The Hearing at the Grave — Friday, March 8, 1991, 5:48 PM

West Side tavern / Kedzie Avenue / Kaspar & Sons / Tremere Chantry, Astor Street / Humboldt Park / Old Northside Church Chicago and northern Illinois

The man at the end of the bar off Pulaski wore a Hawthorne Works windbreaker with the patch gone gray at the thread, and the bank envelope under his glass said FINAL in red. Out in the side lot, on one word and a held look, he unfolded it himself. The second mortgage on Kostner, satisfied in full by a cashier’s check from Naperville, with a note stapled to the corner: Dad, don’t argue about it. Call me. Jeanine. He owed nothing to anyone, and he was furious about it.

A man with no debts was no use to Darius’s blood, but fifty-one years on the same six blocks had filled him with names, and he gave them up in the cold. The last he said with contempt: Andrzej, the Pole in the rooming house on Kedzie.

Andrzej sat on the porch step in a quilted jacket with a Warsaw tag on the collar, a cigarette cupped against the wind. Four questions in broken English produced the figures: thirty-eight hundred to the travel agency on Milwaukee Avenue for the passport, the ticket and the room, plus three hundred a week, against two-forty take-home from a Cicero loading dock. The agency held his passport. The collector came Fridays at nine.

The arithmetic ran one direction. Darius was running close to empty, the boy’s pulse beat quick and tired under the jaw, and the count of minutes until nine came apart in his head.

The quilted jacket tore at the seam and the Warsaw tag came away in his fingers. Andrzej got one word out in Polish and it broke in his throat. The blood was hot and bitter, tobacco and diesel, and under that four months of lying awake adding up a number that only got bigger. His heels drummed twice on the concrete and quit. Darius drank until there was no room for another swallow, and the body in his arms weighed less than the jacket.

It was 8:26, the collector due at nine. He set the base of the skull on the lip of the step, and what gave under his palms was clean and final. He dragged the torn throat across the rusted rail until it was ragged enough to pass. Then he stepped back to the curb and looked. The neck was broken and the wound was torn and nothing was wet. A patrolman with a flashlight would see it in one pass.

What he felt was good. A young man’s iron sat under his breastbone like a second heart, the shakes of two nights were gone, and every sense ran warm and clear. And he was doing the sum, because he could not stop: thirty-eight hundred, three hundred a week, two-forty to pay it with, a debt that never closed, and he had closed it. Nobody on Milwaukee Avenue would collect. It gave him the clean feeling of a balanced ledger. Becky was the first entry. This was the second, smaller, a stranger, and the Beast had not been this easy with him since. It sat in the warm place behind his teeth with its legs stretched out like a dog beside a stove.

Neat. You were always going to. He’d have died a little a week for the rest of his life. You spared him the interest.

Some part of him used to answer that voice. He did not notice that it had stopped.

Across Kedzie a second-floor curtain stood open two inches. Eleven steps across the street, a stairwell of boiled cabbage and floor wax, a brass plate that said WANDA PIOTROWSKA over a mat that said Witamy. The door opened before he knocked. She was in her sixties, an old man’s cardigan over her housecoat, the telephone in her hand and its cord stretched across the hall. She hadn’t dialed.

“He was a good boy,” she said, Poland in the vowels. “On Sundays I give him plates. He says it’s too much. I say, you’re thin.” She looked at his hands and stepped back from the door. “I saw.”

He told her what she had seen in four sentences, level and without hurry. The receiver went down into its cradle, and she put a hand on her chest.

“Poor boy. Too much to drink on a Friday. He fell on his steps. I heard the ambulance.” She brought a plate from the radiator with a dish towel over it and held it out in both hands. “You are his friend? Give him this. He is too thin.”

Four pierogi with onions in butter, still warm. She shut the door with a small nod of thanks, and the game show went on playing to nobody on the other side.

At the haven Sable sat with her color high. Behind the Metro a girl with a Dead Kennedys button had gone up Clark in an ambulance, because Sable had fed until her own throat refused and then spent a quarter at the corner pay phone. Tomás reloaded the Colt’s empty magazine and set the pistol at Darius’s end of the oilcloth.

On Astor Street the service gate opened before they reached the stoop. Erichtho came out in a gray coat buttoned wrong by one button, arms crossed, an unlit cigarette in her fingers.

“Tomás. You’re going in to see him. Go the long way, around the side. Nicolai doesn’t own the gate.” “What did you bring him that he doesn’t have already?”

“The chance to be man of the hour,” Tomás said. “A hero to the city, even.”

