Anno Dracula 1918 - The Bloody Red Baron (11 page)

Many of the audience were on their feet, pressing close to the stage. At the Folies, they would be cheering and whooping, making a display of gay goodfellow abandon. Here, they were intent and silent, holding breath, eyes on the stage, shutting out their comrades. How many of these men would want it known that they were patrons of the Raoul Privache?

'When she was guillotined, did someone stick her head back on to her body?'

She bit into her own wrist, gnawing through the artery, and began sucking. Blood rushed through the collapsing tube and she swallowed, gulping steadily.

'No, they buried her,' Beauregard explained. 'Her body rotted but her head
grew
another. It took ten years.'

She paused for breath and sneered at the audience, blood speckling her chin, then redoubled her attack. As she sucked, her extended fingers twisted into a useless fist.

'Of course, some say she hasn't been the same woman since.'

'How far can she go?'

'Can she consume herself entirely so that there's nothing left? She hasn't yet.'

Isolde's raw flesh changed colour as she sucked the blood out of it, but her face flushed, bloated.

'I think we've seen enough,' Beauregard said, standing.

Winthrop was relieved. He did not want to be a part of Isolde's audience.

They stepped into the corridor. Dravot stood by the door, reading
Comic Cuts.
Beauregard and the sergeant were old comrades.

'Danny, are you looking after our young lieutenant?'

'I do my best, sir.'

Beauregard laughed. 'Glad to hear it. The fate of the Empire may rest on him.'

Winthrop could not shake Isolde from his mind.

'Shall we take the air, Edwin?'

They left the theatre. It was a relief to get out into clean cold. The snow did not settle, leaving slushy residue on the pavement. Winthrop and Beauregard strolled, Dravot following about twenty paces behind.

'When I was your age,' Beauregard said 'this was not the world in which I expected to grow old.'

Winthrop had been born in 18%, after the Terror. To him, vampires were as natural a part of the world as Dutchmen or deer. From his father, he understood what every Englishman of Beauregard's generation had lived through, the mental adjustments everyone was forced to make during the Terror.

'I remember a time when Lord Ruthven wasn't Prime Minister and Edward Albert Victor wasn't King. Since neither gentleman shows any intention of dying, it may b£ that they will hold their positions well beyond my lifetime. And yours, should you not take the opportunity to turn.'

'Turn? Become a thing like
that>'

He nodded back at the Raoul Privache, thinking of Isolde's blood-veined eyes as she sucked herself stupid.

'Not all vampires are of her line. They are not a race apart, Edwin. Not all demons and monsters. They're simply ourselves expanded. From birth, we change in a million ways. Vampires are more changed than the warm.'

Winthrop had, of course, thought of turning. Shortly after his father's death, his mother tried to persuade him to seek the Dark Kiss, to preserve himself from mortality. At seventeen, he had not been ready. Now, he was no surer. Besides, he knew it was not a simple decision: there was the question of bloodline.

'The best woman I ever knew was a vampire,' Beauregard said, 'and the worst man.'

Miles away, there was an explosion. Tongues of flame licked the sky, outlining the whale-shape of a Zeppelin. There had been more air raids in the last month. Parisians had taken to calling the incendiary devices that fell 'Valentines from the Kaiser'. Zeppelins had to fly at such altitudes that it was impossible to drop bombs on precise targets, so anyone and anything could be destroyed. There was no real military purpose to the raids; Dracula had decreed a policy of
Schrecklichkeit,
'frightfulness', to batter the morale of the Allies.

'Before we next talk, I want you to read this,' Beauregard said, handing over an envelope. 'You might call it a deathbed confession. A woman who was shot this morning told me her story and I've done my best to set it down in her own words. It's a trick worth cultivating, to remember exactly what people say. Often, you will find they have told you things they themselves are not aware of.'

Winthrop slipped the envelope into his pocket. Firebells clanged in the distance. There were bursts of Archie, too low to hurt the Zep. The dirigible drifted higher, pushing up into the clouds. There were usually five or six ships in a raiding party. If the Hun actually wanted to destroy something specific, they would send one of the big long-range Gotha bombers.

