The Milwaukee Run — Wednesday, March 6, 1991, 5:41 PM

South Pilsen / Modius Mansion, Gary / I-94 / Hyatt Regency, Milwaukee / Kaspar & Sons

Chicago, Illinois — Gary, Indiana — Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The woman on the side street off Twenty-First wore a coat with a fur collar that had been somebody’s good coat in 1974 and was now a thing she slept in. She was moving fast in no direction, her legs getting separate news from her head. Fifty-two degrees at eight-thirty on a March Tuesday, no wind, the snow a week out of Pilsen and the alleys giving back everything they’d been holding since December.

“What kinda party you having, baby?”

That was all it took. It usually was. She came toward the voice and Sable let her get close enough to show the missing button, the cracked place on her lower lip, the pupils gone wide and fixed and busy, then took her elbow, gentle, a hand steadying a friend who’d had one too many, and walked her back toward the loading bay of the tortilla plant where the light gave out.

What Sable failed to account for on this night and no other, because her head was in Gary in a music room with a south-facing window doing arithmetic on a woman’s escape, was the crack.

It came through the blood like a flare going up inside a dark house. Every room lit at once. The Pusher didn’t have to say anything, and didn’t, and the silence wasn’t restraint; it was appetite getting exactly what it had been asking for and going quiet over the bowl. Sable drank and the light kept coming up and she drank, and somewhere in there she stopped being a woman feeding and became a mouth attached to a supply line, and the hands pushing weakly at her shoulder stopped pushing, and then stopped being hands doing anything at all, just weight hanging off wrists.

She came back to herself kneeling on wet concrete with a stranger’s head on her thigh. Still breathing. Barely, and with no evident intention of continuing.

She laid her flat with the coat under her head, then walked two blocks to the payphone outside the shuttered currency exchange on Blue Island, put in her quarter, and told the dispatcher there was a woman down behind the tortilla plant on Twenty-First, unconscious, possible overdose. She hung up on the question about her name. Somebody else’s breath-fog was still on the mouthpiece. She wiped her lips with the back of her wrist, and it came away dark, and she looked at it a while under the streetlight before she wiped that on the inside of her coat.

The Cutlass idled at the corner with its parking lights on.

“Well?” Darius said.

“Drive.”

He drove. He didn’t ask about the cuff, and he didn’t ask why they were going south when the haven was north.

Somewhere around the Indiana line she gave him the rest of it. Not Tomás. Never Tomás. She’d been settled on that since the Succubus Club, since she’d watched a man she chose as coterie walk a staked prisoner into Nicolai’s house and consider the matter correctly handled. Tomás reported. That wasn’t a flaw in him; it was what he was. You don’t ask a compass to keep a secret. You just don’t hand it one.

“Milwaukee,” Darius said.

“Milwaukee.”

“And she does what, exactly?”

“She takes it out of her.”

He thought about that for a mile of dead storefronts. “Fifty-two years.”

“I know how long it’s been.”

The Modius mansion sat in the part of Gary where the houses still pretended: three stories of ornamented brick, lawn cut, porch light on, and a rot in the joists you could smell from the sidewalk if you knew what you were smelling for. The south music room window was third from the corner. Sable tapped it twice with a fingernail, which was the arrangement, and the sash went up before she finished the second tap.

Allicia had been packed for weeks.

That was the first thing, and it undid something in Sable’s chest she hadn’t known was still tied. Dark wool coat over a house dress. Low heels, not the Italian things Modius bought her. Walking shoes. A leather clutch with the corners gone soft from handling. Her hair was shorter at the nape than at Miller Beach, cut close along the jaw by somebody who knew what they were doing, which meant it had been planned, paid for, and explained away.

“You came.” Her voice was low and unused, an instrument out of its case. “He’s at the foundry. Internal Audit night — he won’t be back until two. Lucian is at the docks. I have until one if we go now. Where are we going.”

Not are we going. She’d asked the only question left.

“To freedom,” Sable said. “Follow me.”

Allicia put a leg over the sill and stepped down onto the frozen grass without a sound. She didn’t look back at the house. Not at the window, not at the porch light, not at fifty-two years of piano in a room with good acoustics. She straightened her coat and walked.

The Cutlass waited at the alley mouth. Allicia saw the car. Saw the shape behind the wheel.

“Who else knows?”

“Just us. Him. Erichtho. And the woman who’s going to help you.”

Allicia counted to four behind her eyes, got in the back seat, and asked nothing further.

