Sweeter Than Wine

  “I did.” Squeezing my arm with both hands, she laid her head on my shoulder.

  Brains are an aphrodisiac.

  We didn’t make it to the bedroom.

  22: AN EVENING AT HOME

  “Know that Allah is with those who guard

  against evil.”—The Quran

  My friend Moe called me that evening, to confirm that I’d sent the young mall security guard to him. He was more than happy to give the kid a chance and, given a little training, even let him carry a gun. The guy figured that he still owed me for his tall, blond, slender, pretty American wife and the fifty or sixty kids they’d generated so far.

  We always had the same discussion. That and the one about how I shouldn’t get my pornography from the Internet. But the truth is, I’ve never been willing to pay for anything like that, and the only thing I’d obtained for Moe was his freedom. That he’d used it better than most individuals would have—to pursue his heart’s desire, instead of that of his mother and father, sulking back at the family homestead in old Mumbai—was entirely his own accomplishment, and I told him so.

  Again.

  Thanks to her former keeper, Surica and I had pretty much missed our lunch. I’d be thinking about miso until I had a chance at another bowl. So I called out for pizza—no onion or garlic, of course—and we shared the girl who delivered it before going on to the main course. It sounds horrible, stated flatly like that, but it isn’t, not at all. I gave the delivery girl a generous tip, but I always do that. The people who bring you food, especially when it’s miserable outside, should be as well rewarded as possible. And, of course, she’d be a bit healthier, and live a little longer, for having delivered a pizza to us.

  She was delicious, but it may have been the company.

  Fiddlestring usually avoids events like that. He rejoined us for the pizza. He’s nuts about Italian sausage, as who in their right mind isn’t? It’s also interesting the number of different drinks that go well with pizza: wine, beer, Coke. Even a mediocre wine or a lousy beer is better taken with pizza. About the only drink that doesn’t is milk.

  Yech.

  I had about 1500 satellite and cable channels I could access, and big, flat screens all over the house, including the bathrooms. But as is often the case, there was nothing on TV that either of us found particularly interesting. We always found each other interesting, and were about to do something about that, right there in the living room, when the doorbell rang. I glanced down at my watch. It was just after nine.

  Even at the best of times, there are certain individuals who think that the world would be a better, cleaner place without yours truly, so I take various precautions, especially after dark. Unholstering my .45 automatic, I held it behind the small of my back as I went to the inner door. As usual, Fiddlestring had “followed in front” of me as my backup.

  Like the rear of the house, there’s a big, glassed-in porch in front. They act like what you might call “solar airlocks”, protecting me from being burned by sunlight whenever I have to answer the door. No problem with that at this time of the night and with that weather. Outside, waiting there on the porch step, stood Priscilla Varick, by herself.

  I reholstered the Colt, opening the outer door for her.

  “I hope it’s not too late,” she told me, as I followed her back to the living room. She’d left an umbrella and her topcoat on the porch to drip dry. She knew her way around well enough. We’d spent plenty of time together, me and the Varick family, over the years. I knew their house well, too. “Varick’s got some sort of late-night regional task force meeting until about midnight, my two little birdies have flown from the nest again, and I have something important I need to say to you.”

  I gave her a suspicious eye. “And you can’t wait to meet Surica.”

  “You’re damned right I can’t wait to meet Surica—hello, there! I’m Priscilla.” She thrust a hand out. Surica took it, then embraced her. It was a very strange sight, and a sign that my life was already changing.

  They sat down on the sofa. “I’m so happy to finally meet you. I’ve been worried about J for a long time. Are you also...” She reached up and delicately touched her own upper canine incisor. Surica smiled and nodded. “Good!” said Priscilla. “I have never believed in mixed marriages.”

  I laughed. So did Surica. What the hell had I ever done to deserve friends like the Varicks? “Can I get you a beer or something?” I asked.

  “Tea, if you don’t mind the trouble, hot tea.” She shivered. I couldn’t blame her. Outside, it had settled down to a slow, steady drizzle.

