He rapped three times hard on the director's door of the Wallace Wing. A minute passed and he rapped again, harder this time.
"Come."
He pushed the door open on Charles's rectory. This wasn't the first time he had been here. A real overworked packrat, Braxton's suite resembled the home-away-from- home that became the fate of so many New Yorker workers' office spaces. Except that here fossils and Greek amphorae and modern appliances shouldered each other for room on the wall-climbing shelves. Beside the door crouched one of Charles's personal affectations--a taxidermized upstate ten-point buck with black glass alien eyes. Hunting was about the only sport that Charles took in, if you didn't count railing on his poor employees half the time and firing them the other half.
As brutal as he sometimes was, Alek had to admit that Braxton was a fair employer in a city that didn't seem to know what fair play was anymore. Alek glanced away from the deer, remembering those occasional tirades in Color Deluxe, how it had taken just about every once of his patience to keep from quitting his job as an usher in the museum.
But he supposed it was the art that had kept him going. The possibility that maybe one day--maybe one day soon--Charles Braxton would really look at his work and give him a grant. A show. A real show like the masters were apt to get. Well, he'd had it, hadn't he? And where had his dreams brought him? The most important day of his life also turned out to be the last normal one. He looked at the oil painting hanging on the far wall of Charles's office--a woman with chains upon her face and her arm upraised to an encroaching storm--and wondered who had hung it there, Charles or Tahlia.
"I like your work," Tahlia said. She was standing off to one side near the oil, a glass of wine in her hand. Her husband was nowhere to be found. She lowered her gaze, looked up at him piously from beneath her feathery lashes as if he was some interesting painting or sculpture to be appraised and categorized. Alek felt a curious mixture of relief and gratitude, as if the matter of his talent might end there. But Tahlia had other plans. From the tone of her voice he was almost certain that she was merely being polite. "But I think you are greedy. You play at feelings, yes, but you also hide behind them."
Her bizarre critiquing of his work caught him off-guard. His head jerked up and he almost completely forgot his reason for being here.
"What...do you mean?"
"Art is suffering. Every great artist suffers. It is the human condition that makes him suffer--loss, sorrow, the futility of love, the fears of mortality. You have painted loss. But the loss you paint is a sham and of little consequence. You paint darkness, but it is the darkness you imagine men feel, the darkness you believe waits for them at the end of their lives. It is not your darkness. The only work which almost touches your brilliance is this one. You are greedy and you keep the darkness and the loss and, ultimately, the beauty, to yourself. You keep it within, afraid to expose it to the sun. And because of that greed, because of that petty need to hide your beauty, you will never be great."
She spoke quietly, earnestly, without condescending him, and Alek knew in his heart that she was right. He also knew that she had studied his work, all of it, for this painting on Braxton's wall he considered his best. He had poured everything he had at the time into the image. But there was also the uneasy feeling that somehow or other he had traded on misfortune to create it, like a fascinated bystander at the scene of a gruesome car accident.
Tahlia shrugged noncommittally. Again as if his fears and agenda were plain for her to see. "An artist is a vampire, did you know? He drinks the pain and sorrow out of the wounds of others and turns that pain and sorrow into immortality. And when you do that you raise a monument to his or her memory. You make your sufferers immortal."
Under a wall armory of shields and crosswords and weapons of the Crusades, Teresa sat up on Charles's leather smoking couch. Alek hadn't noticed her there until just now, as she came alive like some great porcelain artist's doll. She seemed about ready to say something, then changed her mind and put her hands in her lap.
"You have," he said, watching Teresa, "an unusual perspective, Mrs. B--Tahlia."
"Perhaps I am more like you than unlike you. Even for our obvious differences."
Alek hesitated, the fear of being bated somehow hovering near. "I'm not sure I understand what you mean," he said at last.
"You choose to be evasive." She nodded, put her hand over a yellowish skull on Charles's desk weighing invoices; it was a great feline skull, extinct, with saber teeth, but she touched it like a pet she had once loved. "We could play that game, yes. But I rather doubt you have much time left. The Coven is closing in on you. Wine?" She offered him a glass.
