“Useful or not, you could just answer the question.”
For several minutes, Calvin examined the palms of his hands, as if he couldn’t quite believe how empty they were. “This isn’t advice,” he said. “It’s just how things look to me.”
I didn’t see any reason to say anything, so I didn’t.
“If I ask myself whether someone in particular deserves to live, the only way I can decide is by short-circuiting the question. I don’t really know what qualities go into exempting a human being from my nutritional needs. I can’t walk through a crowd of people and pick out the ones who merit exemption. Whatever it is that makes someone distinctively valuable, it isn’t obvious to an observer. At least, not to this observer. In order to choose, I have to resort to something too arbitrary and too vague to articulate: a feeling, an intuition, a sense of something that, ultimately, I don’t understand. If I do that, I know I’m simply falling back on built-in prejudices that tip the scales one way or the other, for reasons that elude me. I suspect you know exactly what I mean.”
“I think I do,” I said.
“This wouldn’t be a problem, except that I, like you, want to know why the scales tip one way rather than the other. But since I’ve never been able to answer that question in any satisfactory way, I ask a different question. I ask who deserves to die.”
I couldn’t see how that question would be any easier to answer, and said as much.
“What makes the second question answerable is that I’m intimately familiar with evil. I may not know what good is, but I can look into myself and see its opposite. All the coldness, the savagery, the ruthless, calculating indifference, are as familiar to me as the palms of my hands. But what makes the question answerable is that there are human beings just like me. And the strange thing is, those people also know when they see evil, because they are also intimately familiar with it. When they see me, when we make eye contact, I’m like a mirror in which they catch a glimpse of themselves. When that happens, and it happens more often than you might think, there is a moment of recognition that is unmistakable. When I see that spark of recognition, I know I’ve found my next meal.”
Under different circumstances, I would have thought Calvin was, as they say, fucking with me. The idea that he could see evil acknowledge itself struck me as pretty far-fetched, and my doubt must have been apparent to Calvin.
“Like I said, it’s not advice. I’m just telling you what works for me.”
“So you only kill these so-called evil people?” I asked.
“Not only, but mostly. I think of it as my way of balancing accounts. I realize the accounts are imaginary. Just a story I tell myself. There is no cosmic balance sheet. But it’s a story that seems amenable to my predilections, and it’s the best I can do.”
“I can see you’re serious,” I said, not sure what else to say.
“I suppose there’s a certain twisted logic to it. Evil defeated by greater evil in the name of something good. But the logic is definitely of the twisted variety.”
“I wasn’t expecting you to be impressed,” Calvin said. “But if you think about it, I think you’ll see it’s not so crazy. Look at yourself. Human culture offers you a lot of ease and enjoyment. This comfortable suburban house you live in, the music and literature and all the other arts you enjoy, the conveniences of modern technology. All of this is above the contribution people make to your nutritional health and, ultimately, to your sanity. I benefit from all these things the same as you do. As a rule, the people I kill aren’t instrumental in creating this culture. They’re like me. They don’t contribute. They just take, and in the process, they take it for granted that the world is there for them to exploit as they please. They are, in a word, bloodsuckers. Reducing their numbers is my contribution.”
•
The conversation trailed off after that. I think we were both talked out. We chatted a while longer, waiting for the sun to set. Calvin told me some interesting and amusing anecdotes about other vampires he’d known over the centuries. I entertained him in turn with some funny stories of my own.
When the sun was all the way down, Calvin got up from the sofa, stretched, and said it was time to go. I opened the door and we walked out onto the balcony. The sky was overcast and a chill wind rustled the leaves of the trees.
“I enjoyed our conversation,” Calvin said, though the tone of his voice remained neutral. He offered his hand, which surprised me a little. I expected the shake to be perfunctory, in keeping, I suppose, with his emotional detachment. But he surprised me again by the firmness of his grip, stepping closer and gazing into my eyes. In that instant, there was a flicker of recognition in the depths of his gaze. For the briefest moment, his eyes were like a mirror in which I could see only myself.
Chapter 23
“Hello, Shake,” Karla said, when she answered the phone.
“Hello, Karla.”
“What’s up?”
“A couple of things. I want you to run an errand for me. I need you to drive down to San Francisco again, to Satellite. I want you to deliver a message for me. I don’t care when you go. Any night in the next week or two is fine, except Mondays or Tuesdays. The guy I want you to see is off on those days.”
“Hang on a second, Shake. Let me get a pencil. OK, go ahead.”
“Go to Satellite and ask to speak to Levko.”
“How do you spell that?”
“Like it sounds. L-E-V-K-O. Tell him you have a message from Shake. Tell him to call and leave a message at 916-101-2001 the next time Beketov
