Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (4 page)

‘She won’t understand why that’s amusing, Count,’ Penelope said, sweetly. ‘Katie,
Paese sera
is the newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, and
Osservatore Romano
is the Vatican paper.’

Marcello shrugged, showing no shame.

‘They are deadly enemies, you see, the priests and the reds,’ Penelope explained further.

Kate wondered if anyone would mind if she killed Penny.

The Count had a suite at the Hotel Hassler, a baroque remainder of old world magnificence at the top of the Spanish Steps. The elder tipped the doorman to the amount Kate expected to pay for a month’s lodging in her
pensione
.

Kate, Penelope, Tom and Marcello sat in the crowded bar while Kernassy and Malenka settled in upstairs. Klove ferried many trunks from the Fiat up to the suite. Kate was self-conscious about her own tiny suitcase. Penny made an observation about her travelling light, implying — correctly — a poverty of wardrobe.

Marcello and Tom drank espresso, and Penelope insisted Kate sample the vampire fare. She summoned over a handsome, blank-faced young waiter. He wore a finely striped waistcoat and very tight black trousers. Penny ordered a measure for herself — to be sociable, she said — and one for Kate.

The waiter deftly popped a snap-fastener on his cuff and rolled up his sleeve. A tourniquet was tied around his elbow, and a steel needle was stuck into a fat vein in his lower arm, attached by a short clear plastic tube to a spigot.

He twisted open the tap and allowed a brief squirt of his blood into a thin cocktail glass. Penelope made great show of sniffing and tasting, then signalled him to go on. The waiter twice measured two inches of the red stuff over ice and a slice of lemon. Penny gave him a handful of
lire
and waved him away. He couldn’t serve many vampire customers before having to be relieved. Kate wondered how many nights a week he worked. Did poverty-stricken Southerners dribble away their lives to send money home to their families? Or was everyone carefully vetted by a snobbish management?

Penelope raised her drink and smiled, delicate fang-points extended.

‘Good health,’ she said, clinking Kate’s glass and sipping.

Kate looked at Marcello, wondering if he were disgusted by this display. She couldn’t tell. He held up his tiny coffee cup in a parody toast.

All three of her companions looked at her as she touched her tongue to the cocktail.

It was a rush. She had not had human blood for weeks. She forced herself not to gulp. It was rich and would make her giddy if she tossed it down. She savoured a peppery mouthful, let it wash against the back of her throat, then swallowed demurely

‘Signorina Reed, is it true what they say of Italian men?’ asked Marcello. ‘Is our blood hot?’

‘This isn’t,’ she said. ‘It has ice in it.’

Marcello smiled with genuine sweetness.

‘It would have to,’ Tom said. ‘Or you’d flame away.’

Kate sensed a fastidiousness in Penelope’s American friend. If he disliked public displays of vampirism, why was he hanging around Penny? Was he jealous that she was drinking the decanted blood of an anonymous waiter, rather than taking his straight from the barrel?

It would take a while to sort all these people out in her mind. If, after tonight, she saw them at all. She could cheerfully avoid Penny for the rest of her visit and knew Tom would prefer her out of the way, but Count Kernassy appeared uncommonly decent for one of the old ones. And Marcello…

Malenka swept into the bar in a new dress and caused a sensation.

Kate assumed the Via Veneto was less likely to be bowled over by Malenka. The most beautiful, famous, notorious, and interesting people in the world gathered here nightly. She was sure she spotted Jean-Paul Sartre outside the Café de Paris, shrinking under the awning as Simone de Beauvoir arm-wrestled Ernest Hemingway into submission. Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer strolled past arm in arm, a pack of worshipful urchins at their heels.

But Malenka conquered all.

Her gown, from the House of Massimo Morlacchi, was a masterpiece of architectural engineering. Midnight black velvet, it was cut low, slashed high and had round windows at the waist. Malenka was one of those vampires who didn’t breathe. Any expansion of her rib-cage would explode the whole assembly. A white Wendigo fur wrap writhed on her wide, white shoulders — she had huge, lady-wrestler shoulders, Penny eagerly pointed out — as if it still had some remnant of life.

The Count displayed his niece. She rested a hand on his arm, her white flesh glowing, shoving the elder into permanent shadow.

