The next evening Jules stood hesitantly before the front door of Maureen’s French Quarter town house, fidgeting as nervously as a boy about to pick up his prom date. For the first time in years, he found himself wishing he could see his reflection in a mirror. He spat in his palms and slicked down his unruly hair as best he could. Then he brushed the last few flecks of dirt from his threadbare sport coat. It would have to do. Finally, he lifted the big brass pineapple-shaped knocker and let it crash against the door’s cracked red paint.
A few moments later, he heard a slow, heavy tread approaching the door. After a few seconds of queasy silence, three balky dead bolts clicked, and the door opened.
Maureen’s nose twitched violently. She made no effort to disguise her revulsion. “Oh. My. Gawd.”
“Hi, baby.” Jules smiled weakly. “It’s good to see you.”
Maureen stepped back quickly from the doorway. She pointed curtly in the direction of the bathroom. “Shower. Now.”
“Don’t I even get a ‘hello’?”
“Scrape that toxic waste off your hide and I’ll consider it. Bathroom’s through there. Drop all your things through the big chute in the hallway. And I meaneverything.”
Jules stepped inside. He briefly considered trying for a hug, but the fact that she was eyeing him as though he were a gigantic cockroach changed his mind. He walked down the hallway until he came to the chute and began peeling off his clothes. He dropped his coat on the polished cedar floor; a cloud of gray dust swirled around his ankles. His shirt clung to him like a massive strip of cellophane wrap. He opened the chute, which was big enough to stuff a body through, and peered inside before dropping in his wadded-up shirt, pants, and socks. A wave of heat hit his face from the darkness below.
“Hey, baby, where does this thing lead to? The laundry?”
“No. The incinerator.” She picked up his coat with a pair of fireplace tongs. “Reach in and take out your wallet,” she commanded. Jules obediently followed orders. Then she dropped the coat through the opening.
“Hey! That’s my best sport coat!”
“Not anymore,” she said, prodding him toward the bathroom with her tongs.
After half an hour of scrubbing himself beneath a scalding, high-pressure cascade, Jules began to feel vaguely human again. Every few minutes Maureen’s pudgy hand would appear through the shower curtain, handing him a series of astringent soaps and shampoos to use. Finally, she reached in and turned off the hot water, signaling that he was allowed to come out.
After he toweled himself off, she handed him a fluffy pink robe through the door. He was surprised by how well it fit. He searched through her drawers until he found a razor (a lady’s razor, but it would have to do), then felt his way through an uneven shave. Failing to find any aftershave, he wet down his hands with some of Maureen’s perfume and patted it onto his semismooth, but burning, cheeks and neck.
He found Maureen waiting for him in the kitchen, pouring the contents of several plastic bowls into a tall blender. “Your friend the cabdriver was worried sick about you,” she said, scraping what looked like raw eggs into the blender with a wooden spoon.
“Erato? He was worried about me?”
“Yeah, Erato, that’s the one. He came looking for me at the club the night after your house burned down. He thought I might know where you’d disappeared to.” She flicked on the blender for twenty seconds, then poured the contents into a large glass and handed it to him. “Here. Drink up. I’ll bet you’re hungry.”
Jules eyed the reddish mixture uncertainly. “What’s in this?”
“Egg whites, Italian stewed tomatoes, okra, mirlitons, V8 juice, and a little Tabasco sauce. Oh, and blood, of course.”
Jules winced slightly and set the glass on a table. “Sounds to me like a surefire recipe for the runs. Uh, thanks for goin‘ to all that trouble for me, but can’t I just have some blood by itself?”
Maureen sank her fists aggressively into her billowy hips and stared Jules down. “Jules Duchon, you’re going to drink that mixture and you’re going to like it.”
“But, Mo, aside from coffee, I ain’t been able to tolerate normal food in years-”
“Well, consider this a start, mister! You need to lose weight and get yourself healthy!Especially now! What, you think you can just waltz back into town and go back to all your old bad habits like nothing’s happened? You might as well just waddle down the middle of Martin Luther King Boulevard with a great big target painted on your chest. A sign that says,KILL ME NOW-I’M TOO FAT ANDstupidTO TAKE CARE OF MYSELF. Sure! Let’s go visit this Malice X of yours right now and save him the trouble of looking for you.”
“Aww, Mo-”
She slapped his hands away, then knelt down and feigned breaking a leg off one of her kitchen chairs. “Better yet, I’ll just sharpen up a wooden stake for you-right here, tonight-and you can plunge it through your heart yourself. Wouldn’t that be faster and easier?” She yanked more strenuously, and the leg began to crack. “Huh? Wouldn’t it?”