Broadway south, past the Torch with its sign dark, past the rail crossing where the arms had been stuck up for two years. Hammond, the Illinois line, the long northward run into I-94, the city going by on the right in strata: yards, stacks, projects, black water at the crossings, and over all of it the low orange lid the streetlights put on the sky.

Sable turned around in the seat to look at the woman she’d stolen. Three weeks since Miller Beach, and the coat was new. That interested her more than anything else in the car: no Modius in it anywhere, so it had come from a store or a friend or a five-fingered afternoon, and either way it was a garment a woman acquires once she has decided to be somebody who leaves.

“You cut your hair,” Sable said. “It’s good. Shows your neck.”

She reached back and touched the line of it behind the ear where the barber had taken it close. Light. Two fingers. An owner checking her own property, exactly the register Allicia had been kept in for half a century, and Sable knew what she was doing with that and did it anyway. Allicia’s pupils changed. Not fear. The other thing: the small collapse in a face when somebody looks at it and sees it, after years of being looked at and not seen.

Sable held the look one beat past comfortable, then turned back to the windshield and the lane markers coming on.

“Chicago’s been educational.” A laugh, low in the throat. “There’s a bass player at a club on Forty-Seventh who does things to a room. And a woman at the Succubus Club who collects people and keeps them in a closet. I’ve been busy.”

She didn’t say Claudine. She didn’t say Annabelle. She left the outlines open and let the dark in the back seat fill them in with bodies and heat and beds that weren’t this one.

Allicia’s hand went to her own collar. Adjusted it. The gesture of a woman who has just been made aware that she has skin.

Sable reached back and put her hand there instead. Not adjusting. Replacing.

Allicia went still, and it wasn’t the stillness of freezing up; it was the stillness of being held, which Sable had seen in two people in her life and had always found more erotic than movement. Her chin came up. The line of her throat opened. Fifty-two years of a man who could taste her blood across a room, and what she offered in the back of a Cutlass doing sixty-five past Gurnee wasn’t blood. It was territory.

Her hand came up over Sable’s, pressed it down, and kept it there.

At some point Sable was in the back seat. She doesn’t remember opening a door. The Pusher stayed quiet that whole hour, and this time the silence was the other kind, the kind where the thing inside you sits back because it has nothing to correct.

Darius reached up and turned the mirror toward the ceiling.

They crossed into Milwaukee County at 12:15 and Allicia hadn’t moved her hand.

The Hyatt Regency stood off East Kilbourn in twenty stories of smoked glass, designed in 1971 to look like the future and settled since into looking like an airport. Milwaukee at midnight on a Tuesday: four cars on the street, an empty bus, a man in a Brewers jacket walking a dog that didn’t want to be out.

“Wait here,” Sable told Darius. And to the back seat: “Stay in the car. I need to make sure she’s expecting us.”

The lobby was travertine and dead ferns and a night clerk with a paperback face-down on the counter, twenty-two or so, his blazer sleeve shiny at the elbow. He surfaced at the sound of heels.

“I’m here for Dr. Genevieve Aldenberg,” Sable said. “Tell her I have the results from the Denver consultation.”

Three months ago Erichtho had given her that sentence in a chantry corridor and made her say it back twice. She had carried it since, a key in a coat she never wore.

The clerk didn’t call anybody. He looked at her with a new and careful blankness, a young man who has been given one instruction by a guest who tips, and said, “Suite 1814. Elevators are to your left, ma’am.”

She went back out for Allicia. They crossed the travertine together and Allicia took her arm. Not lovers. A grip that needed to confirm the floor was real.

The door of 1814 opened six inches on the chain.

The eye in the gap was brown and unhurried. It went over Sable once, accounting, then moved past her to Allicia and stopped.

Sable let her vision slide sideways into the other seeing, the one that costs her something every time and gives back more than it costs. Color came up around the woman in the gap like frost taking a window.

Pale violet, saturated, filling everything: hunger, and not the throat kind. The kind that lives behind the eyes and eats problems. Under it, banked low and old, a dark red aimed at nobody in this hallway, anger with a long and specific address somewhere else, kept at pilot light a very long time. A white flicker at the edges, already fading. Somebody had knocked at midnight and she hadn’t expected it.

No black. No mottling of deception, no bleach of fear, none of the red-edged appetite Sable had read on every predator she’d met since Gary. A scientist interrupted at her bench, irritated, until the violet found Allicia and flared bright as a struck match and the irritation was gone. She was looking at a fifty-two-year bond the same way a surgeon looks at a tumor she’s only ever read about.

