“That’s a relief. I’d hate to think any real works of art got their heads knocked off. Even Soviet propagandist works of art.” The American was still grinning when the Russian shot him the filthiest look he could muster. He continued, “We eat here.”
“We do not.”
“Don’t you ever get homesick?”
Constantly,
the Russian thought.
But not for this.
But he stopped anyway, looking up at the bulky broad-shouldered statue, encrusted with faux pigeon droppings, and said, “Vladimir Ilyich, where
is
your head?”
“It’s in the vodka locker,” a smooth familiar voice said from the restaurant’s doorway. “Viva Las Vegas. I think you two have a bit of history to catch up on. And I hear you’re looking for a girl.”
The Russian and his partner turned as one, shoulder to shoulder, reaching for but not producing their weapons. The man leaned against the marble-framed entry, hands in the pockets of a voluptuous leather trench coat, dark blond hair fallen over his forehead, sunglasses concealing his eyes despite the dimness of the casino.
“Wow,” the American said. “You know you look like—”
“Yeah, I get that a lot. Come on.” He jerked his thumb in direction and turned his back.
Helplessly, the Russian exchanged a glance with his partner. They fell into step behind the stranger, who was carrying on a running monologue without bothering to glance over his shoulder and see if the spies were keeping up. “You’re friends of Jackie’s. And, unless I miss my guess, a little behind the times?”
The American coughed. “A little.”
“American politics have been running downhill since the Kennedy assassinations, really. But the former Soviet Union’s in even worse shape.” The man in the leather trench coat shot a speculative glance at the Russian. “I doubt you’ll be pleased—”
“Assassinations? Plural?” the American interrupted, at the same moment that the Russian said “
Former?
”
“Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles in June of 1968,” the man who looked—and sounded—like the King of Rock and Roll said, checking his stride a little. The Russian hurried to keep up, matching his gait to the American’s. “The Soviet Union dissolved its government peaceably in December of 1991, dividing into fifteen separate countries, most of which are still struggling, economically devastated, eleven years later. It happened just a little more than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was actually in Kiev when it happened—Ukraine’s had a rough time of it.”
“Ukraine always does,” the Russian said, resignation in his breast. “Are there still roses?”
“Roses?”
“In Kiev.”
The stranger stopped so short that the American almost walked into him. He paused and frowned. The Russian held his breath, his heart tight in his chest, and couldn’t say why the roses mattered, except they did. His hands were sweating. He shoved them into his pockets, ignoring his partner’s concerned glance. The man who looked like Elvis Presley pulled his sunglasses off, tucked them carefully into his breast pocket, looked the Russian in the eye and said, “There were in 1991. There’s worse.”
His partner’s hand was on his shoulder. He leaned back against it, frowning. “Let me hear it.”
“The power plant at Chornobyl—the nuclear plant—you know it?”
“The site had been chosen, but construction had not been started yet, the last I knew.” The Russian dropped his chin, already knowing what the ghost of Elvis would say. His degree was in physics; he knew better than most that the proposed Soviet nuclear plants were an unsafe design. “There was an explosion.”
“In 1986.”
“Of course there was,” the Russian said, and looked up, something that didn’t feel like a smile twisting his lips. “It’s the history of Ukraine, my friend. If it weren’t ideologically questionable, I’d wonder if there were a curse.” He turned on his heel and stalked back toward the maimed statue of Lenin, the
precieux
faux-Russian bar—he recognized the chandelier, now that he thought about it; he’d seen it in one embassy or another—and, most importantly, the promised vodka locker.
His partner, still visibly rattled by the news that Bobby Kennedy had been shot, was right beside him. He needed the steadying hand on his elbow more than he cared to admit. “I thought we weren’t eating in the tacky nightclub.”
“We’re not,” the Russian said, crisply. “We’re drinking.”
There was Ukrainian vodka on the menu, and they served it both in martini glasses and in samplers of shots frozen into blocks of red-dyed ice. The bar itself had a strip of ice like a hockey rink down the center, and the walls were cluttered with peeling propaganda posters. Coupled with dim lighting, the effect was overwhelmingly claustrophobic, but the Russian’s partner leaned against the bar on his left-hand side and the stranger in the trench coat leaned on his right, and there was a certain comfort to be had drinking silently between acquaintances while the decapitated head of Vladimir Ilyich glowered down at him from its high shelf in the glassed-in freezer behind the bar.
