A Matter of Taste

Chapter 6

Out in the corridor, heading directly for the elevators, Joe Keogh got as far as the door of the next apartment down the hall before his brisk passage was interrupted.

She came out into the hallway smiling in his direction, making eye contact as if she was determined to intercept him and was not going to be too subtle about it. She might easily have seen him coming, for the door that she emerged from was strategically placed at a bend in the passage, so anyone looking through a wide-angle viewer from inside would command the stretch of hallway in front of the Maule apartment. She was a fortyish lady, average height, overweight but trying to carry it well, with skillfully if showily dyed hair, rich black streaked with silver. Subtle things about her face suggested that battles had been and were still being fought across that territory, again with skill, to prevent or wipe out jowls as well as wrinkles. What he could deduce about her body, swathed in a kind of robe or housecoat—Joe could never remember all the exact classifications for the things that women wore—suggested that it was well maintained, if not exactly shapely.

She opened her door quickly and came out, light on her feet despite her heft, bumping into Joe as he moved to step around her.

"Excuse me, I'm sorry!" Her voice was soft and pleasant, her smile a real charmer. "Were you by any chance in Mr. Maule's apartment?"

No, she's not. That was all that Joe could think of in the first moment, looking the woman over carefully. He mumbled some kind of an apology for bumping into her.

"I'm Mrs. Hassler?" As if she felt rebuffed by his failure to answer her question, the lady now seemed to be asking him if her name was quite acceptable. "It's really none of my business, but I know Mr. Maule slightly. Through the Residents' Association. And I was wondering if he's all right."

Getting too rude with the neighbors could be a bad mistake; if none of them had called in the cops yet, after a night of strange disturbances in the corridor, one of them might easily be on the brink of doing so.

"Mrs.—ah, Hassler, did you say?" Joe wondered fleetingly whether to introduce himself, and if so what name to use. He put off the decision. "Yes, I just came from Maule's place. He's okay. Was there something that alarmed you?"

"Well…" Now the lady was going to be reluctant to commit herself. From his police days Joe could recognize the type, desperately curious but not wanting to be involved. She went on: "There were some people in the hallway last night, in front of his door. I don't know who they were… I don't know if you could really call it a disturbance, but it was unusual."

Joe shrugged lightly. "I wasn't here last night. Actually, yes, he's a little under the weather today, in fact he's asleep right now. But he's going to be all right."

"He's a nice gentleman," she said softly, fixing him with a dark-eyed, liquid stare. "It's none of my business, but I wondered."

"Yes. Well. He's quite all right."

Still Mrs. Hassler was not ready to be reassured and take herself away. "In the city it seems you never know your neighbors. At least rarely. You'd think that in this building we'd be a community. Or at least here on this floor. But it doesn't seem to work that way."

"It would be nice if it did." Joe gave the lady his best, most reassuring smile and a little nod. Then he turned away and moved on. He could hear her door close softly before he'd gone a dozen steps. She thought the old man was a nice gentleman. The way she said it meant she didn't know him all that well—which was no surprise. A much less experienced seducer than the old man would know enough to keep his affairs at a reasonable distance from where he lived.

Before Joe had gone twenty more steps he passed a man and a woman walking in the other direction. Their goal, at this point, could have been any of half a dozen apartments, including Maule's or Mrs. Hassler's. As the couple drew to one side of the corridor to pass him, Joe gave each of them brief but intense scrutiny. He'd be willing to bet his right arm that both these people were breathers. He didn't think he could be fooled, not after knowing the old man so many years, and after certain other encounters less benign. Of course these two innocent-looking breathers still might be agents of the enemy. But Joe didn't think so.

There were about fifty elevators in the building altogether, distributed in several banks, and his wait in this lobby for a descending car was mercifully brief. In another moment he was on his way down. But he hadn't started to relax yet, and it was just as well, because the elevator stopped at the next floor below, and another well-dressed couple got aboard. The woman was on the small side, age hard to guess, hair blond, eyes gray, face strikingly attractive if not conventionally pretty. The man was big, a little taller than Joe, and perfectly matched Angie's description of Valentine Kaiser. Even if the match hadn't been so good, Joe thought he would have known these two at once for what they were. Not that there was anything gross or overt in their appearance to differentiate them from the common run of humanity; with vampires there very seldom was. Corpselike complexions and needle fangs could be considered racial stereotypes, the exception and not the rule.