  “I don’t mind at all.” I headed toward the kitchen. We’d never really had much of a summer this year, and it was shaping up to be a miserable excuse for an autumn. I filled the electric kettle and got it running. I pulled several different teas down from the cupboard and put them in a little porcelain bowl, set that and a matching cup on a reed tray, and by the time I’d accomplished that much, the kettle was boiling. Hot water in a little matching teapot beside the cup, a spoon on the side, milk, sugar, and lemon, and back out into the living room.

  They sat sort of sideways, facing each other on the little sofa. Fiddlestring was sitting like a sphinx between them, purring his ass off.

  Priscilla was telling Surica, “So in the middle of the movie he said to me, ‘If you’d transfer to Von Mises, we could get married,’ and that was his proposal. Tell the truth, aside from the fact that I knew he was the one the moment I saw him writing that citation, I was more than ready to get the hell out of Moscow on Boulder Creek. Von Mises Memorial may not be as sexy as the University of Colorado, but as colleges go, it’s more practical—and much better screwed into reality.”

  Surica: “I’ll keep that in mind, should I ever wish to go back to school.” I don’t believe she’d ever been to school, but she’d had tutors.

  Excellent tutors.

  Priscilla: “You really should, you know. You’d have all kinds of fun. Oh—except for the—but I guess you could sign up for night classes.”

  They both broke out in hysterical laughter. Night classes. Go figure what some people will find funny. It startled Fiddlestring. He got down off the sofa and left the room with an indignant twist of his tail.

  Once we got settled, Priscilla with her tea, Surica with her wine, and me with a CooperSmith’s Not Brown Ale, my best friend’s wife got serious.

  “I’m so glad Anton finally told you that we’ve known about you, J, almost from the beginning. We never even talked about it at home, to spare the kids too much strain keeping your secret. But they knew. How could they not know? Eventually we had to explain it to them as best we could—as well as we understood it, anyway—like the talk you have to have, sooner or later, about sex: ‘Yes, Virginia, your Uncle J is a vampire, but he doesn’t seem to bother anybody very much about it.’

  “In point of fact, you don’t look at all like a vampire, Gifford. You look a lot more like some basketball hero from a Norman Rockwell painting.”

  She turned to Surica. “Now you, you do look like a vampire—and I mean it only in the most complimentary way possible. Beautiful, slender, willowy, but amply built—like Joanne Kelly on The Dresden Files.”

  That was a new one on me. I made a note to check it out. HULU, probably.

  “But I haven’t gotten to the reason I came, J.” I sat down in my favorite chair opposite the couch and Priscilla turned toward me. “I know you don’t want thanks, but you have to understand something. I love my life. I love my big, strong, all-too-silent husband. I love my son who’s going to be just like him. And I love my daughter, whom I hope will be at least a little bit like me. I love the home we’ve all made together, and I love my work. I wasn’t anywhere near ready to give them up, but it looked like I didn’t have any choice in that matter.”

  Priscilla had been trained as an art historian. She did a little painting and sculpture herself, and even sold reasonably well in local shops. On birthdays and Christmases over a quarter c
entury, she had given me enough art to decorate my house from one end to the other. If she couldn’t restore a work of art herself, then she knew who could. But the main thing she was known for nationally was appraisals and authentications.

  “It was easy to do, Priscilla. I gave you a little of my blood. I carry a virus—so does Surica—that eats cancer for breakfast and anything else that might ail the human constitution for lunch and dinner.”

  “A virus,” Priscilla said thoughtfully. “I had no idea.”

  “I’d be happy to do it again, for anyone in your family and a couple or three other folks I know. But you must never tell anybody about it, or somebody might try to catch us and drain us—we don’t have enough blood, between us, to save the world—or maybe just dissect us for the CDC. They won’t succeed, of course, but a lot of people will have to die in the attempt, almost certainly including us.”

  She nodded solemn understanding.

  “By the way,” I said, “There’s still some pizza if anybody’s interested.”

  Fiddlestring stuck his head around the corner and said, “Miao?”

  And that’s when a man with a gun in his hand came through the door.

