Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (6 page)

She should know he was dying. He had been about it long enough.

‘Yes, Commander Bond,’ he replied, at last. ‘I’m still interested. It’s a hard bone to let go.’

‘You’re considered the authority.’

‘Flatter the old duffer, eh?’

‘Not at all.’

‘You want to hear about him? Dracula?’

If he were to publish his memoirs — an enterprise from which he was forbidden by law — they would have to be called
Anni Draculae
— ‘the Dracula Years’. The exile of Palazzo Otranto was the defining influence of his overlong life. The thing he most regretted about death was leaving the stage before the Count, not being there at the King Vampire’s finish.

‘Dragulya,’
he repeated, drawing out the name, as Churchill always did. ‘What would this century have been like without him? You’ve read Stoker’s book? About how he could have been stopped at the beginning?’

‘I don’t have much time to read.’

Too busy running after warm wenches and getting into scrapes, Beauregard would be bound.

‘A mistake, I think, Commander Bond. But then, I’ve had a great deal of time. I’ve read everything about Dracula, fact and fiction. I know more about him than anyone else alive.’

‘With respect, Sir, we have people close to Dracula, who’ve been there for centuries.’

One of Winthrop’s
idées fixées
was recruiting vampire elders to spy on their
principe.
So, Diogenes had finally pulled it off. There were moles in the Carpathian Guard.

‘I said
alive.’

He chuckled. That made his chest hurt. His laugh turned to a cough.

Geneviève, supernaturally attuned to every wheeze and creak, parted the curtains and stepped through the french windows. In a sleeveless cream polo-neck sweater and violet toreador pants, she was a beauty. Spots of colour on chalk-white cheeks showed her anger. She shot a chill look at Bond and knelt by Beauregard, clucking like a French governess. She made him lift his mug to his mouth, forcing him to take a swallow of the tea he had forgotten.

Unembarrassed, Bond leaned against the balcony, smoke pluming from his nostrils. Thin sunlight glinted in his hard eyes. He would have had to learn cruelty to serve Diogenes. Maybe he’d always had the knot inside him, waiting to be undone. He had been recruited warm and turned scientifically through tubes and transfusions, then trained and shaped to be the weapon required for the job. That was another of Winthrop’s ideas.

‘Charles-
Chèri,
you mustn’t go on like this.’

Geneviève didn’t scold or whine. She made a charade of fussing but understood exactly how much she could do for him and how much she could not. She laid her head briefly in his lap so he would not see the beginnings of pink tears in her eyes. Her honey-blonde hair spilled over his thin, heavily veined hands. His fingers stirred with an impulse to stroke her.

Bond looked at them.

With a flash of the insight Beauregard had developed in his career, augmented by the traces of herself Geneviève had left in him, he knew what Bond was thinking. A dutiful grand-daughter. No,
great-
grand-daughter.

She was by far the older, but he wore all the years she had cast aside. Geneviève was turned in 1432, at the age of sixteen. After five centuries, she seemed no older than twenty. Provided you didn’t look too closely at her eyes.

It took him frustrating seconds to remember exactly how old he was. He was born in 1853, had received a telegram from the new Queen in 1953. The year was now…? He got it, finally, as always: 1959. He was 105 years old; 106 next month, August. He might not exactly look his age — another effect of her kisses, he knew — but he was undeniably old, inside and out, a living ghost of his younger selves.

He had almost outgrown pain. Ten or twenty years ago, he was stricken with all the aches and pangs of age, but they had faded. His body was losing the habit of feeling. Sometimes, he felt exactly like a spirit, communicating with the world through a half-witted medium, unable to get his message across. Only Geneviève understood, through a species of natural telepathy.

He controlled his coughing.

‘You had better leave,’ Geneviève told Bond, firmly.

‘It’s all right, Gené. I’m all right.’

She looked up at him, blue eyes penetrating. The trick with Geneviève was to not lie. She could always tell. Pamela, his wife, had been the same. It was not just a vampire trait.

The trick was to tell his truth.

‘You can’t let it go either, my dearest,’ he said.

She looked away and he stroked her soft, fine hair. The electric touch took him back, to their first time together: her teeth and nails tracing trickling patterns on his skin, her cat-tongue tingling the love-wounds.

