The Color of Light (50 page)

He finished with a flourish of unfamiliar saints’ names. Out of his vestments, he produced a sharpened wooden stake and a mallet, and planted it over my heart, where he had painted my chest with oil.

The point dug into my bare skin. When his eyes met mine again, they burned with religious fervor.

“The pain is your penance, my son,” he said.

“Wait,” I said. “Padre. Before we start.”

The men from the town muttered uneasily, shuffling their feet, gripping their tools. He shushed them, then turned back to me.

“You’ve known other vampires.”

“Yes.” He crossed himself.

“Do I have a purpose? Am I part of God’s design?”

Thoughtfully, he stroked his stringy beard. “Of course,” he said. “Every creature on God’s earth has a reason for being. You punish the headstrong, the questioning, the wandering, the weak, the ones who stray. You exist to hammer home the lessons of teachers, parents, the God-fearing. Even evil has a purpose.

“Take his arms,” he said to his men.

I opened my fangs wide and struck, crushing his larynx and windpipe with my jaws. He was a wily old vampire hunter, and he got in one good stroke with the mallet before he went down. I felt the point of the stake wedge between my ribs. His blood ran down my throat, hot and garlicky.

The men around me shouted in panic and raised their weapons. Blows rained down upon my back, my shoulders. The man holding the cross wielded it like a baseball bat, striking me in the side, and I felt something break.

From behind came a sharp crack, like the snapping of a bough. The man with the cross looked concerned; and then he slumped forward and collapsed. I whipped around, and there was Rudi, holding a pistol.

“This man is under the protection of the Third Reich,” he announced in German. The villagers were terrified now, staring aghast at their dead leader. “Stay where you are. I want all your names.”

There was a moment of silence, a stalemate. Then one of the men flung his torch at Rudi, who dodged away, firing wildly. They dropped their tools and melted into the woods. Rudi emptied his pistol into the trees.

And then Anastasia began to laugh. Somewhere nearby, a chorus of wolves warbled along with her. “Brilliant, my darling!” she said when she could finally speak. “I really thought you were going to let him do it. Oh, you were magnificent!”

“You are one crazy bastard, Sinclair.” Rudi agreed, shaking his head. “Excuse me, please. I have to make a call.” He disappeared behind the car, where he kept a field telephone in the boot.

Anastasia leaned over, ran her warm tongue in a long line up my chest, lapping up the blood. Then she kissed me, deeply and fervently. “Thank you,” she said, smiling. “That was a better tribute to Constantin than I could have planned.” She buttoned my shirt back up and straightened my tie. “Now let’s get out of here. You could really use a bath.”

Rudi came hurrying up. His whole affect had changed. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” Anastasia said.

“The front,” he said. “We are at war with Russia.”

It was still nighttime when we got back to Sighisoara, Anastasia was asleep with her head on my shoulder. Rudi pulled up outside Gestapo Headquarters, formerly the town hall. “Better if you stay inside,” he advised us. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

I was too restless to sleep, and besides, I was still hungry. I got out of the car and quietly shut the door. I wasn’t about to start letting Anastasia’s boyfriends tell me what to do.

I prowled through streets just wide enough for a horse-cart, over broken cobblestones, past stooped, darkened hovels, hoping to run into a rebellious teenager, a married someone on the way back from a tryst. I lingered outside one storey cottages with high, miserly windows, I lurked in a covered passageway completely overgrown with vines. But the streets were deserted, the shutters battened down tight against the likes of me.

Ascending a set of stairs cut into the mountain, I found myself before the massive wooden doors of a basilica. I pushed them open, waiting to be struck by lightning, or for the earth to open up under my feet. When neither of these things happened, I removed my hat and found a bench, surrounded by painted scenes from the lives of the saints.

At the moment that I stepped forward to meet the old man, I had every intention of letting him drive that stake through my heart.

He was right. Every time I dug my teeth into another innocent throat, I receded farther away from the man I used to be. I had been a vampire for almost two years now. I’d lost track of how many people I had killed long ago.

Was I evil? Yes, I killed people, many people. The savage things I did in the dead of night to keep myself alive were certainly evil. If the old man was right, I deserved to die, and sooner better than later.