Her arms tightened until the coat bunched at the shoulders, and the cigarette folded and fell to the pavement in two pieces. The voice she used next was pitched for the ghoul at the top of the steps. “The Regent is in the library, Mr. Navarro. Gerald will show you in.” She stopped inside the gate with her palm flat on the iron, both hands shaking. “He asked for you at nine.”

Nicolai sat at a reading table under a low lamp, a boy of ten in a school jacket whose shoes didn’t reach the floor. Tomás gave him everything in order, down to the Prince’s deniable errand and the name Neally had paid with. Nicolai wrote the name on a clean line of the ledger, alone.

“His blood has been thicker than his papers since January. I have wanted a taste of it for two months without a reason the Prince would accept. A name like that is the reason.”

Darius came up two flights with the street’s cold on his coat. A steel lancet opened his wrist in one pass, and the boy caught the bead on a glass slide and lifted it to his mouth. The lamp leaned an inch toward him and stayed there.

“Your blood sits two steps nearer the source than your papers say. I will keep that, Mr. Cole, because it is useful to me. There is another blood under yours, older than the Prince’s and older than my own. I have tasted it once before in this city and did not know what I had. It is in Lodin’s veins. A trace, but constant, like salt in a well.” He set the slide down. “The body you carried out of that compound in January is in the Prince’s keeping. The name Neally gave you is the name of that body. You have met him, Mr. Cole. You are the one he reached for.”

He wrote two letters. The first went to the Pontifex Maximus in Vienna under red wax. The second carried no direction, and he sealed it in black under a thumb that pressed harder than it needed to, and did not look at it again.

The rite over blood from the seat of Bach’s Lexus took forty minutes and smelled of old iron. “An old stone church, northwest, one road in off the Interstate. A barn behind it, and the machines standing in a line. They are waiting for you.” Neally was harder. The thread through Darius came up thin, and Nicolai stopped with the knife in his hand. “I discounted what was in it. The Prince’s blood is in Mr. Cole by his own hand. It is in Mr. Edwards by the Embrace.” He opened his palm again. “Humboldt Park. A storage facility, units let by the month, a night attendant who answers to no one. He is hiding where he thought no one would look.”

He pressed a disc of dull gray metal, warm, no bigger than a half-dollar, into Tomás’s palm. “Against the skin. Until dawn I will see what you see.” Abraham DuSable would drive them. And when they had Mr. Edwards, Nicolai would have an hour with him first.

DuSable parked by a loading dock in Humboldt Park, tipped his head back against the rest, and left his body idling at the curb. Fifteen minutes later he spoke to the windshield with cold hands on the wheel. “Four ghouls in a van, watching the front. Edwards is on the second floor at the back with a young woman holding a gun in her lap. He’s sitting with his hands open on his knees, like a man who’s been told not to move.”

Darius walked the north wall and counted: front office, chained loading door, an iron fire stair screened from the van by a parked truck. Four doors and one stair. At ten to two the pay phone on the light pole rang, and Tomás, listening from the car, heard a woman’s voice, steady and rehearsed: Come up now. He won’t fight you.

The stair rang once under Darius’s boot. Nobody in the lot turned. They waited in the dark end of the corridor under a caged bulb until two men came up the interior stair and put a key in the lock. The door opened on the woman, a revolver loose in her hand, and Neally in a metal chair behind her. The lead ghoul looked up into Darius’s face.

“Down.”

His knees went and he folded onto the concrete with his eyes open. Sable stepped out of the dark at the second man, and something in her face made the room smaller. He hit the wall with his gun hand open and empty and ran.

He made the alley shouting. DuSable braked his car across its mouth instead of running anyone down and got out in his coat and tie. “I will not put four men under a car in a public lane at two in the morning on a stranger’s say-so. It leaves bodies I’d then have to explain.” He told the driver to sit, and the man sat on the pavement. Tomás had the runner by the collar at the loading door: “Be still.” The third came round the building with a hand under his coat, met DuSable’s eyes in the headlights, and knelt. Nobody fired.

On the dark street to the north, the woman had followed them down the fire stair. She stood thirty feet back under a dead lamp with the revolver pointed at the pavement. Neally lifted his head.

“Let her come. She was told what to say.”

