Anno Dracula (20 page)

The dhampire was cringing in a shrinking shadow.

‘Johnny,’ she said, stepping into the light.

Her skin darkened and creased, but she ignored it. She had crumpled bills in her hand, dirty money. He could imagine what she had done to get it.

It was the girl he had once called Nocturna. The Virgin of 54. She wasn’t fresh any more, in any way.

‘Please,’ she begged, mouth open and raw.

‘Things have changed,’ he said, stepping into the elevator, drawing the mesh across between them. He saw her red-rimmed eyes.

‘Take it,’ she said, rolling the bills into tubes and shoving them through the grille. They fell at his feet.

‘Talk to Rudy or Elvira,’ he said. ‘They’ll fix you up with a suck.’

She shook her head, desperately. Her hair was a mess, singed white in patches. She grabbed the grille, fingers sticking through like worms.

‘I don’t want a suck, I want
you
.’

‘You don’t want me, darling. You can’t afford me. Now, pull in your claws or you’ll lose them.’

She was crying rusty tears.

He wrenched the lever and the elevator began to rise. The girl pulled her hands free. Her face sank and disappeared. She had pestered him before. He would have to do something about her.

It wasn’t that he didn’t do business that way any more, but that he had to be more selective about the clientele. For the briefest of suckles from the vein, the price was now $10,000. He was choosy about the mouths he spurted into.

Everyone else could just buy a suck.

Rudy and Elvira were waiting in the foyer of the apartment, red-eyed from the night, coming down slowly. They were dhampires themselves, of course. The Father had known the worth of warm slaves, his gypsies and madmen, and Johnny had taken some care in selecting the vassals he needed.

As Johnny entered the apartment, peeling off his floor-length turquoise suede coat and tossing away his black-feathered white Stetson hat, Rudy leaped up from the couch, almost to attention. Elvira, constricted inside a black sheath dress low-necked enough to show her navel, raised a welcoming eyebrow and tossed aside
The Sensuous Woman.
Rudy took his coat and hat and hung them up. Elvira rose like a snake from a basket and air-kissed his cheeks. She touched black nails to his face, feeling the bloat of the blood.

They proceeded to the dining room.

Rudy Pasko, a hustler Johnny had picked up on the A-train, dreamed of turning, becoming like his master. Jittery, nakedly ambitious,
American
, he would be a real monster, paying everybody back for ignoring him in life. For the moment, he had his uses.

Elvira, this year’s compleat Drac Hag, was a better bet for immortality. She knew when to run cool or hot, and took care to keep a part of herself back, even while snuffing mountains of drac and chewing on any youth who happened to be passing. She liked to snack on gay men, claiming - with her usual dreadful wordplay - that they had better taste than straights. Andy had passed her on from the Factory.

The money was on the polished oak dining table, in attaché cases. It had already been counted, but Johnny sat down and did it again. Rudy called him ‘the Count’, almost mockingly. The boy didn’t understand; the money wasn’t Johnny’s until it was counted. The obsessive-compulsive thing was a trick of the Dracula bloodline. Some degenerate, mountain-dwelling distant cousins could be distracted from their prey by a handful of pumpkin seeds, unable to pass by without counting every one. That was absurd, this was important. Andy understood about money, why it was essential not for what it could buy but in itself. Numbers were beautiful.

Johnny’s fingers were so sensitive that he could make the count just by riffling the bundles, by caressing the cash. He picked out the dirty bills, the torn or taped or stained notes, and tossed them to Rudy.

There was $158,591 on the table, a fair night’s takings. His personal rake would be an even $100,000.

‘Where does the ninety-one dollars come from, Rudy?’

The boy shrugged. The non-negotiable price of a suck was $500. There shouldn’t be looser change floating around.

‘Boys and girls have expenses,’ Rudy said.

‘They are not to dip into the till,’ Johnny said, using an expression he had recently learned. ‘They are to hand over the takings. If they have expenses, they must ask you to cover them. You have enough for all eventualities, have you not?’

Rudy looked at the heap of messy bills and nodded. He had to be reminded of his hook sometimes.

‘Now, things must be taken care of.’

Rudy followed him into the reception room. The heart of the penthouse, the reception room was windowless but with an expanse of glass ceiling. Just now, with the sun rising, the skylight was curtained by a rolling metal blind drawn by a hand-cranked winch.

There was no furniture, and the hardwood floor was protected by a plastic sheet. It was Rudy’s duty to get the room ready for Johnny by dawn. He had laid out shallow metal trays in rows, like seed-beds in a nursery.

Johnny undid his fly and carefully pissed blood onto the first tray. The pool spread, until it lapped against the sides. He paused his flow, and proceeded to the next tray, and the next. In all, he filled thirty-seven trays to a depth of about a quarter of an inch. He lost his bloat, face smoothing and tightening, clothes hanging properly again.

Johnny watched from the doorway as Rudy worked the winch, rolling the blind. Rays of light speared down through the glass ceiling, falling heavily on the trays. Morning sun was the best, the purest. The trays smoked slightly, like vats of tomato soup on griddles. There was a smell he found offensive, but which the warm - even dhampires - could not distinguish. Like an elder exposed to merciless daylight, the blood was turning to granulated material. Within a few hours it would all be red dust, like the sands of Mars. Drac.

