Confessions of a Vampire

Confessions of a Campire 5-7

Confessions of a Vampire - by David MacMillan

I've played a bit long in Zurich with the lads up to this point. It's time for them to move westward as the story does have a political thriller aspect to it. You know the principle good guys now; it's time for you to start meeting or, at least hearing of, the bad boys. I've chosen then to get the lads to the US and settled in with this posting - that's chapters 5-7. I hope you enjoy them.

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Chapter 5

I stood in my living room and gaped at Emil in shock. The late autumn sun still cast a feeble light through the louvers of the room's windows. Only two days ago, I had Tom MacPherson lying on my sofa unconscious from his spirit's recognition of me as I explained myself to the young man standing before me now. Now, Tom was flying above the Atlantic and probably catching up to the sun.

"Karl, I'm sorry," Emil told me again, his hand reaching between us to touch my arm, its fingers gripping my biceps.

"Unglaublich," I mumbled as knowledge of Sergei's flight continued to make its way into my thoughts.

Unbelievable.

Unmöglich. Definitely impossible. Würther hadn't fled me when he regained consciousness and knew who I was. Sergei had come to save me. This Tom MacPherson fled me.

"Take this, Karl," Emil told me and I looked at him, seeing him then. Him and the glass of whiskey he held towards me.

"I-"

"Drink it," he said. "It'll help." I knew what it would do to me and help wasn't the word I would use to describe its effects. Numbly, however, I took the whiskey and swallowed half the glass without tasting its contents.

I felt it almost immediately. My legs were weak under me and I felt stupor begin to descend over me. I collapsed into the chair behind me. And I did not take my gaze from Emil's face.

"Tell me what happened - everything from when you helped him home," I said and set the whiskey glass on the table beside me.

Emil sat in the chair across from me. "He kept mumbling in a language I didn't know - it sounded like Russian-"

"It was," I confirmed automatically. "Go on."

"Half-way to his flat, he changed to German - it seemed a flow of consciousness - but nothing was coherent, Karl."

"He went from Sergei to Würther then-" I touched the man's thoughts, reliving his memories and hearing my Würther speak again. Hearing him again tell me to leave him on that bloody field of edelweiß. The pain as the bullets tore through his side, crushing bone and lung. And his refusal of immortality. I shuddered. There were times the past definitely was not better than the present.

I smiled bitterly at Emil. "He was reliving his life as Würther," I told him. "It was a flow of his memories."

"How do you know?" he demanded suspiciously.

"I read your memories just now. I heard him speak again." Emil became blurred as my eyes glistened with tears.

"Karl!" He pushed himself out of his chair to kneel before me. "You're bleeding!"

His words pulled me back from my tears for Sergei, for Würther, dying in a field of wild flowers. "Where?"

"Around your eyes. Are you okay? Should I call a doctor?"

I pulled a handkerchief from my front pocket and wiped at my face. When I peered at him again, my vision was clear. The handkerchief was bright crimson, the colour of arterial blood. I chuckled.

"I'm all right, my friend."

"You're sure?"

I nodded. "You saw tears in my eyes."

"Tears? As red as blood?"

"Vampire tears are blood, Emil. Tear ducts are generally as useless as bladders and colons are to us."

He sat back on his haunches, still watching me closely. "You aren't just saying that? You aren't going to die because your life partner fled you?"

"Sit back in the chair and finish your story, Emi."

"I helped him into his room and made him sit down. I didn't leave until he started acting himself."

"What did he say after he again became Tom MacPherson?" I asked.

He chuckled. "He said he had just gone tripping on the weirdest drug he ever met, a flashback-" He saw my puzzled frown. "There are drugs - hallucinogens - that make you see things that don't exist or that distorts things that do. LSD is one of them."

"He thought he was on drugs?"

"I'm not sure of that. Americans have such quaint ways of expressing themselves sometimes. It might have been just his way of explaining what had happened to him."

I nodded.

"He didn't say much more than that. And I left-" Emil smiled wryly. "I had some things I had to think about, and he seemed to be okay."

"You saw him before he left?"

"I went to the airport with him, Karl - four hours ago. He said he was leaving early-"

"Early?"

"We have another fortnight of classes - before the holidays."

"Go on."

"I asked him why. He told me he had learnt a lot of things about himself, things he had to think about and decide if he wanted to accept."

"Did he say anything about me - or his experience?"

"Not directly. I kept trying to pin him down. I knew you were - that you wanted him." Emil looked down at his hands with those words, unable to meet my gaze.

"He said there were a lot of things he didn't understand. That he was frightened when he thought about them. He had to get away from Zürich, away from everybody here, so he could look at them, face up to them."

"Then he didn't reject me?"

"No, Karl, he didn't reject you. He needs breathing space is all."

"Breathing space?" My brows knitted across my forehead. "He's mortal - he breathes naturally. The cells of his body needs the oxygen his lungs pull in from the air."

Emil frowned. "It's an expression; it means he needed to put distance between you - what he learnt about you and him - and himself."

My mind was clearing. Fortunately, alcohol's hold on a vampire was short-lived. I rose and began to pace in the small room.

I had been a fool not to keep him here and watch over him as I had Würther. To help him through the difficult transition into awareness. Honour had demanded I not force myself on him. I hadn't even attempted to contact him in person.

Now he was in America. Or would be before I could do anything about it. With supersonic jets, he was past London and probably past Iceland as well. An image of the map of the United States of America floated through my thoughts.

It was so big!

I stopped in front of the sofa and turned to Emil, staring at him in horror at the near impossibility of finding Tom MacPherson in all those thousands of kilometres.

"Where was he from?" I asked, barely daring to hope this youth knew that much about the man I already knew I must follow.

He shrugged. "I don't think I know. He was reading at the University of Maryland. Wait! I think he said he was from Baltimore - or near there - in the state of Maryland."

I sank onto the sofa, shaking my head at the impossibility of finding him. I could steal into the registrar's office - if only I could work computers, I could go into his records at the university.

My thoughts stopped then. I knew I could find him. I could find everything the university knew about this student enrolled in it. All I had to do was see Marcus Eichmann again.

"Are you going to try to follow him?" Emil asked cautiously.

I nodded. "I can find his address, his home-"

"Do you want me to go with you?"

I stared at him in surprise.

"I know - if we find him and he wants you - you're his, Karl. But you need me to help him accept you and what you offer him. Otherwise, he may just fly off again and you'll never be able to find him."

"You'd do this?" I asked dubiously.

"I love you, Karl von Muribor. I understand that now. It doesn't matter you don't love me back. You care for me. You like me. You're willing to be my friend. I'll accept that." He smiled wanly, tears glistening in his eyes.

"It's the only thing I've got - and you need my help. You can't move about easily during the day."

"It may take a while to track him down - can you afford to be away from the university that long?"

He snorted. "This is my last term. I'll simply ask my professors for papers I can write to gain credit for the courses. There'll be libraries there, won't there?"

"I think Baltimore is near the national capital. Surely, there are good ones in Washington you may use."

He smiled tightly. "Will you permit us to sleep together too?"

"You want that?" He nodded abjectly. "Then you shall have all of me I can give you, Emil. What about Josefina and your flat?"

"I'll give her the money you gave me. It'll pay for the flat and keep her in food for a year at least." He looked away. "I don't have anything else left here."

I chuckled, trying to revive the moment's levity. "I don't envy you that meeting, my friend."

He smiled wanly. "I don't envy you yours when we've tracked Tom down."

It never ceases to amaze me what a computer can accomplish when it has someone at the keyboard who knows how to make it work.

Normally, bureaucrats were alike the world over - snapping little poodles with no teeth guarding access to the intellect of their masters. In increasing numbers of cases, those masters were the computers which told them what to think.

The university's registrar was the snapping, toothless poodle and Marcus Eichmann knew how to bypass it entirely, speaking directly to the computer intelligence telling that office what to do.

Eichmann was unpleased to look over his shoulder and find me watching him from the doorway of his cubicle. "You're through with me, my Prince," he told me, nervously keeping his eyes on me. "And I with you."

I watched silently as he fumbled in his jeans pocket, his nervousness growing. He smiled when he finally found what he was searching for, pulled it out, and held the cross out between us. "You stay away from me."

I stepped into the cubicle and reached out to touch the metal with two fingers. "It's a bit cheap, don't you think?" I asked and smiled. "You have enough money to afford nice jewelry."

He glared at me, his fear receding before my unthreatening mien, even as I disproved the old wives' tale about crosses and vampires. "What do you want?"

"I want all the information on an American student at the university - full name, home address, school address, everything you can give me."

"It'll cost you."

"I think not." I opened my mouth enough to extend my fangs. He edged against the computer table, shivering in his fear.

"What's his name, my Prince?" he asked.

I had one more thing I needed do before following Thomas MacPherson into the western sky. I still had three bags of gold coins secreted in the back of my closet. Schillings minted to commemorate the coronation of Franz-Josef almost 150 years ago. Coins never used, in mint condition.

