Anno Dracula (53 page)

The world paid little attention to Romania, distracted by the Gulf. Iraq had invaded and occupied oil-rich Kuwait and the tiny principality of Lugash. Saddam Hussein claimed to be acting under direct orders from Allah to depose the decadent vampire sheikhs who’d been bleeding the region dry for centuries. Whether Allah also told him to steal everything of value in both countries for himself was a question Saddam would not be drawn on. President Bush was rallying NATO and the UN in favour of counter-attack. There was talk of US Bat-Soldiers being deployed for ‘surgical strikes’ against Baghdad. The whole sordid mess suited Alucard.

Feraru appeared first, Crainic huffing after him.

‘Good evening,’ Alucard spoke out of the darkness, surprising even the nyctlapts. He stepped from the shadow of the cavern mouth.

Feraru smiled, eager.

‘My London people have got a commit from Cliff Richard to headline at Stonehenge. He’s going to sing the Lord’s Prayer backwards to the tune of “Mack the Knife”. It’ll be the Christmas Number One in the UK. And he’ll make it a TM charity record.’

Alucard now knew who Cliff Richard was. An eternally youthful vampire pop singer whose fame had never crossed running water.

Crainic said nothing. The elder was worried about the Old Country, troubled by methods used in the cause to which he was committed. Too many brutes who’d opposed the counter-revolution were transformed into its servants. Yet again, tyranny shapeshifted, absorbing those who stood against it. Crainic’s thoughts of his homeland were overlaid by stamping boots, tearing teeth and thumping fists.

‘We can’t rely on others to give,’ said Alucard, in Romanian. ‘We have to take. This is the lesson.’

Crainic realised he was being addressed in his own language.

The Father was an armour around Alucard, the old wise mind shot through his get’s brain. It was as if the conjuring had not been thwarted. At this moment, Alucard was the ghost and Dracula the physical presence. They were aspects of the same being.

‘Who are you, John Alucard?’ Crainic asked, in Romanian. ‘Who are you really?’

The Father spoke. ‘King of the Cats.’

Alucard felt Crainic’s mind changing. Until now, embarrassed by Meinster’s love of titles, he’d not understood the Baron’s need to claim this particular meaningless distinction. Count Dracula had been the undisputed ruler of pale-kind, but the title expired with him and it was futile for the Baron or this Hollywood player to lay claim to it. To declare oneself King of the Cats was not to accede to Napoleon’s throne but to claim to
be
Napoleon, a cartoon lunatic with a sideways hat and paw stuck in his institutional shirt. Now, Crainic knew better. Everything that had been Dracula’s, physically and spiritually, was Alucard’s by right. If
nosferatu
were to have Transylvania, this man — their father and furtherer — must be recognised.

Crainic went down on one knee and bowed his head, pulling off his student’s cap.

‘I acknowledge you, master,’ he said. ‘In death and life, Count Dracula.’

The Father withdrew. Alucard was alone in his mind again, shocked clean. A point had been made.

Feraru, whose Romanian was basic, wasn’t following this.

He had only seconds to think, anyway. Holly came out of the night and fell upon him. Two strokes of her nails and a mouth over the wound. No blood fell.

Crainic noticed his comrade being taken. He accepted what was happening.

Penny was with them, approving Holly’s strike.

Feraru’s money was committed, which was what mattered. He was just a walking wallet, for Meinster and the Movement, even for his own family. His consciousness, his body, was surplus.

As Holly sucked purposefully, Feraru’s face shrivelled. His eyes opened wider, irises paling to transparency, thread-thin vessels emptying of red. The girl took more than blood from him. His hair bleached white. He was in shock.

‘Crainic, you must trust me,’ said Alucard. ‘There is no Transylvania Movement, there is no Baron Meinster. It’s all a sham. It’s all so hideously small. But what we are — what we are doing — is important. It will win us not a province, but a world. I need to know you’re with me.’

Alucard extended his hand. In the night, to the others’ eyes, the ruby ring was black, but Alucard saw the bloody spark in its heart. He made Crainic see it too.

Crainic kissed the ring.

Holly stood, gore-smear on her face, eyes wide red. As the last of Feraru’s blood rattled in her throat, her face shifted like a dissolve. Alucard looked at Holly, at the new face she was wearing.

T
wo homicide detectives stood over a body. Number One Male, late teens/early twenties, five-nine. Black cloak with red trim, jeans, serious running shoes. Face down on the street. Scarlet spider-web radiating along cracks in the asphalt. The rank tang of dead blood at dawn. Cause of death: multiple GSW.

Murder? Yes — obviously. Yet, not her bailiwick... except technically.

At first lookover, Geneviève diagnosed a characteristic East Baltimore disagreement-over-the-sale-of-illicit-substances slaying. The crime scene: a come-down-in-the-world neighbourhood. Boarded-up row-houses. Sturdy Victorian homes for the well off, sub-divided a few Depressions back for the struggling poor. Now, shells for skells. Gang graffiti. Junked cars. A violently orange couch upended next to a dumpster. Thin crowd of kept-back-beyond-the-yellow-tape citizens. They’d have seen nothing.

Her blue windbreaker had OCME on the back in oversized yellow letters, in imitation of those FBI jackets worn to help limit the number of times when federal agents got accidentally shot by fellow law enforcement professionals. She went through a pair of Nike knock-off trainers a month. This gig regularly took her into alleys carpeted with bottle shrapnel and across floors sticky with undrinkable body fluids. She toted her forensic kit in a Gladstone bag she’d had since Gladstone was alive.

