Anno Dracula (52 page)

Kitten laughed the laugh John had taught her. It didn’t mess up her face. Laughter should be like making music not breaking wind. A controlled flow, not an unconfined explosion.

‘Kitten,’ John’s voice came from a speaker, ‘you may join us now in the reception hall. Our guests await your pleasure.’

‘Go on,’ Beverly said, ‘make an entrance.’

Kitten rid herself of nervousness. She knew John’s friends were important, but she had a sense of her own importance to him. Nothing could threaten that.

Leaving Beverly in the dressing room, Kitten walked down a short corridor to the first-floor gallery and stepped into a spotlight. She looked down at a crowd. Conversation and sipping stopped as they saw her. Waiters and waitresses circulated with trays, bearing thimble-beakers filled with their own blood. The caterers John used guaranteed golden quality.

Kitten smiled.

John was near the main doorway with a woman in a man’s evening suit — black tie and tailored tux, very tight black pants with a violet stripe down the side, glittering black pumps. John, in Astaire white tie and tails, transmitted encouragement to Kitten, his blood singing in her brain.

She drifted along the gallery, hand trailing the balustrade, and paused at the top of the steps, then descended, without a wobble, heels spiking red carpet, head high, shoulders back, chest out. Beverly had taught her that clothes were all about posture. A circle of men and women waited at the bottom of the stairs. John made his way through them.

‘Kitten, how kind of you to appear,’ said John.

She smiled and said nothing. He took her hand and she stepped off the bottom step as if alighting from a heavenly chariot to join the mortals on Earth.

‘You must meet everybody,’ said John, guiding her across the hall. ‘Mr Feraru, of the Transylvania Movement, with his associates Mr Crainic and Mr Striescu. They have the confidence of Baron Meinster and stand high in the Romanian provisional government. Hamish Bond, of the British Secret Service. Allegedly retired. Be on your guard with him. He has a reputation with the ladies. Griffin Mill, from the studio. Griffin has just come in on
The Rock,
the project I was telling you about. We’re very excited about the Eddy Poe rewrite. Mr William Gates, the entrepreneur who does clever things with computers. Captain Gardner, of the American Bat-Soldier Program. Warren Beatty and
la bella signorina
Ciccone.
Dick Tracy
, I have to say, kids, I think you can be very proud of the picture, though I also have to say we made the right decision to let it go to Disney. Mr Chapman, of the Pale Anti-Defamation League, who has done so much to gain acceptance for our kind. Thanks to his lobbying, General Mills were forced to withdraw their disgusting “Count Chocula” cereal from the warm market. Mr Edward Exley, our estimable chief of police. If you’ve got a concealed cam-corder, don’t mention it to him. Just kidding, Ed. Fine job on the post-King verdict clamp-down. Jack Nicholson, of course, devouring something from the live buffet. Crispian, who runs the Viper Room and other clubs too cutting-edge for us to have heard of yet. Sebastian Newcastle, a big wheel at CAA. He’s agenting L. Keith Winton’s twelve-volume
Kindred
saga. He used to be a nuclear physicist, but he’s found a field where he can let off the really big bombs.’

Kitten kept track of them. John had briefed her on the guests. Almost all vampires. All important people in Los Angeles, and therefore the world. She knew who was in favour, who was here to be wooed, who was on the way out, who could be safely ignored. Of the movie folk, she knew the grosses on their last, second-to-last and, in almost certainty, next pictures. Of the political and business folk, she knew what they wanted and the likelihood of them getting it.

Oddly, the only person she hadn’t been briefed on was the dark-haired woman in the tux. She squeezed a waiter’s forearm, squirting blood-drops through a spigot into a shot-glass. John steered Kitten through the crowd towards her. She let the waiter go and reddened her mouth with a sip. She had a summer smile on her face but winter in her eyes.

‘This is someone who’ll be very close to you,’ said John. ‘Penelope Churchward, Lady Godalming. I’ve asked her to do me a kindness and become, well, I suppose we should say your mentor, but I hope most of all she will be your friend.’

