Empire V (25 page)

But what had occurred in the depths of Heartland I could not see – it remained in some way hidden from me, as if part of her interior mapping had been obscured. I had not previously come across this phenomenon, so could not restrain myself from asking:

‘What happened when you were with Ishtar Borisovna?'

She frowned.

‘I beg you, let's not speak of it. Everyone asks me about it, Mithra, you …'

‘Mithra?' I interrupted.

The name suddenly made me pay attention, and I realised that Hera's feelings towards Mithra were almost as warm as they were towards me.
Almost
. But Mithra …

Mithra, I realised with a mixture of jealousy and rage, had bitten her not once but twice. She had bitten him once. Nothing more had taken place between them, but that was already more than enough. Evidence of their closeness had been the last glimpse I was able to see in the outgoing tide of her memory before the window finally closed. The moment it did so I desperately wanted to bite her again, to find out exactly what place Mithra occupied in her life.

I also knew, of course, that this was something I should not do. It was clear as day: the second bite is followed by an irresistible need for a third, then a fourth … and so on without end … A name for the craving even came unbidden into my head: plasmaholism – although this had less to do with red liquid's plasma than with ‘holism', the pathological desire for totality, for unrestricted access to her soul at the slightest suspicion of betrayal. If I were once to yield to the temptation, and then again, I thought, I could end up sucking the beloved being dry of all her red liquid.

Something of this must have shown in my face, for Hera blushed and said:

‘What? What have you seen there?'

‘Mithra has bitten you?'

‘Yes, he has. That is why I do not want to see him. And I won't want to see you, if you bite me again.'

‘Do you mean I can never bite you again?'

‘You and I have to trust each other,' she said. ‘And if we keep biting one another there can never be trust between us.'

‘Why not?'

‘What trust can there be if you know everything?'

This was logical.

‘If it had been up to me,' I said, ‘I wouldn't have done it first. You're the one who began it.'

‘I know,' she sighed. ‘Loki told me to. He said it is essential to be utterly cynical and ruthless about men, even if one's heart tells you otherwise.'

This was another area of her experience into which I had not looked.

‘Loki?' I asked in astonishment. ‘What did you study with him?'

‘The art of combat and of love. The same as you.'

‘But he's … he's a man.'

‘When we were having lessons on the art of love, he came dressed as a woman.'

I tried unsuccessfully to visualise Loki in a dress.

‘That's extraordinary,' I said. ‘He told me quite the opposite, that a vampire should not bite a woman in whom he … well, in whom he is interested. So as not to lose the interest.'

Hera fiddled with her hair.

‘Well,' she enquired, ‘did it survive? The interest I mean? You didn't lose it altogether?'

‘Not the least bit,' I replied. ‘But I hardly saw anything. You could say that I don't know any more about you than I did before. All I wanted was to be quits with you. When you bit me by the museum …'

‘Don't go on about it,' said Hera. ‘Can't we change the subject?'

‘All right. But one thing I don't understand: I wasn't able to see what had happened to you with Ishtar. How can that be?'

‘She has that power. Whatever occurs between Ishtar and anyone whom she bites is hidden to everyone else. I wouldn't be able to see what you talked about with her either. Nor would even Enlil or Marduk.'

‘I had the impression you were frightened and upset.'

Hera's face darkened.

‘I did ask you not to talk about it. I may be able to tell you one day.'

‘OK,' I agreed. ‘Let's talk about something more life-enhancing. What did Loki look like in a dress?'

‘Marvellous. He'd even got hold of artificial tits. I think he really liked it.'

‘What did you cover in the course on love?'

‘Loki talked to me about statistics.'

‘What sort of statistics?'

‘Are you seriously interested?'

I nodded.