He leaned down and pulled her hands away from the chair, as gently as he could. “C’mon, stop it. Just calm down, huh? Look-I’ll drink your concoction, okay? Here. Watch me.” He lifted the glass to his lips and downed its contents in four mighty gulps, forcibly suppressing both his gag reflex and a series of shudders.
Maureen appeared at least partially mollified by his efforts. “Good,” she said, taking the glass from him and rinsing it in the sink. “My house, my rules. The one hundred percent blood I keep in the fridge is strictly off-limits to you. Understand? If I come home some evening to find that you’ve been sneaking any, you’ll be out on the street again before you’ve even had time to belch. You clear on that?”
“Like glass, baby.”
“Yeah, you’d better be.” She reached over and smoothed the wrinkles from the shoulders of his robe, then brushed a stray thread from his cheek with a surprisingly gentle flick of her fingertips. “Heh. You actually look pretty good in that robe of mine. But I guess we’d better get you some new clothes of your own.”
Jules allowed himself to smile, even as he fought to ignore the small-scale tropical disturbance in the pit of his stomach. “Yeah, I guess we better, seein‘ as how you just burned up the last set of clothes I had to my name.”
They drove up Canal Street to Krauss’s. The grand old department store at the corner of Canal and Basin, just outside the French Quarter, was in the final months of its “Going Out of Business” sale. Jules and Maureen had both shopped there often over the years, due to the store’s tradition of late closing times and its well-stocked Big-and-Tall (Men’s) and Youthful Stouts (Women’s) Clothing Departments.
Jules parked his Lincoln behind the store, within spitting distance of the vaguely menacing apartment blocks of the Lafitte Housing Project. Slamming his creaking door shut, he couldn’t help but notice how much at home his car looked against the backdrop of boarded-up windows and exposed, broken pipes. A gust of wind blew through the parking lot, and Jules pulled his reluctantly borrowed wig lower around his ears to keep it from blowing away. The edges of his muumuu were lifted up around his trunklike thighs so that for a second he looked like a Daliesque Marilyn Monroe standing over the subway grating inThe Seven Year Itch.
Maureen noticed Jules’s pained expression. “Oh, like I told you, there’s no need to get all embarrassed. This dump’s going out of business any day now, so it’s not like you’ll ever be seeing any of these salesclerks again, anyway.” She grabbed his hand and hustled him toward the rear entrance. “And besides, ‘Julia’ my dear, with you in that getup, there’s much less chance of some unfriendly bat-boy noticing that you’ve come back into town.”
Jules grabbed back his hand. “Whoa whoawhoa! This is a one-time-only deal! You can’t expect me to trick myself up like some goddamn Bourbon Street transvestite every time I leave your house-”
“Oh, I wouldn’tdream of demanding that of you, Jules. There’s too much danger that you might take to it and begin raiding my wardrobe. No, we’ll only take these more drastic precautions until I can drill it into that thick skull of yours that you need to call in some help. And youknow who I mean.”
Jules was about to demand some further explanation of Maureen’s cryptic remark when they were swept into the human maelstrom waiting inside. The department store’s shelves and racks looked like they’d been ransacked by looters. Or maybe locusts. Dozens of shoppers scanned price tags for red slashes and enticing markdowns. Jules stared at the elderly cashiers furiously pecking away at their equally elderly mechanical cash registers, all relics of the Swing Era, and remembered when his mother had brought him to shop and gawk here on Krauss’s opening day, more than a hundred years ago. Looking around him, he was surprised by how little the store had changed. New Orleans had managed to hold on to its musty, familiar, comforting haunts much longer than most other towns, he told himself. Even so, this would soon all be gone: the horseshoe lunch counter on the second floor, next to the Shoe Department; the odd little fourth-floor section that juxtaposed candles, hand-dipped chocolates, and nautical knickknacks; and the clerks who knew their favorite customers better than they knew their own families.
Maureen gave his arm a powerful yank. “Comeon, Jules! You lollygag much longer and they’ll toss you out with the old mannequins. I’m due at the club in a little over an hour, and so long as I’m your meal ticket, you’d better not make me late for a shift!”
The Big-and-Tall section was tucked away in a corner of the Men’s Clothing Department on the first floor. Jules noted with relief that its racks were a bit less depleted than racks elsewhere in the store.
A frazzled-looking salesman, his wrinkled tie drooping at half-mast, approached them. “Can I help you ladies with anything? Shopping for a husky husband or son? We’re runnin‘ great closeout specials on safari suits.”
Jules cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “we’re shoppin‘ forme.”
The salesman, who’d obviously served a wide range of customers in his years on the floor, barely cocked an eyebrow.