Lorna Pruitt, three years his assistant in the Prince’s office, had hidden him in her late aunt’s storage unit. At eleven, four men from the Prince’s own security had come up the stairs, men she knew by sight, and told her to hold the gun on him and phone down at one. “I didn’t know whether that was right. I still don’t.” A witness at a lit window went back to bed on DuSable’s word. A patrol car that rolled into the alley backed out again with its radio silent. Darius knelt in front of the one ghoul whose memory had only blurred and held his eyes until nothing was left behind them but a van and a call that never came.

At the Chantry Neally drank three bags at a steel table and thanked nobody. Tomás sat in the corner through Nicolai’s hour.

“I paid with what I had.”

“I asked where you learned it.”

“Where I was told to.” Neally looked at the wall behind Nicolai’s shoulder. “I don’t remember who told me.”

Nicolai capped his pen. “The bond answers for him. It is a very good lock.”

Sable came back from the telephones with the city: Lodin’s household in uproar over a lost prisoner, Modius’s man at the Succubus Club asking after Allicia, and someone who wasn’t Kindred asking around the Gold Coast where Darius Cole fed. At 4:14 the wall phone rang and a soft Creole voice gave Darius the church and the terms, one car. First light is a problem for you. It isn’t one for us. He had never given anyone the number. Walt called to whisper about a gray car outside the walkup and an envelope under Modius’s seal. DuSable brought word that a Justicar had sent an Archon to Chicago. Nicolai handed Tomás the keys to a cargo van sealed against light. “Daylight is not a reason to be careless, Mr. Navarro.”

Darius called Brennon to send the signal for the ambush.

“The people you were thinking of went home at three, Mr. Cole. They got a telephone call from the top. Something about a man lost in the city, and every available hand turned toward finding him.” His voice dropped. “I’d have mentioned it, but nobody asked me.”

Headlights picked them up on the Interstate and held a quarter mile back all the way. At 5:32 the gravel ended at a long dark church with two stained glass windows still holding color and a yard of broken headstones. In the middle of the cemetery someone had dug a hole bigger than a grave. The bikes stood in a half-circle. Bach out front, grinning; Mireille at his shoulder; the Chorus one dark shape behind them. At the church door Jefferson stood with a hand on the shoulder of a woman who wasn’t looking at anyone.

“My friends! The day’s light was long and we slept uneasily. We missed your scent.” Bach looked past Darius to the van. “You’ve brought him. We’ve prepared the Becoming for your craven Camarilla coward.”

Darius walked in with his hands visible. “There’s a car behind us. It’s been there since the Interstate, and it isn’t Lodin’s. A Justicar has sent an Archon to Chicago, and this is the man’s eyes. By tomorrow night he’s walking through every Camarilla house, and he won’t stop at yours.”

Bach threw his head back and the pack roared with him. “They send an Archon! Let him sit on the road and watch. We’ll give him something to carry home.”

Mireille didn’t laugh. “Monsieur Cole, a car followed you to a place we asked you to come alone. You tell us this to warn us, or to explain why it is here?”

“It was a gift. I wouldn’t hand you a reason to doubt me while I’m asking you for a hearing.”

Something in her shoulders let go. “Then the pack owes Monsieur Cole a courtesy.”

A tan sedan came down the church road and stopped short of the gate with its lights out. Sable and Tomás walked Neally out of the van, and Jefferson crossed the grass to meet him. “Mr. Cole. I’ve been looking forward to this for some time.” Bach took Neally by the chin and tipped his face toward the hole, and the pack began to howl. It came up through the soles of Darius’s feet and asked his throat to open. He set his teeth. Sable flushed and held. Tomás’s jaw worked once and shut.

When the howl died, Neally spoke to Darius. “You said it was a hearing.”

“What does it do to him,” Darius asked Jefferson, “and who answers if it goes wrong?”

“It buries him. The earth takes what the Camarilla taught him to be, one piece at a time, and what comes up has nothing human left to spend. The bond ends there. It’s the only way it ever ends.” “Who answers is easy. I do. Do you know what it is to lose a woman to the same man a hundred times? I took command of his senses with Emily’s help and let his own mind finish the work. He came here on his own two feet.”

Darius had watched his hands through all of it. They moved on every word except free.

Then Bach let go of Neally’s arm. “Folks, stand easy.” The knives went away, and the voice that came out of Bach now belonged behind the counter of a hardware store. “We said we’d hear him, and we’re going to hear him. Sun comes up at six-fourteen. Doesn’t bother us. I just wouldn’t want it to rush you.” The man from the sedan, in a gray overcoat with a camera on a strap, had come in on foot with one empty hand raised. Mireille offered him a camp chair at the cemetery’s edge, and he sat in it because there was nothing else to do.