Was there any good left in me at all? Could it be that my sole purpose in this world was to punish unhappy housewives and wayward teenagers? Was that the sum of me? Maybe the old man was wrong. Maybe it was still in my hands to shape my own destiny.

I dropped my head into my hands. I didn’t feel evil. I felt lost. And then, Sofia’s lovely face appeared before my mind’s eye, as she had looked in the dance hall, listening to me go on about my hopes and dreams, her eyes half-closed as she basked in the sound of my voice. I felt anger throbbing dully behind my temples.
Sofia, Sofia. Look at what’s become of me.

The sun was coming up, illuminating the stained glass windows. Time to go.

I hurried back the way I had come, anxiously watching the lightening sky, sinking back into the soft leather of the Mercedes seat just as the sun burst in a red-orange ball over the Carpathians. As the morning light feebly touched the plaza with its first rays, I could just make out something new in the main square where yesterday the market tables had stood. With a shock, I realized I was looking at the skeletal framework of a gallows.

Seven bodies swung from it, necks stretched too long, twisting slowly back and forth. Stripped of his white and saffron robes, the Archbishop was just a scrawny old man, meeting the first few stunned parishioners in a sad gray suit of oft-mended long underwear.

Just then, Rudi returned, accompanied by a man in a black uniform with silver lightning slashes on his collar. They conferred briefly, and then Rudi raised his arm in a Nazi salute and got in. He put the car in gear, rolling us past the corpses slowly rotating in the morning breeze and out of the gates of the city, heading east into the sunrise.

The next day, I boarded a train that would take me to another train that would connect with a third train that would take me away from this place. I returned to Paris, the City of Light, from Eastern Europe, the cradle of darkness. It was June, 1941.

Outside the Gare de l’Est, I flagged down a cab and asked him to take me home. It took me a moment to remember the exact address; I’d last seen it two years ago.

Everything was exactly the way I had left it. Clothing heaped on a chair, a few unwashed dishes on the kitchen counter. A toothbrush on the sink. A dingy white shirt on the floor where I had dropped it, a souvenir of my haste to leave town. My table laid with neat rows of paint. My brushes, waiting for my return, standing bristle-end-up in a coffee can. I stroked their sable tips across my open palm, as if I were a canvas.

I gazed at the paintings in various stages of completion propped up against the walls, where they would remain forever unfinished. The young man who had started them was dead.

I was cold. I was always cold. I built a fire and huddled in front of the fireplace, bundled up to my neck in an eiderdown quilt. Then I unwrapped one of my new paintings
—
the Rembrandt
—
and hung it up over the fireplace. Stepping back to admire it, I bumped into the armchair. With a soft thump, something slid onto the floor at my feet.

It was my sketchbook, covered with a light layer of dust. I picked it up, brushing it off, and flipped idly through it. Quick drawings of old men in the Tuileries, unfinished baguettes and wine bottles, studies of an open hand or the way a skirt draped around a body. Endless doodles of people in cafés. Painfully bad poetry. Hastily scribbled appointments to meet friends at a gallery, a nightclub, a theater. Mysterious jottings, their meanings lost to time.

A paper fell out, glided to the floor. I stooped down to pick it up. I turned it over slowly, knowing what it was. An Exquisite Corpse drawing, from the night I found Sofia alone at a table in La Coupole, the same night she drew my head onto the body of a god with the wings of an angel. I leaned against the fireplace, traced my fingers lightly over her strong black lines.

The night she told me her story. The night I fell in love with her. The night she ruined my life.

And then, finally, I allowed myself to turn my head and rest my eyes on Sofia’s artworks, rescued from her flat along with her paints and brushes,
leaning against the wall in the corner where the porter had deposited them.

Now I leafed through her copies of nudes and holy families, holier to me because they were done by her hand. I ran my fingers over her female figures as if by doing so, I could touch her.

I was finally angry. Outraged. Consumed with fury.

Had she only stayed with me, none of this would have happened. We would have made our own happily-ever-after in Paris, or London, or New York, or whatever sodding place she wanted to live. I would not be a parasitical blood-sucking incubus, and she would not be a phony housewife going to gardening club meetings with a fake smile pasted on her face in Toledo-fucking-Ohio.

