The World on Blood Read online

  THE WORLD ON BLOOD

  By

  Jonathan Nasaw

  Contents

  Book One - on Blood

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Book Two - At Feasts Full Warm of Blood

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Afterward

  THE WORLD ON BLOOD

  Jonathan Nasaw

  A DUTTON BOOK

  DUTTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Dutton, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

  Distributed in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Inc.

  First Printing, April, 1996

  Copyright © Jonathan Nasaw, 1996

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  ISBN 0-525-94066-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Bernhard Modern and Minion

  Designed by Julian Hamer

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper. ©

  For Patricia

  BOOK ONE

  on Blood

  Chapter 1

  ^ »

  ONE

  It is possible to steal a baby from a hospital at night. Whistler awoke at sunset with that simple thought shining like a beacon through the murk of his hangover.

  It wouldn't be easy, he knew. Daytime would have been easy, but daytime, alas, had not been an option for over twenty-five years.

  He opened his eyes, groaned aloud, and sat up gingerly. The wineglass on the bedside table was nearly half full, but a quick sniff told him that the stuff had gone bad overnight—or rather, since morning. With a roll of his eyes, as if it were all too much to bear, he emptied the contents into the potted plant on the bedside table, then dropped to his knees, flipped back the comforter, and from the small refrigerated compartment built into the platform of the king-size bed, he withdrew a 32-oz Clamato Juice jar.

  The liquid he poured from the jar into the glass bore only a passing resemblance to Clamato Juice. But then, that was the point. "If there's one thing certain in this sorry world," Nick Santos, who'd invented the trick, used to say, "it's that no thief, housecleaner, overnight guest or midnight muncher is ever going to cop a slash from a jar of off-ish looking Clamato Juice."

  At the thought of Nick, Whistler's long jaw tightened for a moment. Then he raised the glass—a toast to absent friends—and tossed the contents back with an understated flourish. Whistler did everything with an understated flourish—or hoped to.

  After a shower, and another splash from the jar, Whistler went strolling naked through his walk-in closet, pushing aside rack after rack of custom-made shirts, silk suits from his tailor in Hong King, elaborate dressing gowns and pajamas and leather and vinyl S&M wear, and enough kimonos to stock a geisha house, until finally he reached his rack of hospital costumes: orderly's whites, surgical greens, a lab coat with a stethoscope tucked into the pocket, and two custodian's uniforms, both green—one with Tony stitched over the left breast pocket, the other with Art.

  He selected the latter, quoting his namesake aloud—"Tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, Art is upon the Town"—and permitting himself a frugal smile.

  The baby would have to be a Doe of course, he decided as he stepped into the one-piece coverall. So much cleaner with the Does—no parents to overreact. It was also a happy coincidence that they were almost always brought to the understaffed county hospitals, where the security precautions were… not oppressive, to put it kindly. The last one he'd borrowed from a county hospital hadn't even been missed, so far as he'd been able to tell. In any event, there had been nothing in the news about the disappearance—or the return, for that matter.

  But the timing would be critical. He checked the hour as he slipped on his wristwatch, a Patek Philippe that had once belonged to his father. (It was no heirloom, though—Whistler had swiped it from the old man in London back in 1966.) Not quite 6:00, he noted. El Sobrante was only fifteen or twenty minutes from the county hospital in Martinez—if they hadn't changed the visiting hours, that gave him a good two or three hours to kill.

  He wandered downstairs to the kitchen of the restored white clapboard farmhouse to see about dinner and found a note from Selene on the antique kitchen table. The entire house was furnished in genuine 1930s Depression-era farmhouse kitsch, right down to the Bakelite deco radio on the counter and the Laurel and Hardy salt and pepper shakers on the rubberized checked tablecloth.

  Jamey dear—Okay, I'm off to Tahoe to mix up a few brews with the gals. Thanks in advance for the use of the Manor—we'll leave it as we found it. And thanks for dinner last night—the leftovers are in the fridge. I also left you a 1/2 pint just in case—the way you were drinking last night, I wanted to make sure you had a waker-upper. By the way, I caught one of your little helpers snooping around the house while you were busy with the other one. I'd have turned her into a frog, but it was the one with the boobs, and I know how you feel about boobs. I would have come up to say goodbye in person, but the Creature was rampant, and I still have six months of celibacy left on my vow. Hugs and (chaste) kisses—Selene.

  As he rummaged among the take-out cartons in the Frigidaire, Whistler tried to remember the name of the young woman from the night before, so he could ask the service not to send her again. Ah, but what an erotic tableau vivant she and the boyish Vietnamese hooker had made against the backdrop of his pearl gray sheets. Thanks all the same, Selene, but I think I'll take my chances.

