As he shifted, I caught a glint of something hidden in his shirt, winking at me from the unbuttoned collar of satin. Before he could answer my previous question, I asked him, "What's that?"

He looked down, pulled out a string of polished pale beads, with a dull ivory crucifix dangling from the end. "My rosary," he answered.

"You keep a rosary?"

"At all times," said the vampire.

"For what?" I half laughed.

He smiled at me a bit. "I'm a Roman Catholic," he said.

"You go to Mass and stuff?" He nodded, once. "You take communion?"

"No," he admitted. "I cannot."

"Will you die?"

"I will have a stomach ache. I cannot digest. Also it would be wrong. A mockery of the things that I hold precious. I do go to Mass, confession, everything. I went this morning."

"Weird," I said.

"You will not become 'one of us,' " he said.

The room service came. A different old man came in with a wheeled cart, bearing a tray of bread, cheeses, and fat drab olives, and a bottle of wine that had already been uncorked. The vampire thanked the old man graciously and gave him a ridiculous tip, and the old man left with his wheeled cart, closing the door almost soundlessly behind him.

Once again I was alone in the room with the creature. He leaned forward and poured wine into one of the pair of glasses, and handed it to me. I took the glass and sipped at it, testing its flavor for anything strange, but it was normal good chianti, quite dry. I downed the rest of the glass at a swallow. The vampire refilled my glass without comment.

"Do you have a name?" I asked.

"My name is Orfeo Ricari."

"Italian?"

"By birth," he said.

"A long time ago?" I said, drinking another half glass.

"Very long."

"Why... why did you pick me?" The first glass finally hit me, burning through my empty stomach and hitting my bloodstream. It almost hurt.

Orfeo Ricari toyed uneasily with his rosary beads, counting them unconsciously off with pinches of his fingernails. "I did not choose you particularly," he said. "You were simply the first person I came to. Your university is very close to where I was buried."

"That... graveyard?" The one four blocks away, on the near side of Golden Gate Park, lovely, rather old, fenced in with razor wire to keep the kids away. "What are you talking about?"

"Can't you guess? I was buried. I was dead. I came back out. I was practically dead when I came to you-obviously completely mad, quite far from any kind of control. I was dead for seven months and then I was dug up again by some idiot schoolchildren."

I was getting there. That story, from the papers. "You killed them."

"I didn't know. I didn't mean to. I had no control; I was furious; they were there. I needed their blood. I don't want to. I hate killing," he said passionately. "Do you understand? I didn't mean to come to you-but I could smell your animals on the wind, and then-you came in-and your blood-" He stopped short, and gulped. "I wanted to apologize to you. I wanted you to know that I had no control over what I did that night, and I shall make it up to you."

Did he know? Did he know of my orgasms? And of the pain that lingered after the physical pain had gone away, the horrible longing to be taken again in his harsh and peeling hands and brought to his lips, like a bowl of wine? And now that he was no longer a walking atrocity of bones and decay, now that he was whole and beautiful again? I fell silent, not looking at him.

Ricari made another gesture with his hand. "Please," he said. "Eat. Eat and drink and enjoy. I like to see people eating. I cannot."

I picked up an olive and sucked it from its pit, washing it down with the end of my second glass. He refilled the glass again. I spoke with hesitation. "How could you... come back to life after you'd been dead and buried?"

He sighed. "I have done this before," he explained. "I am very, very old. I have lived through too much and seen too many changes. I am tired of being alive. But I cannot take my own life-it is a sin in God's eyes, and the ways that I can die, truly and forever, are so few and so painful that I hesitate. But, if I starve myself of blood long enough, I grow less and less animate, less like a living thing. I cooperate with, or I force the cooperation of, an undertaker, and I arrange for my death to take place. I rid myself of possesions, and the time comes, and I am closed in a coffin like any other dead man. Then I am buried-no one the wiser of knowing that there is still a flicker of me left. Rapidly it too dies, and I am at rest, as long as I am underground and the temptations of the world are far away. However, I am rarely allowed to rest for long. Someone digs me up hoping to find riches hidden in my coffin, or to dislodge me for some newer corpse. As soon as I reach the air and take a breath, I am here again. And unfortunately for him that brings me back, the reward is immediate death. I cannot stop until I have the blood of two or three humans in me, and I can think straight again and stop myself. You should thank your rats. They saved a human life-probably yours."

"I was just dessert," I commented.

He blushed. It was amazing-his face filled up with color like dawn spreading over the sky. "I apologize," he repeated. "That blood is richer. Goes further."

