He got in, settling into the plush cushions.
“Want a drink?” Miriam asked brightly.
Sarah and Leo came in.
“You know what I’d like? Have you got a good cigar? After lovemaking like that, nothing in the world would be as nice as a really fine cigar.”
Leo grunted with barely concealed disgust.
“We have some Cohiba Piramides in the club,” Sarah said in a dull voice. “But it’s awfully confined for you to smoke a cigar here.”
“Luis,” Miriam called, “go back in and get my lover some cigars.”
Luis brought them out and held open the humidor.
“I was looking for a Macanudo, maybe,” Paul said.
“Cohibas are a bit better,” Leo replied, unable to conceal a sneer.
“We’ll all smoke,” Miriam snapped, handing cigars to Sarah and Leo. “Self-defense, Sarah! Let me get my hand grenade — Paul says my lighter is dangerous, did I tell you? Hadn’t that ever occurred to you, Sarah?”
“I’m sorry, Miri, it hadn’t.”
“Well, he’s going to get me a new one. He says we wouldn’t want my pretty face to get burned, would we?” She cut and lit a cigar and handed it to Paul.
Paul took a drag of a smoke that was hard but incredibly rich, and he knew that it was true, that this cigar was better than a Macanudo. Way better, in fact.
Miriam offered one to Sarah, who waved it away. She pressed it on her.
“Look,” Sarah said, “I don’t want to!”
“Smoke!”
Paul was fascinated. What kind of accountant took orders like that? Miriam treated Sarah more like some kind of a slave.
Sarah took the cigar. Leo lit up in a hurry. In the front, Luis lit up. Only Miriam didn’t smoke. She sat glaring at Sarah. Whatever was going on between those two, Paul thought, they were absolutely furious with each other.
There was some cognac in the car, and Paul had a snifter with his cigar. It was as soft as a pillow, this brandy, but full of flavor. He didn’t bother to ask how old it was. Probably came straight out of Napoleon’s hip flask.
He allowed himself to imagine that what had come between him and Miriam might be serious.
“Where is home, by the way?”
“I have a beautiful home. You’re going to just love it. And if you don’t, then we are going to change it so you do. Isn’t that right, girls?”
“Yes, Miri,” Sarah said, tears in the corners of her eyes. Paul felt sorry for her. Knowing Miriam, she’d been bedding this sweet little thing. They could have been serious lovers. And then all of a sudden, here comes this guy, and bang, Sarah’s strictly backseat.
Paul wanted to kiss Miriam again. He wanted to be in her again, to go in there and just live in there. That was his damn wheelhouse from now on, that fabulous twat of hers. What a creature. What a damn night.
It got quiet in the car. Leo and Sarah were staring daggers at Miriam. They looked as if they wanted to beat her up, as a matter of fact.
Well, let ’em try, Paul thought. She was his girl now and nothing anybody could say, nothing they could do, could change that. Except — he was aware that it was a little dangerous to say you’d fallen in love forever because of a single great roll in the hay.
But, hey, there was something there, something damned wonderful and serious. It had happened. It damn well had.
He watched Sarah puff a little on her cigar, then closed his eyes and sipped some more cognac.
This was the life, despite the fact that all the exercise had made his shoulder start to sing. He’d like a couple of naproxen or something. No more opium. He’d done his share of drugs for the night.
He thought of his seven grand at the Terminal Hotel. If he didn’t show up sometime tomorrow, they’d be sure to toss the room. Probably they already had. That would mean the Book of Names was gone. Also the seven grand. Everybody knew to toss the bedsprings if you were tossing a room.
So, what did that mean to him, now that he was on the lam? Loss of the seven grand would be tragic. As for the Book of Names, he wasn’t sure if he was going to continue in that line. Maybe he’d done enough killing. He could write a pretty decent report, so maybe he’d interview at The New York Times. They hired out of CIA all the time . . . but mostly from the analytical divisions, not from the tough guys.