The Russian toasted it silently with his second martini glass full of Zlatogor and breathed out through his teeth. He didn’t need to talk; his partner spoke for him. “Did Jack send you looking for us? To bring us . . . up to speed?”
“Jack sent me looking for his boyfriend. Look, what do I call you guys?”
The Russian and the American exchanged glances and shrugged. “What do we call you?” the American asked.
“Tribute.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Baby, you know that already.” Tribute smiled and swirled the vodka in his shot glass. He put it back on the ice without touching it to his lips and squared his cocktail napkin precisely. The Russian swallowed vodka hard, watching the curvaceous brunette bartender as she slunk from one end of the ice-topped surface to the other.
“So how come you look so much like the Suicide King?” Tribute asked, after the Russian had finished his second drink.
“Suicide King?”
“Jackie’s boyfriend. The Suicide King. Jackie calls him Stewart. Jackie’s the knave of spades, if you hadn’t caught on.”
“The one-eyed jack. Yes, of course. And his partner then would have to be the King of Hearts.” The Russian glanced up as he spoke, then glanced down as Tribute pushed the untouched shot glass toward him. “Boyfriend, you say? I suppose that’s something else that’s changed.” He took the shot glass with a sigh. “I do not know. Do you have any more bombshells to drop on my head?”
“Not at the moment. Although I’m looking forward to your reaction to President Ronald Reagan.”
Tribute had timed it perfectly. The American choked hard, flinching as fiery alcohol bathed his sinuses. He grabbed a napkin and covered the lower half of his face. “Currently?”
“No, back in the eighties. You all are just too much fun.”
The American winced, set his napkin down, and sipped his drink again. “So who shot RFK?”
“Supposedly, a fellow named Sirhan Sirhan, but there are conspiracy theories about that, just like JFK.” Tribute shrugged, drawing circles on the ice with his thumb. A passing matron turned to blink at his profile, shook her head, and kept on walking. The Russian ordered another drink.
“My friend here thinks Oswald did JFK all by himself,” the American said, angling his head to include the silent Russian.
The Russian snorted and looked down.
The American said, “Why did you come looking for us?”
“I didn’t,” Tribute said, swiveling his chair to catch the American’s eye. “I was looking for Angel. Apparently, given that people were talking about two guys dressed funny and asking the same questions I was, so were you.”
The Russian glanced down at the munchie menu to hide his smile. If Tribute had found them, then perhaps the assassin would too. He blinked at the card stock in his hand. “Russian nachos? What on Earth?”
“Blame Julia Child.”
“I love Julia Child. On PBS.” The American was laughing at him, but it didn’t matter. The American never had believed he could cook. “I suppose she’s dead as well?”
Tribute smiled as he shook his head this time. “Still going strong.”
Odd, how that little bit of continuity eased the congealed twist of worry in the Russian’s chest. “What does she have to do with Mexicanized Russian food?”
Tribute shrugged. “Fusion cuisine. The world’s gotten a lot smaller since your day.”
“Our day?” The Russian recognized that tone in his partner’s voice. The American was still working on his first martini. “I’d have guessed our day was your day too. Aren’t you a, what did Jackie call us, a media ghost as well? ’Cause you’d be, what, seventy or so?”
Tribute turned to them and grinned; the Russian almost startled back into the American’s arms at the glitter of white inhuman teeth. “I died in 1977. And I’m sixty-seven, for what it’s worth.”
“Wampyr,” the Russian said. “Well, well.”
Tribute’s eyebrow rose. “You’re taking it well.”
“We’ve met your kind before.”
“Twice,” the American added, and the Russian turned his back on the vampire—a foolish thing to do, but ten ounces of eighty-proof vodka on an empty stomach after twelve hours in the heat perhaps had dulled his instincts—and shook his head.
“Only once,” he argued. “The other one we never actually met.”
“I was thinking of the fellow with the bats—”
“—random madman. Not a real supernatural being.”
Tribute laughed, drawing their attention back. “That’s refreshing. The next thing people usually say is that I’ve changed. When they actually get to live long enough to figure out who I am, I mean.”
