The Mirror — Friday, 12 January 1990, 10:00 PM

The Torch / Fifth Avenue / Modius’s Mansion / The Oasis, 75th Street Gary, Indiana / Chicago, Illinois

The Torch smelled like Friday even on a Monday. Spilled bourbon soaking into wood grain, cigarette tar layered so deep in the ceiling tiles it had become architecture, and underneath it the warm animal funk of human beings drinking because the alternative was thinking, which in Gary, Indiana, in January, was not an activity that led anywhere good.

Sable took her seat at the bar the way she always took it. Three stools from occupied. Back straight, shoulders down, chin at the angle that said I’m not looking for company in a voice that made every man in the room want to provide it. She ordered a whiskey sour she’d never taste and set it on the bar and waited.

Victor brought the drink without comment. He’d learned her rhythms the way she’d learned his. The bartender and the predator, coexisting in the same ecosystem, each pretending the other was something simpler than what they were.

The man noticed her within five minutes. Forties, Carhartt jacket with the sleeves rolled to show forearms that had been doing real work for twenty years. He was on his third Budweiser and sitting with the particular stillness of a man who had driven to a bar alone on a Monday night because his apartment was worse. She caught his reflection in the mirror behind the bottles. He looked twice. The third time she let their eyes meet and held it for exactly long enough before turning back to her drink.

She ordered a second whiskey sour. Set it down slow. The message was simple and she’d been sending it since she was sixteen years old at The Oasis on 75th Street, back when sending it was survival and receiving it was a transaction she controlled down to the penny.

He came over. “Mind if I sit?”

She hesitated. Let him see the hesitation. Let him believe he was watching her decide, when the decision had been made before she walked through the door. She nodded toward the empty stool and he sat down with the relief of a man who’d been chosen, which was the furthest thing from what had happened.

His name was Danny. Milwaukee originally, moved here for the mills fourteen years ago. Roofing now. Ex-wife got the house. He talked and Sable listened and the listening was the oldest tool in the kit, older than the face, older than the body, older than any of it. You listen to a man the way no one has listened to him in months and he will follow you anywhere. Kiki taught her that at fifteen. The Embrace hadn’t improved on the lesson, only on the duration of its usefulness.

“You’re not from Gary originally, are you?” she said. “You don’t have that dead-city look yet.”

He stopped talking. Something moved behind his eyes, the small shock of being perceived by a beautiful woman in a bar in a city where nobody perceived anything except the weight of their own bad luck.

“Milwaukee,” he said. “Fourteen years ago.”

“And you’re still waiting for it to start.”

He nodded slowly. His hand was on the bar. She didn’t touch it.

“Let’s get some air,” she said. “The back door?”

The alley behind The Torch. Brick wall, grease smell, a single yellow bulb painting everything the color of old newspaper. Danny’s back against the wall, his breathing fast and shallow, his pulse visible in the vein on his neck. He thought this was going somewhere sexual. She let him think it. His hands were at his sides and his eyes were half-closed and when she put her mouth on his throat he made a sound that wasn’t pain and wasn’t pleasure, just surrender, the exhale of a man letting go of something he’d been holding too tight for too long.

Seven points. She took all of it, everything the night would give her, and felt the hunger die the way a fire dies when you pour water on it, all at once, the relief so total it was almost grief. Her vision sharpened. The cold retreated. For the first time in four days she felt like she was living inside her own skin instead of haunting it.

She stopped. Left him breathing against the brick with his collar dark and his face slack. He’d wake up in an hour wondering what happened, and he’d go home and sleep and tomorrow the puncture marks would be something he explained to himself in a way that made sense, because that was what people did with the things that didn’t make sense: they built a story around the wound and lived inside it.

Sable slipped through the service gate and walked to the Buick without looking back. Three blocks from The Torch she realized she was smiling, and the smile felt wrong on her face, like wearing someone else’s expression, so she stopped.