I carried them to Hauptmann's and demanded the president. An account worth a billion francs enabled me to make the demand and produced the middle-aged, healthy-looking man quickly. Appraising him as he strolled up to me I had to admit to myself the banking industry had come a long way in the image it projected of itself. This man was anything but a Swiss gnome.

"How may I help you, Prince von Muribor?" he asked.

"I need these-" I indicated my bags now on a receptionist's desk with my hand, "secured."

"A vault? That's no problem, my Prince."

"Perhaps they can be appraised, their value ascertained?"

"That, too, poses no problem."

"Would Hauptmann's ensure it is so?"

"Of course, Sir." He gazed at the bags for a moment. "What do they contain?"

"Commemorative Reich schillings, Herr Präsident - from the coronation of Kaiser Franz-Josef."

His brow raised questioningly as he glanced back at me.

"The gold ones?" he asked, an unrecognisable excitement to his voice.

I nodded.

"Mint condition?"

I sensed his excitement rising. I nodded again.

"May we carry them to my office, my Prince?"

I lifted two bags easily. He struggled with the remaining one.

In his office, his eyes gleamed and his body actually shivered with desire as he stared at the one coin he pulled from his bag.

"A registered appraiser, of course, shall need see each coin, my Prince. If they're all as this one, this collection is priceless."

"Priceless?"

"At least five hundred million Swiss." He pulled another coin from its bag and stroked it wondrously, as if it were his new-born son.

"I'll accept fair market value for them."

He stared at me with no comprehension.

"Sell them for me, Herr Präsident - at fair market value. Deposit the proceeds to my account."

His eyes dropped back to the coin in his fingers. "Perhaps Sotheby's-?"

"Will you do this for me?" I asked standing.

He nodded slowly, still gazing at the coin.

"Then take ten of them for your personal collection - a gift from me to you."

"My Prince!"

"And of course deduct any percentage your bank and the auctioneer shall need charge."

He nodded numbly.

We were airborne on the evening flight to Heathrow where we would change to something called a Concorde which promised to have us across the Atlantic and at Dulles Airport near Washington, D. C., in four hours - leaving me with more than three hours to find my hotel and barricade myself against the coming sun. Given what I had already experienced of this world I had awakened to, I believed the company's propaganda.

Emil leant toward me as we left London and asked: "Aren't you supposed to have a coffin full of dirt from your home?"

I laughed, feeling the tension of the past two days leave me. I was doing what I could; and was now encapsuled in a metal bullet ten kilometres above the earth. "Read your economic books, Emil," I told him, "they provide more accurate information than those vampire romances you've begun to read."

He glanced out the small window that held the nearly airless stratosphere away from us, then back at me, his eyes avoiding the paperback book in his lap. "I didn't use to read them, Karl - but they're the closest thing to information I could find on you."

"You'll have to unlearn all you've read."

He grinned and picked up the book he had intended to read, holding it up for me to see it. CONVERSATIONS WITH A VAMPIRE by Ann Rice. "She's pretty good as a writer." His grin broadened. "She holds my attention those times I don't have anything better to do than read."

"Are you trying to tell me something?" I asked innocently.

"Only that you're fucking me tomorrow before we do anything else."

I shook my head slowly. A month ago, Emil Paulik was a young man not about to hike his backside for anybody, a young man hell-bent on someday marrying and fathering children. I had eased his fears and took his virginity partially by guile. I was still amazed at how far he had come since then and with no help from me.

He had already forsaken his girlfriend and, with her, his future plans of fatherhood. He was truly comfortable as what I had once known as an invert. He was equally as mercurial about immortality. The world had truly changed from the one I knew before I slept after Würther's death.

"Karl, can you stay awake during the day or do you just collapse into something like a coma when the sun comes up?" he asked, his voice not carrying beyond me.

"It depends on how much heat there is," I answered. "If it's sunny and hot as in summer, I simply collapse where I stand within an hour of the dawn. If there's not much heat, I don't need sleep."

"You could go day after day in the cold?" he asked with surprise.

I smiled. "If you put me naked on an Antarctic ice field, I could probably do that - though I'd still burn some from just the heat in the sunlight. I probably wouldn't have skin burning off me, though."

"You can take that much cold?" I had aroused his curiosity.

"Cold doesn't affect me. At least, not any I've found. I've romped naked on snow-covered mountains near my home-"

"With Sergei?"

I sensed his mental shudder even as he asked the question. I nodded. He hated the man for the hold he had on me; yet, he wanted to know everything about him, accepting how closely my life was entwined with his.

"Will I be able to trust you?" I asked suddenly, following a doubt that came to me as I toyed with this realisation about him.

"Trust me?"

"You know I search for Sergei - this Tom MacPherson. Yet, you want me. You believe you love me enough to follow me into immortality. Are you going to tell yourself that, if you can't have me, no one shall?"

"What kind of person do you think I am?" he demanded in a hiss.

"Don't allow yourself to be hurt. There are things I need to know about you every bit as important to me as the gaps in your knowledge of me are to you. You can't just walk away from me here as you could back in Zürich."

I grimaced, wondering if I was saying too much. "We're an easy breed to kill, once you know how."

He studied my face for long moments. "Why would I want to kill you?"

"Because you can't have me."

"Unless Tom decides he doesn't want you," he reminded me. "But why're you worried about me killing you?"

"You're asking questions about the effect of heat and cold - how we die."

He sat back in his seat and shook his head slowly. "I'd never kill you, Karl. I love you. I want to be like you and spend my life with you. If it comes to that, I'll accept whatever you'll give me and share you with Tom."

He watched at me intently, even as he fell silent. The silence between us grew, making me nervous. Gingerly, I reached out to touch his thoughts.

|I hoped you'd finally come in my mind,| he told me telepathically. I stared at him in amazement. |Read my thoughts, look under every doubt you can find. I invite you here, Karli, any time. I will never hurt you and, God willing, I'll never fail you.|

I was reading his thoughts, thoughts directed to me. He wasn't telepathic. He was not projecting the thoughts at me. But his invitation was there, repeating over and over again, because he guessed I would read his thoughts. Worse than his knowing my telepathic ability was how organised was the first thought he wanted me to read.

This lad had me pegged far too well for my continued equilibrium. It had seemed all so very straight-forward when I sniffed his crotch in the promenade in Zürich as October began.

Pay him a weekly stipend, I told myself, and keep my libido sated.

Straight-forward and simple. Very Karl Josef Gustav von Muribor centred. Only, I had not considered Emil or how he saw our arrangement. Inconsiderate me.

CHAPTER SIX

The whispering murmurs returned along the corridors of my mind as we rode the ground shuttle toward the airport's terminal building. They were nearly as incoherent as they were in Zürich before Sergei's soul had awakened, but they now carried feelings - and warning.

This Tom MacPherson did not want me following him. He was warning me away instinctively, though he had not yet learnt to use his thoughts as Sergei or, even Würther, had been able to.

Not yet was the operative phrase. This lad was assimilating his soul's awareness and putting its knowledge to use far faster than my curate had when he met me and learnt of his past. Sergei knew I would follow him to the ends of the earth; Tom wanted time to sort through his new thoughts before he decided what he was going to do about us. I was supposed to wait.

Not bloody likely!

I had never seen a Negro except on film before Emil and I slipped onto the backseat of the first cab queued before the terminal. I thought they were black; after all, the very name of their race came from the Latin for that colour. But the driver was a mahogany brown.

His nose was flatter than would be found among any of the ethnic groups of Europe. And his close-cropped hair was coarse and tightly curled.

His features combined far more pleasantly than I would have expected. Unfortunately for this particular member of his race, he cared nothing for his body. He had fed it glutinously and it had rewarded him with fat.

He was pleasant enough, greeting us with a friendly smile as he turned to us in the motorised cab. He said something which I didn't understand and I saw Emil hadn't either. My blue-eyed, light-complected student spoke English far better than I, but his was as Englander as mine. I, however, could read thoughts. I touched the driver's mind. He wanted to know where we were going.

"The Willard Hotel," I told him and sat back as our cab pulled away from the terminal.

"You read his thoughts?" Emil asked in German. I nodded. "Tom said I spoke English like a native, Karl - but I didn't understand this man at all."

"I saw GONE WITH THE WIND at the cinema in Paris when it was first released," I told him, remembering that trip to Paris with Würther less than two years before he was to lie in a field of edelweiß with his side blown away. I forced the memory away quickly. "The Negroes seemed to speak a totally different dialect than the Caucasians." I chuckled. "As different as Schwabian or Dutch is from German."

"Or your Viennese," he laughed.

We travelled along a lighted autobahn through the desolate, dark Virginia landscape for more than thirty kilometres before we exited and began to pass through residential areas that seemed to go on forever before we entered upon another autobahn. Road signs began to touch memories of the thirteen year old boy I was in 1861, avidly reading of the unbelievable war the Americans started among themselves. Manassas. Arlington. Alexandria.