These are the words I told myself as I fed her drawings, one by one by one, into the hungry jaws of the fire.

Some of the images were visible for a few moments, backlit by firelight, before flames caught the edges. Two models in bloomers drawn in willow charcoal and sanguine. A Del Sarto Madonna. And then the paper would brown and curl into ash. With each drawing, my hatred grew.

I didn’t stop there. I was possessed. I scoured the flat of my own artwork, throwing armloads of laid paper from the finest mills of Europe onto the blaze. Tongues of flame jetted forth into the room. The paintings went next; the stretchers took up too much space in the fireplace, so I took my knife to them and flayed them out of their frames.

A lifetime of work went up the chimney. The fire roared like a furnace. I held my hands up to its blaze. Oh, I was warm now.

As I was about to throw in the last of the lot, a canvas, I caught a glimpse of the image, and turned it around.

A couple swathed in white sheets, locked in embrace. The man raised himself over his partner, supported by sinewy arms. The woman spread ecstatically beneath him, her lips a red smudge in the heart-shaped face, her hair falling in blue-black streaks around the pillow. Unmistakably Sofia, her skin almost as white as the sheets. The man
—
well, it was me.

I’d never seen it before, she must have done it right before she left. I made to throw it in the fire, too; but at the last moment I lost my courage.
Carefully, I wrapped it up in the old bedcovering I had used to transport the Rembrandt, and stashed it in the maid’s room behind the kitchen.

Smoking with rage, I swept forth into the night.

So, I resumed the life I’d left behind, in a fashion. I went to clubs and bars and theaters, seeking out slummy places least likely to be frequented by the society I used to know, searching among the individuals least likely to be missed. I traded
bon mots
with the Free French, émigré spies, SS officers. I flirted with French prostitutes and lonely German girls in drab gray uniforms. I even acquired a notoriety of sorts; the papers wrote breathlessly of the Reich’s tireless efforts to bring down the Montmartre Ripper.

As for all those shortages you might have heard about, well, I didn’t suffer any. If a fellow had money, he had brandy, cigars, fine suits, and all the pretty girls he could eat; I didn’t need ration coupons for
them.
I drank and smoked and whored and debauched and made clever conversation, just as I used to, only now the evening was likely to end with me taking a girl down the street to a darkened doorway and stealing more than just a couple of kisses.

Through it all, Sofia was my dark muse, my twisted inspiration. If I made a girl squirm, if I made a girl scream, she was still the motivation that gave my actions shape. My new life was a circus freak-show doppelganger for my old life.

December, 1942. It was late, maybe two or three in the morning. The setting was a filthy, piss-smelling alleyway alongside a theater in Montmartre, the walls running iridescent blue-green with mold. I was just finishing up with a showgirl from the naughty revue around the corner. Full, satisfied, I was just letting her down on the pavement when I heard a sound behind me.

Let it be rats,
I prayed.
Please God, let it be rats.

I wheeled around. Someone was standing between me and the street.

“Sinclair?” The voice was English, with an upper crust accent, familiar. “Raphael
Sinclair?”

Now I could see his face. A tall Englishman with dark, wavy hair. He was gaping at the showgirl, at the blood commingling with the sequins and the bedraggled feathers on her costume. He stared at me, stared at the girl, stared back at me again. Someone was with him, a boy with eyeshadow and lipstick, who took one look at me, crossed himself and disappeared.

“Oh, my God, Sinclair,” he whispered. “Oh, dear God. So it’s true.”

“What’s true, Colby?” I said, walking slowly towards him, heartsick.
Colby, Colby, why did it have to be you?

He was licking his lips nervously, backing away. “Leo was very funny about it…he said…it was the damndest thing, utterly mad…”

He was wearing a white dinner jacket with a red carnation under a black overcoat. I fingered the lapels of his coat. “Nice,” I said. “Cashmere?”

He nodded. “Found this tailor on the Row. Brilliant work.”

I asked him if he had a smoke. He reached into his pocket, produced a silver case. I put a cigarette between my lips. He leaned forward to light it, then lit one for himself. We both blew smoke into the cold air.