Chapter 7
As Faith was dancing with Nightwing, Spike was busy getting himself kicked out of a bar that, even by his (rather low) standards, was pretty crummy. The beer was practically water, the pretzels on the counter had too much salt on them, and the Jukebox had no decent music in it, not even any Billy Idol. Still, even as they were throwing him out the door, he continued his supposed 'rant'.
"And your menu stinks!" he shouted as the bouncer continued to forcibly remove him "You don't even have one of those flowers made out of onionnnn—owww!"
Spike was interrupted as his body made contact with one of the trashcans out in front of the bar. He promptly picked himself up and began brushing street trash off of his leather jacket. "Bloody thing managed to survive hell, least I can do is keep it from the dry cleaners..." he muttered to himself.
He had been kicked out of more bars than he could even remember over the past hundred and twenty years. Up until the past week, however, it had never been done deliberately. Every night, he had been getting himself thrown out the door of wherever seemed like it was convenient. He would build a reputation as a 'troublemaker' in Gotham, and he would use that to get a look at the (as called by the humans, though experience had taught him better) seamy underbelly of the city.
Back in the old days, it would have been no trouble at all. 'William the Bloody' had been one of the most well-known (and most disturbing) vampires of his time, and he would have had no problem finding assistance. The past three years in Sunnydale, however, had tainted him in the eyes of his kind.
He was a member of 'the other side' now, as they saw it. He was a traitor. Indeed, had he not suffered his fiery end in the final battle against the First, he most certainly would have been a marked vampire in danger of being killed by either side.
To top that off, Spike was discovering that the 'spread' of the vampires in Gotham City was nothing like it had been in Sunnydale, or almost any other city he had seen. Vampires normally formed up in to packs, or gangs of some kind. Gotham was proving that was not always true. When he did see others of his kind in the city, they were in groups of two or three, and none of them seemed to be working for (or with) anyone higher authority.
It might be that it had only been three months and that the vampires of Gotham might just not be organized in the way he was used to, but that did not seem to be what was going on. His gut told him that the pattern of whatever was happening was far larger, and more sinister, than it seemed to be.
After a week spent searching the dregs of Gotham for answers and coming up without a damn thing, he decided to try another angle. He had heard people talking about another set of murders taking place in the city, and the newspapers mentioned it, too.
Some part of him had reacted with admiration. "That's genius!" something inside had thought. Many years of experience had shown him vamps who had pursued careers in crime to make money, but mostly they had stopped at drug pushing and enforcement. He had never heard of any vamp (of his time, at least) ever making an attempt at a serious inroad in to the world of criminal activity; there was too much risk of exposure; to say nothing of having to be at meetings at the crack of dawn.
To do something like what was being done – something on the level the 'Godfather' had taken it to – was something he had never imagined happening, much less succeeding. He wanted to figure out what was going on, and he knew only one way to do it that would be effective. Become a part of it.
So it was that in the past week he had been thrown out of (at least, as he remembered) twenty bars. He had caused six bar-wide brawls, performed nine acts of major vandalism and been as much of a public nuisance as he could make of himself without getting caught.
He knew of many easier(and likely more effective) ways to get the attention of the people responsible for what was going on, but every one of them involved use of a level of violence he was no longer comfortable using. Plus, they might get him arrested, and while jail didn't bother him in the slightest, being locked up would make what he was trying to do a whole hell of a lot harder.
Unfortunately, all of his efforts, up until this point, had (at least apparently had not) brought any attention to him, and now he was thinking that it might be time to change his tactics. He didn't like having to do it. It was high-risk, low-potential idea, but he wasn't sure anything else would…
A voice spoke from nowhere. "Spike?"
The vampire looked around in surprise at the name that had been used--- in the past couple of weeks he had been calling himself Will in order to try and keep his cover. (The irony of his needing a secret identity in Gotham City was not lost on him.) In less than a second he saw where the voice was coming from a – man less than ten feet away, on his left.
"It is you, right?" the man said
When he heard the voice again, he knew who was speaking with--- and in the same moment he wished he hadn't acknowledged the speaker. "Nestor?" he said slowly.
Even in life, Nestor Maddox had been intolerable. Growing up in Mississippi in the first decade of the twentieth century, Nestor was raised—- like so many others of that period--- by a Klansman father. But even by the standard of bigoted, angry rednecks, Nestor was close to a monster. Before he was eighteen, he had participated in a dozen lynch mobs. Not content with simply killing people of another race in the South, he went North in his twenties so he could "hang those uppity Northern darkies", as he had put it at the time.
Nestor was responsible for the extraordinarily brutal murders of eight black men in the Midwest, managing to get away with his crimes more because of police indifference to the matter than because of his own cleverness.
