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  SWEETER THAN WINE

  L. NEIL SMITH

  Phoenix Pick

  An Imprint of Arc Manor

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  Sweeter Than Wine copyright © 20111 by L. Neil Smith. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

  Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Rider, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  THE AUTHOR ASSERTS HIS MORAL RIGHTS

  Digital Edition

  ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-60450-484-2

  ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-483-5

  Published by Phoenix Pick

  an imprint of Arc Manor

  P. O. Box 10339

  Rockville, MD 20849-0339

  www.ArcManor.com

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  L. NEIL SMITH AT PHOENIX PICK

  WWW.ELNEIL.COM

  Tom Paine Maru

  The Venus Belt

  The Crystal Empire

  Pallas

  Ceres

  Sweeter Than Wine

  Hope (with Aaron Zelman)

  ***

  To Rylla and Jen, who got me into this.

  ***

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  Most of Sweeter Than Wine was written in November, 2009 as my participation in the zany and wonderful National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. Each year, thousands of people, mostly young, who have a story to tell and would otherwise never have gotten it told, promise each other to write 50,000 words in 30 silly and exhausting days. I’ve wanted to tell this story for nearly thirty years and now, thanks to NaNoWriMo, here it is.

  Check out http://www.nanowrimo.org/

  I’d also like to thank my friends Curt Howland and Ken Valentine for making this a better book than it would have been

  without their help.

  Very special thanks to Cathy.

  ***

  SWEETER THAN WINE

  THE TRAVELER: CHARLESTON

  “Time sweeps everything before it, and can bring with it good as well as evil, and evil as well as good.”—Niccolo Machiavelli

  The electronic alarm, set for the date as well as the time, went off. It took a long while to shake off weeks of unconsciousness that had come before it, one hour, two hours, three...the traveler never looked.

  Outside, it was nighttime, exactly as planned. At the traveler’s order, before the long sea voyage, a small hole had been bored in the face of the otherwise anonymous freighter container. A kind of lens—nothing more than a two-centimeter-thick rod of clear glass three millimeters in diameter, set in a finely threaded metal collar—had been screwed into it, absolutely inconspicuous, even to a careful observer. From the outside of the container, it would merely look like a mechanical excrescence, a bolt or something else that no one would ever pay any attention to. From inside the container, it would offer the traveler life and death evidence about what time of day it really was.

  Clocks, after all, can go wrong.

  The traveler unfastened the cot’s retaining straps—the cot itself was bolted to the floor—stood up, laid hands on a medium sized canvas shoulder bag, already neatly packed, and unlaced it from the lashing holes that had held it in place on one wall no matter how the container might be tossed about. Everything else—the cot, the sanitary facility hardly used, a small, battery-powered cooler whose precious contents the traveler now exhausted—was meant to be left behind.

  Toward the front end of the container, as quietly as possible, the traveler bent the splayed ends of a lightweight cotter pin where they passed through a thumb-thick steel shaft, extracted the pin, turned the shaft, which served as a handle lever, and heard with satisfaction the locking mechanism on the outside of the container make a thunking noise.

  Cautiously the right-hand door was swung open, admitting fresh, damp, cool air, laden with the odors of salt water, dead fish, rotted sea vegetation, and several varieties of lubricant and marine motor fuel. There were noises to go with it: splashing at the fringes of the harbor, distant bells, the horn of tugboat laboring through the darkness.

  The traveler stepped out onto the concrete surface of the dock, dazzled momentarily by the starlight, a sliver of cloud-wisped moon, the city lights of a hundred different colors across the water that reflected them. These were the lights, thought the traveler—who had never ventured to North America before—of Charleston, South Carolina.

  From the canvas bag, the traveler produced a fist-sized egg-shaped plastic object, another item made especially to order by a very highly skilled—and normally quite lavishly-compensated—artisan, now deceased.

  The traveler, who had employed this extraordinary individual, and his father and grandfather before him, on many previous occasions, was leaving Europe for the foreseeable future, and had no further use for the man. Because Interpol was all too well aware of his existence and his activities on behalf of the traveler and others, the unfortunate fellow represented a potentially dangerous loose end that must be discarded.

  The traveler removed another cotter pin, this one on a pull-ring, from the top of the device, being careful to throw them back into the container. A lever, curving from top to bottom of the device, and made from a stamped piece of sheet steel a centimeter wide, was released to fly after them. The traveler tossed the device inside the container, onto the cot, shut and locked the door from the outside, and was two hundred meters away before it went off, soundlessly, without visible flame.

  There would be no explosion. There would be no fire. Everything in the container, including the paint on its walls, ceiling, and floor, the cot and bedding, tiny cooler, contents of the portable lavatory, and every single fingerprint, would quietly smolder into a fine white ash.

  The colorful city lights twinkled across the water, beckoning to the traveler, making promises about movement, warmth, life, and easy prey.

