‘What’s happened, Boris Ignatievich?’ I asked.
‘Anton Gorodetsky,’ the boss continued, still not looking up. ‘You’ve been in the training-and-education section for ten years – a bit too long, don’t you think?’
I started pondering.
This conversation reminded me of something.
‘Are there any complaints?’ I asked. ‘I reckon I do a pretty good job… and I don’t avoid work in the field.’
‘That is as well as saving the world every now and then, raising a daughter who’s an Absolute Enchantress and getting along well with your wife, who’s a Great Enchantress…’ the boss said sourly.
‘I also tolerate my boss, a Great Magician,’ I replied in the same tone.
Gesar finally condescended to look up. He nodded.
‘Yes, you tolerate me. And you’ll go on tolerating me. All right, then, Anton Gorodetsky: there are unregistered vampires operating in the city. Seven attacks in a week.’
‘Oh ho,’ I said. ‘They gorge themselves every day, the perverts… What about our field operatives?’
Gesar seemed not to have heard me. He sorted through his papers.
‘The first victim… Alexander Borisov. Twenty-three years of age. A salesman in a boutique… unmarried… blah, blah, blah… attacked in broad daylight in the Taganka district. The second victim – the next day. Nikolai Evgeniev. Forty-seven years of age. An engineer. The Preobrazhenka district. The third – Tatyana Rumyantseva. Nineteen years of age. A student at Moscow State University. Chertanovo district. The fourth – Oksana Eliseeva, fifty-two years of age. A cleaning woman. Mitino district. The fifth – Nastya Andronnikova, a schoolgirl, ten years of age…’
‘What a scumbag…’ I blurted out.
‘In broad daylight, Matveevsky district.’
‘He’s switched to women,’ I said. ‘He’s sampled them. And now he’s started experimenting with age…’
‘The sixth victim – Gennady Davydov. Sixty years old. A pensioner.’
‘Is there a pair of them carrying out the attacks, then?’ I suggested.
‘Maybe it is a pair,’ said Gesar. ‘But there’s definitely a female involved.’
‘Where’s the information from? Did someone survive and tell us?’ I asked.
Gesar ignored my question.
‘The seventh and, for the time being, the last victim: Olya Yalova, a schoolgirl, fifteen years old. By the way, say thank you to your old acquaintance, Dmitry Pastukhov. He found her and delivered her to us hotfoot… which was very helpful.’
Gesar gathered all his papers together, straightened up the edges with the palm of his hand and put them in a folder.
‘So, one of the victims survived?’ I asked hopefully.
‘Yes.’ Gesar paused for a second, looking into my eyes. ‘They all survived.’
‘All of them?’ I exclaimed, baffled. ‘But then… were they turned?’
‘No. Someone just fed on them. A little bit. They sucked on the last girl pretty seriously – the doctor says she lost at least a litre of blood. But that’s easily explained – the girl was on her way to see her boyfriend… and, apparently, the plan was for them to have… er… intercourse… for the first time.’
Strangely enough, Gesar got embarrassed when he mentioned it. And his embarrassment was clear in any case from the formal term that he used instead of ‘sex’.
‘I get it,’ I said, nodding. ‘The girl was full of endorphins and hormones. The vampire, whatever gender it was, got drunk. It’s lucky that he or she pulled away at all. I’ve got the whole picture, boss. I’ll put a team together straight away and send them—’
‘It’s your case.’ Gesar pushed the folder across the desk. ‘You’re the one who’s going to hunt this vampiress… or these vampires.’
‘Why?’ I asked, astonished.
‘Because that’s the way she or they want it.’
‘Have they made any kind of demands? Passed on any message via the victims?’
An impish smile appeared on Gesar’s face.
‘You could say that… Take the case and go. If you decide to work in classic style, you can get the blood from the stockroom. Oh yes… and give me a call when you catch on.’
‘And you’ll tell me something smart,’ I said morosely, getting up and taking the folder.
‘No, I simply had a bet with our dear colleague Olga on how long it would take you to catch on, Anton Gorodetsky. She said an hour, I said a quarter of an hour… See how much faith I have in you?’
I walked out of Gesar’s office without saying goodbye.
Half an hour later, after I had glanced through the documents, laid them out on my desk and gazed at the lines of print for a while, I gave him a call.
‘Well?’ Gesar asked.
‘Alexander. Nikolai. Tatyana. Oksana. Nastya. Gennady. Olya. The next victim should be called Roman, for instance, or Rimma.’
‘I was closer to the truth, after all,’ Gesar said smugly. ‘Half an hour.’
‘They’re certainly ingenious,’ I remarked.
‘They?’
‘Yes, I think so. There are two of them, a guy and a girl.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Gesar agreed. ‘But ingenious or not… it would be better if we didn’t let things get as far as the “t”.’
I didn’t say anything. But Gesar didn’t hang up.
And neither did I.
‘Something you want to ask?’ I eventually heard Gesar’s voice enquire.
‘That vampire girl – fifteen years ago – the one who attacked the boy Egor… Was she definitely executed?’
‘She was laid to rest,’ Gesar said frostily. ‘Yes. Quite definitely. For certain. I checked it myself.’
‘When?’
‘This morning. It was the first thing that occurred to me too. Check out everything we have on whether the pseudo–revitalisation of vampires is possible.’
And then Gesar hung up. Which meant that he’d told me everything.
Everything I needed to know, of course. But not everything that might come in useful, or everything that he knew himself.
Great Ones never told you everything.
And I’d learned to do that myself. I hadn’t told Gesar everything, either.
Our hospital ward was located in the semi-basement, on the same level as the guest rooms. Below that were the repositories, the jail cells and other high-risk areas that needed to be guarded.
No one ever formally stood guard over the hospital. In the first place, it was empty. If a member of the Watch was injured, a healer would heal him in two or three hours. If the healer couldn’t heal him, then most likely the patient was already dead.
And then, in the second place, any healer was also a highly qualified killer. Basically, all it took was to apply a healing spell ‘backwards’ and the result would be fatal. Our doctors didn’t need to be protected: they could protect anyone at all, including themselves. What was it that belligerent, drunk doctor said in the old Soviet comedy movie? ‘I’m a doctor. I can fix it, and I can break it.’
Now, however, when there was a patient in the hospital and that patient was a human being who had been attacked by a Dark One, they’d put a guard on the door. Arkady, who had only started working in the Watch recently, had previously been a schoolteacher. And, exactly as his new colleagues had expected, he had claimed that hunting vampires was far easier than teaching physics in tenth class. I knew him, of course, just as I knew everyone who had trained in the Night Watch in recent years. And he certainly knew me.
But I halted at the entrance to the hospital suite, as regulations required. Following some ideas he had in his head about the correct dress code for a security guard, Arkady was wearing a formal blue suit (which was logical enough, in principle). He got up from behind his table (fortunately for the guards here, our paranoia hadn’t yet gone so far as to require them to stand in position, spells at the ready), and looked me over in the ordinary world and in the Twilight. Only then did he open the door.