His luck had run out in Detroit. A rather angry black vampire who had known he was responsible for the killings had killed him, and then turned him so that he could, as he put it, "kill this stupid racist bastard again". The vampire, however, had underestimated Nestor, and ended up being just another pile of dust.
After being turned, most vampires that Spike had seen stopped caring about whom it was they killed. It simply didn't matter anymore – black or white, man or woman, gay or straight – a neck was a neck. Blood was blood.
Nestor was a different story. His hatred of blacks had survived his death, and it had become even greater. His loathing for blacks became so intense that for the first twenty years that he was a vampire, he spent a majority of his time killing black people in public places, bragging about it to any nearby cops, and then fleeing the area. It had taken until the nineteen-fifties for him to realize that doing it was dangerous, and that his hate crimes, if they were to continue, were going to have to be completed in private. No more talking to the cops.
It had been in 1973, New York, that he had run in to Spike. Spike had killed Nikki Wood a few moths earlier, and Nestor wanted to get in his good graces – not only because he had killed a Slayer, but because it had been a black woman he had killed. That made all the difference.
Spike had been reluctant to let Nestor tag along with him. He had a low tolerance for zealots of any kind, no matter what their obsession was – ritual, racism, drugs or whatever other sick ideas might be in their minds. Still, after Nestor had followed them around for some time, Spike had finally let Nestor run with his gang.
That had been a huge mistake on Spike's part. Nestor's focus on the world hadn't changed at all in fifty years. During the sixties, he had done some time with the American Nazi Party, and it had made him even more set in his mind about whom he turned and who he simply slaughtered. He refused to turn a black, saying that doing it was "tainting the purity of every vampire".
Spike, as well as, indeed, most of the vampire population of the United States thought that Nestor was completely 'round the bend. Even Drusilla (who had spent most of the nineteen-seventies in Canada and only come hunting in the 'States sporadically) thought he was completely out of it, and had told spike that Nestor needed to learn to understand that "we're all the Devil's children. He must understand that or he shall get a good spanking."
In her quietly mad way Dru had been prescient. The 'spanking' for Nestor came during the summer of '77 at the height of the 'Son of Sam' madness. On more than one occasion Nestor had bragged that he was the "man behind the curtain" responsible for the murder. It was bullshit, of course— no self-serving vampire would complete any killing with a shotgun. But in the middle of the hysteria that had seized the city, some black and Hispanic vamps that Nestor had managed to piss off somehow managed to convince people in the Bushmill section of Queens that Nestor was the serial murderer. The group had been unsure how to handle it until a hot night in July when the power in the entire borough had gone out. In the midst of the general looting and rioting a small number began to worry about this so called monster. The number of people involved slowly grew until nearly a hundred people gathered to "take care of the Aryan bastard."
Nestor was a strong vamp but only a very old and powerful one would have been able to turn back all those rioters. In the melee that followed, fifteen people died and Nestor Maddox was practically torn apart. Indeed he was assumed dust for almost three years until he had resurfaced in Chicago. He never told anyone how he had survived the riot, but he dropped his whole 'white power' trip. According to gossip, however, Nestor still hadn't managed to rise beyond 'muscle for hire' in the evil hierarchy. Spike was hoping that this was still the case.
"Well, gollly!" Nestor had a drawl so pronounced Gomer Pyle would have winced hearing it. "Guess the rumors 'bout your fiery demise were premature!"
Even when Nestor had been working for him, Spike had done his best to keep things ice cold between the two of them. Unfortunately, this had the opposite effect--- the meaner he was to Nestor, the more upbeat he became. Now, seeing him for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, Spike decided to try something that for some reason had never occurred to him in all their time together. "Well, you know, turns out Hell is easier to get out of then Alaska." he said in as peppy a tone as he could muster.
"Aw fuck, should've known not even that fire and brimstone could take down ol' Billy Boy!" Nestor was now just a few feet away and finishing his statement, he slapped Spike on the back hard enough to leave a mark on his jacket.
So much for reverse psychology, Spike thought to himself. He desperately wanted to walk away but he had a very strong hunch that this was his way in.
So swallowing his pride (as well as his yearning to throttle Nestor) he forced a smile on his face. "So what brings you the darkest city in the east?" he asked as cheerfully as he could manage.
"Ah, you know, usual shit. Month ago I heard that this town was becoming open for vamps. So I got my crap together and came out to the Big City!" Nestor turned around. "Man, it's everything that they said it would be."
"You're kidding, right?" said Spike. "Bars have pissant beer, nobody's out on the streets cause we got them all spooked, and you can't find enough vamps to get a decent bit of violence started!"
Spike was laying it on so thick that another vampire would have noticed that he was bullshitting him. Nestor, however, was as sharp as yogurt and didn't notice. "Well, that's what I thought to—'til I met the Big Man!"
