Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (14 page)

Marcello and Kate stood, out of respect, and the priest left, vestments billowing. She watched him stride through the crowds, a lone ascetic among voluptuaries. Beneath his knife-logic mind was a not unkindly soul, she thought. But he’d cleverly dodged the question about secret crusades.

She sat down and, after a moment’s hesitation, so did Marcello. He was still uncomfortable with her. Was it because he’d seen her crouched by the corpses of Kernassy and Malenka? Or had he been reserved before that? He was with vampires at the airport, so he could hardly have a phobia about her kind.

No, she realised, it was her usual curse. Whenever she met a man she liked, she gave everything away at once. She broadcast some signal that made the object of her interest privy to her hopes and desires and, at the same time, rendered her faintly repulsive to him. She’d tried being cool, being friendly, being clever, and being blatant. No approach modified the first impression.

She scared them off. That was all there was to it.

With those damned sunglasses, she couldn’t tell what Marcello was thinking. Geneviève would’ve seen through the black lenses and read his shrinking soul. Kate worried that he was trying to think of an excuse to escape from her.

‘Have you written up the murders?’ she asked.

With an apologetic turn of the head, he admitted he’d passed on the bare details to several editors. She couldn’t believe he was as bored as he affected to be. No newspaperman could walk into the scene of a double murder and fail to smell a by-line and a paycheque. And he’d taken the trouble to consult Father Merrin. He was posing, pretending a profound disinterest he couldn’t possibly feel.

‘I’ve been thinking of doing an article on the Crimson Executioner,’ she said. ‘He’s unknown in Britain. By chance, I’m in the middle of the news. But I need more than just the one close shave. I need background, and I need to stay on the story. We should work together.’

That was too blunt. He’d run screaming now.

‘Perhaps we might even get to him ahead of Silvestri,’ she ventured.

Marcello’s mouth pressed into a thoughtful line. Brows knit above the rims of his dark glasses. He let out a plume of smoke.

‘Perhaps,’ he said.

Perhaps.
That was almost as good as
ayes.
Better than a
maybe,
and not a
no.

‘Partners?’ she suggested, offering her hand.

He stubbed out his cigarette, lit another one, sucked in smoke, let out smoke, considered a moment, and took her hand, not squeezing, not shaking.

‘Partners,’ she confirmed.

9

LIVE AND LET DIE

H
e knew he was being followed. Three of them, two large, one small. Bond, on foot today, took the opportunity to dawdle in the Parco di Traiano, to smoke them out.

Strewn about were all manner of ancient things worth a touristy look-see. Whenever he peered at a plaque, or pondered a chunk of broken statue, he enjoyed the thought of his tails getting uncomfortable under their collars. Each stop made them more conspicuous. Actually, they were about as unobtrusive as a Korean wrestler at an English golf clubhouse. He wondered why they’d got into this business in the first place. The point, as he’d been told many times, was to blend in, not stand out. Then again, Bond liked a dash of the ostentatious. It wasn’t exactly easy to overlook an Aston Martin, for instance. And his other car was a Bentley.

He guessed they were from the Other Side, the people Anibas had thrown in with. They wouldn’t be happy to lose a valuable vixen like her, and might even be inclined — somewhat unfairly, but what could you expect from that shower? — to blame him for their loss. Another possibility was that the larger of the two large fellows was this Crimson Executioner, to whom he owed his life but whom he wouldn’t be especially keen on tangling with again. After all, the vampire killer might not always confine his garrotting activities to elders. The situation in Rome was complicated, as Winthrop had warned him. He needed to consult the old man again.

From the park, he could see Beauregard in his bath chair on his balcony, nodding perhaps in sleep, sometimes looking out at the view. In the Diogenes Club, the old man was a legend. Youngsters who’d come up in the war tended to get a touch fed up when fossils of Edwin Winthrop’s generation harped on about the daring exploits of Charles Beauregard, the man who faced Dracula in his lair and lived to tell of it. Having met the fellow, Bond began to understand what all the fuss was about.

