“This Vikram. His people anyway. They killed Chad? And maybe Roxanne?” I said.
“Sounds like them. I seen them work once. I was part of a tribe for a while. They got sloppy. Vikram’s folks showed up in the middle of the night. They don’t fool. I hid till it was over.”
“Are they looking for me?”
She shrugged, lips pouted.
“No ways to know. You did the right thing coming here. And you got damned lucky meeting me. I can school you. Keep you on the narrow path.”
“By not leaving bodies behind?”
“Uh huh,” she said.
“But I still have to feed. And some of us need more than you,” I said.
“You eat all your meals in one place. I mean, back when you were living?”
“No.”
“Eat all of them at once? Breakfast? Supper?”
“Unh uh.”
“Same now. No need to guzzle when you can sip. It’s more work sometimes but lots safer.” She hopped off the bench, hands in the pockets of a wool coat two sizes too big for her. The hem slapped the back of her bare calves as she walked. I followed her around the pond toward a park exit.
“Not sure what you mean,” I said.
“Take a little from this one. Little from that one till you have what you need.”
“Don’t people object to having a vein opened by a total stranger?”
“There’s more than enough folks in a city this big never notice if you cut them. Drunks and hopheads almost anywhere you look—if you know where to look.”
“Hopheads.” I laughed.
“Something wrong with what I said?” She cut me a cross look.
“Just funny hearing that. Nobody calls them that anymore.”
“I don’t trifle myself with keeping up with modern parlance.” She said it with a huff. We stood at a crosswalk watching taxis zip by.
“I noticed.”
“If you’re going to make fun of me . . .”
“Not at all. You’re the teacher,” I said.
“Damn right,” she said. She squeezed my hand and stepped across the street toward a row of grand old hotels that faced the park along 59th.
• 31 •
Lissa was right.
The city was a Las Vegas buffet.
A lot of nights we didn’t need to go up to the surface. There were addicts and drunks to be found on the station platforms and concourses. We’d find them lying insensate or nodding. Lissa called them lambs. She and I would playact that we knew them.
“Uncle Billy, we’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
People walked past without even a look. We’d get the lamb up on his feet and walk him someplace more private. Lissa would open one of the smaller vessels on an arm using a folding straight razor she wore on her back suspended from a thong around her neck. We’d each take enough to bring the hunger under control. I’d apply pressure to the cut for a moment or two. After a movie or a walk in the starlight we’d move on to another lamb. The hunting got easier and the pickings fatter the later it got.
The ones we fed on would wake up with a cut they wouldn’t remember getting. Maybe a hazy memory of someone helping him up. Any wooziness from blood loss would just be part of their hangover.
Lissa was expert at determining the level of blotto our victims were experiencing.
“Listen to their breathing. Watch their hands,” she said. She’d give the leg an experimental kick. If they came around and could speak in complete sentences we moved on.
I was surprised at first at how many we found dead. Overdoses. It’s hard to feed on the dead. No assisting internal pressure. And the blood tastes skunky like beer gone bad. There were enough pickings that we could be somewhat discerning in our tastes.
We were feeding off the bottom. Most of the alkies and druggies we found were lifers. Deadbeats made homeless by their addictions. Their clothes smelled rancid and their bodies crawled with lice and sores. Their blood had the sour aftertaste of malnourishment and whatever toxins they took in to feed their jones. None of those toxins affected us. The blood of a heroin addict didn’t make us high just as the blood of a drunk didn’t give us a buzz. Still, they offered a poor vintage.
“We can do better,” I said.
We were walking the dark tracks under Seventh Avenue toward our recent home in an old L.I.R.R. car parked in a string on a siding.
“How so?” she said.
“A better class of lambs. Something richer than the fare we get down here in the tunnels.”
“We do well enough. I’m satisfied.”
“You’re not satisfied. You just got used to it.”
She shrugged.
“This is my life now. I don’t want to spend it as some . . . thing crawling in the dark like a . . .” I said.