They arrived on no less than Sutton Place and pulled up — guess where — in front of the prettiest house on the whole block.
“Man,” Paul said as he got out. This was way far away from his side of the tracks. He looked up at the imposing façade. It looked damn old, but it was perfectly kept.
Miriam hurried up the steps and threw the door open. Paul joined her. “I oughta pick you up and carry you across the threshold,” he said.
“Welcome to my abode. Girls, he wants some breakfast! Caviar and eggs! Champers!”
Sarah and Leonore marched off into the back of the house.
“I don’t think they like me too much.”
“They’ll get used to you. In fact, I have a prediction. Sarah is going to totally change her opinion of you.”
Paul had big plans for bedtime, which came after a breakfast where Miriam picked and drank champagne, and he thought he must have consumed sixteen eggs at least. Sarah served table, and Leonore cooked. Sarah was awful pretty when she was mad.
Paul smoked another of the cigars in the big library. He saw all kinds of amazing books. There were also locked bookcases with really ancient looking black books in them, their spines unmarked. There were even scroll boxes, smelling of beeswax. He drew a scroll partly out, but it was real old and he was afraid to unroll it for fear he’d crack the parchment and cost her a cool million or something.
He would not have been surprised to find a Gutenberg Bible in here. What he did discover was to him equally amazing — a portfolio containing an original collection of opera libretti. These were not simply early printed copies. They were the manuscript scores.
Here was Rigoletto in what was apparently Verdi’s own hurried scrawl. Reverently, he drew the score out. Miriam came up behind him so quietly that he was startled.
She laid a delicate hand on his shoulder.“You take an interest in opera?”
“A great interest.”
She took the score and walked through to another wonderful room. The wide parquet floor was covered with a Persian rug — the real thing, undoubtedly. But Paul’s attention was taken by the Steinway, a concert grand set in an alcove all its own. The windows that framed it appeared to be Tiffany stained-glass.
The sun was rising, spreading golden light across the rich mahogany top of the piano. On it stood a vase that was probably an ancient Greek original. Sarah was quietly filling it with flowers from a garden that could be seen beyond the windows, just beginning to glow with the light of morning.
Miriam opened the piano. She toyed with the keys for a moment, then riffled in the score. “Sarah,” she said, “would you?”
Sarah sat down at the piano. Suddenly she looked up at Paul. She held out her hands. “These belong to a surgeon,” she said.
What was she getting at?
She trilled up and down the scales, shaking her head in the shafts of sunlight, so that her locks shot red-brown sparks.
Miriam set the score before her, and Sarah began to play, and quite well. It took Paul a moment to recognize “Caro Nome,” and then Miriam was singing it, one of the greatest homages to the female soul that had ever been written. That she was singing it directly from the hand of its author made the experience all the more haunting.
Leo came in and listened, wiping her hands on her apron and blowing a curl out of her eyes.
When the song came to an end, Paul wanted to hold Miriam, to let her know again how he felt. They had just had profound sex together, and he was in profound love. It sounded stupid, he knew that, and he couldn’t actually say it. He’d only known her for a few hours, for the love of Christ.
She threw back her head and sang at
the top of her lungs, “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful guy!” She danced him round and round the room.
At noon she was still showing him her collections, her poetry — she had the original folio manuscript of John Keats’s “Lamia,” and Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” among many other wonders.
Paul struggled to show interest, but he had been asleep in the chair where he sat for at least a full minute when she shook his shoulder.
“Come on,” she whispered in his ear, “you need a cuddle.”
She took him upstairs, then, and they stripped in the sumptuous bedroom. She dropped her clothes to the floor for Leo to run around picking up. He was afraid to do the same, and put his on the edge of a little daybed.
Sarah drew them a bath in a huge onyx tub that must have, in itself, cost a million dollars. In fact, it was the damnedest tub he’d ever seen — beautiful, glowing stone embedded with gold nymphs and satyrs and sea creatures.
