The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (325 page)

“Dora knew from nothing and was outside playing down the block. They were all packed! I shot Terry and the boyfriend, right in that stupid little tract house in Metairie where Terry had chosen to bring up my daughter rather than on St. Charles Avenue. Shot them both. Got blood all over her polyester wall-to-wall carpet, and her Formica-top kitchen breakfast bar.”

“I can imagine it.”

“I dumped both of them in the swamps. It had been a long time since I’d handled something like this directly, but no matter, it was easy enough. The electrician’s truck was in the garage anyway, and I bagged them up, and I took them out that way, into the back of the truck. I took them way out somewhere, out Jefferson Highway, I don’t even know where I dumped them. No, maybe it was out Chef Menteur. Yeah, it was Chef Menteur. Somewhere around one of the old forts on the Rigules River. They just disappeared in the muck.”

“I can see it. I’ve been dumped in the swamps myself.”

He was too excited to hear my mumblings. He continued.

“Then I went back for Dora, who was by then sitting on the steps with her elbows on her knees wondering why nobody was home, and the door was locked so she couldn’t get in, and she started screaming, ‘Daddy! I knew you’d come. I knew you would!’ the minute she saw me. I didn’t risk going inside to get her clothes. I didn’t want her to see the blood. I put her with me in the boyfriend’s pickup truck and out of New Orleans we drove, and we left the truck in Seattle, Washington. That was my cross-country odyssey with Dora.

“All those miles, insanity, just the two of us together talking and talking. I think I was trying to tell Dora everything that I had learned. Nothing evil and self-destructive, nothing that would ever bring the darkness near her, only the good things, what I had learned about virtue and honesty and what corrupts people, and what was worthwhile.

“ ‘You can’t just simply do nothing in this life, Dora,’ I kept saying, ‘you can’t just leave this world the way you found it.’ I even told her how when I was young I was going to be a religious leader, and what I did now was collect beautiful things, church art from all over Europe and the Orient. I dealt in it, to keep the few pieces I wanted. I led her to believe, of course, that is what had made me rich, and by then, oddly enough, it was partly true.”

“And she knew you’d killed Terry.”

“No. You got the wrong idea on that one. All those images were tumbling in my mind. I felt it when you were taking my blood. That wasn’t it. She knew I’d gotten rid of Terry, or I’d freed her from Terry, and now she could be with Daddy forever, and fly away with Daddy when Daddy flew away. That’s a different thing from knowing Daddy murdered Terry. That she does not know. Once when she was twelve, she called, sobbing, and said, ‘Daddy, will you please tell me where Mother is, where did she and that guy go when they went to Florida.’ I played it off, that I hadn’t wanted to tell her that Terry was dead. Thank God for the phone. I do very well on the phone. I like it. It’s like being on the radio.

“But back to Dora of six years old. Daddy took Dora to New York and got a suite at the Plaza. After that, Dora had everything Daddy could buy.”

“She cry for Terry even then?”

“Yes. And she was probably the only one who ever did. Before the wedding, Terry’s mother had told me Terry was a slut. They hated each other. Terry’s father had been a policeman. He was an okay guy. But he didn’t like his daughter either. Terry wasn’t a nice person. Terry was mean by nature;
Terry wasn’t even a good person to bump into in the street, let alone to know or to need or to hold.

“Her family back there thought she’d run off to Florida and abandoned Dora to me. That’s all they ever knew till the day the old man and woman died, Terry’s parents. There’s some cousins. They still believe that. But they don’t know who I am, really, it’s all rather difficult to explain. Of course by now maybe they’ve seen the articles in the papers and magazines. I don’t know, that’s not important. Dora cried for her mother, yes. But after that big lie I told her when she was twelve, she never asked about anything again.

“But Terry’s devotion to Dora had been as perfect as that of any mammalian mother! Instinctive; nurselike; antiseptic. She’d feed Dora from the four food groups. She’d dress Dora up in beautiful clothes, take her to dancing school, and sit there and gossip with the other mothers. She was proud of Dora. But she rarely ever spoke to Dora. I think they could go for days without their eyes meeting. It was mammalian. And for Terry, probably everything was like that.”

