Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (30 page)

‘This is dirt, nothing more,’ Pretorius decided, flicking some off his fingers. ‘Much of it is street grime swept up with the remains. Would our lady elder care to be revived with layer after layer of dog faeces or petrol smuts shot through her body? I think not.’

‘You misrepresent my views,’ West said.

‘We have an elder here,’ Pretorius said, acknowledging Geneviève with a yellow smile. ‘Shall we call upon her expertise, West? Shall we ask her whether she would be happy to be summoned from eternal night to find shards of cobblestone incorporated into her body like malignant tumours? Or shall we merely settle the matter by admitting that you are an incompetent blockhead?’

West turned away. Pretorius allowed himself a tiny twitch of triumph.

Sergeant Ginko began: ‘Mademoiselle Dieudonné is here to…’

‘Identify the corpse of Count Dracula,’ said Pretorius. ‘I know. Welcome, lady. Would you like some gin?’

He shook an unlabelled bottle of clear liquid.

‘It’s my only weakness,’ he said, taking a swallow.

Geneviève shook her head.

‘Pity. Very good for you, gin. You vampires don’t drink enough, you know. Rely too much on the meagre sustenance of blood. You should all have at least a pint of gin a month. And weak tea. Or else you dry up inside. Like frogs away from water. Very nasty.’

West pushed his glasses up over his forehead. His watery eyes passed over her and he came close to look. His fingers prodded her face.

‘Remarkable, remarkable,’ he mused. ‘The lividity, the pliability, the evident…’

‘Put her down, West,’ snapped Pretorius. ‘Stop playing with the guests.’

‘I maintain that…’

‘Nobody needs to know what you maintain, fool. Excuse me, Mademoiselle. Mr West has been pursuing his own crackpot notions for a good many years. He often forgets his theories were discredited before the War and acts as if sense could be made of all this.’

Pretorius indicated the room with a flourish.

‘As if making sense were anything but a convenient fiction.’

Geneviève didn’t know what to make of Dr Pretorius. Like most scientists who specialised in the theory and practice of vampirism, he was not a vampire himself. He was, however, unnaturally old. She remembered his name from articles she had read at least a century ago and had the idea he had been old then. Whereas Charles had retained the outward appearance of youth for a great many years, Pretorius looked ancient. His hands were arthritic claws and his clear blue eyes nested in wrinkles, but inner steel and fire suggested a vitality that was nowhere near exhausted. Turning vampire was only the most common way of achieving unnatural longevity. A Chinese criminal Charles had encountered a time or two was believed to rely on an elixir tailored to his peculiar physiology. And there were stories of other ancients who still walked the Earth.

West was apoplectic. ‘Everything is mechanical,’ he shouted, prompting Pretorius to a comical, conspiratorial cringe. ‘If we do not as yet understand a process, it is because we have not perceived the rules which govern its working. The dead may walk. This is a fact. There is no magic in it at all. A long-lived, as-yet unidentified virus — perhaps mutated by radium deposits in the Carpathians — will doubtless prove to be at the bottom of it. If this can be harnessed, then it will be possible for all to survive death at no cost.’

Pretorius smiled. ‘How many years, West? How long have you been searching for your virus? The idea is not even original with him, Mademoiselle. He was catamite to a certain Dr Moreau, who laid down much of the groundwork for this fruitless detour. And Moreau was a collaborator with Henry Jekyll.’

‘I know,’ she said, interrupting the tirade.

She had met Dr Jekyll and Dr Moreau.

‘Well, yes, of course you do. Before Jekyll, there was Van Helsing. And there’ve been others: Alexander Fleming, Peter Blood, Edmund Cordery. All squinting into their microscopes, watching the little red cells go round and round, looking for an answer.’

‘Miss Dieudonné,’ began West, ‘do you think yourself a natural being?’

Pretorius raised a feathery eyebrow and bid her answer.

‘No more nor less than I did when I was warm.’

‘You see, West, you’re on the wrong path. It’s not that we don’t understand how vampires live. We don’t understand how
humans
live. We can approximate the formulae. We can create life in glass jars. We can reanimate dead tissue. We can try to sell our souls to Satan, for all the good it will do. We can have everything, except an answer that makes sense.’

‘I refuse to accept that.’

‘Refuse all you may, West. I have been at this a great deal longer than you. I learned many years ago that it was futile to try to explain. The deeper you get, the
less
sense there is, the more contradictions emerge.’

‘You’re r-r-regressing to alchemy,’ stuttered West. ‘What is next, s-s-sorcery?’

Pretorius grinned like a gargoyle. ‘If that is the route we must take. But even sorcery is a way of systematising the unknowable. Perhaps we must accept that things do not make sense. The universe is wildly inconsistent, shifting from moment to moment, plunging from catastrophe to creation.’

‘Everything can be understood, Einstein maintained…’

‘Not at the end he didn’t. At the end, nobody claims to understand. Talk all you will of viruses and radium deposits, or of demons and goblins, but the fact is that there are creatures who cast no reflection in a looking glass. That cannot be explained. In the eighty years the world has been forced to accept that there are indeed such things as vampires, that has defeated many a greater mind than yours, Herbert West. Remember Max Planck’s Black Blood Refractive Postulate? What would you give for the laws of optics and refraction? Or any other scientific law? Not a farthing. Things that can’t be, are. If there are gods, they are mad or idiot. This girl here defies all your attempts to measure, calculate, categorise, define, confine, or constrain. And what are you going to do about it, bleat?’

‘You are wrong,’ West said quietly.

‘I think not,’ said Pretorius.

Geneviève’s mind was spinning. Something in Pretorius’s fervour frightened her. Could be she was really afraid that he was right? She’d outgrown a youthful terror that she might be a damned soul. But if she was not a creature of science, then what was she? What was left?