Broad daylight or not, being cooped up with two of them in the little space, spending long, long seconds well out of public view, was enough to make Joe sweat. No one said anything, but the couple both looked at Joe, and he was sure they knew he knew what they were.

Valentine Kaiser turned away from Joe as soon as the doors closed. Somehow in the next moment he had snapped open the maintenance panel beside the elevator's long row of buttons. Reaching inside, he did something. The elevator stopped right where it was between floors, then, smoothly, with scarcely a pause, it was going up again.

Only when they were ascending did Kaiser break the silence. "We ought to have a talk," he said, smiling at Joe.

"Okay."

"I am Valentine Kaiser. And you—?"

"Joe Keogh."

The other nodded, as if that was the answer he had been expecting. "I've heard the name." He moved his head slightly in the direction of his companion. "This is Lila," he said. Lila stood by smiling at Joe. There were moments when her smile looked kindly, and others when it seemed utterly vacant.

Presently Kaiser reached inside the open panel to manipulate the wiring again. The elevator slowed smoothly to a stop on the ninety-seventh floor. As soon as the door opened Joe's fellow passengers gestured him out. He gave them no argument. They emerged into what looked like some kind of service corridor. Then, with Lila walking ahead at a brisk pace, gesturing for Joe to follow, and Kaiser bringing up the rear, they rounded a corner and passed through an unlocked fire door. Joe, glancing at the door's lock while it was open, decided that the bolts weren't working, having been induced somehow to stay retracted.

The door closed behind them. Now the three people, marching steadily, were treading the concrete steps of a fire stair, going up. Joe wondered how many floors there were above this, but he got no farther than ninety-eight.

Emerging through another fire door, onto the ninety-eighth floor, Joe found himself surrounded by a muted roar of machinery, in a brightly lit, low-ceilinged cavern. One room, he decided, must occupy all or most of the entire level. The view of its more distant portions was blocked by row after row of metal-paneled cabinets, and by bends and straightaways of massive ductwork. The level of noise was high, compounded from fan blades, rushing air, occasional electronic beeps, and other indistinguishable components of the machinery needed to keep the thousands of occupants comfortable in their stores and offices and dwelling units.

No other people were in sight. Valentine Kaiser now led the way, in the manner of a man who knew just where he was going.

Presently, around the corner of an aisle that throbbed with noise, another vampire met Joe and his escort. This one was a young-looking woman, dressed in jeans and sweater like a college student. She acknowledged Kaiser's arrival with an odd gesture, a nod that was almost a bow, followed by a curious look at Joe.

"Anything yet?" Kaiser demanded of her.

The lookout shook her head, looking disgusted. Kaiser muttered words that sounded like swearing, in a language that reminded Joe of Latin, and moved on.

Lila followed, making sure that Joe came along, as Kaiser led them around another corner. Here some panels had been removed from a bank of metal cabinets, and a figure in coveralls, this one a man and a breather, was at work, with screwdriver, pliers, and some kind of electronic meter.

Looking over the workman's shoulder into the exposed machinery, Joe decided from the number of wires visible that this might be the central tie-up for the building's phone lines.

Kaiser paused just behind the workman. "Any success?"

The man turned his face back over his shoulder, looked scared, and mumbled something.

"You might as well admit it loud and clear, I can hear you anyway. I'm beginning to suspect you're not as much an expert as you've claimed to be."

"Sorry," the workman muttered, not turning around.

"Are you? I'm not sure you know what the word means." Kaiser appeared to be considering how best to explain it.

The man raised his head for a quick look at Joe, as if wondering whether Joe was someone he had to be afraid of too. Then he quickly averted his eyes again.

