Anno Dracula (47 page)

Frost kissed the ring and left.

On the stage a shirtless Kilmer was on his knees gasping at a microphone. Alucard decided to tell Carolco to greenlight
The Doors,
to teach Oliver Stone a lesson. He might let Kilmer do ‘Light My Fire’ in the middle of the concert. A rumour would spread that the real Morrison was returning from the grave to avenge himself on pretenders to the Lizard Crown.

Frost jostled Visser at the door. They didn’t know each other - Alucard liked to keep his tools in separate compartments - but Frost’s nostrils twitched. He took extra sidesteps to avoid getting close to the warm man.

Like Alucard, Visser could part dance-floor crowds and walk unmolested across the room. Nothing to do with fear and respect, and everything with disgust. Everything the private eye ate contained garlic. The stench radiated from his fleshy face, squeezing out in droplets of alcoholic sweat. The fat old Texan wore a once-white suit and a cowboy hat. His grin was feral enough to pass for a
nosferatu
snarl. He said he’d once tried human meat, to see whether he could stand to turn vampire. According to him, long pig tasted like shit next to the ribs at Dr Hoggly-Woggly.

Alucard indicated an unoccupied back room. Visser’s grin broadened and he sauntered in, hitching up a skull-buckled belt under his soft, substantial belly bulge. He moved like an ass-wiggling beauty queen, as if daring the viper crowd to feast on him.

They would not meet here again. Too many would remember seeing John Alucard with such unappetising wormmeat. They’d wonder at his low tastes, though no one would say anything.

Alucard swiftly nipped into the room and closed the door. The small, unlit chamber was soundproofed. The absence of noise was shocking.

A match flared - a magnesium burst to Alucard’s night-adapted eyes - and Visser lit a cigarillo, under-lighting his face like a carnival devil. The private eye sat on a leather-upholstered piece of furniture - a cross between a dentist’s chair and a tackle-dummy, with manacles, straps and other useful add-ons. Pine-scented air-fresheners hung from the ceiling. The floor was tacky.

‘No support for my poor ole back,’ drawled Visser, thumping the rape-rack.

‘It adjusts,’ said Alucard, stepping closer.

Visser seemed to exhale garlic through his pores, halting Alucard in his tracks.

‘I’m sure it does, Mr A. I’ll just take your word on that.’

Alucard laughed. Visser was terrified of him, which was as it should be. He was a licensed private investigator. Also - a nasty, resourceful little man. He’d come to Alucard’s notice when acting for the eleventh husband of vampire socialite Nerissa Simms, managing to take photographs which were evidence of adultery on velvet sheets, though neither the errant wife nor the (female) co-respondent showed up on film. Now on a retainer to one of Alucard’s dummy corporations, he followed the private and public lives of persons of interest.

‘Our three friends from out of town, Visser? How have they been?’

‘All day in coffins in Chateau Marmont,’ said the detective. ‘Feraru has been at the room service girls and is hitting the parties and the clubs. He was in here last night. Crainic is taking meetings with Undead-American businessmen, third-level government people, journalists. He’s got a one-on-one with Harry Martin for
Newsweek.
Most folk he’s wooing are Shop in disguise. I have the minutes of a secret conversation he had with Darius Jedburgh out at the Bat-Soldier base in New Mexico. You can guess the gist. “Puh-lease come and help us take over our pissant country, pretty please. We hate commies oh so much even though we licked their red boots for forty years. Gimme foreign aid, Mr President, and we’ll be so grateful you’ll never want for a blow job in Eastern Europe ever again, no sirree bob.”’

Visser was whinier than he was funny, but Alucard recognised good judgment.

‘The KGB goon...’ he continued.

‘Securitate
,’ Alucard corrected.

‘Whatever, Streisand... Striescu... He’s done it again. Has a powerful red thirst on him, I guess. They’ll be calling him the Skid-Row Slasher or Scorpio Junior. Snatched a pimp right off a corner in South Central. Bit his neck through, guzzled down the full eight pints, tossed the empty in a dumpster. The dead guy’s name was Momentous Pryde, if you can believe it. Your secret policeman just loves the taste of nigger blood.’

‘It’s still red. There’s no difference.’

‘Maybe it’s the novelty. So many things you can get here aren’t on the menu in the Old Country. Wonder if he’ll try Korean while he’s in town.’