The chain came out of its track.

“Come in.”

Small. Five-two in bare feet, dark hair pulled back off a face that would be called sweet if the sweetness came from anywhere inside it. Hotel bathrobe, the good kind, belted. The suite behind her: a king bed made and unslept in, a desk drowned under paper and leather notebooks, a laptop open to a screen of green characters that scrolled while Sable watched. Two room-service trays sat on the credenza with the domes off, the food arranged and cut and pushed around the plates, not one bite gone anywhere, because nothing on those plates could go anywhere. Staged for a hotel staff that would otherwise start to wonder. Hollandaise congealing under the lamp. No circles on the floor, no candles, no brass. A working room.

“Your Majesty,” Sable said.

Something moved in the small woman’s face and got put away again.

“Close the door.” And to Allicia, without turning: “Sit.”

Allicia sat on the edge of the bed with the clutch in her lap and her knees together, and the two of them — one standing, one seated — did something to the air that had nothing to do with Sable at all.

“Erichtho’s girl. The Toreador from Gary.” Carna crossed to the desk and turned a notebook face-down. “You used the Denver phrase. That word is a key, not a conversation starter. So. What are you bringing me?”

“I love this woman. I want her freed of her bond to Modius. In return, I’ll tell you everything you’d like to know about how Harry Houdini broke the Pyramid’s bond last month in Chicago.”

Carna’s arms came uncrossed. Her hands dropped to her sides and stayed there, open and forgotten, and on a woman who hadn’t made an unconsidered gesture since the fifteenth century it was as good as a scream.

“Harry Houdini.” She turned the name over like a coin she was checking for teeth marks. “You are offering me two things. A subject, and intelligence. In exchange for one.”

She looked at Sable.

“You said you love her.”

“I do.”

Green characters scrolled on the laptop. Twelve floors down, an elevator chimed for nobody.

“Sit down,” Carna said.

Sable took the desk chair. Carna crossed to the bed and stood in front of Allicia, close enough that the hem of the bathrobe touched her knees.

“Give me your wrist.”

Allicia looked at Sable — one look, all question, is this the thing, is this what we came for — and Sable nodded, and Allicia put out her left hand.

Carna turned it palm up, pressed two fingers into the soft place over the veins, and closed her eyes. Her lips moved without sound. Thirty seconds. A minute. The room went quiet enough that Sable could hear the ice machine at the end of the corridor cycling.

“Fifty-two years.” Carna opened her eyes and did not let go of the wrist. “One anchor. Narrow and very deep. This isn’t a weekend project, it’s surgery. The bond is structural — it has taken over functions that should be hers. Memory. Desire. The capacity to want something without first checking whether he’d approve of her wanting it. If I cut it out, parts of her come out with it. She’ll have to rebuild. That takes time she may not have if Modius finds out she’s here.”

She let the wrist go and sat back against the edge of the desk, one ankle crossed over the other.

“Now. Tell me about Houdini. Everything. Start with how they caught him and work backward.”

Sable looked at Allicia first.

A woman had just been told that the thing she’d wanted for half a century would be taken out of her with a knife, and that pieces of her would be on the tray afterward. What came up in her face was hope. Not the bright kind. The kind that hurts going in, the understanding that what you want will cost something nobody can price and you’re going to say yes anyway, and that the yes is itself the first amputation. She had heard parts of her go with it and kept only the word cut, and cut meant a hand and a blade and an end.

She looked at Sable. Nodded once.

So Sable told it. The Succubus Club in February. Orloff’s blood dolls coming across the floor in a line, four of them dressed for a party and sent to kill. The back corridor, Gibson with his hands up, the old man in the good suit who could have gone through a wall and instead stood still while three Kindred closed on him and surrendered out of arithmetic rather than fear. Sable had negotiated that in a hallway smelling of spilled gin and cigarette ash, and he had listened to her, and that part she left out.

Then the interrogation. Embraced 1926. Bonded to the Vienna Council inside a week of waking. Contacted in New York by men who didn’t identify themselves and who turned out later to be Sabbat, ‘26 or ‘27, he was never sure. They had a process, a ritual, partial, something they’d plainly got hold of rather than invented. Four years of sessions, painful and disorienting, and he never once understood what was being done to him. By 1930 the bond was gone. He faked a death that made the papers and lived sixty free years on the far side of it.