"Papa, why do the Americans fight among themselves?" I had demanded of my father, the general, in the stables before our morning ride.

"The Southern states don't want Lincoln as their President," he answered and returned his attention to which horse he would ride.

"Like the Magyars, if they didn't like the Emperor?" I asked, attempting to comprehend such an impossibility. He had nodded and pointed the horse he wanted out to the groom. "Why not just have a putsch? Or assassinate him like the Russians do their Tsar?"

"The Americans are democrats. They let all the people make political decisions."

"Unglaublich!" I could not comprehend such unbelievable lunacy. How did they get anything done? Then I understood, as only a child can. Unrestrained democracy left a land open to rebellion every time one side disagreed with the other but could not win the election. The lower classes needed restraints on them to make progress possible, as a child needed his father to direct his growth into manhood.

"We're about to pass the Lee-Custis House, gentlemen," our driver told us, breaking into my revelry.

"General Robert E. Lee's house?" I asked, remembering the ever courteous gentlemen general beloved by the European press during that long-ago war. The man in the front seat nodded and I stared at the spotlighted columns of the portico, so like the Greek temples I had walked through in the Parthenon as a young man.

"It's part of Arlington National Cemetery," the driver announced, "looks out over the Potomac River and Washington." I used my vision and saw the militarily correct rows of crosses stretching for hectares eastward from the house. I shivered. So much useless, meaningless death. So much wasted young promise. So many Emils lost for nothing.

I awakened to the feeling of being watched. I sat straight up in the bed, my muscles coiled, my eyes open, and my fangs bared.

"You would rip my throat out so willingly?" Emil asked and laughed.

I relaxed and shook my head. How long had it been since last I had a companion share my bed into the daylight? Not since Würther. Not for more than fifty years. I met his gaze with embarrassment at the exhibition of my survival instincts.

"I love you, Karl Josef Gustav, Fürst von Muribor."

I felt the warmth of his emotion, allowing it through the defences I was still dismantling. "You may love me, Emil - but I suggest you'll be much safer in future if you make yourself comfort in another room this time of the day."

"I want what you promised last night," he answered, turning strangely petulant. "I've been sitting here for two hours waiting for you to wake and give it to me." He rose and I saw he was naked. He slipped into the bed beside me.

"I don't have a condom," I told him as his face neared mine.

"You're a vampire, Karli. It's a pretty safe bet I don't have to worry." His lips found mine as he moved to lie on top of me, grinding his sex against my abdomen as his fingers reached between us to grip my manhood, stroking it into erection.

"We need housing," I opined as we lay together in the bed, his head against my chest.

"We can stay here," he answered, the movement of his lips against my nipple doing nice things to me, things that would distract me if I weren't vigilant. "You know where Tom's parents live, where the university is - it won't take but a day or two to find him."

"At two hundred dollars a night for this room? That's nearly six hundred francs a day."

He sat up, his eyes round as he look down into my face. "So much money? Mein Gott!"

"Tom knows me. He knows his past. He warns me away, demanding time alone to understand everything. To make decisions that may not include me. This is his country and he's not going to be easy to find."

"You know this?"

"I hear his spirit's whisperings. Telepathy, you would call it. But, unlike your thoughts waiting for me yesterday, these are broadcast."

"I wish I could read thoughts like you do."

"You don't. We use that power to remove memory of ourselves. Or to lessen fear. Most mortals' thoughts are simply boring, petty nonsense no one cares about."

"We need to find a place then," an all-business side of him said, erupting from the comfortably satiated youth of moments before. "Do we want a flat or a house?"

I permitted myself to consider the question. For two months I lived in the garret in Zürich and they were months I now recognised of my feeling cramped and crowded. A house would provide room for a mortal Emil to move about without disturbing me and for me to go and come without bothering him. A house, too, lent itself to the impression of solidity, lending that sense to its owners as well.

It had been for that reason my father kept the house in Berlin even after von Bismarck's Prussians forcibly removed Austria from Germany. A house in the capital of the strongest and, thus, most dangerous country in the world would also be an ear to that country's intentions - especially if the right contacts were made.

"A house," I answered.

"In a gay neighbourhood or straight?"

"There's a difference?" I asked in surprise.

"Very gay neighbourhoods are upscale-"

"Why?"

"Because gays spend their money on their homes, Karl," he answered grinning. "We want our sex in comfort and nice surroundings; and, fortunately, we aren't going to have children to waste our money on.

"Very, very upscale areas are mixed - with educated, moneyed, and understanding straight people predominating. But proletariat neighbourhoods usually look rundown. Both poor and gay neighbourhoods have more crime-"

I laughed. "You're asking me how much money I have."

He appeared wounded. "Never! I'm merely laying out your choices as well as reasons upon which to make them."

"We'll go upscale, Emi. If one of the reasons to have a house is to have an ear open to what is happening in this capital, those with power would prefer to come to a nice home in a safe neighbourhood."

He grinned down at me. "Now, we need to find a realtor." His fingers tweaked a nipple before moving down along my ribs to my abdomen. "But, first, I think I need a second course."

"A second course?" I asked as his fingers found me and began idly to play.

My own fingers reached out and touched his hip, its warmth tingling back into me. "A second course it is," I answered and smiled at him as my lips approached his.

House buying was a learning experience. When I bought a house in Paris in 1895, I merely turned the search over to my banker in Vienna who, as a favour, called upon a banker in Paris who handled my account while I was there. He did the work, leaving me but a few papers to sign.

That was not how they did it in America. I actually needed Emil Paulik to lead me through the maze of petty, interlocking business arrangements where everyone appeared to get his cut.

Emil had been busy while I slept my first day in America. He had ventured out into Washington, D. C., and located the central public library; there, he picked up a thick gay newspaper in which gay-owned and -operated businesses advertised, among whom were at least ten realtors.

Unglaublich. A homosexual community large enough to support so many businesses. Business owners willing to state they were homosexual. And advertise themselves as such in a weekly newspaper that catered predominantly to that community. The America of 1996 was certainly not the Austria of Dollfuß or the Ostmark of Hitler's Reich.

While Emil telephoned a realtor to arrange an appointment, I read through The Washington Blade, marvelling at how far the love that dared not speak its name had come in a hundred years. Two children of some Maryland police chief had come into a known gay cruising area and mugged a gay man. Skinheads congregated at street corners on DuPont Circle to intimidate gay men and women. Reverend Pat Koughlin preached homosexuality was a sin and condoned gay-bashing. A Senator called for the United States to send all its homosexuals to a Pacific island so the country could be free of them. Arlington police conducted sting operations against gays. Beautiful Joe McCarthy said the Christian Circle had as its agenda the return of America to family values - expressly leaving homosexuals out of his concept of family. The Post Office entrapped some man in someplace called North Dakota by sending him child pornography and, when he accepted it, arresting him.

This was America?

Wahnsinn! Complete, unadulterated insanity.

Admittedly, my English was poor as I had barely used it in a hundred years; but there was more than half the news I did not understand. The meanings behind the words and sentences were what left me confused and bewildered.

What I could not understand was how the country I had learnt nearly alone defeated Hitler and the Axis could have sunk so deeply into the quagmire of reaction and the fascism that lurked so closely behind it. That was the insanity I could not understand.

I tossed the newspaper on the bed as Emil replaced the telephone receiver in its stand and, smiling, crossed the room to me. "You look as if you ate something indigestible," he commented.

"Did you read this?" I pointed to the newspaper on the bed.

"Sure. I had more than five hours before you woke up. I read it. I also read The Washington Times and The Washington Post."

"Are they gay also?" I asked, not at all sure I wanted more of the homosexual-oriented diet from which I had just eaten, especially if everyone seemed to be forming a coalition to make homosexuals second class citizens or put pink triangles on their coats as Hitler had.

He grinned. "They're the mainstream papers." He knelt beside the bed and picked up more newspapers.

"Gott im Himmel!" I grunted as he handed them to me.

"We've got a seven o'clock appointment with an agent in Capitol Hill."

"Where is Capitol Hill?" I demanded.

"Near the American Congress' buildings. It's supposed to be very upscale. It's not even five o'clock now." He grinned. "We've got time to eat-"

I picked up a paper. The Washington Times. I started reading half-heartedly, my stomach reminding me harshly I hadn't fed in two days. I forgot it immediately. With growing horror, I rushed through the rest of the paper in my hands.

I frowned and tore the paper in two as anger consumed me.

"You read it through that fast?" Emil asked, not comprehending my anger.

"Vampires are faster than mortals," I hissed and stared at the two halves of the newspaper still in my hands. "This trash is a newspaper?" I demanded.

He nodded.

"It's nothing more than a reactionary apologia! It's-" I sorted through my memories of the German twenties for a word that would describe the dribble I had just read to a young 90's European, "von Papen's Nationalist Party newspaper. They offer nothing, but blame everything on the liberal government."

