Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (29 page)

Though Penelope was bleeding him as regularly as ever, she was more businesslike about it. She nipped without passion, as if he were an animal or a servant. She was concerned with too much else to spare time for coaxing him along. He didn’t even mind. Just so long as he could stay.

‘I think we have discovered why the late Prince was so attractive to the House of Vajda,’ Penelope said.

She stabbed a finger at a column of numbers.

‘Not to put too fine a point on it, Asa is stony broke and has been for two hundred years. She inherited a fortune with her title, but spent it all on living from decade to decade. She has never had any income except plunder, never made any investments. Without Dracula’s gold, the poor dear will have to throw herself on the mercy of her creditors. Or find herself another wealthy fiancé.’

Penelope spoke as if this discovery didn’t please her. She seemed to express genuine sympathy for the Princess.

‘That’s the trouble with elders,’ she said. ‘They live forever and don’t realise things run out. They were born in an age when stewards ran households, and never learned to balance the books.’

A little of his blood was smudged at the corner of her mouth. He didn’t point it out.

She slammed the ledger shut.

‘Asa’s bankruptcy is a minor inconvenience. Since no connection was actually made with the House of Dracula, she can safely be sent packing with a charitable handout. The real nightmare will come when we have to settle the Count’s affairs. The guests who are expected for tea will complicate matters. I had hoped to put them off until after the police closed the case, but they are impatient.’

Penelope took charge because someone had to. When word came of the other murders in Rome on the night of Dracula’s death, the elders assembled for the ball scurried out of Italy, dispersing to the corners of the world. Without their Prince, most of the Carpathian Guard felt no duty to remain at Otranto. Dead men who had stuck to their posts for centuries were gone overnight. Some exposed themselves to the sun and crumbled, out of shame at their failure to protect their master. Others less honourable simply deserted, taking with them whatever items of value they could lay their claws on. Many of the servants also hightailed it out of the palace. The retainers who stayed did so perhaps because they couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

There was all manner of mess. Penelope had rolled up her sleeves and set to clearing up.

Klove opened the door and let five people into the room.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Penelope, a perfect hostess.

The distinguished newcomers were Clare Boothe Luce, the American Ambassador; John Profumo, the British Minister of War; General Giovanni Di Lorenzo, head of the Italian Secret Police; Andrey Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister; and General Charles de Gaulle, President of the Republic of France. De Gaulle might have come in person to make sure Dracula was truly dead.

Double doors opened and servants wheeled in a convoy of tea trolleys.

‘Might I offer you hospitality?’ asked Penelope. ‘It is a tradition of this house.’

She was acting like the widow. As she picked up a hefty teapot and bent forward to pour, Profumo sneakily eyed the top of her summer dress.

De Gaulle snorted through his prominent beak at this British affectation. Penelope drew his attention to a decanter of brandy that evidently met with his approval. Mrs Luce, who reminded Tom nastily of his aunt, didn’t take kindly to the display of indulgence; she was as ill at ease both with taking tea from a dead woman as with the presence of a known Communist. Gromyko sipped his weak, milky tea and stuck out his little finger like a charm school graduate.

‘Thank you, gracious lady,’ said the Russian.

‘You are welcome.’

‘If we could get down to brass tacks, Andrey,’ said Mrs Luce. She used the Russian’s Christian name like an insult.

‘Very well,
Clare
,’ he retorted, shrugging an apology to Penelope.

‘Who is this person?’ Di Lorenzo demanded, meaning Tom.

‘My good right hand,’ said Penelope. ‘A countryman of yours, Ambassador. Perhaps you know his people.’

As it happened, she didn’t. Which was a mercy

‘Miss Churchward,’ ventured Profumo, ‘do you have the authority to speak for the House of Dracula?’

‘So it seems,’ Penelope admitted. ‘I’ve no formal position, but have been with the household long enough to be familiar with its affairs. In the absence of any official executrix, I’ve taken matters in hand. Thus far, I have not been opposed.’

Profumo nodded.

‘You are aware of the terms of
il principe’s
residency in the Palazzo Otranto?’ asked the Italian.

‘Not entirely,’ said Penelope. ‘I understand a treaty was struck during the last war, between Dracula and the Allies. I assume that is why this party has such an interesting international flavour?’

‘Dracula lived here at the sufferance of the Allied powers,’ Mrs Luce stated. ‘A condition of the Croglin Grange Treaty was that he make no attempt to leave.’

Penelope nodded. Tom had wondered whether Dracula might not have been some sort of prisoner.

‘We were concerned, dear lady, about his engagement,’ said Gromyko. ‘It was never clear where the bride and groom would reside. The possibility that they might choose to leave this palace, and thus violate Croglin Grange, gave us much to worry over.’

Mrs Luce shot the Russian a nasty look. A die-hard anti-Communist, and prominent supporter of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, she was also known to loathe vampires. She had coined the slogan ‘Never Dead Nor Red’, popularised by her husband Henry’s blatantly-titled magazine,
Life.

‘Sadly, that concern is at an end,’ said Penelope.

‘Indeed, indeed,’ said Profumo, trying to smooth things over. The minister attacked the bourbon biscuits as if he’d skipped lunch.

‘There is no Dracula,’ said Di Lorenzo. ‘There is no Croglin Grange.’

Tom didn’t understand.

‘Very well,’ said Penelope. ‘If I might be permitted to stay on long enough to settle things.’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Profumo. ‘Does anyone have any objections?’

De Gaulle looked up from his brandy and said, ‘Non’.

Tom realised they were being evicted. The Italians wanted their palace back. It hadn’t occurred to him, but of course Otranto had never really been Dracula’s property.

