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Author's note: I apologise profusely and profoundly! Please allow me to explain this late update. Internet service was interrupted for two long weeks. Darn it! But now I'm back! You may notice that this story is slightly longer than usual because it's supposed to be in 2 chapters. But I decided against it and served it in one. Now there's no more delays!
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I could imagine Josef giggling away in his posh, comfortable office that was abuzz with all sort of screens and phones ringing in the background if I told him this. Damn it. This was not going as best as it could be.
I sat there, staring at the spot where Cynthia had been fifteen minutes earlier. She must have left the block, heck, maybe the city, by now. The strange thing was I had no feeling of urgency. Normally I would leap and chase after a client, telling her that I would do anything to accommodate her case. But here I was, staring into space like some fat cat waiting for perhaps a bowl of milk to magically appear out of thin air.
My head was empty for the last sixteen minutes. Now, though, a train of thought began.
Aaron Duvall died in prison, around 1990 in July. Years before, he was arrested and imprisoned because of an assault and battery charge. Two days before he died, he wrote a letter to apply for long distance learning. The day he died, he received the letter telling him he was accepted. A few hours later, he committed suicide.
Why did Cynthia insist that Aaron was still alive? Could it be that the guy she had seen twice was just a dead ringer of Aaron? How in the hell could Cynthia be so certain about that? Was there anything wrong with this picture?
Plenty of young men around LA looked like Aaron. Not to say that he was a common-looking man. Like I've mentioned before, anyone who had money in LA could go around and get under the knife, and a few days later you'd end up looking like Aaron if it was good. If it was bad, there was no saving you.
I knew I could not stop thinking about this, so I decided to go down and drive.
It was a few hours before dawn. Driving down Los Angeles streets at these hours was calming to me. The wind in my hair helped to draw the thoughts away, if only for a while. Gosh, I really needed this. There was so much to figure out, but even more plenty to fall through along the way. I made a sharp turn on the following junction, barely missing a Toyota coming out of the other street.
Again, I tried to let my mind wander off but this time, it was along very dark corners of my mind. Old sins cast long shadows, they say. So do crimes. Was there something else that I could not have seen? Something so small that I could have missed? Or maybe something so big I barely notice it? Either way, if either were correct, I could not see them right now. For the love of humanity, I could not see them.
I made another sharp, sudden turn. A white metal body flashed before my eyes before disappearing behind my rear view mirror.
"DO YOU Have a death wish..."
I smiled. The way voices fade away with distance really made me long for the decay that comes with mortality. Voices, memories, body, muscles, hair – all that disappears with time. Not me. Not Josef, not his friends, not any of the others who were like us. For heaven's sake, I never wanted all this longevity. At times I hated everything that was me, what I had become: unable to fade into time, becoming spectator, never the participant. I hate becoming a spectator. That's why I don't go to any spectator games, like baseball or basketball. Not that I hate the game, but that was neither here nor there –
My foot found the brake pedal and just floored it. It was lucky there was no car behind me; otherwise I had to call my insurance agent the next morning. But now a massive idea had just hit me in the face.
I had to get back to Josef.
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"Josef!"
I banged his bedroom door. The doorman knew me good enough to let me in, although getting into his bedroom is a different matter altogether. If I were a woman, that would be a different story. "JO-SEF!"
A muffled sound came through the door. A second later it opened. Josef's head peeked through the half-ajar door, eyes half-closed, droopy. His voice, however, was as sharp as a razor. "You know what time is it?"
"Yeah, Hang Seng is closing now. And I need your help with prison."
Josef's eyes drooped lower, if possible, and so did his voice. "What have you got yourself into now?"
"No, not me; Aaron Duvall!"
"I thought he died."
"He did! He did die. But – just saying, Josef, bear with me – but what if Aaron did not really die?"
Josef stared through me. A long silence passed between us. Then he opened the door a bit wider, sucker-punched me in the stomach so fast I had no way of making sure it ever happened, but I doubled over and fell down, and closed the door slowly as you please.
"What the hell was that for!" I screamed at him after I finally recovered. "JO-SEF!!"
"Come back at night, you dummy!" I heard him say through the door.
"You don't have to punch me!"
"Serves you right for waking me up!"
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The last time Josef punched me like that was when I tried to hit on a girl he really liked. He left me lying on the dance floor, because it turned out Josef really liked that girl – for dinner. I was not so strong back then, so the punch really packed a lot of pain. Still, for a four-hundred year, that punch was still strong.
As promised, I quickly went to Josef's place where I found him with his poker friends. I had to wait for them to finish a set before Josef decided to take notice and speak to me.
"You know very well that prison is a dangerous place for a vampire to be in," Josef said. "Whatever put that idea in that little head of yours?"
I told him. "This was really something that I haven't explored yet."
Josef laughed. "You sound like you're about to have sex with twins."
"Josef, please. I need you to listen to me."
"Yeah, I'm all ears."
"Is there a mole in the penitentiary?"