His head spun. For a moment, yet again, he almost felt as if Akisha were again with him, motherly and protective, yet a brutal predator to him as well. He took the glass, set it aside, atop a text book. "Who are you?'
"Tahlia Frencesca Braxton," she answered simply.
"No--who are you? How do you know Byron? And the Coven? What do you know about that?"
She smiled. Demure. She drank her wine. "You seek the Chronicle. Paris's Chronicle. Am I right?"
Alek said, "How can you...?" He looked to Teresa; together, they looked at Tahlia. Tahlia nodded and sucked back on her smoke with careful passion. Then she crushed it out and halved her eyes like some wily cat. "Oh, this is before your time, dear. I was a regular wet-nose myself when I knew Byron. A debutante, if such a thing still existed in the forties. Long time ago, back when the dinosaurs ruled the earth."
She tipped her head, again catlike. A secretive woman, but full of secrets she could no longer hide. Or chose not to. "Of course you won't find anything in those artsy books on Byron. He was a cartographer in the French army, did you know? He also raided tombs in Egypt and pyramids in South America. Later on, he played the tragic eccentric painter, all right, but within reason. You see, Byron didn't care at all about upping his piece value if it meant drawing every slayer down out of his hole like flies to a carcass."
Alek felt frozen to the floor with fascination.
Tahlia smiled her wide, toothy, movie-star smile. Suddenly she became the White Bird again, the cat no longer. "His exhibits were on loan here and Byron came following after--what folks today call a tour, I guess. Only they called it abroad then. Anyway, Byron told me everything about Paris and the Coven--about the coward who calls himself Amadeus. Byron used to wander the galleries after closing, sit and study the frescoes. And could Byron talk. Said he remembered the Bastille, the Occupation. Napoleon, Hitler--they were all the same to him. When you were as old as he was it all starts running together, he said. Only art bookmarks time. He pointed to a hundred different pieces he'd done under a hundred different names. He used to laugh he'd died a thousand deaths a poor, proud painter."
Tahlia nodded to herself. "And me...well, I guess I was his Renfield. At first. At least until the night he started showing me the basics of watercolor in his Village loft and finished up showing me other things." She fell to a meditative silence and watched the floor, her eyes alight with memories, some sweet, some so sad they were a palpable emotion between the two of them, like the fragrance of a woman's skin, the brush of silk.
Alek closed his eyes, then opened them again. He wandered closer to the woman, examining her mature but in no way unbeautiful face. The lines there were not imperceptible, but instead of aging her as they should have, they gave her only a mysterious character. She was like one of his own, but not. She was mortal. Wasn't she? "You can't be in your seventies. It's not possible."
"Seventy-six," she said, reaching for a sip of wine. "The blood of his kind...it acts rather like an elixir on human tissue, did you know?" She smiled, but now somehow infinitely sadly, as if she'd been asked to speak of the dead. She sat down at her husband's desk and took the stem of her cigarette from her upturned mouth and rested it lightly at her temple. Her hand grew utterly still over the cat skull. Still now, she was like a famous oil saying much by saying nothing at all. Then the portrait came alive. The portrait said, "We both expected him to bury me. We never expected we would have only thirteen years out of an eternity. Thirteen years..."
Teresa had risen from the couch, And now she went to the woman and knelt at Tahlia's feet and took her hand from off the cat skull and held it prayerfully between both of her own. Was this possible now, this icon? Predator subservient to prey? But it was. It was.
"Love is dangerous," she said. "I am sorry for your loss, but all of us here have lost someone."
Tahlia's eyes narrowed and she set aside her smoke and sealed the icon with her second mortal hand. "I married Charlie--I don't know, I suppose I thought it would help me find the answers I needed. The names of the people involved in Byron's disappearance. Charlie knows so much of this town...but nothing ever came of it." Her face darkened. She said, after blowing out a breath, "Byron was not a man you would have liked to know, sister. Too old. Full of bitter drink. And I fear some of it has rubbed off on me."