Kate and Penelope, vaguely escorted by Marcello and Tom, followed paces behind the main attraction. The faithful Klove was somewhere near in case anyone was too overenthusiastic in their attentions.

The paparazzi ran in a pack, snapping at Malenka, insatiable and insistent. Kate was sure she would show up as a smudge in the corner of a lot of pictures. She didn’t photograph well.

They went from the Rosati to the Strega to the Zeppa to the Doney, stopping for drinks at each. Marcello stayed with espresso but Tom was on to
amaretti
. Penelope sweetly goaded Kate into more vampire cocktails.

She became quite drunk. There might be something in these stories of the virile blood of Italian men. She allowed Marcello to support her, but went rigid whenever she thought she was turning clingy or clumsy.

She stopped drinking. No one noticed. She could gut a nun with a breadknife tonight and no one would notice. She was carried along in Malenka’s tide.

At each stop, youths offered their necks to Malenka. Some she petted, some she bit, some she almost drained. She must be glutted, and yet she was still white as bone and ice. Kate gathered that one warm lad turned cold in her arms and nearly died, happy, refusing to complain.

At each café, and in the streets, there was music. More orchestras, portable gramophones, tiny wirelesses. Humming, singing, stamping, cheering people. One irritating song was everywhere. When Kate realised what it was called, she had the presence of mind to be aghast.

Malenka sailed on in rhythm. Every few seconds she paused, and gave three sudden thrusts with her hips and elbows.

Cha cha cha…

‘It’s for the wedding,’ Penelope told Kate. ‘Embarrassing, really. Princess Asa hates it.’

Drac-u-la, Drac-u-la…

Dra… Cha cha cha…

Malenka danced as she walked. Supposedly phlegmatic sophisticates stopped to stare. Famous people allowed themselves for the moment to take supporting roles in the great Technicolor pageant of her procession. The television playwright Clare Quilty made an ostentatious point of ignoring the passing sensation, and said something waspish about overdevelopment to his wraithlike vampire companion, Vivian Darkbloom. The actor Edmond Purdom registered more emotion and interest on his face than he managed in any of his films. The Polish werewolf Waldemar Daninski howled and barked, like the big bad wolf in the Tex Avery cartoons.

Appalled and astonished, Kate looked at Marcello. Without taking his eyes off of Malenka’s rotating
derriére
, he shrugged and lit another cigarette. She waved her fingers to catch his attention. He offered her his cigarette case and she took one, to smoke the taste of blood out of her mouth. He flipped open a Zippo lighter and she bent to suck flame. They bumped heads and apologised.

There was something here.

She looked around and saw Penelope and Tom lagging back. Penny talked intently at the American, gripping his arm. That must be another story.

Stray paparazzi, blocked from getting through to Malenka and the Count, pestered Marcello and Kate. He told them to go away and that he was a nobody like them, but they snapped and popped anyway. Kate knew enough to shield her eyes.

‘I’ll have to get some dark glasses,’ she said.

Marcello laughed. ‘Everybody wears them, I admit. We are all in hiding. It is a Roman tradition.’

Penelope and Tom were gone. The Count was taken up with Malenka. His promise to see Kate to Trastevere was gone with the setting sun. So much for the word of Kernassy.

She thought Marcello might look after her, though his attention, like everybody else’s, was fixed on Malenka. No, his attention was different. She recognised an ironic distance. He wasn’t involved. He took it all in, to write about later.

She was a bit like that too.

But Malenka had bewitched him, as she had all other men. It must be those ridiculous breasts. And all that hair.

A satyr-bearded man in a polo-neckjerseyjumped out of a palm tree and threw himself down on the road, begging Malenka to
‘cha cha cha
’ over him. Klove picked him up and shoved him back into the crowd.

Cha cha cha…

Suddenly, it all seemed desperately funny. Kate began laughing, and Marcello politely joined in.

‘Drac-u-la… Dra…
cha cha cha
,’ she gasped, making fumbling arm movements.
‘Cha cha cha!’

It was all too silly.

Marcello stopped her falling down.

Time passed in a rapid blur. More cafés, more famous faces, more crowds. A constellation of flashbulb supernovae. Malenka wanted to visit this bar, to be snapped with that picturesque orphan, to sample a specific waiter’s blood in a certain out-of-the-way trattoria, to be seen in front of every famous frontage in Rome, to hug a surprised country priest and show him her teeth.