It reminded him of something you might find in a palace. It had an ancient Roman look to it. The only place he had ever seen anything carved with such perfection, however, was in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. The sarcophagus there looked a little like this tub.
Sarah wore a green dress with a maid’s cap and a white apron. Between her soft good looks and Miriam’s wondrous, long-legged nudity, Paul was damn well ready to go again. Sarah gave him a playful tweak as he stepped into the tub.
“Don’t misfire his cannon.” Miriam laughed as she joined him. Sarah washed their hair and their backs with fragrant soap. She washed his face, which was an incredibly intimate experience. Being naked with Miriam would mean being naked with her friends, apparently. Hell, the more the merrier.
Here in this bathtub with these amazing people around him, he defi-nitely decided that his past was no longer his problem. He told himself that this decision was now and forever. The world had survived a long time with vampires hiding in its shadows.
From this moment on, he had a new job: getting Miriam to marry him.
He lounged back, eyes closed, as Sarah’s fingers delicately massaged his cheeks and softly caressed his forehead. Miriam’s toes appeared between his legs, pressing and touching.
Yeah, it was heaven. The crusty old tough guy had found one hell of a pasture, looked like. He thought — hoped — that he was presently feeling the tiredness and disappointment of a lifetime, and maybe even its many, many sins, slipping away into the past and welcome forgetfulness, being cleansed away by the ministry of angels.
Then he noticed Leo. She had come in quietly. She sat on the john with her legs crossed, smoking and watching him. He saw the strange little knife again. It was outlined in the pocket of her very tight jeans.
Their eyes met. She smiled.
EIGHTEEN
Careless Love
Miriam and Sarah stood hand in hand looking at the magnificent human specimen lying asleep on the bed.
“He’s in hog heaven,” Sarah said.
“He is.”
Leo took out the fleam. She moved toward the bed, then looked to Miriam, her face questioning.
“Leo, we’re not going to do him.”
“But I feel — ” She shuddered. “We have to.”
“She’s right, Miri. Think what he’s seen. Think who he is!”
Paul stirred, throwing a large hand out from under the covers. “Miri . . .”
Miriam went to the bedside and knelt and kissed the hand. “I’m here, my love.”
The hand reached out, stroked her cheek. “Mmm . . .”
She slid in beside him.
When Sarah saw the tenderness in Miriam’s eyes, she was horrified. What had happened to her? Had she gone insane? This was the most foolhardy thing she had ever done.
“Leo,” Sarah said, “do it.”
Leo looked at the fleam. “H-how?”
Miriam’s head came out of the covers. She raised herself up. She whispered, her mouth close to Sarah’s ear. “I think I’m pregnant.”
Sarah stepped back, for a moment too surprised even to respond. She was a scientist and doctor who’d had twenty years to study every aspect of Miri’s body. A limitless budget had made the lab in the basement a wonder of science, equipped with every conceivable instrument, including many that Sarah had designed herself and had built by the finest medical engineering establishments in the world.
Sarah knew, therefore, that this “pregnancy” was a tragic fantasy. It must mean — could only mean — that Miri’s last egg had dropped. She was not pregnant; she just wanted to be. She could not become pregnant by a human being. All that had really happened was that Miriam Blaylock had lost her last chance to bear a child.
Sarah rushed into her and Miri’s sunroom, where they had their private little place together. Miri sewed for a hobby, using the intricate stitches taught her by her mother, producing the exquisite leatherwork of the Keepers. On the floor where Sarah had laid it, beside a couple of ancient half-opened scrolls, was the Book of Names that so much blood, human and Keeper, had been shed over in Paris.
Sarah threw herself down on her daybed and let the bitterness and the sorrow that had built up over the last terrible hours flood out of her in the form of huge, gasping sobs. Sometimes Sarah hated Miri, but mostly she loved her, and especially when she was suffering and vulnerable, as she most certainly was now.
