Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (7 page)

She smiled sweetly. It was like a pin through his heart. That feeling had not faded.

Sometimes he called her Pamela, and she let it pass. His wife had died after two years of marriage, nearly eighty years ago. The heat made Rome much like the hill country of India, where he and Pam had lived while he pursued what Kipling called the Great Game, the chess match of intelligence and counter-intelligence between the Russias and the British Empire over the disposition of the subcontinent — the first Cold War. Pam had said all along that no good would come of it, and had constantly been a thorn about duty, forcing him to question where it actually lay. Geneviève might be the last and longest-lasting of his loves, but he had a clearer sense of his brief time with Pam, of the joy and pain.

Guilt made him love Geneviève the more.

He took her hand and gripped it, squeezing with all the strength he had left.

She kissed his forehead.

It must be a grotesque sight, a young girl with an old man. A song of his youth was ‘A Bird in a Gilded Cage’. But Geneviève only
seemed
young, just as he was beyond old. Anything past a hundred was unnatural. An age for trees and turtles, not men.

‘I need you, Charles,’ she breathed.

It was not a lie. It was her truth, told in such a way that he could not refuse it.

She climbed onto the couch alongside him. When they lay together, he was still the taller. If her head was beside his, her feet barely reached past his knees.

She kissed his cheek and chin, smooth where she had shaved him an hour ago. Quite a bit of hair remained on his head, thick and white, but he no longer wore a moustache. He owed his hair to her, and probably his eyesight and the majority of his teeth.

She loosened his dressing gown from his neck and undid the top button of his pyjama jacket. She nuzzled the hollow of his throat and moved her mouth, feeling for the old wounds.

He was calm, spasms gone. In his heart, he was aroused. His blood flowed faster. In a way that would have astonished him as a young man, that was enough.

‘This is absurd, Gené,’ he murmured. ‘You’re…’

‘Old enough to be your great-grandmother ten times over. You’re the young lover with the elderly mistress, remember.’

Her fangs slipped into well-worn grooves in his shoulder, well away from the vein. He could never decide whether the tingling darts were hot needles or sharp icicles.

He shook with delight. Her tongue undulated against his skin. He felt her body tense against his and knew his taste was flooding into her.

Once, she would have drunk. Now, she sipped.

No,
tasted
.

He knew what she was doing. For years, she hadn’t been drinking his blood. She opened his wounds and put her mouth to them, taking not substance but sustenance, drawing from his heart not his body.

And she gave him of herself.

He was as much a vampire as she. Geneviève kept him alive with her blood. With the rough, sharp point of her tongue, she scratched away at the inside of her mouth, and dribbled smidgens into his wounds. It was in her power to force him to drink her blood, to turn him into her son-in-darkness, to make him her vampire get. But not in her character.

There were three vampire women in his life, all of different bloodlines. Geneviève, like Kate Reed, could not just take from her lovers. She had to leave something of herself behind, in the mind and body. Everyone she touched was changed by her, affected.

The other one had torn his neck and taken from him with contempt as much as desire. When he thought of her, it was with pity.

How many years did he owe Geneviève?

Her blood had kept him young, without him realising it. Because he hadn’t wanted to realise. Now, he knew she was keeping him alive. The men of his family were not on the whole long-lived. An uncle had made it to ninety, and a nephew was still alive at eighty-one. But his father had died, of a Bombay fever, at forty-eight, and both his grandfathers were dead when he was born. For him, 105 was not a natural age.

In their communion, Geneviève sobbed silently, her sorrow coursing through his heart.

‘Don’t, my darling,’ he said, comforting her.

He wanted to raise his hands, to touch her face, to blot her tears, but he was in a daze. His mind still darted, but his limbs were heavy, unresponsive.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

Now would be a good time, he thought. Her warmth was inside him, would be carried along with him. He imagined himself shrinking inside his worn-out body, spirals of light and dark winding around him. His face arranged a smile.

Geneviève pulled suddenly away from his neck. He felt air on his wet skin.