Josef's face became dark all of a sudden. "Where are you getting with this?"
"Answer me."
He slowly looked over my shoulder. I did not turn. I knew nobody was there. But being Josef, paranoia was his main trait. Then he began:
"We don't talk about it outside the Circle –"
"What's The Circle?"
"Can you just listen?" I made a motion, zipping my lips. "Thank you. It's something we cooked up over last century after the government got really tight with the law. Some were thankful of it. Remember the Prohibition?"
Since I was allowed to talk on grounds for answering a question, I did my role quite wonderfully. "Yeah. But why were the vampires involved in the Prohibition?"
"We don't drink liquor, yeah, but we were involved in the business of selling them. We started selling them underground after Prohibition took place, but every now and then some got caught. So we had to have somebody within the system to take care of the unfortunate ones. Take them out as slowly as possible without anyone noticing."
"Does the system work?"
"It worked. However, we've had no reason to use the system for the last seventy years."
"And?"
To hear Josef's reply was like watching a sponge being squeezed out for the last vestiges of water. "A request came about five years ago."
My spine tingled. "Where from?"
He said three words. Three precious words. How funny your whole sanity could hinge upon three small words.
"The state penitentiary."
I grinned. "What exactly was this request?" I asked further.
At this moment, Josef's face really became dark it was almost lost within the shadows of the room. "To become one of us."
I sat back and let out a loud sigh. My mind was a whirlwind of emotions. There was relief, because I finally could let it rest in the back of my mind the fact that I was correct. There was sadness for Cynthia, because although Aaron was still walking around, he was no longer alive. However, there was no happiness. What was left, after all that feelings had passed, was a slight feeling of deceit.
"You knew this." I saw Josef's hand go up, trying to stave my words, but I ignored it. Some kind of fire was swelling within me that could not be stopped. My fatigue was giving way to it. "You knew this, but you did not tell me. Why haven't you told me this?" Josef flung both his hands in the air while I went on. "You could have simply told me all about Aaron and saved me the trouble, but you kept silent and let me loose in a maze like a blind lab rat."
"It was fun while it lasted," Josef said in a repentant voice. His face, though, was everything but.
"Does everything exist only to amuse you!?" I could not help it – the anger suddenly bubbled to surface and burst like methane gas that had just caught fire. "I am not an amusement to anybody, dammit! If you want to have a puppet, sire one of your blood girls and take her as a wife!"
Now, Josef and I knew that there are no boundaries between us. We know each other too well to hide anything. Heck, I already told you that I even detailed to Josef how I killed Coraline and where I did that. He in turn told me a lot of things, some of which he chose to divulge in between blood-drinking sessions, others like a mine detonated without warning or like anvils dropped on my toes. But when those words were spewed out of my lips, I knew I had crossed a hitherto unknown line.
His eyes brooded over. His lips became a thin line, unsmiling, frigid. The air around us – around me, in fact, suddenly seemed stifling. His whole body became as hard and cold as marble. Unable to help myself, I immediately snarled at him, so thick was the air around me with menacing aura that came off Josef. But Josef maintained his silence, which was like fighting quicksand – it surrounded and gripped hard.
Slowly, I recovered, stood up shakily, and turned around. I gave him no farewells. I needed a long sleep tonight. Should Cynthia think kindly of me and choose to call me later, I would simply tell her the same story and give her all the convincing evidence needed to stopper whatever thoughts she still had for Aaron. If she did not spare any, then I could continue sleeping.
After checking my face in a mirror – there was plenty in the lobby of Josef's office – I took the elevator down and walked off into the night. I came walking; I went home the same, leaving all the anger behind like a trail of noxious gas.
p-q
Next evening, I sat in my office. Unfortunately, that reminded me more of Josef. Everything around here was bought with Josef's money. I still owed him, dammit. Should I go and apologise? How do vampires correctly apologise? Maybe I should ask for blood from Santiago. But Josef drank only fresh blood. He did not drink drawn blood because he claimed they reminded him too much of stale bread.
Here I was, thinking about Josef, when I should be thinking about that Aaron guy who started it all, who chose to fake his own death and get out of the prison, only to strut around Los Angeles and get detected by an ex-girlfriend who had unfinished issues. Why he couldn't just stay down like a vampire with a stake through his heart was anybody's guess. That would have made everything easier, for goodness' sake.
Now, although I knew Aaron was still alive, I now had new conflict: should I tell Cynthia that Aaron was still alive – kind of – or simply let it be? Maybe I'd just wait it out – see if Cynthia called and then I decide whether I would tell her.
The phone rang. "Mick St. John, Private Investigator. Do the deed."
I was in no mood to answer the phone, so I let the call go to my voicemail. Then I heard Josef's voice.
"Pick up, you idiot."
Feeling rather childish, I did not move from where I was lounging. The chair was quite comfortable, and I leant backwards in it, almost lying on it. I began thinking about a certain night club where I could go and mingle for –
"I know you're there. Pick up or I'll call my accountant and have every single scrap of your office carted away to the Arctic Circle. You know they don't need a PI there."