  A few minutes later, more or less as the traveler had anticipated, a middle-aged, slightly overweight individual wearing an ill-fitting uniform, reeking with human perspiration, approached from near the junction of the dock and the shoreline proper, where seemingly endless rows of big metal warehouses disappeared into the distance, right and left.

  There were probably security cameras hanging everywhere—it was getting to be like that as the ridiculous human species grew more and more afraid of itself, when there were better (or far worse) things to be afraid of in this world—but at the moment, that couldn’t be helped.

  “Excuse me, U.S. Customs. This is a restricted impounding and quarantine area,” the man said, shining a long, obscenely brilliant flashlight into the traveler’s face. “You need to show me some I.D., please.”

  The traveler, who had first learned the English language fifteen centuries earlier, being forced to relearn it several times as it had evolved into what the man was speaking now, nodded, swiftly stepping closer to the guard, seizing him one-handedly by the throat, dragging him into the black shadows of a small building on the dock. The guard tried making noises, then groped desperately for the
revolver at his belt.

  Whimsically, the traveler let him do it, almost enjoying the icy hot sensation as the trigger was pulled over and over again, thrusting six rapidly-expanding lead-cored, cupronickel-jacketed projectiles into the traveler’s abdomen. As the half dozen hollowpoints blossomed within the traveler like lethal flowers, the bodies of the traveler and the guard muffled the noise. When it was over, the traveler pulled the guard closer, exposing outsized upper canine incisors the victim was allowed to see before they sank into his neck at the carotid artery.

  He died making gurgling noises as the traveler drank him dry. The bullet wounds had already closed and begun healing from the inside. The bullets would migrate out of the wounds within the next couple of days.

  The scars would vanish in a week.

  The traveler left the body in a nearby dumpster, jumped a 12-foot chainlink fence topped with a coil of razor wire, and headed for the city.

  Where lights were bright and there were a hundred thousand other throats.

  Waiting.

  1: BORN EVERY MINUTE

  “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes

  it for happiness.”—Mary Wollstonecraft

  My client was writing me a check as fast as he could.

  It was a big check, I don’t work cheap.

  He was in a hurry because he was an idiot. I had just proven to his satisfaction that Charlene, his curvaceous blond secretary was the baddie who’d been embezzling from his office for the past six months. She was an idiot, too; she’d come with him to this meeting, probably thinking her long eyelashes, sexy hips, and magnificent mammaries would protect her from anything. Now she was being taken away by two very young, uniformed representatives of the New Prospect Police Department.

  That’s New Prospect, Colorado, a little old-fashioned town of shady, tree-lined brick-paved avenues, snuggled at the feet of the Rockies, altogether too near the northern edge of the capital city, Denver.

  Dum, da dum dum.

  I liked the printed jersey dress that clung to Charlene’s body like a wisp of smoke. It reminded me of the way girls looked in movies I’d gone to see as a kid, back in rural east-central Illinois. There was even a chance that the tears presently spoiling her eye makeup were real. Allowing for her 21st century hairstyle, she resembled Jean Harlow a little, which was a shame, because she wasn’t going to look nearly as good in the orange jumpsuit Hamilton County would be issuing her.

  My client finished with me and jumped up. “Don’t worry, Charlene!” he hollered at her back as they marched her through my front door. “I’ll come down and pay your bail! You’ll see, everything will be all right!”

  No it wouldn’t be, but it wasn’t my job to tell him. It was my job to straighten things out afterward, in case she killed him, or he killed her, or his wife killed them both. Even then, I don’t normally do murders if I can avoid them. For an unlicensed private investigator (I like to think of myself as an “equalizer”) working from his home, discreetly offering his services, there just isn’t any money in them. Only dead people and people who, one way or another, wind up dead inside.

  It was getting late. When cops and client and culprit were gone—I watched the patrol car pull away from the curb, the client’s BMW taillights right behind them—I dead bolted the front door, turned out the porch light, put the check and the Xeroxes of Charlene’s questionable ledger entries away in the safe (copies would go to the District Attorney and the client’s lawyer in the morning), turned the office lights out, and headed for the kitchen at the back of the house.

  I would have set the house alarm—I’ve made plenty of folks hate me over the years—but I don’t have one. I can hear a pin drop 200 yards away. To me, owing to the peculiar capabilities and limitations of my situation, it sounds just like a manhole cover falling off a truck. Besides, as late as it was, I wouldn’t be going to bed until morning.

  I heard a quiet “Meow?” and glanced toward the hall to the first floor bedroom. Fiddlestring had come out of hiding. The big orange tiger-stripe hates company. When we have visitors, he lurks under the bed and plots, like a James Bond villain, to have them all killed. He attacked a little girl once—a weird, scary little girl with an even weirder, scarier mommy—who had herded him into a corner where he couldn’t back up any more. She should have known better, he’d given her plenty of warning, hissing and spitting and growling as cats will. When she lunged for him, he went around one bare leg like an oldtime patented apple peeling machine, and she not only howled, she wet her panties.

