Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
The Ruby Tear (11 page)
Dining Out
B
aron von Craggen went hunting. He tracked a thin, weary prostitute, who wore a false-fur coat spottily trimmed with spangles, until nearly dawn. Then she collected her dole of crack in exchange for her night’s earnings. He darted ahead of her as she hurried home, and called to her from the doorway of a boarded up brownstone slated for gentrification.
He felt good: .steady, strong, and in control. This was his normal life, with no wild impulses to taste the mouth of his enemy’s woman in a public place, like some rash, love-stricken boy! Kissing, like a suitor, where for generations of his dark life he had only gone for food and where he could commit swift piracy that involved him in no social aftermath.
What in the name of all his years had happened to him?
He pushed thoughts of Jessamyn Croft away and instead watched his chosen victim hesitate, trembling in the grip of slavery to the drug in her pocket. Her face was turned toward him, whiter than salt, and he saw the tip of her tongue nervously moisten her lips.
She was a child really, but already the stamp of death was plain for one who could see it. Without a doubt, she carried some infection that would kill her before long. He recognized the dull sheen of despair in her eyes and the self-neglect of despair in the droop of the ragged black tights showing below her shabby coat’s hem.
Keeping silent, he watched her decide to turn one last trick after hours, for a payment she might secretly keep for herself instead of surrendering it to her pimp. Something to buy breakfast with later. Or more drugs.
Something she wanted enough to make her reckless.
“What do you like, Mister?” she said finally, moving cautiously nearer. Lank hair straggled from a crooked French knot at the nape of her thin neck.
“Come closer,” he said. “Twenty dollars—”
“Twenty-five,” she said, with a spasmodic grin no doubt meant to be a willing smile. Two teeth were missing on the left side of her mouth. Her pimp was obviously not an easy boss. Someday Ivo would get around to him, too, maybe, and return treatment in kind plus a little extra.
But for tonight: “Twenty-five,” he agreed. “Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you.”
If she had been a little stronger, a little less sick, she might have had the spirit to divert him with a wisecrack, something like, “If anybody could still hurt me, mister, I wouldn’t be in this line of work.”
And then he might have given her the money for the simple feel of her thin breasts under his hands, so she would have cash in her pocket for a cup of coffee, and maybe that would lead her to something else, something better. It was a fancy he sometimes indulged in about these thrown-away ones.
But she was too far gone, he could see that; and it decided him. He was a skilled practitioner of his own form of triage.
She came nearer, her thin face blank with resignation. So he turned her back against the boarded up door, took her bony frame in his arms, drew down the matted collar of the coat, and pressed his lips to her throat.
A pinch on her cheek distracted her—she never felt his fangs break her skin. Then he sucked in such a powerful draught of her blood that she lost consciousness immediately, collapsing against him.
He drank what he needed as fast as he could; her blood was no vintage to linger over. Then, seeing no one at hand to observe, he hefted her cooling corpse in his arms and carried it across the street to the ratty little park on the other side, where he set her down on a half-broken bench. He tucked her old coat modestly about her skinny legs and left her there, pale and lifeless.
Once again safe in his own apartment, he sat in the light of the special bulbs he had installed in his kitchen and examined three trays of jewelry. These were the fruits of his labors in Europe, on his last trip. He picked up each piece and studied it, matching it tentatively to a selection of names from a list of dealers and collectors on a long yellow legal pad at his elbow.
While he worked, he drank red wine. His hardy digestive system had already cleansed the girl’s drug-tainted blood, but the taste of it had been foul.
Dark Mother
, he called in his mind after a while,
are you with me tonight?
Every night
, the answer came.
You have fed on illness again, Baron.
An addict. I ended her misery and filled my belly at the same time. Isn’t that what you intended for me? That I should become a public benefactor?
I intended to help you find your property and take your revenge.
Well, I am close, I think. He scurries about, searching for salvation from me, and I wouldn’t dream of interrupting his progress beforetime. Let it play itself out, that is always the best way. Meanwhile I must nourish myself, as you well know. Do you disapprove of my hunting?
Silence.
