2
Benji Mahmoud
I FIGURED THAT Benji Mahmoud was probably twelve years old when Marius made him a vampire, but no one knew for sure, including Benji. He’d been born in Israel to a Bedouin family, then hired and imported into the United States by the family of a young female piano player named Sybelle—who was clearly insane—so that he could be Sybelle’s companion. Both young people met the Vampire Armand in New York in the mid-1990s but weren’t inducted into the Blood till a little later, when Marius worked the Dark Trick on both of them as a gift to Armand. Of course Armand was furious, felt betrayed, deplored that the human lives of his charges had been cut short, etcetera, but Marius had done the only thing that could be done with two humans who were living for all practical purposes in Our World and fast losing taste for any other. Human wards like that are hostages to fortune. And Armand should have known that, that some vampire enemy or other was going to knock off one or the other or both of these two young people just to get at Armand. That’s the way such things can too easily go.
So Marius brought them over.
I was not myself in those days. I was battered and broken thanks to my adventures with Memnoch, a spirit who claimed to have been “the Devil” of the Christian belief system, and I scarcely noticed all this, only knowing that I loved the music that Sybelle made and little more.
By the time I took real notice of Benji Mahmoud, he was living in New York with Armand and Louis and Sybelle, and he had invented the radio station. As I mentioned earlier, it was broadcast at first, but Benji was far too inventive to put up with the mortal world’s constraints on him for long, and he soon operated the program as an internet radio stream out of the townhouse on the Upper East Side, often speaking to the Children of the Darkness nightly and inviting their phone calls from all over the world.
In the broadcast days, Benji had talked in a low voice, under Sybelle’s music, a voice that without specific enhancement couldn’t be heard by mortal ears, hoping that the vampires of the world would get the message. Trouble was, a lot of the vampires couldn’t hear him either. So when Benji went to internet radio he dropped that trick. He just talked, talked to Us and paid no attention whatsoever to the vampire-fiction enthusiasts or little Goths who called the show, weeding them out by the timbre of their voices easily enough to devote his on-air time to real Children of Darkness.
Sybelle’s exquisite piano music was a major part of the show, and sometimes they broadcast as much as five or six hours a night, and sometimes not at all. But Benji’s message was soon heard from one end of the Earth to the other:
We are a tribe; we want to survive; and the elders aren’t helping us.
Now when he first started to talk of this—of the parentless and the undefended haunting every city on Earth and the negligence and selfishness of the “elders,” I thought surely somebody would take offense, shut him down, or at least set him back in some dramatic way.
But Benji was right about things. I was not. Nobody bothered to stop him because in fact nobody cared. And Benji went on talking to the mavericks and rogues and orphans who called his line at night about how to be careful, how to persevere, how to feed on the evildoer, and cover up the kill, and remember always that the world belongs to humans.
Benji gave the Undead everywhere an argot as well, peppering his commentaries with terms from the Vampire Chronicles, including some I hadn’t used before, or ever heard perhaps, establishing a language for all to share. Interesting, that. Or at least I found it so.
A couple of times I went to New York just to spy on Benji. He’d developed a definite personal style by then. He wore expertly tailored three-piece suits, usually in gray- or brown-striped worsted wool, gorgeous pastel dress shirts, and flashing Brooks Brothers silk ties, and he always wore a black felt Italian-made fedora, the perfect gangster hat, and spick-and-span wing-tip shoes.
As the result, even with his small build, small bones, small round cheerful little face, and glittering black eyes, he didn’t look like a child at all, but like a little man, and that had become his favorite pet name for himself. “Little Man.” Little Man owned more than five galleries in Chelsea and SoHo, a Greenwich Village restaurant just off Washington Square, and an old-fashioned haberdashery shop where he bought his hats. He had legal papers galore, including a legal driver’s license, plus credit cards, cell phones, a bicycle or two, and often drove his restored MG TD sports car in New York on summer nights, but mostly went about in a chauffeur-driven black Lincoln stretch limousine, and spent a lot of time in cafés and restaurants pretending to dine with mortals who found him fascinating. He and Sybelle hunted well in the back alleys. They both knew the art of the Little Drink and could satisfy themselves with any number of Little Drinks at nightclubs and charity balls without ever taking a life or disabling some innocent victim.
And whereas Sybelle was something of a remote and mysterious presence at his side—gorgeous in designer gowns and costly gems—Benji had scores of human friends, who thought of him as eccentric and amusing and delightful with his “vampire radio show,” which they considered “performance art” of the most clever sort, assuming he supplied all the voices for the show, including the Japanese- and Chinese-speaking Children of the Night who called in and talked for hours in their native tongue, taxing Benji’s preternatural powers to the max as he strove to keep up with them.
In sum, Benji was a wild success as a vampire. He had a website backing up the radio show and an e-mail address, and sometimes read e-mails over the air, so to speak, but it always came back to the same thing: We’re a tribe, and as a tribe we need to stick together, have loyalty, care about one another, and figure on lasting in this world where immortals could be burnt up or decapitated like anybody else. The elders have sold us out!
And always, always, there was Benji’s warning to the Undead: “Don’t come to New York. Don’t try to find me. I’m here for you by phone and by e-mail, but never set foot in this town, or you’ll have to face Armand, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.” In fact, he was always warning them that no one city could really support the numbers of vampires being Born to Darkness now, and fledglings had to be clever, had to seek out new territories, and had to learn to live in peace with others.
On the phone, the callers spilled their woe. They were anxious and afraid; they deplored the brawls happening all over; and they were scared to death of the ancient ones who would burn you up on sight. In vain they searched for the great Lestat, the great Marius, the great Pandora, on and on and on.
Over and over Benji commiserated, advised, and sometimes just shared their grief. “They don’t help us, do they?” Benji would declare. “Why did Lestat write his books! Where is the great scholar David Talbot, and what of the great Jesse Reeves, Born to Darkness in the arms of the ancient Maharet? What a selfish, self-centered, and self-obsessed bunch they are!”
And then he’d start with his “Lestat, where are you?”
Like I’m one of the elders? Come on, now, seriously!
Well, in terms of influence, yes. Of course. I wrote my autobiography. I became the famous rock star, like for five minutes! I wrote the story of how Akasha was destroyed and how the fount of power was taken out of her and into the vampire Mekare. I admit. I did all that. I wrote and published my account of the Body Thief and of Memnoch. Okay, okay. And yes, if my rock music and rock videos hadn’t been loosed into the world, the old queen Akasha might never have risen from her throne and worked the Great Burning, in which vampires all over the planet were turned to ashes. My fault, okay, I admit it.
But I have what?—two hundred and thirty-three years in the Blood? Something like that. As I said before, I’m a brat by anybody’s standards, a reckless kid!
The real elders, the ones he was always taunting, insulting, and deriding, were the Children of the Millennia—the great immortals—Marius, and Pandora, and the ancient twins, of course, Mekare and Maharet, and their companion Khayman. Benji made that clear enough.
“How can this Mekare be the Queen of the Damned if she does not rule?” Benji would ask. “Does not her twin, Maharet, care for us as a great vampire family? And where is Khayman, old as the twins are, and why does he not care for us as we struggle through the world seeking for answers? How is it that Jesse, young Jesse of our world, does not urge these ancient ones to listen to our voices?”
All this was amazing to me and scary to me, as I’ve explained. But even if no one moved to silence Benjamin, was it going to come to anything? Was it going to make anything happen?
And all the while, other things were happening, bad things. Really bad things. And some good things too perhaps.
Benji was not the only vampire doing something entirely new under the stars of Heaven.
There was Fareed, who had come along well before Benji. And I hadn’t thought Fareed would last either.