Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (8 page)

Of course, Jack was never arrested.

Kate wondered if she should tell Marcello the police thought her innocent. He’d been startled enough by the moment of discovery. Even through
cool-baby
shades, he registered shock and suspicion. She knew the impression would be hard to shift. To him, she might always be a bloodthirsty monster.

Damn. There was always something.

She chided herself. Two people were destroyed and she was worried about impressing a warm man who, she was sure, found her as attractive as a face-rub with a dead fish.

She hadn’t disliked Gabor Kernassy. And Malenka was more ridiculous than anything else. They might have been shallow, but they were kinder to her than convention obliged them to be. Even Malenka was funny. Kate had planned to write about the circus around the starlet. She’d have made money from them. Considering murder as news, she still might.

They had been slaughtered in front of her.

A long-bladed silver knife had fetched off Kernassy’s head and skewered Malenka’s heart. The police found the thing in the fountain, washed clean. Silvestri made sure it didn’t vanish along with Malenka’s dress.

Kate knew she wouldn’t let this go. She had a great deal to occupy her in this city, unfinished business of long standing. But this was now her business too.

Someone called her name.

For an instant, she thought it might be Marcello. But it was a woman.

Geneviève.

She was behind the rope barrier, wearing a white straw hat and sunglasses. She waved at Kate with another hat.

‘They won’t let me through,’ Geneviève shrugged, smiling.

She looked so
young.

Her sun-blonde hair shone. Her smile was almost a little girl’s. Her old eyes were out of sight. She was genuinely pleased to see Kate.

She’d given the police the telephone number. Silvestri must have had someone make a call. That was considerate.

‘I’ve been told I can go free,’ Kate said. ‘I’m innocent.’

‘I doubt that, Kate.’

She spoke English with the ghost of a French accent.

They hugged over the rope, cheek-kissing. It wasn’t quite comfortable, as if someone were between them.

Charles, of course.

They were only friends in that they triangulated on Charles, and perhaps
il principe.
So many complications ran between them all. Edwin Winthrop fit into the pattern, too. And Penelope.

‘I’ve brought you a
chapeau
,’ Geneviève said. ‘I knew you wouldn’t expect the sun. The English never do and in this one thing I assumed the Irish would not be different.’

The rope was lifted by a policeman. Kate ducked under and took the hat. It kept the worst of the light off her face. Kate looked at the backs of her hands. They were red.

‘You must take care,’ Geneviève said, ‘or you’ll go off like a firework. In this lovely climate, spontaneous combustion is a hazard.’

4

MYSTERIES OF OTRANTO

T
he Palazzo Otranto might have been grown rather than built. It was neat as a snail’s shell or a human heart, an architectural spiral. The main corridor began as a ledge inside the topmost tower, like the rifling of a gun barrel, and wound down through the building, the rooms off it larger the nearer they were to ground level, turning at last into a circular passageway around the cavernous basements. No staircases, just a constant helter-skelter slope and the occasional sharp step. Hell on the knees.

The palazzo was in Fregene, on the coast a few miles outside Rome, among pine forests and the usual ruins. There was a Temple of Pan on the grounds. The Dracula household celebrated eternal Saturnalia, a nebulous and never-ending party that attracted guests like flies.

Tom had been here since Spring and wasn’t sure if he should stay much longer. There was no particular reason to move on and he certainly didn’t want to return to the bailiwick of the New York Police Department. He’d left the States in the first place to avoid questions about a silly stunt some folk might call mail fraud though it hadn’t gone on long enough for him to make money out of it, worse luck. The exclusive company of the dead was deepening his customary ennui. Someone dangerous might pick up on the irritation he attempted to conceal behind fashionable disinterest. The dead were clowns, but also killers.

This was, however, the life of ease and refinement he always imagined would suit him best. Goodish paintings were about, mostly from old and fussy schools he didn’t cotton to. A VistaVision Schalcken hung in his tower room, an angry horse with nightmare eyes. Renaissance schlock adorned the ballrooms, Biblical scenes heavy with bloody thunderclouds and gross nudes.

The dead clung to the fashions of their lives. The exception was
il principe,
whose premature enthusiasm for Van Gogh — he was the only person to buy from the painter in his lifetime — had paid off in his several exiles. Canvases worthless when bought now stood security for loans that kept the household among the wealthiest in Europe. Those daubs, at which Tom would have liked to get a look, were shut up in Dracula’s private apartments, in the lower cellar depths.

In this topsy-turvy world, the most luxurious and sought-after quarters were the deepest underground, the nearest to Hell, the most like tombs or vaults. Penthouses that’d do for American millionaires were palmed off on half-living servants and enslaved blood donors.

In his months here, Tom had only set eyes on
il principe
once, with Penelope. He stuck to his apartments and rarely visited the party of which he was the host. He seemed like any other ancient dead man, with long white military moustaches and dark glasses like the wings of a black beetle. Nevertheless, Tom admired Dracula, for his Van Gogh craze if nothing else. That taste, once daringly radical, suggested an openness to the new uncharacteristic of the dead. Also, that — whatever his current circumstances — he could still be a dangerous man, a predator. Tom respected him. He’d leave
il principe
alone, and hope Dracula did the same for him.

In the mornings, before the household stirred, Tom took precious time to himself. He liked to sit in the Crystal Room, a conservatory on the first floor, looking out at the grounds through forty-foot walls of glass. Before noon, the room was a kaleidoscope of sunlight; he was rarely bugged by the dead.

He claimed a favourite chair to read the
International Herald Tribune
and drink continuous thimble-cups of bitter, strong espresso. The warm servants of the day shift, who rarely lasted long, were eager to keep him happy. Not a cruel fellow, he liked a little bowing and scraping. He felt he’d earned his leisure. It had taken not a little ingenuity and hard graft to get him here.