“Salamander?” she said.
“Yes. Like that.”
“Salamanders are happy enough.”
“Because they have to be. They don’t know better. We do. We lived different lives before this. You remember?”
“I don’t have much to remember. Nothing good anyways. I’ve been as I am now mostly all my time in this world.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Lissa was as I knew her for a lot longer than she was ever a little girl. I’d spent only a few months in my current state. Most of my memories were of that other life.
“I might be a monster but I don’t want to live like one,” I said.
“We’re not monsters. We’re part of life. As much a part of life as a tiger or a flea. There’s a purpose to us being this way. Has to be,” she said.
“We’re in God’s plan?”
“Some kind of plan, else why would we be like this?”
We reached the row of cars on the dark siding. Inside they smelled of caked grease and old rust. I beat on a seat cushion, causing a nest of mice to flee before lying back on it. Lissa climbed up to an overhead luggage rack where she had a blanket spread.
“Tomorrow night we spread our wings a little,” I said. I rested my head on a stack of moldering newspapers.
She answered with a dry laugh.
“Now we’re flying salamanders,” she said.
“That’s right. Rising out of the mud to take Manhattan.”
She was quiet now, not even the sound of breathing from atop the blanket above me. All I could see of her were her sneakers, pink with little blue flowers. She was old enough to be my grandmother’s mother. In her quiet times it was hard to think of her that way. Her face was the face of an angel when she slept. There was no trace of the thing she had become.
Maybe she was right. Maybe we were part of God’s plan somehow. We had a place in the grand scheme of things.
And, starting the next night, that place was going to be south of 14th.
• 32 •
We topped off with a tweaker we found lying on a bench in Madison Park. He was crashed after days of smoking crank. The stink of it was on him. The sharp chemical taste of it was in his blood. We only took enough to quench the thirst for a bit and left him in the bushes at the base of a tree.
It was my idea to hit the after-hours clubs that were dotted all over Tribeca, NoHo, SoHo and the Village. Some legal and some not. The clubs came and went. Popping up overnight to burn bright and loud, and disappearing as the tides of trendiness swept in and out to take some places away and replace them with others like shiny pebbles on a beach.
There were pay-to-enter parties in lofts and raves in cellars. Many never advertised and you either heard of them by word of mouth or you followed the boom of the music to the latest place to be. Or looked for a line of limos and taxis waiting at the curb.
What was constant was a clientele on the younger side with a self-destructive attraction to liquor and drugs. A better class of junkie. A drunk in designer clothes. They smelled better and the blood tasted sweeter. They also had cash and jewelry on them they wouldn’t miss. And if they missed them they’d consider the loss the price of having a hell of a ni
ght. Even if it was a night they couldn’t remember. The one thing they’d never notice was the tiny cut on their wrist or ankle surrounded by a purple circle of bruising.
Lissa would wait nearby in a doorway or alley, anywhere that let her keep an eye on any exits. Dressed in a designer suit jacket I lifted from a blotto Wall Street drunk a few nights before, I’d troll the bar. I was looking for anyone stupefied enough to be pliable but not so fried they couldn’t walk out with me.
The first night I sidled up to a guy propped on his elbows at a marble-topped bar. His head was dipping and rising out of time with the music thrumming from speakers in the ceiling. He had an armada of empties in front of him and the change from a hundred lying in a pool of spilled vodka.
“Slow here tonight,” I shouted. I bumped his shoulder with mine.
He turned his head in slow motion. Eyes red and unfocused. Mouth slack. An expensive suit and even more expensive watch. He smelled of vomit. This was a serious bender.
“You said?” he said.
“Slow! Slow in here tonight! No talent!”
“Talent?”
“Pussy!” I shrieked in his ear.
He turned, distracted by the barman scooping a twenty from his change and dropping a few bills and change in its place by a fresh V&T on ice.
“Used to be better here. But all the hot honeys are going to that place on Perry.”
He turned back to me.
“What place?”
