Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (10 page)

They zigzagged away from the Piazza di Trevi toward the Piazza di Spagna, then up a steep side-road. Kate clung to her hat. Geneviève drove her back to the Hassler.

In the hotel lobby, she reclaimed her suitcase from an imperious uniformed functionary. She wondered if the management had cleared out Count Kernassy’s suite.

Sergeant Ginko, Silvestri’s pet, was questioning some maids. The investigation must be proceeding along the usual channels, trying to establish something in the Count’s past that would lead to the killer. It wasn’t likely to be a fruitful avenue: she thought Kernassy was murdered for what he was, not for anything he had done.

Had the news got to Penelope? Was it in the daily papers? Surely, Marcello must have sold the story. Kate would have done in London.

Geneviève lifted her sunglasses to examine marble and gilt. Rich people with expensive luggage streamed steadily into the lobby.

‘You came straight here from Fiumicino? You must like the high life, Kate.’

Kate shook her head. She felt out of place here, a mouse at a banquet.

‘I went along with things because it was easier. As usual, it’s landed me in trouble.’

She remembered the cadre of bellhops swarming in Malenka’s wake, trying to claim her luggage from Klove. Only half a day ago.

‘They say the waiters here are
très
delicious,’ Geneviève said, peering into the empty, shadowed bar.

‘They are,’ Kate agreed.

Geneviève looked, almost admiring, at her.

‘You are a dark horse.’

Geneviève was fond of English idioms. She picked them up from Charles.

Kate had an idiom too. ‘When in Rome…’

‘I think you are a wicked girl,’ Geneviève said, affectionately. ‘Charles should’ve warned me.’

It was the first time Geneviève mentioned him. They would have to talk. Soon.

Geneviève realised it too, and suggested they slip off for
gelati.
Kate agreed. They left the lobby, Kate carrying her suitcase. Geneviève’s Vespa looked impertinent parked outside the Hassler, so near the Spanish Steps. Geneviève gave her scooter an affectionate little pat, and tipped the doorman to watch over it.

They walked down the steps, against the human tide. Warm people in summer dresses strolled past. The few early-bird vampires among them wore enveloping robes like desert sheiks. Everyone had huge hats and dark glasses. Kate spotted fashions that would be in London by Christmas.

At the foot of the steps, a row of young artists — all berets and beards, as if they were dressing the part — sat on stools, doing sketches of the tourists. Kate could never walk past a group like this, in London or Paris, without being tempted. After seventy odd years without a reflection, she had a constant, nagging curiosity about how she looked. She remembered the shadow she’d seen in the waters of the Trevi Fountain, and shivered.

Geneviève knew a café opposite the house where John Keats had died. It was surprisingly neglected by the tourists who frequented the Museo Keats-Shelley.

‘It’s a vampire place,’ she explained. ‘Alive by night.’

They were given a table under a black awning. The cool shade was delightful. Kate touched her face and found it still hot from the sun. Geneviève ordered in Italian, and two tall glasses of soft crimson ice cream were presented. Kate touched hers with a long spoon, dislodging the cherry on top.

‘The management claims they import Abyssinian virgins, but they use sheep’s blood really.’

Kate had tried blood ice cream before. Crunchy rather than creamy, it was an unsatisfying blend of tastes and sensations. This was different.

‘It’s lovely,’ she admitted, throat a-tingle.

‘This is a city for the senses,’ Geneviève said. ‘A place for the heart, not the head. If you want to think, you go to Paris; if you want to feel, you come to Rome. After a while, it’ll drive you mad. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to stand it, after…’

She left the sentence unfinished.

‘How is he?’ Kate asked, directly.

Geneviève angled her head in thought, frowning a little. She slipped her sunglasses up into her hair like an alice band. Kate saw hurt in her eyes.

‘From day to day, he fades. There’s no single illness, only old age. The things which hold him here are passing.’

‘Is it too late? For him to turn?’