Jules ended up walking to the cash register with three safari suits (two in mauve, one in lavender-the more popular colors were long gone), two pairs of drawstring pants, a black-and-gold checkered suit coat, a parcel of lime-green and melon-colored Oxford shirts, and a red velvet vest that even Maureen had to admit looked rather stylish on him.
But his best purchase by far was the wonderful trench coat that the clerk dug out of back stock for him. It was a near-exact copy of the famous garment worn by Humphrey Bogart inCasablanca. Even better, it had the intriguingly exotic pedigree of having been manufactured in the People’s Republic of Poland.
While they were standing in line, Jules nudged Maureen with an overstuffed shopping bag. “Say, what’d you mean earlier about me needin‘ to call in help?”
She glanced back at him, her eyes flashing with irritation. “I meant just that. It’s pretty clear. You need help.” She glanced nervously at the mostly black crowd, then pulled Jules out of line to an isolated corner. “Thestaying alive kind of help. You can’t keep wandering around the city by yourself like some big goofy clown looking for the rest of the circus. You need someone who’s good at figuring things out. You’re not exactly a rocket scientist, you know.”
Jules felt himself redden all over. Maureen, for reasons known only to her impenetrable female mind, had just launched a direct assault on his self-esteem. “What? Are you sayin‘ I’m notsmart enough to solve my own problem? Hey, maybe I wasn’t head of the class in arithmetic, but when it comes to good ol’ common sense, I gotplenty, sweetheart. Look, I got through World War Deuce, didn’t I? The navy wouldn’t have hadhalf as many landing craft on D-Day if it weren’t for me and Doodlebug puttin‘ the bite on them saboteurs-”
Maureen’s eyes flashed with triumph.“Exactly!”
“Huh? ‘Exactly’ what?”
“You just said it yourself. You didn’t fight those saboteurs all by yourself. It was you and Doodlebug.”
“Well, yeah, sure. But he was my sidekick. He didn’t reallycount. I kept him around for laughs. I mean, his biggest job was when he used to run to the corner while we were on stakeout and get me coffee.”
“Don’t you fool yourself. I was around back then, too. That ‘kid’ was thereal brains behind the Hooded Terror. You would’ve tripped over your own cape without Doodlebug around. You need him now more than ever.”
Jules wasn’t smiling. “Yeah? Well, read my lips, Miss Know-It-All.No Doodlebug. No. Doodle. Bug. Ain’t gonna happen.”
Maureen’s voice softened, and she batted her eyes at Jules in a way that might almost be construed as coquettish. “Oh, I don’t see why you have to be sostubborn. After all, you and Doodlebug were such good partners during the war. And besides, I’m sure the two of you would work together even better now,” she said, playfully running her fingertips along the seam of Jules’s muumuu, “now that you have evenmore in common.”
“Why, you-!”
A few minutes later, after Maureen had paid for all of Jules’s purchases with her platinum charge card, a thoroughly chastised Jules fumbled through his newly purchased pockets for his keys and opened the passenger-side door for her. “Look, Mo, I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to blow up in front of all them cashier ladies. I really,really appreciate all you’re doin‘ for me.” He waited patiently for her to latch up her seat belt, then carefully closed her door and hurried back to his own side. “Say, you wanna maybe go over to the Trolley Stop for some coffee before your shift? I’d get to show off my new duds, and I could introduce you around to some of the guys.”
Maureen sighed with exasperation; her long, heavy breath left a circle of vapor on the passenger window. “This is a perfect example of what I was talking about before. You crow about all this ‘common sense’ you supposedly have, and then your first decision is to go straight to the one place where people know to find you. The one place in the whole city Malice X iscertain to have a lookout watching for you. Do I need to spell it out any more clearly?”
“Nope.” Jules felt himself redden again as he backed out of Krauss’s parking lot onto Basin Street. Much as he hated to admit it, Maureen had a point. He couldn’t just fall back into his old life as if nothing had happened.
“Just drop me at the club,” she said. “As is, makeup’ll have to be a rush job tonight.”
Jules crossed the seedy boundary of North Rampart Street and entered the Quarter. On Iberville, two preteen boys savagely kicked a third and peeled off his expensive basketball shoes while a pair of tourists holding half-drained Hurricanes watched.
“You want my best advice, Jules? You just stay put at my place tonight. Stay put andthink; come up with a plan before you run out somewhere and get yourself killed.”
Jules was silent until he pulled up to the curb in front of Jezebel’s Joy Room. “Just one question before you go. Where am I sleepin‘ at the end of the night? You got a ’guest coffin‘ or somethin’?”
Maureen hesitated before replying. “Look, you can sleep with me for a couple of nights-just until you get a new coffin built.”