‘He said' – Hera furrowed her brow in concentration – ‘let me try to remember … “Statistically speaking, the average male's relations with a woman are characterised by contempt and unbridled cynicism … Research has shown that seen from the perspective of male sexual morality two categories of women exist. A woman who declines to engage in the sexual act with a man is a ‘bitch'. A woman who consents is a ‘whore'. A male's relations with a woman are not only cynical but extremely irrational. The predominant view among men – held by seventy-four per cent of those surveyed – is that the majority of young women fall into both categories simultaneously, which is of course a logical impossibility …”'

‘What was the conclusion?' I asked.

‘That it is essential to be utterly ruthless in our dealings with men, since they deserve no other approach.'

‘Did Loki bring an inflatable woman for your lessons too?'

Hera looked at me in bafflement.

‘What on earth are you talking about?'

‘I mean, of course, an inflatable man,' I corrected.

‘No. You mean you had an inflatable woman?'

I muttered something unintelligible.

‘What did you do with her?'

I gestured feebly with my hands.

‘Was she lovely, though?'

I could bear no more of this.

‘Could we change the subject?'

Hera shrugged her shoulders.

‘As you please. You brought it up.'

A long silence followed.

‘This is a weird conversation we're having,' said Hera sadly. ‘We always seem to have to stop talking about whatever subject we get into.'

‘We're vampires,' I replied. ‘That is probably how it has to be.'

At that moment the soup was brought in.

The ensuing ritual took several minutes. The waiters placed on the table a grotesquely rococo soup tureen, took away the unused place settings, replaced them with new plates, then fished out from the steaming depths of the tureen a brightly painted china figurine with exaggeratedly rouged cheeks. At first I thought this must be Khodorkovsky, but the writing across her breast made it clear it was Hillary Clinton. The waiter then ceremonially placed the figure on a towel and presented it for inspection to each of us in turn, approximately as the cork of an expensive bottle of wine is presented to the nostrils of the client. It was then equally ceremonially returned to the soup. Hillary smelt of fish. Clearly there was a subtle point to all this, but once again it escaped me.

After the waiters had left the room, we stayed sitting on the floor.

‘Are you going to eat something?' enquired Hera.

I shook my head.

‘Why not?'

‘Because of the watch.'

‘What watch?'

‘Patek Philippe,' I replied. ‘Long story. Anyhow, what has Hillary Clinton to do with Russian fish soup? She's American, after all. I think they've rather overdone this one.'

‘It's always the same in these expensive places,' said Hera. ‘A sort of epidemic. Like for instance
Fallen Demon
or
IBAN Tsarevich
. Have you ever been to the
Marie Antoinette
on Tverskaya Street?'

‘No, I haven't.'

‘They have a guillotine there, just as you go in through the door. And the man wandering round the dining room serving desserts is the Marquis de Sade. Have you been to
Akhnaten
?'

‘No, I haven't been there either,' I said, feeling like a clodhopping bumpkin with straw in my hair.

‘This season they've introduced monotheism. But the patron still dresses like Osiris. Or rather, undresses like Osiris.'

‘Osiris?'

‘Yes. Although I'm not clear what the connection is. Anyhow, on 4 November, this new Day of National Unity we've got now, he is brought back to life five times to Glinka's music. They bring in cypress trees specially, and keening women.'

‘Everyone seems to be searching for some national idea or other.'

‘Aha, right,' agreed Hera. ‘But every time they let it off the hook at the last moment. The worst of it is this indiscriminate eclecticism.'

‘That's not so surprising,' I said. ‘They suck black liquid, so they can afford it. But this Osiris you were mentioning, he's not by any chance a vampire, is he?'

‘Certainly not. It's just the role he plays, not his real name. No vampire would ever run a restaurant.'

‘You don't know a vampire called Osiris?'

Hera shook her head.

‘Who is he?'

For a second I hesitated, unsure whether to tell her or not. Then I decided I would.

‘Ishtar told me to seek him out, when she saw how interested I was in certain things she could not tell me anything about.'

‘For instance?'

‘For instance, the origins of the world. Or what happens when we die.'

‘Do you find things like that really interesting?' asked Hera.

‘Don't you?