She had parked her cherry-red Plymouth Fury just behind the white van from the morgue. The car had been with her longer than most men in her life, and given her less grief. Blake and Grimes, her morgue attendants, were on the scene already, breakfasting on Pop-Tarts.

Walking from her car, she passed a lounger who eyeballed her from under a cowboy hat. Big white guy, out of state. Creepy. Then again, this was Creep Town.

Docs and cops were like aliens here. Real vamps were scarce on the drac corners. Plenty of dhamps hereabouts, though. That’s what rattled her cobweb. Folks thinking hard about what she had in her veins, what it could do for them.

She bet Dracula hadn’t seen that coming when he made his damn Declaration.

The cops looked up from the body.

‘Gené Dee, Gené Dee, what have you got to say to me,’ sung-chanted the light-skinned African-American detective who always wore a hat.

‘Ou se trouve l’assassin diabolique?’
asked the underfed Jewish detective who always attempted French
avec l’accent diabolique
when talking with her. He lowered his hipster shades to show her soulful comedy eyes.

There had to be something she’d not been told.

‘What troubles the mighty murder police?’ she asked.

She’d moved from Toronto to Baltimore at the specific request of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for Maryland. For some reason Crab Town got more than its share of gimmick killings. Rare moth cocoons in the gullets of preserved severed heads. Mad poets walling themselves up in tribute to Edgar Allan Poe. Giant crustacean attacks. Lately, there’d been a rash of vampire-related freak crimes. A hundred years after the Dracula Declaration, there were still few specialists in vampire medicine, let alone vampire forensics. Despite what had gone down in Los Angeles, she’d been headhunted back to the USA.

...but not to work routine drug shootings.

‘True you busted Jack the Ripper?’ asked the black detective.

‘There was no Jack the Ripper,’ said his partner. ‘It was a Masonic conspiracy...’

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she said.

Sometimes - like now - she felt it was still 1888 and she was stuck in Whitechapel. This was another old, bad district. More open to the skies, less crowded - block after block of empty or seemingly empty houses -but the same stink. City jungle, predators and prey.

Then, she’d lived in the middle of the slum. This time, she was snug across town in a Federal Hill apartment, an easy walk from the morgue on Penn Street. Rents near the harbour were high, so she roomed with two other professional women. Lorie Bryer, an editorial contributor to the
Baltimore Sun
, was intelligent, reasonable and empathetic, which was probably why she got more hate mail than anyone else on the paper. Emma Zoole, an architectural model-maker, specialised in crime scene reconstructions used in court to walk juries through murders. Neither was a vampire, though Emma was a weekend dhamp. Geneviève was gently trying to persuade Lorie, whom she liked a lot, to ease Emma, a flake with a colourful love life, out of the flat. Geneviève spent enough on-the-job time at crime scenes without coming home to find a doll’s house replica of the Tri-State Hooker Hacker’s latest killing room on the kitchen table.

Mr Deceased had six holes in the back of his cloak. An unusual garment, but surely not why Geneviève was here. Dressing like a vampire — rather, like vampires were supposed to dress — didn’t make you undead. It was arrant stereotyping, anyway. Unlike Emma Zoole, she didn’t sleep in a white coffin and have a wardrobe full of shrouds.

‘Meet Alonzo Fortunato,’ said the black cop. ‘Honour student. High school athlete. Once a.k.a. “Track” Fortunato. Gave up on gold and started peddling red. Got hisself a new street name. “Drak”...’

‘Hence the un-fortunate Mr Fortunato’s distinctive choice of attire,’ put in the other detective. ‘He was a walking billboard for his putrid product. The finest powdered
sang de vampire
in the city,
probablement
.’

Geneviève shuddered. The drac craze had followed her from Los Angeles to Toronto to here. It was still spreading. According to DEA reports, the business of selling vampire blood in liquid or powdered form, in various degrees of purity or adulteration, started in New York in the late 1970s, a country away from where she’d been at the time. She still took it personally. Nico, someone she hadn’t saved, was one of her personal ghosts. The vampire waif was an early casualty of the drac scene; not of the bleeding process — plenty of vampires bled to nothing to make red powder — but the whole bloody business.

She gave Alonzo Fortunato, today’s victim, due consideration.

‘Cause of death was a handgun, discharged repeatedly,’ she said. ‘You find owner of said gun, you solve case. Drak goes up on the board in black. Commendations all round. Now can I get back to my morgue? I have pressing whodunits...’

‘Ah ah ah, not so fast, Dr Dee,’ said the black detective. ‘Come into the parlour...’

When shot, Fortunato had been running from a particular house. She back-tracked his likely trail up some steps to an open door. A uniform was stationed on the stoop.

The detectives ushered her inside. The stench was worse here.

Though the windows were boarded, the house was in use. Power was hooked up. Coats on a rack. She was directed into a reception room off the hallway.

Seven more dead people. Four males, two females, one whose sex would have to be determined at autopsy. Predominantly black. Comprehensively shot. Weirdly stretched, as if sculpted from warm wax. A still life with weapons, shell casings, drugs paraphernalia, blood spatter, death. Feathers from murdered cushions still floated like zephyrs on the summer breeze. A free-standing lamp had been felled, casting harsh film noir shadows.

Too many bodies for Blake and Grimes to get into the van for a single run. They’d need back-up. Admin had been on at her about the expense of additional journeys in city vehicles. If they got their way, corpses would be stacked like firewood and moved like furniture.

‘Welcome to the war zone,’ said the Jewish detective. ‘Savour one of the city’s happiest traditions: the yo-on-yo firefight and general massacre... Time to sort out who shot who in what order.’