A Matter Of Taste, Fred Saberhagen [love story books to read TXT] 📗

with you in my apartment when she was last seen alive. Do you want to make this a personal matter between the two of us, or shall we call it even?”

      Joe’s lips were very dry. He resisted the urge to lick them. “All right, let’s call it even between us. I’m here trying to make peace.”

      The other looked off into the distance as if meditating. At length he sighed. As if he were the one who had a right to be doubtful of Joe’s motives. Suddenly he asked: “Now are you willing to go back with me, and ask me in?”

      “Back to the old man’s place? He can ask you in there himself if he wants you in.”

      Kaiser looked sadly misunderstood. It was an attitude that he wore very well; perhaps he practiced it a lot.

      When he spoke he sounded perfectly sincere. “We both know that the old man, as you call him, is in no shape to do that. I’m not going to rob him or kill him.” His tone, his manner, assured Joe that that was the most preposterous idea anyone had ever heard of. “I just want to talk with him, to see him face-to-face. I’m really concerned about his welfare.”

      “He’s doing fine.”

      “Then why doesn’t he answer his door himself?” After allowing time for Joe to answer, Kaiser went on. “Probably you think you’re protecting him. But have you considered that you might be putting him in danger, and your young friends also?”

      “I don’t think so.”

      Kaiser shook his head. “How many years have you known him?”

      Joe was silent.

      The vampire persisted. “How many? Ten years? Fifteen?”

      Joe said: “About eleven.” He realized that he was starting to respond, almost to cooperate, automatically. The feeling was almost one of relief.

      Kaiser leaned just a little closer to him on the bench. Lowering his voice, he confided: “The old man—as you call him—and I go back almost five hundred years. Believe that?”

      “It’s possible.”

      “It’s quite true. Now, my friends and I didn’t murder that woman, Elizabeth Wiswell. We didn’t harm her in the least. We were trying to help her, though she died when she was with us. What you saw, what horrified you so, was part of our effort to examine her dead body, to see if she had been somehow used as a tool to poison him. But there was no indication of that. The results of our tests, that you found so alarming, were negative.”

      “I don’t believe she was quite dead when I first saw her.”

      Kaiser dismissed this idle notion with a small wave of his hand. “What really killed her was something that the 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