‘Our Geneviève was the first woman to set foot inside the Diogenes Club, Commander Bond, the first to face the Ruling Cabal. Does that seem archaic to you? Mediaeval?’

‘Not really.’

‘You should be quizzing her. She hasn’t let the bone go, either, the Dracula bone. And she’s better able to do something about him than a living fossil like me.’

‘He should be dead,’ Geneviève said. ‘He should
have been
dead a long time. Truly dead.’

‘Plenty would agree with you,’ said the new-born.

Geneviève stood up and looked at the young vampire’s blockily handsome face. He had healed scars.

‘Plenty have had opportunity to end it. To end
him.
Once, we… you know that story, of course — an old tale, tedious to you. Ancient history.’

Beauregard understood Geneviève’s bitterness.

In 1943, it had been expedient for the Allies to come to a dark accommodation. It had taken Edwin Winthrop to negotiate the Croglin Grange Treaty, which brought the King Vampire into the war. The younger man, unfettered by what he sometimes called ‘Victorian notions’, was willing to take the responsibility and the opprobrium on himself. Despite everything, Beauregard had approved the policy. Even Churchill, detesting Dracula as he did Hitler, went along with the alliance, though he never shook the Count’s hand. Beauregard had, turning away from the King Vampire’s dagger smile. His personal defeat, willingly given, was in the name of a greater victory.

It was as well that Geneviève was in Java then, remote from the tides of history. She would have tried to rip out Dracula’s throat.

‘In this century, you’ve never understood Vlad Tepes,’ said Geneviève. ‘You’ve always thought he could be appeased and accommodated. He’s never been a politician, like Lord Ruthven. He’s a mediaeval man, a barbarian. His throne is raised upon a mountain of skulls.’

The wars of this modern age were different from those of earlier centuries. Partly because of new armaments which made conflict on a worldwide scale not only possible but inevitable, and partly because of the Changes — the spread of vampirism begun by Dracula’s emergence into the Western world. Without vampires, Beauregard was sure there could never have been Nazis; if anyone was Dracula’s heir, it had been Hitler. Though the Final Solution applied as much to vampires of the Dracula line as to Jews, Hitler had intended to turn once his Reich was absolute, to last the full thousand years. The creation of an undying master race by science and sorcery was a German project dating back to the First World War, ironically as much Dracula’s vision as Hitler’s. If the Nazis hadn’t excluded his bloodline from the register of purity, Dracula would have sided with them.

‘You made him your ally,’ Geneviève said, coldly.

Bond shrugged. ‘Stalin was our ally too, and the Devil Incarnate after Yalta. Politics aren’t my department,
mademoiselle.
Cleverer brains than mine struggle with that. Mine is but to do or die, preferably the former.’

‘You’ve died once, obviously.’

‘Of course. You know what they say…’

‘No. What?’

‘You only live
twice.’

Geneviève stood, hand resting on Beauregard’s shoulder. He was her last tie, he knew. When he was gone, what would she feel free to do?

‘Pardon me for being blunt, Commander,’ she said, ‘but some of us have less time. What exactly are you here to find out?’

The spy couldn’t give a straight answer. Winthrop was still thinking in zigzags, and his agent might not even know the point of his mission.

‘I’m writing a report on the Royal Engagement.’

‘You are perhaps a gossip columnist?’

Bond smiled, showing sharp teeth. With the beginnings of amusement, Beauregard saw the new-born was taken with Geneviève. If she worked him properly, she would have a conquest.

‘Thanks to Beauregard and people like him, we know a lot about Dracula,’ said Bond. ‘You’re wrong to think we’ve never tried to understand him. He’s been a public figure since the 1880s. We know how he thinks. We know what he wants. It’s always been about power. Since his warm days, he’s seen himself as a conqueror. He’s spread his bloodline to an army of get. Each time he’s married, it has been to advance his cause, to build a power base.’

He heard Edwin Winthrop speaking through Bond. This was Winthrop’s worldview. Beauregard could not argue with it exactly, but had come to understand — during the eras of Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin — that the Count was not a unique, or even uncommon, type. The coldest thought that ever settled in him was that Dracula had succeeded after all. Every nation on Earth — Great Britain not excluded — acted as if it were ruled by the King Vampire.