In the afternoon, as he slept in his white-satin-lined coffin, a troop of good Catholic boys whose fear of Johnny was even stronger than the blood-hooks in their brains came to the apartment and, under Elvira’s supervision, worked on the trays, scooping up and measuring out the powdered blood into foil twists (‘sucks’ or ‘jabs’) that retailed for $500 each. After sunset, the boys (and a few girls) took care of the distribution, spreading out to the clubs and parties and street corners and park nooks where the dhampires hung out.

Known on the street as drac or bat’s blood, the powder could be snuffed, swallowed, smoked or heated to liquid and injected. With a fresh user, the effect lasted the hours of the night and was burned out of the system at sunrise. After a few weeks, the customer was properly hooked - a dhampire - and needed three or four sucks a night to keep sharp. No one knew about long-term effects yet, though serious dhampires like Nocturna were prone to severe sunburn and even showed signs of being susceptible to spontaneous combustion. Besides a red thirst for a gulp or two of blood, the dhampire also had a need, of course, to raise cash to feed the habit. Johnny didn’t care much about that side of the business, but the
Daily Bugle
had run editorials about the rise in mugging, burglary, car crime and other petty fund-raising activities.

Thus far, Johnny was sole supplier of the quality stuff. During their short-lived venture, the Triads had cut their dwindling drac with cayenne pepper, tomato paste and powdered cat shit. The Good Catholics were all dhampires themselves, though he kicked them out and cut them off if they exceeded their prescribed dosage - which kept them scrupulously honest about cash. His major expenses were kickbacks to the families, club owners, bouncers, street cops and other mildly interested parties.

Johnny Pop would be out of the business soon. He was greedy for more than money. Andy had impressed on him the importance of being famous.

Johnny Pop was certainly the social success of the summer. He had just showed up at Trader Vic’s with
Margaret Trudeau
on his elegant arm. Penelope was not surprised and Andy was silently ecstatic. An inveterate collector of people, he delighted in the idea of the Transylvanian hustler and the Canadian Prime Minister’s ex getting together. Margaux Hemingway would be furious: she had confided in Andy and Penny that she thought it was serious with Johnny. Penny could have told her what was serious with Johnny, but she didn’t think any warm woman would understand.

From across the room, as everyone turned to ogle the couple, Penny observed Johnny, realising again why no one else saw him as she did. He had Olde Worlde charm by the bucketful. That thirsty edge that had made him seem a rough beast was gone. His hair was an improbable construction, teased and puffed every which way, and his lips were a girl’s. But his eyes were Dracula’s. It had taken her a while to notice, for she had really known
il principe
only after his fire had dwindled. This was what the
young
Dracula, freshly
nosferatu,
must have been like. This was the bat-cloaked creature of velvet night who with sheer smoking magnetism had overwhelmed flighty Lucy, virtuous Mina and stately Victoria, who had bested Van Helsing and stolen an empire. He didn’t dance so often now that he had the city’s attention, but all his moves were like dancing, his gestures so considered, his looks so perfect.

He had told several versions of the story, but always insisted he was Dracula’s get, perhaps the last to be turned personally by the King Vampire in his 500-year reign. Johnny didn’t like to give dates, but Penny put his conversion at somewhere during the last war. Who he had been when warm was another matter. He claimed to be a lineal descendant as well as get, the last modern son of some bye-blow of the Impaler, which was why the dying bloodline had fired in him, making him the true Son of Dracula. She could almost believe it. Though he was proud to name his Father-in-Darkness, he didn’t like to talk about the Old Country and what had brought him to America. There were stories there, she would wager. Eventually, it would all come out. He had probably drained a commissar’s daughter and got out one step ahead of red vampire killers.

There was trouble in the Carpathians now. The Transylvania Movement, wanting to claim Dracula’s ancient fiefdom as a homeland for all the displaced vampires of the world, were in open conflict with Ceauşescu’s army. The only thing Johnny had said about that mess was that he would prefer to be in America than Romania. After all, the modern history of vampirism - so despised by the Transylvanians - had begun when Dracula left his homeland for what was in 1885 the most exciting, modern city in the world. She conceded the point: Johnny Pop was displaying the real Dracula spirit, not TM reactionaries like Meinster and Crainic who wanted to retreat to their castles and pretend it was still the Middle Ages.

Andy got fidgety as Johnny worked the room, greeting poor Truman Capote or venerable Paulette Goddard, sharp Ivan Boesky or needy Liza Minnelli. He was deliberately delaying his inevitable path to Andy’s table. It was like a Renaissance court, Penny realised. Eternal shifts of power and privilege, of favour and slight. Three months ago, Johnny had needed to be in with Andy; now, Johnny had risen to such a position that he could afford to hold himself apart, to declare independence. She had never seen Andy on the hook this badly, and was willing to admit she took some delight in it. At last, the master was mastered.