Charles Frith put his fingertip to his lips. “The Health Minister is going to announce to the press tomorrow that the Korean Flu epidemic has been successfully contained.”
“Isn’t that kind of premature? We still don’t know how many strigoi mortii there might be.”
“True. But when we do find them, we know how to deal with them, don’t we, thanks to you.” He stood up. “By the way, the police dug up the back garden at the Laurels. They found poor old Dr. Watkins, and his receptionist, and they found Professor Braithwaite, too, and his two assistants from the Royal Aircraft Establishment. All of them gutted like herring.”
He put another chocolate into his mouth, but promptly spat it into my wastebasket. “Ye gods! Pah! Turkish delight!”
On the afternoon of my third day in hospital, I phoned Jill. Her father answered, and he didn’t sound at all pleased to hear from me.
“Jill’s not here, Captain.”
“Is she OK?”
“I said, she’s not here.”
“Well, can you ask her to call me, please? I’d really like to talk to her.”
“I’m sorry, old man, but I think you’ve already caused us enough trouble, don’t you?”
He hung up. For a moment, I thought of calling back, but then I hung up, too.
I telephoned Louise every day, however, and on the third week she flew over from New York to see me. I was out in the hospital garden by then, in a wheelchair, with a thick plaid blanket wrapped around me. She came across the lawn carrying a large bunch of flowers and a shopping bag full of books.
Her hair was cut short and pixie-feathery, so that she looked even more like Audrey Hepburn than ever. She was wearing a smart lemon-yellow suit with white piping around it. She smelled of Chanel No. 5.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “You can’t kiss me yet. Risk of infection.”
She sat down on the green-painted bench next to me. “My God, Jim. Your poor face.”
“Don’t worry, it’s not so bad as it looks. My left hand got the worst of it.”
“Jean and Harold send you their best. So does Mo. When do you think you’ll be able to come home?”
“Soon as the doctors give me the all-clear. Three or four weeks, not much longer.”
“I wish you could tell me what happened.”
I laid my bandaged right hand on her knee. “I think it’s better if you don’t know. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.”
“You won’t have to do this again, though?”
“No. But it’s possible that I’m still at risk.”
She raised one of her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “I don’t understand. What kind of a risk?”
“Well. the people I was brought over here to deal with. they’re not very good at forgiving and forgetting. I think we’ve managed to catch up with most of them, but there’s always a chance that one or two of them might have slipped through the net.”
“Meaning what? That they’re going to come after you?”
“Something like that.”
“Even in the States?”
“They don’t give up easy, I’m afraid.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Move, I’m afraid. Go live someplace else, under a different name.”
“Move? Are you serious? Where? I can’t move. I have all my friends in New Milford. My work. Besides, I don’t want to move. And I happen to like the name Falcon.”
“Sweetheart. these people are very, very dangerous.”
“So why did you agree to get mixed up in this at all? Didn’t you spare one single thought for me?”
“I didn’t have any choice. I’m sorry.”
“Oh — you’re sorry? That makes it all right, then.”
Louise stayed all afternoon but I guess I already knew that our marriage had been torpedoed below the waterline. Louise lived for her social life — her dinner parties and her charity drives and her craft classes. She would never be able to tolerate a solitary existence in a strange city, under an assumed name, jumping every time the phone rang and checking every stranger who came knocking at our door.
But until I was sure that Duca’s remains had been quartered and beheaded and buried in holy ground, and until I was sure that every other strigoi mortii had been hunted down and destroyed, I would always have to live with the fear that they would be trying to find me.
The living Screechers I was less concerned about. Without a dead Screecher to guide them, and to give them the final drink of blood they needed to become immortal, they would soon decay so much that they would be beyond any hope of transformation. Their bodies would eventually be discovered in cellars, and attics, and under railroad arches, so extensively decayed that nobody would ever realize that they had once been vampires.
Louise flew home five days later. She was still advised by my doctors not to kiss me, and it occurred to me that I might never kiss her again.
Napa, 1957
I returned to the States on November 22, leaving Heathrow Airport in a silvery-gray fog. With George Goodhew and Warrant Officer Tim Headley I had tracked down only two more strigoi mortii — one close to Oxford and the other in Swindon — but I was pretty sure that we had now caught all of them. There had been six or seven more outbreaks of “Korean Flu” in the London suburbs, but as far as I could tell these were the last desperate feeding frenzies of the few live Screechers who were left. After Guy Fawkes’ Day, on November 5, there were no more reported killings.
Charles Frith came to the airport himself to see me off. He wore a gray suit and tan leather gloves. “I want you to know that we deeply appreciate what you’ve managed to do for us, Captain. It’s a great pity that ah. We can never give you the public credit you so richly deserve.”
George had been carrying my Kit for me and when I reached the gate he handed it over. “Let’s hope you won’t be needing this again.”
“Thanks, George. Let’s hope so.”
I returned to New Milford but when I arrived the house was empty. Louise was in Boston, visiting her sister. I was pretty sure that she had timed the trip deliberately, so that she wouldn’t have to welcome me home, but I didn’t have any proof of it.
I had been back less than a day when I was visited by the two counterintelligence officers from Fort Holabird who had first briefed me on my mission to London — the one with the sandy hair and the one with the Clark Kent spectacles.
They came into the house with their caps tucked under their arms.
“We’ve received a very positive report back from MI6,” said the sandy-haired officer. “This little operation has done great things for our relationship with British intelligence.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that I wasn’t half-cremated for nothing.”
“You won’t be staying here for very much longer?”
“I need to pack some things, make some arrangements. Talk to my wife.”
The officer in the heavy-rimmed eyeglasses looked around the room and said, “Expect you’ll be sorry to leave. But we’ve fixed you and your wife up with a very pleasant home in Louisville.”
“Louisville, Kentucky?”
“That’s the one. A four-bedroom house with an orchard in back. And we can handle all the moving for you.”
“Why the hell would I want to live in Louisville, Kentucky?”
“Because. it’s a very friendly city. And it’s very central. And that’s where they invented the Hot Brown sandwich. And. who’s going to think of looking for you there, of all places?”
Louise refused to come with me. I can’t say that I blamed her, but she put me into an impossible position. If I stayed in New Milford with her, there was always the possibility that one of the strigoi mortii would find me, and kill me, and kill her, too, and I couldn’t expose her to a danger like that, especially since I wasn’t even allowed to tell her what the danger was.