If Angels Fight (23 page)

He walked over and they made kissing gestures. “You must have heard?” he said.

“About your break-up? Sorry.”

“Inevitable. I imagine it will all be very civilized. I’ll get a settlement and visiting rights with Ai Ling.” He looked around. “Business has really picked up.”

Lilia said, “Yes. I was even summoned to Seventh Avenue by the Kindly Ones.”

“My, MY!”

“Remember when telephone gossip was the fastest news on the planet? Now what any kid posts online, the world knows before the next day dawns.”

Larry smiled and turned away. She watched him help a pale young man select a ring with a tiny broken crucifix on it.

Lilia remembered the last Nightwalker scene turning sour. “
BLOODY HELL
” screamed a Post headline. “
Nightwalkers in Rehab
,” was a three part series in the
The Village Voice
. But it was years between those first hints and the morning everyone woke up with hideous addictions to blood and biting.

This time the turnaround would be quick. And Lilia knew she had to ride the wave or go under for good.

A few nights later, the Savage Design trio, complete with personal assistants, photographers, a video crew and a special secret, arrived at Lilia’s shop.

Paulo, in soccer shorts and jersey, repeatedly kicked a ball against the hydrant in front of Reliquary. The kid’s legs did a fast dance step as he stopped the rebound each time then slammed the ball again. Seemingly independent of this, the lizard eyes took in the store and its surroundings.

Felice nodded to Lilia as she went through Reliquary with her face carefully kept in neutral and examined everything while murmuring notes to herself on a hand-held recorder.

“Nothing needs to be changed,” she said to the production assistant who followed her. “Treat each dusty corner and gauche display as an asset. Pretend you’re an explorer stumbling on a mysterious if tacky Transylvanian castle.”

Then she said into the recorder, “Time is more precious than blood on this particular project. It’s all a matter of
death
and DEATH.”

A team of trimmers lighted and dressed Reliquary’s front windows. Katya appeared outside shortly afterwards, towering in dark, rough leather platform shoes with dizzyingly high heels that seemed to be watching when you stared. She herded a couple of long-necked professional models and half a dozen Nightwalker kids whom she’d discovered around the city.

The photography crew did shots of them posing on the sidewalk. “They’ll be in here shortly,” Katya assured Lilia when she popped into the shop. She also insisted on using Scarlet Jones and Bret in the promotional shots.

“We’ll have them behind the counter like they run the place, darling. They exhibit the proper mix of inexperience and incipient damnation.”

It went without saying that Lilia herself would stay out of camera range—her’s was not the look or age range being aimed for. As the crew began setting up inside, the male model said something to Katya that Lilia couldn’t hear. In reply, Katya looked down at him and pointed to her shoes. The guy wilted.

Scarlet Jones and Bret wore sunglasses as they basked in the photographer’s lights. Felice had them change into white silk tops that rested off their shoulders. Lilia noticed that the bites on their necks were deeper and thought these new blouses looked somehow familiar.

Felice turned to her and said, “Of course you recognize the original Herrault design from the last Nightwalker go-round. Maison Herrault itself OK’d these knock-offs.

“I was afraid we’d have to go to Indonesia for production. Time delay on a fad like this can be fatal. But Hurrah for the Recession! Suddenly there are sweatshops in the Bronx—fast, cheap, and with passable quality.”

Lilia looked away lest Felice smile. But she heard the other say, “Reliquary will get a six week exclusivity period, after which they’ll be sold at other specialty shops throughout North America and world markets. Then,” her mouth turned downward, “Blooming-dales, Macy’s, and by next summer, Target.” She and the young man adjusting Scarlet and Bret’s clothes both shuddered.

“Here’s a little surprise,” said Katya, “someone you’ll remember from the ‘good’ old days.”

Paulo somewhat gingerly ushered in a tiny, ancient woman. As she entered, this woman briskly flicked a cigarette butt on the sidewalk while reaching into the formless smock she wore to draw out and light another one.

Lilia looked on amazed. This was the legendary Marguerite, “The Seamstress Extraordinary,” as she’d been called back in the old Garment District. It was said that Marguerite could, without measuring, without even looking, cut a sleeve or a pant leg to exactly the length needed.