“Roxanne’s,” I said. The first name I thought of.
“Sounds sexy.” It came out, “zouns zessy.”
“Bet your ass. Models. Art school students. All kinds of pussy.” Full pimp mode me.
“I know you?” His twisted features loomed closer.
“Yeah. Bill Nordling. That conference in . . . in . . .”
“Vegas. You were with Goldman.” He poked an unsteady finger into my chest.
“Used to be. Moved down the street. You know how it is.”
He nodded sagely, no more idea of what I was talking about than I did. He swept all but a ten and the loose change from the bar and stuffed the other bills in his coat pocket.
“You’re right, Bill. This place sucks. No ass.” It came out, “you rye, Bill. Zis place suss.”
I took his arm to help him slide off the stool. Together we weaved along the edge of the dance floor toward a fire exit. The fug of hot sweat coming off the pack of dancers stoked the fire in my belly.
He started to revive in the cold gust of air that struck us as we stepped into the alley. I felt his arm tighten on mine. There was some serious gym muscle under the Armani sleeve.
“Shit. We need to get a cab,” he said. His voice was less slurred now.
“Daddy? Mama sent me to bring you home.”
We both turned as one to Lissa stepping from the shadows deeper in the alley. She wore a woeful expression, hands clutched together. I’m not sure if it was knowledge of her true nature but she looked like she walked out of an old tintype. Her voice quavered, her dark eyes wet. But not with tears.
“This your little girl?” the drunk said. He straightened. His arm started to pull from mine.
“That’s my daddy,” she said before I could speak.
“We can walk her home then catch a cab. My place is just down this way,” I said. I renewed my grip on his arm to steer him farther into the alley, into the shadows cast by the bars of fire escapes above.
He fought to pull away from me. I tightened up, yanking him closer to me.
“You tell me where this place is. Meet me there,” he said. He grunted with the effort to free himself.
“You’ll never find it without me.”
“Then forget it. I think I had enough.”
He made one final effort to take his arm back. I turned, swinging him against my hip. His feet left the ground and I flung him against a dumpster where he hit his head on the steel lip. He dropped to the slick paving, deflated. He didn’t move.
Lissa glided past me to drop to her knees by him. The razor came out of her coat and she flicked it open. She made a tiny slit where the heel of his hand met his wrist. I slipped the Breitling from his other wrist before plucking a wallet from his inside coat pocket and a money clip from his pants.
I took my turn at his wrist when Lissa was done. The pulse was slow and weak. It took effort to draw the blood out. I wondered if he was dying. We left him there, propped against the dumpster. We went down to the station at Lafayette and caught an express uptown.
• 33 •
“Everything worth doing starts out badly. There’s a learning curve,” I said.
“You read that someplace?” Lissa said.
She was walking the tracks ahead of me. Somehow those little legs moved fast enough that I had to jog to keep up. I tripped on a chipped concrete tie and went stumbling. I ran to get to her side again.
“It was better than feeding off junkies and winos. And we have some money. That watch is worth five thousand minimum.”
“Money? What’s the good of money? You going to hire a lawyer with it when you get caught?”
“Come on, Lissa. The police aren’t going to catch us.”
She turned to me. A local slowly trundling by made sparks that lit Lissa’s face a ghostly white. Her eyes turned to swirling black smoke, fixed on mine until the sound of the passing cars faded away.
“Ain’t about police. I told you. Ain’t about getting arrested and, if you’re lucky, when the sun comes up, you cook down to gristle and bones in a cell somewheres.”
“Vikram. This mystery guy. Some kind of original gangsta.”
“No mystery. No mystery. You left a witness behind. That man wasn’t no ways drunk enough to forget you. Or forget me.”
“He might be dead. His pulse was weak,” I said. I regretted it.
Her brows knitted over those eyes, those ancient, damning eyes.
“Don’t follow me,” she said. She stormed away down the tracks, her skinny legs flashing under the swaying hem of the coat.