‘To the void,’ toasted Pretorius, lifting his gin. ‘To the chaos we must learn to love.’

‘Mademoiselle Dieudonné is to make an identification,’ prompted Ginko, who’d sat through the debate without complaining.

Pretorius reached under a black blanket and produced an object. It was Dracula’s head, still unrotted, eyes angry.

‘Is this him?’

Geneviève nodded.

‘You have to say it,’ Pretorius said. ‘Officially.’

‘That’s Dracula,’ she said.

‘Quelle surprise
,’ Pretorius said, tossing the head aside like a turnip. ‘I don’t like to speculate without fully consulting my estimable colleague West, but I think it’s safe to say the old bastard’s truly dead. Is there anything else?’

Geneviève looked at the Sergeant. He shrugged.

‘I think you can leave me to it then,’ Pretorius said. ‘You’ll get my forensic report in the next week. I doubt it will be of any use to you, or indeed anyone. Good day.’

They were required to leave.

27

PROFONDO ROSSO

F
or a while, it was a nightmare. Having learned of the chase among the pack didn’t make her a happier quarry. She did all the stupid things she’d seen people do when barracked by reporters. She flung her hands over her face, looked down at her shoes, and tried to walk on an invisible straight line through the crowd. She didn’t so much as snap ‘no comment’ in answer to increasingly blunt and impolite questions tossed at her like grapples. She must have looked guilty as Judas.

Kate got back to the
pensione
just in time to be thrown out. The press had been there too and got a lot of interview material from the landlady’s family about what a suspicious foreign slut she was. She hadn’t slept in Trastevere more than twice since arriving in Rome. She’d spent most of her time at Marcello’s apartment, with Charles and Geneviève, out on the street, or in prison. Nevertheless, she was required to settle an inflated bill to get her suitcase back.

She tried to telephone Marcello at his apartment but got no answer. She trudged up and down Via Veneto, but couldn’t find him in any of his usual haunts.

Of course, she realised Marcello had told the other reporters about her. It was how they had been able to lay in wait outside the police station. It was also presumably why he hadn’t been there. Apart from anything that might have been between them, she was a story and he ought to have been there to get it. At least he had enough gumption to be ashamed of putting her on the spot.

She still planned on taking it out on him.

While she had been in prison, the mood of the city had changed. The Via Veneto wasn’t as abandoned as before, except in the sense that a great many had abandoned it for somewhere else. The Café Strega was almost deserted. The elder vampires were gone, and quite a few new-borns were making themselves scarce. If the Crimson Executioner wanted the undead out of the city, he’d scored a triumph.

She sat in the café, sipping blood. To her relief, no one bothered her. The feeding frenzy over her story had passed, and someone else would be haring around with the press at their heels. The police had announced that she was not a suspect in the death of Prince Dracula. That left the press free to speculate on increasingly bizarre conspiracies. She liked the one about the Carpathian guardsman brainwashed by the Red Chinese and transformed into a vampire slayer, though she was a lot more likely to believe it was all down to the Jesuits.

Charles was gone, and now Dracula too. Her past was being dismantled. One man she had loved, the other hated, but they had defined a world she understood. A world in which she had a place, a cause, duties, ties. The cords that fixed her in the universe were being snipped one at a time.

Was this how elders came to feel? In time, everything they remembered from life passed. They alone remained, locked into their skulls, lost in a world of pop-up toasters and television advertisements.

She felt very small and not a little afraid.

‘The answers to such mysteries are very often found under the soles of our shoes.’

Father Merrin’s comment stuck in her mind. He had placed a subtle emphasis on the sentence. It was something he’d intended she should remember, should think about.

What was under the soles of her shoes?

Tiles. None too clean.

And beneath that?

Eventually, earth and rock and magma.

There were catacombs, ruins, caves, lairs, cells, basements. Even nightclubs. She kept being taken underground. Rome was like an iceberg. Only a fraction was on the surface.

What lived under Rome?

Or who?

‘There are tears everywhere,’ Santona had said. ‘The stones of the city pour forth tears.’

She remembered Santona too, her talk of
Mater Lachrymarum,
the Mother of Tears. The fortune-teller implied a link between this mysterious person and the girl who’d led Kate into Dracula’s tomb. The child’s pretty, evil face appeared to her still. Everything else might die here in Rome but the little girl would live on. Kate had a sense she was an ancient creature: not a vampire, but an elemental, something eternal and dreadful.

A mother must have a daughter. She kept coming back to that. Santona had said
Mater Lachrymarum
was not the girl’s mother, but the city’s.

How could Rome have a mother? According to Kate’s old classics teacher, the city had two fathers, Romulus and Remus. No mother was mentioned, unless it was the wolf bitch who suckled the twins.

Something stirred in her heart. Not just terror, but curiosity, a need to know, to understand. It was a song she’d heard since her warm days, perhaps the overriding melody of her life.

Charles’s death had knocked her out of herself. But perhaps Dracula’s passing had slapped her back on course. There was something new mixed in, a tune she’d never heard before. In a sense she didn’t want to contemplate yet, she was free. Without Dracula, the world was free to make of itself what it wished. And without Charles, so was she.

She wept hot tears.

She was not yet ready to be this free, this alone. It was like leaving school, leaving home, leaving society. To have no rules or measures, to have nothing but herself.

Her tears dried.

‘Kate,’ someone said, laying hands on hers, sitting down at the table.

She thought it might be Marcello. Despite her annoyance at him, her heart leaped.

It was Geneviève. She tried not to be disappointed.

‘Kate, how are you? I hadn’t heard they’d let you out.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, pulling in her hands.

‘You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had,’ Geneviève said. She signalled a waiter with one hand. ‘They had me identify Dracula’s head.’