‘No,’ she said, suddenly firm, selfish almost.

Through her blood, he had tugged at her. She knew what he was thinking, what he was feeling.

‘No,’ she repeated, tenderly, imploring. ‘Not yet, please.’

His arms worked. They folded around her. He consented to live.

‘That man was lying, Charles,’ she said.

He knew.

‘He doesn’t make reports. He’s not the type. He acts on reports.’

‘Good girl,’ he said.

As he fell asleep, lulled by the beat of his heart, he heard the telephone ring.

‘Better… answer that,’ he breathed.

3

GIALLO POLIZIA

I
nspector Silvestri talked in high, musical Italian to uniformed subordinates, directing their activities in the Piazza di Trevi. Speaking English to Kate, his voice was entirely different, deeper. Flat-toned, like a bad actor.

‘You saw the assassin?’ Silvestri asked.
‘Il Boia Scarlatto?’

Il Boia Scarlatto
— the Crimson Executioner.

In her mind, she still could. A face rippling in the pool.

‘Only his reflection,’ she admitted.

Silvestri noted that down. Despite the Roman summer, he wore the European detective’s unofficial uniform, an off-white Maigret raincoat. He was a solid, middle-aged man.

‘He had a reflection?’

‘The man was not a vampire, Inspector.’

Two policemen lifted Kernassy’s cloak out of the water like a hammock, holding his fragile remains in it. Minions from the coroner’s office sifted with butterfly nets, scooping up stuff she supposed must be Malenka.

The Morlacchi gown had been spirited away, which irritated Silvestri. Some cop’s fiancée or mistress had best not ask questions about the provenance of their birthday gift. Kate hoped it was cleaned and mended before presentation.

Merciless sun poured into the piazza. She had not expected the heat to be this bad. She didn’t perspire — a trick of her altered body chemistry — but was thus all the more uncomfortable when the temperature rose much above the English norm. She was evolved to be a night creature.

Crowds of curiosity-seekers were roped back. The paparazzi who’d haunted Malenka were replaced by less frenetic, hungrier-looking crime reporters. On the Via San Vincenzo, angry carhorns honked. Despite the barriers, a lad on a Lambretta took a shortcut through the piazza, shooed on by gun-toting carabinieri.

The shadow Kate had found at one side of the fountain was shrinking. Her eyes hurt from the glare. She felt the tingle of sunlight on her face and hands, and knew she was going beet-red. Sun-scars sometimes took decades to heal. She’d planned to spend the day indoors like a proper vampire, and emerge after nightfall.

She looked around for Marcello. He was chatting easily with a couple of uniformed cops and some fellows she took to be reporters. They shared cigarettes and laughed. She recognised the professional callousness of those who trawl around where ghastly things have happened, pressmen as much as policemen. She was herself used to exchanging small talk over smokes while leaning against bullet-riddled, blood-patterned massacre walls.

What had Marcello told Silvestri? They clearly knew each other. The first thing the Inspector had done upon arriving was take the Italian reporter aside and listen intently to a lengthy explanation with illustrative gestures.

One of the coroner’s men uttered a cry of disgust and fished out the dead, waterlogged cat. Everyone expressed sympathy for the poor thing. That suggested how vampires might stand in Rome. Dotted through the crowds like black scarecrows, nuns and priests glared disapproval at her. The Catholic Church was never going to be comfortable with her kind.

Kate guessed she was the favourite suspect. Marcello had come back to the piazza and found her alone with the remains of Count Kernassy and Malenka. He hadn’t seen the killer, hadn’t even heard his ridiculous laughter.

She’d retold her story three times and given a description to a police artist. They had worked up a sketch which looked embarrassingly like a comic strip villain, complete with mad grin. Next time, she’d be sure to be nearly killed by someone who could be taken seriously.

‘Have you found the little girl?’ she asked Silvestri. ‘She looked sad, frightened. She saw the murderer.’

