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“In Venice, I employed a poor, young, ambitious carpenter to help with my home. He told me it was his dream to construct a huge ship, and believed he could sell it for a great deal of money. He showed me plans and drawings, and I was fascinated by his vision. I invested, bought all the materials he would need. I rented him a warehouse, and I paid the workers. The boat hebuilt was magnificent, and it sold for an extraordinary amount of money. I made back three times what I had invested, and he entered the merchant class overnight. The merchants of Venice were richer than kings at that time, and you could feel the Old World ending as the new one was being born all around us. We immediately started working on three new ships.
“I doubled, then tripled my wealth in Venice, and never lacked for fresh blood and transient people. I met a woman who enjoyed being fed upon, which was a revelation. It was a luscious time in my life. I met the first of my kind there, and we hunted together. She showed me ways of life I could not have dreamed of, meeting other vampires to feast on girls we lured in with trinkets, much like what is happening here, now, to your classmates.”
Saber swallowed but didn’t say anything.
“I was in Venice for almost seventy years, then I traveled. I went to Florence, Paris, the Netherlands where I built another ship, outfitted it for my own purposes, and was part of the import-export boom that began there at that time, traveling to Japan to buy cloth, jade, paper, and the most exquisite porcelain from China.
“I went, next, to London. I heard more and more about traders and explorers going to the Americas, but I was, at that time, still in love with Europe. When a gentleman from England settled in Virginia and started a new society there, I took notice. The thought of starting over as a farmer intrigued me, and I was growing bored of urban living. I had a boat built, as I had that expertise, outfitted it with everything I would need to survive on board, and packed the rest of it with goods that were of value in the colonies, cloth, glassware, cutlery, farming tools, that sort of thing. It was the beginning of my involvement in the West Indian Trade, and it was terribly popular.”
“Weren’t slaves—”
“I didn’t do slaves,” he said shortly. “Not out of any humanitarian impulse. I felt it was a dirty, corrupt business, and while I don’t have any particular empathy for mankind, I did not want to be associated with the kind of businessmen who lacked even the most basic moral capacity. I had been a vampire, by that time, for almost three hundred years, and I couldn’t really see much difference between an African slave and a European nobleman. I could adopt the behavior of the upper classes if I wanted to participate insociety, but it was a charade, a pretense. I had seen many times firsthand how savage and ugly people of any class could be. Class, social class, is nothing but a thin veil draped over a stew of savagery, pettiness, and greed.”
“So you became a farmer in Virginia?”
Ansel smiled.
“No, I never got around to doing any farming. Can you imagine me working in a field? I stuck with trade, ship building, and stayed in the cities. When rebellion came, I played both sides, selling goods to both the Americans and the English, but did secretly hope for the success of the rebels, because they were more interesting. And then I became, without having exactly chosen it for myself, an American.”
23
“It’s getting late, Saber,” Ansel said then.
“That’s ok.”
“I’m almost done.”
Saber nodded.
“In the coming decades, in New York I really started my art collection. I was friends with Winslow Homer, who had an apartment there during that time. He sold me that painting you noticed.
“I became too conspicuous in New York, it’s a small town in its way, so I moved, briefly, to Cuba, came back to the mainland, and went on to a new city, San Francisco, in a private train car. There were many others of my kind in San Francisco at that time. The city was almost entirely transient persons, new arrivals, and the streets crawled with sailors and prostitutes. If a hundred people had gone missing every night, no one would have noticed or cared, a dynamic that attracts vampires like flies to rotting fruit.
“There was an earthquake in San Francisco, and I was there for the rebuilding. The Panama Canal opened, I built more ships, and watched the city, the state of California, go through a population explosion. I helped build cargo ships, then partsfor air-craft carriers. After the world wars I became obsessed with computers, learning what they were and how they worked, and invested in semiconductors and other new technologies. It took several hundred years, but I finally found something more fascinating than ship building. I was in San Francisco for over a hundred years, the longest I had stayed anywhere, because California has a short attention span. I could reinvent myself every few decades and never have to worry about running in the same social circles as I had before. There were always new people, new money, new industries.”
“What changed?” Saber asked. “Why did you leave?”
“Seattle started growing as a city, and the long nights really appealed to me. I was ready to start over, and this time I wanted to be close to a city, but have privacy, separation. Cities in California are crowded, and I almost hadn’t noticed the way the world was kind of closing in.”
“So, the island?”
“It’s kind of a perfect place for vampires. There were a few already here when I arrived. More have come. There’s something nice about knowing they’re here without having to live with them. We do occasionally socialize.”
Saber felt her focus shift. This was useful information.
“How many?” she asked. “How many vampires live on the island?”
Ansel tilted his head from side to side, thinking.
“Ten? Somewhere in that range.”
“I’d think more people would go missing.”
“They go to Seattle to hunt.”
“And you?”
“I don’t know if I want to tell you that.”