Jules smiled.“Really?”
Maureen, pointedly, did not return the smile. “Now don’t you go reading anything into this! You have exactly two nights to get yourself a new coffin built. In the meantime, as you may remember, my bed is very large-it takes up a full room, in fact-so you and I willnot be sleeping in close quarters. Think the Petries, from the oldDick Van Dyke Show. One foot on the floor, buster.”
“That’s okay with me, babe. Just as long as I got somewhere to sleep.”
“Itbetter be okay. Because that’s the way it is.” She gathered her things and opened the door, which scraped loudly on the sidewalk. And then she surprised him by leaning over and awkwardly pecking him on the cheek.
Jules waved out his window as he drove off in the direction of her Bienville Street home. But instead of putting his car in the garage, he turned onto Canal Street and headed west. Maureen was right about a lot of things. He would need to be at the top of his game to make it through even a week back in New Orleans. That meant getting as healthy as he could. No more aching knees. No more shortness of breath or incipient diabetes (or whatever the hell he was beginning to suffer from).
There was only one man who could possibly help him. Only one man who both understood Jules and maybe had the medical smarts to figure out a cure for what ailed him. The man who’d signed his paychecks and fed him the blood of the recently deceased for nearly thirty years. Jules wasn’t sure that Dr. Amos Landrieu, onetime city coroner, was still among the living; after all, he’d been near retirement age when he’d been voted out of office twenty-three years ago.
But so long as the Lincoln didn’t throw a piston on the way, Jules was determined to make this a night of reunions.
The name on the mailbox in front of the big old Greek Revival-style house on Cleveland Avenue, near the Jewish cemetery, still readAMOS LANDRIEU, M.D. The doctor’s car, an aged but well-maintained Mercedes sedan, was parked in the driveway. Jules saw a light on in an upstairs bedroom.
He hadn’t spoken with his old boss in more than fifteen years. After Dr. Landrieu’s comeback election campaign sputtered before it could even get off the ground, there hadn’t seemed much point to staying in touch. Jules regretted this now. The events of the past few weeks had taught him that you couldn’t have too many friends.
The emaciated branches of the spindly trees in the nearby Jewish cemetery rustled with a sudden gust of wind as Jules gathered his courage to ring the doctor’s doorbell. Even after nearly three decades of working side by side, Jules had never been totally sure what his boss had really thought of him. Their interactions had always been short, direct, and work-related; clinical, in both senses of the word. Dr. Landrieu was the only human being in New Orleans who knew what Jules was. He knew about the victims whose blood Jules had drained. In fact, suppressing Jules’s appetite with the blood of the dead had been the main reason the doctor had kept him on as his assistant for so many years. How would the doctor react now, seeing Jules again after so long? Would he call the police? Or toss a basin of holy water in Jules’s face?
Jules rang the doorbell. Half a minute later he heard footsteps descend the stairs inside the house. A light illuminated the foyer, and a second light flickered into dusty brilliance above Jules’s head. He sensed himself being observed through the peephole set in the middle of the oaken door.
A moment later the door slowly opened. Dr. Landrieu was in a robe, standing a little more stooped than Jules remembered, the lines and folds shadowing his eyes a bit deeper, his hair whiter and more scarce.
“Hiya, Doc,” Jules said. “Remember me?”
“Jules Duchon. How could I forget you?” The doctor’s voice was tired and weak and resigned, the sound of gravel bouncing down a rusted old tin roof. His eyes were very round and very small, like a startled sparrow’s, and a large blue vein that crossed his left eyebrow pulsed strongly. His thin fingers traced the sign of a cross on his chest.
Jules flinched, but he quickly recovered his composure. “Uh, Doc, can I come in?”
“Then the game would be all over, wouldn’t it?” Dr. Landrieu said, smiling faintly. “According to the old legends, you can’t enter my home until I invite you in. Isn’t that so? But if I remember correctly, you didn’t play by a lot of those old rules. No, a lack of invitation on my part will not suffice to save me. I always expected, Jules, that when my time on this earth was done, the Angel of Death would wear your face when he came for me. Very well. You may come in. But do we have time for a final cup of coffee before you, eh, do your business?”
Jules nervously rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Gee, Doc, you’ve got me all wrong. I’m not here to, y’know, fang you or anything. I mean, you’ve never done anything but good by me, so you’re probably the last person on earth I’d ever slake my thirst on. Well, one of the last, anyway.”
The old physician’s breathing became more regular. “Then what brings you to my door, Jules? It’s not as though you’ve been in the habit of paying me impromptu social calls over the last two decades.”
