John sat at the table, munching between sentences. "All right. He's not really my uncle, and his name isn't really Matthew Maule. At least that's only one of a number of names he uses. When I was kidnapped, at the age of sixteen, he was calling himself Dr. Emile Corday. Just an old friend of the family, visiting from London. The Chicago cops are probably still looking for Dr. Corday. Not that he did anything to be ashamed of then. The people he hurt were all kidnappers."
"Oh."
"So I'll tell you what I can. But I can't tell it the way he would. I can't even find the right place to begin."
Chapter 6
Out in the corridor, heading directly for the elevators, Joe Keogh got as far as the door of the next apartment down the hall before his brisk passage was interrupted.
She came out into the hallway smiling in his direction, making eye contact as if she was determined to intercept him and was not going to be too subtle about it. She might easily have seen him coming, for the door that she emerged from was strategically placed at a bend in the passage, so anyone looking through a wide-angle viewer from inside would command the stretch of hallway in front of the Maule apartment. She was a fortyish lady, average height, overweight but trying to carry it well, with skillfully if showily dyed hair, rich black streaked with silver. Subtle things about her face suggested that battles had been and were still being fought across that territory, again with skill, to prevent or wipe out jowls as well as wrinkles. What he could deduce about her body, swathed in a kind of robe or housecoat—Joe could never remember all the exact classifications for the things that women wore—suggested that it was well maintained, if not exactly shapely.
She opened her door quickly and came out, light on her feet despite her heft, bumping into Joe as he moved to step around her.
"Excuse me, I'm sorry!" Her voice was soft and pleasant, her smile a real charmer. "Were you by any chance in Mr. Maule's apartment?"
No, she's not. That was all that Joe could think of in the first moment, looking the woman over carefully. He mumbled some kind of an apology for bumping into her.
"I'm Mrs. Hassler?" As if she felt rebuffed by his failure to answer her question, the lady now seemed to be asking him if her name was quite acceptable. "It's really none of my business, but I know Mr. Maule slightly. Through the Residents' Association. And I was wondering if he's all right."
Getting too rude with the neighbors could be a bad mistake; if none of them had called in the cops yet, after a night of strange disturbances in the corridor, one of them might easily be on the brink of doing so.
"Mrs.—ah, Hassler, did you say?" Joe wondered fleetingly whether to introduce himself, and if so what name to use. He put off the decision. "Yes, I just came from Maule's place. He's okay. Was there something that alarmed you?"
"Well…" Now the lady was going to be reluctant to commit herself. From his police days Joe could recognize the type, desperately curious but not wanting to be involved. She went on: "There were some people in the hallway last night, in front of his door. I don't know who they were… I don't know if you could really call it a disturbance, but it was unusual."
Joe shrugged lightly. "I wasn't here last night. Actually, yes, he's a little under the weather today, in fact he's asleep right now. But he's going to be all right."
"He's a nice gentleman," she said softly, fixing him with a dark-eyed, liquid stare. "It's none of my business, but I wondered."
"Yes. Well. He's quite all right."
Still Mrs. Hassler was not ready to be reassured and take herself away. "In the city it seems you never know your neighbors. At least rarely. You'd think that in this building we'd be a community. Or at least here on this floor. But it doesn't seem to work that way."
"It would be nice if it did." Joe gave the lady his best, most reassuring smile and a little nod. Then he turned away and moved on. He could hear her door close softly before he'd gone a dozen steps. She thought the old man was a nice gentleman. The way she said it meant she didn't know him all that well—which was no surprise. A much less experienced seducer than the old man would know enough to keep his affairs at a reasonable distance from where he lived.
Before Joe had gone twenty more steps he passed a man and a woman walking in the other direction. Their goal, at this point, could have been any of half a dozen apartments, including Maule's or Mrs. Hassler's. As the couple drew to one side of the corridor to pass him, Joe gave each of them brief but intense scrutiny. He'd be willing to bet his right arm that both these people were breathers. He didn't think he could be fooled, not after knowing the old man so many years, and after certain other encounters less benign. Of course these two innocent-looking breathers still might be agents of the enemy. But Joe didn't think so.
There were about fifty elevators in the building altogether, distributed in several banks, and his wait in this lobby for a descending car was mercifully brief. In another moment he was on his way down. But he hadn't started to relax yet, and it was just as well, because the elevator stopped at the next floor below, and another well-dressed couple got aboard. The woman was on the small side, age hard to guess, hair blond, eyes gray, face strikingly attractive if not conventionally pretty. The man was big, a little taller than Joe, and perfectly matched Angie's description of Valentine Kaiser. Even if the match hadn't been so good, Joe thought he would have known these two at once for what they were. Not that there was anything gross or overt in their appearance to differentiate them from the common run of humanity; with vampires there very seldom was. Corpselike complexions and needle fangs could be considered racial stereotypes, the exception and not the rule.
Broad daylight or not, being cooped up with two of them in the little space, spending long, long seconds well out of public view, was enough to make Joe sweat. No one said anything, but the couple both looked at Joe, and he was sure they knew he knew what they were.
Valentine Kaiser turned away from Joe as soon as the doors closed. Somehow in the next moment he had snapped open the maintenance panel beside the elevator's long row of buttons. Reaching inside, he did something. The elevator stopped right where it was between floors, then, smoothly, with scarcely a pause, it was going up again.
Only when they were ascending did Kaiser break the silence. "We ought to have a talk," he said, smiling at Joe.
"Okay."
"I am Valentine Kaiser. And you—?"
"Joe Keogh."
The other nodded, as if that was the answer he had been expecting. "I've heard the name." He moved his head slightly in the direction of his companion. "This is Lila," he said. Lila stood by smiling at Joe. There were moments when her smile looked kindly, and others when it seemed utterly vacant.
Presently Kaiser reached inside the open panel to manipulate the wiring again. The elevator slowed smoothly to a stop on the ninety-seventh floor. As soon as the door opened Joe's fellow passengers gestured him out. He gave them no argument. They emerged into what looked like some kind of service corridor. Then, with Lila walking ahead at a brisk pace, gesturing for Joe to follow, and Kaiser bringing up the rear, they rounded a corner and passed through an unlocked fire door. Joe, glancing at the door's lock while it was open, decided that the bolts weren't working, having been induced somehow to stay retracted.
The door closed behind them. Now the three people, marching steadily, were treading the concrete steps of a fire stair, going up. Joe wondered how many floors there were above this, but he got no farther than ninety-eight.
Emerging through another fire door, onto the ninety-eighth floor, Joe found himself surrounded by a muted roar of machinery, in a brightly lit, low-ceilinged cavern. One room, he decided, must occupy all or most of the entire level. The view of its more distant portions was blocked by row after row of metal-paneled cabinets, and by bends and straightaways of massive ductwork. The level of noise was high, compounded from fan blades, rushing air, occasional electronic beeps, and other indistinguishable components of the machinery needed to keep the thousands of occupants comfortable in their stores and offices and dwelling units.