"I know the one you seek, caro," Teresa whispered, her black lashes skating her white cheek as she dropped her eyes.
"I'd heard a name once, a woman, Deb--"
"Amadeus."
It was enough to slay her speech. She looked ready to protest, but Teresa chose to gift her with her attention again and something in Teresa's eyes stopped her. The truth.
"Debra--was Byron's lover for a time, but never his slayer," Teresa said.
Tahlia hesitated a moment. Then she nodded, numb perhaps straight to the bone. Alek could in fact feel the shock pouring off of her in freezing-hot waves. It was like an epiphany. It was like death. Or a bizarre rebirth. He couldn't imagine it--to spend practically your entire life in the revenge business, chasing a woman down who was already dead.
Unspent tears gleamed in Tahlia's eyes. She glanced querulously around the room as if searching for something or seeking an escape. "I am sorry. I'm a foolish old woman. And a bad hostess. If there's anything I can get you--?"
"There is." Alek withdrew the handmade map and spread it out on the desk in front of her.
Tahlia looked it over for a moment. Then she looked up.
"It's Byron's work, Tahlia."
"I know. You do wonderful reproductions," she said.
He took a deep breath, wondering how to phrase this correctly. "Then maybe you know why I'm here."
"You're here for the Chronicle," she said, and Alek felt his heat skip. "Byron told me. He said he had it, that someone would come for it. But no one ever did." Her husky smoker's voice faded to a whisper. Then nothing. "Debra," she said the name, finally. "Who was she?"
"Just another victim." Alek looked aside. His voice, when it came haltingly a few moment's later, sounded to himself like a lone wind through a tunnel of rocks. "Tahlia...Do you have it, still? The Chronicle? Did Byron give it to you?"
She will say no. For a moment he was absolutely sure. She will say no, that Byron died before he ever gave it to her. She will say no, sorry kids, he didn't, and that will be that.
"Yes."
Alek started like a man kicked. His heart fluttered. "You have it? You really do?" He was leaning all the way over the desk, practically in Tahlia's face, so close he could smell the human commingling of sweat and tobacco smoke and musky perfume on her. And he did not care.
Tahlia hesitated herself, but only a moment. "I have a box, a fireproofed box. He gave it to me." She mimed its size, about a foot in breadth, twice that in length.
Oh yes! Yes, yes, yes!
She got up from her seat. "It's in Charlie's wall safe. I put it there. I don't know why." She moved robotically to the Manet on the wall opposite his fresco and opened it, spun a combination lock, and the door clicked silently open. She dug for a minute or two. The box had been there a long time obviously and had found its way to the far back. But after a few heartpounding moments she turned around with the fireproofed box in both hands.
It was one of those dark green late-sixties models, the kind used by the military before they became a mainstay in the American public. Old, but built to last a long time. Decades. Maybe centuries.
It fell heavy as a brick upon Braxton's desk.
Tahlia said, "I told Charlie it was my mother's pearls. I didn't want him to open it and know. I still don't." She looked up at him. Not imploringly, but with comradeship.
"Your secret dies with me," he said. "I swear it."
Teresa's hand fell over the box. She pet it forlornly, like some great treasure. A treasure, yes. Great? Yes, yes! They had done it. Done what they must. And now Alek felt such relief and long-stayed fatigue he wondered it he wouldn't simply fall to the floor in a faint. He didn't know what they would find when they opened that box, did not know if it would really be enough to save him, but here at least was dated, living proof of what the Vatican had planned for Alek's people, proof that the Coven was a useless mental fixation, a Judas goat that would one day very soon lead all the others to slaughter.
He looked again at the keyless box, the way Teresa moved her fingers around the locked-tight edges. She grunted, and then there was a snap of metal. She flipped the top back.
Alek leaned in close, saw the inside of the box was encrusted with dust and five decades of debris. And a book. It stank like a library and Alek felt his heart climb another notch up his throat in anticipation.
Teresa gathered the Chronicle in her arms, lifted it out of the box, and presented it to him. For a moment he did nothing but stare at it, the swirls of dust on the battered brown leather cover, the mark of Teresa's fingerprints on it. And then he took it, looking up at her with surprise.