“I’ll cut to the chase, Doc. I need your help. All these years of livin‘ the New Orleans lifestyle”-he patted his bulbous stomach for emphasis-“they’ve caught up with me. My knees, my hips-practically every joint in my damn body feels like an exploding firecracker when I put any weight on it. Just crossing a street can make me winded. And to top it off, I think maybe I’m comin’ down with diabetes.”
Dr. Landrieu’s eyes brightened with sudden interest. “Diabetes? What makes you think that? What sort of symptoms have you been experiencing?”
“Well, I’m thirsty a lot more often then I used to be. Some nights, I’m thirsty all the time. And sometimes right after I, uh, feed, my heart goes all nutzo and my vision gets blurry. I been readin‘ articles about diabetes inModern Maturity, so I figure I sorta know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“I see. This is very interesting. Most interesting, indeed.” Dr. Landrieu opened his door wider and gestured for Jules to enter. “Please come in. I’d like to perform some tests. Perhaps I can help you.”
Jules’s face lit up like a sunrise. “Really? That’s great, Doc! That’s just great! Thanks!” He stepped into the foyer, then followed Dr. Landrieu into the living room, tastefully furnished with Victorian and Edwardian antiques. “Say, is that offer of a pot of coffee still good?”
“Of course. It’ll just take a moment to prepare. But why don’t you hold off on drinking any until after I’ve extracted some samples from you? We wouldn’t want any caffeine or sugar to skew the results.”
“Sounds right to me. What do we do first?”
“Come downstairs with me. I’ve maintained a modest private practice since my,ahem, retirement from public service, and my instruments are down there in my office.”
Jules clung tightly to the banister as he descended the steep stairs to the doctor’s office, wincing as each of his knees bore his full weight in turn. “Uh, Doc, not that I doubt you or anything, but will instruments that work on, y’know,normal people also work on me?”
“That’s actually quite a good question, Jules,” Dr. Landrieu replied as he reset the weights on his clinical scale to zero. “But rest assured, the entire time you were working for me, you were somewhat of a hobby of mine. I was probably the only physician in the country with an on-staff vampire available to study. Do you recall the blood samples I took from you over the years?”
“Sure. Every six months or so, you were stickin‘ me.”
“And do you remember the reason I gave you for taking all those samples?”
“Uh, yeah… it was somethin‘ about wanting to see if drinkin’ all that blood from dead people was havin‘ any effect on me over the long haul.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I told you.” He gestured for Jules to step onto the scale. “Come. Let’s get a weight on you. I’ll want to compare your present weight with the old charts I kept from thirty years ago.”
Jules didn’t move. “Uh, Doc, I don’t wanna be a party pooper or nuthin‘, but that’s a real nice scale you’ve got there, and I’ll bet it cost you a bundle-”
The doctor smiled. “Oh, you really needn’t worry. This being New Orleans, many of my patients are within fifty pounds of your weight. My scale is what you call ‘industrial strength.’ So hop onboard.”
Jules reluctantly complied, gingerly stepping onto the scale one foot at a time to make sure its springs wouldn’t bust. Once his patient was standing firmly on the scale, Dr. Landrieu began pushing the steel weights steadily to the right. Three hundred, 400, 450 pounds, and still the scale’s nose remained glued in the stratosphere.
“There we are. Four hundred and sixty-three pounds,” the doctor said. “That’s quite a gain since the last time I weighed you.”
Damn lying scale,Jules thought.I must’velost weight during those hell-nights in Baton Rouge. ‘Course, I did eat four or five sacks of dog chow…
“One of the reasons I took regular blood samples from you,” Dr. Landrieu continued, “was to determine whether your unusual diet was having any long-term effect on your health. But I had other reasons, as well.” He handed Jules a small clear plastic cup. “Please expectorate in this.”
“Huh?”
“Expectorate.Spit. ”
“Oh. Okay.”
After Jules swished and spat in the most polite way he could, his host continued. “I never mentioned this to you, because I wasn’t sure how you’d react, but at first the primary goal of my researches was to find a cure for your vampirism.”
“You’re shittin‘ me, Doc-really?”
“Oh yes, really and truly. Unfortunately, I soon found that my reach exceeded my grasp, I’m afraid. The issues involved were well beyond my limited knowledge and resources. As you might well imagine, I was quite disappointed by my failure. However, I soon consoled myself by turning my researches in another direction. I was fascinated by your apparent resistance to many of the outward signs of aging, with the exception of your considerable weight gain. I wanted to determine whether your kind of person would be susceptible to the range of diseases medical science believes are brought on by advancing years or by various ‘unhealthy lifestyle’ factors. Diseases such as diabetes.”