‘There’ll be a point to it. Revenge or trouble making.’

‘The others don’t know about his night stalking. He’s careful about that. They don’t like each other much, all three of them. The limey is too dumb to notice what the others think of him. He’s paying for the whole trip, the hotel tab, everything. You might say he’s a real sucker.’

‘I’ve heard all the jokes, Visser.’

The detective chuckled, shaking his chins.

‘Suit yourself. Feraru used to be a major dhamp in London, before he turned. Snuffed red all through the boom and the crash. He was drac-head supreme of the Stock Exchange. Do you know that he still uses the stuff? Isn’t that insane? A real goddamned vampire who does drac! What does he get? Fangs on his fangs?’

‘It’s a habit. Like a lot of things.’

‘Mucho loco
is what it is. He was cruising Hollywood Boulevard last night in a limo. Scored a couple of low-grade vials off some street skag. More cayenne pepper than anything. Feraru spent half the night snorting red, and the other half pouring blood out of his nose.’

Visser finished his cigarillo and lit another one. The night’s specific business was done, but Alucard had long-term projects.

‘So, Visser, how are my girls?’

‘Still goin’ strong, Mr A. I got information on ’em all. Recent shit. No major developments.’

Of the three vampire women, only Penelope Churchward was in California. He’d hired her as a technical advisor on
Bat-21
. Another one for reinvention: Penny’s latest incarnation was as a Daughter of the American Revolution, an Orange County Republican with the Governor’s ear.

‘Churchward has re-upped for another dime with the Shop. They don’t let her join in all their reindeer games. I pushed a few buttons to find out policy in the event of a sad accident. No one’s panties would get in a bunch. She’s done for them what they wanted done. Now, she’s high-maintenance surplus.’

Alucard shook his head. He saw no particular point in having Penny killed. She couldn’t hurt him and had no real reason to want to. She’d quit the New York scene of her own accord, walking out on Andy, making room for Johnny Pop.

‘She’s definitely made the connection,’ said Visser. ‘She knows who you are.’

That
was
new material. He wondered whether to spit or swallow. Visser could be stringing him along, creating a need for a high-priced hit.

‘She knows who I was once.’

‘Same difference.’

‘No, it’s not.’

The investigator had, of course, dug back and thought he knew all about John Alucard. It was as well to let Visser play mastermind. He’d learned enough to be respectful, to stay properly scared. A minion should be more afraid of the consequences of breaking faith with his master than eager for rewards others might give him for treachery.

‘I have plans for Penny. She’s got lines into the music industry which I might need.’

‘The Short Lion still holdin’ out?’

‘Just negotiating.’

‘They say the little faggot’s lost his voice.’

Alucard snorted. ‘Did you ever hear his voice?’

‘I like Hank Williams Jr myself.’

The vampire superstars of rock were throwing snits. The Short Lion didn’t want to appear on the same stage as Timmy V, but equally couldn’t bear to let his rival hog the spotlight. Right now, the eternal child was hotter with key demographics than the exile prince. Only sad urban murgatroyds bought the last Short Lion solo album,
Queen of the Damned,
while every teenage girl in America owned Timmy’s
Bat
. The Short Lion was regularly hailed the greatest vampire celebrity of the 1980s, but his dark sun was moving into eclipse. Dating Julia Roberts didn’t help. But Alucard still wanted both singers on his bill. And he wanted them together.

‘Here are the mick bitch viper’s clippings,’ said Visser, pulling out a fat folder of pages torn from newspapers and magazines. ‘My mailman wonders why I subscribe to
City Limits, Searchlight, Private Eye, Spare Rib
and
International Times.’

For much of the last decade, Kate Reed had been up to her thick specs in feminist mud at the Women’s Peace Camp in Greenham Common, England, popping out of a shallowly buried coffin to chant slogans at the American airbase and file stories about potential (and actual) mishaps with nuclear weapons. After a Romanian jail, a muddy grave in the English countryside was a picnic on the village green. These nights, she was back in a flat on the Holloway Road, sharing rent with a freelance film critic and saving pennies to trade her Amstrad word-processor for an Apple. Her articles appeared in low-paying periodicals whose subscriber base was evenly divided between the radical left and security personnel infiltrating and observing the radical left.