Maybe some of the Inuit lost their sleigh and needed a PI to look for it, Mister Know-It-All.
"You do not want to hear me sing."
I froze in my chair. Not likely, since this was recorded.
"All right, then. I blame you for the moonlit sky, and the dream that died, with the eagle's flight. I blame you for the moonlit nights, when I wonder why, are the seas still dry? Don't blame this..."
When it really comes down to it, vampires are nothing more than intuition distilled. We feed when we're hungry; we snarl when we're threatened, we sleep when it's dawn. My intuition at that moment came, sadly, a breath too late. I had leapt from my chair, sped across the room to where the telephone was located, knocked it off, and somehow found the handset on the floor.
Josef's voice spat out of it into my ear: "Well, that was disappointing. I was really beginning to think that you're not at home." His voice was cheery as usual, as if nothing had happened yesterday. Imagine sleeping with your female friend and calling her up next morning like nothing had happened. That was how Josef should have felt. But I guess his propriety had long disappeared with the ages.
"Why are you calling?" I asked.
"Oh, still mad about yesterday, are we? I thought you're more resilient than that."
"Why are you calling?" I repeated myself.
"Mick, do I need a reason for everything that I do?"
"You may not need a reason, but you could have told me."
He fell silent. That was a first. I went on: "I thought there are no secrets between us, man. We're both – well, like this. So far I've been open about everything to you. The least you could have done is be open to me about everything you are. I will not judge you. I will never do that."
Josef suddenly gave a shaky laugh. "Dear lord, we sound like an old couple!"
"Hey, you're the one who called first and began singing – off-key," I countered. "Nobody does that except to get attention – and forgiveness."
"Just to get your lazy butt off the couch," said Josef, his voice light and teasing. Maybe he was asking for some apology, in his own way. Josef's mind is warped – or advanced, take your pick. His version of apology is by forcing it upon the receiver. "Come on, Mick. Let's get out tonight."
"Oh, a song through the phone and a dinner date! What is this, a proposal?"
"Think what you may," Josef sneered. "But be prepared, 'cause we're going to a place you'll never guess in a million years."
"Then I'd better start guessing," I replied.
p-q
When you're a vampire, surprise is a feeling you no longer wish to retain. Partly because now you are part of the unknown, the darker side of life. You also cannot afford to feel surprised. It only takes away time that is vital for your preparation of survival. But now and then you do get surprised, like when Josef asked me to pull over.
"Where in the world are we? Why are we here?"
Josef beamed at me as if he was about to get a bar of blood candy. "You'll see."
He walked off, while I stared at the building before us. We were in upstate Los Angeles, where there were fewer high-rise buildings. This building was only two storeys tall, very modestly constructed, and there was no trace of grandeur going on about it. The only huge thing it had was a signboard that said 'Velvet Heaven'. It certainly was not a night club – I did not see a long queue of people lining at the door. Neither was this a high-class brothel – the garish neon lights were absent. To add to my confusion, we were in the middle of some housing estate. I went out of the car, locked it, and followed Josef's lead.
At the door, Josef was conversing with some brunette. I stayed a respective distance away, even made an attempt at turning off my supersonic hearing.
She was once beautiful, and still looked it, sans the tell-tale signs of going under the knife. Either that or she had help from the best doctor around. They talked at length and now and then threw searching glances at me. Mostly the brunette. At one point she nodded, opened the door a bit wider, and Josef motioned at me to come in.
As I walked through the threshold, I realised what this building was. It was a cake house. The whole first floor was littered with cakes placed upon crystal cake stands. But they were no ordinary cakes. Each of them was exquisitely made, painstakingly created. I could not imagine how many hours one could labour creating these arts.
My eyes fell upon a three-tiered cake that was made from white icing. It had folds more than I cared to count, and the details upon it were ingenious. The lace-like trimmings at the edge of the hanging folds could have been real lace had I not touched it and brought it to my eyes, where it disappeared in a white smudge upon my fingers, much to the disapproval of the brunette.
I recalled, with embarrassment, why I was here. "Why are we here, Josef?" I asked him as the brunette walked off to presumably the office.
"You'll see, you'll see," he said, that childlike enthusiasm was so unlike Josef. He even rubbed his hands together.
Slowly the door to the office opened and out came the brunette. In tow was a young man, no older than twenty, dirty blonde hair and tall. When he was under the light, the face that started it all was visible. I gave Josef a wry look, then turned to the young man.
"Can we have a personal chat, ma'am?" I asked the woman. She turned Josef, who nodded once, and went back to the office. "Now, you young man. How have you been?"
Understandably, he gave me a strange look. "Who are you? You're nobody I know."
"I happen to be a private investigator." As soon as the words came out, he backed away with a wary look in his eyes.
"Listen before you do anything foolish. I was hired to look for you, Aaron Duvall."
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