“So what exactly are you tellin‘ me, Doc?” Jules handed over his cupful of saliva.
“Oh, thank you. Just one more extraction left. I’ll need a bit of your blood.” Jules followed Dr. Landrieu over to a table covered with an assortment of sterile syringes, alcohol swabs, and other medical implements. “Roll up your left sleeve, would you? So many fascinating questions. Even after we were no longer working together, I continued with my research. How does insulin work within the body of a vampire? Does it serve any function at all? Will diseases of the pancreas progress in the same fashion as they do with normal human beings?”
Jules bit his lower lip as Dr. Landrieu poked the syringe through the white skin of his biceps and slowly drew back the plunger, collecting about an ounce of blood. It seemed so disturbingly unnatural for someone else to be drawing blood fromhim. “So give me the short version, huh, Doc? You able to help me or not?”
Dr. Landrieu carefully transferred the blood sample from the syringe to a test tube. “The ‘short version,’ Jules, is that if my tests indicate that you are indeed suffering from some form of adult-onset diabetes, I have on hand an experimental compound that may serve for you the same function that insulin injections do for a normal diabetes sufferer.”
“You’re sayin‘ you’ve got a cure for me? You’re a miracle worker, Doc! I knew my shit luck was bound to turn around!”
“Now hold on a minute there. I didn’t say anything about a cure. What I may have for you is atreatment. A drug that, if it’s effective, you’ll need to take every day for the rest of your, er, life. Just as many normal diabetes sufferers need to take their insulin injections every day in order to keep their blood sugar levels stable.”
“Hey, that’s good enough for me! So when will we know the results of your tests?”
“Oh, that shouldn’t take very long. Go relax up in the living room. I’ll be up in a few minutes. And then we’ll have that pot of coffee.”
Jules waited patiently upstairs, perusing the doctor’s bookshelves, which, apart from the expected medical and anatomy tomes, also held a respectable collection of nineteenth-century Persian erotica. He felt a jagged twinge in his heart when he recalled his own lost collections. After a few moments, Dr. Landrieu appeared in the doorway.
“Everything is ‘cooking,’ as they say. We should have our results shortly. Why don’t you come with me into the kitchen?”
Jules forced the memory of his recent losses from his mind. “Sure thing.”
“I don’t believe I ever told you this,” Dr. Landrieu said while pouring bottled water into his coffeemaker, “but the most crushing disappointment of my professional life was losing those last two races I ran for city coroner. Not because I was out of a job-I stood to make far better money in private practice, particularly with my connections. No, I suffered the torments of the damned because I knew that, out of office, I no longer had the opportunity to lure you away from live victims. How many lives did I save during those nearly thirty years you were in my employ? A thousand? Fifteen hundred? I was a good and conscientious public servant-with the possible exception of a kickback or two, and that was rather small beer-but I always considered my greatest service to the people of this city to be keeping you off her streets at night. Here. Here’s your coffee. I have some nondairy creamer, if you’d like.”
“Uh, thanks. No creamer, though.” Jules’s first sip of coffee tasted especially bitter. “Gee, Doc, I never knew you felt that way. If I’d a known, I dunno, maybe we could’ve worked out some kinda arrangement or something, y’know, after you weren’t in office no more…”
“I have a proposal for you.” Dr. Landrieu sat across from Jules and lanced him with a penetrating stare. “What I suggest may sound somewhat unusual, or even outlandish, but you must believe that I am absolutely serious. I have been thinking about this for a long time. You can’t know how many nights I turned on the evening news to see the police pulling a dead body from a swamp or a vacant lot, and always I wondered,Is this the work of my old friend Jules? And illogical though it might be, each time I asked myself that question, an arrow of guilt pierced my heart.”
The doctor sighed, his gaze dropping to the steam rising from his mug of coffee. His moment of self-absorption did not last long, however. “But that is neither here nor there. This is my proposal-come to Argentina with me. Now that my Eudice is gone, there is no longer anything to hold me to New Orleans. Work as my assistant again, train with me, and you will never again need to hunt.”
“What’re you talkin‘ about, Doc? Argentina? What, you got a new job as a coroner lined up down there?”
The doctor allowed himself to smile. “No, not as a coroner. A much more lucrative job than that, both for me and for you. Down in Argentina, you see, there is a national craze for cosmetic surgery. All segments of society, both rich and poor, indulge in it. Among Argentine women, body sculpting is especially popular. A procedure you might know as liposuction. There is a tremendous shortage of cosmetic surgeons in Argentina. For anyone with a medical degree and a few years of experience in virtually any specialty, acquiring a license to practice cosmetic surgery in Argentina is child’s play.”