This party couldn’t just be to award the Order of the Boot to the last of Dracula’s household. There must be other matters to settle, of international importance.

‘Gracious lady,’ said the Russian, ‘we are anxious that the papers of the late Prince be disposed of tactfully.’

‘There is a great deal of documentation,’ Penelope admitted. ‘In a variety of languages, with few of which I am familiar. Much must be of historical importance. I should hope a permanent home could be found for this Dracula archive.’

The distinguished visitors exchanged looks. Tom understood these people. They all wanted to be left alone with the papers, to search for documents embarrassing to themselves or their enemies. None trusted the others not to exploit the material for their own ends, quite correctly. They were all out for what they could get.

‘The British Museum Library would be willing to take the burden,’ Profumo suggested, accepting another pouring of tea.

‘Non,’ said de Gaulle.

No one else was blatant enough to put their own case. That would come later.

There was a commotion outside.

‘I believe the Princess Asa is joining us,’ said Penelope.

Klove, deferentially unhappy about it, opened the door again, and the princess trailed in. Asa still wore her wedding gown. Flowers were wound into her hair and spots of rouge inexpertly applied to her cheeks. She all but wailed as she dragged herself into the Crystal Room.

‘Princess, dear, can I offer you refreshment?’

Penelope held a white mouse by its tail. She had taken the animal from a writhing fishbowl full of the rodents. Leftovers from the party.

Asa took the mouse and savaged it in two bites. Blood squirted down her lacework bosom.

Penelope looked at her with triumphant sympathy. She shared the expression with her guests, allowing herself the hint of a ‘what can you do?’ shrug.

Asa swallowed what she’d chewed and clung to Penelope like a child. The Englishwoman picked through the Moldavian’s hair, smoothing tangles and extracting dead flowers.

‘She’s had a shock, poor thing,’ Penelope explained, needlessly. ‘But she’ll be her own self in a few years. Won’t you, dearest Asa?’

She nodded and Asa mimicked her.

26

MR WEST AND DR PRETORIUS

T
he remains were kept on the lowest level of the central morgue. From preserved scraps of mural, Geneviève guessed the building was built upon the foundations of an ancient Roman institution. Maybe this was where they’d brought gutted gladiators for primitive experiments in anatomy. More likely the place, like everywhere else important, had once been a brothel.

She passed down through rooms with pull-out drawers for the dead to rooms where corpses were strewn haphazardly on gurneys. Victims of age, disease, violence, and accident lay untroubled, bumped to the back of the queue by the vampire murders. Though she had only the slightest acquaintance with any of the victims, the destruction of seven elders — eight, if Dracula were included — made her think about her own mortality. If she’d left the party earlier, she might have had her own encounter with the Crimson Executioner. All the victims were of an age to have outlasted generations of fearless vampire slayers, to have survived many assassination attempts. She had no reason to think she’d have had any better luck if the man in red had come for her with a silver-bladed axe.

A trick of acoustics meant there was a constant background whispering. The voices of doctors and coroners, policemen and grieving relatives, were picked up on the building’s internal wind and circulated in a sinister susurrus that sounded dreadfully like the massed complaining of the dead. Born in an age where squeamishness was unheard of — her human father was a surgeon who had worked on battlefields, and she’d been his apprentice — and having lived through centuries too often marked by grue, Geneviève was not easily affected by empty flesh vessels or bothered by thoughts of angry spirits.

This place, however, made her skin crawl.

Through curiosity as much as duty she had consented to the request relayed from the police via the French consul. With the sudden exodus of elders from Rome, she was apparently the only person within reach who could legitimately identify the body. That she’d already done so at the scene of the crime made the whole business redundant, but forms had to be filled in and the identification made in the presence of an official witness.

Sergeant Ginko guided her through the labyrinth of the morgue. He grumbled sourly that if pressure had not been brought from above to have so many policemen at the Palazzo Otranto, then the Crimson Executioner wouldn’t have had such an easy time of it in the city. She doubted that any number of men would have prevented the killings.

From his white-belted blue uniform and white beret, she knew the Sergeant was with the
polizia,
the state police. They had responsibility for violent crime, but a rivalry existed with the
carabinieri,
the red-trousered military police, who tended to boast that if it were down to them, none of this would ever have happened. Both the
polizia
and the
carabinieri
sneered at the
vigili urbani,
the municipal police, who wore blue in winter and white in summer and chiefly made a hash of directing traffic.

They came into a room the size of a swimming pool, lit like an American pool hall. Banks of shrouded lights hung over long tables. Two men worked among the dead. Geneviève understood specialists had been called on to do the forensic work.

Ginko introduced her to Mr Herbert West, of the Miskatonic University, and Dr Septimus Pretorius, who was attached to no institution. Neither gentleman gave her more than a nod. They were absorbed in examining a strew of ashes topped by a wig of long black hair and dotted here and there with teeth or tiny bones.

West was a whiny little American, with a boyish face and a fragile demeanour. A splatter of blood smeared one lens of his glasses and streaked through his tidy hair.

‘Were enough blood spilled on these ashes,’ West argued, ‘I believe Luna Mora would coalesce and walk again. Nodes remain even on a microscopic level which could link up and recreate her body. Of course, consciousness has flown forever. We could merely reconstitute and reanimate something with the shape of Luna Mora, not the person herself. For that, we should need the physical brain, the seat of reason.’

Dr Pretorius snorted like a dowager who notices a niece using the wrong fork. He had the face of a disapproving gnome, and a bird’s nest of fine cottony hair. His white smock was immaculate.

‘You are a buffoon, West,’ he said.

West spluttered, but made no reply. His face reddened.