CHAPTER FORTY

FORTY
London’s vampire, who shall remain nameless,
presented himself at my hotel room door. I opened it
and he pushed past me into the room.
“No need for dramatics or violence,” he said. “I
know you’re in the theater and that violence runs deep
in the American vein, but try and control yourself.
You’re in my town now.”
His dark hair was slicked straight back and
his face was pasty and pale and he was narrow shouldered.
He wore a gray pinstripe suit without
the vest but with a tie. I instantly knew that he was
another vampire and I was taken aback, to understate
the facts. I decided to try subterfuge.

“Excuse me. Do I know you? I’m Gus
Windham. Maybe you have the wrong room?”
“Stow it. You’re a vampire, and you’re whoever
you say you are, makes no difference. How long are
you staying here?”
He had an accent that I have since learned is
from London’s East End. He looked at me closely.
“You’re an original, aren’t you?”
I was not sure what he meant about being an
original and remained silent, which was easy, as this
vampire was intent on doing the talking.
“Let me get right down to it. You can’t come
here on holiday and leave a bunch of bloody corpses lying around, mate. I’ve got a certain way of doing things here. Don’t want to get the coppers all stirred up, now do we? How long do you plan to be here anyway?””
“I’ve done everything possible to keep a low profile.”
“You call feeding on a drunk in Soho and leaving his corpse in the gutter ‘low profile’? Are you mad? And what do you call bleedin’ high profile then?”
He was talking about my 3 a.m. meal almost eighteen hours earlier. “It should have looked like liver failure, if anyone bothered to check.”
“You drained him of every drop. How’s that going to look, I ask you?”
“Who’s going to care? He was a bum.”
“He was a bloke on a bender. Look you want to leave bodies lying around, hop over to Ulster, would you please? And put a bullet in the corpse when you’re done, for form’s sake. You still haven’t answered my question.”
“Which question? About being an original? I didn’t quite catch your drift. What . . .”
“Nah. You’re an original. It would be obvious if you were a revenant, though that behavior in Soho is on the level of a revenant.”
“Revenant?”
“Are you dense or what? A revenant – a human made into one of us.”
“Oh. I see. No, I’m an original.”
“I said I can see that for myself.”
“Do you have a lot of revenants here?”
“Not really.”
“What question exactly did you want me to answer?”
I was tiring of his tone and approach.
“When are you taking your vampire cowboy bleedin’ self back to America where you belong? I’ve got a good thing going here and I don’t need you making things difficult.”
I agreed to leave as soon as I could arrange a jet charter.
“A jet charter? Are you bleedin’ mad? Why on earth would you do that? You can fly, right? You do know that you can fly?”
“No need to be insulting. I’ve never gone that far in one hop is all.”
“You don’t do it in one bleedin’ hop, all right? Did you bother to look at a map?”
I shook my head ‘no’.
“Unbelievable. If Brother Brendan and his lot of monks made it across the Atlantic in leather covered coracles, you’d think a vampire could make it flying. Only I guess you wouldn’t think so or you’d have done it. So, I’m going to tell you how to get back without a hired bleedin’ aircraft but you better be on your way tonight, and you better not make a return trip without clearing it with me first, and like as not, I won’t clear it. Am I making myself clear, so to speak?”
“Perfectly.”
“All right then. You fly over to Ireland. It’s several minutes west of here. Try to land on the northwest coast. From there you launch with your body at about a sixty degree angle. You should be headed northwest. You understand the points of the compass and all, right?”
I nodded an affirmative.
“Okay then. Point yourself northwest. Fly as high as you can without leaving the earth’s gravity. Are you following what I’m saying here, guv?”
I nodded for again him to continue. He was trying my patience but there was nothing I could do about that.
“Head back down at more or less the same angle. You should see a huge land mass. That’s Greenland. There are not a lot of lights there. There is an airbase for your U.S. Air Force. I’d avoid that and go farther north. To my knowledge there is none of our kind on Greenland. There are some Laplander clans roaming about up there, living off reindeer balls and moss, looks like. You can snatch a blood sack from among those types if you’re hungry. If you do or you don’t feed, Canada is south southwest from Greenland. You can’t miss it, and from there you can surely find your way home.”
“Thank you. That will be my route.”
“If you do grab a blood sack among the Lapps, drop the body in a crevasse on the glacier there. Or not. It’s not my bailiwick now is it? It’s just that we tend to tidy up after ourselves on this side of the Atlantic, if you catch my drift.”
“I try to do the same at home.”
“Then why would you come here and leave an exsanguinated corpse lying in a gutter in Soho? I can’t figure you Yanks.”
“Let me offer my apologies for any inconvenience, if it will help.”
“All right. All right. Won’t help but there you go. Luckily I spotted him first and recognized his condition for what it was, right? I dumped the body in the Channel with some rope round his waist and a concrete block tied to either end .”
“Thank you for taking care of that. I will be on my way tonight.”
“That’s a load off, it is. . . You’re the Broadway producer, right? I’ve heard of you through some of the high rollers who come in the casino. Knew you were a vampire right off. Don’t know how you stand it – two vampires in the same city.”
“Two? What are you talking about?”
“That artist. What’s he call himself? Andy Warhol. That’s it. Paints soup cans.”
“Andy’s not a vampire. I’ve met him. He wants to be a vampire but he’s just another human being.”
“Oh please. I’ve seen photos. That creature is a vampire as sure as I am.”
“He’s not. He calls himself Drella – which is supposed to be part Dracula and part Cinderella – but it’s an act. No. It’s more than an act. He would love to be a vampire, or to be his concept of a vampire anyway. It’s some kind of obsession.”
“What’s it all coming to? A human being who wants to be one of us, who wants to kill and feed on his own kind. How did we ever become role models? The world is changing, Gus. The world is becoming stranger and stranger.”
“That it is. And by the looks of things, it’s going to keep on that way.”
He grunted and I said, “I didn’t catch your name.”
“I didn’t give it, Gus. I’ll tell you what, if I’m ever coming to New York, I’ll get in touch first and tell you then. Meantime, when you launch, find your way to someplace secluded or where you won’t be so obvious. Out toward Luton might be sensible. Just don’t be launching yourself from the middle of Piccadilly Square as the theater lets out, leaping into the sky like Superman or some other nonsense.”
I chuckled and said, “I won’t.”
That was my one previous contact with the individual who is now proposing that we swap cities. I have to say the idea appeals to me on more than one level. First, there’s the state of the theater here versus there. When the cost of presenting shows is as high as it is now in New York, and those who invest are driven by vanity more than by a desire to make money, when Hollywood, television and comic books become primary source material for musicals, when originality is scorned on behalf of mediocrity, there has got to be some kind of major shake up soon. It is in the air.