Fundamental Differences — Wednesday, January 30, 1991, 4:35 PM

Succubus Club / I-90 South / Niebuhr Lane Shelter, Gary Chicago and Gary, Indiana

The penthouse smelled like carpet cleaner and rage. Brennon was pacing the length of the room in his shirtsleeves, tie loosened. Three hundred years of composure and tonight it had cracked.

Gengis sat on the arm of a leather sofa near the window, one boot on the cushion. Sir occupied a chair near the bar with a glass he wasn’t drinking, watching Brennon, measuring how many things he was willing to break. Portia was in the corner booth, a glass of red wine untouched beside her, her hands folded, her face as blank as a coin that has not yet been stamped.

“He touched me,” Brennon said. Not to anyone. To the room. “He put his hand on my chest and I – " He stopped walking. Started again. “That man walks out of this building tonight in a condition that prevents him from walking back in.”

Darius had gotten the short version on the stairs from Sir. A preacher from Gary (Episcopal, not the Baptists from the buses) had crossed the rope line, found Brennon on the main floor, and put a palm flat against his sternum. And Brennon had left. Not backed away, not excused himself. Left. An 8th-generation Ventrue with three hundred years of social engineering behind him, chased out of his own club by a mortal’s open hand.

True Faith. Darius had read about it in Modius’s library, a single paragraph in a volume on Inquisition-era tactics that Modius kept shelved between editions of Vasari. The prose had been clinical and the clinical tone had not helped, because the clinical tone was the sound of something that terrified the author.

“How about a scandal,” Darius said. “The kid. Neon. We have him go out and tell the congregation their pastor touched him.”

Three faces looked at him.

“Traces back to the club,” Sir said.

“The kid’s Kindred,” Gengis said. “Ten minutes in a television studio and the whole thing falls apart.”

“And you hand Coleman a martyrdom,” Sir added. “A man falsely accused by the establishment he was protesting? He comes back with cameras.”

Darius tried the second angle. False father. Someone Dominated into claiming paternity of a scandal, then scrubbed with the Forgetful Mind afterward.

Sir shook his head. “The Masquerade exposure exceeds the benefit by an order of magnitude.”

Gengis: “You can’t build that in one night. It’s logistics. Where’s the patsy? Who handles him afterward? You’re talking about a week of preparation for an op that goes sideways the second someone checks the dates.”

Third angle. Cops. Someone with a badge and a thumb on the local precinct.

“Removal of a lawful minister from the sidewalk in front of his own congregation,” Sir said. “That’s not resolution. That’s a photograph in the Tribune.”

Gengis leaned forward. “And he comes back next week with twice as many buses.”

Brennon stopped pacing. He was at the window now, the city behind him reduced to a smear of lights, and his face had settled into something Darius recognized from Modius’s worst nights. A man staring at an instrument that would not play.

“He needs to leave Chicago tonight and not come back,” Brennon said. “How you accomplish that is your affair.”

“I tried to get close to him earlier,” Sir said. He set his glass down. The admission cost him something. “I couldn’t do it.”

Darius looked at Portia. She had not moved since he entered. Her wine sat at the same level, a perfect meniscus, and her gaze was on Brennon with a patience that did not belong in a room this agitated.

“I think there’s a deeper issue here,” Darius said. “Modius.”

Brennon turned from the window.

“The buses are from Gary. The protestors are from Gary. This has his fingerprints.”

“I’m aware,” Brennon said. “And I want to discuss it. After Coleman is handled.”

Darius stood. “I’ll handle it my way.”

He took the stairs down to the main floor.

The bass hit at the landing. Industrial music, strobe, the press of mortal bodies generating heat that the dead borrowed and the dead pretended was theirs. The dance floor was three-quarters full. The mezzanine crowd leaned on the rail above, watching the floor with proprietary attention.

Coleman was near the east wall, talking to a couple in matching leather. Blood dolls, the voluntary kind, the ones who came to the club hoping for what the club actually sold. Coleman had his coat folded over one arm. He was listening to them. Head tilted, hands still, giving them thirty years of undivided pastoral attention.

He was fifty, maybe fifty-five. Black, graying at the temples, a face that carried its mileage in the jaw and the forehead, not the eyes. The eyes were clear. He wore a charcoal topcoat over a black shirt with a clerical collar, and he stood like he owned every inch of floor beneath him.

Darius felt the pressure at fifteen feet. A warmth in the sternum, then a tightening. Not pain. Recognition. Something old in his blood identifying something older in the man by the wall and filing a report that said: leave.

He kept walking. Ten feet. The tightening became specific: jaw, hands, the muscles along his spine pulling taut in sequence. His vision narrowed. The strobe caught Coleman’s collar and the white strip pulsed like a heartbeat.

