THE LAST WATCH

“No mystery story ever manages without words on the walls or the mirror,” said Olga. “Although, the writing ought to be in blood, of course…”

“This toothpaste suits the purpose too,” I replied. “Red, blue, and white. The traditional colors of the Inquisition are gray and blue.”

“I know,” Olga said thoughtfully. “Do you think it was deliberate? Vampire, Inquisitor, Healer?”

“I can’t see the line between deliberate intention and coincidence,” I admitted.

I walked along the short corridor and glanced into the sitting room. The light worked there.

“It’s very nice,” said Olga. “The house is so run-down, but they did a nice repair job in here.”

“Gennady’s a builder by profession,” I explained. “He did everything at home himself, and he helped me out once…Well, I didn’t know who he was then. He was very well thought of at work.”

“Of course he was, as a nondrinker,” Olga agreed, and walked into the bedroom.

“He’s a perfectionist too,” I said, continuing to praise Gennady as if we hadn’t come here to lay the vampire to rest, as if I was recommending him to Olga to refurbish her apartment.

I heard a muffled sound behind me and turned around.

Olga was being sick. She was slumped against the doorpost, with her face turned away from the bedroom, and puking straight onto the wall. Then she looked up at me, wiped her mouth with her hand, and said, “A perfectionist…Yes, so I just saw.”

I definitely didn’t want to see what Olga had taken such a violent dislike to. But I walked over to the door of the bedroom anyway, on legs that had turned to rubber in advance.

“Wait, I’ll get out of the way,” Olga muttered, moving aside for me.

I glanced into the bedroom. It took me several seconds to make sense of what I saw.

Olga needn’t have bothered to move. I didn’t even have time to turn around, I just puked up my lunch straight into the bedroom, through the doorway. If shaking hands through a doorway is bad luck, then what about puking through one?

GESAR WAS STANDING AT THE WINDOW, WATCHING THE CITY DECK itself out in its evening lights. He was standing there silently, hands clasped behind his back, shuffling his fingers as if he were weaving some kind of cunning spell.

Olga and I didn’t say anything either. Anyone might have thought that it was all our fault…

Garik came in and lingered just inside the door.

“Well?” Gesar asked without turning around.

“Fifty-two,” Garik said.

“What do the specialists say?”

“They’ve examined three. They all have the same injuries. The throat has been bitten and the blood has been drunk. Boris Ignatievich, can we carry on with this somewhere else? The stench is so terrible that the spells can’t handle it… And it’s all around the house already…as if a sewer had burst…”

“Have you called a truck?”

“A van.”

“All right, take them away,” said Gesar. “To some waste ground, well away from the city. Let them be inspected there.”

“And then?”

“And then…,” Gesar said pensively. “Then bury them.”

“Are we not going to send them back to their families?”

Gesar thought it over. Then suddenly he turned to me. “Anton, what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “Disappeared without a trace or murdered…I don’t know which is better for the families.”

“Bury them,” Gesar ordered. “When the time comes, we’ll think about it. Perhaps we’ll start quietly exhuming them and sending them back to their families. Invent a story for each one. Do they all have documents?”

“Yes. They were lying in a separate pile. All neat and tidy, the work of a perfectionist.”

Yes, he had always been neat and tidy. He used to lay down plastic sheeting when he drilled holes in the wall and carefully cleaned the floor after himself.

“How could we have failed to notice him?” Gesar asked in a voice filled with pain. “How did we botch it? A vampire killed more than fifty people right under our very noses!”

“Well, none of them are Moscow locals,” Garik said. “They’re from Tajikistan, Moldova, Ukraine…” He sighed. “Working men who came to Moscow looking for a job. Not registered in Moscow, of course. They lived here illegally. They have places along the main roads where they stand for a day or two, waiting to be hired. And he’s a builder, right? He knew everyone and they knew him. He just drove up and said he needed five men for a job. And he chose them himself, too, the bastard. Then he drove them away. And a week later he came back for some more…”

“Are people really still so sloppy?” Gesar asked. “Even now? Fifty men died, and nobody missed them?”

“Nobody,” Garik said with a sigh. “That dead piece of filth…he probably didn’t kill them all straightaway… He killed one, and the others waited for their turn-for a day, two, three. In this room. And he put the ones he’d drunk in two garbage bags so they wouldn’t stink, and stacked them in the corner. The radiators on that side are even switched off. He must have started in the winter…”

“I really feel like killing someone,” Gesar spat through his teeth. “Preferably a vampire. But any Dark One would do.”

“Then try me,” said Zabulon, casually moving Garik aside as he entered the Saushkin family’s sitting room. He yawned and sat down on the divan.

“Don’t provoke me,” Gesar said quietly. “I might just take it as an official challenge to a duel.”

A deadly silence fell in the apartment. Zabulon screwed up his eyes and braced himself. As usual, he was wearing a suit, but without a tie. And for some reason I got the impression that he had chosen the black suit and white shirt deliberately, as a sign of mourning.

Olga and I waited, watching the standoff between these two Others who were responsible for what happened on a sixth of the world’s land surface.

“Gesar, it was a figure of speech,” Zabulon said in a conciliatory tone of voice. He leaned back on the divan. “You don’t think I was aware of this…excess, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Gesar snapped. But from his voice it was clear that he knew perfectly well that Zabulon had nothing to do with this business.

“Well, let me tell you,” Zabulon said just as peaceably, “that I am every bit as outraged as you are, or perhaps even more so. And the entire community of Moscow vampires is outraged and demands the execution of this criminal.”

Gesar snorted.

And Zabulon finally couldn’t resist making a jibe. “You know, they don’t like the idea of their food base being undermined…”

“I’ll give them a food base,” Gesar snapped in a low, grave voice. “I’ll keep a lid on the preserved blood for five years.”

“Do you think the Inquisition will support you?” Zabulon asked.

“I think so,” said Gesar, finally turning around and looking him in the eye. “I think so. And you will support my request.”

Zabulon lost the game of stare-me-down. The Dark One sighed, turned away, looked at me, and shrugged, as if to say, What am I to do with him, eh? He took out a long, frivolous pink cigarette and lit it. Then he said, “They’ve gone completely wild…”

“Then you make sure they don’t go wild.”

“Their children can’t grow up without this, you know that. Without fresh blood they never reach sexual maturity.”

Naturally, Zabulon was not in the least concerned for the fate of vampire children. He just wanted to make fun of Gesar. As far as that was at all possible.

“Children? We’ll allow the children fresh blood,” Gesar said after thinking for a moment. “We wouldn’t want thirty…er…Anton?”

“Thirty-two,” I told him, remembering the exact number.

“We wouldn’t want thirty-two bloodsucking teenagers. Fresh blood. But donor blood! We are suspending the issue of licenses for five years.”