“This is rather funny, that you should get mixed up with a person like this, you know.”

“No, not funny. Fate. We made Dora. She gave the voice to Dora, and the beauty. And there is something in Dora from Terry which is like hardness, but that’s too unkind a word. Dora is a mixture of us, really, an optimum mixture.”

“Well, you gave her your own beauty too.”

“Yes, but something far more interesting and marketable happened when the genes collided. You’ve seen my daughter. My daughter is photogenic, and beneath the flash and dash I gave her, there is the steadiness of Terry. She converts people over the airwaves. ‘And what is the true message of Christ!’ she declares, staring right into the camera. ‘That Christ is in every stranger you meet, the poor, the hungry, the sick, the people next door!’ And the audience believes it.”

“I’ve watched. I’ve seen her. She could just rise to the top.”

He sighed.

“I sent Dora to school. By this time I was making big, big money. I had to put lots of miles between me and my daughter. I switched Dora among three schools overall before graduation, which was hard for her, but she didn’t question me about these maneuvers, or the secrecy surrounding our meetings. I led her to believe I was always on the verge of having to rush to Florence to save a fresco from being destroyed by idiots, or to Rome to explore a catacomb that had just been found.

“When Dora began to take a serious interest in religion, I thought it was spiritually elegant, you know. I thought my growing collection of statues and books had inspired her. And when she told me at eighteen that she had been accepted to Harvard and that she meant to study comparative religion, I was amused. I made the usual sexist assumption: study what you want and marry a rich man. And let me show you my latest icon or statue.

“But Dora’s fervor and theological bent were developing far beyond anything I had ever experienced. Dora went to the Holy Land when she was nineteen. She went back twice before she graduated. She spent the next two years studying religions all over the world. Then she proposed the entire idea of her television program: she wanted to talk to people. Cable had made possible all these religion channels. You could tune in to this minister or that Catholic priest.

“ ‘You serious about this?’ I asked. I hadn’t known she believed it all. But she was out to be true to ideals that I had never fully understood myself yet somehow passed on to her.

“ ‘Dad, you get me one hour on television three times a week, and the money to use it the way I want,’ she said, ‘and you’ll see what happens.’ She began to talk about all kinds of ethical questions, how we could save our souls in today’s world. She envisioned short lectures or sermons, punctuated by ecstatic singing and dancing. The abortion issue—she makes impassioned logical speeches that both sides are right! She explains how each life is sacrosanct yet a woman must have dominion over her own body.”

“I’ve seen the program.”

“You realize seventy-five different cable networks have picked up this program! You realize what news of my death may do to my daughter’s church?”

He paused, thinking, then resumed as rapid-fire as before.

“You know, I don’t think I ever had a religious aspiration, a spiritual goal, so to speak, that wasn’t drenched in something materialistic and glamorous, do you know what I mean?”

“Of course.”

“But with Dora, it’s different. Dora really doesn’t care about material things. The relics, the icons, what do they mean to Dora? Dora believes against impossible psychological and intellectual odds that God exists.” He stopped again, shaking his head with regret.

“You were right in what you said to me earlier. I am a racketeer. Even for my beloved Wynken I had an angle, what they call now an agenda. Dora is no racketeer.”

I remembered his remark in the barroom, “I think I sold my soul for places like this.” I had known what he was talking about when he said it. I knew it now.

“Let me get back to the story. Early on, as I told you, I gave up that idea of a secular religion. By the time Dora started in earnest, I hadn’t thought about those ambitions in years. I had Dora. And I had Wynken as my obsession. I chased down more of Wynken’s books, and managed through my various connections to purchase five different letters of the period which made clear mention of Wynken de Wilde and Blanche de Wilde and her husband, Damien, as well. I had searchers digging for me in Europe and America. Rhineland mysticism, dig into it.

“My researchers found a capsule version of Wynken’s story in a couple of German texts. Something about women practicing the rites of Diana, witchcraft. Wynken dragged out of the monastery and publicly accused. The record of the trial, however, was lost.

“It had not survived the Second World War. But in other
places there were other documents, caches of letters. Once you had the code word Wynken—once you knew what to look for—you were on the way.

