“Naturally you’re cautious,” Laurace said. “Do you think I’m not? We’ve both had to be, or die. But look around you. Would something like this belong to any criminal such as you ever knew?”
“N-no… Unless the prophet of a cult— But I never heard of you, and I would have, as rich as you must be.”
“I’m not. Nor is the organization I lead. It does require me to maintain the appearance of, m-m, solidity. As to your questions, though;” Laurace sipped of her wine. Her voice grew slow, almost dreamy:
“I don’t know when I was born. If any record was made, I couldn’t tell where to find it, and probably it’s long lost. Who cared about a pickaninny slave? But from what I remember, and what I deduced after I began to study, I must be about two hundred years old. That isn’t much, set against your age. Fourteen hundred, did you say? But of course I wondered, more and more desperately, whether I was quite alone in the world or not.
“Any others like me must be hiding the fact like me. Men can go into a variety of occupations, lives. Women have fewer opportunities. When at last I had the means to search, it made sense to begin with the trade that a woman might very well, even most likely, be forced into.”
“Whoredom,” said Clara starkly.
“I told you before, I pass no judgments. We do what we must, to survive. One such as you could have left a trail, a trail often broken but perhaps possible to follow, given time and patience. After all, she wouldn’t expect anybody would think to try. Newspaper files, police and court records, tax rolls and other registers where prostitution had been legal, old photographs—things like that, gathered, sifted, compared. Some of my agents have been private detectives, some have been … followers of mine. None knows why I wanted this information. Slowly, out of countless fragments, a few parts fitted together. It seemed there had been a woman who did well in Chicago back in the nineties till she got into some kind of trouble, curiously similar to one in New York later, in New Orleans later still, again in New York—”
Clara made a slicing gesture. “Never mind,” she snapped. “I get the idea. I should have remembered, in fact. It happened before.”
“What?”
“Back in Konstantinopolis—Istanbul—oh, Lord, nine hundred years ago, it must have been. A man tracked me down pretty much the same way.”
Laurace started to rise, sank back, leaned forward. “Another immortal?” she cried. “A man? What became of .him?”
“I don’t know.” Belligerently: “I wasn’t glad to be found then, and I’m not sure I am now. You are a woman, I guess that makes a difference, but you’ve got to convince me, you know?”
“A man,” Laurace whispered. “Who was he? What was he like?”
“Two. He had a partner. They were traders out of Russia. I didn’t want to go off with them, so I shook them, and never heard anything since. Probably they’re dead. Let’s not talk it about it yet, okay?”
The rain-silence descended.
“What a horror of a life you have had,” Laurace finally said.
Clara grinned on the left side of her mouth. “Oh, I’m tough. Between the times I work, when I live easy on what Fve earned and saved—or sometimes, yeah, I’ve married money—it’s good enough that I want to keep going.”
“I should think—you told me you’ve mostly been a, a madam since you came to America—isn’t that better than it … used to be for you?”
“Not always.”
SHE HATED sleeping where she worked. In Chicago she had an apartment five blocks away. Usually she could go home about two or three A.M., and the afternoons were her own; then business was slack enough for Sadie to manage. She’d go shopping downtown, or enjoy the sunshine and flowers in Jackson Park, or visit one of the museums built after the Columbian Exposition, or ride a trolley out into the countryside, all sorts of things, maybe with a couple of the girls, maybe by herself, but always ladylike.
Gas lamps flared. Pavement stretched ash-gray, empty as the moon. Lightly though she walked, her footfalls sounded loud in her ears. The two men who came out of an alley were tike more shadows until they fell in on either side of her.