  In what Whistler hoped was a stab at humor, Selene had left his half-pint in a creamer shaped like a cow. Before leaving for the hospital, he poured half the contents into a silver hip flask, then held the pitcher above his face like a bota and let the remaining liquid cascade from the cow's mouth into his, and trickle down his throat. Being fairly fresh, it started coming on within minutes, and by the time he reached the hospital he was so high that the kidnapping itself was something of an anticlimax.

  Shamefully easy for a man of Whistler's ability, in fact. As if for his convenience, they'd shifted the Does all the way to the back of the nursery—no need to have them up by the glass for parental viewing, was apparently the thinking. Art the janitor had only to sweep his way past the nursing station and on through the nursery, snatch up one of the two sleeping Does, and slide out through the back door and down the service stairs.

  The hardest part was deciding which one to take, the John or the Jane. After an instant's hesitation, during which he reflected that the last D
oe he'd snatched had been a Jane, he selected the John. Not that gender had anything to do with it. He wasn't a child molester, for godsakes.

  TWO

  El Cerrito is a city in transition. Richmond encroaches from the north, Berkeley from the south. To the east rise wooded hills studded with overpriced homes; to the west, at the edge of the San Francisco Bay, stretches a bleak industrial littoral. Even the little hill for which the town was named lies across the border in Albany.

  All in all, it had never been considered a promising location for any new enterprise, let alone a nondenominational twelve-step church with a female pastor. Or so the Reverend Betty Ruth Shoemaker had been advised two years before, by her friends, by her banker, and by conventional wisdom, which, until recently, she'd always thought of as ninety-nine percent convention and one percent wisdom. On a good day.

  But on the Friday night after the Thanksgiving of 1991, with the ashes of the great firestorm still blackening the East Bay hills, and the ashes of old Elizabeth Corey resting among them (or stirring, depending on the wind), Betty Ruth found herself staring at the screen of her elderly computer and wondering whether conventional wisdom hadn't been right for once.

  For when the firestorm finally enveloped Libby Corey's graceful old Maybeck house that October, it had deprived the Church of the Higher Power of its major benefactress, who at age eighty-two had been up on the roof with a garden hose trying to wet down the shake shingles.

  "Eighty-two years old and up on the roof with a hose," said Betty out loud—talking to oneself was a ministerial perquisite: she could always pretend she was praying. "Not a bad way to go at that age. They say the smoke gets you first, you never even feel the flames."

  But it occurred to her that that was conventional wisdom too. She frowned at her reflection on the screen, superimposed over the church's utterly dismal spreadsheet, then glanced around an office furnished largely with garage-sale spoils: faux-Tiffany desk lamp with a nymph etched in green and gold on the glass shade; Serenity Prayer clock: God grant us the wisdom, etc.; scarred olive-green metal desk; pre-ergonomic desk chair with duct-taped arms. Two filing cabinets, no window. Enough room to swing a cat if you held your elbows close to your sides.

  She turned back to the desk to make a few ineffectual stabs at cleaning up—mostly throwing papers and bills into her bulging To Be Filed file—but when she looked at the computer screen again, the spreadsheet was still there, still reproachful.

  "What we really need is a miracle," she declared. "A three-hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar-a-month miracle." That being the current projected shortfall for the Church of the Higher Power, assuming she forwent her salary. A fair assumption—she hadn't drawn it since the founding of the CHP, managing to survive instead on income from her counseling. "Is that asking too much?" she inquired of the computer, which was apparently sitting in for the deity tonight. "One more twelve-step group to rent the smaller meeting room three nights a week?"

  No reply—none expected. She reached around to turn off the old Mac, ignoring once again the yellow Trust In God But Back Up Your Hard Disk Post-it slapped on the side of the monitor, then stepped out into the church, shutting the door behind her.

  "Ah, well," she announced to the darkness and the faint smell of cedar. "May the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary be at rest."

  "Amen to that." A man's voice from somewhere in the shadows of the pews.

  Betty gasped, clapping her hand to her chest. She could just make out a face at the back of the church, white and waxen as a camellia in the dark. "Who's there?" Her fingers felt behind her for the row of light switches on the wall, flipped a few at random: two banks of overhead lights clanked on in the rafters, illuminating the chancel and the mourners' bench.

  "Sorry, didn't mean to startle you." The man rose from the back pew and stepped out sideways into the aisle. "I'm Nick? Nick Santos?"

  His boots tapped the hardwood as he strode up the aisle, and she recognized him when he reached the light—a slender man in his mid-forties, in faded but pressed stonewashed jeans and a soft blue chambray shirt; only a comma of his thick walnut-brown hair had been allowed to fall in studied casualness over one eyebrow. Let's review, she thought as he approached. The perfect man. My age group, well mannered, impeccably dressed, exquisitely groomed, devastatingly handsome. In other words, he's gay. "Oh, of course. Nick. The A.A. meeting?"

  He nodded. "A.A., N.A., M.A., CODA, A.C.A.—you name it, I'm addicted to it."

  Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics, Marijuana, Codependents, Adult Children of Alcoholics. "What, no S.L.A.?" she joked.

