A Matter of Taste

Chapter 18

Shortly after the gavel went down to end the Residents' Association meeting, Mrs. Hassler emerged from the Boulevard Room on the fifteenth floor of the great building. As she turned toward the elevators, she found, with mixed emotions, that she was still accompanied by Mr. Kaiser, who had sat next to her part of the time tonight. He was a charming but somewhat diffident young man who had introduced himself during another meeting weeks ago.

"Have you seen our friend Mr. Maule during the last few days?" young Kaiser inquired now. He too, it seemed, was acquainted, though only slightly, with the somewhat reclusive Maule. And he too thought there might be some current reason for Maule's friends to be concerned about him.

Mrs. Hassler cleared her throat. "Only briefly," she temporized.

Her companion did not seem to be paying close attention to her answer. "You look a little pale yourself," he commented in a solicitous midwestern voice, continuing to walk right at her elbow. "If you don't mind my saying so. Are you all right?"

'Well"—she could feel herself blushing—"I did feel just a little under the weather earlier. But I've been looking forward to this meeting for some time, and I was just determined not to miss it."

Kaiser murmured sympathetically. They shared again their mutual dislike for the building's new owners, and particularly those owners' new architectural plans, which had caused the front of the plaza to be enveloped in ugly scaffolding, and as a byproduct had revived the otherwise moribund Residents' Association and brought about meetings like the one tonight, at which the possibilities of legal action and other alternatives to preserve the character of the plaza had been discussed.

On the way up in the elevator, Kaiser showed himself ready to listen to a little gossip about Mr. Maule's strange relatives, who lately had evidently been bothering the poor man without mercy.

He gave the impression of not having heard about that particular problem before. "Standing around out in the hall, you say? What sort of people were they?"

Feeling uncomfortable, Mrs. Hassler told a fib. "Goodness, I never really got a good look at any of them. It was just the—the way they stood there."

Her young companion frowned and seemed to be taking the matter rather seriously. "I wonder—should we just stop at his door, right now, and ring?"

"I don't like to bother him, if—"

"No, nonsense, if he sees us both at his door he'll let us in."

Mrs. Hassler, her worries again aroused, went along with the young man's suggestion.

In a few moments they were standing in front of Maule's apartment. Kaiser prodded the doorbell with an energetic finger.

"That's very strange," said Mrs. Hassler a second later. "I'm just now noticing it."

"What's that?"

"The door. Look. It's not really on the hinges any longer. You can see a crack of daylight all the way around."

"Why, so you can." Kaiser was standing right in the viewer's field of view, and making sure that his companion was in it also. His ears were quite good enough to bring him the faint sounds from beyond the door, of a pair of breathers who had begun to creep about again like frightened mice. Their little electronic screen would be showing him standing in the hall, and now when he silently raised his left hand they would be able to see it clearly, poised in the air a few inches from the back of Mrs. Hassler's neck.

"Push the bell again," said Mrs. Hassler. But before he could do so, his first attempt was at last answered.

"What do you want?" The breathing voice from inside came through the speaker as a tortured squeak.

"May we come in?" the man who called himself Valentine Kaiser responded politely. And his eyes twinkled.

Maule, arriving from the eighty-ninth floor with Joe, approached his own apartment very cautiously. While he was still ten paces down the corridor Maule sensed Kaiser's presence within, and himself promptly vanished into the air. Out of the air came a whisper in Joe's ear, instructing him to go on and tap at the front door.

Here we go again, thought Joe Keogh. He approached the door with no particular effort at stealth, doing his best to suggest to anyone who might be watching or listening that he had no suspicion that anything was wrong. He tapped the button briskly and called out in a low voice to identify himself, then stood where the viewer could pick him up.

In a moment there came the sound of shifting furniture; then the detached door was lifted partially aside by unseen hands. Joe took a deep breath and stepped in through the gap.

