“He could have been,” I agreed. “So, either he puked, or he bit and then held the victim until he bled out. But what for?”

“To confuse us all and mislead the investigation.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, shaking my head. “Why confuse things? Why leave the marks of a vampire’s bite and drain away the blood? They’re very careful with it; they wouldn’t just pour it away. Our vampires even have a saying for novices: ‘Blood spilled on the ground is mother’s milk wasted.’”

“You can always find a way to make sense of anything,” Foma declared didactically. “For example-the killer vampire needed to make us suspect a young, hungry vampire. So he bit the boy but he didn’t drink, just poured the blood away, hoping that it wouldn’t be found. Or the vampire was hungry, but as soon as he bit, he realized what he’d done and decided to pour the blood away, to create the impression of falsified evidence…”

Completely carried away now, I fluttered my hands in the air, as if I was talking to Gesar. “Oh, come on, Bo-Foma! You can come up with lots of theories, but I’ve never met a hungry vampire who would leave the blood once he had his fangs in. This argument isn’t getting us anywhere. What’s far more important is why the boy was killed. Was he a random victim? Then we really do have to look for a tourist or a novice. Or did someone have a special reason for killing Victor?”

“A vampire can kill a man with a single blow,” said Foma. “And without even touching him. Why would he leave any clues behind? Victor could have died from a heart attack, and no one would have suspected a thing.”

“Agreed,” I said with a nod. “Then…then your Master is right. It’s some vampire from out of town, and the boy just happened to be in the wrong place. He bit him, then got frightened and puked up the blood…”

“It looks that way,” Foma agreed. “But there’s still something bothering me, Anton.”

We finished our beer without another word.

“Have you tried testing traces from the body?” I asked.

I didn’t have to say that I meant traces left by an aura.

“A dead aura from a dead body?” Foma said with a skeptical shake of his head. “That’s never been much help. But we did try. No traces were found… Tell me, watchman, what else did you see that was unusual in the Dungeons?”

“There are Others working there,” I said. “There’s no blue moss, although the place is overflowing with emotions. Someone cleans it out regularly.”

“There are no Others working there,” Foma snapped. “The blue moss just doesn’t grow there.”

I looked at him uncertainly.

“Out of interest, we tried bringing it in from outside. It withers and falls off in an hour. A sort of natural anomaly.”

“Well…it happens, I suppose,” I said, making a mental note to check in the archives.

“It does,” Foma agreed. “Anton, I’d like to ask you not to leave the investigation just yet. There’s something here that really bothers me. Try having a word with Victor’s girlfriend.”

“Is the girl still here?”

“Of course. The police asked her not to leave town. The Alex City Hotel, not far from here. I think it will be easier for you to make contact with her.”

“Do you suspect her of something?”

Foma shook his head. “She’s just an ordinary person… It’s something else. She’s taking her lover’s death very hard, but cooperating willingly with the police. Still, maybe a fellow Russian will find it easier to get through to her. A gesture, a glance, a word-any little thing. I really don’t want to close this case and leave everything to the police, Anton.”

“And it would be a good thing to meet the owner of the Dungeons of Scotland, too,” I said.

“That won’t get you anywhere,” Foma said dismissively.

“Why not?”

“Because those stupid Dungeons belong to me!” Foma said with loathing.

“But-” I broke off. “Well…but then…”

“What then? I have a small holding company, Scottish Colours, that works in the tourist business. Our Night Watch is a shareholder in the company, and the profits go to finance its activities. We organize musical events and circus performances, we have shares in a few hotels, four pubs, the Dungeons of Scotland, three tour buses, and an agency that takes tourists to the Scottish lochs. How else would you like us to earn our money?” He laughed. “The whole of Edinburgh lives off the tourists. If you go to Glasgow and you find yourself in the suburbs, you’ll see a frightening sight-buildings on the point of collapse, hotels boarded up, factories closed down. Industry is dying. It’s not profitable to produce goods in Europe any longer, but it is profitable to produce services. What else should an old bard do but run concerts and tourist attractions?”

“I understand, it was just unexpected…”

“There aren’t any Others working there,” Foma repeated. “It’s a strange place…the blue moss doesn’t grow there… That was why I bought the land in the first place. But I didn’t find anything unusual.”

“Then could the murder have been intended as a blow against you?” I asked. “Against you personally and the Night Watch of Edinburgh? Does someone want to compromise Light Ones?”

Foma smiled and stood up.

“That’s what I need you for, Anton. To have a powerful magician from the outside involved in the investigation. Have a word with Valeria, all right? And don’t put it off.”

But I ended up having to put off the meeting with Valeria for a little while after all.

When I was already almost at the hotel, I saw yet another crowd of tourists gathered in a circle around a performing street artist. There was a whole rainbow of tiny little colored balls flying up in the air above the people’s heads, and somehow I knew who I was going to see, even though Egor had called himself a conjurer and not a juggler.

In actual fact, there were five performers there. Three young guys in bright circus clothes were taking a break. A young girl in a flowing, semitransparent dress was going around to the spectators with a tray, and they were gladly putting in coins and notes.

At the moment, only Egor was performing. He was wearing a black suit and white shirt, with a bow tie-looking very well-groomed and quite different from the crowd in their summery clothes.

Egor was juggling with the colored balls. But not simply juggling… His right hand was shooting red, blue, and green balls no bigger than a cherry high up into the air. The open palm swiveled with emphatic slowness, demonstrating that there was nothing in it. Then the fingers folded together and the whole hand swung rapidly-and another ball went soaring upward. His left hand caught the falling balls and crumpled them into his fist, breaking off the rainbow, then immediately opened again-empty.

The little balls came from nowhere and disappeared into nowhere. There were more and more of them all the time, as if Egor didn’t have enough time to take back out of the air everything that he had thrown up into it. The colored parabola kept growing brighter and brighter, denser and denser, turning into a gleaming, glittering rope of color. It was dazzling. The movements of his fingers became so fast that they exceeded the ability of any prestidigitator. The spectators held their breath. The sounds of the street rolled up to that motionless circle of people and died, like the murmuring waves of a distant sea. The colored cord fluttered through Egor’s hands.

The tension grew and grew. The girl stopped collecting money-nobody was looking at her now in any case. She turned toward Egor and looked at him with eyes filled with love and delight.

Egor suddenly jerked both his hands-and he was left holding a fluttering, brightly colored ribbon.

The spectators applauded as if they just woke up.

I recalled the hoary old joke about the conjurer who came to a circus looking for a job. “I go out onstage and juggle with different-colored fish, get it? And then they fly up into the big top and disappear. The only thing is, I haven’t figured out how to do it yet…”