Joe, leaning back against another paneled unit with his hands in his coat pockets, was observing other features of the surroundings, near and far. These included a power substation, a large part of the building's elevator machinery, and provisions for heating and air-conditioning. Also somewhere nearby, he supposed, would be water tanks and pumps, and of course the phone equipment.

Kaiser gave up staring at his trembling workman and turned to Joe: "I hope you're more useful than he is." He grinned. "You're willing to talk with me, aren't you? Tell me things? Or are you determined to keep secrets?"

"Fine, we can have a talk. Anytime. Would you like to make an appointment?"

Kaiser only grinned. "Maybe we should have our talk sooner rather than later." He ruminated. "Yes, let's do that. But I have a few things to do up here, I'll have to ask you to wait downstairs for me for a few minutes. Lila will walk you down."

Joe didn't ask downstairs where. He was sure that all was going to be made clear to him. Before he and Lila were allowed to depart, Kaiser muttered something privately to the gray-eyed woman, as if giving her special instructions of some kind.

Once she'd received her orders, the woman turned to Joe, put out a hand, and exerted effortless inhuman strength, turning Joe around with a grip on his shoulder as if he were no bigger than a small child. She smiled up at him as she turned him around. Joe knew better than to take it personally. With Lila just behind him, he was marched back to the otherwise still-deserted service stairway and down nine flights of concrete steps to eighty-nine, a residential level.

The corridor here looked just like the one on Uncle Matthew's floor. They encountered no one in the hall. Joe's escort stopped him suddenly, with an effortless tug on his arm, in front of an apartment door. Then Lila took out a key and opened the door and gestured Joe inside.

The place was laid out a little differently from the apartment of Matthew Maule, and was sparsely and plainly furnished. One other person was in the living room, a young woman wearing an army surplus field jacket, open over a dirty-looking shirt. Her jeans were worn, her bare feet grimy. She looked up sharply as Joe and his escort entered, and then relaxed. She was a breather.

"I'll be staying here for a while, dear," Lila said to her in a surprisingly sweet voice. "If you've got anything to do elsewhere, go right ahead"

The young woman seemed about to get up from her seat on the sofa, then changed her mind. "I'm waiting for Val," she said "You can go ahead whatever you want."

Lila nodded, apparently satisfied. Joe looked around. He wasn't being invited to sit down. There seemed to be no one else in the apartment, though of course he couldn't see all the rooms.

Casually he started strolling. He liked very much the idea of putting at least a little distance between himself and Lila. His guardian was just standing in the living room, in that untiring way they had. Might as well look the place over a little, if possible, and then—

His stroll had brought him partway down a hall, to a spot from which he could look in through an open bedroom door, past a bed with rumpled sheets and blankets, to an open bathroom door beyond And in the bathroom was what looked like—

Joe stopped, his mouth suddenly dry. He turned to look back at Lila. Lila, leaning against the front door in a somewhat masculine pose, arms folded, was smiling pleasantly at Joe.

Loosening his topcoat, Joe moved on into the untenanted bedroom and into the bathroom beyond.

It was the waitress, he had no doubt of that from Angie's and John's description. Red hair, shapely body, naked now. It was hard to tell, under present conditions, about her age. Her limbs were bound with twine, all tied up compactly close to her body in a kind of tumbler's knot, her body suspended head downward over the green-tiled bathtub. Plaster and tile had been knocked in patches from the walls and ceiling, to find a solid purchase for the heavy bolts that had been driven in to give solid support for the chains that held a human body's weight.

Joe was almost sure with his first good look at the discolored face, the half-open eyes, the needle bite wounds on the throat and elsewhere that she was already dead, though a very faint trail of saliva still drooled from the distended lips of her open mouth. The string of clear saliva went trailing down into an indescribable puddle in the tub, where the stopper of the drain was closed, so that the tub had caught and preserved the considerable volume of vomit, blood, and perhaps other fluids that had drained from the woman's body since she was hung up like this.

Joe put out his left hand, and had just time to feel the coldness of Elizabeth Wiswell's shoulder, before a warning voice sounded just behind him.

"Don't touch!"

He turned to see Lila, who had moved a couple of rooms closer, almost twinkling at him. Joe leaned against the doorframe, fighting down a sudden urge to vomit. Briefly he allowed himself to close his eyes.