It was my turn to blush. I covered it up with immature blustering. "So if you were dead and stuff and you gave everything away, how come you get to hang out here with room service and everything?"

"I called my lawyer and told him there'd been a slight change in situation," said Ricari.

"So he knows about you."

"Yes."

"How many people know? Am I just really out of it?"

"I could count them on the hand of a three-fingered man," he said. "Including yourself."

"So-wait-" I waved the hand with the wine glass in it. "How do you live? If you hate killing? And nobody knows about you?"

"What I did to you," he mumbled. "Controlling with my mind. Usually it works. Usually they never remember anything."

"But I remember all of it. I do now anyway."

"With you I knew it wouldn't last, even as I was doing it-you did as I made you do, but you were still there, watching me, curiously, cautiously. You're different. I think it's because of what you do-what you've done. You make it your business to absorb knowledge without having to think about it." Ricari stared out the window. The moon was gone. "Usually my victims are asleep, drugged, or so weak of will that they would forget their mother's name if I told them to. One way or the other, they don't know what's happened, or they discount it altogether as preposterous."

"I almost did," I confessed. "I sometimes thought I was going crazy... I thought I'd made it up. But then... I know what I know. I believe in what I see."

"I wasn't sure whether you'd come," he said. "No. I was sure."

We sat in silence for a while and I ate bread and cheese and olives, whisking them down with chianti. I was getting kind of drunk, but things seemed to make more sense that way. He chewed his lower lip, and I noticed that his lips were slightly chapped, and a very faint mist of stubble had begun to darken his chin and his jaw above the sideburns. How odd, I thought, his hair grows, and he sloughs off his skin.

"I have," he began after clearing his throat, "something to ask you, Ariane."

"Yeah?"

"Will you kill me?"

"What?"

"End my life. I beg you. You are a woman of science. Death comes to you naturally. Surely you do not wish such an abomination to go on? Or think of it humanely. I want to die so much. Would you do no less for any stray cat, who cannot kill itself?" He leaned forward in the chaise longue, his eyes bright and passionate.

"I-I can't," I protested. "No."

"Ariane." He grimaced, and I saw for the first time in that angelic face, the bright sharp fangs, no longer than usual cuspids but very sharp, narrower than a human's teeth. The lower jaw had them too, but blunter, and a sleek little recess where the upper fangs rested, so as not to pierce the gum. Like an animal's fangs. "I am older than this building where we sit. I still talk of pianofortes and I clasped the hand of Wollstonecraft. Will you end this for me?"

"Oh, my God," I said softly. "No. Absolutely not. Absolutely not!"

"Why?"

"I don't believe you for one thing!" I jumped up out of the stiff little chair where I had been sitting opposite him. "How do I even know you're telling the truth? I'm drunk! You might just be some Polk Street hustler with a cheesy accent and a fucked-up sense of humor! You're not a hundred years old! I'm not going to kill you!"

"I will prove it," he said.

He stood up, and grabbing a London Fog raincoat from another stiff chair, slipped it on. He found some black wing tips under the secretary and stepped into them. He was perhaps my height, less weight than I for sure, his movements almost too quick to see. "Come with me," he said agitatedly. "Since you didn't deign to take off your coat, come with me downstairs."

I followed him out of the room and to the elevator. High spots of color dotted his cheeks above the sideburns. "By profession," he said as we got into the elevator and pulled the door closed, "I was a translator, in Paris, in 1812. I translated Italian into French, and Italian into English, and back again. Some of my works still exist."

He burst out of the elevator into the lobby and past the front-desk man, who barely glanced up from the crossword puzzle, and I trailed meekly after him, half lost in a cloud of wine. Ricari flung open the door to the bookstore so hard it stood open, its hinges bent, and sat down in one of the booky corridors, trailing his fingernails across the spines of old, mildewy antique books. I came to rest beside him.

After some minutes of heated perusing, he pulled from the shelf above us a small blue book, the spine ribbed in the old fashion, the pages edged in dulled gilt. "I found this last night," he said with a tight, defeatist pleasure. "If I could have killed myself then, I would have."

I stroked my way to the title page. Elementary Treatise on Nicomanichean Morality, by Leonardo Gallimassi, translated by O. Ricari. It was an eighth printing, 1888. I looked at him without comprehension. "This is not proof," I said.

He stared at me with pure blank exasperation. "Damned girl," he swore softly under his breath, and grabbed my wrist gently and pulled me from the bookstore through the shell-shocked door. We were going back into the hotel, he blazing with furious grace and me shambling after, bedazzled by his prettiness. Fake or not, I was beginning to think I would follow him over a cliff.

