely find our room in time. I was already kicking my shoes off and unzipping my coat before we made it to the door, and when I stumbled inside the little suite, Alex, straightening up from where he’d set down the cases, tore open his belt and seized me. He tossed me down onto the blue upholstered lower berth, made a mock-savage snarl, and paid me back for my silliness by jumping on me.
The fuck was good, but before the train had even made it to the next station, perhaps twenty minutes later, I moved away and put my clothes back on. Alex sighed happily, not minding either the desertion or the cold. “You are better than gold-leaf ice cream,” he purred.
I pulled open the window shade, and saw the trees whipping past, dark fans against a washed-out indigo sky. The trees were joined by electricity poles and jaundice-colored streetlights, then by crumbling brick buildings and the filthy detritus of the logging trade. We had come to Washington state just by staggering over the border; I wondered whether it was Portland or Vancouver that was the Tijuana of the two.
“My dear?” Alexander Vassilyevich said, sounding annoyed, or concerned. I wasn’t sure which.
“Yes, precious,” I answered, and pulled the shade back down.
He smiled a little. “No, no, please, let’s have it up. Let’s soak up a bit of the evening time, shall we? We can still watch the light die.”
“I can’t see any light over there,” I murmured, and our window faced west.
“I can still see it,” he said.
“Well, I am happy for you,” I said. I stood up and stretched, then walked the length of the room and back. It was about half the size of Ariane’s kitchen. “This is luxury,” I said.
That made him laugh. “But darling, they make up the beds for us and bring us the paper. And look—bottled water. Isn’t it just like the Turandot? At least, just like the elevator at the Turandot—this one goes up and down, too.”
“Isn’t it terrible!” I said, coming back to sit with him again. He picked up my hand and kissed it, then held it between his shapely thighs. “You’d think, it being a railway, that it would be more efficient to make the way smooth.”
“It adds romance,” he said. “Makes you feel like you’re going somewhere.”
We both fell silent at the same time. I didn’t want to look at his face or his body. Keeping my hand between his legs, I gazed out the window. We could have been seen, if someone stood on the signaling tower five feet away through a muddy, weed-choked field. I tried to get an erotic feeling from that knowledge, but I just wasn’t interested in public sex, not with my husband. I had been, and done so, with Daniel Blum, but that had been a long time ago, since before Sinatra married Mia Farrow, when Vegas was still a fun place to go at Christmastime, and a very public place to have public sex. Somehow, with Alexander, it was different. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of his older, gray-hair-flecked, wiry body; I felt jealous of it. I didn’t want anyone to see him naked but me.
I wished that he had tried to stop me, with Daniel.
Alex swallowed and cleared his throat. “There is also a meal service,” he mentioned.
“Fresh linens?” I replied lightly, still unable to turn back.
He squeezed his thighs together on my hand. Like my touch in the taxicab, it was hard enough to make me emit a little squeak. He could crush the bones in my hand with his thighs, if he wished. “Remind me to tell the staff to leave our suite alone during the day,” he said, his voice casual, spreading his legs a little so I could take back my hand. “They can change our linens in the evening, with us in the room. Not that they’ll need to change our linens, if we just keep on screwing on the couch.”
With a grunt of distaste, he got dressed, drawing a fresh shirt from the suitcase. He sat on the bunk next to me and pulled the other case up onto his lap. His claws delicately spun the combination lock as though he were playing a harp. The case opened with the tiniest click, like the sound of a moth landing on a glass door.
Underneath a brown felt false bottom and a thick, quilted metallic insulating layer, the brown bottles were strapped in, their little cousin, the twenty-milliliter syringe, affixed to the insulation layer with a rude strip of black electrical tape. The bottles were nearly opaque, but the syringe was not, and I was transfixed by Orchid’s strange, moody color.
“Just checking on it,” said Alex.
“It’s barely been out of your sight since we got it. What could possibly have happened?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just wanted to look at it again, I think. We’ve several hundred thousand dollars here.”
“Which belong to Ariane, if I understand correctly.”
“No, Ariane’s made her money already,” Alexander Vassilyevich said, shaking his head. He closed the case and spun the tumblers on the lock, at random this time. “What we make from this is ours. I heard her; she might not have said anything aloud, but I saw the truth in her heart. The last thing she needs right now is more money. Though I do wonder if that Italian might want to take his money back all of a sudden; I didn’t care for the looks of him. He has all the signs of a highly religious hypocrite.”
“Some of her money came from Daniel,” I pointed out, but in the smallest voice possible.