  Her mother, a client determined to get the goods on hubby, was outraged that I didn’t pull my .38 out then and there and blow that animal’s head off, or something equally emphatic. I said her little girl had simply gotten what she’d deserved. Damned if she didn’t hire me anyway, and paid me promptly (they always do). Turned out that her husband was only hiding out in the New Prospect Public Library to get away, if only for an hour or two, from the weird, scary females in his life.

  I didn’t blame him a bit.

  Fiddlestring sawed back and forth, threatening to trip me.

  I reached down and scratched his head roughly, working on the ears. Truth is, male cats basically think they’re dogs. They like to be roughed up, shoulder-punched, shadow-boxed, and wrestled with like a bunch of Broncos fans watching the Superbowl together. You could hear him purr all the way across the room, like somebody mowing the damn lawn outside your bedroom window. “How’d you like something to eat?”

  “Meow!”

  In the kitchen, I opened and decanted a can of smoked oysters for Fiddlestring, fixed myself a cup of strong coffee, and made a peanut butter and chutney sandwich. That would take care of my stomach, but a familiar sensation told me that before tomorrow morning, I’d have to feed.

  A vampire doesn’t live on peanut butter alone.

  2: DANCING IN THE DARK

  “When choosing between two evils, I always like to try

  the one I’ve never tried before.”—Mae West

  To begin with, it’s a virus.

  A symbiotic virus: I treat it right and it protects me from disease, aging, and injury. Physically, it makes me extremely strong. I can’t fly, or turn into a bat, but after an unfortunate accident I had with a bandsaw back in the 50s, I discovered that I can grow a pinky back—and that severed body parts turn to fine, gray ash. My finger, lying there on the saw table, quickly came to resemble a burnt cigar.

  The virus also has certain legendary weaknesses. It can’t stand the direct sun because ultraviolet light destroys it, quite violently. (Don’t ask me how I learned that; you don’t want to know.) Garlic will kill it, too. I’ve watched that drama play out a hundred times through the microscope. Even related vegetables like onions and leeks make me queasy.

  Likewise, direct contact with metallic silver has much the same nasty, cauterizing effect on my virus-permeated flesh that contact with silver nitrate has on ordinary, uninfected human beings. Think about table salt on a garden slug. Whenever I handle silver objects—reasonably often in my particular line of work—I have to wear gloves.

  On the other hand, I can see my own image perfectly well in a mirror. How many laws of physics would you have to repeal for it to be any other way? And as for a stake through the heart, who wouldn’t die?

  Me, that’s who.

  Ironically, the vampire virus would seal the wound up—instantly fatal to any ordinary individual—until it healed. But even vampires appear to have had their superstitions. Research tells me it was only a piece of the True Cross that was supposed to have been lethal to them.

  I wonder whether you could find something like that on eBay.

  Sorry to de-romanticize it, but there you are. It is, as they say, what it is. It’s a very old, very primitive, very large virus that you can actually see for yourself if you have a fairly good optical microscope.

  I got my dose a couple of weeks after D-Day. Having unexpectedly survived the terrors of Omaha Beach,
I got separated from my unit (I was a Second Lieutenant and I guess nobody missed me) and wound up alone in a picturesque little French village about twenty minutes before it got overrun by the badguys, trying to arrange a resurgence against the invasion.

  In a little postcard perfect but abandoned house, it didn’t take long to discover a cleverly concealed wine cellar—the French had made a fine art of hiding their best stuff from the soldiers of all nations—behind a false wall in a basement. Outside, it was bright and sunny, houses surprisingly pristine in their whitewashed glory. I pulled the fake wall into place behind me and sat in the dank, stuffy, musty-smelling darkness for an hour, trying to figure out what to do next.

  Before I really noticed it, I wasn’t smelling mildew any more, but something else, something elusive, evocative, giving me a feeling that was all wrong, considering where I was and what was going on. Outside, I could hear the Huns in combat boots stomping up and down the little street. I could hear the occasional car, and even an armored personnel carrier. Once or twice, aircraft that didn’t sound like our own flew overhead.

  And still the sensation that was half aroma and half imaginary spiders crawling up and down my spine persisted. I squatted where I was, one hand on my sidearm in its flapped issue holster, thinking how good a drink of wine would be right now, if only I could make myself move.

  Move!

  I whirled, and reached behind me in the darkness, my outstretched hand landing on something I hadn’t felt since Sally Danforth had given me a spectacular send-off in her father’s hayloft the day after I’d graduated from the local aggie college and enlisted in the United States Army. That Hitler was going to get his, now that I was in the fight!

  My hand, it seemed, had found a breast. A very warm, very soft, moderately large breast. A left breast, to be precise, under what felt to me like a uniform shirt. For some reason I didn’t withdraw my hand immediately (normally, I’m somewhat bashful, and that would have been my reflexive response at any other time, on any other day, in any other war), but kept it where it was, instead, enjoying what it was feeling.