‘The person we don’t know about is the Princess,’ Bond continued, exhaling more smoke. ‘She flits in and out of the records, leaving no significant trace. What Head Office want to know is, why Asa Vajda? She’s of the bloodline of Javutich, a near-extinct breed. Dracula has enough history. What he needs, as always, is geography — estates, a throne, a fastness. Like most elders’ — Bond dipped his eyes at Geneviève —
‘il principe
is dispossessed, a monied vagabond. Ceaușescu certainly isn’t going to take him back.’

Hundreds of Transylvanian vampires, having survived Nazi death camps, were returned to their homeland after the War and promptly killed, with the shameful collusion of the Allies, by their warm countrymen. Nicolae Ceaușescu still conducted a campaign of extermination against vampires who persisted in an attachment to native soil that happened to lie within modern Romania. As terrified as any of his peasant ancestors, the premier took Castle Dracula for his Summer Palace, to show his mastery.

‘Princess Asa is Moldavian,’ Beauregard said. ‘Dracula is a Wallach. Something like two-thirds of the world’s vampire elders come from the horseshoe of the Carpathians. If Dracula is to have temporal power again, that’s where he must begin, in what is now Romania. When one gets to be very old, homeland comes to mean a lot.’

Geneviève squeezed his shoulder.

‘Head Office think along the same lines, Beauregard. But as a dynastic marriage, this doesn’t ring true. By rights, Dracula should connect himself with a strong bloodline. Countess Elisabeth of the House of Bathory is an obvious candidate.’

‘She’s lesbian,’ Geneviève put in.

‘This isn’t a love match,
Mademoiselle
Dieudonné. You have to admit it’s a comedown. Going from the Queen of England to a backwoods hellcat with twigs in her hair and earth in the folds of her shroud?’

‘The Count has his odd fancies. Ask Mrs Harker.’

‘If it’s bloodline he wants, Gené, I’m surprised he hasn’t come a-courting.’

Geneviève shuddered.
‘Très amusant,
Charles-
Chèri.’

Bond shook his head. ‘He’s up to something. Dracula has never made a move that wasn’t for his own ends first and last. But what are his ends?’

‘Complete and utter subjugation of everyone and everything,’ Geneviève said. ‘Forever. There, I’ve told you his secret. Can I claim my five hundred francs?’

The spy cracked another one-sided smile. Sizing Geneviève up, he thought himself man enough to tame her. Beauregard chuckled again and found himself coughing. It was worse this time, jagged glass rolling around inside his chest. Breathing became a chore.

‘This interview is over,’ Geneviève insisted.

She knelt by him again, helping him drink, pressing a hand against his chest, willing him to survive. She forgot to hide her eyes. He saw the gathering red at her tearducts.

‘Very well,’ Bond consented. ‘May I call back? If other lines of inquiry dry.’

Beauregard tried to stop coughing. He could not manage it.

‘I’d prefer you didn’t,’ Geneviève said.

He tried to overrule her, but the words wouldn’t come. It was best to let her decide.

‘Let yourself out,’ she said.

‘Of course.’ He extinguished his cigarette. ‘Good day to you both. You can reach me at the Inghilterra.’

He slipped silently through the french windows and left the apartment.

Beauregard allowed his spasm to subside of its own accord. He spluttered, leaking foam from his mouth. Geneviève wiped his face, like his nanny.

As he had come to expect, the pain faded fast. His eyes and ears were still sharp, but he had almost no senses of taste or smell. Only memories.

‘Pauvre chèri,’
said Geneviève.

She wheeled him inside.

Though he had only lived on the Via Eudosiana for ten years, the apartment was crowded with a century of acquisitions. Bookshelves lined the walls up to the high ceiling. A great many odd objects picked up in all quarters of the globe were collected unsorted in corners. Geneviève often found an African mask or Chinese jade figure in a box or drawer and remarked on its quality or value. He had covertly made an inventory — such list-making upset her, he knew — and considered who would get the most out of each item. The library would go to Edwin Winthrop.

Geneviève helped him out of his bath chair onto the day bed in his study. He was so light now that even a warm girl could have lifted him up and set him down like a baby. Geneviève let him do as much as he could under his own steam. Using the last strength in his wasted muscles, he rose from his chair, steadying himself on her arm, then more or less collapsed onto the couch, allowing her to arrange his legs under a tartan blanket.