"And don't throw up in the tub. That would ruin things. We have a kind of experiment going there," the vampire said behind him.

"Who is she?" asked Joe, though he was certain that he knew.

"Just a little thing. A thing that wouldn't do what we wanted it to do."

Joe thought he heard a tiny sound, a faint choking too inhuman to be called a moan, from the body over the tub.

Vaguely disbelieving, he turned his head in that direction. "Elizabeth?"

The tiny sound was not repeated.

"Come out of there," ordered Lila. Joe looked at her, standing five feet away in the bathroom doorway. She added: "I want to show you something, little man-thing. I may even let you have some fun."

Joe stayed where he was. He reached inside his sportcoat and drew a .38 from under his left arm. It was an old-fashioned-looking weapon, dull metal that had been around for some years. On the few occasions when he'd needed it, it had always been dependable.

Lila smiled tolerantly. Of course none of them had even bothered to search him.

"You have a lot to learn," she murmured, smiling prettily, "if you think that bullets are going to hurt us. Now you're not going to have any fun. Pain instead. Pain such as you've never—"

Joe gritted his teeth and shot the vampire twice, aiming as best he could for a button on her blouse that lay just between her breasts.

He imagined that he could see how one of the lead-cored wooden slugs nicked the little button before it went on to tear splintering into the exotic bone and flesh behind it. The double impact lifted the solid body of the woman from her feet and hurled her back. Her gray-eyed, attractive face registering a look of intense surprise, she fell onto the rumpled bed.

Joe took a step forward, revolver ready. He stood for a long moment in the bathroom doorway, watching the sprawled body beginning to undergo grotesque alterations.

The young woman, the breather, from the living room, was standing in the bedroom doorway looking in. "What is it? I heard—" Then she stopped, staring at the bed.

Her paralyzed pause gave Joe time to reach her before she could turn and run. He grabbed her by the arms and shoulders, and she tried to bite him. He slugged her ruthlessly, revolver barrel across the back of the head.

In another moment he was dragging the stunned breather into a closet, closing the door, and bringing a chair to wedge it shut.

Then he looked back at the bed. In much less than a minute, the true death had overtaken Lila. Her face was shriveling, collapsing on the collapsing skull behind it, like a time-lapse sequence of a Halloween pumpkin in decay. The well-dressed woman's corpse was diminishing rapidly in size, and now even as Joe watched, it disappeared completely. Last to go was the clothing, but at last it went, and then everything, everything that had been directly attached to the form, was gone. He'd seen it happen that way before, to one of them, but even so Joe's hands were shaking and a fresh wave of nausea passed over him.

Moving quickly back into the bathroom, he looked once more at the woman suspended above the tub. With the fingers of his left hand he rolled back an eyelid and touched the ball beneath. No doubt about it now, she was as dead as anyone he'd ever seen.

Wasting not a second, but moving with extreme care, Joe moved to the front door of the apartment. He eased it open, then, revolver still in hand, held ready under his folded topcoat, he tiptoed out into the corridor, closing the door softly behind him.

He took the opposite direction from the one by which he'd been brought here. He wasn't going to try to take the rest of them, not now, not alone; that would be crazy. At least two of them were on the maintenance floor upstairs, and he had only four shots left. Even in daylight two vampires together were at least one too many. He wouldn't have tried to take one if he'd been given any choice about it.

Walking briskly, he came to another bank of elevators almost immediately, just around a corner. When he got to a phone, he could leave an anonymous tip for the police, have them check out Valentine's apartment. But he wasn't sure that would be a good idea. Elizabeth Wiswell was dead now and couldn't be helped. Better not have cops swarming around the building until the old man had died or had recovered enough to face them.

A couple of innocent breathers, talking loudly, joined him, waiting for an elevator. He stood waiting as quietly as he could, neither facing them directly nor making a point of turning his face away. He was still holding the pistol ready under his folded topcoat.

He was going down to street level, not back to the old man's apartment; if the people trapped there were going to have a chance, someone was going to have to help them from the outside.