He stopped dead and lit a cigarette, fixing his tails’ positions in his mind.

The larger of the two large ones was very tall, well over seven feet, anchored by clumping asphalt-spreader’s boots. His complexion was a greenish-grey, not very healthy. The oversize bowler perched on his flattish head, shaded heavily lidded, watery eyes. His teeth, glimpsed when thin black lips stretched in an approximate smile, flashed steel. The collar of his black duffel coat bunched up around his neck, covering protuberances. He moved slowly, lumbering, and his long, scarred hands seemed spindly. But there was great strength there. He would not be easy to kill.

The other large one — Bond assumed it was human — was broader, bundled up in a clay-stained overcoat, legs like stiff tree trunks, doughy face the brown of freshly scooped mud. On a head the shape of a plum pudding was a strange wig-hat, somewhere between a page-boy bob and an upturned flowerpot. A Star of David hung around its throat, perhaps to ward off vampires.

These were not undead in any sense he understood, but he was convinced they weren’t exactly alive either.

At least, they clod-hopped enough to be obvious. They’d picked him up a few streets away from the Inghilterra and trudged purposefully after him all afternoon and into the evening, making a bad job of loitering aimlessly whenever he slowed down.

The third was the most interesting, a long-necked ballerina with a doll-like white face and porcelain arms. She drifted along on her points like a stray from a
commedia dell’arte
troupe, skirts slightly bedraggled. He hadn’t been sure of her at first, but she definitely triangulated with the others.

A team of three meant something serious. If he was only to be tailed, less noticeable agents would have been deployed. And if he were to be assassinated, a sniper with a silver bullet could handle the job. Considering how often the Other Side had decreed he should be truly dead, it was a surprise they hadn’t yet called in an East German Ladies’ Rifle Champion to get him cleanly out of the way. It was always nonsense with venomous spiders under the eiderdown or bizarre strong-arm characters. Like these.

He left the park and looked up at Beauregard’s balcony. The old man saw him at once and dropped something over the parapet. Bond’s hand snaked out instinctively. He snatched the keys from the air. He was being invited up.

He assumed Beauregard’s vampire companion wasn’t at home. That might be a good thing. The Dieudonné woman didn’t care for him much. Which was a shame, since she was interesting, with arresting eyes and an electric grace. A fiery spirit burned inside her supple body. It would be an interesting challenge to bend spirit and body both to his will, to unleash centuried passions and join them to his own relentless hunger.

On the stoop of the apartment building, he paused and looked around. His three tails converged, striding or tripping through the low mist of the park.

The weight of his Walther was comforting under his armpit. Whatever these characters were, a silver bullet or two in the head or heart ought to see them off. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Having a licence to kill was all well and good, but he had to fill in forms in triplicate whenever it was exercised. And even friendly foreign governments, like whoever was running Italy this week, whinged when British Intelligence killed folk on their patches.

He yawned with calculation, exposing fangs to the night air, tasting the breeze. He was still quickened by Anibas’s potent blood. Sometimes, he felt an enemy’s fear on the tip of his tongue, could suck out of evaporated sweat an idea of purpose. Now, there was a riot of Roman senses, but nothing from the three comrades.

Nothing at all.

Not vampire, not warm.

He let himself in to the large, dark lobby and took the cage lift up to Beauregard’s landing. It rose with a satisfying clunking and rattling of chains.

He unlocked the door of Beauregard’s flat and stepped inside. The old man called to him to come through to the study. Bond found Beauregard wheeling in from the balcony, exerting himself a little.

‘You must excuse me, Commander Bond. Gené is not at home. She’s out picking a dress for a special occasion.’

‘A wedding?’ he ventured.

‘Yes, but it’ll have to do for a funeral too. So our Crimson Executioner has destroyed the Lady Anibas?’