"That's pretty standard for an opposition press, Karl."

"No. If a newspaper is going to coat its news coverage with politics, it needs to show how its side's positions are different. This rubbish doesn't do that. It blames everything bad on liberals. It offers no solutions. Even Hitler offered solutions. Only von Papen didn't."

"Who's von Papen?"

I stared at him in surprise. "He invited Hitler into the German government, convincing Hindenberg he could be controlled. The same happened in Austria when Dollfuß came to power. In Italy with Mussolini too. In Hungary and Rumania as well. Every time fascists came to power, reactionaries paved the road to power for them."

"That's pretty ancient history-" He stopped as he saw hurt flare in my eyes, mixing with my receding anger.

"Ancient history? I lived through it. I lost Würther to it. Your father fought on one side or the other in it-"

"My grandfather," he corrected. "He was French and in the Resistance."

I felt suddenly old. An old work horse, still skittish with the memory of pain met as a colt. I tried to convince myself I was seeing ghosts who were dead and buried. The Nazis were gone. The Communists were gone. Eastern Europe and, even, Russia were democratic now. Emulating their western cousins. Emulating this country where newspapers, preachers, and Senators called for a return to a nineteenth century of fear and hate that existed only in their diseased minds. There were no more von Papens and Marshall Pétains.

I tried. But I couldn't believe mankind had evolved so far in fifty years it wouldn't repeat its recent history without a strong hand at the helm of power to guide it through the shoals.

"You're hungry?" I asked, forcing the bad taste of fear from my mouth.

"I'm becoming that way," he answered with a grin.

"Do you know of a restaurant?"

He shrugged. "I passed many today as I strolled about, but I don't know anything about them."

"Look in The Blade. They had restaurant adverts. Find something that promises a German flavour that doesn't mind gays."

`You want German food?' I sensed he was playing with me, angling me toward a sexual corner without even realising it.

"I can't eat dead food, Emil."

He stared at me, pulled from the fantasies that had been growing inside him. "What're you-?" Realisation dawned on him. "You've got to have blood." I nodded. "Where?"

"I don't know. I'll hunt tonight."

"You didn't hunt last night."

I shrugged.

"You're hungry?"

"Yes. But it's not overpowering."

He eyed me speculatively. "Can you - uh - control your feeding?"

"What that supposed to mean?"

He clasped his hands before him and gazed down at the floor, refusing to look at me. "You can have some of my blood - until you hunt." He looked up then, his eyes searching mine. "Just don't kill me while you're doing it. No more than half a litre. You'll have to control yourself."

"You're serious, aren't you?"

"When you need it you can have it, Karl."

I laughed. "Thanks, my friend. But I'm still not ready to leave you a pale shadow of yourself yet."

Emil shrugged, but I caught the slight frown that crossed his lips.

"Emi, you can only become like me if you drink my blood - my drinking yours only leaves you weakened. Or dead."

I was surprised by this man's determination to join the ranks of the undead now he knew I stood there - and the intelligent subterfuge he had devised to have me lead him there.

There was a wet chill to the air when we left the Willard. The doorman hailed a cab for us. The realtor was to meet us at his office on Pennsylvania Avenue in the Capitol Hills division of Washington. The Cafe Berlin was the only German restaurant to actively solicit gay patrons and was on Massachusetts Avenue, in the same quarter of the city. I directed the driver to the realty company's location first and, then, to the restaurant by the quickest route. I wanted to develop a feel for the part of this city I was to live in.

Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, SE, was clean and its immediate neighbourhood was obviously upscale as we turned left onto Sixth. The several blocks of houses we passed bespoke both money and effort at upkeep. The same money and effort continued as we turned left onto Massachusetts and moved northward. I began seeing couples of young men oblivious to my watching them strolling along the sidewalks as we entered a well-lighted commercial district.

The cab pulled over in front of what I initially thought was a house. Then I took in the bricked patio with empty tables and smelled distinctly German cooking.

Emil ate and I sipped at a Moselle, feeling the ambiance of the restaurant. I extended my senses beyond the walls, touching random thoughts throughout the neighbourhood. I felt the acceptance of diversity that permeated the population about me; but I also found fear lingering just behind the surface thoughts. The same fear, person after person: the fear of mugging and, even, random murder beyond the walls of one's house.

The people about me lived suspiciously behind burglar alarms, barred windows and doors. It seemed there were worse things than the undead walking the streets of America's capital city at night. The suspicion was racial; the images I found in mind after mind was of young Negro men coming into the neighbourhood from the poor areas north, south, and east of this one. I was stunned by the uniformity of the images.

I delved further. While suspicion was directed exclusively toward young Negroes, it wasn't as racial as it first seemed. It carried class distinctions which became blurred by race. I pulled back, my mind returning to the small German restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, in surprise.

These well-paid, well-educated, mostly Caucasian home owners saw Negroes as living in poverty, this causing them to rob, to distribute drugs to have an income, to kill others of their race in territorial struggles to protect that income, and to enter white neighbourhoods to rape, rob, and kill on a lark.

It made no sense. The poor of the Europe I knew until the Nazis drove me into sleep did occasionally rob the middle-class and rich. But they didn't do it as a lark. And they didn't rape and kill for the hell of it.

The Europe I had awakened to in August had a social net that fed and housed the poor. Only those who refused the employment their vocational training had prepared them for, who had surrendered to despair like those I fed on, fell through that net. But most of them became derelicts, undangerous to anyone but themselves. There were robberies, but few rapes and murders.

Had America developed a new sociology where murder, rape, and pillage were become random acts of pleasure?

More importantly, did I want to live in such a society?

Emil was watching me closely when I glanced across the table at him, pulling my thoughts away from the abyss at which they had stood. "Are you all right?" he asked.

I smiled back at him. "It's nothing." I saw his plate was empty. "How was your dinner?"

He grinned. "I travel more than 6,000 kilometres to a country with a totally different culture, and I end up eating some of the best German food I've ever had, including my mother's."

"Then, you'll need walk off all those calories," I told him chuckling.

He glanced at his wrist watch. "We've got thirty minutes and it's but a short walk to the realtor's office."

The fears of humans were rarely mine. I inhabited their world, but I did not fear as they did. I would own a house in this city, at least until I had found Tom MacPherson and learnt his intentions. I would have a home made as secure as man and vampire could make it to deter burglary. And it would be in a well-lighted and relatively safe neighbourhood, that I might have guests who were mortal and feared for their lives and purses. But I did not fear the night-darkened streets, not even for Emil beside me as we began to walk. I could protect him against any mortal.

The next four evenings were hectic. The realtor was avid to sell me a house and have me living in it before Christmas and that meant his pounding on my hotel door at the earliest possible moment I would permit his appearance. And showing me cold house after cold house - cold not so much because of the temperature, but because each one felt unlived in. Uncherished and, even, unremembered. I was unimpressed.

And I was hungry. Interminable little chats with the imminently cheerful realtor after the night's showings inevitably lasted until one and two o'clock. By the time I had Emil back to the hotel and sexually sated enough he had gone to bed, dawn was but two or three hours away.

Hunting was something that could not be rushed for me, however. I liked to choose my dinner, weighing his worth against what I might find later on. For me, hunting had always taken more than two or three hours - except in Zürich.

I was forced to become mist and ooze out our eighth floor window as Emil slipped into sleep in a city I didn't know and rush what I was uncomfortable rushing.

I fortunately found derelicts hovering over open grates on the grounds of every large government building and most of the parks to the west of the Willard. Men and women more than slightly neurotic and convinced they couldn't work made homes of discarded cardboard boxes. They wore their filth and layer upon layer of dirty, rotting clothing with pride, daring anyone to shame them. They drank, they shot heroin, and they smoked crack cocaine. They harangued those who tried to pass by without seeing them. They were not the passive, reclusive derelicts I knew from Europe resigned to the death they brought slowly to themselves.

I fed and did not kill. I became drunk and woke to strange and unpleasant tastes in my mouth.

By the fourth day of the realtor's exclusive six-month contract, I was ready to buy almost anything he would show me. I needed the peace my own house would afford me. I needed more wholesome dinners than what I was finding near the Potomac in southwest Washington. I wanted undisturbed time to learn the realities of power in America's capital as well as to meet its wielders. I wanted to locate Thomas MacPherson to begin nudging

him into a decision that included me even as I attempted to decide what I should do with Emil Paulik.

Sergei, now Tom MacPherson, whispered to me, lulling me into sleep as each new dawn lightened the sky over Washington. I grew increasingly more fond of Emil Paulik each afternoon I woke and found him smiling at me from across the room or felt his warmth beneath or beside me with both our lusts sated when our realtor would finally leave us to ourselves.