I’d like to see one of those beasts brought down in flames,' Winthrop said.

Beauregard looked up to the skies, snowflakes brushing his eyelashes like tears.

'I’m tired now and I must go. Read Madame Zelle's confession carefully. Perhaps you will find something
I've
missed.'

The old man turned and walked smartly away, cane clipping the pavement. Drunken Americans courteously made way for him. In his day, Charles Beauregard must have been quite someone. Even now, he was the single most impressive individual Winthrop had come across in the service of the King.

Winthrop looked around for Dravot, and saw him after a few moments. The sergeant stood calmly in the shadows under an awning. Each time he played this game, he found Dravot more swiftly. He supposed he was learning something.

For all the magnificently painted ceilings and leather couches, this was another waiting room. He would pass the rest of his life in such places, hoping unconcerned dignitaries might conclude important business with time enough to spare for Edgar Poe. From terms in the army and at West Point, he was familiar with the ancient martial
dictum
'hurry up and wait'. At the heart of the world's supreme military power, the rule was enshrined in national law. Prague was merely an outlying fiefdom of Berlin; this was the metropolis of waiting rooms, the central circle of prevarication. In Bohemia, Poe had fallen through cracks and been the last of the ignored. Here, he was merely the least of the hordes of the overlooked.

The hall was crowded with men whose finery suggested importance and worth. Within sight were enough feathered helms, gold tassels, sparkly epaulettes, polished buttons, medal clusters, white capes, shiny boots, brocaded waistcoats and striped trousers to outfit a comic opera company for a season. Yet supplicants paced with irritable energy or slumped in weary attitudes, revealing only powerlessness and irrelevance. Poe was a slumper, Hanns Heinz Ewers a pacer. He went back and forth like a sentry, hands clasped behind his back, neck stiff as a ramrod.

Their appointment was with Dr Mabuse, Director of the Intelligence and Press Department of the Imperial German Air Service. At nearly midnight, the building was still busy. The most Poe had gathered was that he was to be asked to write a book. He did not mention that in the last three years, he had been unable to complete so much as a humorous couplet.

Junior officers clutched document bundles, desperate to be relieved of the bad news they brought. Colonels, generals, a field marshal were levelled in rank by an age of waiting.

A clerk, his hair a peculiarly shocked bird's nest, sometimes emerged, like a figure from a cuckoo clock, from a tiny door to call a name.

'Von Bayern,' he barked. 'Hauptmann Gregory von Bayern.'

An elder, neatly uniformed without the trimmings, stood at the sound of his name and was ushered out of the room. Ewers's envious eyes bored into von Bayern's uniformed back as it disappeared smartly through doors marked with a gilded bas- relief of the imperial German eagle.

'They
always get preference,' Ewers stage-whispered bitterly, meaning elders. 'The centuried fools don't know what year it is, but are sure of a commission and the opportunity to eclipse the work of an able new-born.'

Obviously, Ewers was eaten inside by resentment. Poe was learning more of his
doppelgänger.

In the first-class railway carriage, numbed by Ewers's reminiscences, Poe found his travelling companion tolerable only because his position guaranteed patronage, advancement or degradation. Ewers's stories of life in the service of the Kaiser were laced with the ironic, justified falls of those who had crossed or disappointed him. Each gem of truth in his autobiographical monologue was polished until it shone, then set in a tracery of arrant fiction.

It was an uncomfortable journey, with the etched faces of soldiers returning from leave always outside the compartment or in the darks between the carriages. The grey of their uniforms spread to their faces, showing colour only in the red around their eyes.

Apparitions haunted Poe still. On a nearby couch, squeezed between a puffy diplomat and a mightily whiskered general, was a man from the front, a wild-eyed walking skeleton wrapped in a uniform. Jittery at every heel-click on marble, a muddied despatch clamped under his arm, he was one of the living dead, a warm man who seemed more dead than the vampires either side of him. His dented helmet was smeared with French dirt.

The stomach of his coat was pink-tinged with his own blood. Any rank insignia he might once have worn were obscured or ripped away. The man's stretched face was a mask of pain.