The studio was dark. She took the alley stairs two at a time, key in the lock, the door swinging open into the smell of dust and old wood and absence. Her eyes adjusted. The barre. The mirror. The pointe shoes hanging by their ribbons.

The note was on the floor just inside the door. Cream-colored paper, folded once, placed where she’d step on it if she wasn’t looking. She was always looking.

The handwriting was elegant. Toreador precision, every letter a small performance.

The studio was mine. Now it’s yours. I’d like to know why.

Midnight tomorrow. The Oasis. Ask for the back room.

—A

Sable read it twice. Folded it along its original crease and put it in her coat pocket and stood in the middle of the floor with the mirror showing nothing and the photograph of Allicia watching from the back wall.

Four days of silence. Then this. Not hostile, not warm. Probing. The handwriting of a woman who had practiced patience for fifty years and was choosing, now, to break it.

The Oasis. Sable’s club. Her old life. The place where Big Six used to sit in the front row with his hands on his knees and watch her dance with the flat attention of a man selecting livestock.

Allicia couldn’t know that. Nobody in Gary knew where Sable Price came from or what she’d been before the Embrace turned her into something with a clan name and a patron. Allicia had picked a South Side club the way you’d pick any neutral ground. Coincidence. The universe arranging its furniture without consulting anyone who had to sit in it.

Miller Beach. The mansion. White columns in the dark, the lawn dead with winter, the lake wind coming off Michigan in long flat gusts that pressed her coat against her body. She rang and the ghoul appeared and she walked past him before he could finish his sentence because she’d learned that momentum worked better than permission in this house.

Modius was in the drawing room. Fire lit tonight. He was standing by the piano with one hand on the closed lid, dressed in charcoal and silk, and when he saw her his expression shifted into something she recognized from The Oasis, from every VIP lounge she’d ever worked: the satisfaction of a man whose investment is performing.

“Twice in four days. I’m flattered.”

She dropped her shoulders. Not the kneeling, not the slip, not the full performance. Something calibrated to look like worry. “My Prince, Allicia left a note at the studio. She wants to meet.” A pause. Let the weight settle. “I don’t want to cause problems between you and her. She was there first. That studio was hers. If my being there is making things difficult, I’d rather know now.”

The words were positioned. The concern was real but the framing was strategic, designed to make him reassure her, which would force him to show his hand on Allicia. She could feel the performance wavering at the edges, the scaffolding just visible enough that a man with centuries of practice could see it if he looked.

He looked. For two seconds he turned the words over behind his eyes and she could feel him weighing the seams. Then the vanity caught. The idea that his new ward worried about his household, cared about his comfort, came to him first before acting. The flattery landed where it always landed with Modius, in the part of him that needed to believe he was loved rather than obeyed.

“Allicia is settled,” he said. He moved to the piano. One finger along the closed lid. “She has her role. She has her comforts. What she does not have is the right to interrogate my decisions.”

He looked back at Sable.

“Go to the meeting. Hear what she has to say. Then come tell me.”

The finger left the piano lid. He turned to the fireplace. The conversation was over. She’d come for guidance and gotten an assignment. She was his spy now, aimed at the woman whose pointe shoes still hung from the barre in the room he’d given away.

“You did well to come to me first,” he said. To the mantel. Not to her.

The ghoul appeared in the hallway.

Seventy-fifth Street. 1:15 in the morning. Sable parked the Buick across the street from The Oasis with the engine running and the headlights off and looked at the building where she used to take her clothes off for money.

The sign hadn’t changed. THE OASIS in pink neon, the S flickering. Three cars in the lot. A bouncer she didn’t recognize on a stool by the front door, reading a newspaper under the awning light. The bass line of whatever the DJ was playing vibrated through the brick and into the asphalt and up through the Buick’s chassis into her hands on the steering wheel.