  "Sex and Love?" He grinned ruefully. "That gave me up when I gave up all my other addictions."

  "I know what you mean," she said, laughing. But his reply had cut a little too close to the bone, and she hurriedly changed the subject. "So what was it you needed to talk to me about?"

  "One of my groups renting the smaller meeting room three nights a week."

  In her mind's ear, Betty heard old Libby Corey's distinctive cackle, and she caught herself wondering, without a trace of embarrassment, whether she shouldn't have sought a rather larger miracle. Enough to get the damp-rotted bathroom walls repaired, say. Or maybe World Peace. But undermining the elation was a faint dread. She told herself it was only the shock of coincidence, that hearing her own prayer coming back to her nearly word for word had unsettled her, but the rest of the conversation had an eerie ring nonetheless. "We should be able to fit you in. Which group did you say it was?"

  "I didn't. It's V.A."

  "Don't think I've heard of that one. What's the V stand for?"

  "Very."

  "Very Anonymous?"

  "Very."

  THREE

  Nick Santos carried his cordless phone out to the padded chaise on the redwood deck of his home in the East Bay hills. Below him the lights of Berkeley tumbled steeply from Grizzly Peak Road down to the flats, and rolled on to the edge of the black bay. He tugged off his boots and straightened the hems of his stonewashed jeans, then leaned back to dial the first number on the V.A. phone list.

  "James, it's Nick," he informed an answering machine. "I have a room for us. The Church of the Higher Power, El Cerrito, corner of Jackson and Darling. Nine o'clock Saturday night. Meeting room downstairs, on the right. We also have Monday and Wednesday nights, same time, same place. It's perfect—basement room, no windows, thick door that locks. See you tomorrow—stay clean in between."

  He made nine more calls, and reached three people, five machines, and a busy signal, then punched auto redial and waited, watching the letters GOODYEAR floating mysteriously towards the Bay Bridge—they were just passing Alcatraz when his phone buzzed to let him know the call was going through.

  "West County Blood Bank, this is Beverly."

  "Bev, it's Nick. We've got us a room at the Church of the Higher Power in El Cerrito." They had been meeting at a branch of the Berkeley library, now closed for asbestos abatement.

  "You know how I feel about churches."

  "It's nondenominational—hell, it's a twelve-step church, and we're a twelve-step program—what do you want, egg in your beer?"

  "Any crosses?" Beverly asked.

  "There's one on the wall of the meeting room, but it can probably come down."

  "I suppose it'll have to do—the situation here can't go on much longer. When's the first meeting?"

  "Nine o'clock tomorrow night. When did she last cop?"

  "I've been keeping an eye on her since yesterday, so Wednesday at the latest—she's probably getting desperate."

  "Might she have any other sources?" Nick wanted to know.

  "I don't think so—she's a pure virgin Orphan if there ever was one. If she hadn't gotten the job here, I don't know how she'd be getting it. But what I've done, I've set it up so that she'll have the keys tomorrow night—we always have one person on standby on Saturday nights, in case of a run on the bank. I'm sure the temptation will be too much: all I have to do is tell her I'l
l be in the office myself after nine, and she'll have to make her move before then. Cheese Louise and I will hide somewhere, then confront her and bring her to the meeting with us."

  "How the hell are you going to hide Cheese Louise?"

  "Don't be size-ist."

  "Sorry. Do you want us to hold off the meeting until you guys get there with… what was her name?"

  "Lourdes. Lourdes Perez."

  "Loor-diss?"

  "But spelled like the shrine. She's Filipino. Filipina, I guess. Sure, hold the opening prayer for us—if we can't get her to come along, we'll be there ourselves by nine-thirty at the latest."

  "Sounds like a plan. Call me if you need me."

  "Okay. Take it easy, Nick."

  "Easy, and one day at a time."

  FOUR

  Not until little John Doe had been changed, fed a bottle of warm milk wrist-tested for temperature and fortified with Luzan rum, then rocked to sleep in the wooden trundle bed on the floor of the farmhouse kitchen, did Whistler allow himself to draw its blood. That was all fore-play—the boredom that drove him to baby-blood usually disappeared as soon as he began the hunt, and once he had the baby in hand, no sense of urgency remained.

  Still, he took a craftsmanlike pride in his work, finding the thready blue vein in the instep with its hardy but bird-quick pulse, drawing the blood so cleanly through the syringe that the child never stirred, deftly replacing one ampule with another and then a third before sliding the needle out while pressing a cotton ball against the wound with his thumb. When he withdrew the cotton, only a tiny blue pinhole remained.

  There weren't a dozen blood techs west of the Rockies who could have done half as well, he noted proudly as he reversed the plunger, sending the contents of the last ampule hissing into a silver-rimmed wineglass. This he held to the light, that he might approve the color, a dark eggplant purple, before taking his first genteel sip.