Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (5 page)

She lay on the bench, head throbbing.

Something fast and red bounded into the piazza. Kernassy turned, cloak swirling, and was struck. The elder was lifted up and tossed into the fountain. His head was gone completely. Blood fountained from his neck-stump. His torso tumbled backwards, tangled in the cloak. The head soared and crashed into a pool, face powdering off it.

Kate tried to sit up, but couldn’t.

Malenka screamed in fury, talons and fangs starting. She leaped like a lioness. Something that flashed silver struck under her bosom.

Kate got up and tried to step forward. A hand took her by the back of the neck and made her watch. She had seen true death come to many vampires. Most elders went like Kernassy, turned instantly to dust and bones, centuries of age and decay catching up in seconds.

Something she’d never seen before happened to Malenka.

If she had grown old as a warm woman, Malenka would have become fat. It was in her body type, a ripeness ready to swell. Now, pockets of blubber bulged under Malenka’s skin, inflating her face, her belly, her thighs, her torso, her arms. She ballooned, splitting like overcooked sausage. White stuff, veined with red, bubbled out of her rent skin. Her dress exploded.

Malenka boiled over. Her cheeks expanded, and her forehead, her jowls, her throat, even her lips. Her eyes stared in panic from the bottoms of their wells of flesh, imploring. Kate was stabbed with guilt for having taken a petty dislike to this woman. Blood poured from Malenka, along with masses of fatty tissue. Her hands were huge, meat hanging off their backs and the fingers.

Kate was held fast like a kitten. An outsize hand gripped the back of her neck, clamping her shorn hackles. She looked down. The Count’s cloak floated like a wingspread of black duckweed. Coins lay like a scatter of eyes on the pool-bed.

She braced comparatively tiny hands against the low stone rim.

Operatic laughter roared out of the Piazza di Trevi and up the Quirinal Hill. The killer was bellowing gusts of triumphant hilarity. The fountain’s rush was muted for a moment.

She was pushed slowly forward. Her elbows began to bend the wrong way. Her thick specs, blobbed with droplets, slid down her nose, blurring everything further. Fang-teeth sharpened in her mouth, an instinctive defence mechanism rather than a response to spilled blood. She felt no flicker of red thirst, only disgust and puzzlement.

The killer steadily forced her face to the water, as if he wanted to make this kitten drink. Maybe he thought her of a bloodline susceptible to running water or, considering the nearness of the church of Santa Maria in Trivio, holy water. If so, he was wrong. She wasn’t even Catholic: water thrice-blessed by the Pope would only get her wet.

Kernassy’s fleshless skull grinned from one of the upper pools. His empty boots lay among coins. Ribbons of old blood, the foul blood of the Dracula line, threaded through the water, not mixing. It was sucked up from the pool and sprayed from the jets, falling all around like dead rain.

Face near the surface of the water, dizzy from the stink of spoiled blood, Kate focused on the killer’s rippling reflection: crimson skull-cowl, black domino mask, tunnel-mouth nostrils, Burt Lancaster grin. Bare-chested, he displayed an expansively muscled and oiled torso.

Her hands slipped from the rim and plunged into cold water. She was shoved forward and her chest slammed against stone. Her glasses fell off and splashed into the fountain. Without specs and with the agitation of the water, she glimpsed a dark image between the wavelets — her own reflection, rarely seen. It hadn’t vanished altogether like those of some vampires, or been stolen away like Peter Pan’s shadow. But, since her turning, it was hard to find. Only in extraordinary circumstances, like the imminence of true death, did her reflection come back.

For a mad moment, she was distracted. So this was how she looked with short hair. Not bad — very mid-century, a sort of existentialist Joan of Arc. She’d been tempted to hack off her waist-length red rope since the 1920s. Only now, with the European fashion for cropped bobs, had she dared ask her hairdresser to wield the silver scissors.

The killer, laughing like a demon of mockery, had a knee on her spine, pinning her to the edge of the fountain. He let go of her neck. She reached behind, and her fingers scrabbled on his muscular leg. He wore thick tights.