Auspex opened without her asking. The senses widened and the building gave up its secrets. Two exits besides the front: the service door on the east side where the dancers smoked, and the fire exit in the back. The fire exit had a new padlock and chain on the outside. One way out the back now, through the service door. The back room where Allicia wanted to meet was the VIP lounge, no windows, one door, velvet booths that smelled like perfume and sweat and cash. She’d done private dances in that room for men who thought they were paying for intimacy when they were paying for proximity, and the difference between those two things was the width of Sable’s entire career.

Four heartbeats inside the building. No Kindred. No dead blood.

Then she saw the Lincoln.

Black Town Car, tinted windows, parked nose-out by the service door. Engine cold. Nobody inside. Illinois plates. Too clean for this block, too deliberate in its positioning, backed in for a fast exit the way a man parks when leaving in a hurry is part of his operational vocabulary.

She knew that car. She knew it the way her body knew the Robert Taylor stairwells, the way her hands knew the feel of cash folded lengthwise, the way her nervous system knew the atmospheric pressure of Marcus Tillman walking into a room. Big Six. His Lincoln, or one just like it. Parked at The Oasis the way it used to be parked at The Oasis, because some men don’t change their patterns and some patterns don’t release their prey.

One of those four heartbeats was his.

Sable sat in the Buick with the heater pushing air against legs that couldn’t feel warmth anymore and thought about a night two years ago when she was alive and working the VIP and Big Six sat in the front booth for four hours without ordering a drink, without speaking, without taking his eyes off her, and when she left through the service door at 3 AM his Lincoln was parked in the alley and his window was down and he said, “You need a ride home, Sable?” and the way he said her name made it sound like something he’d already written on a deed.

She was faster now. Stronger. She had teeth that could open his throat and a discipline that could make him worship her until she told him to stop. But her hands were shaking on the steering wheel, and the shaking had nothing to do with what she was and everything to do with what she had been, and the distance between those two things was not as wide as she wanted it to be.

Tomorrow night she had to walk into that building and sit in the back room with Allicia and have a conversation about Modius while Big Six sat somewhere on the other side of the wall, watching the new girls with the same flat patience he’d watched her, and he wouldn’t know she was there, and she wouldn’t be able to stop knowing he was.

She pulled away from the curb without headlights. Two blocks before she turned them on. Old habit. The highway was empty. The lake was black.

Fifth Avenue. 2:15 AM.

The studio was cold. The radiator took twenty minutes to warm. She sat against the wall beneath Allicia’s photograph and thought about tomorrow and didn’t come to any conclusions because the conclusions required information she didn’t have yet. What Allicia wanted. Whether Big Six came to The Oasis every night or just some nights. Whether the back room was safe enough to have a conversation that mattered.

She’d go early. Before Big Six arrived, if he came at all. Get into the back room first. Control the space. And she’d bring something, though she wasn’t sure what yet. A knife. A plan. Williams, if she could reach him.

Dawn pressed against the boarded windows. She could feel it in her feet first, then her spine, then the weight behind her eyes. The sun pushing everything dead back underground.

She lay on the hardwood floor. The mirror was dark. The pointe shoes turned slowly on their ribbons in a draft she couldn’t trace. Allicia’s photograph watched from the wall, the black-and-white woman frozen at the barre in a room that used to be hers, in front of a mirror that used to show her reflection, and Sable wondered if this was what it looked like from the inside: the slow replacement, the new model moving into the old model’s space, inheriting her furniture and her patron and her silence, and whether Allicia had lain on this same floor years ago and looked at this same ceiling and thought I am not going to become the woman who came before me, and whether that thought had worked, and whether any thought worked against the machinery of a prince who collected women the way other men collected paintings, replacing each one when the colors faded.

She closed her eyes. The floor was hard. The room was cold. Somewhere on 75th Street, a man in a black Lincoln was driving home from a strip club with no idea that the girl he lost was still alive, or something like alive, and that she was coming back to his building tomorrow night, and that she was afraid of him in a way that had nothing to do with what he could do to her and everything to do with what he reminded her she used to be.