That afternoon Marguerite smoked one Galois after another. Requests that she stop were met with shrugs, coughs and mumbles in barely recognizable English, “A vice like any other!”

“Amazed?” Paulo murmured to Lilia.

“That she’s not dead,” Lilia said.

“Not in the usual sense anyway,” he replied. “She’s become a sort of curator for Herrault. His emissary in this world.”

In the old days, Marguerite was employed at the prestigious Maison Herrault’s New York branch and lent out to old friends of the late designer. She would always be brought along on fashion shoots in cases of an emergency.

One had arisen in Reliquary just before she appeared. The lapel of the top Bret wore wouldn’t lay open at the angle the photographer wanted. Marguerite reached up for Bret’s ear, pulled his head down to her eye level, and with a needle, thread, and scissors from inside her smock, made three stitches and fixed the lapel in place.

Decades before as a naïve young intern, Lilia had first encountered Marguerite. It was in a room slightly larger than a closet at the Studio Building where all fashion photography was done back in that day.

There, with fabric fragments thick on the floor, Marguerite stitched buttons onto a waistband while she squinted at the airshaft outside the window and sipped from a small glass of what young Lilia supposed was red wine.

She had been told to take a pair of women’s flared slacks and have Marguerite turn them into culottes. This was an emergency, a great crisis—the shoot was to feature culottes but the garment in question did not yet exist.

Marguerite was present for just such moments. She had looked at Lilia with disgust and disapproval as if she was about to send her back to the kitchen with the demand that she be properly braised.

Then, with scarcely a glance at the design sketch Lilia gave her, Marguerite had snipped off one leg, with a second slice snipped the other and cuffed both with a few stitches. She muttered “voila,” blew smoke in Lilia’s face and shoved the garment at her.

Recalling this, Lilia watched Marguerite finger the tops Scarlet and Bret wore. “Instant prêt a porter!” the old woman muttered to herself. “For such a venue anything more than off-the-rack would not do.”

Herrault had been a contemporary of Chanel, protégé of Schiaparelli, lover of Mainbocher, rival of Dior. His ‘Sang Chaud’ Collection, the master’s last great triumph, had defined the look of the prior Nightwalker craze.

His slacks, jackets, skirts and gowns draped the wearer almost rigidly. But his tops were open, flowing. “The throat too is an erogen-ous zone,” he famously said, “I believe the ultimate one.” His firm, Maison Herrault, carried on his cult.

Behind Lilia, Katya whispered, “We’re doing it backwards this time. First come these knockoffs with a certain flair.”

“Herrault’s name will never be officially connected with any of this,” said Felice. “But the look will be pushed in places like
Our Daily Shmata
. Images being shot today will turn up in every online post about the dark new trend.”

“Next spring, Maison Herrault will put out a line that incorporates this ‘street fashion,’” said Paulo. “We aim for a quick kill and exit.”

The kid’s body, restless, started dribbling the heavy soccer ball on the floor. Even Marguerite noticed and winced.

Lilia concentrated on the six weeks in which these tops would be hers alone to sell.

Late the next day, Lilia began seeing images of the shoot on websites like “Stuff I Saw Last Night.” One favorite was a shot of Reliquary taken at dusk from across the street. Felice’s copy ran with it:
Nightwalkers are all dark glamour, forbidden fashion
.

In the photo, a young guy dressed casually and walking on the sidewalk was caught by surprise and held by the gaze of a woman whose dark clothes seemed to blend into the shadows in which she stood. The silk scarf around her elegant neck flowed over her shoulders as if blown in a night breeze.

The lighted shop windows behind them displayed pairs of manikins echoing the live models’ poses. One had the sexes of Nightwalker and potential recruit reversed; in the other both were the same sex.

She scrolled past shots of the interior with Scarlet, Bret and company caught in moments of beauty and mystery. Interspersed with this was more copy:

They’re the newest thing!

They’re exclusive, an ultimate in-group. 

You rarely see an unattractive Child of the Night!

And you never meet a dull one!

Those words came back to Lilia after dark on an evening in the short days of November. A young
Vogue
editor, favored by the Kindly Ones and aiming to steal a prime place in the February book, was shooting a secret preview of Maison Herrault’s Fall/Winter collection. Marguerite was on hand.

