Miss Trilby dumped the mail on the counter and swept into the back room.
"Cheerful today, hmm?" said Scuroforno.
"Really, she's so good to me. She lends me money to go to Seattle and see my daughter. She's just nervous today."
"Ah. By the way, before I leave, do you have a cold, or were you crying?"
Gretchen reddened. "I have a chronic sinus infection." She suddenly saw herself objectively: stringy hair, bad posture, skinny. How could she be flirting with this man?
He touched her wrist. "Take care." And strode through the door into the street.
"Him you don't need," said Miss Trilby, bustling back in and firing up the shop's ancient Kaypro computer.
"Did I say I did?"
"Your face says you think you do. Did he buy anything?"
"I'm sorry. I can never predict what he'll be interested in."
"I'll die in the poorhouse. Sell him antique medical texts. Or detective novels. He stands reading historical novels right off the shelf and laughs. Pretends to be an expert, finds all the mistakes."
"What have you got against him, besides reading and not buying?"
"Oh, he buys. But Gretchen, lambkin, a man like that you don't need. Loner. Crazy."
"But he listens. He's so understanding."
"Like the butcher with the calf. What's this immortal cancer stuff he's feeding you?"
"Nothing. We were talking about Ashley."
"Sorry, lambkin. Life hasn't been kind to you. But be a little wise. This man has delusions he's a vampire."
Gretchen smoothed the dust jacket of Euryanthe and Oberon at Covent Garden . "Maybe he is."
Miss Trilby rounded her lips in mock horror. "Perhaps! Doesn't look much like Frank Langella, though, does he?"
No, he didn't, thought Gretchen, as she sorted orders for reprints of Kadensho's Book of the Flowery Tradition and de Honnecourt's Fervor of Buenos Aires .
But there was something appealing about Nick Scuroforno, something besides his empathy for a homely divorcee with a terminally ill child. His spare, dark humour, maybe that was it. Miss Trilby did not understand everything.
Why not make a play for him?
Even to herself, her efforts seemed pathetic. She got Keesha, the single mother across the hall in her apartment, to help her frost her hair. She bought a cheap cardigan trimmed with angora and dug out an old padded bra.
"Lambkin," said Miss Trilby dryly one afternoon when Gretchen came in dolled up in her desperate finery, "the man is not exactly a fashion plate himself."
But Scuroforno seemed flattered, if not impressed, by Gretchen's efforts, and took her out for coffee, then a late dinner. Mostly, however, he came into the bookstore an hour before closing and let her pretend to sell him some white elephant like the Reverend Wood's Trespassers: How Inhabitants of Earth, Air, and Water Are Enabled to Trespass on Domains Not Their Own . She would fiddle with the silver chain on her neck, and they would slide to the floor where she would pour out her troubles to him. Other customers seldom came in so late.
"You trust him with private details of your life," said Miss Trilby, "but what do you know of his?"
He did talk. He did. Philosophy, history, details of Gretchen's daughter's illness. One day, she asked, "What do you do?"
"I steal souls. Photographer."
Oh.
"Can't make much money on that artsy stuff," Miss Trilby commented when she heard this. "Rumour says he's got a private source of income."
"Illegal, you mean?"
"What a romantic you are, Gretchen. Ask him."
Gambling luck and investments, he told her.
One day, leaving for the shop, Gretchen opened her mail and found a letter — not even a phone call — that Ashley's remission was over. Her little girl was in the hospital again.
The grief was surreal, physical. She was afraid to go back into her apartment. She had bought a copy of Jan Pienkowski's Haunted House , full of diabolically funny pop-ups, for Ashley's birthday. She couldn't bear to look at it now, waiting like a poisoned bait on the counter.
She went straight to the shop, began alphabetizing the new stock. Nothing made sense, she couldn't remember if O came after N. Miss Trilby had to drag her away, make her stop. "What's wrong? Is it Ashley?"
Gretchen handed her the letter.
Miss Trilby read it through her thick lorgnette. Then, "Look at yourself. Your cheeks are flushed. Eyes bright. Disaster becomes you. Or is it the nearness of death bids us breed, like romance in a concentration camp?"
Gretchen shuddered. "Maybe my body is tricking me into reproducing again."
"To replace Ashley. Not funny, lambkin. But possibly true. I ask again, why this man? Doesn't madness frighten you?"
Next day, Gretchen followed him to his car. It seemed natural to get in, uninvited, ride home with him, follow him up two flights of stairs covered with cracked treads.
He let her perch on a stool in his kitchen darkroom while he printed peculiar old architectural photographs. The room smelled of chemicals, vinegary. An old Commodore 64 propped the pantry door open. She had seen a new computer in his living-room, running a screen saver of Giger babies holding grenades, and wraiths dancing an agony dance.
"I never eat here," he said. "As a kitchen, it's useless."
He emptied trays, washed solutions down the drain, rinsed. Her heart beat hard under the sleazy angora. His body, sleek as a lion's, gave off a male scent, faintly predatory.
While his back was turned, she undid her cardigan. The buttons too easily slipped out of the cheap fuzzy fabric, conspiring with lust.
She slipped it off as he turned around. And felt the draught of the cold kitchen and the surprise of his gaze on her inadequate chest.
He turned away, dried his hands on the kitchen towel. "Don't fall in love with me."
"Not at all arrogant, are you?" She wouldn't, wouldn't fall in love. No. That wasn't quite it.
"Not arrogance. A warning. I'm territorial; predators have to be. For a while, yes, I'd keep you around. But sooner or later, you'd interfere with my hunting. I'd kill you or drive you away to prevent myself from killing you."
"I won't fall in love with you." Level. Convincing.
"All right." He threw the towel into the sink, came to her. Covered her mouth with his.
She responded clumsily, overreacting after the long dry spell, clawing his back.
The kiss ended. He stroked her hair. "Don't worry. I won't draw blood. I can control the impulse."
She half pretended to play along with him. Half of her did believe. "It doesn't matter. I want to be like you." A joke?
He sat on the kitchen chair, pulled her to him and put his cheek against her breasts. "It doesn't work that way. You have to have the right genes to be susceptible."
"It really is an infection?" Still half pretending to believe, still almost joking.
"A virus that gives you cancer. All I know is that of all the thousands I've preyed upon, only a few have got the fever and lived to become — like me."
"Vampire?"
"As good a word as any. One who I infected and who lived on was my son. He got the fever and turned. That's why I think it's genetic." He pulled her nearer, as if for warmth.
"What happens if the prey doesn't have the genes?"
"Nothing. Nothing happens. I never take enough to kill. I haven't killed a human in over a hundred years. You're safe."
She slid to her knees, wrapping her arms around his waist. He held her head to him, stroking her bare arms and shoulders. "Silk," he said finally, pulling her up, touching her breast. She had nursed Ashley, but it hadn't stopped her from getting leukaemia. Fire and ice sizzled across her breasts, as if her milk were letting down.