Back in Suite 900 he tore off the London Fog coat, and paced the room, deep in thought. I sank back into my chair and began mechanically eating olives. At last he came to a halt in front of me and began to unbutton his sleeve, rolling it back over his forearm.

His skin was the same delicate whiteness all over, the veins standing bluely like rivers along the wrist and swelling into tributaries at the hollow of his elbow.

He seized the cheese knife and gashed his palm with it. We yelled out as one. Dark, viscous blood welled out of the wound and began to drip onto the parquet floor, like drops of molten chocolate. It was just not human blood.

And it was just not a human wound. Ricari stuffed the wound into his mouth and sucked at it, letting his saliva run down over his hand, then held it out to me. Almost visibly the wound was reducing in size and severity. The smaller it got, the faster it healed. "Can you do that?" he asked me saucily, drops of bright sweat standing out on his forehead. I looked into his eyes for a long moment, enjoying his expression of triumph, and when I looked at his hand again, the gash was merely a fat pink seam, pulsing as it closed the last gaps between the severed skin cells. Then it was a scar.

I looked at the drops of blood on the floor. They were black. I bent over to touch them; they were hardened, like disks of warm plastic, stuck fast to the wood inlay.

Ricari lay back onto the chaise longue, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.

"You do feel pain," I murmured.

"I do. As much as you do." He was paler than before, and looked shaken.

I stood up then, and came over to the chaise longue. I sat beside him and touched his shoulder under the satin-he was very cool, not quite cold, but not warm-and then I touched his cheek. He was very smooth and soft, and there, cool too. "You didn't have to do that," I said, quite sobered up.

"Obviously I did." He looked up at me wearily. "It worked, right? You believe me now?"

"Yes." Under my fingertips his skin seemed to vibrate. "I will make you a deal," I said.

"Yes?"

"Let me know you," I said. "Study you. Hear your story. Then I'll... I'll do the humane thing."

He took my hands between his, and kissed my fingertips. "All right," he said. "Promise me."

"I promise," I said. "You promise you'll let me know you first, though. I must... lay you to rest properly. You can live on in other ways."

He nodded, closing his eyes.

Chapter Three.

"I sleep during the day," he said, "but I can go about in the day so long as I take care. Sunlight hurts my skin-burns me. I simply like night better. Not so many people about. I can conduct my business without looking so strange.

"You mustn't bother with any old superstitions. Very little hurts me. Only prolonged sunlight, immolation, being dismembered. Most don't make it as long as I. I avoid conflict. I try not to get dismembered or set on fire-perhaps a bad impulse, for it's allowed me to go on for this long. Most meet violent deaths before this point. Some go on longer. I am reaching the end of what I can stand-I am probably already going mad.

"I like it when you have garlic on your breath-please eat garlic. I love its smell on your skin. It's good for your blood.

"I cannot eat; once I could, but I stopped a long time ago. It seemed wasteful-I who do not need to consume food, stealing food from the mouths of those who need it to survive. I do not care for the less delicate natural functions of the human body, and once I was rid of them, did not wish to have them back again. It is one of the few freedoms I enjoy in this form."

Ricari spoke easily and fluidly as we walked at midnight along the piers at the Marina. It was cold now, but the rains had stopped, and I had put on a long scarf and gloves and joined him on his stroll. The cold did not seem to affect him much, though he was bareheaded, wearing only the London Fog coat over some black dress pants and a turtleneck sweater. He gesticulated in the free Italian style as he walked and talked, and often turned to me with a knowing look that reminded me of the Italian grandmothers in New Orleans. He had come to meet me after going to an evening mass, and he was aglow.

"How long have you been in San Francisco?" I asked.

"Eh... fifteen years..."

"And before that?"

"Before that, New York City. Before that, Canton-Hong Kong now. Before that Cornwall. Before that-"

"Before that?"

"Berlin," he said reluctantly.

"When was that?"

"Nineteen-twenties," he said.

"That must have been interesting," I said.

"Yes," Ricari replied distantly.

Sensing a dead end, I switched the subject. "How long do you stay in a place before leaving it?"

"Oh, it depends. Anywhere from a year to twenty or thirty years. Before it was easier. Not so many photographic records and things to give away the fact that I still look like a youth." The lean boyish face pouted, odd against the weary pattern of his speech. "I am coming up on my time to leave this place-I died, after all, and was buried. If that poor undertaker sees me passing on the street, he'll likely lose his mind and be locked up. That is where you come in."