Geneviève pondered a moment. Kate knew she must have been fretting with the question. Why hadn’t she done anything, made a decision?

‘The Church says there’s such a thing as deathbed conversion,’ said Geneviève. ‘I don’t know why it wouldn’t be possible. To turn, you only have to be near death.’

‘You have no get?’

The other vampire shook her head.

‘In all these centuries, there’s been no one?’ Kate asked.

Geneviève looked a little sad and shrugged, a very French gesture.

‘For the first four hundred years, I had to hide. You weren’t a vampire then, Kate. Before Dracula came to London and the undead population exploded, many vampires felt turning was a curse, not a blessing. They believed they’d sinned so dreadfully they were barred from Heaven. Even now, I’m not sure the Changes were all for the best.’

‘You can’t mean that, Geneviève.’

‘You are still young, Kate.’

Kate felt pinpricks of anger. Geneviève was acting like the typical elder. Seen everything, done everything, know everything. Pretty much bored with it all.

‘You have no get, either.’

‘I’m not sure about my bloodline,’ Kate said. ‘Of the many my father-in-darkness turned, I’m the sole survivor.’

The majority of those who turned vampire failed to live out their normal lifespan, let alone become elders. New-borns of tainted bloodline did not grow true. When a warm person turned, they went through a moment of liquid malleability. At that point, it took a strong mind to stay whole. Many condemned themselves to a brief, painful shamble through the dark.

‘Charles is alive because of us, Kate. You and I, we have drunk from him. Touched his life. We have not turned him, but we have changed him. He is a part of us and we a part of him. Sometimes, he gets us mixed up in his mind. He looks at me and sees you.’

‘And Pamela?’

Now Geneviève was pained. Skilled readers of emotion, they could hold a conversation via tiny expressions.

Kate regretted her angry spark. She shouldn’t underestimate the depth of the woman’s feeling for Charles. What distinguished Geneviève Dieudonné from most elders was that she could love, genuinely. Many elders couldn’t even love themselves.

‘Yes,’ Geneviève admitted. ‘More and more, there is Pamela.’

‘You never knew her.’

Pamela Churchward, Penelope’s cousin, had been a few years older than Kate. She’d known how Kate, then a near-blind warm adolescent carrot-top, felt about Charles, and always took the trouble to be kindly. Pam died young, in India, miscarrying Charles’s child. The terrible, bloody business had affected Charles, turned him toward duty, away from himself.

Charles’s engagement to Penelope was a futile attempt to get Pamela back. That hadn’t been fair, especially to Penny. Kate thought not being Pam was what had driven Penny to Lord Godalming and the Dark Kiss.

‘Pamela was more like you than Penelope,’ Kate said.

‘And more like you than me,’ Geneviève replied.

‘Only because I wanted to be like her. Penny did too, and even Mina Murray. Pam was the original and we the poor copies.’

‘Tchah!
You’ve had eighty years to become a real live girl, Kate. Pamela had a few summers of seeming perfection. Even Charles knows that had she lived, she’d have been like the rest of us. Not a saint, but a struggler.’

Unexpectedly, Geneviève took Kate’s hand.

‘One of us must turn him,’ she said, red tears in her eyes. ‘We can’t let him go.’

‘Even if that’s what he wants most? To be with Pamela, not…’

‘Not me? Or you, Kate.’

When Charles died, it would be the end of the warm world for her. He was the last living survivor of her girlhood. But it was Charles the man she wanted to hold on to, not Charles the Victorian, the right-thinking, honourable, good-hearted servant of Queen and Country.

This century was such a
mess.

‘After true death, is there anything?’ Kate asked.

Geneviève let Kate’s hand go as if it were electrified.

‘How should I know?’

‘All your years. You were a supernatural being.’

‘We are all supernatural beings, the warm no less than the undead. When I was a girl, I couldn’t separate religion from the Church. That was a temporal institution, devoted to the perpetuation of its power. When I turned, we were persecuted. Those who tracked us down and destroyed us did so in the name of God. In this century, we are all creatures of science, our mysteries dissected. Those who have tried to destroy us have done so in the name of science, in a calculated attempt to eliminate an evolutionary competitor. It’s all the same.’