Jules took another sip of coffee while he tried to put the pieces together. “Uh-huh. I see as how that might be good news for you. But how do I fit into all this?”
“You obviously don’t know much about the liposuction procedure.”
“Nope.”
“To put it simply, liposuction involves the insertion of a cannula, a sort of combination scalpel and vacuum cleaner, into areas of a patient’s body that harbor intractable and unsightly fat reserves. The surgeon sweeps the cannula beneath the patient’s dermis, snipping away and then suctioning out masses of fatty tissues.”
“Yeech! I mean, dieting’s bad enough, but this-”
“Don’t be so quick to pass judgment, my friend. Liposuction, as it currently stands, is a very crude procedure. Along with every ounce of fat tissue extracted, two or more ounces of subcutaneous fluids are also removed. Including”-and here Dr. Landrieu paused for effect-“blood. The resulting slurry is an extremely rich organic mixture, typically composed of nearly two-thirds plasma components. Virtually all cosmetic surgeons dispose of this slurry as medical waste. I, however”-he raised his right eyebrow pointedly-“could very well imagine other uses it might be put to.”
Jules felt his mouth begin to water, even though his mind hadn’t yet struggled through all the implications. “You mean, uh, me, eh, like, drinkin‘ it?”
Dr. Landrieu brought his hands together in a thunderclap. “Yes, Jules! Imagine dining on milk shakes and caviar for the rest of your unlimited existence! For I have little doubt that eventually, with a judicious application of bribes, we could set you up in your own practice in the hinterlands. So that after I pass on to my inevitable reward, you would not want for anything.” He reached across the table and grabbed hold of Jules’s free hand. “Now tell me, am I makingsense?”
Jules felt beads of sweat trickle down the interior seams of his new safari suit. He felt he had come to a decisive juncture in his undead existence. The bitter coffee roiled in his stomach like a boiling black gumbo. “Wait-I can’t think about it all at once. Doc, I can’t change my whole fuckin‘ life in just five minutes. You’ve gotta give me some time to think this through.”
Dr. Landrieu released his hand. “Of course. I hope my enthusiasm didn’t intimidate you. Let me go downstairs and check on your results. Then we’ll have more to talk about.”
Jules rested his forehead heavily on his hands. Argentina sounded like a paradise. But could he bear to leave New Orleans? Hadn’t his miserable five-day exile proven to him that living outside the Big Easy was like trying to survive without air?
Dr. Landrieu reentered the kitchen and sat down across from Jules. “It’s as I’d expected. You’re suffering from the beginning stages of a condition analogous to adult-onset diabetes mellitus. Fortunately for you, since we’ve caught it early, and little permanent degeneration has occurred, my experimental compound should prove very effective in staving off further symptoms.”
“Doc, I just thought of somethin‘-if this diabetes has been caused by what I’ve been eatin’ all these years, wouldn’t going down with you to Argentina and livin‘ off those ’milk shakes’ make it a whole lot worse?”
Dr. Landrieu smiled. “As your physician, I’m a step or two ahead of you. Should my compound be as efficacious as I have every right to expect it will be, your dietary worries will be at an end. You will be in the envious position of being able to eat whatever you damn well please. So tell me, what do you think of the notion of relocating down south?”
Jules paused before answering, slowly stirring his coffee with a teaspoon. “Well, Doc, I’ve gotta be honest with you… it’d be awfully hard for me to leave New Orleans.”
The doctor leaned forward across the table. “Why?”
Jules shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “It’s just… well, this old town’s a part of me, like my fingernails or the calluses on the bottoms of my feet. I never have to wonder where my pals are or where I can get me a good cup of joe. I can drive through the French Quarter and roll down my windows and hear my kinda music floatin‘ through the air, for free. I can hardly imagine evenvisitin’ some other place.”
The doctor was silent. Jules avoided meeting his gaze, instead staring into the murky depths of his stone-cold coffee. “So, uh, do I still get to try out that medicine of yours?”
Dr. Landrieu slowly stood. “Of course, Jules. I’m a physician, not a blackmailer. I have a small supply in the refrigerator. Let me get it for you.” He opened the refrigerator behind Jules and was hidden by the door as he fumbled with the contents inside. “Just give me a moment longer; I need to make sure there is enough to get you started on your regimen… Yes. We are in good shape.”
He closed the refrigerator and handed Jules a small white plastic bottle with a child-resistant cap. Sticky shreds of an old label still clung to the bottle’s sides. “Please pardon the looks of that bottle. I try to recycle as much as I can. Well. You have enough tablets there for fifteen days. Take two each night, one upon rising and one before you retire.”