He wondered if she had withdrawn, as she sometimes did for weeks at a time lately. He studied a handsome silver belt-buckle inlaid with jet, searching for cracks or chips in the stones. Often he obtained pieces under circumstances that didn’t permit close and careful examination on the spot—in shadowy bomb sites, makeshift cafes, and gloomy alleyways.
The setting needed polishing, just enough to give sculptural depth to the silver work. But he didn’t feel like laying out his cleaning kit.
He sat back and toyed with his wineglass, turning it on its round base and idly wondering how steep an angle he could hold it at without losing a drop of the dregs.
What I disapprove of is not your hunting
, the answer came at last,
but as to that, with a little effort you could have taken sweeter blood.
I want no sweeter blood! I want no blood at all, and when my work is finished here I will starve for lack of it without complaint. I have seen enough of addiction by now to swear that the last Baron von Craggen will not be bound to this world by an addiction to anyone’s blood!
So you deliberately choose to drink filth?
I drink filth so that I will not drink more, or more often, than I must.
And because for such creatures, the rejected people of this society, no one else has any use that is not foul. These castaways sustain me, though, and for that I love them, in my own way.
Who else is there to love them at all? What the world of men has become bewilders me. At least in my time there was the Church. The helping orders of monks and nuns, worldly and corrupt as they often were, did at least offer a little charitable love, even to lepers.
Again, a pause, and he could hear the faint pounding of mindless modern music vibrating in the building’s walls.
Was she blonde, your prey of tonight?
Did she resemble my lost Magda? No, she did not. I think not, anyway; I do not remember anymore what Magda looked like, you know that. But if Magda lived in this world instead of that one, she might have ended on the streets like this girl, after my enemies were done with her.
This is an old pattern with you, Baron,
sighed the voice in his mind.
Are you not tired of it? Your pity, your love, your feelings of any kind have no effect one way or the other on these bits of human garbage that you release from their wretched lives. I like to see you take more pleasure in your food. Perhaps this other one, this woman of the stage
—
He didn’t answer, but turned and turned his glass and thought about a certain man he knew who would pay a pretty penny for that delicate intaglioed watch-fob in red carnelian, lying in the middle tray.
I see in your mind that she is beautiful, although marked by injury and suffering. Not like Magda, of course
—
Nothing like Magda.
That wasn’t quite true, but he didn’t want to discuss it further with the Dark One, who might—how could he tell?—feel jealous.
Jessamyn Croft had a touch of what he remembered as a certain purity in Magda, not in the limited sense of chastity but the wider one, the quality of the soul. In Magda this had been the result of her devotion to God and all His saints and His angels; she had been aggressively pious, even for those days. But in those rough times piety had been a necessary defense for a young woman.
Sometimes he wondered if Magda had come to accept her abduction as simply God’s will. She would have loved this dainty golden rosary cross with a saint—good God, he forgot which was which sometimes!—painted in the center in beautifully detailed enamel.
In Jessamyn Croft he also read a sort of purifying dedication. He couldn’t tell what it was, but that it attracted him was undeniable.
This actress loves the enemy of the house of Craggen,
the Other said, interrupting his restless musing.
You do know that she loves your enemy, do you not?
He shook his head like a horse shaking off flies.
Of course I know it! That is why she is of use to me: she will be my path to him, one way or another. As it is, I would only have to twist her hair in my fingers to have him come running to save her, right into my waiting hands. And when the time is right, I will.
Are you so sure?
came the reply.
I think you call her image to mind more often than befits a mere tool of your design.
He chuckled unpleasantly.
So I should enjoy my feeding but not enjoy the hunt, is that your instruction? Why should I not toy with the woman who is the beloved of my enemy, before I attack that enemy himself? His cursed ancestor used, abused, and destroyed the sweet one of my own heart, long ago. I take what is owed me plus some small interest, bit by bit; that is all.
Silence, broken by the distant wail of a siren that he could hear right through the windowpanes. He took another sip of wine and began turning the glass again.
You are not on your home ground now, Baron.
There are so many distractions, and too few reminders of your task. Take care that you are not drawn off your path, or it may be you who needs the pity and—the love, if that is what it is, of others.
Well,
he responded lightly,
that would be a new experience, at least.
But in his mind he saw the face of Jessamyn Croft, with its frank intelligence and its beauty subtly tempered by suffering.