It would fall to Sarah to examine her in the stirrups, as she had done so often, and to give her the news that would break her heart. In the end, Miri would come back to her, turning as always to Sarah’s enfolding arms for comfort. Sarah would give her what comfort she could, but how can you relieve the sorrow of a woman who has just learned that she has lost her last chance for a baby?
And worse, by so doing she had exposed herself and her household to mortal danger. She was in there alone with that evil creature — how could she be so heedless?
There were tender sounds coming from the bedroom, sounds of love-making. Sarah went to the door and signaled Leo, who was standing by helplessly and self-consciously.
“Sarah, I feel dreadful!”
“I know, dear.” As much as she detested this foolish girl, she could only sympathize with her now. She had lived this suffering.
“I’ve got to have blood.” She gave Sarah a desperate glance. “I tried to eat some of the omelet I made him, but it was revolting, it tasted like wet paper.” She threw her arms around Sarah. “He smells good. He smells like — like —”
“Food.”
“What have I done, Sarah, what have I done to myself?” Sarah could not answer her. There were no words to describe the ruin of a soul. But she held her, she kissed her soft hair. “We’ll hunt you up a meal. Like that old woman. A nice meal.”
Leo looked at her out of awful, stricken eyes. “I don’t want to kill anybody.”
“You made a choice.”
“I don’t want to!”
Sarah moved quickly to close the bedroom door. He mustn’t overhear this.
“Leo, I’m going to tell you something about that man in there. I don’t want you to be frightened. It’s all going to come right. I hope it is.”
She went across to the graceful New Kingdom table that stood beneath the wide window. Paul’s magnum pistol lay there. The table had been a gift to Miri from Thutmose IV, “in exchange,” as she put it, “for some girlish indiscretions that he found very enjoyable.”
“This is going to come as a surprise, I know. That man in there is a killer of the Keepers. A professional.”
Leo’s eyes went to the closed door. “I didn’t think anybody knew about them.”
“There are people who know. He’s one of them. He’s murdered hundreds of them.” She said nothing of how that made her feel — the combination of relief and cold terror.
“Oh, my God. But why is she — ”
“Leo, something happened tonight that I still don’t fully understand. She apparently enjoyed that man immoderately. She thinks, for whatever r
eason, that he fertilized her egg.”
“Only another Keeper can. Isn’t that true?”
Sarah nodded. “It’s a fantasy, nothing more. A tragic fantasy.”
“She can make a mistake like that?”
“Miriam — a Keeper woman — has only four eggs in her lifetime. This is her last one.”
“Does she have any children?”
“No. Apparently she’s lost her last egg, and — well, she seems to have had a bit of a breakdown.”
“Can’t you give her anything? I mean, you’re a doctor and all.”
“What we need to do is to give her a pregnancy test. When it comes up negative, my hope is that she’ll come to her senses.”
“And I’ll get — I’ll get to . . .” She lowered her eyes. Her face burned with shame. “I hate this!”
“You bought it,” Sarah said. “Wear it.”
“I don’t want to do any more killing! Not ever, Sarah.”
“Join the club.”
“But I have to, don’t I?”
“Join the club.”
Leo began to weep. The hopelessness in the small, defeated sobs was familiar from Sarah’s own private moments. Sarah embraced her, and Leo held on tight. “It hurts, Sarah. It hurts terribly!”
“Blood will fix that.”
Leo grew pale. “I’ll kill myself,” she said.
Sarah was silent. Leo hadn’t yet seen the attic. Better to put that off for a few days.
“What do I do, Sarah?”
“Leo, that man in there is a monster. He’s killed hundreds of Keepers, and he’ll kill Miri the instant he discovers what she is.”
“She won’t let him.”
“In bed together for hours, exploring each other naked, and him being familiar with Keepers and how they look — it could happen at any moment.” She gestured toward the magnum. “That thing is loaded with explosive bullets. They’ll blow your brains right out of your head, your heart out of your chest. The only thing that Miriam’s body can’t survive is the failure of blood flow. Given an intact circulatory system, she’ll heal. Always. He knows this. He knows exactly how to kill a Keeper.”