Consultation with a Vampire - 01 (7 page)

“Yes, and the older the vampire, the more powerful this ability,” DeChevue said with a slight grimace.

“Perhaps you’ll grow into it,” Edwin said.
 

“But I am over 300 years old. There is no way that one such as you could resist.”

“Fine, I will not resist. What assistance can I offer you?”

“Are you mocking me?” DeChevue asked.
 

“Please,” Edwin said. “This is not good for either of us. Let us return to the negotiation.”

DeChevue reached out and grabbed Edwin’s throat. Fangs protruding, he snarled. “What if I rip out your throat for this impudence and bathe in your blood?”

Edwin remained calm. He considered the hideous, vain creature in front of him. Again, he wondered, was this man simply delusional, or was he real? Could he have truly have been alive for 300 years and learned so little about himself?

“You will not harm me,” Edwin said, his voice husky from the claws at his throat.
 

“You seek to control me with your voice? Ha! Your powers are no match for me!”

“I have no powers. You will not harm me because that won’t get you what you want.” The fingers at Edwin’s throat loosened their grip. DeChevue stepped back, a little embarrassed. As DeChevue sank back into his chair, Edwin ignored him.
 

It was time to force his prospective client into a decision. Edwin produced a pen and a small white card from the inside of his suit jacket. Then he made a note on the card and placed it on the coffee table. “I’ve written down an amount and a bank account number. Wire that amount to the bank account, and I will know you are serious. Then we will establish a retainer agreement and begin.”

DeChevue looked at the card. “The amount is no problem. But I do not have a bank account.”

“You have no bank account?” Edwin asked, fearing that this meant DeChevue was the worst kind of impostor – the penniless kind.
 

“M’sieur, when one has lived as long as I have, one develops a profound distrust for banks and paper money.”

This sent a chill down Edwin’s spine. This, this was
exactly
the kind of thing that someone who had lived for hundreds of years might come to believe. How many failed currencies would have passed through this man’s hands? Had he seen the ruinous inflation of King Louis XIV or the subjects of Otto von Bismarck carrying wheelbarrows full of paper through the streets just to buy a loaf of bread? Had he watched the pound sterling and the upstart dollar lose nearly all of their value in the last 125 years? For the first time since the whole strange affair began, Edwin seriously entertained the thought that vampires could be real.
 

“Then, where do you keep your money?”

“Gold, buried in my cellar. For what place could be safer than the lair of Nosferatu!” DeChevue exclaimed with an explosion of melodrama.

Edwin couldn’t tell if this behavior was genius or madness. He said, “Very well. I will take payment in gold.”
 

Agnes and Madeleine looked at Topper with equal amounts of contempt and wondered what he was carrying.
 

Topper looked at Madeleine with moony eyes and said, “I brought you a gift.”
 

“Flowers?” Madeleine asked, her voice dripping with contempt.

“No,” Topper said self-consciously. “They’re BLOOD oranges.” He looked back and forth between the two obviously unimpressed women. “Get it? I was gonna hit a wino over the head with a brick and give ’em to ya. You know, buy ya a nice dinner, but I couldn’t figure out how to drag him into my car. That, and there is all the DNA evidence to worry about. So we can...”
 

“You think I am incapable of hunting for myself?” Madeleine asked, with deadly melodrama.

“Well, sure. I mean, no. I mean. Look, it’s like this. I like you. And in the ancient ways of my tribe, I show my love by killing something and bringing it to you as a trophy.”

“Oh, Good Lord,” Agnes said, confident that God would condone the use of blasphemy as a defense against barbarism.
 

“So, we’ll go out, and the world will be your lobster tank. You just point out who you want for dinner and Ol’ Topper will take care of the rest.”

“Oh, ma petite amuse-bouche...”

“I love it when she calls me that,” Topper mock-whispered to Agnes.
 

“It is not a compliment,” Agnes said.

“You are very sweet,” Madeleine said.

“Oh yeah, baby. Have a little nibble. I am sweeter than Sweet Tarts dissolved in root beer,” Topper said.