The house was as large as the one on Akademiestraße in Vienna I once fled with Würther. It dated back to when men of substance had houses in which they could invite friends and power brokers to a soiree. It stood on its own short block, giving it grounds usually unknown to city dwellers. A black wrought-iron fence imbedded in concrete protected it from the street and the small park before it.

It too was cold but still held dim memories of laughter and happiness.

I glanced at Emil and he nodded back at me. "How much?" I asked. The price didn't matter. Each hundred million Swiss francs in my account was worth at least seventy million U.S. dollars at Christmas, 1996. I needed only present my letter of credit from Hauptmann's Bank to a person of authority at Riggs National Bank and I could write this realtor a check for the amount of the property.

CHAPTER SIX

The whispering murmurs returned along the corridors of my mind as we rode the ground shuttle toward the airport's terminal building. They were nearly as incoherent as they were in Zürich before Sergei's soul had awakened, but they now carried feelings - and warning.

This Tom MacPherson did not want me following him. He was warning me away instinctively, though he had not yet learnt to use his thoughts as Sergei or, even Würther, had been able to.

Not yet was the operative phrase. This lad was assimilating his soul's awareness and putting its knowledge to use far faster than my curate had when he met me and learnt of his past. Sergei knew I would follow him to the ends of the earth; Tom wanted time to sort through his new thoughts before he decided what he was going to do about us. I was supposed to wait.

Not bloody likely!

I had never seen a Negro except on film before Emil and I slipped onto the backseat of the first cab queued before the terminal. I thought they were black; after all, the very name of their race came from the Latin for that colour. But the driver was a mahogany brown.

His nose was flatter than would be found among any of the ethnic groups of Europe. And his close-cropped hair was coarse and tightly curled.

His features combined far more pleasantly than I would have expected. Unfortunately for this particular member of his race, he cared nothing for his body. He had fed it glutinously and it had rewarded him with fat.

He was pleasant enough, greeting us with a friendly smile as he turned to us in the motorised cab. He said something which I didn't understand and I saw Emil hadn't either. My blue-eyed, light-complected student spoke English far better than I, but his was as Englander as mine. I, however, could read thoughts. I touched the driver's mind. He wanted to know where we were going.

"The Willard Hotel," I told him and sat back as our cab pulled away from the terminal.

"You read his thoughts?" Emil asked in German. I nodded. "Tom said I spoke English like a native, Karl - but I didn't understand this man at all."

"I saw GONE WITH THE WIND at the cinema in Paris when it was first released," I told him, remembering that trip to Paris with Würther less than two years before he was to lie in a field of edelweiß with his side blown away. I forced the memory away quickly. "The Negroes seemed to speak a totally different dialect than the Caucasians." I chuckled. "As different as Schwabian or Dutch is from German."

"Or your Viennese," he laughed.

We travelled along a lighted autobahn through the desolate, dark Virginia landscape for more than thirty kilometres before we exited and began to pass through residential areas that seemed to go on forever before we entered upon another autobahn. Road signs began to touch memories of the thirteen year old boy I was in 1861, avidly reading of the unbelievable war the Americans started among themselves. Manassas. Arlington. Alexandria.

"Papa, why do the Americans fight among themselves?" I had demanded of my father, the general, in the stables before our morning ride.

"The Southern states don't want Lincoln as their President," he answered and returned his attention to which horse he would ride.

"Like the Magyars, if they didn't like the Emperor?" I asked, attempting to comprehend such an impossibility. He had nodded and pointed the horse he wanted out to the groom. "Why not just have a putsch? Or assassinate him like the Russians do their Tsar?"

"The Americans are democrats. They let all the people make political decisions."

"Unglaublich!" I could not comprehend such unbelievable lunacy. How did they get anything done? Then I understood, as only a child can. Unrestrained democracy left a land open to rebellion every time one side disagreed with the other but could not win the election. The lower classes needed restraints on them to make progress possible, as a child needed his father to direct his growth into manhood.

"We're about to pass the Lee-Custis House, gentlemen," our driver told us, breaking into my revelry.

"General Robert E. Lee's house?" I asked, remembering the ever courteous gentlemen general beloved by the European press during that long-ago war. The man in the front seat nodded and I stared at the spotlighted columns of the portico, so like the Greek temples I had walked through in the Parthenon as a young man.

"It's part of Arlington National Cemetery," the driver announced, "looks out over the Potomac River and Washington." I used my vision and saw the militarily correct rows of crosses stretching for hectares eastward from the house. I shivered. So much useless, meaningless death. So much wasted young promise. So many Emils lost for nothing.

I awakened to the feeling of being watched. I sat straight up in the bed, my muscles coiled, my eyes open, and my fangs bared.

"You would rip my throat out so willingly?" Emil asked and laughed.

I relaxed and shook my head. How long had it been since last I had a companion share my bed into the daylight? Not since Würther. Not for more than fifty years. I met his gaze with embarrassment at the exhibition of my survival instincts.

"I love you, Karl Josef Gustav, Fürst von Muribor."

I felt the warmth of his emotion, allowing it through the defences I was still dismantling. "You may love me, Emil - but I suggest you'll be much safer in future if you make yourself comfort in another room this time of the day."

"I want what you promised last night," he answered, turning strangely petulant. "I've been sitting here for two hours waiting for you to wake and give it to me." He rose and I saw he was naked. He slipped into the bed beside me.

"I don't have a condom," I told him as his face neared mine.

"You're a vampire, Karli. It's a pretty safe bet I don't have to worry." His lips found mine as he moved to lie on top of me, grinding his sex against my abdomen as his fingers reached between us to grip my manhood, stroking it into erection.

"We need housing," I opined as we lay together in the bed, his head against my chest.

"We can stay here," he answered, the movement of his lips against my nipple doing nice things to me, things that would distract me if I weren't vigilant. "You know where Tom's parents live, where the university is - it won't take but a day or two to find him."

"At two hundred dollars a night for this room? That's nearly six hundred francs a day."

He sat up, his eyes round as he look down into my face. "So much money? Mein Gott!"

"Tom knows me. He knows his past. He warns me away, demanding time alone to understand everything. To make decisions that may not include me. This is his country and he's not going to be easy to find."

"You know this?"

"I hear his spirit's whisperings. Telepathy, you would call it. But, unlike your thoughts waiting for me yesterday, these are broadcast."

"I wish I could read thoughts like you do."

"You don't. We use that power to remove memory of ourselves. Or to lessen fear. Most mortals' thoughts are simply boring, petty nonsense no one cares about."

"We need to find a place then," an all-business side of him said, erupting from the comfortably satiated youth of moments before. "Do we want a flat or a house?"

I permitted myself to consider the question. For two months I lived in the garret in Zürich and they were months I now recognised of my feeling cramped and crowded. A house would provide room for a mortal Emil to move about without disturbing me and for me to go and come without bothering him. A house, too, lent itself to the impression of solidity, lending that sense to its owners as well.

It had been for that reason my father kept the house in Berlin even after von Bismarck's Prussians forcibly removed Austria from Germany. A house in the capital of the strongest and, thus, most dangerous country in the world would also be an ear to that country's intentions - especially if the right contacts were made.

"A house," I answered.

"In a gay neighbourhood or straight?"

"There's a difference?" I asked in surprise.

"Very gay neighbourhoods are upscale-"

"Why?"

"Because gays spend their money on their homes, Karl," he answered grinning. "We want our sex in comfort and nice surroundings; and, fortunately, we aren't going to have children to waste our money on.

"Very, very upscale areas are mixed - with educated, moneyed, and understanding straight people predominating. But proletariat neighbourhoods usually look rundown. Both poor and gay neighbourhoods have more crime-"

I laughed. "You're asking me how much money I have."

He appeared wounded. "Never! I'm merely laying out your choices as well as reasons upon which to make them."

"We'll go upscale, Emi. If one of the reasons to have a house is to have an ear open to what is happening in this capital, those with power would prefer to come to a nice home in a safe neighbourhood."

He grinned down at me. "Now, we need to find a realtor." His fingers tweaked a nipple before moving down along my ribs to my abdomen. "But, first, I think I need a second course."

"A second course?" I asked as his fingers found me and began idly to play.

My own fingers reached out and touched his hip, its warmth tingling back into me. "A second course it is," I answered and smiled at him as my lips approached his.

House buying was a learning experience. When I bought a house in Paris in 1895, I merely turned the search over to my banker in Vienna who, as a favour, called upon a banker in Paris who handled my account while I was there. He did the work, leaving me but a few papers to sign.

That was not how they did it in America. I actually needed Emil Paulik to lead me through the maze of petty, interlocking business arrangements where everyone appeared to get his cut.

Emil had been busy while I slept my first day in America. He had ventured out into Washington, D. C., and located the central public library; there, he picked up a thick gay newspaper in which gay-owned and -operated businesses advertised, among whom were at least ten realtors.

Unglaublich. A homosexual community large enough to support so many businesses. Business owners willing to state they were homosexual. And advertise themselves as such in a weekly newspaper that catered predominantly to that community. The America of 1996 was certainly not the Austria of Dollfuß or the Ostmark of Hitler's Reich.