The Children of the Night were trendy again but Lilia, feeling frumpy and old, was shoved once more into a corner of her own shop. She wore a leather choker under her turtleneck sweater.

The leather held evidence of a few token love bites and at least one deep and sincere chomp customers had sent her way in the last few days. Lilia remembered the soft glow a bite could give both vampire and victim. But she was not going to get hooked like last time.

She was not alone in her corner. Larry had come in as the
Vogue
crew was setting up. Immediately the ethereal young guy with whom he entered was seized by the editor. “Wherever did you find him! Surely he’ll want to be part of this!” The young man went with the editor and never once glanced back.

Larry, looking frazzled and worn, told Lilia, “There’s going to be a divorce settlement, but not as big as I’d thought. He threatens to bring up vampires as regards visiting rights with Ai-Ling.”

“You’ve been down before,” Lilia found herself saying, bucking him up just as in the old days. “Like I was until recently,” she added, to let him know she hadn’t forgotten his decades of neglect.

He winced and said, “There’s stuff I regret.”

“Me too. Nightwalker life was wild fun at first. Then came the pain of kicking the blood habit.”

“Ichordone therapy,” he said. “Methadone for vampires. It was torture. I came out of that cured and brainwashed into thinking all I wanted was to find a rich mate, have a nice life, and raise children.”

“You made it clear the future wouldn’t include me,” she said.

“I wish I was as sure of anything now as I was of EVERYTHING right then,” he said. It was as close to an apology as he was likely to give.

Lilia noted with some relish his unsuccessful attempts to catch the eye of the guy he’d come with. But she felt a pang of regret when Larry gave up, said good night, and exited.

Under the lights, Marguerite, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, subdued a recalcitrant ruffle with a swift succession of scissor snips.

Lilia remembered the second episode of their long ago encounter in the Studio Building. A terrible mistake had occurred! The flared slacks had been turned into culottes. BUT the former slacks themselves were needed for a shot that HAD to be done.

The photographer and the art director were afraid to face the Seamstress Extraordinary, so Lilia was sent again. When she appeared and stuttered through her request, Marguerite had glared at her while fingering the scissors. She pointed at the slacks legs on the floor. Lilia stooped and handed them to her.

Marguerite slugged the last contents of the glass down, picked up a threaded needle. Again, without looking, the ageless woman stitched a leg together once, twice, perhaps six times.

The juncture was almost invisible to the eye and certainly could be to the camera. She handed the slacks back to Lilia. “But the other leg,” said the girl.

“En silhouette,” said the woman, sank back on a stool and closed her eyes. “One side only,” she added.

“I can’t take it back like this!”

In a move like a snake, the woman grabbed Lilia’s left hand. With scissors she cut the girl’s index finger, squeezed out bubbles of blood, and avidly lapped them all off. She repeated this a few times, then picked up the slacks and again with no more than six stitches created a seamless whole. Lilia, in tears, picked up the garment with her unbloodied hand and fled.

For the rest of that day she floated in a world where light blurred her vision into color patterns, where hysterical photographers and art directors existed in a distant place and nothing touched her.

Only later when she and Larry entered the world of the Nightwalkers did Lilia understand that what she’d felt had been just a small corner of the wonder of the Bite. At that point she also had not faced the horrid downside of withdrawal.

At Reliquary the night of the
Vogue
shoot, Lilia didn’t notice Marguerite beside her until the old woman grabbed her hair and pulled her head down. With a tiny shears she snipped the leather choker on Lilia’s neck and bit her long and deep.

“This is not a game for tourists and amateurs,” she hissed as Lilia floated in a blood high. “You will not stand apart and be amused at the workings of my world.”

Late that February, all was celebratory in the Savage Design conference room. Maison Herrault had triumphed in New York and Paris. The
Vogue
layout, all dark elegance and pale skin, was displayed on the walls.

Marguerite and the Kindly Ones were very pleased with their shares of the proceeds. Lilia sat as far away from everyone as possible. She floated on the remnants of the prior night’s blood buzz and gazed at the artwork through sunglasses.