"Cairn down, David, please. You go on back to London, and hit the files, as you described. I'm going to find this little bastard. I'm going to hear what he has to say. Don't worry! I won't proceed without consulting you. And if I do decide-"
"You won't decide! Not until you talk to me." "All right."
"This is a pledge?"
"On my honor as a bloodthirsty murderer, yes."
"I want a phone number in New Orleans."
I stared at him hard for a moment. "Ail right. I've never done this before. But here it is." I gave him the phone number of my French Quarter rooftop rooms. "Aren't you going to write it down?"
"I've memorized it."
"Then farewell!"
I rose from the table, struggling, in my excitement, to move like a human. Ah, move like a human. Think of it, to be inside a human body. To see the sun, really see it, a tiny blazing ball in a blue sky! "Oh, and, David, I almost forgot, everything's covered here. Call my man. He'll arrange for your flight . . ."
"I don't care about that, Lestat. Listen to me. Set an appointment to speak with me about this, right now! You dare vanish on me, I'll never-"
I stood there smiling down at him. I could tell I was charming him. Of course he wouldn't threaten never to speak to me again. How absurd. "Ghastly mistakes," I said, unable to stop smiling. "Yes, I do make them, don't I?"
"What will they do to you-the others? Your precious Marius, the older ones, if you do such a thing?"
"They might surprise you, David. Maybe all they want is to be human again. Maybe that's all any of us want. Another chance." I thought of Louis in his house hi New Orleans.
Dear God, what would Louis think when I told him about all this?
David muttered something under his breath, angry and impatient, yet his face was full of affection and concern.
I blew him a little kiss and was gone.
Scarcely an hour had passed before I realized I couldn't find the wily fiend. If he was in Paris, he was cloaked so that I couldn't pick up the faintest shimmer of his presence. And nowhere did I catch an image of him in anyone else's mind.
This didn't mean he wasn't in Paris. Telepathy is extremely hit or miss; and Paris was a vast city, teeming with citizens of all the countries of the world.
At last I came back to the hotel, discovered David had already checked out, leaving all his various phone numbers with me for fax, computer, and regular calls.
"Please contact me tomorrow evening," he'd written. "I shall have some information for you by then."
I went upstairs to prepare for the journey home. I couldn't wait to see this lunatic mortal again. And Louis- I had to lay it all before Louis. Of course he wouldn't believe it was possible, that would be the first thing he'd say. But he would understand the lure. Oh, yes, he would.
I hadn't been in the room a minute, trying to determine if there was anything here I needed to take with me-ah, yes, David's manuscripts-when I saw a plain envelope lying on the table beside the bed. It was propped against a great vase of flowers. "Count van Kindergarten" was written on it in a firm, rather masculine script.
I knew the minute I saw it that it was a note from him. The message inside was handwritten, in the same firm, heavily engraved style.
Don't be hasty. And don't listen to your fool friend from the Talamasca either. I shall see you in New Orleans tomorrow night. Don't disappoint me. Jackson Square. We shall then make an appointment to work a little alchemy of our own. I think you understand now what's at stake.
Yours sincerely, Raglan James
"Raglan James." I whispered the name aloud. Raglan James. I didn't like the name. The name was like him.
I dialed the concierge.
"This fax system which has just been invented," I said in French, "you have it here? Explain it to me, please."
It was as I suspected, a complete facsimile of this little note could be sent from the hotel office over a telephone wire to David's London machine. Then David would not only have this information, he would have the handwriting, for what it was worth.
I arranged to have this done, picked up the manuscripts, stopped by the desk with the note of Raglan James, had it faxed, took it back, and then went to Notre Dame to say good-bye to Paris with a little prayer.
I was mad. Absolutely mad. When had I ever known such pure happiness! I stood in the dark cathedral, which was now locked on account of the hour, and I thought of the first time I'd ever stepped into it so many, many decades ago. There had been no great square before the church doors, only the little Place de Greve hemmed in with crooked buildings; and there had been no great boulevards in Paris such as there are now, only broad mud streets, which we thought so very grand.
I thought of all those blue skies, and what it had felt like to be hungry, truly hungry for bread and for meat, and to be drunk on good wine. I thought of Nicolas, my mortal friend, whom I'd loved so much, and how cold it had been in our little attic room. Nicki and I arguing the way that David and I had argued! Oh, yes, It seemed my great long existence had been a nightmare since those days, a sweeping nightmare full of giants and monsters and horrid ghastly masks covering the faces of beings who menaced me in the eternal dark. I was trembling. I was weeping. To be human, I thought. To be human again. I think I said the words aloud.
Then a sudden whispered laugh startled me. It was a child somewhere in the darkness, a little girl.
I turned around. I was almost certain I could see her-a small gray form darting up the far aisle towards a side altar, and then out of sight. Her footsteps had been barely aiidible.
But surely this was some mistake. No scent. No real presence. Just illusion.
Nevertheless I cried out: "Claudia!"
And my voice came tumbling back to me in a harsh echo. No one there, of course.
I thought of David: "You're going to make another ghastly mistake!"
Yes, I have made ghastly mistakes. How can I deny it? Terrible, terrible errors. The atmosphere of my recent dreams came back to me, but it wouldn't deepen, and there remained only an evanescent sense of being with her. Something about an oil lamp and her laughing at me.
I thought again of her execution-the brick-walled air well, the approaching sun, how small she had been; and then the remembered pain of the Gobi Desert mingled with it and I couldn't bear it any longer. I realized I had folded my arms around my chest, and was trembling, my body rigid, as though being tormented with an electric shock. Ah, but surely she hadn't suffered. Surely it had been instantaneous for one so tender and little. Ashes to ashes . . .
This was pure anguish. It wasn't those times I wanted to remember, no matter how long I'd lingered in the Cafe de la Paix earlier, or how strong I imagined I had become. It was my Paris, before the Theatre of the Vampires, when I'd been innocent and alive.
I stayed a while longer in the dark, merely looking at the great branching arches above me. What a marvelous and majestic church this was-even now with the pop and rattle of motorcars beyond. It was like a forest made of stone.
I blew a kiss to it, as I had to David. And I went off to undertake the long journey home.
SEVEN
NEW ORLEANS. I arrived quite early in the evening for I had gone backwards in time against the turning of the world. It was cold and crisp, but not cruelly so, though a bad norther was on its way. The sky was without a cloud and full of small and very distinct stars. I went at once to my little rooftop apartment in the French Quarter, which for all its glamour is not very high at all, being on the top of a four-storey building, erected long before the Civil War, and having a rather intimate view of the river and its beautiful twin bridges, and which catches, when the windows are open, the noises of the happily crowded Cafe du Monde and of the busy shops and streets around Jackson Square.