  23: SOMETHING WICKED

  “Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction

  between good and evil.”—Anatole France

  The gun, being held between thumb and forefinger like a dead rat, was Anton’s .40 caliber Glock M22, dripping water onto my hardwood floor.

  So, for that matter, was Anton. The right side of his topcoat, the outside of his right pants leg, and his right shoe were wet and muddy. Oddly, his other side appeared to be dry. Anton was the old-fashioned kind of gentleman who suppresses his natural tendency toward profanity in the presence of ladies. I could see the strain of it now, in his face.

  “Ever have one of those days?” he asked the room. “I had just gotten out of the car in front of the house, here, congratulating myself that my task force meeting had broken up early, when my foot slipped on something slick, and down I went. Luckily I carry my cell phone on the left side. It would be considerably harder to get dried out.”

  While Priscilla and Surica relieved Anton of his sodden topcoat—as I recalled, he didn’t like wearing a suit jacket under it and had likely left it at his office—removed whatever he’d been carrying in his pockets, and spread the coat over a couple of plastic-coated metal chairs to dry, I went to my office for a gun cleaning kit I keep in a gym bag in the lower right-hand drawer of my desk where a fictional hardboiled detective is supposed to keep his traditional bottle of Bushmill’s.

  I kept mine in the kitchen, only it was Cuervo.

  Opening the bag, I spread a couple of car mechanic’s red rags on the breakfast counter where Anton’s personal effects—badge flipper, wallet, gloves, two sets of keys, cell phone, and small notebook were beginning to pile up, and extended an open hand for his waterlogged pistola.

  “I’ll do it,” he growled. By now he was out of his wet shirt and trousers, his unmentionables, as well, and was wearing one of several bathrobes I never wear, myself. He took a pair of cased bifocals out of one of the pockets, perched them on his nose, and sat down on a stool.

  Actually, it was good therapy for Anton’s elevated blood pressure. For some reason there are few things in life more relaxing (petting a cat is one of them) than disassembling a personal firearm, cleaning it thoroughly, and putting it back together again. Maybe it has something to do with restoring some peace and order to one small corner of the universe.

  Pressing a small rectangular button at the rear trigger guard root on the left side of the piece, Anton pulled the plastic box magazine from the underside of the handle. Some older Glocks don’t drop their magazines automatically when you press the catch button, and Anton’s was one of those. With fifteen rounds in the magazine—seventeen if you happen to be shooting nine millimeter—it may not be all that important.

  “Shit!” Apparently Anton had forgotten about the ladies present. I would have, too. When the magazine had come out of the weapon, it had more or less poured water onto the red rags. Maybe a tablespoon full. He added, “I guess when I do a job, I make a point of doing it thoroughly!”

  I laughed and got out some more red rags.

  Anton pulled the slide back, and one of the .40 caliber Winchester “SilverTip” cartridges he used fell out of the ejection port onto the rags. They’re not silver, but lead, with highly-polished cupronickel or aluminum jackets, depending on the caliber and age. These were the former.

  I started unloading the magazine, pushing on the back end of each cartridge (for some reason known as the “head”) with my thumb, and letting them fall onto another red rag. Unless Anton requested otherwise, I’d let him disassemble the magazine and dry it. It isn’t complicated. Two spare magazines he carried on the offside had been perfectly dry. I didn’t bother with them. If it ain’t wet, don’t dry it.

  I rolled the cartridges around on the rag, drying them off. My guess was that, in spite of normal procedure in ordinary times, with ammunition as scarce as it was right now, Anton would want to use them again, as backups, if not for anything else. It was almost certainly an acceptable practice. The bullets were sealed into the case mouths with some kind of stickum, and the whole assembly had a shelf life of about a million years. Me, I’d shot .45 ammunition—and it wasn’t that long ago—that had been manufactured during the First World War.

  Not a misfire in the entire lot of a thousand rounds.