Her face was a bitter mask, her eyes stormy. He tried to tell himself that this was a moment of joy and discovery, but already a chill had taken root in his belly like a little worm. The blood slowed in his veins. He hated that look on her face, hated her for having it now.
Then she turned away.
"Is that why he died?" Tahlia whispered, her voice iced with sarcasm as she glanced over at the massive tome.
Alek gave in and opened the book. Latin. He read the first words on the first page to himself.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
He touched the ancient page, concentrated on the words as if they would change before his very eyes.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...
In the beginning...
No. That wasn't true. This wasn't real. Because--because he had done all this now, the subway and the Empress, and before, all that, Akisha and Byron's awful work and the swan and he had fought in this war, yes he had, and there were those who had died in the name of this thing, this impossible thing (now, yes, very impossible, yes) but this wasn't the way things were, no, no, not at all. This wasn't the way things were supposed to turn out...
But was it a joke then? A joke with an evil punchline?
In the beginning God...
There was no Chronicle. Or at least, none here. None in the States. None that Byron had had. Paris...what had he done? Was it still in Rome, then? Did it even exist at all anymore?
Someone put their hand on him. He snarled and retreated from the contact, snarled at them both, through his nose and his bitter, tasteless mouth. He narrowed his eyes, felt the beauty of his own monstrosity seize him, blacken the pits of his eyes. He would be ugly then, ugly like the monster at the and of the story when it sheds the final level of its humanity like a bad skin. Like a snake. Like what he was, under the man. The snake. The beast, The vampire monster that could scare even the most sophisticated and jaded back to their childhood fears. He would be ugly because it was what he was, had always been, would always be.
He scarcely recalled his next move, only the numbing mash of the canvas in front of him, his fresco, and the maze of mindless panic within, the slash of human fingernails that were anything but human, the strength that belonged to the beast and only the beast. The scrape and skitter of torn fabric, the flakes of oil paint under his nails. And then the floor itself rose like a mountain of wood planks constructed with the sole purpose of tripping him up. Climbing it he lost faith and fell to his knees. So he gave in and crawled like an infant, like an animal, to the top and made it out of the hot, headachey, overstuffed office, out into the scorching cold where he could be free. Could fly--.
He fell. Sprawled. Broken. Finished. There was white now in his hair and he thought with giddy amazement, I am Amadeus after all. As was foretold, as is preordained, our names, together, writ in the book of the world in our own commingled blood. Why do I care?
The book. The useless book.
Written for Man. For the Chosen of God.
Not for him and his. Not for his kith.
Not for the vampire. Never that.
Why am I fighting it?
And she found him like that, the little whore, found him weeping with the humor of irony and his forgotten pain. And he looked at her over one shoulder, spitting frozen strands of his hair away, in complete abhorrence of all she was. Fucking whore. That was what she was. All she was. Monster. Medusa who bad bewitched him.
Lilith.
Cunt.
"Caro," she spoke softly, coming toward him, as to the savage or the sick or the dead.
He answered her not at all.
"Beloved--"
He exploded. "Don't say that," he spat. "Don't ever fucking call me that, you fucking bitch!"
She frowned and reached for him and he cowered, bared his teeth in a treacherous smile like an animal trapped in its warren with no hope of escape. He was cold, cold as death, and it was dark and her face glowed pale and as perfect as the cold Valentine moon overhead, a moon that never left, that would keep him in its lunar spell forever.
But she was not Debra, had never been Debra. Debra was dead. And now, at last, so was he. She loved him, perhaps, but what she loved was dead and loveless. "I never asked for you," he told her with enormous honesty and articulation. "I'm not like you! I'm not like you at all! I hate you, I hate you to death, to hell!"
Perhaps she wept or died under his words, but what did it matter? It was his craft to destroy, his obligation. It was what Amadeus had fashioned him for, his only purpose
He was a slayer.
A machine built for only one purpose.
He was an angel, a harbinger of death.
And he wept tears of blood.