The wineglass tilted in his grip, and the last drops shot out and spattered a fine necklace of inlaid silver, so that it looked as it had when he had bought it from a weeping old man in the ruins of what had once been a music shop. Then, the necklace had still been stained with the blood of the old man’s wife, shot by a chetnik sniper in the hills above Sarajevo.
Accidents
J
ess found Marie in the costume shop, huddled in a chair in the corner with a battered tin box in her lap. Half-hidden amid the hanging racks of clothing basted and glued and velcroed for quick changes, the dresser was quietly crying.
It’s happened again, Jess thought with a clutch of dread; the prankster has struck. She pushed past the worn worktable with its aged sewing machines and bent over the woman.
“Marie, what’s wrong?”
The dresser mutely held out the box and pulled off the lid: it was the old lozenge-tin she had used to put the Berlin iron pendant and earrings in, to lock them inside the drawer in Nell Clausen’s desk that served as the Edwardian’s “safe.” Now the jewelry lay tangled into a bizarre knot, held together as if by invisible welds, a useless lump of intricately worked metal.
“I don’t understand,” Jess said, staring at the mess in disbelief. So much for her plans to wear the pendant and earrings on opening night, and then give them back with thanks, and—maybe—as a sensible farewell. “Are they
melted
? What happened?”
“It’s some kind of superglue,” Marie gulped. “Somebody’s stuck them all together. When I tried to get them apart with solvent, it just took off some of the black finish—I’ve ruined them!”
“Marie, don’t cry,” Jess begged. “It’s the prankster’s fault, not yours. I can’t believe this is still going on. It’s like the behavior of some witless five-year-old with some kind of childish grudge!”
And it was getting to her, she realized, breathing deeply to calm herself: she was on the edge of tears and suddenly unsure of the lines of Eva’s biggest speech, which she was to work on this afternoon.
Marie, of course, knew how important today’s session was, and had tried to fix this latest problem without troubling Jess at all. Poor thing, she would probably feel totally responsible if a performer she was dressing got hurt or scared off—
Unless Marie herself—? Suppose this was the extent to which Nick would go to run Jess out of the production and away from whoever he thought Ivo Craggen was. But that was nonsense! So unlike the Nick she knew—but of course that man had been twisted into a different shape by the damned accident, so who could know what was really going on with him.
He was supposedly traveling now, but could he—if it was him—could he have paid someone—
not Marie, surely not!
—bribed someone to do this?
Jessamyn felt darkly dazzled by the possibility of treachery so close to home. But Marie did have the run of the theater, like most of the staff, and could work there at odd hours without being challenged.
I am really in bad shape if I can even think such a thing,
Jess reproached herself angrily; but she was more furious with Nick, whose wild stories had planted the seeds of these paranoid speculations in her mind.
Damn the man, if he had to leave the country to get far enough from her and from his play since her presence in it spoiled it for him, why couldn’t he have just
gone
? Why call her up in the middle of the night to fill her head with some wild story of supernatural vengeance, like a ridiculous parody of the Three Witches in the Scottish play?
“Relax, Marie, it’s not the end of the world,” she said, expelling Nick firmly from her thoughts. She helped Marie to her feet and hustled her out of the costume shop. Once inside her own dressing room, Jess shut the door.
“We’ll do without the damned things, and nobody will ever know the difference! As for Mr. Craggen, I never asked him for anything. If he wants to blame someone for what’s happened it’s going to be me, not you.
“Only it would help if you thought about this, Marie, while it’s still fresh in your mind: have you seen anybody hanging around the place who doesn’t belong, anybody you think might have done this?”
Marie stood hugging herself and shaking her head dolefully.
“Think it over. I want to have a good grip on what we can say when we go see Nell Clausen and raise hell about it. Maybe we can use this to demand better security in this theater. It’s pretty clear that we need it!”
The likelihood of money being available for this was minuscule, but she hoped that going on the offensive for a change might help Marie gather her scattered wits.
Jess bent and peered at herself in the makeup mirror, wishing she could just go home and go back to sleep. She felt strung out from the interrupted night before. It didn’t help to see that she looked almost as tired as she felt.