“But you are too, too, too.” Topper hung on her every delicate syllable as she searched for the right word in English. “Oh, I cannot.”

“Oh, c’mon, hot French undead broad. Think about how beautiful it could be. We ravish somebody and then have a late-night snack with nobody having to cook! For all eternity!” He looked at the beautiful French vampire pleadingly as if he were trying to persuade a jury.
 

Madeleine laughed. To Topper, it sounded like the most delightful, musical, enchanting sound he had ever heard.
 

“Oh, mon petit hors-d’œuvre. You are–” And here she twisted the spike. “I could never be with you. You are too small to be a main course.”

Topper’s face fell. In all the time that Agnes had known the little man, she had never seen him lose his confidence. His loud, low-to-the-ground brand of swagger had seemed as much a part of him as his skin. But now, it was as if his skin had slipped free and pooled around his ankles. The effect was horrifying. Topper’s spine, usually a tiny barbell of unbendable pride, melted and sagged. His personality retreated from the room, and for the first time, the loud, brash dwarf seemed diminished.
 

Madeleine’s laughter rang harshly in the strange, underground lobby. “Oh, ho, ho, it is sooooo sad. Mon petit. You poor, poor creature, you cannot be a whole man. You are only a midget.” She made the word sound sexy and French, breathing the end of it out: mi-ghey. The muscles in Topper’s scalp tensed, and his ears moved back an inch.

“What’d you say?” Topper asked.

“I am sorry, mon petit.”

“That means ‘little,’ right? That’s just code for ‘midget,’ right?” Topper tried to summon a head of steam. That real, first-rate anger which turned him into the tiny self- (and other-) destructive tornado that he relied upon in dangerous, difficult, or even hilarious situations. But this time, his power would not come.

He thought of throwing himself at her like a man hell-bent on destroying love itself. But that would not get him what he wanted. What he needed as a man in the desert needs water. So, Topper turned to other resources within himself. How could he persuade her she was wrong? A thousand arguments and passionate summaries raced through him. At that moment, he felt he could have convinced any jury anywhere of anything. But even that power was to no avail.
 

Topper knew that women’s hearts do not admit the logic of the courtroom. They are persuaded by more primal magic than eloquence and the law. For in the court of love, logic holds no sway. There is no measure of justice amid the cruel and often random rain of Cupid’s arrows. There is only the expectation of pain and confusion, offset somewhere, however briefly, by the momentary triumph of Eros. For Madeleine, even after all of her years and experience, it came down to a matter of power, money, and height. Topper, while amusing, knew he had scored too low on all three. And although he tried valiantly, there was really no arguing with that.
 

Violence and argument denied to him, he dropped his sack of oranges on the floor, hung his head, and left. Agnes was surprised to find that she felt sorry for him.

The door to Edwin’s underground consulting sphere opened. DeChevue emerged, followed by Edwin, who had to duck a little to make it through the standard-sized door.
 

As Madeleine looked at Edwin, her eyes traveled upward and upward. What stature, she thought. What a cold air he had about him. Not petty cruelty, but true, ruthless indifference. The attraction was instant. Like the female praying mantis, she wanted to climb him and consume him from the head down.
 

“You drive an especially hard bargain,” DeChevue said, looking more than a little defeated by their exchange. Madeleine was shocked to see her master, her creator, the strongest man or vampire she had ever known, somehow overcome by a mortal. How could this be? Her attraction to Edwin grew stronger.
 

“Why did you not bend him to your will?” she asked DeChevue.
 

“I tried. It did not work,” said the vampire, more than a little embarrassed.

“It cannot be,” Madeleine protested, adding, “There is no man who can resist my charms.”

“Very well, you may try,” DeChevue said with a shrug.
 

Madeleine rose from her chair and advanced upon her prey. Edwin looked down upon her and said, “Please, it is late and I am tired.”
 

“Nothing can save you from Madeleine!” she hissed dramatically. Edwin sighed. Then Madeleine raised her arms and waved them slowly and, she thought, quite seductively. A nice touch, but her real work was in the eyes. From the windows of her soul, she reached out to Edwin. She reached toward his lust, toward his fear, toward his warm, weak humanity.
 