Alucard took the clippings. He would enjoy reading them later. Katie was so far out of the loop she was no real threat. If she ever showed signs of making a move against him, a call to the unlisted number of Caleb Croft in Cheltenham would see her whisked without trial into indefinite detention, preferably in the Little Ease cell of the Tower of London. The silly girl had done enough things in her long life which could be defined as terrorism. Visser had dug up an old story about someone called Eric DeBoys which meant Croft could stick a murder on Kate Reed if he wanted. Furthermore, she was on a stack of shitlists in Thatcher’s Britain simply by being, as Visser put it, ‘a mick bitch viper’. Thanks to the continuing influence of Lord Ruthven, she could be forgiven for drinking blood, but being Irish, a woman and a loudmouth red-flagged her files in what was left of the British Empire.

‘The Frog twist’s still with the Mounties,’ said Visser. ‘Made the news with her testimony at the Lacroix trial. One hundred and twenty-two counts of aggravated vampirism and cold-blooded murder. Fella must have a taste for it, if you ask me. Likes ’em juicy and with a bit of fight in ’em. The Canucks are making a deal to ship him to the Rock for a century or two. He’ll make a lot of friends there.’

Alucard had never actually met Geneviève Dieudonné, but had a clear mental image of her. She was living in Toronto, presumably on the grounds that Canadians could at least properly pronounce her name (Zh-NE-v’yev), working as senior forensic technician on attachment to the only North American police department which boasted an equal-opportunity employment policy for vampires. Thanks to do-gooders like Geneviève’s cop pal Knight and the romantic novelist Fitzroy, Toronto was known as a hole for Granpa Munsters.

A breed of
nosferatu
suck-up was named after the sickeningly cuddly, non-threatening vampire Al Lewis played on
All in the Family.
Rosamund on
Bloodwitched
was the vixen warm America secretly wanted to be neckraped by; Granpa was the fangless fool who knew his place in the sit-com crypt. Even Carroll O’Connor’s diehard ninety-eight-point-sixer Archie Bunker let Granpa cross his threshold, and became best pals with the viper he spent two seasons dreading and plotting to stake.

Geneviève was, Alucard was pleased to learn, a controversial figure even in the Toronto ‘pale’ community. A growing minority saw her as not merely a Granpa but a diabolical traitress selling out her night-brethren for the meagre approval of the warm. She had worked for the apprehension of a couple of serial killers who turned out to be vampires. Called to justify her actions, she claimed to be following the Zaroff doctrine, but that, for her, the most dangerous game wasn’t warm.

‘Gorse is on the Rock, too,’ said Visser. ‘Maybe him and Lacroix will be bunkies. They can pin up a picture of the Frog on their dartboard and jerk each other off as they fantasise about the things they’d like to do to her fine white hide. If they ever get out, she’s dust.’

It wasn’t worth calling in a Winton favour to have the Dieudonné woman staked. That would be too easy.

‘Is Geneviève seeing anyone?’

Visser’s grin showed flecks in his gums. ‘Jealous, boss? Is she your dream girl too?’

When he conjured up Geneviève’s face in his mind, it was through a bloody film, as the Father had seen her from atop a throne at the summit of his red reign. From the summit, there had only been one direction to go. In no small part thanks to Geneviève’s intervention, Dracula had lost his position in Great Britain, cut out of power after the death of Queen Victoria and toppled after years of open rebellion. The French elder had been there again, one of the last faces the Father saw as his eyes dimmed, his head stuck on a pole at the Palazzo Otranto in 1959. All three of the women - Penny, Kate, Gené - had been there, at the death. The Father whispered that they had all been involved, had all contributed. Geneviève had undone the conjuring that should have restarted the Anni Draculae. John Alucard’s business with that strange trio - they weren’t exactly friends, having squabbled over the affections of some warm man years ago - was not over. In the end, he would see dawnlight rise on their ashes.

‘I went up to Toronto for her big day,’ said Visser, calculation gleaming in his eye. ‘Was in the courtroom just for her testimony. She’s a honey, all right. Solid nine and a half... a ten, if it weren’t for the overbite.’

Alucard’s fingers darted out and pinched Visser’s greasy dewlap. His nails pressed through slick skin. Blood welled, overripe with garlic stink. The private eye grit his teeth against the pain. His eyes grew as big as saucers. Fear boiled off him like steam, seeping out around his collar and through the damp patches under his arms.

‘Give it to me,’ Alucard ordered.

He knew what Visser would have got in Toronto.