She was going to be murdered by a Mexican wrestler. It was too silly for words.

If he kept pressing, her ribs would shatter. If a broken bone stuck through her heart, she would die. Again. This time, it would take.

The killer wasn’t a vampire. His strength of wrist equalled most elders, but his hand was hot, sweaty. She felt a strong pumping of blood in his thigh. He was a warm man, alive.

The noises of her body were more distinct than the crash of the water. Blood pulsed in her ears. Bones creaked inside her chest. Her reflected face, clear now even to her fogged eyes, looked up in rabbiteyed panic. She seemed a young woman, the 25-year-old twit she’d been in 1888. She was hurting, not a common thing with her.

The pressure on her back let up slightly. The laughter stopped.

Kate’s first thought, a universal journalist’s instinct, was not to save herself but to understand. She scooped up her wet specs, sliding them on.

She still couldn’t get up. Even if she bent her neck back as far as it would go, she couldn’t see above the broad pool. At the other side of the water was another reflected face.

A little girl peered over the rim. In her upside-down face, a frowning crescent mouth floated above a sad eye. She had long hair, blonde like Geneviève’s. Ripples made her shimmer, as if she were shaking her head solemnly. A tear crawled up her hollow cheek.

Kate tried to think of the Italian for ‘run away’.

‘Va
,’ she tried to shout, coming out only with a gasp.

The girl didn’t move. She was a ghost in the water, stuck in time.

The killer removed his knee from her back. Kate tried to gather her vampire qualities. Talons slipped easily from her fingers. Her teeth became fangs. Strength uncoiled in her limbs.

She sprang up and balanced on the rim of the fountain, clawing at empty air, ready to kill… nothing.

The killer was gone, spirited away. Kate looked across the piazza for the little girl. She heard the rapid pit-pat of the child running off down the Via delle Muratte and saw the last of her shadow, enormous on a far wall. The roaring hiss of the fountain returned, filling her ears.

Her flash of anger passed, her teeth and claws receded. In place of fighting rage, she had only puzzlement. She knew she had missed something. She stood alone in Piazza di Trevi with the truly dead.

Then Marcello came back with milk. He gently set the bottle on the brick pavement and came over to her. There was dawnlight in the sky. Hating herself for living the cliché, she swooned in his arms.

2

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE

S
he wheeled his bath chair onto the broad balcony and positioned it in deep shadow. Beauregard welcomed the enfolding darkness as if it were a comfortable blanket. At his age, direct sunlight would kill him faster than it would Geneviève, and she was a vampire. She left his tea within his reach. Green gunpowder. He practically lived on the stuff.

From shade, he looked out at the grey light, down into the Via Eudosiana. This early in the morning, the misty haze — almost scented fog — was not yet burned away. It was already hot, promising a day in which flat loaves could be baked on sun-warmed flagstones.

A sleek, silver Aston Martin parked outside the apartment building. It attracted the awed interest of two small children. Beauregard deduced the guest expected at dawn was on his way up.

He heard Geneviève answer the door and admit his caller. She did not approve of his consenting to this interview.

She showed the guest onto the balcony and withdrew into the flat to make a racket, needlessly tidying. He understood her point, but had agreed to talk with the visitor as much out of curiosity as duty. If he was to be pumped for information, he would be paid in kind. Taking an interest was a way of proving to himself that he was still part of the world.

The vampire spy stood on the balcony and lit a cigarette with a Ronson lighter, flame reddening his forceful face. He exhaled smoke and looked down on Beauregard. His quizzical smile exposed a prominent fang.

‘The name’s Bond,’ he said, with a slight Scots roll. ‘Hamish Bond.’

‘Good morning, Commander Bond,’ Beauregard said. ‘Welcome to the Eternal City.’