"Where's the old man?" he asked as innocently as he could, looking at John's and Angie's frightened faces. "Isn't he—"

A force that felt like the grip of an angry gorilla clamped down on Joe's shoulders—

—and in a moment was wrenched away. Before Joe had time to think about crying out, he was free again, uninjured. Two blurry and tremendous figures, looking somehow larger than life though both were in human-form, were spinning about the room, crashing into such furniture as had somehow survived the earlier struggle. Maule at last had come to grips with his chief opponent.

Angie was crawling into a corner behind a sofa; John appeared to be trying to find his wooden spear again. Joe caught sight of the woman he had seen briefly in the hallway earlier, Mrs. Hassler. She was stretched out, fully clothed, on another sofa at the far end of the room, and appeared to be peacefully asleep; as Joe watched, her lips puffed out in a gentle snore.

Dodging away from the two combatants as they crashed into the piano near the center of the room, Joe moved toward the far end where Mrs. Hassler lay. He'd drawn his gun now, but hadn't had the chance to get off a clean shot.

Before that chance came, the wrestling match was over.

It ended at one side of the room, with Kaiser—or Borgia—pinned facedown in a hammerlock, with his head and shoulders atop a sturdy wooden table that managed to support both his and his opponent's considerable weight.

Joe, sidestepping for a clear shot with his revolver at Kaiser's head, saw that there was to be no shape-changing in this spasmodic struggle between two powerful vampires. Borgia appeared to be trying something of the kind, for waves of liquid change distorted his face and body momentarily. But Maule, standing above and behind him, gripping him with immovable hands, cried out, in a language none of the breathers could understand, such words as seemed to prevent it.

John had located the broken shaft of a wooden spear, and was approaching with this weapon raised. Joe still aimed a liqnum vitae bullet. But Maule, raising his voice, forbade either of them to kill this man.

"I swear," said Borgia, sounding half-strangled, "on my sacred honor that I will honor a truce if you will grant me one."

The man who pinned him only laughed. It was a strange and unfamiliar sound.

"No killing, and no truce? Then what?" Borgia's choking laugh was even stranger. "Do you mean to grip me like this forever?"

"Until I have decided what to do next—why do you hunt me?"

"You know full well why, Prince."

"On my own honor, I do not."

"Then you can guess. Because of the four hundred years of torment I endured? Four centuries buried in alien soil, where I could neither rest, nor regain full consciousness, until at last the drug wore off—"

"That was not my fault," said Maule in slow, inexorable tones.

"Why shouldn't we finish him?" John demanded.

Maule did not answer.

"What are we going to do with him, then?" Joe wanted to know.

Angie, struggling against what felt like terminal exhaustion, had retreated to the only chair currently upright in the room, and let herself sink into it.

And then she realized that she could not really rest. Not yet.

Pulling herself slowly to her feet, she left the room, unnoticed by any of the men. Moving as in a daze, without much conscious emotion, she stooped in the bedroom hallway to pick up from the floor a large, sharp, convenient wooden splinter.

In Maule's bedroom she somehow found the strength to tug the dresser out a little distance from the wall. The secret compartment opened easily. There were the jars. She found the proper one. Not likely that she would forget what it looked like.

Back in the living room, the debate was still going on.

"Again you will spare my life, I suppose," said Borgia in a less strangled voice. He had been allowed to shift his position slightly, and was now lying more on his right side and shoulder than on his face. One arm was still bent up beside his back. "Because of your damned honor. I suppose you can discover some way to imprison me again. And then in two hundred years, or a hundred, or whenever I can, I will be coming after you again."

"Perhaps," said Maule.

"No perhaps. There is no doubt about it."

"I thought," said Maule, as though the words constituted some kind of explanation, "that Spain would be your native soil."

"At this date I am not likely to accept apologies."

"Nor am I likely to offer any."

None of the men were aware of Angie's immediate presence until she was very close. None of them paid much attention to her even then. Not until she had whipped out the long, poisoned splinter from behind her back and thrust it, hard, up under Borgia's ribs, aiming for his vampire's heart.