The Nazis had tried to purge most vampire bloodlines. Even now, Kate occasionally heard warm people mutter that Hitler had been right about that.

Ever since she could think for herself, Kate had been an agnostic. Now, she wondered about the immortality of the soul.

‘There are vampires, Geneviève. There are werewolves. Are there ghosts?’

‘I think so, though I’ve never seen one.’

‘As a girl, I fancied I saw dozens. I went through a spiritualist craze, along with half the world. Ectoplasm and table-rapping. It was all very “scientific”, you know. We Victorians wished to map the afterlife as we had mapped Africa. We wanted to believe death was a change, not an ending. Of course, that’s exactly what it turned out to be for some of us, for me. When I turned, I lost interest. Only recently have I realised the puzzle wasn’t solved but abandoned. At first, being a vampire seemed like being immortal. Then I realised how few of us even live a long time. Last night, I saw two elders die in an instant, like anyone else. We’ll both end, Geneviève. Then what?’

Their
gelati
had melted.

‘This is perhaps an overly momentous conversation for such a time and place,’ Geneviève said. ‘This is a city of life and death. Those great matters will attend to themselves without us. We are just a pair of pretty old ladies…’

‘Less of the “old”, Grandmama.’

‘We should take young lovers and have them buy us clothes.’

Kate thought of Marcello and blushed.

Damn. Geneviève would, of course, notice.

Kate looked away, letting the shadow of her hat fall over her face.

‘Kate?’

Geneviève reached over and lifted up Kate’s hatbrim.

Wiping away tears, she found herself giggling.

‘Kate, you’ve been here less than a day…’

Geneviève was astonished but not displeased. She laughed out loud.

‘Kate Reed, you’re a dark horse. And no mistake.’

6

FROM MOLDAVIA WITH LOVE

A
s evening fell, his blood rose. His eyes clicked open in the dark. Through the afternoon, he’d slept the sleep of the dead in a shuttered room at the Hotel Inghilterra.

Hamish Bond regretted the loss of those periods of half-sleep he had enjoyed as a warm man. After a fine meal, a day of exertion or making love to a beautiful woman, he would relish the slow departure of consciousness. As a vampire, he simply willed himself to rest as if turning out a light. His mind stopped along with his heart. It was compensation that he only needed three or four hours’ sleep — coffin-time, they called it — in a given month.

At once he knew he was not alone.

He had sealed the door and the windows, of course. He would have been alerted if the seals had fallen.

‘It’s no use lying still, Commander Bond,’ purred a silky voice. ‘I saw your eyes open.’

The room was pitch dark. His companion was like him, a vampire.

Casually, he sat up in bed, hand closing on the Walther PPK under the covers. He slept in a Japanese pyjama jacket, belted tightly at the waist.

He could see in the dark too.

She was on the other side of the room, breathing smoke through large, elegant nostrils. One of his cigarettes angled like a scalpel between her long, slender fingers.

She was sitting naked in an armchair, one knee demurely propped on the other. Though she had the throat for jade and the earlobes for diamonds, she wore no jewellery. Midnight-black hair grew straight back from a pronounced widow’s peak and cascaded over wide shoulders and onto proud breasts.

Her face was broad, Slavic with an almost Mongolian cast. Her fluorescent, violet eyes had suggestions of epicanthic folds. Her face was the beautiful mask of a pagan idol, luxuriant lips parted sweetly to afford a glimpse of savage fangs.

He knew at once she was an elder.

Her crossed legs were long. He appreciated the stretch of velvet-sheathed muscle from hip to knee. Halfway down her shins, flesh and bone thinned, trailing away into a wisp of white mist.

He’d heard of the trick, but never seen it done. She’d willed herself to become living fog, flowed under the locked and trip-wired door, then reassembled herself in his armchair.