A Matter of Taste

old man did.'

'No, I don't believe—'

'What's really happening now is that the old man is having one of his seizures. I don't suppose you've ever seen one of them before?'

'Seizures?' Joe cleared his throat. His own voice sounded terribly weak and ineffective. 'What are they?' He couldn't help it, he felt like a kid trying to argue with a grown-up, gripped by the conviction that nothing he said was really going to count.

'His seizures, or call them fits, occur four or five times a century, fortunately no more often. As a rule they begin suddenly, with an attack of extreme lethargy. Unnatural sleep, unconsciousness—I mean of course unnatural by his, our, standards, not by yours. The lethargy is followed in a day or two by a fit of violent madness.'

'Sounds pretty horrible.'

'It is pretty horrible,' Kaiser said simply. 'Do those symptoms sound like anything that you've observed recently?'

Joe forced himself to break eye contact, to get up off the bench. He walked five paces away, in the process several times almost colliding with people in the ceaseless flow of visitors through the museum. Then he turned and came back and stood confronting Kaiser, who had remained seated.

Joe said: 'Look—you people poisoned him, somehow. You drugged him, using that woman. Getting something into her blood.'

'Bah. I hardly think such a thing is possible. Besides, why should we want to do that?'

'You did something like that. Yes.'

The vampire gestured casually. His attitude said that Joe was proving impossible to talk to.

'You drugged him,' persisted Joe. 'And then you tried everything to get into his apartment. To make sure he was dead, or to finish him off.'

'Joe, Joe—it's all right if I call you Joe? You weren't there personally, last night, were you? Or early this morning?'

'I was in your apartment this morning. I saw that dead woman hanging over the bathtub.'

A passerby looked at Joe Keogh curiously when he said that.

'I would suggest you lower your voice,' said Kaiser. 'Not that it will make any difference to me personally… but about last night. You weren't there. The truth is that when I came to the door, your young friends panicked, for no good reason—the young man in particular, John. He's had a bad experience, hasn't he, at some point? With one of us, nosferatu?'

'With more than one of you.'

'Well, that's too bad. But everyone has bad experiences, and must learn to deal with them. Last night John panicked, as I say. Today I can only hope it's not too late to convince you that's the wrong response. I wish you could believe that my friends and I were really trying to save Elizabeth Wiswell's life. Regrettably we failed. But, as I said before, she died as a result of something the old man did to her.'

'No.'

Kaiser sighed. His attitude of trying to be helpful was so plausible that Joe had to fight more and more fiercely in his own mind to keep from believing it.

But he could not quite be convinced. The man talking to him seemed to slip away mentally now and then. Facts, comparatively minor points but meaningful, kept getting shunted aside. The aura of plausibility had nothing to support it but a fierce ego and an active brain. God, what a salesman. Charisma was the buzzword for it now. But all was not well, Joe thought, inside the handsome head that nodded and smiled at him and spoke such reasonable words.

With a freezing sensation, Joe realized just how close he had come to letting himself be convinced.

Joe moved away again. This time he leaned against the wall

'Can we make a deal?' he asked abruptly. 'Arrange some kind of temporary truce at least?'

The other blinked at him. Kaiser, as if sensing the shift in Joe's attitude, relaxed the sales pressure. 'Why not?' he said in an ordinary voice. 'Your people in the apartment can come and go freely. Well give up badgering them to get in. Maybe the fit will pass over without going into the violent phase. I expect my old friend will live through it in any case. If in the meantime he should inadvertently harm someone he likes—well, I've tried. I've done about all that I can do. Meet me here again tomorrow? Say, ten in the morning? If you've decided you can trust me a little bit, there might still be time to help our mutual friend.'

'Ten o'clock,' said Joe. 'Right here.'

'Right.' Kaiser stood up and put out his hand to shake, an honest and manly gesture. When Joe refused, shaking his head just slightly, he shrugged, smiled a faint but winning smile, and moved along, heading toward the Michigan Avenue exit.

Joe watched him out of sight, as far as the throng at the main door. Then he went to a public phone inside the museum and punched the number of Uncle Matthew's condo.

Chapter 9

I have observed as I grow older that my chronic need for the home earth grows gradually less intense. In the year in which I electronically set down these words, standing in close sight of the end of the twentieth century, I find that I can ordinarily manage with a mere couple of kilograms of that dear crumbly soil, sealed sanitarily in a plastic bag beneath my bottom sheet or mattress.

Even in 1492, the year in which I at last managed to reenter Italy, this diminution of my dependence on the homeland had begun. Also by that time, to my considerable relief, I no longer found it necessary to sleep for years at a stretch. Even naps whose duration stretched into months were becoming increasingly rare.

As the time of my departure for Italy drew near, I had no very clear idea of where my two surviving assassins were likely to be found. About two years had passed since any intelligence regarding either Bogdan or Basarab had reached me. Given the perilous nature of their profession, I considered it very doubtful whether they were still alive. Therefore I decided that my first Italian destination should be Florence.

Roughly a quarter of a century earlier, at the time of my last visit to that intriguing, prosperous, often dangerous but never boring city, I had made some good friends as well as some fierce enemies among its citizens. I thought that some of those friends might be able to help me now, even if they could hardly be expected to recognize, in my youthful-looking, blood-drinking, and nocturnal figure, the breathing condottiere they had once known as Signor Ladislao.

From the beginning I had realized that to locate the objects of my vengeance would probably require my appearance in society, at any and all levels, listening everywhere, questioning discreetly. I had done my best to practice playing the role of a breathing man, first in the market towns of my homeland and then in Bucharest. That I had spent most of my life up until that time in such a state was of course a considerable advantage. By the last decade of the fifteenth century, I had no doubt of my ability to take my place in any company as a more or less ordinary breathing human—at least for a short time, when sunlight was not a problem, eating and drinking not absolute requirements. And now, at last, all was in readiness. My only real worry was that one or both of my intended victims might have gone to the grave before I had a chance to get my hands on them.

During my breathing years, traversing the Alps had invariably been something of an ordeal, and in the month of March it was often not possible at all. Now, traveling almost without baggage, alternately in wolf-form and mist- form, I found the cold and snow of spring—in the mountains, still late winter—almost no impediment. On the southern slopes, whose descent brought me down into Lombardy, I paused in man-form at an inn and rejoiced to find that the trunk deposited there the year before in the name of Ladislao was still safe, kept faithfully awaiting my arrival.

From Lombardy, freshly equipped with money, clothing of Italian cut, and a small emergency supply of earth, I progressed by swift stages on to Florence, which city I found considerably transformed from the energetic metropolis I had known more than twenty years before. Now it seemed almost that a century of change had intervened; there was practically no one I knew left in the city. The people I did converse with were too distracted with their own problems to think about the Balkan mercenaries for whom I was so diligently searching.

Most disappointingly, I learned to my sorrow of the serious illness of Lorenzo the Magnificent, which was feared would be his last. Lorenzo had been a mere youth when I had seen him last, though already leader of the