He wasn’t surprised Beauregard should know. The man still had his sources of information.

‘You were in Rome to see her, I presume? To turn her, as it were. One of Edwin’s little operations. As might be predicted, she wasn’t quite prepared to sign up. What happened? Did the Russians get to her with a better offer?’

He only had to confirm Beauregard’s suppositions.

The old man shook his head knowingly. Still obviously frail, he was a little flushed too. He might be a warm man, but he’d picked up — from his vampire mistress? — the trick of sapping energy from associates.

‘Their section chief in Rome is very able,’ said Beauregard. ‘You’ve been briefed on him.’

‘Gregor Brastov.’

‘Count Gregor Brastov, he was once. A proper Carpathian. Not many of the breed in Smert Spionem. Over centuries, he’s developed the skills one needs to survive successive purges. They call him the Cat Man. Always lands on his paws.’

Smert Spionem — Death to Spies! — was Lavrenti Beria’s Soviet Intelligence department. The Other Side’s equivalent of the Diogenes Club. Bond had tangled with their long-range employees before, and was fascinated by the colourless Beria’s love of eccentric and flamboyant lieutenants.

‘Winthrop says Brastov is one of the most dangerous creatures in Europe.’

‘Typically acute,’ concurred Beauregard. ‘Brastov is more isolated in Rome than he might be. Mario Balato, a local Communist Party bigwig, is a vampire-hater of the first water. He is forever citing passages in Marx to justify the prejudice. Aristocrats draining the lifeblood of the noble peasantry, dead labour leeching off the living. Our American cousins think, in their slightly simple-minded manner, that Moscow runs all foreign Communist Parties with an iron hand. Certainly, Khrushchev wishes that were true, as much as Stalin did. But the Italian reds are too bolshy, as it were, to go along with Comintern more than half the time. Brastov imports his own people, and there’s been friction with Balato’s crowd — factional killings, safe houses blown up, that sort of thing. One theory has the Crimson Executioner as literally a Red Vampire Killer, acting on Balato’s orders.’

‘Liquidating Anibas was as much an attack on Brastov as on the House of Vajda, then. She was a prize. Three unique individuals have stumped around after me all afternoon, which suggests Smert Spionem are rather upset.’

The old man’s thin hands darted like birds, waving away the theory

‘The Executioner’s too theatrical to be one of Balato’s knifemen. To be honest, his activities strike me as being more in
our
line.’

It had occurred to him, of course. The Crimson Executioner had saved his life, eliminating someone who was on the point of killing him. Winthrop could be running another agent in Rome without letting Bond in on it. That sort of ‘need to know’ trickery wouldn’t be surprising from Diogenes.

Beauregard wheeled backwards, heels trailing on the carpet. He rolled over to a low table and offered brandy from a decanter.

Bond accepted.

‘I have to watch my measures,’ Beauregard admitted, ‘but I can derive vicarious pleasure from your enjoyment.’

It was a good, not quite excellent, Courvoisier. He let it sing on his tongue for a moment. Since turning, his palate had become extraordinarily sensitive. He feared he was spoiled for anything less than truly first rate.

Beauregard took a Havana cigar from a box and accepted a light. He puffed, and looked a little sad.

‘I’ve lost surprisingly little in extreme old age,’ he said, with quiet pride. ‘But taste is going.’

Bond knew he was unlikely to last, even as a vampire, to the age Charles Beauregard had attained. He was not the type to rise, as Winthrop had done and Beauregard before him, to the Ruling Cabal. Few field agents went on much beyond forty. It was a question of nerve, not willingness. As a vampire, he might have four or five more decades in the game than a warm man, though he risked, in the picturesque phrase of a colleague from the CIA, ‘going blood simple’. One of the less comfortable factors of turning was that it was never certain what exactly one would turn into.

‘Did you see the Crimson Executioner?’ Beauregard asked.

‘Just his hands. They were red.’