His expression unchanged, Edwin just stared at her.
 

Madeleine could not understand. It was as if his soul had been removed or locked away. In its place was an endless cold, the clicking of relays, the patient measurement of infinitesimal neural voltage drops. She recoiled in amazement, gasping for air. “You? You!” she said, unable to voice what she felt. He was completely beyond her and she had never encountered such a thing– or even imagined it was possible.
 

“Madeleine, we must go,” DeChevue commanded. “The night awaits!”

Her eyes lingered upon Edwin’s. She bit the right corner of her lower lip and then tore herself away.
 

As the two “vampires” stalked out of the chamber, Edwin called out, “Thank you, Monsieur. I am ready to begin whenever you are.”

“Well,” Agnes said, “that was precisely the sort of thing that gives the ridiculous a bad name.”

“Yes, indeed. Now I must get some sleep, for there is much to do.”

“You don’t really- I mean, come now, Edwin. You don’t think they are really vampires, do you?”
 

“I don’t know, Agnes, but if he can pay, I am prepared to work for him.”

As Edwin gathered his things, he wondered, But what if they are real? What dark possibilities would that unlock?
 

It had been easy enough for Edwin to dismiss an offer of immortality as a matter of reflex. Basic negotiation strategy was always to reject the first offer; a better deal might be waiting in the wings. It was a sound defensive strategy as well. If people do not know what is important to you, they cannot use it to control you.
 

But now that DeChevue had paid and Edwin had sequestered himself to work, he’d had time to think it over.
 

It had taken Edwin all of three days to solve DeChevue’s problem. He had spent an additional day mopping up a few ancillary difficulties that DeChevue hadn’t asked (or even thought) about, but they were easy enough to fix. After all, a sizable stack of gold sat in Edwin’s safe. He could do a little work to earn it.
 

As Edwin always did, he used his office as an extension of his mind. He organized and re-organized information throughout the vast room. He created new connections by moving things around. Sometimes he would sit quietly and watch the light play across the visible constructions of his thinking. All too often, an idea that seemed brilliant in the dwindling light of the afternoon would be revealed as utter folly in the clear light of a fresh dawn.

So it was that his normally empty, pristine office, high in the city’s most elegant building, became filled with books, binders, scraps of information written on odd-sized paper, and strips of red ribbon indicating the flashes of insight that connected seemingly unrelated ideas.
 

On the fifth day, he moved a few items around out of boredom, but he was really just going through the motions. The work was done. Now, the mighty engine of Edwin’s brain searched for another problem to solve. So it was that his thoughts returned to DeChevue’s offer and the theoretically infinite number of tomorrows it presented.

The whole idea set Edwin profoundly on edge. He had often imagined his life as a function, a summation, of a long series of days that stretched forward until his inevitable termination — the day that life called him into its office and told him, gently, kindly, respectfully, that his services would no longer be required. Edwin believed that his role as a rational creature was to maximize the value of his function in the time he had.
 

But to push back the ending? To delay it until, perhaps, infinity! Would that not push the present value of his function to infinity? Should that not be a summation devoutly wished?

How would it work? Edwin wondered. Did it matter? Did it matter how men flew through the air? Did it matter how one man might live forever by avoiding the sunlight and drinking the blood of others? Of course, these things mattered in a theoretical sense. Someone should investigate and make sure that the universe was still playing by the rules. But as a practical matter for a man of business, when one saw a man fly past the window in a spandex costume, one did not ask, “How is that accomplished?” One asked, “To what profitable use can I put that?”

Of course, such a transaction presented a number of practical problems. Would DeChevue follow through on his offer? There was no possibility of partial payment to secure the deal. One could not put immortality in escrow. But as a theoretical ideal... If Edwin could trust the self-centered fop who styled himself Lord of the Night...

He thought on it for days. The gyroscope of his brain spun in tighter and tighter circles, and got nowhere.