Kate wondered how many of the crowd were staying the distance in the hope that Malenka’s miracle dress would collapse completely. Already, her
cha cha cha
had torn new splits over her hips, causing great excitement. Kate half thought it the fashion equivalent of an ice sculpture, crafted to last for only so long. Before dawn, it would fall away in pieces and the photographers would finally get the shots they needed to complete their portfolios.

Marcello got Kate through it. Without him, she’d have been left behind in some café, like her suitcase (which was at the Hassler, she remembered). She considered a dozen different ways to ask if he would care to have her nip his neck, trying to frame it in a way that would suggest she was offering herself politely but not insistently to him rather than planning something close to rape.

He was a bit irritated with her. Every time it looked as if he might get closer to Malenka, she was in the way. Sensing how he felt, she tried to be sober and didn’t do a good job of it. Her expression must be comically solemn, for despite himself Marcello was forced to laugh at her.

The cocktails hadn’t helped. The red thirst was gone, but the need was there. Blood was not enough. It was very civilised and midcentury to decant it into glass and take it like a tonic, but she needed human contact, her mouth on sensitive skin, her fangs piercing, the sighs in her ears, the unresisting body in her arms, the rush of
feelings.

She was being silly, quite as stupidly blatant as Malenka. Penelope didn’t have to go through all this face-pulling to attract attention. Or Geneviève, who was French and only had to ignore a person for a few minutes to make him her slave forever.

Kate noticed suddenly how hot it was. Midnight had come and gone, but the night was still balmy and tropical. Her face burned, as if she were warm. Blood-tides pounded in her temples, and she was unsteady on her feet.

How did it happen? The crowds melted away. Their footsteps echoed in empty streets. Malenka still hummed the ‘Dracula
Cha Cha Cha’.

Kate focused on something famous.

The Trevi Fountain. A statuary group depicted King Poseidon and his Tritons, pouring forth water from seashell spouts. One Triton struggled with a rearing sea-horse, the other led a docile creature. The sea-horses symbolised the unpredictable moods of the sea, her
Baedeker
said. She’d planned to visit the Piazza di Trevi on her ‘Roman holiday’, thinking even of tossing away fifty lire and making a wish.

A cat meowed. It padded elegantly along the rim of the fountain pool and nuzzled up to Malenka’s plump, pale arm. She picked the cat up and rubbed its face against hers. Its white fur exactly matched her wrap.

‘Poor little lost dear,’ she said. ‘He must have milk.’

It was a command. She looked at Count Kernassy, and he looked at Marcello.

‘Everywhere is shut,’ he said. ‘Even in Roma…’

‘There will be somewhere,’ Malenka declared. ‘It would not do to let such a tiny beauty die of thirst.’

She made kissing sounds. The cat climbed onto her head. It curled up, like a slit-eyed busby.

‘Marcello, see to it,’ the Count said, coldly. He handed over banknotes, which Marcello made disappear.

Kate was embarrassed. Marcello politely withdrew, in search of milk, fuming behind his sunglasses. She understood he was as much a pet as this suddenly adopted cat, and felt bad for him, bad about herself.

She was more like him than she was like these people.

Malenka leaped up onto the fountain. The cat slid off her head and landed unsurprisingly in her cleavage, slipping comfortably into the flesh valley. Malenka tightrope-tiptoed along the edge, then stepped into the water. It rose to her thighs. Her dress spread like a water lily.

The cat was spooked. It yowled and scratched. Malenka bit into its neck and threw it away. She wiped blood from her mouth with the back of her hand.

They wouldn’t need milk any more.

Kate sat down on a stone bench. Her head span.

Whatever the cat had sensed made her tingle. She felt her claws starting.

Malenka’s mood changed again. She waded among the waters, beseeching the Count to join her, letting the cascade fall on her hair, her face, her chest.

‘There are coins. You can dive for treasure.’

‘You are
mio tesoro, cara.’

Malenka draped herself over a sea-horse, pointing her breasts at the stars.

One of the cocktail waiters must have been suffering from a fever. Kate was not feeling at all well. Impressions filtered into her mind in flashbulb bursts. Hot, dusty, empty landscape. Laughing famous faces. A dangerous crimson shadow.