'That's very strange,' said Mrs. Hassler a second later. 'I'm just now noticing it.'
'What's that?'
'The door. Look. It's not really on the hinges any longer. You can see a crack of daylight all the way around.'
'Why, so you can.' Kaiser was standing right in the viewer's field of view, and making sure that his companion was in it also. His ears were quite good enough to bring him the faint sounds from beyond the door, of a pair of breathers who had begun to creep about again like frightened mice. Their little electronic screen would be showing him standing in the hall, and now when he silently raised his left hand they would be able to see it clearly, poised in the air a few inches from the back of Mrs. Hassler's neck.
'Push the bell again,' said Mrs. Hassler. But before he could do so, his first attempt was at last answered.
'What do you want?' The breathing voice from inside came through the speaker as a tortured squeak.
'May we come in?' the man who called himself Valentine Kaiser responded politely. And his eyes twinkled.
Maule, arriving from the eighty-ninth floor with Joe, approached his own apartment very cautiously. While he was still ten paces down the corridor Maule sensed Kaiser's presence within, and himself promptly vanished into the air. Out of the air came a whisper in Joe's ear, instructing him to go on and tap at the front door.
Here we go again, thought Joe Keogh. He approached the door with no particular effort at stealth, doing his best to suggest to anyone who might be watching or listening that he had no suspicion that anything was wrong. He tapped the button briskly and called out in a low voice to identify himself, then stood where the viewer could pick him up.
In a moment there came the sound of shifting furniture; then the detached door was lifted partially aside by unseen hands. Joe took a deep breath and stepped in through the gap.
'Where's the old man?' he asked as innocently as he could, looking at John's and Angie's frightened faces. 'Isn't he—'
—and in a moment was wrenched away. Before Joe had time to think about crying out, he was free again, uninjured. Two blurry and tremendous figures, looking somehow larger than life though both were in human-form, were spinning about the room, crashing into such furniture as had somehow survived the earlier struggle. Maule at last had come to grips with his chief opponent.
Angie was crawling into a corner behind a sofa; John appeared to be trying to find his wooden spear again. Joe caught sight of the woman he had seen briefly in the hallway earlier, Mrs. Hassler. She was stretched out, fully clothed, on another sofa at the far end of the room, and appeared to be peacefully asleep; as Joe watched, her lips puffed out in a gentle snore.
Dodging away from the two combatants as they crashed into the piano near the center of the room, Joe moved toward the far end where Mrs. Hassler lay. He'd drawn his gun now, but hadn't had the chance to get off a clean shot.
Before that chance came, the wrestling match was over.
It ended at one side of the room, with Kaiser—or Borgia—pinned facedown in a hammerlock, with his head and shoulders atop a sturdy wooden table that managed to support both his and his opponent's considerable weight.
Joe, sidestepping for a clear shot with his revolver at Kaiser's head, saw that there was to be no shape- changing in this spasmodic struggle between two powerful vampires. Borgia appeared to be trying something of the kind, for waves of liquid change distorted his face and body momentarily. But Maule, standing above and behind him, gripping him with immovable hands, cried out, in a language none of the breathers could understand, such words as seemed to prevent it.
John had located the broken shaft of a wooden spear, and was approaching with this weapon raised. Joe still aimed a liqnum vitae bullet. But Maule, raising his voice, forbade either of them to kill this man.
'I swear,' said Borgia, sounding half-strangled, 'on my sacred honor that I will honor a truce if you will grant me one.'
The man who pinned him only laughed. It was a strange and unfamiliar sound.
'No killing, and no truce? Then what?' Borgia's choking laugh was even stranger. 'Do you mean to grip me like this forever?'
'Until I have decided what to do next—why do you hunt me?'
'You know full well why, Prince.'
'On my own honor, I do not.'
'Then you can guess. Because of the four hundred years of torment I endured? Four centuries buried in alien soil, where I could neither rest, nor regain full consciousness, until at last the drug wore off—'
'That was not my fault,' said Maule in slow, inexorable tones.
'Why shouldn't we finish him?' John demanded.
Maule did not answer.
'What are we going to do with him, then?' Joe wanted to know.
Angie, struggling against what felt like terminal exhaustion, had retreated to the only chair currently upright in the room, and let herself sink into it.
And then she realized that she could not really rest. Not yet.
Pulling herself slowly to her feet, she left the room, unnoticed by any of the men. Moving as in a daze, without much conscious emotion, she stooped in the bedroom hallway to pick up from the floor a large, sharp, convenient wooden splinter.
In Maule's bedroom she somehow found the strength to tug the dresser out a little distance from the wall. The secret compartment opened easily. There were the jars. She found the proper one. Not likely that she would forget what it looked like.
Back in the living room, the debate was still going on.
'Again you will spare my life, I suppose,' said Borgia in a less strangled voice. He had been allowed to shift his position slightly, and was now lying more on his right side and shoulder than on his face. One arm was still bent up beside his back. 'Because of your damned honor. I suppose you can discover some way to imprison me again. And then in two hundred years, or a hundred, or whenever I can, I will be coming after you again.'
'Perhaps,' said Maule.
'No perhaps. There is no doubt about it.'
'I thought,' said Maule, as though the words constituted some kind of explanation, 'that Spain would be your native soil.'
'At this date I am not likely to accept apologies.'
'Nor am I likely to offer any.'
None of the men were aware of Angie's immediate presence until she was very close. None of them paid much attention to her even then. Not until she had whipped out the long, poisoned splinter from behind her back and thrust it, hard, up under Borgia's ribs, aiming for his vampire's heart.
Chapter 19
Feeling doubly repulsed by the behavior of Duke Cesare and the blackened and hideous spectacle of his father's body, I hastened to distance myself from the Vatican through which, for some eleven years, they had sought to dominate the world. Rome in general agreed with me in being ready to see the last of the Borgias; Alexander's death was celebrated in a general wave of rejoicing. At the same time, out in the farms and villages of the Romagna, many mourned the impending fall from power of his son, the young man who had given their towns the best government they could remember.
As for myself, I rejoiced in my new freedom. Indeed it was freedom in a degree that I had never yet experienced; that night marked the first time since the beginning of my life as a vampire that I felt myself under no obligation, either to the Borgias or to that even grimmer master called Revenge.
Of course my liberty was not perfect; I suppose that in this world no one's ever is. In my case the sharpest