While Emil telephoned a realtor to arrange an appointment, I read through The Washington Blade, marvelling at how far the love that dared not speak its name had come in a hundred years. Two children of some Maryland police chief had come into a known gay cruising area and mugged a gay man. Skinheads congregated at street corners on DuPont Circle to intimidate gay men and women. Reverend Pat Koughlin preached homosexuality was a sin and condoned gay-bashing. A Senator called for the United States to send all its homosexuals to a Pacific island so the country could be free of them. Arlington police conducted sting operations against gays. Beautiful Joe McCarthy said the Christian Circle had as its agenda the return of America to family values - expressly leaving homosexuals out of his concept of family. The Post Office entrapped some man in someplace called North Dakota by sending him child pornography and, when he accepted it, arresting him.

This was America?

Wahnsinn! Complete, unadulterated insanity.

Admittedly, my English was poor as I had barely used it in a hundred years; but there was more than half the news I did not understand. The meanings behind the words and sentences were what left me confused and bewildered.

What I could not understand was how the country I had learnt nearly alone defeated Hitler and the Axis could have sunk so deeply into the quagmire of reaction and the fascism that lurked so closely behind it. That was the insanity I could not understand.

I tossed the newspaper on the bed as Emil replaced the telephone receiver in its stand and, smiling, crossed the room to me. "You look as if you ate something indigestible," he commented.

"Did you read this?" I pointed to the newspaper on the bed.

"Sure. I had more than five hours before you woke up. I read it. I also read The Washington Times and The Washington Post."

"Are they gay also?" I asked, not at all sure I wanted more of the homosexual-oriented diet from which I had just eaten, especially if everyone seemed to be forming a coalition to make homosexuals second class citizens or put pink triangles on their coats as Hitler had.

He grinned. "They're the mainstream papers." He knelt beside the bed and picked up more newspapers.

"Gott im Himmel!" I grunted as he handed them to me.

"We've got a seven o'clock appointment with an agent in Capitol Hill."

"Where is Capitol Hill?" I demanded.

"Near the American Congress' buildings. It's supposed to be very upscale. It's not even five o'clock now." He grinned. "We've got time to eat-"

I picked up a paper. The Washington Times. I started reading half-heartedly, my stomach reminding me harshly I hadn't fed in two days. I forgot it immediately. With growing horror, I rushed through the rest of the paper in my hands.

I frowned and tore the paper in two as anger consumed me.

"You read it through that fast?" Emil asked, not comprehending my anger.

"Vampires are faster than mortals," I hissed and stared at the two halves of the newspaper still in my hands. "This trash is a newspaper?" I demanded.

He nodded.

"It's nothing more than a reactionary apologia! It's-" I sorted through my memories of the German twenties for a word that would describe the dribble I had just read to a young 90's European, "von Papen's Nationalist Party newspaper. They offer nothing, but blame everything on the liberal government."

"That's pretty standard for an opposition press, Karl."

"No. If a newspaper is going to coat its news coverage with politics, it needs to show how its side's positions are different. This rubbish doesn't do that. It blames everything bad on liberals. It offers no solutions. Even Hitler offered solutions. Only von Papen didn't."

"Who's von Papen?"

I stared at him in surprise. "He invited Hitler into the German government, convincing Hindenberg he could be controlled. The same happened in Austria when Dollfuß came to power. In Italy with Mussolini too. In Hungary and Rumania as well. Every time fascists came to power, reactionaries paved the road to power for them."

"That's pretty ancient history-" He stopped as he saw hurt flare in my eyes, mixing with my receding anger.

"Ancient history? I lived through it. I lost Würther to it. Your father fought on one side or the other in it-"

"My grandfather," he corrected. "He was French and in the Resistance."

I felt suddenly old. An old work horse, still skittish with the memory of pain met as a colt. I tried to convince myself I was seeing ghosts who were dead and buried. The Nazis were gone. The Communists were gone. Eastern Europe and, even, Russia were democratic now. Emulating their western cousins. Emulating this country where newspapers, preachers, and Senators called for a return to a nineteenth century of fear and hate that existed only in their diseased minds. There were no more von Papens and Marshall Pétains.

I tried. But I couldn't believe mankind had evolved so far in fifty years it wouldn't repeat its recent history without a strong hand at the helm of power to guide it through the shoals.

"You're hungry?" I asked, forcing the bad taste of fear from my mouth.

"I'm becoming that way," he answered with a grin.

"Do you know of a restaurant?"

He shrugged. "I passed many today as I strolled about, but I don't know anything about them."

"Look in The Blade. They had restaurant adverts. Find something that promises a German flavour that doesn't mind gays."

`You want German food?' I sensed he was playing with me, angling me toward a sexual corner without even realising it.

"I can't eat dead food, Emil."

He stared at me, pulled from the fantasies that had been growing inside him. "What're you-?" Realisation dawned on him. "You've got to have blood." I nodded. "Where?"

"I don't know. I'll hunt tonight."

"You didn't hunt last night."

I shrugged.

"You're hungry?"

"Yes. But it's not overpowering."

He eyed me speculatively. "Can you - uh - control your feeding?"

"What that supposed to mean?"

He clasped his hands before him and gazed down at the floor, refusing to look at me. "You can have some of my blood - until you hunt." He looked up then, his eyes searching mine. "Just don't kill me while you're doing it. No more than half a litre. You'll have to control yourself."

"You're serious, aren't you?"

"When you need it you can have it, Karl."

I laughed. "Thanks, my friend. But I'm still not ready to leave you a pale shadow of yourself yet."

Emil shrugged, but I caught the slight frown that crossed his lips.

"Emi, you can only become like me if you drink my blood - my drinking yours only leaves you weakened. Or dead."

I was surprised by this man's determination to join the ranks of the undead now he knew I stood there - and the intelligent subterfuge he had devised to have me lead him there.

There was a wet chill to the air when we left the Willard. The doorman hailed a cab for us. The realtor was to meet us at his office on Pennsylvania Avenue in the Capitol Hills division of Washington. The Cafe Berlin was the only German restaurant to actively solicit gay patrons and was on Massachusetts Avenue, in the same quarter of the city. I directed the driver to the realty company's location first and, then, to the restaurant by the quickest route. I wanted to develop a feel for the part of this city I was to live in.

Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, SE, was clean and its immediate neighbourhood was obviously upscale as we turned left onto Sixth. The several blocks of houses we passed bespoke both money and effort at upkeep. The same money and effort continued as we turned left onto Massachusetts and moved northward. I began seeing couples of young men oblivious to my watching them strolling along the sidewalks as we entered a well-lighted commercial district.

The cab pulled over in front of what I initially thought was a house. Then I took in the bricked patio with empty tables and smelled distinctly German cooking.

Emil ate and I sipped at a Moselle, feeling the ambiance of the restaurant. I extended my senses beyond the walls, touching random thoughts throughout the neighbourhood. I felt the acceptance of diversity that permeated the population about me; but I also found fear lingering just behind the surface thoughts. The same fear, person after person: the fear of mugging and, even, random murder beyond the walls of one's house.

The people about me lived suspiciously behind burglar alarms, barred windows and doors. It seemed there were worse things than the undead walking the streets of America's capital city at night. The suspicion was racial; the images I found in mind after mind was of young Negro men coming into the neighbourhood from the poor areas north, south, and east of this one. I was stunned by the uniformity of the images.

I delved further. While suspicion was directed exclusively toward young Negroes, it wasn't as racial as it first seemed. It carried class distinctions which became blurred by race. I pulled back, my mind returning to the small German restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, in surprise.

These well-paid, well-educated, mostly Caucasian home owners saw Negroes as living in poverty, this causing them to rob, to distribute drugs to have an income, to kill others of their race in territorial struggles to protect that income, and to enter white neighbourhoods to rape, rob, and kill on a lark.

It made no sense. The poor of the Europe I knew until the Nazis drove me into sleep did occasionally rob the middle-class and rich. But they didn't do it as a lark. And they didn't rape and kill for the hell of it.

The Europe I had awakened to in August had a social net that fed and housed the poor. Only those who refused the employment their vocational training had prepared them for, who had surrendered to despair like those I fed on, fell through that net. But most of them became derelicts, undangerous to anyone but themselves. There were robberies, but few rapes and murders.

Had America developed a new sociology where murder, rape, and pillage were become random acts of pleasure?

More importantly, did I want to live in such a society?

Emil was watching me closely when I glanced across the table at him, pulling my thoughts away from the abyss at which they had stood. "Are you all right?" he asked.

I smiled back at him. "It's nothing." I saw his plate was empty. "How was your dinner?"

He grinned. "I travel more than 6,000 kilometres to a country with a totally different culture, and I end up eating some of the best German food I've ever had, including my mother's."

"Then, you'll need walk off all those calories," I told him chuckling.