‘No,' replied Hera firmly. ‘They're just the sort of stupid questions men always ask, the standard phallic projections of an unstable and immature intellect. I'll find out what happens after death when I die. Why should I bother about it now?'

‘That's true, too,' I agreed, not wanting to argue. ‘All the same, since Ishtar Borisovna herself suggested it, I should try to find him.'

‘Ask Enlil.'

‘Osiris is his brother, and they've fallen out. I can't ask Enlil.'

‘All right,' said Hera, ‘I'll track him down. And if you hear anything interesting from this Osiris, you will tell me, won't you?'

‘It's a deal.'

Getting up, I began walking round the room as though stretching my legs. In fact they had not gone numb at all, I simply wanted to get closer to Hera and was trying to make my manoeuvre appear more natural.

I have to admit that all these preliminaries to the active phase of seduction have always been such an effort for me that they threatened seriously to devalue the prize. Usually at such times I behaved like a sex-obsessed idiot (which, to be honest, I was). But on this occasion I knew precisely Hera's feelings, and was determined to exploit my advantage.

Reaching the window in the course of my peregrinations, I turned to go back towards the door, then stopped halfway, made a right-angle turn, took two ponderous steps towards Hera, and sat down beside her.

‘What are you doing?' she asked.

‘It's like the old joke,' I said. ‘One vampire sits on the rails, another comes along and says: “Couldn't you move along a bit?”'

‘Oh,' said Hera, and blushed a little. ‘I see what you mean, we are sitting on the rails.'

She pulled over another of the rail-shaped cushions and placed it between us.

I realised that my roaming manoeuvre had been too clumsy. We would have to go on talking.

‘Hera,' I said, ‘do you know what I'd like to ask you?'

‘What?'

‘About the Tongue. Do you feel it now?'

‘In what sense?'

‘Well, before, for the first six weeks or so, I could feel it all the time. Not just physically, but with my whole … well, brain I suppose. Or, if you'll forgive the expression, with my soul. But now I'm not aware of it at all. It's as if the Tongue has gone away; there's no sensation of it anywhere. I'm just as I was before.'

‘It only seems like that,' said Hera. ‘We are not the same as we were before. What has happened is that our memory has changed along with ourselves, so that now it appears to us as though we were always like that.'

‘How can that be?'

‘Jehovah explained it to me. What we think we remember is not how it really was. Memory is an amalgam of chemical compounds. It can accommodate any changes that are consistent with the laws of chemistry. If you take a lot of acid, the memory also acidifies, and so on. The Tongue radically changes our internal chemistry.'

‘That sounds rather alarming,' I said.

‘Why? What is there to worry about? The Tongue won't do us any harm. Generally speaking, it's a minimalist. At the very beginning, when it has just found a new nest to settle into, it arranges things how it wants them, bedding itself down so to say. At that stage you may feel uncomfortable. But once it has got used to you it stops being worried about anything and sleeps most of the time, like a bear in its lair. The Tongue is immortal, you know. It only wakes up to get a feed of
bablos
.'

‘What about when there is a tasting?'

‘It doesn't have to wake up for that. It doesn't care one bit what happens to us from day to day – to it, that's completely uninteresting. As far as the Tongue is concerned our life is like a dream that often it probably doesn't even notice.'

I thought about it. The description seemed to accord pretty well with my own perceptions.

‘Have you ever tried
bablos
?' I asked.

Hera shook her head.

‘We are to be given it together.'

‘When?'

‘I don't know. As far as I could understand, it will come out of the blue. Ishtar decides when. Even Enlil and Marduk don't know exactly when or how. They only have a vague idea.'

Every time I learnt something new from Hera, I experienced a slight pang of jealousy.

‘Listen,' I said, ‘I do envy you. Not only do you have a car and a driver, you always seem to get to know everything a month before I do. How do you manage it?'

‘You ought to be more sociable,' smiled Hera. ‘And spend less time hanging head down in your cupboard.'