Late on a summer night thirty years later, Lilia met Larry in front of Reliquary on West Broadway at the trashy end of Soho. Tense, knowing things had to go just right; she noticed he wore the napkin with the Maud’s Place logo displayed like a handkerchief in his jacket pocket. She did wonder where he had told Boyd he was going.
Cabs cruised and groups of young people searched for afterhours clubs. On weekends near the solstice, Saturday darkness comes later and Sunday morning is very early. There’s almost no place left for the night.
Larry looked at the sign, the darkened windows, and shabby aura of the store. “Some amazing times here,” he remarked and shook his head.
Once it had been different: Cool Reliquary! the ads in the Village Voice had said. Not Your Mommy’s Kind of Boutique—Not Your Daddy’s Either had been the title of the article in New York Magazine just after the shop opened in the early eighties.
Suitable designer styles were offered: capes in a variety of lengths, parasols to keep the sun out of the eyes, shirts and blouses that displayed best half open and exposing the throat and neck.
Then there was the tchotchkes, relics from what turned out to have been an endless succession of mysterious clubs and salons. Fra Diablo just off Union Square had attracted rumor and curiosity in the 1870s, the Bat Bar flourished just after the turn of the century. Club Indigo in Harlem in the late twenties had introduced white patrons to an impeccable African American staff and entertainment that could only be talked about in whispers.
“All those venues and every one of them produced artifacts,” Larry said. “Certain individuals liked to have stuff like that around. Other people in the know would be aware of their interests without a word being spoken.”
The two talked over old times as they walked toward Sixth Avenue while looking for a cab. They remembered the time that Nightwalkers first showed up at the Mudd Club, the way columnists in the Village Voice hinted at a craze that was not quite drugs or sex. The New Yorker had said, “Some call it a very old European tradition.”
Everyone wanted artifacts, to take back to Westchester, to Chicago, to Paris, to Rome, a sign that they’d had at least a brush with the tingly and strange. Reliquary was where they got them.
“Daylight was something to be endured,” Larry said. “We lived at night.”
Lilia remembered those times like she’d seen them through the wrong end of binoculars. But she wasn’t going to contradict him or mention the crash that followed the boom.
For her, it began when her dentist noticed the way her teeth had grown and ordered her out of his office. Then, on one of Lilia’s rare visits to the Philadelphia suburbs, her mother mentioned the pallor. “Are those hickeys?” she had asked, catching sight of the bite marks on Lilia’s neck.
She remembered the day the newspaper and magazine articles suddenly turned sour. BLOOD CRAZED! the tabloids screamed. CONTAGIOUS DISEASE DISGUISED AS HIP CULT the magazines cried.
Rich kids’ families pulled them into elite and expensive therapy. Everyone else ended up in city hospitals and day clinics. Ichordone, horrible and soul deadening, was the methadone of vampirism. She wondered if Larry had managed to forget about that, guessed he had, and saw no reason to remind him.
At Sixth Avenue they found a cab and rode uptown through the Village and the old Ladies Mile. Groups hung about the corners, stood in front of the desecrated church that had been a nightclub. For a moment, on a side street, Lilia thought she saw a figure in a cape. She felt Larry tense and knew he’d seen it too.
“It’s always been cycles, hasn’t it?” he murmured. She said nothing. “Every twenty-five, thirty years: one is overdue,” he said, and she nodded.
The cab turned on Twenty-Fifth Street and stopped at the Garage. This last stronghold of the Flea Market was set in the middle of the block and went right through to Twenty-Fourth. The official opening was eight a.m. but dealers were already getting read. Their vans rolled up and down the garage ramps and visitors were slipping in along with them.
A thin young woman and buff boy in black went down the ramp to the lower level. Lilia let Larry take the lead and follow them down. She wondered if all this was going to work.
The place had none of the mystery of the predawn flea market. It smelled of exhaust and bad coffee and was lighted so there was no need for flashlights. Older buyers watched dealers unpack their stock.
The couple in black drifted towards the back of the selling floor and a little knot of young people just out of the bars and clubs in a far corner.
Larry headed in that direction without looking to see if Lilia was with him. She was a step or two behind, following him back into a world they’d once known.
She knew what he was going to find: place cards with celebrity names: Cole Porter, Winston Guest, and Dorothy Parker from Club Indigo. Delicate fans decorated with cats baring their teeth from the Golden Palace, which had flourished down in Chinatown once upon a time. And, of course, salted into the mix were a few items from Myrna’s Place. This was the contents of the parcel Lilia had been given on Roosevelt Island a couple of days before.
She watched the way Larry took in not only the items for sale but also the ones who had come to look at them. A few more kids stopped by. This was a gathering spot like their booth had been thirty years before.
They looked at Larry and his napkin with its crest of lips and teeth displayed. He asked the dealer where she had gotten the stuff and if she had any more.
The dealer was Eastern European and had trouble with English on certain occasions. She said a woman had sold them and hadn’t left a name. No she didn’t have any more. She was good at this and didn’t once glance Lilia’s way.
The onlookers stirred. Lilia turned and saw figures in sunglasses moving in the shadows cast by pillars and vans. Nightwalkers had arrived. A new, less formal generation in shorts and flip-flops, though Lilia noticed that several still wore capes.
Other dealers and their customers paused and shook their heads. Lilia’s spine crawled. She wondered if all this was worth it. Then she saw something that again confirmed fate was with her.
The young writer of the Alice and the Vampires book was seemingly borne along as a kind of trophy by the Nightwalkers. His eyes were wide and he looked dazed. His shirt was open and several small puncture wounds ringed his neck and throat.
Larry’s eyes widened and Lilia knew he’d once again found his exclusive clique. Clearly it was open to the young and pretty, but perhaps also to the well-to-do.
He reached for his wallet, asked the dealer how much she wanted for the lot of vampire tchotchkes. He didn’t flinch at the gouger price Lilia had told her to charge. The crowd seemed disturbed by this interloper.