He glanced at his wrist watch. "We've got thirty minutes and it's but a short walk to the realtor's office."

The fears of humans were rarely mine. I inhabited their world, but I did not fear as they did. I would own a house in this city, at least until I had found Tom MacPherson and learnt his intentions. I would have a home made as secure as man and vampire could make it to deter burglary. And it would be in a well-lighted and relatively safe neighbourhood, that I might have guests who were mortal and feared for their lives and purses. But I did not fear the night-darkened streets, not even for Emil beside me as we began to walk. I could protect him against any mortal.

The next four evenings were hectic. The realtor was avid to sell me a house and have me living in it before Christmas and that meant his pounding on my hotel door at the earliest possible moment I would permit his appearance. And showing me cold house after cold house - cold not so much because of the temperature, but because each one felt unlived in. Uncherished and, even, unremembered. I was unimpressed.

And I was hungry. Interminable little chats with the imminently cheerful realtor after the night's showings inevitably lasted until one and two o'clock. By the time I had Emil back to the hotel and sexually sated enough he had gone to bed, dawn was but two or three hours away.

Hunting was something that could not be rushed for me, however. I liked to choose my dinner, weighing his worth against what I might find later on. For me, hunting had always taken more than two or three hours - except in Zürich.

I was forced to become mist and ooze out our eighth floor window as Emil slipped into sleep in a city I didn't know and rush what I was uncomfortable rushing.

I fortunately found derelicts hovering over open grates on the grounds of every large government building and most of the parks to the west of the Willard. Men and women more than slightly neurotic and convinced they couldn't work made homes of discarded cardboard boxes. They wore their filth and layer upon layer of dirty, rotting clothing with pride, daring anyone to shame them. They drank, they shot heroin, and they smoked crack cocaine. They harangued those who tried to pass by without seeing them. They were not the passive, reclusive derelicts I knew from Europe resigned to the death they brought slowly to themselves.

I fed and did not kill. I became drunk and woke to strange and unpleasant tastes in my mouth.

By the fourth day of the realtor's exclusive six-month contract, I was ready to buy almost anything he would show me. I needed the peace my own house would afford me. I needed more wholesome dinners than what I was finding near the Potomac in southwest Washington. I wanted undisturbed time to learn the realities of power in America's capital as well as to meet its wielders. I wanted to locate Thomas MacPherson to begin nudging him into a decision that included me even as I attempted to decide what I should do with Emil Paulik.

Sergei, now Tom MacPherson, whispered to me, lulling me into sleep as each new dawn lightened the sky over Washington. I grew increasingly more fond of Emil Paulik each afternoon I woke and found him smiling at me from across the room or felt his warmth beneath or beside me with both our lusts sated when our realtor would finally leave us to ourselves.

The house was as large as the one on Akademiestraße in Vienna I once fled with Würther. It dated back to when men of substance had houses in which they could invite friends and power brokers to a soiree. It stood on its own short block, giving it grounds usually unknown to city dwellers. A black wrought-iron fence imbedded in concrete protected it from the street and the small park before it.

It too was cold but still held dim memories of laughter and happiness.

I glanced at Emil and he nodded back at me. "How much?" I asked. The price didn't matter. Each hundred million Swiss francs in my account was worth at least seventy million U.S. dollars at Christmas, 1996. I needed only present my letter of credit from Hauptmann's Bank to a person of authority at Riggs National Bank and I could write this realtor a check for the amount of the property.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Three days before Christmas I awakened in my own bed for the first time in more than fifty-six years, a bed I had bought instead of rented with a hired garret. A bed with no lumps and sags.

It was the winter solstice, the shortest day in the year. I awakened barely an hour past noon, already comfortable in only three short weeks with the knowledge a mortal was in the room with me - one who posed no threat to me. I opened my eyes and saw Emil in sweater and jeans smiling back at me, warming his backside at the roaring fire across the room from the bed.

"Did you sleep well in your own bed?" he asked when he was sure I was awake.

"The concept of ownership has something to say for itself."

He grinned. "I think a firm mattress and springs that don't squeak say much more."

I stretched and pushed the covers from my legs. "I don't remember you complaining before."

He chuckled. "When an experience is new, a man is too involved in experiencing it to be distracted, Karl."

"Are you telling me I've become as old and comfortable as a broken-in shoe?"

His eyes widened. "Never!" He crossed the bedroom quickly and knelt before me. "You will never be an old shoe to me, Liebchen." A huskiness had come to his voice as his lips touched my thigh above the knee and became the caress of a butterfly as they moved upward.

"I love you," he mumbled and sent his tongue darting to the exposing glans of my manhood.

I sighed and lay back across the mattress, allowing him to consume me and giving myself up to the warmth engulfing me.

We lay pressed together under the covers, a sheen of perspiration on his naked skin the aftermath of our sex. He wiggled his backside against my now subdued manhood. "Am I good, Karli?"

"Good as a sexual partner or as a person?" I asked, wallowing in my satiation.

He looked over his shoulder at me, his eyes questioning. "I hadn't thought of how you saw me before," he said doubtfully. "I guess I just assumed-" He hesitated, pulling his thoughts together. "How do you think of me?" he asked finally.

"You're intelligent, handsome, honest, honorable-" I touched his cheek with my fingertip, traced it to the flair of his nostrils, and smiled. "You're independent but share. You see what needs to be done and do it. And you're someone with whom I've become very comfortable these past two months."

"You mean it?"

"I don't lie, Emi." I smiled into the pools of blue sky that were his eyes. "I don't feel I have to with you."

He turned, his lips finding mine as his body pressed against me. His kiss was not one of hunger but a simple heart-felt thank you.

"You are also someone I've become fond of these past months," I told him moments later when he pulled his face back to smile at me. My fingers absently caressed his closest cheek and moved down onto his neck.

"You'll love me yet," he said softly and nuzzled the tip of my nose with his.

I chuckled. "I already do."

He pulled back again and gazed questioningly at me. "And Tom?"

"As Sergei and Würther, I love him too. There are years and experiences shared between the two of us that will never cease having meaning, Emi. He knows those as well as I do."

"So, you love both of us?"

I frowned at the thoughts his question brought to the fore of my mind. I worked myself toward accepting I could love more than one person at one time.

A boy, even a man, loves his parents and siblings; and that is a multiple love lasting throughout the man's lifetime. Heterosexual men love their children and wives - but also come to love the mistresses they establish in separate households and the children they beget.

I was fond of Emil Paulik. That fondness already went far past my pleasure at his good looks and our sexual compatibility. In two months, we had come to share much of our daily lives - from Sergei's reawakening as Tom MacPherson to house-hunting in Washington, D. C.

Love - or, even, fondness - was more than sex and mumbled sweet-nothings to each other after coupling. It was shared experiences. A life shared together. A life built on many moments of comfort, companionship, unity of purpose, doing things together - in addition to mutually pleasing sexual couplings.

Did I love Emil Paulik? I had to admit the signs were there. The confluence of our lives these past three months and the pleasantness of that union bespoke the beginnings of love. If we were together much longer, I would sorely, even painfully, miss him. If we parted today, rending the fabric of our lives together, I would feel pain.

Yes. I had come to love Emil Paulik. Without intent to do so. Despite my intent not to do so.

"Yes. I love you both."

He smiled as beatifically as any carved saint in any cathedral in Vienna. "Then, we need to find Tom and get this thing settled between you two."

"Why?" I groaned in surprise. "I would rather not have to choose between the two of you."

His eyes clouded with surprise. "Why would you do that?" he asked slowly. "In Zürich, l liked Tom as a friend," he continued, answering himself.

"He's also quite handsome-" He smiled ruefully. "I think I can learn to accept him as an equal claimant for your heart. And share you in bed - if that's what you decide you want."

"And if he will not accept that arrangement?" I asked, my voice awed with shock at the idea of a permanent menage a trois.

"Right now, we don't even know he's willing to accept your immortality, much less your love."

"How can he not?" I demanded. "We've loved each other more than a hundred years."

"That's true. But it's not the same life after life, is it?"

I gazed at him dubiously, unsure where he was leading.

"As Sergei, he became a vampire first and saved you afterwards. You made love when he was Sergei, but were you always the topman?"

I shook my head slowly, uncomfortable at sharing the intimacy of that relationship with him.

"But, as Würther, he refused to become a vampire - even when he was dying-"

I nodded.

"In bed with him, were you always the dominant one?"

I nodded this time.

"It was the same soul both times; but, his second time around, he made different choices from the first time." Emil paused, pulling together the strands of his argument. "It appears then a soul does not always repeat its decisions life after life. Like a man makes decisions different from those he made as a child - he's the same person, but maturing and learning."

I stared at him for long moments but was lost in the thoughts making their way through my mind, assimilating this idea.

"That sounds like Buddhism, Emil," I said finally. "The soul continues to return to this - to the physical plane - to make restitution for debts incurred in earlier lives as well as to develop spiritually. That's how it grows toward what they call enlightenment in that religion."