Five feet. He could smell soap, wool, the faint sweat of a man who had been standing in a crowded room for two hours. The warmth in his sternum was a fist now. His teeth ached. He held his hands at his sides and kept them still.

Two feet. He could see the thread count in the collar. Coleman looked up from the blood dolls.

Darius caught his eyes.

Leave this place. Go back to Gary. Don’t come back.

The command went out and hit something it could not move. Coleman blinked. His brow furrowed, not in pain or recognition but in the small confusion of a man who had missed a sentence.

“I’m sorry,” Coleman said. “I didn’t quite catch that. Were you saying something about Gary?”

Darius let the breath out through his nose. The command had gone nowhere. It had met something in Coleman that was not a wall – a wall can be broken – but a substance, a density, a thing that did not resist because it did not need to.

“What do you want?” Darius said.

Coleman studied him for a moment. Not the appraisal of a predator or the wariness of prey. The look of a man trying to understand what was in front of him without pretending he already knew.

“I came from Gary,” Coleman said. “Some of my parishioners were frightened. A man they didn’t know paid them to come here and protest a nightclub they’d never visited. Fifteen men from the shelter took twenty-dollar bills from a stranger in a camel coat and got on buses. The church people came along because the church people always come along. That’s what a congregation does. I came because I wanted to see what was worth protesting.”

“And?”

“And I found a nightclub full of young people who look lonely.” He paused. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I came because people I care about were scared.”

“I want you out of here.”

“I understand that,” Coleman said. “And I’ll leave if the owner asks me to. I’d like to hear it from him.”

“You already heard it. From me. On his behalf. Leave. Take your people with you.” Darius kept his voice flat, stripped of inflection, the register he used for conversations that had one acceptable outcome. “Or this gets worse.”

Coleman put on his coat. He did it slowly. One arm, then the other, then the buttons, bottom to top. A man who had decided to leave and would not be rushed by the decision. He looked at Darius with an expression that was not contempt and not pity and occupied a territory between them that Darius did not have a word for.

“I don’t know who you are, son. But I’ve been threatened by men who meant it a lot more than you do, and I’m still here.”

He walked toward the entrance. On the way he spoke to two groups of protestors lingering near the bar, and six of them followed him out through the steel door, and the bass closed behind them like water filling a hole.

Sable was already moving.

Darius had caught her eye from across the floor. A look, a tilt of the head toward the entrance, and she peeled off the mezzanine rail and disappeared into the crowd before Coleman reached the door. She had a gift for that. People saw her when she wanted to be seen and when she stopped wanting they found they were looking at the place she had been.

She trailed him at thirty feet, south on State, the cold pressing through her coat in a way that registered as data rather than discomfort. Coleman walked with the stride of a man headed somewhere specific. Two blocks south: three charter buses idling at the curb, exhaust plumes white in the January air, faces in the windows. Baptist congregants. The people who had come because a stranger with twenty-dollar bills told them to.

Coleman stopped at the lead bus. He did not board. He was counting heads.

She closed the distance. The pressure started at ten feet. The same warmth, sternum-deep, a signal that did not translate into language but into the imperative to turn and walk the other direction. At six feet her legs locked. Not metaphorically. The muscles in her thighs seized and she stopped on the sidewalk and could not make herself take another step.

Coleman turned. He saw a woman standing very still on the sidewalk in twelve-degree weather with her face blank and her hands at her sides and something wrong.

“Are you all right, miss?”

She tried to speak. Her jaw would not open. The pressure in her sternum was a vibration now, a frequency her body recognized and her mind did not, and the vibration said: you are the wrong thing in the wrong place and if you come closer this will get worse.

She did the only thing left.

“Stay back!” she shouted. “I’m sick – stay away from me – it’s contagious –”

Coleman stopped. Palms up. Two pastors on the bus steps turned to look.

“Do you need me to call an ambulance?”

She bent double and forced the blood up. It came out hot and dark, thicker than what a living woman would produce, and it hit the pavement in a splatter that steamed in the cold. The sound she made was not acting.

A woman inside the first bus screamed. One of the pastors ran for the curb, shouting about police. Coleman stood ten feet away, his face caught between the impulse to help and the recognition that whatever was happening to this woman was beyond his training.

“Just go,” she said. “Go. I’m sick.”

The buses were revving. Pastors scrambled for the doors. The first bus lurched into gear, exhaust billowing, taillights swinging as the driver pulled away from the curb. Coleman watched for three seconds, then made his decision. He jogged to the lead bus, caught the door, and boarded.

Three charter buses pulled south on State toward the I-90 on-ramp. Gary-bound.

Sable straightened up. She scuffed the blood with her boot, kicked gutter slush over the rest. In the sodium light it looked like a spilled drink, maybe a broken bottle. A squad car rolled past on the cross street and didn’t slow.