The new-born took a cursory look across Parco di Traiano, taking in the ruin of Nero’s Golden House (one of Rome’s many monuments to megalomania) and the jagged edge of the Flavian Amphitheatre, the Colosseum. Beauregard noticed with sadness that Bond was not taken with the scenery. Duty ought not blind one to the view. Indeed, it was the duty of those in their shared profession to pay attention.

Though travelling under his naval rank, Bond was out of uniform, dressed as if for baccarat at Monte. His white Savile Row dinner jacket was perfectly cut, loose enough to suggest to the observant the possibility of a shoulder holster. Beauregard knew exactly what this man was, even what was in the holster. A Walther PPK 7.65mm, worn in a Berns-Martin Triple-Draw, clip of eight lead-jacketed silver bullets. Nasty thing.

The breeze played with a stray comma of Bond’s black hair. Smoke tore from his cigarette, a handmade Balkan-Turkish blend with three gold bands. Too distinctive for a fellow in his line, too memorable. Those custom gaspers suggested an attitude. Here was a vampire who knew how to shrug in a dinner jacket without rucking the collar, wore shirts of sea-island cotton and could draw a pistol as easily as he pulled his Ronson from an inside pocket. One would think he
wanted
to make an impression, to strike a pose for the gun-sight.

Charles Beauregard hoped he had never been like this.

If any Crown servant deserved a retreat to private life, Beauregard was that man. Yet the Diogenes Club — British Intelligence, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms — was not an institution from which retirement was uncomplicated. For one thing, the notion that members might have a private life was discouraged. He had served the Club, rising on occasion to its highest office, for the best part of a century.

He looked out into brightening daylight, studying the view Bond had already dismissed, finding it a source of endless fascination. This city was older than them all. That was a comfort.

‘You’re something of a legend, Beauregard. I trained under Sergeant Dravot. He donated the blood for my turning. It’s a good line. He speaks often of you.’

‘Ah yes, Danny Dravot. My old guardian angel.’

Beauregard discerned an echo of Dravot in Bond’s rich voice, even in his relaxed but ready stance. The sergeant turned out sons-in-darkness with some of his calibre. Under the polish, Bond would be a good man, a reliable operative.

Dravot, turned vampire in the 1880s, would be a sergeant until the end of time. And would remain at the disposal of the Diogenes Club.

So much of Beauregard’s life, of the considerable weight of memory anchoring him to his bed and chair, was bound up with that unassuming building in Pall Mall. If, as was increasingly the case, his mind drifted, a past of photographic vividness would blot out the fuzzy present. Often, he found himself back there: India in 1879, London in 1888, France in 1918, Berlin in 1938.

Faces and voices were clear in his mind. Mycroft Holmes, Edwin Winthrop, Lord Ruthven. Geneviève, Kate, Penelope. Lord Godalming, Dr Seward, the Prince Consort. The Kaiser, the Red Baron, Adolf Hitler. Sergeant Dravot dogging his steps. Dracula fleeing time and again, always finding a nest, never letting go.

He remembered his silver-plated swordstick. Had that been as ostentatious as Bond’s Walther? Probably.

Now, it was not a question of drifting. It was a matter of casting, of trying to recall. That, infuriatingly, was more difficult. The game pie served at Simpson’s in the Strand in 1888 came instantly to mind, the memory hot in his dry mouth. But he couldn’t remember what was for supper last night.

‘Head Office assume you’ve kept an eye on Dracula,’ ventured Bond. ‘It’d be out of character for you to let go. Especially with him so nearby.’

‘Head Office?’

The jargon amused Beauregard. In his day, the slang was different. Before he was one of them, they were just the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club. Then a faction of cricketers took to calling them the Pavilion. For a while, it was the Circus. The Cabal consisted of between one and five people, usually three. In the 1920s and throughout the last war, called back from his first stab at retirement, he had sat at the head of the table. Now, young Winthrop — ‘young’? He was sixty-three! — occupied that chair.

‘I beg your pardon, Sir.’

He had been worrying at his memories too hard and floated away from the present. He must concentrate. He should get through this quickly, if not for himself then for Geneviève. If he overstrained, she became upset.