  Meanwhile, Anton pointed the empty pistol in the safe direction of one of my herb planters (just in case) and pulled the trigger, which produced a noisy metal and plastic clank. Believe it or not, that was part of the official disassembly process. Then he held it in an odd grip that let him retract the slide about an eighth of an inch against the pressure of a powerful recoil spring, while he pulled down on a couple of little serrated nubs above the trigger guard, both sides of the pistol.

  This released the slide to be pushed forward off the frame. I knew from experience that the polymer frame (for which read some kind of plastic) remaining in his right hand felt even lighter than balsa wood, not at all right, my every instinct told me, for a powerful high pressure cartridge like the .40. But my instincts were wrong. I also knew that the damned stuff was stronger, tougher, and would last much longer, than any equivalent part fabricated from steel. I’ve been told they have a specimen in Austria, where Glocks are made, that has been fired by some kind of automated machinery hundreds of thousands of times.

  By contrast, a government model .45 is documented to be good for only 5000 rounds before it’s supposed to be retired. Mine has gone at least four times further than that, but I keep an eye on it and baby it.

  Still, plastic?

  Where the Glock’s frame was made of plastic, containing only a few small parts made of steel, the Glock’s slide, easily comprising more than two thirds of the pistol’s unloaded weight, was all steel, with no artificial additives of any kind. So much for being undetectable at airports.

  Holding the slide upside-down in his left palm, Anton removed the captive recoil spring assembly—which was pretty wet—and then the barrel, and that was it. The whole pistol had now been broken down for inspection and cleaning into only five parts: magazine; frame; recoil assembly, slide; and barrel. Taking it further was properly work for a gunsmith.

  Now it was time for toothbrushes (arguably one of the most useful multipurpose artifacts ever invented), round brushes for the bore and chamber, and one of those tiny brushes they sometimes pack with coffee makers. You can accumulate a lot of those if you live as long as I have.

  Soon, a heady aroma from my youth, that of Hoppe’s Number Nine bore cleaning solvent (I’ve often thought they ought to make an aftershave or men’s cologne) was drifting through the house. Surica and Priscilla, both of whom knew their way around guns, pitched in with Q-Tips and a hair dryer. A drop or two of Tri-Flow, a lubricant allegedly containing microscopic little beads of Teflon
, and we were finished.

  Anton reassembled the Glock—he was the only one of us who had handled it; the rest of us had been drinking, and I draw the line just before a single beer—and laid it atop the counter. His Uncle Mike’s holster was constructed of ballistic nylon and would dry out readily enough.

  ***

  Anton accepted a drink—I do keep a little whiskey around, Jameson’s—and leaned back on the living room sofa, stretching his long legs. I’d built a little fire in the tiny fireplace, and suddenly the cold and damp outside didn’t seem to matter quite so much any more.

  Cave people had probably discovered that 30,000 years ago, but it’s always nice to reaffirm it. Of course they didn’t have whiskey or tequila.

  Poor cave people.

  Without being asked, Priscilla had gone into the kitchen and prepared some food for a rainy evening: tomato soup, grilled cheese sandwiches. She knew where everything was. Canned Campbell’s in the cupboard, mixed with water in a bowl, a dash of Lea and Perrin’s, heat in the microwave, add about the amount of half and half you’d add to coffee.

  The sandwiches she produced were every bit as simple: bread (I like the kind with bits of nuts baked into it), American cheese, very thinly-sliced tomatoes, butter, hot griddle. Surica watched the whole process in fascination, never before acquainted with the concept of “comfort food”. Given what I knew about her parents, I didn’t wonder why.

  We ate and drank for a little while, not saying much, watching the fire.

  Then: “Nobody asked me about the meeting, the task force.” Anton snagged another half sandwich from the plate—Priscilla cuts them from corner to corner, like my mom did—and sat back again, sipping whiskey.

  The women didn’t say anything. A look on Priscilla’s face told me she thought that something was up. I said, “I wasn’t going to ask you. I thought that kind of thing is secret. Homeland Security and all that.”

  “Not DHS this time,” said Anton, “FBI. They came, along with cops from several different states, most of them southern. CBI was there, too.”