She sat down with a sigh in the swivel chair in front of the mirror. In a minute, she’d be crying herself. The pressure of rehearsal against the deadline of opening night was tough at best. She wasn’t sure how much additional stress she could handle without cracking, which of course must be the prankster’s goal.
This thought stiffened her determination not to buckle under these despicable attacks. But if things were to change for the better—to come under control so that she could give her full attention to making her performance the best comeback in history—clearly she would have to make it happen herself.
She tried again, turning in her chair and taking Marie’s surprisingly soft hands. She willed Marie to concentrate.
“Don’t give up,” she urged. “Think about it, Marie! Maybe you did see something, just a glimpse or a shadow—something you weren’t even aware of noticing at the time. Think back: when you got here, was there anything unusual?”
The older woman shook her head again, then paused, frowning. “Well, there was a man—of course there are always lots of people downtown, but at three in the afternoon, in the stage-door alley it did seem a little odd, someone standing out there in the cold like that, at that hour.”
“What did he look like? What was he doing?” The thought occurred to her that perhaps Ivo had come around looking for her. Maybe he had sneaked in and ruined the jewelry himself, for reasons of his own.
“Just a guy,” the dresser said helplessly, which pretty well clinched it: no heterosexual woman could look at Ivo Craggen and say he was “just a guy.”
“A tallish man, I think,” Marie continued slowly, “but hunched down into his coat—it’s so cold out, everybody’s all muffled up. You wouldn’t know your own mother from an Eskimo out there today.”
“Then he had a hat on? Gloves? A scarf, maybe?”
“A scarf,” Marie agreed, dubiously. Pushing out her lower lip in thought, she turned to combing out Eva’s second-act wig, a lustrous black fall of curls. “And a hat, a regular man’s hat, though I can’t imagine why; it certainly can’t keep your head warm. I remember thinking, that guy’s ears must be freezing! You see everybody in woolen caps like Russians this winter, or fur hats even, the men too.”
“But what was he doing? Do you remember? Maybe he’d just stopped there a minute to have a smoke out of the wind.”
Marie squinted, trying to see into her memory. “Blowing on his hands, that’s what he was doing, so I couldn’t even see his face: his hands hid it, and no, he had no gloves on, now that I think about it. I thought he was waiting for someone out there. But he didn’t seem to be watching the people going by, and when I looked back before letting the door lock behind me, he was gone.”
“Listen, he was probably nothing to do with us,” Jess said, hiding her disappointment at the meagerness of this report. “But if you do spot him again, you tell me right away, okay? Now, I would love a cup of tea before everybody else gets here. Something with a little caffeine in it and a wedge of lemon. My throat’s dry as burned toast.”
Looking relieved, the dresser went out to the staff lounge for the tea. Jess began voice exercises, dropping her jaw and vocalizing from the diaphragm to open her throat and soften the stiffness out of her neck. She needed to disperse her tension and get her thoughts focused on the tortured relationship of Marko, the head of a family steeped in centuries of profitable crimes and machinations, and Eva, the idealistic niece come home to claim the emerald, which she wanted to sell for money to redress those crimes.
Marko had his own ideas about the emerald. He wanted to use it as bait, to bring vengeful family enemies to the treaty table, where they could be slaughtered with the treachery he felt they deserved.
Perhaps she could use the increasing unease about the theater prankster (and now this prowler in the alley, if that was what he had been) to put a little extra edge on her character’s nervous determination.
It was something to try, anyway, and see how Walter and the others reacted.
The rehearsal went well. Anthony radiated a heightened degree of anxiety himself, giving the character of Marko an aura of frenetic despair. He demanded that the attacking enemy be defeated and punished, but it was obviously justifiable vengeance against him and his that he feared.
Anita MacNeil, playing Marko’s estranged wife Hildegarde, picked up on this and developed a quirky sort of murderous intensity that set off Eva’s quiet insistence to admirable effect.
Jess did not talk to Nell Clausen that day, although Nell, very un-theatrically dressed in a casual but beautifully tailored suit, did look in on the rehearsal. It had occurred to Jess, as she was trying on her first act costume, that since the jewelry had been in Nell Clausen’s safe-drawer, it might just be possible that Nell herself was involved somehow in this latest destructive incident.