Alex gave a guttural laugh and didn’t meet my eyes. “You know, Elisabeta Hanya, that I’m not usually like this, but I would thank you to try harder not to think of him right now. I would like to think that when I am in the room with you, you are not in another room with someone else. Besides, he is dead—it’s time to stop thinking about him.”
“I don’t stop thinking of people when they’re dead,” I said shortly.
“Of course you do,” he said. “You would go mad otherwise. I did not say you had to forget him. I simply want your thoughts focused right now, and your warmer feelings directed toward me. Please?”
I could only promise him with a kiss, not words. Hadn’t it always been the way? I didn’t lie to Alexander Vassilyevich, including making promises that I could not guarantee. “I’d like a drink,” I said. “Let’s go to the lounge car. I always find that a glass of vodka really brings out your eyes.”
I wanted that Orchid so badly that my tense jaw audibly cracked when I tried to laugh. I knew that he could tell, but he grinned with good humor, obligingly sliding back into his shoes and tidying his mussed hair in the mirror just outside the tiny lavatory. He might have wanted Orchid, too, but I had no clear view of his emotions; his thoughts were lighthearted and logical, but his emotions were tightly tucked away and hidden in the dark.
It wasn’t like him to do that.
There had always been a part of him that was private, and I appreciated that; as much as I loved him, I knew that it would not be a good thing to see all of him, all of the time. Eighty-nine years of being together wasn’t a trifle. But I couldn’t hide anything of substance from him, and I never could. We had fallen in love while I was still human, and my mind was as clear to his gaze as a glass of water. Long before I ever had the inner sight, he had developed strategies for keeping parts of himself hidden from my view. I had simply never really noticed, or cared, before.
The lounge car was mostly full, and noisy with alcohol-raised voices. Alex made a table available for us by convincing the young couple sitting by the window that they had reached a point in their new acquaintance that justified having sex, sending them all of his unsatisfied sexual tension. They hopped up and rushed away. I changed my mind, craving champagne. Although he didn’t ordinarily like it, Alex joined me in sharing a bottle.
We both looked everywhere except at each other.
Mostly, I watched the dark scenery go by, and occasionally met the eyes of the men who were looking at me, but not for long enough to show genuine interest. As usual, the men were varied, but none of them were particularly beautiful. Not enough to make me stop searching for those ragged holes in the clouds, with the stars shining out so much more brightly than they ever could in the city. Every time I saw a break in the clouds I took a sip of champagne; an hour passed, and champagne remained in my glass.
“Darling,” came Alex’s voice, quiet but startling all the same, “look. Doesn’t it look like Rachell?”
Leaning against the bar, ordering a cocktail that had been trendy three years previous, wearing a satin skirt too short for the weather and a clingy cardigan sweater, she looked like an anorexic high-school girl, one in the first flushes of food deprivation, before she started missing periods, but after receiving constant praise for her thinness. She did resemble Rachell in that way, and also because of the long, straight brown hair and lost-looking eyes. Somehow, though, she was being served alcohol, so she must have been at least twenty-one; what an enigma. “Yes, it does,” I said. “But Rachell was prettier.”
“Yes,” said Alex, and rose from his chair.
I sat back, sipped my champagne, and watched him approach her, and immediately seize her interest; the man she’d come with, a youth in ill-fitting pants and a baseball cap, stared at their interaction, becoming so incensed that he actually approached Alexander Vassilyevich with the intent of intimidation. With one sharp glance and a snap of Alex’s fingers, the man in the cap turned on his heel and left the lounge car altogether. The thin girl was enchanted by this. My husband, the irresistible charmer, and his type of lady. He bought her drinks and I finished the bottle of champagne on my own, pouring the last golden drops into my glass as they left together.
Out the window, snowflakes blurred past.
The lounge car shut down at midnight, and the remaining passengers and I were compelled to leave. I thought about lingering behind, keeping my eyes on the flashing ground that now wore a cloak of white, but I thought about the Orchid back in our room and decided to return, if only to look at the bottles. The champagne hadn’t done anything except fill my bladder. Perhaps Alex wouldn’t judge me too harshly if I only had a triple-ought-four, just a drop, just enough to relax me. Yes, it was early, but we had woken up early, and gotten sunburned for our trouble. One dose a night; I had no intentions of being greedy. I resolved myself to tell Alex that I would have some, relieving myself in the lavatory in the lounge, ignoring the calls to clear the place out.
When I returned to our berth, I saw the girl slumped against Alex, not unconscious, but rather in that dreamy, untouchable state of calm that our kind can produce, leaving almost no recollection when it ends. He embraced her, holding her securely across his thighs, her slippery skirt threatening to slide off him, his face buried in her hair. He opened his eyes languidly when I entered.
