All Together Dead

more prepared for all the new things I faced in the city of Rhodes. Johan Glassport closed his book and looked at us, as if he were now ready to talk.
    “Mr. Glassport, have you been to Rhodes before?” Mr. Cataliades asked.
    “Yes,” the lawyer answered. “I used to practice in Rhodes. Actually, I used to commute between Rhodes and Chicago; I lived midway between.”
    “When did you go to Mexico?” I asked.
    “Oh, a year or two ago,” he answered. “I had some disagreements with business associates here, and it seemed a good time to…”
    “Get the heck out of the city?” I supplied helpfully.
    “Run like hell?” Diantha suggested.
    “Take the money and vanish?” Mr. Cataliades said.
    “All of the above,” said Johan Glassport with the faintest trace of a smile.

Chapter 9
    It was midafternoon when we arrived in Rhodes. There was an Anubis truck waiting to onload the coffins and transport them to the Pyramid of Gizeh. I looked out the limo windows every second of the ride into the city, and despite the overwhelming presence of the chain stores we also saw in Shreveport, I had no doubt I was in a different place. Heavy red brick, city traffic, row houses, glimpses of the lake…I was trying to look in all directions at once. Then we came into view of the hotel; it was amazing. The day wasn’t sunny enough for the bronze glass to glint, but the Pyramid of Gizeh looked impressive anyway. Sure enough, there was the park across the six-lane street, which was seething with traffic, and beyond it the vast lake.
    While the Anubis truck pulled around to the back of the Pyramid to discharge its load of vampires and luggage, the limo swept up to the front of the hotel. As we daytime creatures scooted out of the car, I didn’t know what to look at first: the broad waters or the decorations of the structure itself.
    The main doors of the Pyramid were manned by a lot of maroon-and-beige uniformed men, but there were silent guardians, too. There were two elaborate reproductions of sarcophagi placed in an upright position, one on each side of the main lobby doors. They were fascinating, and I would have enjoyed the chance to examine both of them, but we were swept into the building by the staff. One man opened the car door, one examined our identification to make sure we were registered guests—not human reporters, curiosity seekers, or assorted fanatics—and another pushed open the door of the hotel to indicate we should enter.
    I’d stayed in a vampire hotel before, so I expected the armed guards and the lack of ground floor windows. The Pyramid of Gizeh was making more of an effort to look a bit like a human hotel than Dallas’s Silent Shore had; though the walls held murals imitating Egyptian tomb art, the lobby was bright with artificial light and horribly perky with piped-in music—“The Girl from Ipanema” in a vampire hotel.
    The lobby was busier than the Silent Shore’s, too.
    There were lots of humans and other creatures striding around purposefully, lots of action at the check-in desk, and some milling around the hospitality booth put up by the host city’s vampire nest. I’d gone with Sam to a bar supply convention in Shreveport once when he was shopping for a new pump system, and I recognized the general setup. Somewhere, I was sure, there would be a convention hall with booths, and a schedule of panels or demonstrations.
    I hoped there would be a map of the hotel, with all events and locations noted, in our registration packet. Or were the vampires too snooty for such mundane aids? No, there was a hotel diagram framed and lit for the perusal of guests and scheduled tours. This hotel was numbered in reverse order. The top floor, the penthouse, was numbered 1. The bottom, largest floor—the human floor—was numbered 15. There was a mezzanine between the human floor and lobby, and there were large convention rooms in the annex to the northern side of the hotel, the rectangular windowless projection that had looked so odd in the Internet picture.
    I eyed people scurrying through the lobby—maids, bodyguards, valets, bellmen…. Here we were, all us little human beavers, scurrying around to get things ready for the undead conventioneers. (Could you call them that, when this was billed as a summit? What was the difference?) I felt a little sour when I wondered why this was the order of things, when a few years ago, the vampires were the ones doing the scurrying, and that was back into a