Mortal Agent of a Vampire - Chapter 8

I have adapted and published a novella about this relationship, and thus will not repeat it here. Yes, I used feelings because I think that when Vince says he loves Leonie, he is not, or at least not exactly, referring to love. When he first met her, Leonie was a child, less than ten years old, and by then he had been floating around the world like a wisp of a ghost for a century.
Leonie was a German-Jew, a very dangerous status in her time, and her parents had been taken into a Nazi concentration camp, after which Leonie had never seen them again. She was fostered with relatives in Budapest, but soon Hungary fell as well. She was forced to flee. On the way, Vince meets her and becomes her protector.
Passing through Finland, they waited in the snow for seven days and seven nights in order to see the aurora borealis, however good luck did not come. Afterwards, they left Europe by boat. Under Vince’s tutelage, Leonie quickly adapts to her new surroundings and is adopted by a middle-class couple and enrolled in a girl’s school; a gray page passes and her life begins to get on track. Vince visits her occasionally, and when she is eighteen, they return to her homeland. The war has been extinguished, but the trauma is still fresh, and Leonie spends two years searching for her old acquaintance, and this time, fate does not disappoint, and she miraculously meets up with her later husband. He had been through almost exactly the same experiences as she had (except for the Vince part, of course), and they fell in love lightning fast, getting married on the return cruise. Vince left quietly, fading out, according to his own words.
He told me this that night as we lay on a blanket in a wicker basket looking up at the Aurora Borealis, and from his account I felt as if I had glimpsed a corner of his inner world. It would have been enough to be included in Chicken Soup for the Soul, given the sensationalism of the story, if his narration hadn’t been so dry that he couldn’t squeeze in a single lyrical adjective.
“Have you ever regretted it?” I asked when he had finished long enough for me to ask, the blue aurora still draped between heaven and earth, shifting, “I mean, I suppose you could have made her your own kind, so she would have stayed with you.” I don’t know why, but I felt a stifling feeling inside.
Vince gave a smile, “Love her and kill her, what a great suggestion.”
He was back to being the annoying Vince, “Come on, you’re the one who said it, it’s Christmas Eve.”
“Okay,” he gave in, “for a while the idea has been swirling around in my head, but, she refused, I didn’t want to force her, I wanted her to have options I didn’t have.”
I can understand Leonie, but ……
“It’s so ……” I ran out of words, “I really don’t know how you got over it, you saved her, only to watch her marry someone else, grow old, and then now…… ”
Vince looked at the sky, “If you had lived to be my age, you’d understand that memories are a burden you can’t carry around with you at all times.”
The stars in front of me seemed to align and reorganize, changing into a woman’s face, and I thought of Mina. I was the one who spent half of her life with her, but now, she was lying in someone else’s arms.
“But you never let go, do you?”
“Never.” Vince was honest now.
“I think you should at least tell her how you feel about her.”
Vince thought about it for a moment, as if considering it carefully, and then shook his head in a relentless manner, “It wouldn’t change anything.”
“At least you can say to yourself, I did what I could.” I continued to persuade him, “Look, just do it, bring her here and tell her that unlike you, she can’t wait long.”
Vince was silent and after a while he said, “I’ll think about it.”
I was satisfied that this was the first time he had been less authoritarian. Then, as if someone had flicked a switch out of nowhere, the atmosphere of openness changed. Vince became the cold, lonely vampire again, and I was his exhausted agent.
“Let’s go, I’m hungry.” He said.
“Good thing I brought this.” I waved the plastic bag in my hand triumphantly and realized that the turkey had long since frozen into a pile of ice, “Damn!”
Vince looked at me with a smile.
I don’t know how I got the idea to write a novel. I’ve written them before, but they all ended in failure. No publisher would buy them. So gradually, I stopped thinking of it as a career. But this was different, I wasn’t writing for pleasure but, rather, there was an idea stuck in my chest and I had to spit it out or else I’d be all over the place. I asked Vince for permission and he made me swear not to use it for publication or …… you know how he is with threats. I ignored him, that’s what I even planned to do in the first place, asking his permission was just going through the motions, now I’m not so afraid of him, he’s just talking anyway at best.
It was the evening of the twenty-sixth when I got back to Lapland, and I was surprised, I had been thinking that time was stuck on Christmas Eve (stupid). I had my picture taken with the supposedly UN-certified Santa Claus and had a Finnish bath, sorry to say I still prefer the Jacuzzi.
Once again, we boarded Vince’s private jet and he offered to take an inventory of his fixed assets. He does this every few years. I naively agreed with him, it’s just a house or two, right? But when he pulled out a world map, I began to reflect deeply on my mistake.