‘Ah yes,’ he said, affecting the need to jog his memory, flipping back his notes. ‘The little girl who was weeping.’

‘There couldn’t have been many children on the streets. It was near dawn.’

‘There are always children on the streets, Signorina. This is Rome.’

‘She didn’t look…’

What did she mean? She’d only seen the girl’s face. No, the reflection of her face. Upside-down. She couldn’t say what she had been wearing. She had an impression that the girl was not a ragged urchin, even that she came from wealth, old money. Why did she think that?

‘Her hair,’ she said, thinking aloud. ‘It was long, clean. Well-groomed, looked after. It hung over one eye, like Veronica Lake’s.’

Silvestri’s mouth was fixed, but he smiled with his eyes.

‘You observe,’ he said.

‘I’m a reporter. It’s my job.’

His voice changed again, as he rattled off orders to his assistant, Sergeant Ginko. Kate caught a few words:
ragazza
— girl,
lunghi capella
— long hair,
Veronica Lake
— hubba-hubba.

They were taking her seriously now. Good.

‘What else did you observe that you can report?’

She almost said something.

That upside-down face. Blonde tresses, sad-clown mouth, tears. The killer, dressed as an executioner — mask, bare chest, tights. A flash of killing red, sharp silver. Kernassy’s skull, Malenka’s eyes.

What’s wrong with this picture?

‘Go on,’ Silvestri encouraged. ‘Anything, even if you’re not sure of it…’

‘It’s a puzzle,’ she said. ‘I keep trying to fit it all together. One of the pieces is wrong, but I don’t know which. I’m sorry. It’s as frustrating for me as it is for you. I have a sense of wrongness — some tiny detail. Something I saw, but can’t put my finger on. I keep going over it.’

The Inspector was disappointed. He wrote his telephone number on a page of his notebook, tore it out, and offered it to her.

‘If the puzzle fits together, you will call me?’

She took the number.

‘Yes. Of course.’

Silvestri shut his notebook again. It was his favourite prop.

‘You may go, Signorina Katharine Reed.’

She was a little surprised.

‘You don’t want to arrest me? On suspicion?’

Silvestri laughed.

‘No. You have misunderstood. You arrived in Rome only last night, on the same flight as
il conte
and his “niece”. That is confirmed by Alitalia. These were not the first killings.’

Even in the Roman sun, Kate felt a chill.

‘Rome is not safe for
vampiri,’
Silvestri continued. ‘They think themselves hunters of men, but here we have a man who thinks himself a hunter of them. This
Boia Scarlatto
has killed others, in ones and twos. Since the War. All elders.’

‘Surely Malenka was a new-born. She seemed so… modern.’

Silvestri shook his head. ‘She had her centuries.’

All elders.
Why kill Kernassy and Malenka, but not Kate Reed?

There was no hard and fast age at which one became an elder. She supposed you had to survive your natural life expectancy, then live on at least another lifetime. After two centuries, you were getting there. Dracula was an elder, and Lord Ruthven, and Geneviève. Kate was ninety-six. If she’d stayed warm, she might still be alive.

Charles, ten years older, was.

Had the little girl scared off the Crimson Executioner? That didn’t sound likely.

Silvestri ordered his men to lay down Kernassy’s cape and looked at the body. The press photographed the scene with the famous fountain picturesquely blurred in the background. The Inspector put on a serious expression. Like Malenka, he gave the photographers different angles. He experimented with looks: contemplative, decisive, determined.

Reporters paid attention as Silvestri announced,
‘I corpi presentano tracce di violenza supernatural,’
and proceeded to rattle off a statement they all jotted down.

Century-old schoolgirl Italian knocked around the back of her head, tainted by profane Sicilian picked up in the war. She didn’t have to understand every word to catch the policeman’s drift. It was a scene-of-the-crime speech, the same the world over. Every effort was being made and every lead followed. An arrest was promised in the immediate but non-specific future. Kate had first heard the song at the site of one of the Jack the Ripper murders, performed by the artist who made it famous, Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard.