Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (33 page)

Pony tried to latch her needle-ringed mouth on his crotch. He fought panic and stepped back. Her teeth closed on nothing and he felt a wash of relief. Angry, he thumped the vampire girl on the side of her head, then picked her up and tossed her screeching at her sister.

The twins fell in a ball, foaming and spitting.

Flattop stood over Brastov, holding his master’s cloak. After the girls, Bond would have to face this dead-alive thing.

Then someone new bowled into the arena.

A masked man in red tights leaped through the flame and ran across to the fight. He pushed through the spectators and embraced Flattop from behind. He gripped like a wrestler and Flattop gurgled, back bent out of shape, desperation written on his green-grey face.

It was the Crimson Executioner, the man who had killed Anibas and all the others.

‘Cathy, Pony,’ shouted Brastov. ‘To me.’

The girls untangled themselves. The Executioner hefted the broken-backed Flattop above his head in a perfect weightlifter’s stance. The muscles of his arms and legs swelled with exertion. His mouth was fixed in a manic teeth-baring grin and mad eyes shone through his domino mask.

Flattop was thrown away. He landed, groaning.

The twins crept forward, summoned by Brastov. The Executioner looked at them and laughed. Given pause, they stopped in their tracks, hissing.

Brastov’s whiskers bristled. He was angry and terrified.

Bond had cause to be thankful that he was a new-born vampire. This man killed only elders.

The Crimson Executioner, still laughing, picked the Cat Man up by the scruff of his neck and held him off the ground. His boots kicked in the air. His strangled protests sounded more like miaows than complaints.

Bond looked at the faces of the crowd.
Morti viventi,
lips rotted away to display permanent grins, watched with rapt attention, the last of their intelligence fixed on the spectacle.

Among the whores was a large warm woman, not obese or a giant, but big of frame and gesture. Something was strange about her eyes. She gave the classical thumbs-down sign.

‘So decides Mamma Roma,’ she declared.

‘Mamma Roma, Mamma Roma,’ chanted the whores.

The Crimson Executioner nodded.

He demonstrated one of the proverbial ways of skinning a cat. First, he took off Brastov’s face as if it were a mask, then he pulled a red tear down through his chest, as if unbuttoning a shirt. He reached inside and extracted Brastov’s red-clad skeleton from the furry skin. He tossed the fur away, and two female zombies tore it apart in an argument over its possession. Each salvaged scraps, which they rubbed against their noseless faces.

Without his catskin, Brastov was more human. He seemed to grow, assuming the shape of a full-sized man. Blood and bones and organs leaked out of him, falling with a splash around the Executioner’s boots.

Bond saw mad fear in Brastov’s slit pupils.

The Executioner tore the elder vampire apart and let the remains tumble. The zombies fell on the splatter of meat and bone, and began chewing. The Executioner held Brastov’s beating heart and squeezed it like a sponge until it was still.

‘You,’ said Mamma Roma, pointing at Bond.

‘Madam,’ he acknowledged.

‘Come here.’

He looked at the
morti viventi,
brawling and biting over the remains of Gregor Brastov. He saw Cathy and Pony helping the mewling Flattop up onto his feet.

Mamma Roma’s face was implacable. She was past her youth. Her wide hips had birthed many babies. Her full breasts had suckled children and full-grown men.

Her name was apt. She was Rome.

Her arms were out. Her mouth was open.

He went to Mamma.

30

CINEMA INFERNO

K
ate expected to go through all manner of mendacity in order to get into Cinecittà, and had worked up her press credentials to suggest a reason for being in the film studio. But, mingling with a chattering crowd of girls who were massacre extras or makeup assistants, they just walked onto the lot. A relic of the fascist era not repudiated in modern Italy, Mussolini’s purpose-built Hollywood-on-the-Tiber was a chaos of people.

‘How do we find the Argonauts?’ Geneviève asked.

Kate looked at the streams of people heading for the various stages. A troop of French cavalrymen, circa 1812, trotted double-time towards one set of thirty-foot doors, packs and rifles jingling. A circus elephant was led past by a man on stripy-trousered stilts and a woman in spangled tights.

‘I imagine we should follow that, Gené.’

A shining sheepskin the size of a sail was being carefully carried past by four stagehands. Its gold paint was still wet. The Golden Fleece was carried on to Teatro 6. A blackboard by the door was scrawled with the legend
‘gli argonauti’.
A ragged group of weatherbeaten, false-bearded ancient Greeks loitered by the stage, smoking cigarettes and bragging in Italian about their sex lives.

They walked to the warehouse-like building. The Argonauts managed the obligatory whistles, gestures and comments, calling Geneviève ‘eh, blondie’ and Kate
‘arance rosse’.
Red orange juice. Very flattering.

They made it onto the stage.

The vast stage was as crowded and purposeful as a riot. Her experience of film studios was confined to press calls at Ealing or Merton Park, pleasant strolls around the lot accompanied by deferential publicists, always timed to coincide with the tea break. She was overwhelmed by the
noise
of Teatro 6. Films were shot here as in the silent era: several different musical combos playing in disharmony, a building site symphony of hammering and sawing and swearing, the booming cannons of
Napoleon’s Retreat
on the next stage, everyone shouting at once.

Geneviève spotted Orson Welles, raised up from the studio floor, clinging to the plaster prow of the
Argo
— which could only be shot from one side because only half the ship had been constructed — and looking up to the painted Heavens.

This Argo was a blind navigator, eyes covered by cataract lenses the colour of spoiled milk. Tears of pain ran through Welles’s makeup, blobbing around the lower slopes of a monumental false nose. His real schnoz reputedly looked absurd on film, a tiny thing lost in a CinemaScope face, so he retreated behind enormous blobs of putty.

A torrent began. Rainfall from sprinklers above was whipped by vast wind machines. Water was dashed into the shipbuilder’s face, drenching his robes. He clung desperately to the
Argo
and cursed the Gods.

Welles cursed in English. The Gods replied in Italian, German and French.

Actors from many countries, each a star in his or her own territory, had been carefully cast to give
Gli argonauti
‘international appeal’. In dialogue scenes, they all counted slowly up to a hundred in native tongues, a different emotion conveyed by each number. Lines were dubbed in later, often by other actors. Even Welles might lose his unmistakable canyon-deep voice and come out like Mickey Mouse.

A horde of technicians held the big sparkly blue canopy that lapped against the side of the ship, pumping their arms up and down like a synchronised weightlifting team to make waves. Water formed pools in the dips of the canopy and spilled through rips, soaking the poor souls underneath.

Argo was joined at the prow by Jason. Kirk Douglas thrust his dimple into the artificial wind, and clapped the shipbuilder on the shoulder.

‘If we don’t get that rug, fat boy,’ he said, with feeling, ‘it’s your ass.’

‘I’d back my ass against your chin any day of the week, play-actor,’ Argo replied.

Eddy Poe was supposed to be the writer of this script, and that didn’t sound like his style. More heroic lines would be provided later.

Argonauts hauled away on the oars, which battered the sea-canopy, swatting a few technicians to their knees. Curses and cries of pain rose from the depths. A divine voice from on high commanded the crew to keep rowing. In heavily-accented Austrian-English, God ordered extras to put their backs into it. Lesser gods translated the instructions into several European languages.

The torrent was a real downpour now. Some of the sprinkler-heads fell from the studio-skies, and ropes of hosewater lashed the set, twisting in the blast of the wind machines. Douglas supported Welles and water poured off them. That Argo’s nose stayed stuck on was a miracle.

A carnival head broke the surface of the canopy by the boat and reared up on high-tension wires, squirting yet more water from its mouth and nostrils. Kate supposed this was supposed to be Poseidon, or one of his fishface cronies. It looked like a Gargantua-sized glove puppet, with finned ears and lobster-antennae bristling over its big rolling eyes.

The mechanical monster’s fishy lower jaw hooked on the sea, and tore a section of it. A reservoir of prop water spilled through and dozens of feet slipped on the wet floor. The sea collapsed all around the
Argo
, falling away from the oars, exposing the scaffold that held up the half-ship.

Toby Dammit, the English matinée idol cast as Theseus, was discovered sneaking a crafty fag in the cutaway diagram bilges. He looked like something from the bottom of the sea, colourlessly unhealthy, pupils shrinking in the light, cheeks bulging with the internal pressure of his body. Kate had an idea there was more than tobacco in his roll-up.

‘Cut,’ boomed the voice of God.

Suddenly, all noise shut off. Even the quiet trickle of water wound down.

Geneviève tapped Kate’s shoulder and pointed upwards. A chair on a crane descended from a platform where a motion picture camera was mounted like a siege gun. In the chair was an old man in jackboots and an open-necked shirt. One lens of his glasses was blacked-out. He carried a megaphone the size of a dustbin.

‘Who let the sea get wet?’ God — Fritz Lang — demanded. ‘They are fired.’

Geneviève laughed, more in surprise than humour. Her chuckle echoed in the enormous space.

‘She who laughs is also fired,’ decreed God.

Geneviève shrugged and stifled further giggles. Kate looked reproach at her.

An Italian master technician sauntered over to Lang, hands in pockets. He spieled at length, gesturing with expressive shoulders. The director bobbed around twenty feet above, considering.

Finally, he raised his megaphone.

‘We break for fifteen minutes,’ he said, like a supreme court justice declaring a recess. ‘While the sea is fixed. No one is allowed to leave. That is all.’

The chair ascended again, to the studio roof. Everyone started shouting at once, an explosion of babble. Some people even began working. A crew of seamstresses appeared and began to sew the sea back together. They wielded the kind of thick needles and strong twine oldtime mariners would have used to fix rent-apart mainsails. When she saw
The Argonauts
in the cinema, Kate would look out for stitches in the sea.

With an enormous sigh, Welles settled in a straining seat and popped the white rinds from his eyes. They’d found a café adjacent to the Argonauts set, and Welles — remembering them from the Palazzo Otranto — had consented to talk with them.

This must have been a disused stage, converted into a cafeteria. The building was the size of a dirigible hangar, with a street winding through it and smaller buildings contained by it, like ships in the stomach of a giant whale. A row of sidewalk cafés was apparently doing great business, most tables crowded with busy young people. A tinny transistor radio played ‘Dracula
Cha Cha Cha
’, not a song Kate had good memories of. One table over, a bull-headed shape-shifter was boasting to a couple of party girls. She could imagine the role he was playing.

Welles’s costume was still damp, but he was one of those men who seem comfortable in any situation. He dripped on the concrete floor.

Kate was less sure now than when the idea had been proposed that this would be at all useful. After all, Welles was an actor, not a real seer. But he’d been there when Dracula died, and was enough of a magician to see through most tricks.

What she was worried about, she admitted, was that he’d explain how she had done it. Everything between her descent of the cliff and Geneviève finding her covered with
il principe’s
blood was red fog. Someone — this
Mater Lachrymarum
— might have taken her mind and made use of her body. The only thing that really argued against it was the evidence. The silver scalpel, with its traces of burned vampire skin. The unmarked palms of her hands. If Welles could understand the plot of
Mr Arkadin,
could he not also come up with a story that made her a murderess and a mind-puppet?

The café was busy but no one came to take their orders.

‘Two charming vampire ladies come a-calling,’ Welles summed them up, fixing each with an eye. Underneath the face makeup and doughy flesh, currently further encrusted by a ginger-dyed beard, was a mischievous little-boy smile. ‘This is an honour rare in the life of Old Prospero.’