“He said the Sabbat had strings in him he hadn’t found yet,” Sable said. “He didn’t know what they wanted from him long-term. He only knew the bond was gone and he’d rather owe them than owe Vienna. The Tremere in my coterie staked him and handed him to your people in Chicago. Nicolai’s jurisdiction. He’s in chantry custody now, whatever’s left of him.” A second. “Four years of it and he still couldn’t tell you the mechanism. You’re already past him. You know what you’re looking at. He never did.”

Carna had picked a pen up off the desk and was turning it over her knuckles, eyes on the carpet, somewhere in 1927 walking around a problem.

“A partial ritual,” she said. “They had a piece of it and not the whole. Four years because they were brute-forcing something that should take weeks if you understand the substrate.” The pen stopped. “Your Tremere. The one who staked him. Does he know you’re here?”

“Four people know. Me, the man in the car, Erichtho, and now you. My Tremere is in Chicago and he’ll stay there.” Sable put both hands flat on the chair arms. “Now. If she stays here, what happens to her?”

“She stays here. Not this room. I keep a place at Mount Mary, the university out on the west side. Private. Warded. No Kindred traffic at all. Victor doesn’t know it exists and Mortius wouldn’t care if he did.” Carna set the pen down. “The procedure runs in sessions. Weekly, possibly twice weekly. Each one strips a layer off the bond and lets whatever’s underneath come back up and try to hold the space. The first weeks are the worst. She’ll feel like she’s dying, and she’ll want to go back to him, and that wanting is the bond defending itself and not her. She needs somebody near her who can tell the difference.”

She said it as an inventory, and said the rest the same way.

“I’m not her jailer. I’m not her sire, I’m not her lover. She’s a research subject in my care. When the bond is severed she leaves, and where she goes is her business and not mine.”

Allicia’s hands were folded on the clutch. She hadn’t looked away from Carna once.

“I need to be honest with you, because you were honest with me. I have never done this before.”

Allicia’s head came up.

“I have the framework and the theory. I understand the bond at a level nobody in my Clan has bothered to reach, because nobody in my Clan has wanted to.” Something went through the dark red under the violet and banked again. “But I have never severed a bond this old on a living subject. The process will require experiment. Readings I haven’t taken. Blood work that may simply fail. She may get worse before she gets better. She may decide she’d rather go back to him, and if that happens in the middle of it, I won’t know whether I’m listening to the bond defend itself or to a free woman making a choice. That distinction is the hardest part of this and I don’t have an answer for it yet.”

The laptop scrolled. Down on Kilbourn a truck went through the intersection with its empty bed banging.

“What I need from you is time, and visits. She needs someone who isn’t me and isn’t him. Someone who knew her before I opened her up.” She came up off the desk. “Two weeks. Come back then. I’ll have the readings and I’ll know what we’re actually dealing with.”

Sable crossed the room and went down on her knees in front of the bed, between Allicia’s knees, eyes level. Took both her hands. Cold and dry, the nails cut short — another thing a woman does when she has decided to leave a house where her nails were somebody’s hobby.

“Two weeks. I’ll be back.”

Allicia’s thumbs started moving over Sable’s knuckles. Small circles. She wasn’t aware she was doing it. She was taking a rubbing of a hand she was about to be without for fourteen days.

Sable leaned in and put her forehead against Allicia’s. Cold skin on cold skin, no breath between them to warm the inch of air, no pulse in the room but the ice machine down the hall. Two dead women holding onto each other in a hotel suite in Wisconsin while a third watched from the window, her reflection doubled in the glass over twenty stories of parking structure and lake dark.

“I know,” Allicia said.

First words since the car. Fifty-two years in a house with a piano in it, and the first thing she ever said to Sable Price that wasn’t logistics was two syllables with her forehead against another woman’s.

Sable pulled back and stood. She did not look at Carna.

“Two weeks.”

She left.

The back seat was empty and Darius didn’t ask a question for twenty minutes, which was the nearest thing to grace available in a Cutlass on I-94 at one in the morning.

“How long?”

“Two weeks. Then I go back.”

They crossed into Illinois at 1:40. Kenosha, Zion, Waukegan, the refinery flare out over the water burning its steady orange pinhole in the black. She thought about the woman behind the tortilla plant and whether the ambulance had come. She thought about the flare going up in the dark house. She thought about how easy everything after it had been, the window and the sill and the frozen grass, the whole extraction running clean as a bank job, as though the night had charged the full price up front and taken it out of a stranger who could not pay.

They made Kaspar & Sons around three. Dawn at 6:24.

The back seat smelled like Allicia’s coat for a week.