He had villas, vacation homes, office buildings, theaters or whatever in at least twenty-six countries, and even owned a couple of islands. God told me what he was doing buying a ranch as if he would be obsessed with milk, perfect camouflage.
I made a rough calculation that it would take more than a month to run through the trip, even if I didn’t count the layovers.
“I’ve got work to do,” I told him gravely, “and you know I’ve only got fifteen days’ vacation.”
“You promised me that just two minutes ago, do you want to go back on your word?” Vince asked provocatively.
I couldn’t find a rebuttal, “You bad heart.”
“Is this the first day you met me?” Vince tossed me a small book, “It’s got the address and contact details on it, memorize it.” With that, he walked into the aft cabin bedroom. I was left alone to battle with names of people and places I couldn’t even pronounce.
It was on this trip around the world that I began to write. The long flight gave me an isolated environment. The writing process went smoothly, almost instantly, and it only took me two weeks to finish. The entire story is drawn from Vince’s experiences and the characters in it, of course, use pseudonyms. The day my vacation ended, I made two phone calls.One to my parents to say that I was sorry I couldn’t make the ski trip (no wonder) and that I had a very important job that required me to be away for a couple of months, and the second to the newspaper to say that my family and I were on a ski trip ……
The finishing touches only took me two or three days of work, mostly wrestling with the question of whether ‘beautiful’ or ‘pretty’ would be a more appropriate word for such innocuous The main point was to decide whether “beautiful” or “pretty” would be more appropriate for this kind of harmless detail. When it was finished, I showed it to Vince. We were at his estate in Montpellier.
“I’ll read it.” he said, and casually placed it on the coffee table. I thought he was probably just being perfunctory, and I was a little disappointed.
But by the time I’d directed the workers to fix the leaky balcony (which was super hard with my French), I noticed that the manuscript showed signs of flipping, and Vince had made corrections in pencil. He clicked off my big, witty paragraphs without mercy, making the lines subdued, which was a pleasant surprise. In another place, I was particularly struck by the fact that next to a lingering inner monologue, he wrote, “I’m not a lover!” with two thick, black horizontal lines drawn at the bottom.
I have to say, he’s a pro. I was worried that the story would be too short as a long story and too long as a short story, and after his redactions, the problem was completely solved, and I immediately sealed it up and sent it to an editor.
Waiting for a reply, we traveled through Naples, Cairo, a deserted place in central Australia that supposedly turned out to be a gemstone mine or something …… On some coral atoll in the Pacific, wearing only a pair of swim trunks, we dove into a cavern under a mountain peak formed by an undersea volcano eruption, with beams of sunlight streaming into deep blue The sunlight beams into the deep blue, swarms of jellyfish are like sea elves, floating up and down, translucent soft body seems to disappear into the water at any time.
At sunset, I received a reply. It was delivered to me by our sexy air hostess. I opened it while lying on the beach in what must have been the most peaceful and beautiful moment of my life.
I looked at it and laughed out softly.
The sea breeze sang its mother’s lullaby. In the distance the ocean and the sky seemed like two connected pieces of silk, all drenched in orange-red by the setting sun; if God really existed, he must have used PS to turn the whole world into a warm color. Vince was sitting next to me, wearing a pair of Harley sunglasses, he must have heard me laughing, “Looks like there’s going to be another trashy novel on the market.” He sighed falsely.
“A trashy biography, to be precise?” I held up my hand, “High five?”
He tilted his sunglasses down and looked at my paw with the eyes of a housewife picking out pig’s feet at the supermarket, then righted his sunglasses, “I’d better congratulate you in my mind.”
The editor’s reply to my letter was a single sentence, “You should write a foreword to this book as soon as possible.”
Writing the foreword was harder than I thought it would be because I wanted to be all things to all people, and I made a long list of everyone from my parents to my elementary school homeroom teacher, hating to even thank the hot dog vendor downstairs from the newspaper office (that was usually my lunch), and then as if it were time for the oven to come on, a ‘ding’ rang through my head, and I crumpled up the scrawled mess of paper and scribbled the words on a new sheet of paper, “The I would like to dedicate this book to Vince.”
“Go away.” Vince said when I had sealed the letter. The air was starting to get cooler and the first stars appeared in the night sky.
“Where to? It better not be Antarctica.”
“Too bad, I was going to see the penguins.” Vince matched my flirtation in a rare way, then he shook his head, “No, let’s go home.”
“Really?” I looked back at his map of real estate, there were still plenty of places on it that didn’t have little red flags on them.
The sun had sunk almost completely to sea level, like a burnt out piece of charcoal, struggling to flash one last bit of red before disappearing.
Vince stared at the undulating waves, “I’ve thought about it, and I’m taking you up on your offer.”
“What?”
“I want to see Leonie.”
His voice was as deep as a sandbag.

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