Chapters (60)
- DAW Books Presents
- HAPPY HOURINHELL
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Dedication
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- interlude
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- interlude
- thirteen
- fourteen
- interlude
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- interlude
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- forty-one
- forty-two
- forty-three
- forty-four
- forty-five
- forty-six
- forty-seven
- forty-eight
- epilogue
Vera had taken so much out of me that Belle had hardly bothered to slap me around, and now she looked at me with genuine amusement. “Hate men? That just shows you know nothing. For me, men have never been worth hating. A means to an end, that’s all. All my husbands, my boyfriends, my lodgers, they brought me money. I didn’t need them alive to spend it with me—in fact, I didn’t want to argue about how to spend it—so I did away with them. But if it had been women I could have lured, women who had the money, well, so it would have been. I certainly killed a few. But my lady, she is very different. She loves. She loves so much that she is helpless against it.”
“It’s a pretty goddamn funny way to show it.”
Belle shook her head, her big jaw jutting with irritation. “It’s a perfect way to show it. She’s like a butterfly. She lives for love, and she dies for love.”
“She’s not the one dying.”
Belle grunted, then reached out and gave me a lazy slap that loosened a few of my teeth. “You understand nothing. Do you know why she is called Lady Zinc?”
My ears were still ringing from the blow. It was all I could do to shake my head.
“Back in the old life, in Bucharest, she was a wealthy woman. She took many lovers. Nobody ever saw those lovers again. She made only one mistake—letting a local banker into her bed. When he vanished his wife made a stink. The police came, and when they searched Vera’s house they found nearly three dozen zinc coffins in her cellar, each with a window over the corpse’s face, all those zinc boxes arranged like a group of admirers at a party. There was even a chair so Vera could sit and speak to them, look at them, all her beloved, unfaithful lovers. She couldn’t bear to lose them to other women, so when she saw their interest beginning to die, she poisoned them, and they died, too. Too much love, you see? Too much love. It was quite beautiful.” Belle put her great, callused hand on my face and shoved me against the headboard so my brain rattled in my skull. “She offered you a love like that, and you spat in her face. You will not be one of her immortals, like those men were.”
And that was what I was left with, as I struggled through another desperate, painful night trying to scrape through the heavy leather strap on my wrist. Zinc coffins. Thirty or more. That was the measure of Vera’s love. I was only the latest, and I wasn’t even going to have the distinction of earning one of those gray metal boxes.