The cold glitter of the vampire’s eyes arrested whatever the Russian might have said in reply. Carefully, he pushed his martini glass back an inch, using just his fingertips, and then steepled those fingertips against those of the other hand. “But you aren’t that person, are you? You’re something else.”
“A predator,” Tribute supplied.
“A predator who remembers being that man.”
The vampire snorted and picked at the ice of the bar top with his thumbnail some more. He’d worn a little groove, although it didn’t melt where he touched it. “If you can call the person I remember being a man.” He shook his head and cleared his throat. “So the One-eyed Jack’s got you all looking for Angel too. Spreading his resources out a bit, I suppose. Look, I’m supposed to lead him to her—” The sharp-nailed hand splayed flat on the bar, as if he meant to stab between the fingers with a knife. A human’s hand would have blanched in places and reddened in others, from the pressure. Tribute’s stayed bland white, porcelain. “—I can lead you as well. After I get some business of my own out of the way.”
The American leaned forward, clearing his throat. “Why are you helping Jack?”
“The likes of me?”
Vodka was making the Russian’s head swim. He needed to eat. And not Russian Nachos. “Yes.”
“Boy’s got to live some place.” The vampire’s shoulders moved under the black leather coat, which draped in folds soft as cashmere. The dark blond hair drifted down into his eyes. “I like Las Vegas. I want to stay. I have to earn that from Jack.”
“You’re buying your way in.”
Tribute showed the tips of his eyeteeth again as he stood. “Besides,” he said, “I’ve met Los Angeles. One city like her is enough, don’t you think?”
“Where are you going?” The Russian reached out to lay a hand on Tribute’s wrist. The vampire suffered the touch; his flesh was cold, as stiff as wax.
“Hunting,” Tribute said, one word full of potent venom. He stepped back, a sharply folded fifty-dollar bill appearing on the bar where he’d been sitting. “Drinks are on me. I’ll catch you later, little spies; you don’t want to come.”
The coat didn’t swirl as he glided toward the door and was gone. The Russian glanced at the American and waggled his eyebrows in a passable imitation of their superior. “Jackie’s
boyfriend
?”
The American reached out, took the Russian’s martini off the bar, and knocked the whole thing back in a gulp. “Times change,” he said wryly, when his face unpuckered. “You think Tribute’s told Jackie his partner’s alive? Or do you think the genius of Las Vegas is lying to us?”
“I think it’s going to take a lot of sushi to fuel the thinking process,” the Russian answered. “Do you suppose our money’s any good here?”
The American smoothed Tribute’s bill against the ice. “Better than his money would be there,” he said, and tapped President Grant on the nose. “Come on,” he said, steadying the Russian as the Russian pushed himself to his feet. “Let’s see if we can get ourselves shot in a restaurant.”
“Don’t forget our guardian angels,” the Russian answered, casting a mysterious glance skyward.
“I never forget them. I just prefer not to make them work too hard.”
The Assassin and the Lady Sowing the Dragon’s Heart.
Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
The assassin sat in a straight-back chair, polishing his shoes, while the genius of Las Vegas pressed his face into the pillow beside Angel’s thigh and tugged ineffectually against the handcuff locking his right wrist to the bedframe. Angel stroked his hair; he turned further away.
“No.”
Flatly, with an edge that told the assassin that the Suicide King was closer to his right mind than he’d been in days. Consent had to be given, and so he was no longer under the influence of the narcotics and witchcraft Angel had been using to keep him pliant.
“Come on, baby,” Angel said, as the assassin slipped his foot into a gleaming loafer. “You have to eat your soup.”
“Or what? I’ll starve to death?” He snorted and rolled onto his back, using the short chain to haul himself up against the headboard. He sat beside Angel, his thin shoulders squared and his jaw working. He leaned away from her and she curled toward him like a mother coaxing a nauseated child. “If you want me to eat somebody’s heart, why don’t you start with your own?”
The assassin stood, making sure his suit coat hung flat over his pistol. He buttoned both buttons and smoothed his lapels with a flick of his thumbs, checking the look in the mirror. He’d picked up a bit of Las Vegas sun, bronzing his cheekbones. Angel lifted her head, careful to keep the mug of broth in her hand out of reach of the Suicide King. “What do you think you’re doing? I need you here—”