immediately? And I have here some Spanish coins to sell, quite old, I think.”
He scribbled like a madman, his doubts and suspicions fading in the heat of my smiles. He was so glad to have something to do!
“Hold my property in the boulevard du Temple vacant,” I said. “And of course, you’ll manage everything for me. And so forth and so on.”
My property in the boulevard du Temple, the hiding place of a ragged and desperate band of vampires unless Armand had already found them and burnt them up like old costumes. I should find the answer to that question soon enough.
I came down the steps whistling to myself in strictly human fashion, overjoyed that this odious task had been accomplished. And then I realized that Nicki and Gabrielle were nowhere in sight.
I stopped and turned around in the street.
I saw Gabrielle just at the moment I heard her voice, a young boyish figure emerging full blown from an alleyway as if she had just made herself material on the spot.
“Lestat, he’s gone—vanished,” she said.
I couldn’t answer her. I said something foolish, like “What do you mean, vanished!” But my thoughts were more or less drowning out the words in my own head. If I had doubted up until this moment that I loved him, I had been lying to myself.
“I turned my back, and it was that quick, I tell you,” she said. She was half aggrieved, half angry.
“Did you hear any other . . . ”
“No. Nothing. He was simply too quick.”
“Yes, if he moved on his own, if he wasn’t taken . . . ”
“I would have heard his fear if Armand had taken him,” she insisted.
“But does he feel fear? Does he feel anything at all?” I was utterly terrified and utterly exasperated. He’d vanished in a darkness that spread out all around us like a giant wheel from its axis. I think I clenched my fist. I must have made some uncertain little gesture of panic.
“Listen to me,” she said. “There are only two things that go round and round in his mind . . . ”
“Tell me!”
“One is the pyre under les Innocents where he was almost burned. And the other is a small theater—footlights, a stage.”
“Renaud’s,” I said.
SHE and I were archangels together. It didn’t take us a quarter of an hour to reach the noisy boulevard and to move through its raucous crowd past the neglected facade of Renaud’s and back to the stage door.
The boards had all been ripped down and the locks broken. But I heard no sound of Eleni or the others as we slipped quietly into the hallway that went round the back of the stage. No one here.
Perhaps Armand had gathered his children home after all, and that was my doing because I would not take them in.
Nothing but the jungle of props, the great painted scrims of night and day and hill and dale, and the open dressing rooms, those crowded little closets where here and there a mirror glared in the light that seeped through the open door we had left behind.
Then Gabrielle’s hand tightened on my sleeve. She gestured towards the wings proper. And I knew by her face that it wasn’t the other ones. Nicki was there.
I went to the side of the stage. The velvet curtain was drawn back to both sides and I could see his dark figure plainly in the orchestra pit. He was sitting in his old place, his hands folded in his lap. He was facing me but he didn’t notice me. He was staring off as he had done all along.
And the memory came back to me of Gabrielle’s strange words the night after I had made her, that she could not get over the sensation that she had died and could affect nothing in the mortal world.
He appeared that lifeless and that translucent. He was the still, expressionless specter one almost stumbles over in the shadows of the haunted house, all but melded with the dusty furnishings—the fright that is worse perhaps than any other kind.
I looked to see if the violin was there—on the floor, or against his chair—and when I saw that it wasn’t, I thought, Well, there is still a chance.
“Stay here and watch,” I said to Gabrielle. But my heart was knocking in my throat when I looked up at the darkened theater, when I let myself breathe in the old scents. Why did you have to bring us here, Nicki? To