“Mr. Edwards. Tell us what you want.”

“The bond gone. The rite, so I’m free of it.”

“It does free you,” Mireille said, in a clerk’s patient voice. “You’ll go into the earth as what you were and come out as what we are. The old life doesn’t follow you out. Some of it hurts. We don’t hide that, because the ones who lie about it make poor brothers.” Her eyes moved to Darius. “Whatever Monsieur Cole may have imagined, we are not strangers to honesty.”

“You brought him,” Bach said. “You get a say.”

Darius looked at Neally. “Any last words?”

Neally met his eyes with the clarity of a man balancing a ledger. “I promised you the remainder on completion. I believe this is completion. There is a woman in the mountains of Colorado, a recluse. I’ve heard it only from Elders, only as rumor. She knows the old ways of undoing what we are. She can make one of us human again. I don’t know where. Everyone who went looking for her stopped writing. Nobody asked me, Mr. Cole, I note it for the—”

“Neally. That will do.”

Jefferson hadn’t raised his voice. Neally’s mouth closed, his eyes went out of focus, and he sat with both hands open on his knees like a machine switched off at the wall. “Colorado,” Jefferson said, to no one. Then, smiling a little: “You carry interesting things in your pockets, Mr. Cole.”

Darius asked where the pack sat out the day. “Cellar under the church,” Bach said. “Folks have been sleeping down there since before the war.” He asked what the rite cost a man on the way through. “What it costs anyone,” Jefferson said. “He puts down what he carried in.” Mireille: “You walk in owned, you walk out free.”

Sable watched their colors. At Colorado, Jefferson’s had gone hard and tight with want. At costs, and again at free, his jumped half a beat while Mireille’s lay level as a lake in winter, and Bach’s eyes slid to Jefferson and back. The man in the camp chair burned flat and patient, a ledger being kept. Behind the steeple the sky had begun to gray.

Darius made his offer to Jefferson alone. He was the one man the Camarilla would send through a door to Colorado, and the door stayed shut until Neally walked out of that cellar free and the Camarilla party left the churchyard whole. The Camarilla had looked for the woman before, he added, and those people were no friends of the Sabbat.

Jefferson answered Bach instead. “It’s a good trade, Ductus. I’ll say that where he can hear it.”

“Then we do it. Cellar, tonight, sun on top of us. Nobody touches him until he’s said his piece. Jefferson, you hear that? Nobody.”

“Understood.” Jefferson took his hand off Neally’s shoulder, and Neally breathed through a mouth that had been shut.

Darius wanted proof. Mireille gave Bach a small shrug that meant it cost nothing. “He walks to your door when it’s done. On his own feet. Not carried, not led. If your Regent wants to put his tongue to him, he can. The cellar is still ours.”

“Then the introduction is also later,” Jefferson said. “After he’s been tasted, and it says what you say it will.”

“Fine by me.” Bach pushed his hands into his jacket. “Fellas, go home. Don’t go sightseeing.”

The man in the camp chair capped his pen. Mireille walked Neally toward the church, steering him like a drunk friend she was taking home, and Jefferson stood at the open grave until the last of them was inside, and then followed.

The sun came up behind the tree line as a bar of white at the bottom of the van’s blacked-out windshield. Somewhere on the two-lane the disc on Tomás’s chest went cold. Nicolai met them at the top of the Chantry stairs.

“The token ran to first light. I have seen the grave, the Ductus, and the man in the gray coat. I have not seen the cellar, which I take to be the Sabbat’s preference.” One small finger stopped Tomás’s report. “In writing. Mr. Cole, you offered the Sabbat a door into Colorado and attached sound terms to it. I approve. When Mr. Edwards comes to that door, he is in my chamber for the first hour, and what he says about Colorado goes into my files before it goes into yours.”

Lorna Pruitt sat at the long table with a mug nobody had explained to her. In the entry hall, where mortal visitors were made to stand, a man in a dark overcoat held out a black-wax envelope with no address on it, to Nicolai and nobody else. Nicolai turned it once in his hand and put it in his coat unopened.

“You will excuse me. The hour is late, and the sun has not read my correspondence.”

DuSable had a key to the dormitory wing. Darius lay down in his coat, full to the throat with a stranger, and counted without meaning to. Seven stairs at the Chantry. Four doors and one stair at Humboldt Park. Three hundred a week against two-forty. One young man on Kedzie, closed out. Sixty miles northwest the sun stood on the roof of a church with a cellar under it, and Neally was down there in the dark, waiting to say his piece.