Sunlight danced around, flashing off the dragon-scale panes of the conservatory roof, illuminating columns of swirling dust, making angular patterns on the old carpet. Tom felt warmth on his face and was tempted to close his eyes and doze. He might not have to spend the day in a casket lined with Boston soil, but he’d still been up all night. Even the heart-punching coffee couldn’t keep him awake forever. His habit was to siesta in the afternoon and early evening, to be out of the way when the dead rose.

Was his distaste just an American prejudice? There weren’t many living dead in the States. Prohibition hadn’t driven them out completely in the ’20s, but they remained an underground presence, not the mushroom growth they were in Europe. Legal restrictions on their practices were stringently enforced. Tom fancied himself free from most convention, but something about the creatures crawled behind his eyes.

He opened his dressing gown at the throat and undid the top buttons of his Ascot Chang shirt. Dickie’s shirt, originally. He hoped he was tanning. A Mediterranean brown would make the bite-marks stand out less. And he didn’t want to be mistaken for one of the dead. He was with them so much that a wall was rising around him, separating him from the living.

It wasn’t until he came to Europe, head a-buzz with his aunt’s tales of bloodsucking monsters on every street corner, that he really found out anything about the dead. They weren’t so fearsome.

In his own small way, he was a predator on the dead.

In Greece for no very good reason, Tom had run into Richard Fountain, a youngish newlydead. They knew each other from a weekend party in the Hamptons to which Tom had not exactly been invited. Dickie, now on the run from a tiresome girlfriend and a God-awful Cambridge College, was glad of the company, and took him back to his beach-house on Cyprus. Somehow, the Englishman picked up the idea that Tom was from money but estranged from it, a remittance man. Tom could never work out why life in England had become intolerable for Dickie, but it had, driving him south-east in a restless search for something indefinable. His course had led him to a dead peasant named Chriseis, who had turned him on their first night and ditched him in the dark.

Together, Tom and Dickie knocked around a little, hopping from island to island, having the usual adventures. Dickie, hooked on new experience, was obsessed with the dead of Greece. He rooted around everywhere for traces of Chriseis’s bloodline, which he supposed went back to the
vorvolukas
of recent times and the
lamiae
of antiquity. It was a bit of a yawn but nothing that couldn’t be coped with. After all, being bored was better than being in prison. It was Tom’s intention never to go to jail. He loathed the idea of enforced proximity, of being in a tiny space with another man or men not of his choosing.

Through Dickie, Tom realised something important about the dead. When their teeth were stuck in your neck and your blood was washing around their mouths, they were in no position to notice you going through their pockets.

In his ignorance, Tom had thought the dead needed blood to survive the way the living needed water. It wasn’t true. Warm blood could be like dope, or alcohol, or sex, or espresso, or sugar. Anything from a desperate addiction to a mild weakness. When the red thirst was on them, their famed powers of insight and persuasion turned to fuzz and fudge.

At first, Dickie was apologetic about bleeding Tom, and profusely grateful afterward. He didn’t know the ropes. He said ‘excuse me’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ every time he bit some poor warm fool. Then he began to display an arrogant streak, as if he’d made Tom into his slave or something. In long, rambling monologues near dawn in the beachhouse, Dickie talked about sin and evil and gratification, of the need to go beyond guilt and embrace the full human potential. Words like ‘sin’, ‘evil’, and ‘guilt’ were meaningless to Tom. He had heard them often at school and been fascinated by their meanings, but only in an academic way as if they were discredited scientific theories centuries had been wasted on. The miracle was that Dickie still saw something in all that rot.

It became obvious to Tom that the arrangement could not last indefinitely. He’d had to cast around for a way of coming out of it comfortably.

A few trickles of blood fogged Dickie completely, made him uncommonly suggestible. After a month or so of this communion, the dead man no longer noticed if Tom borrowed things on a permanent basis. He liked to wear Dickie’s English clothes, which were of a quality he appreciated. It was providential that they were roughly the same size.

When he accepted death, Richard Fountain threw away his life. It was only fair, then, that Tom should pick it up. He was best placed to enjoy it, after all.

Eventually, the set-up grew highly tiresome. Dickie’s mad fiancée tracked them down to Cyprus. She made accusations which Tom found hurtful and upsetting. To sort things out, Tom and Dickie went off one night in a boat to argue it through and Tom stuck a broken-off spar into Dickie’s chest. Though not dead long enough to turn to dust, he’d gone off like spoiled meat. Tom had tipped him over the side and watched him sink.

He fixed it so Dickie appeared to have left for an untraceable Greek island on a fool’s search for the source of Chriseis’s bloodline, leaving behind a small income signed over into Tom’s control, ‘for the maintenance of the house’. More importantly, Dickie left written instructions that Tom should have the use of his travelling wardrobe. No one was happy, especially the fiancée and the family. The cops were involved, but investigations and insinuations fizzled out.

Dickie was already deceased, so no murder case could be brought. Greece was one of those countries that had never rewritten its laws to accommodate the walking dead. If anyone was sought for the murder, it was the elusive Chriseis. The authorities had no incentive to search for a corpse that was probably unidentifiable mould anyway.

The money carried Tom to Italy and, despite his reluctance to get mixed up again with the dead, eventually washed him into the Palazzo Otranto.

And against Penelope.

She had been dead a long time. Dickie would have said she knew the ropes. If you got close, you could tell her age. Her skin was white, but with an undertint of corruption that was almost bluish. If she were scratched with silver, Tom thought her wounds would peel open, festering. Her face and limbs were perfect, but she had scars, angry red circles, on her breasts and stomach, like bullet holes.