"Who's the---?" Spike changed course, mid-sentence. "What do you mean, the Big Man?"
"The big boss, the man with the plan, top banana!"
"Does he have a real name or does he just talk in clichés?"
Nestor started to come down from his ebullience. "You want to know who the Big Man is?"
Spike was now considering throttling Nestor without learning what he knew. "That. Is. What. I. Want. To. Know." he said incredibly slowly.
Nestor looked closely at the bleached-blond vamp. "Last I heard you had a soul." he said quietly. "How do I know you can be trusted?"
Spike was now being pulled by two conflicting parts of nature. After a few seconds of deciding which one to follow, he decided that he would obey both.
He grabbed the tie Nestor was wearing, gave it a good yank, whirled him around and grabbed the stunned vamp in a headlock. "You're gonna trust me cause if you don't I will slowly and excruciatingly gouge out both your eyes, break your arms and legs, find a telephone pole, nail your hands and feet to it and spend the next three hours skinning you! Get it!?"
There was a very long silence as Nestor considered this. Finally, he gave a big smile. "Shit, Spike, you're back!" he managed to choke out.
Spike wondered for the thousandth time since he'd made Nestor's acquaintance that he had managed to survive one day, let alone nearly a century. Reaching deep down for whatever calm that he had left, he swallowed deeply and said patiently: "Yes, that's right. I'm bad. I'm bad. You know it. Do I get to meet the big bad now?"
"Well, you… have to.. let me go.. first…" Nestor gasped.
Spike rolled his eyes and released Nestor from his chokehold. "First of all, what's this big man's real name?"
When Nestor was finally able to talk again, he looked at Spike. "I don't know." he said softly. Spike fixed him with a glance. "Hey, I'm only a low man in the organization."
"Organization." said Spike slowly. "You're not going to tell me that the undead have joined the Mafia, are you?"
"Of course not." Nestor spoke adamantly. "We're not big enough yet. But we're getting there. For the past few months, we've been taking out all the major families in Gotham. Numbers, drugs, money laundering, we're getting a little bit here, a little bit there. Few more weeks we'll have half of crime in Gotham will be under our control."
"And how exactly are vampires supposed to handle these things full time?" pressed Spike.
"You mean, what do we do when the sun comes up?" Nestor said in a wheedling tone. "We've managed to convince a couple of normal people to front for us in the daytime."
"And how do you manage that?"
Nestor gave Spike a shit-eating grin. "Turns out some of these family men have real families." he said coyly. "And our actions are far messier than the ones Maroni and Thorne can carry out."
Good point, Spike thought to himself. Aloud, he said: "You keep saying your control and your actions. But before that you said that only one of us is pulling the strings."
Suddenly the smile on Nestor's face disappeared. "Well, a lot of us are handling this but we all answer to one vamp."
"And you don't know his name?"
"Not his real one, no." The cheerfulness was gone from Nestor's voice. "He calls himself the Prince. Says that he's been involved in murder and malice for centuries. None of us know who he really is or where he's from. His accent's so thick it could be anywhere on the damn planet."
Spike was pretty sure that Nestor had never left North America but he decided to let this go as unimportant. "And you just let him take charge." he queried.
"Nobody let him do anything. The first time he started acting so uppity, five guys with swords tried to take him out. He managed to dust them all in less than five minutes. Didn't even break a sweat."
Spike considered pointing out to Nestor that vampires didn't sweat and then opted against it. For one thing, it would be over his head. For another he could tell that Nestor was honestly and truly unnerved by this Prince character. "So you all just follow his orders."
Nestor regained some of his cheer. "Well, it's not like we're only doing this because we're scared of him. Son of a buck's made us money. We got fancy cars and swanky apartments; shit for the kind of stuff we're getting I'd take an order or three."
"And these little things make up for the fact that you and your friends are being bossed around?"
Nestor looked at Spike. "And I suppose you've never bossed around a couple of vamps in your time?" he said slyly.
When did Nestor start getting smart? Again Spike kept this thought to himself. "So how does this Prince bloke know so much about the underworld in Gotham City?" he asked instead.
Nestor shrugged. "Guy says he's been planning this for a while. That's he's been working on something like this for nearly half a century."
"And that's good enough for you and your mates?" said Spike doubtfully.
"Every move that he's made has worked so far." said Nestor. " We control half of Gotham's underworld right now.
"Granted that's true, how exactly does he plan to take over the other half?" asked Spike.
"He's got a plan to handle that, too." said Nestor.
"And when is that going to happen?"
Nestor gave another smile, his good humor completely restored. "Any day now."
"How do you know this?" Spike persisted.
"Oh, everyone will know it."