But that made no sense. Why on earth
would
she? Well, she was an old friend of Anita MacNeil’s and had in fact originally suggested Anita for the part of Eva. Could the two of them be trying to shove Jess aside so that Anita, who was now Jess’s back-up for Eva, could take over the major role?
Now there was a paranoid idea! Not that such machinations were unknown in the competitive hotbed of theater. But to even imagine that the gracious, unflappable Nell would stoop so low seemed downright demented. She was the calm, sound business head that kept the Edwardian afloat, highly unlikely to involve herself in a backstage feud even for a friend. Nor could she have been easily duped somehow by Anita. Nell was a smart lady.
But what about Anita? She was ambitious, and not young enough anymore to wait calmly for her own success to be earned (which it mostly wasn’t, as hundreds of New York waiters with stage resumes could testify). Maybe she was desperate enough to try to drive Jess out of the cast, counting on psychological hangovers from the accident to have weakened her rival?
Jess stared gloomily at her own reflection (noting in passing that Eva’s dress still gaped at the neckline). She had never indulged in suspicion of her fellow professionals. (Well, not since she had been a very much younger, very much sillier girl, just starting out.) She wasn’t going to start now if she could help it.
That kind of paranoia was poison to a production. You had to be able to count on your colleagues, and she was damned if she would let her trust in them be undermined by some incidents of petty vandalism.
If they didn’t trust each other on the stage, who in the world
could
performers trust? And lack of trust could wreck the delicate balance of the play itself, as it was developing under Walter’s careful attention.
In the end, she said nothing that day about the glued jewelry to anyone. She persuaded Marie agree to keep it to herself as well. Jess wanted to mull the whole business over quietly, and think about who to approach about stopping it, and how.
And the last thing she wanted to do was to add to the company’s jitters about these spiteful little gestures. It didn’t take much to start theater people whispering about a jinx on the production. She herself couldn’t shake a lingering nervousness. When she started for home after the rehearsal something snagged her attention. She looked around, expecting to see—what? Anita, smiling a secretive smile of satisfaction?
In fact Anita was there, climbing onto the back of the motorcycle ridden by her boyfriend. Anthony Sinclair mimed acting as her equerry, stooping with his hands linked for her to step into in order to swing up and astride a tall, imaginary horse. As the biked pulled out into traffic inches ahead of a UPS van, a yellow cab drew into the curb space and Sinclair stepped back out of the way of the opening door.
A change in his posture—a greyhound tension, keen and taut—made Jess stop to watch.
A woman got out of the cab and looked up at Sinclair—she was a head shorter than he—saying nothing as far as Jess could see from a distance of some twenty-five feet. It was Anthony who spoke, starting eagerly forward, reaching to embrace the woman.
She fended him off with a handful of papers: mail, perhaps, or documents. She spoke; slowly the actor lowered his head and looked over the proferred papers. He snatched them and angrily stuffed them into his coat pocket without looking at them.
The woman continued speaking. That was his wife, Sally Sinclair, barely recognizable without stage makeup and costume lighting. She was smaller than Jess would have expected—smaller than she had seemed playing the old lion’s young wife in “Uncle Vanya” in a recent, much celebrated bare-stage production.
Smaller, but not less impressive: she was an olive-skinned woman in a fur hat and coat, regal as a queen of the jet set. It looked to Jess as if she never took her eyes from Sinclair’s face or raised her voice. Only a rapid, low ripple of speech, passionate with intense emotion, was audible to Jess.
Sinclair stood with his head bowed and his face averted, like a courtier taking a verbal lashing from a superior. There were no fireworks, no dramatics, perhaps because they were so deeply sunk in the intensity of their emotions that for once neither of them was aware of having an audience—Jess.
Nobody else had stopped to look; this was New York.
Only when his wife finished speaking, touching Sinclair’s cheek with her gloved fingertips and withdrawing quickly into the waiting cab, did he break his apparent paralysis. He lunged forward, grabbing at the side of the taxi, calling out in a hoarse voice. But the cab pulled away, leaving him staggering in the gutter.
Afraid that he might actually fall, Jess started toward him. He steadied himself with both gloved hands braced on the trunk of a parked car. When she anxiously spoke his name, the face he turned toward her was so bleak and drawn that she was stopped in her tracks. This was no moment for a sympathetic intrusion.