The general, fussily eating live mice from a brown paper bag, pretended not to notice the state of his comrade. He shrank to one side to avoid actual physical contact with such a disgusting remnant. The diplomat too, concentrated on a mid-air spot in a direction that did not require him to look at the soldier. The worthies, new-born vampires of the most distinguished station, conversed over and around the mud man, discussing the course of the war. Both were confident of imminent victory because the German fighting man was the best in the world. With the Russkies out of it, there was no excuse not to take Paris before the thaw.

The soldier held his stomach as if digesting a caltrop and looked at Poe with a terrible gaze. For a moment, he was certain he had been recognised as the author of
The Battle of St Petersburg,
and that he had been tricked into answering for his failure as a prophet of modern warfare. The thought passed but he seethed at the likes of the general and the diplomat. They were far more responsible than Edgar Poe for the divergence of the course of the war from his vision.

'Poelzig,' announced the clerk. 'Herr Oberst Hjalmar Poelzig.'

A sallow-faced officer arose and sauntered through the doors. Poe assumed he had shares in munitions. Only someone making money could look so arrogantly satisfied.

Ewers still paced, fuming. In the motor-car that conveyed them from the railway station to the Chancellory, Ewers had impressed the driver with the urgency of their mission. The name of Mabuse was well enough known to spur the man to an over-enthusiastic burst of speed. A ferocious honk on the horn startled a horse into rearing. Ewers chuckled while two soldiers tried to calm the beast and the car sped by, eagle pennants fluttering. Now, in this huge room, he was diminished. His true position emerged as each of his humble solicitations was pointedly ignored or waved away by hawk-eyed clerks. If he had not been so tired and thirsty, and conscious of his own bad clothes, Poe might have enjoyed the braggart's slow shrinkage.

A young veteran, a burned arm twisted into a batwing against his side, face snouted and angry with scars, entered with a trolley of newspapers which he hawked around the room. A colonel learned from the front page that secret information he was to hand over to his High Command was now common knowledge. Poe thought to buy a paper, but realised he had absolutely no money about him.

Ewers did his best to impress upon a clerk that his career would suffer dreadfully when it was found by Dr Mabuse that he, Hanns Heinz
Ewers,
had been kept waiting. He suggested darkly that a word from him ensured transfer to active service on the Western Front. The clerk humoured him but action was not forthcoming.

Strangely, Ewers was the only person in the room inclined to complain. The field marshal sat meekly, waiting. It was very German. Everyone knew their rank and place and stuck to it. All very reassuring, providing one had a seat on the pyramid. Anyone whose station could not immediately be determined from a glance at an epaulette was the equivalent of an Indian 'untouchable', excluded entirely from the caste system.

The soldier suppressed a groan and hugged his stomach as if a shrapnel fragment were working its way through. Poe thought a trickle of blood was seeping through the soldier's coat. His red thirst was excited but the battered and filthy soldier was revolting to his sensibilities. Poe would have to be starved indeed to feed on such poor meat.

The mood of the room suddenly changed, as if smoke had been scented in the air. The supplicants were like a herd of grazing deer, alert to the tread of a hunter. A susurrus of whispering swept past like a wind and Poe heard a name, repeated.

'Dracula ...'

The main doors were held open by attendants. A noisome party was coming into the room. Even Ewers stopped pacing to come to attention.

'Dracula ...'

The Graf von Dracula was the Elder Vampire of Europe, Master Strategist and Great Visionary, Architect of Victory and Defender of the Kind. It was due solely to his colossal schemes that the vampire condition was spread throughout the world. Uncle-by-marriage to Kaiser Wilhelm II, he was rumoured to have a greater say in the conduct of the war than Hindenburg or Ludendorff.

'Dracula.'

Soldiers marched in, boots and breastplates clattering. Elders of the Graf's Carpathian Guard, they had fought at his side through the centuries. With them, they brought an icy stink, of old spilled blood and discharged guns.

'Dracula.'

Poe had written to the Graf many times early in the war, encouraged by the elder's endorsement, never retracted but also not mentioned much these days, of
The Battle of St Petersburg.
He had never been granted a reply.