Feeling sorry for myself, I paused long enough to lose her. When I chased down the way she went I couldn’t find her. I searched until just before day broke on the streets above, walking tracks and platforms from under Penn Station to Grand Central. She wasn’t cooping in any of our usual places.
Walking along the tracks, avoiding shafts of gray light coming down through sidewalks vents above, I found a ladder by the tracks just south of the 51st Street metro platform. I climbed along a steel joist to wedge myself back into a brick-walled recess. I could hear the street traffic overhead and the rolling thunder of the trains below as the sleep claimed me.
I was still hungry and my belly and limbs burned with need. Sharper than that was another sensation almost as painful.
I felt alone.
• 34 •
The commodities broker, that’s what he was, from the night before made the papers. He didn’t die but was comatose in an ICU at Presbyterian. Page seven in the News. Page eleven in the Post. I didn’t see the Times. No one left a copy on any of the cars on the subway car I was taking to Bushwick.
From the window I watched the black surface of the river rush by below the tracks. The lights of the cars reflected on the water. The train was running suspended under the Williamsburg Bridge. After the fuck-up of the night before I thought it was a good idea to leave the city for Brooklyn. There were clubs there. Plenty of bars. The place was gentrifying, moving on up. Lots of fresh thoroughbred blood on the hoof.
I had a couple of thousand dollars on me from the billfold and from maxing out the broker’s debit cards at ATMs all over Midtown. No one thought to close his accounts after the mugging. Couldn’t believe the chump had his pin number written down on a slip of paper inside his wallet. And good luck to anyone checking the video off the ATM. I held onto the watch. Chances were there was a bulletin out to pawn shops. I’d have to find another way to move it.
Or keep it. The watch was flashy enough to match the rest of
my cheesy ensemble. It was part of my protective camouflage of a club crawler. I spent some of the cash on a new jacket and some shirts. A nice pair of alligator loafers. All black to fit in with the look of all the other people riding the subway. Everyone in the city looks like they’re dressed for a funeral all the time. Especially in the cold months. Coats, caps, scarves all in black. The only flashes of color were the occasional ribbon showing off the wearer’s pet cause.
I didn’t need Lissa for this, I decided. A kid was a distraction in the world I was prowling. I was better off as a lone wolf. It gave me more options, room to improvise.
It took a fifty to get past the bouncer at the first club. He didn’t like the look of a lone wolf. Gave me a warning glare from his pig eyes as he parted the rope for me. I grinned back and winked over the top of a shiny new pair of Oakleys.
Inside the place was loud enough to blister the paint off the walls. Everything was rimmed in long strands of blue and orange neon. The crowd was mostly white in a neighborhood that was mostly brown only a few years back. I heard conversations in a mix of languages as I threaded the crowd for a section of a long curving bar that ran the length of the building beyond the dance floor. The booths were no good for me and most of them were full to bursting anyway.
I ordered a club soda that I pretended to drink and watched the crowd crushed against the bar. I was starving. The smell of sweat and the rhythm of all those heartbeats was driving me crazy. It was early though. Too early for anyone to be in the condition I needed them to be in. So I watched the room; the young bodies moving under the pulsing lights in time to an incessant beat crashing from speakers mounted high in the black-painted ceiling of what was once a department store from the look of it.
Most customers only stayed at the bar long enough to get one of a half dozen busy bartenders’ attention, grab their drinks, and head back to their booth. A few stayed at the bar, sipping drinks and noshing on the world’s most expensive bowls of mixed nuts and pretzels.
A guy and girl sitting just around the next curve caught my eye. The guy was practically a mirror image of me; the perfect picture of the look I was going for but probably pulling it off better than me. Black on black suit, blond hair that looked like it was permed, and a tattoo of a two-headed eagle spreading its wings above the collar line. Gold chains, a diamond stud in one lobe. The girl was a pneumatic blonde in what looked like a rubber dress that stopped way up on her thighs. The lights turned her hair from silver to white to iridescent blue from second to passing second.