"Perhaps, the Buddha understood things better than other people who started religions." He grinned. "Karl, we have a man who you say has lived at least twice before. I believe you - I saw him when he collapsed back in Zürich. He knew who you were, what you both had shared - and it blew his mind. If that's true, it's only logical there's some kind of meaning behind it. Nothing exists in a vacuum."

I sat up, staring at him still. "My God, you've become a Voltaire. A Rousseau."

"Philosophers of the age of reason," Emil mumbled to himself and shrugged. "So?"

"Then what would be the logic to his deciding not to return to my arms, to the love we've shared for so many years?"

"What was the logic to his deciding as Würther against immortality? Tom's soul is on its own agenda toward enlightenment, Karl; and we can but guess what that is. Perhaps, he needs to stand alone this time around. Or he needs to learn to love a woman and the children he can father."

Emil shrugged. "I don't know." He grinned suddenly. "Or perhaps he needs to learn to share your love this time around - with me."

I groaned.

"So, when do we start looking for him?" he asked, sitting up and sliding off the bed.

I stared at him, fear suddenly clouding my thoughts.

Not fear - exactly.

Apprehension. What if Sergei didn't want either my immortality or my love? I had Emil, of course; but he alone could not come close to providing what Sergei and I had had for a century and longer. I would be starting all over again with Emil. With Sergei an increasingly distant past.

"His thoughts grow stronger, Emil." I knew I was buying time and was ashamed at myself for doing so. "They're almost coherent - but they still continue to warn me away."

I looked down at my hands, embarrassed at the unwanted admission I was making. "They ask for time. He wants to understand what's happened to him. He wants to make his own decisions without me influencing them."

"So, you're going to give him time to put his head together?"

I nodded slowly. "Until the spring. Three or four months - what do they matter when we're talking forever?" I was trying to put the best face on it. But I knew it was my fear - my apprehension - speaking.

"Think you can put up with me being around until you two do get together and decide what happens to you - and me?"

A smile scampered across his lips when I looked up to meet his gaze. I also noticed he had again become tumescent.

"I think we should go exploring this capital of America," I told him, smiling reassurance back at him. "And that means a shower for me."

"I need one too," he said, grinning broadly, "think you could wash my back for me?"

"I suspect I could." I knew there was no way he would be satisfied with just my scrubbing his back.

We debarked our cab a block above a circle named after an Admiral DuPont. I had no idea what the good sea-general had done for his nation as navies had never had much meaning to me or any Austrians. We, of course, had one under the Empire; but it was hardly more than a shore patrol of our Ægean territories; young boys of my day did not dream of the sea nor make naval officers their heroes.

"We're now in the heart of the gay district of Washington," Emil told me matter-of-factly, as if he were become my tour-guide. I looked about us at the mostly two- and three-storied brick buildings and the men and women pulling their coats tight about them and hurrying to wherever they were going.

"It doesn't look much different than the business district about the Willard," I opined.

"It's still early-" He pulled the sleeve of his coat up his arm and looked at his wrist watch. "It's only now after five."

"And you're hungry."

He looked startled, as if I had read his mind. "How do you know that?"

"You're young and we've not brought food into the kitchen at home yet."

"Yeah." He still peered at me dubiously but decided not to pursue the subject. "There's supposed to be some really good restaurants somewhere near here."

He squinted at the street signs above us. "We're at Connecticut and `Q'-" He turned completely around. "We need Seventeenth and `Q'." He groaned. "How're we supposed to know which way to go?"

I chuckled and stepped in front of a rushing woman trying to circle us. "Bitte, gnädnige Frau," I said in my humblest German, "how do I find Seventeenth Street?"

She stopped and glanced at both of us. Deciding we weren't derelicts and accepting we were foreigners from the language of my greeting, she smiled, becoming immediately friendly. She asked what restaurant we were looking for. I looked to Emil.

"Annie's Steak House," he offered, taking my cue and accenting his English atrociously. She nodded and told us the steaks were good and we had to try the Texas toast. She then directed us two blocks east along `Q' and half a block south.

"Why did you use something so formal as `excuse me, honoured lady', Karl?" he asked as we began to stroll eastward. "She didn't even speak German."

I grinned. "People like helping strangers - as long as they feel safe doing so. The German, and the obvious pleading I put in my voice, made us strangers in need of help-"

"What were we before?" he asked in exasperation.

"Just two men who might be a danger to her."

"Did you pick that out of her thoughts?"

I shook my head and smiled. "There are some things one learns about human nature over several lifetimes," I told him.

After he ate his American steak, home fries, and Texas toast and I sipped very slowly on a cognac served in a strange one-shot little bottle with an accompanying snifter, we strolled back toward the circle along `P' Street. He was content now he had gorged himself and I was trying not to remember I was hungry. We followed the south side of DuPont Circle, reading the signs above each converging street, looking for `P' which Emil promised was going to be so gay it'd knock my non-existent hat off.

As we crossed Connecticut and approached New Hampshire, I felt us being watched. Curiously, I looked along the walk ahead of us to find three Caucasian youths standing in front of a large apothecary and staring at us as we approached them.

I reached out and touched their minds. There wasn't much there, and I was amazed at how few thoughts a human could have when with friends.

I felt each man's desire to menace us, but they were under orders to restrict their effort to simple intimidation. Even more curious, I extended my vision to see them more clearly.

They each wore jeans, leather jackets, and thick leather, laced-up boots. All three of them had shaved their heads and they were red with the chill of the night. All three of them wore rings and studs that rode the outer curve of their left ears. It was almost as if the attire and accoutrements were a uniform for them.

In front of the chemist's, I said to Emil in German: "Don't look now, but these three seem to be ruffians who plan on intimidating us." I touched their thoughts again, unwilling to allow Emil to be hurt, if their intent changed.

The youth closest to us had caught the comment, his face frowning as he sought to recognise the language. He smiled when he decided it was German. "Heil, Hitler!" he called, clicking his heels and giving us the informal Nazi salute as we passed them.

Heil, Hitler! For more than two years I had heard that greeting too many times a day before I fled it. One answered the telephone and the door with it and said good-bye with it. One greeted people on the street with it. One even greeted waiters and delivery boys with it and sent them on their way with it. I once suspected a couple began love-making with it.

I had hated it from the Anschluß until Würther and I fled my house on Akademiestraße with the Gestapo a step behind us.

I touched the youth's thoughts again. I prayed he was trying to make a joke at our expense, picking up on our use of German.

I felt only a feeling of well-being in him. We were from the Fatherland. We were good people, no matter the area of town we were in or our being two men together. Because he thought every German was Nazi and racially pure and, thus, good people. I shivered mentally.

How had this happened? Germany lay in ruins in 1945, its people prostrate before the Americans, British, and Russians - the peacocks dead, captured, or trying to hide themselves from the occupiers. I had read the histories since awakening, revenge still burning brightly in me. How could these American youths, who spoke no language but their dialect of English, be Nazis?

"Why did he say that?" Emil asked, puzzled by the greeting.

"They call themselves skinheads, but they're Nazis," I growled as we walked down `P' Street. And felt the three pairs of eyes follow us, respect and something akin to envy in the thoughts behind them. Because they thought we were real Germans, the Meistervolk of Hitlerian insanity.

They were like the young school boys in Vienna when Hitler visited the city after the Anschluß, claiming it forever for the thousand year Reich. I could remember them still in their starched brown shirts and knickers and swastika arm-bands. So proud. So sure of themselves. So naive as to what horror it all held.

How could the grandfathers who destroyed that evil allow their grandsons to revisit it and, like young, untrained dogs, dig it up and parade its smelly remains proudly.

Heil, Hitler? Wahnsinn!

I knew where I would find my dinner tonight. I tried to smile but that was impossible.

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I am now a month away from having my own webpage. When it's up, you'll be able to order any of the 4 anthologies I've edited (that have been published), even autographed copies of them - if you want them. There are 3 more coming between now and the end of January as well. Instead of waiting another year, you'll also be able to order the completed novels of Confessions Of A Vampire, Gut Feelings (Beginnings), Learning To Fly (college), and The Learning Season (Adult/Youth) for only $US3.00 on your credit card. Several collections of my own stories will be offered for the same price as well. I'm also thinking of offering my 3 gay-themed mainstream novels at the site for US$5.00 (they're worth it, even if no agent in NY has shown interest yet).

The 4 novels that are currently being serialised on Nifty will continue running there with one installment a month. You don't have to buy them to read them. You just get to read the whole thing in one reading if you do.

Having lost more than 60 pounds since the 1st of May, I'm not about to forget the programme that melted it off of me. There'll be a click for you to check into that too.

As always, please write me at Vichowel@aol.com - like any writer I crave feedback, whether good or bad. I'm certainly open to your comments about either dieting or publishing. Write me - please.