“Thanks, Doc!” Jules placed the bottle in one of his trench coat’s many pockets, then took out his wallet, which Maureen had generously restocked with forty dollars of walking-around money. “What do I owe you?”
Dr. Landrieu pushed the money aside. “Nothing. I can’t ethically charge you a fee for an experimental drug. Come back in fifteen days and tell me how you feel, and then we’ll discuss payment. In the meantime, the only favor I ask of you is that you not reject the idea of accompanying me to Argentina out of hand. Promise me you’ll reconsider over the next two weeks?”
“Sure thing, Doc. It won’t hurt me none to think about it some more. So anyway, what do I need to know about this here wonder drug of yours? Is it safe to take it with coffee?”
“Certainly. There should be no adverse caffeine interactions.”
“Should I go ahead and take my first one now?”
“I don’t see why not. The sooner you begin, the sooner you’ll experience relief from your symptoms. Actually, you may experience a marked improvement in as little as a day or two.”
“Really? Hey, that’s terrific!” It took Jules a few seconds to get the bottle open; those child-resistant caps had always given him trouble. He tapped a small, round, white tablet into his palm. Jules was surprised to see that it had the letterA engraved on it. Perhaps theA stood for “Amos,” Dr. Landrieu’s first name? He popped the tablet in his mouth and downed it with the dregs of his coffee.
Dr. Landrieu picked up Jules’s empty cup and saucer and deposited them in the sink. “Well. I’m glad we’ve had this little reunion, Jules. I’ll see you again in fifteen days?”
“Sure thing. I hope these pills’re as good as you say they are.”
Dr. Landrieu led him through the living room to the entrance foyer. “Oh, I suspect you’ll be very pleasantly surprised.”
Jules drove along the edge of the Jewish cemetery until he reached Canal Street. Then he made a right turn toward the French Quarter. No doubt about it, his luck was beginning to turn. By the time he reached the garage across from Maureen’s house, he was already feeling the tinglings of a fresh surge of energy. Shuttling his packages from the Lincoln’s trunk, down the garage’s stairs, up Maureen’s front steps, down her hallway, and up more stairs to the closet she’d assigned him, he could swear that his knees already hurt less than before. His stride had more zing in it. Maybe it was just his imagination, but he felt twenty years younger and two hundred pounds lighter.
He sat for a moment on Maureen’s front stoop, pondering how he should spend the rest of his night. A Lucky Dog vendor wheeled his wiener cart along Bienville Street, and Jules waved and wished him a good evening.
“You want I should fix you a dog, pal?” the vendor asked. He looked to be in his late sixties, with a well-tanned, deeply furrowed but personable face.
“Wish I could, buddy,” Jules answered mournfully, eyeing the bin of wieners and tray of condiments with an expression just short of lust.
“I understand,” the vendor said in a consoling voice. He cocked an ear toward the tiny portable radio he carried on his cart and turned up the volume. His gentle smile faded into a grimace. “You been listening to this crap on the news? Those dopes on the North Shore want that asshole Nathan Knight to get back into politics again.”
“What’s this?”
“You’ve gotta remember Nathan Knight, right?”
“He ran for governor or somethin‘, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, and the bum got his racist ass kicked. But now this committee of ‘concerned citizens’ over there across the lake are trying to convince him to make another run for office. They’re holdin’ a big rally a couple of nights from now.” He shook his head sadly. “People like that give me the willies. I don’t know what your politics are, pal. But me, my folks brought me over from Germany when I was five years old. Just before WW Two. So people like that… well, they give me the willies, is all.”
Jules had never given Nathan Knight and his followers much thought. Or any politics, for that matter. He’d always been too concerned about where his next meal was coming from to pay any attention.
The Lucky Dog vendor switched off his radio. “Sorry I disturbed you. Have a good night.” He hefted the handles of his cart and began moving off down the street. Too late, Jules realized that the man had probably interpreted his lost-in-thought silence as disagreement. He hated the notion that the vendor had pegged him as a Knight supporter. But the man was already halfway down the block.
The scent of boiled wieners lingered in the air. Jules thought some more about what he’d just heard. A huge rally of black-hating white people on the North Shore?Hrrmmm… nowthat smelled like an opportunity. A foul-smelling opportunity, for sure; Jules didn’t relish the thought of associating with people who wouldn’t be caught dead sharing a cup of joe with Erato. But Jules had watched enough trash haulers make a good profit from stuff that stank to know it could be done. He could wash his hands of the whole lot of them after it was all over and his life had returned to normal.
Jules smiled at the ingenuity and sheer audacity of his idea. Maureen had wanted him to come up with a plan of action. Well, he just did.
If Malice X could form his own vampire army, then by golly, so could Jules Duchon.