She stood on the sidewalk in the cold and waited for the shaking to stop.

Darius went outside to find the thread.

Brennon wanted Coleman handled, and Coleman was handled. But Coleman wasn’t the problem. Coleman was a good man who had gotten on a bus because people he took care of were frightened, and the person who had frightened them was still in Gary, counting his twenty-dollar bills and imagining the chaos he’d caused.

It took him four minutes to find Ramsley.

The man was sitting on the curb a block south of the club, flannel shirt under a thin jacket, baseball cap, hands tucked between his knees. Short, Black, shoulders pulled in against the cold. He had missed the buses.

“Need a ride?” Darius said.

Ramsley looked up. Quick scan for threat, for advantage, for whether this person wanted something he couldn’t afford to give. He found none of those.

“Where to?”

“Gary. I’m headed that direction.”

Ramsley got in.

I-90 south, forty-five minutes each way. The car was warm and Ramsley talked, loosened by heat and a stranger who was listening without taking notes. He had been paid twenty dollars by a white man at the Niebuhr Lane shelter. Middle-aged, thin face, dark hair going gray, camel overcoat. Talked like a professor. Soft voice, the kind that made you lean in, which meant you were already agreeing before you understood what you were agreeing to. He had never given a name. He paid in crisp new twenties, the kind that came from a bank and not from a wallet.

About fifteen men had taken the deal. Get on a bus. Carry a sign. Stand in front of a nightclub. Easy money.

“And the church people?”

“First Unity Baptist. They were already worked up about something. The shelters, the factory layoffs, somebody’s cousin who went missing. Man in the coat didn’t start the fire. He just pointed at a building and said that’s where it’s coming from.”

“And Coleman?”

Ramsley shifted in his seat. He had been holding this separately.

“Everybody in Gary knows him. Runs three shelters. Good people. Don’t preach at you unless you ask.” A pause. “Episcopal, not Baptist. He came along because he heard about it and wanted to see. That’s what he does. Something’s wrong, he goes and looks at it.”

Darius dropped Ramsley at the Niebuhr Lane shelter at 1:15 AM. The shelter was a converted warehouse on a block where every other building was dark. A woman in a down vest opened the door and waved Ramsley in and looked at Darius once, the look that people who work in shelters develop for men in cars who drop people off at one in the morning, and then the door closed.

He drove back to Chicago.

The penthouse at two in the morning was quieter. Gengis had gone. Sir had gone. Portia was still in her booth, the wine at the same level, the same posture, the same silence. Sable stood near the window. Brennon sat behind a desk that hadn’t been there earlier, a desk that appeared in the room when Brennon decided to become the person who sat behind desks.

“Coleman’s gone,” Darius said. “Voluntarily. He boarded a bus and went back to Gary with the rest of them. He’s not the problem.”

“Then who is.”

“Paid agitators. Fifteen homeless men from the Niebuhr Lane shelter, twenty dollars a head, crisp bills. The recruiter was a white man in a camel overcoat. Middle-aged. Thin face. Dark hair going gray. Soft voice. Talked like a professor.” He let the description sit. “The church people were already upset about conditions in Gary. He just gave them a target.”

Brennon was very still.

“That preening, irrelevant little Prince,” he said, “and his penny-ante provocations.” His voice was level, but it was the wrong kind of level. The surface had frozen and whatever moved underneath could not be seen. “He sent a hundred mortals to my door to prove he still matters.”

“Modius,” Darius said. “Has to be. I spent a year under his thumb. The overcoat, the manner, the cash. He doesn’t delegate this kind of thing. He micromanages it because the micromanaging is the point. He wants you to know it was him.”

Brennon said nothing. The silence was transactional. He was waiting for the ask.

“We don’t want to go back,” Darius said. “Sable and I. We want to stay in Chicago. We want to be here legitimately.”

“You want me to sponsor you.”

“I want you to speak to Lodin’s office. Formally. We’ve been useful tonight. We’ll be useful again.”

Brennon looked at Sable. She was watching the city through the glass, sixteen floors of cold air between the penthouse and the street, and she did not turn. She did not need to. Her silence in that moment was a second signature on a document Darius was writing.

“I will speak to Lodin’s office about your status in this city,” Brennon said. “Formally. In exchange, I want everything you know about Modius’s operations. Not tonight. Soon.”

“We’ll talk soon,” Darius said.

He did not specify when. The information would be parceled, not dumped. That was the difference between a payment and a giveaway, and Darius had learned the difference in a Gary pawn shop before he had learned what his teeth were for.

They left through the VIP stairs. Portia watched them go. Her wine glass caught the light and threw a red line across the white tablecloth, a thread connecting her corner of the room to the door they walked through, and then they were in the stairwell and the thread broke and the glass was just a glass again, untouched, in a room where no one was thirsty.