“When I had a tree hour I sat down and looked at Wynken’s little naked people, and I memorized his poems of love. I knew his poems so that I could sing them. When I saw Dora for weekends—and we met somewhere whenever possible—I would recite them to Dora and maybe even show her my latest find.

“She tolerated my ‘Burnt-out hippie version of free love and mysticism,’ as she called it. ‘I love you, Roge,’ she’d say. ‘But you’re so romantic to think this bad priest was some sort of saint. All he did was sleep with these women, didn’t he? And the books were ways of communicating among the others … when to meet.’

“ ‘Ah, but Dora,’ I would say, ‘there was not a vicious or ugly word in the work of Wynken de Wilde. You see for yourself.’ Six books I had by then. It was all about love. My present translator, a professor at Columbia, had marveled at the mysticism of the poetry, how it was a blending of love of God and the flesh. Dora didn’t buy it. But Dora was already obsessed with her own religious questions. Dora was reading Paul Tillich and William James and Erasmus and lots of books on the state of the world today. That’s Dora’s obsession, the State of the World Today.”

“And Dora won’t care about those books of Wynken’s if I get them to her.”

“No, she won’t touch
any
of my collection, not now!” he said.

“Yet you want
me
to protect all these things,” I said.

“Two years ago,” he sighed. “A couple of news articles! No connection to her, you understand, but with her, my cover was blown forever. She’d been suspecting. It was inevitable, she said, that she’d figure out my money wasn’t clean.”

He shook his head. “Not clean,” he said again. He went on. “The last thing she let me do was buy the convent for her. One
million for the building. And one million to gut it of all the modern desecrations and leave it the way it had been for the nuns in the 1880s, with chapel and refectory and dormitory rooms and wide corridors.…

“But even that, she took with reluctance. As for the artwork, forget it. She may never take from me the money she needs to educate her followers there, her order or whatever the hell a televangelist calls it. The cable TV connection is nothing compared to what I could have made it, fixing up that convent as the base. And the collection—the statues, icons—imagine it. ‘I could make you as big as Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell, darling,’ I said to her. ‘You can’t turn away from my money, not for Jesus’ sake.’ ”

He shook his head despairingly. “She meets with me now out of compassion, and of that my beautiful daughter has an endless supply. Sometimes she’ll take a little gift. Tonight, she would not. Once when the program almost went under, she accepted just enough to get it over the hump. But my saints and angels, she won’t touch them. My books, my treasures, she won’t look at them.

“Of course, we both knew the threat to her reputation. You’ve helped by eliminating me. But there’ll be news of my disappearance soon, has to be. ‘Televangelist financed by cocaine king.’ How long can her secrecy last? It has to survive my death and she has to survive my death. At all costs! Lestat, you hear what I’m saying.”

“I am listening to you, Roger, to every word you say. They aren’t on to her yet, I can assure you.”

“My enemies are a ruthless lot. And the government … who knows who the hell the government is or what the hell the government does.”

“She’s afraid of this scandal?”

“No. Brokenhearted, yes, afraid of scandal, never. She’d take what would come. What she wanted was for me to give it all up! That became her attack. She didn’t care that the world might find out we were father and daughter. She wanted me to
renounce everything. She was afraid for me, like a gangster’s daughter would be, like a gangster’s wife.

“ ‘Just let me build the church,’ I kept pleading. ‘Take the money.’ The television show has proved her mettle. But no more … things are in ruins around her. She’s a little one-hour program three times a week. The ladder to heaven is hers alone to climb. I’m out of it. She’s relying on her audience to bring the millions needed to her.

“And the female mystics she quotes, you’ve heard her read from them, Hildegard of Bingen, and Julian of Norwich. Teresa of Avila. You’ve read any of those women?”

“All of them,” I said.

“Smart females who want to hear smart females listen to her. But she’s beginning to attract everyone. You cannot make it in this world if you speak to only one gender. That isn’t possible. Even I know that, the marketeer in me knows that, the Wall Street genius, and I am that, too, have no doubt. She attracts everyone. Oh, if I only had those last two years to do over, if only I could have launched the church before she discovered—”