The woman took a frosty look at Kitten.

Cleaned-up guttersnipe, but with possibilities. Very faint, but there all the same —

Kitten shut the woman’s thought out, batting it back.

You can hear me, how divine! And you can touch me in here, too. You are a Project.

She shook her cold hand.

‘Call me Penny,’ said the woman. ‘Ignore the rest of these
nouveaux.
They’ll only talk about themselves and their money. You should be more interested in yourself. After all, they’re finished and done and turned into what they wanted to be or need to pretend to be. You’re still on the way. Never become a waxwork, my dear. That’s my first lesson. Keep changing with the times.’ Penny was in her mind, just like John.

Like someone else had been. Someone she couldn’t picture.

Forget that. We’ll deal with it later.

‘How do you like her? Will she do?’

Penny saluted John and said, ‘She certainly will.’

Winter was still in the woman’s eyes, shot through her heart and soul. But Kitten didn’t take against her.

‘Look around,’ Penny whispered in her mind. ‘Ignore the lightweights. The one-off murderers and the dream merchants. Who’s dangerous?’

Everyone in the room had thought about fucking or killing - or fucking and killing - everyone else. Some were constructing elaborate fantasies of conquests, but she discarded most of them - they were the least likely to act out. Who were the real killers?

‘Striescu, Bond, Gardner... Villanueva?’

‘Newcastle, yes. Well done. You’ve missed only two.’

‘Three. John, me, you.’

‘You’re flattering me.’

‘No I’m not.’

Penny almost showed a real smile. Hamish Bond and Captain Gardner, ferocious but controlled, were fixed on her from across the room. Kitten could see the hooks she had in these trained killers.

‘Maybe you aren’t, at that,’ Penny admitted.

Hamish Bond, supposedly squiring a tall black woman with snarly eyes, was now hungrily eyeing Penny
and
Kitten. He raised his glass. A lemon-curl floated in his bloody martini. Kitten saw a tumble of limbs and lips in his mind. Women in segments, dead eyes open, drifting by accompanied by guitar music, overlaid on one another, with guns and cars. Kitten didn’t want to be in that movie. She blinked the kaleidoscope out of her head.

‘Penelope will be the making of you,’ said John.

‘You’ll make yourself. I’ll just clean away the mess we don’t need. The first thing to go will be that awful name. I bet a man gave it to you. Am I right or am I right?’

‘You’re not wrong,’ said John.

Penny looked reproach at John Alucard, then had a moment of doubt before sticking to her guns. She was on probation, but could see, do and say things John could not. There was no point sucking up to him when he’d brought her in to complement his skills.

‘What was your warm name, dear?’

Kitten concentrated, working around the gaps. ‘Hazel?’

John shook his head. It came to her, through the fog.

‘Holly,’ she admitted.

John nodded.

‘Couldn’t be bettered,’ said Penny. ‘Beautiful, romantic, thorny, homey, bitter, cute. Not a saint’s name. Pagan. Holly will do nicely for all concerned. No last name, I think. That was a good idea, John. Holly. Just Holly.’

Kitten was gone. She was Holly.

Fine. Holly was fine.

Alucard had called in favours from Chief Exley — whose fantasy was that if
Dragnet
were back on the air, the Rodney King burning would vanish from public consciousness — to have Griffith Park sealed off until after dawn. The Wild Hunt was not the real Zaroff deal, but a fund-raising excuse for a mock stalk and semi-orgiastic bleedings.

Many industry figures - not all of them vampires - were willing to cough up the ten-thousand-dollar entry fee to be let loose after a mixed band of warm starlets and overconfident stuntmen. The foxes were well-paid to lead the hounds in a satisfying chase with an innocuous finale. Eisner was out there with nightscope glasses and a crossbow, wondering if he could get away with sticking a sucker-tip arrow on Katzenberg ‘by mistake’. Lajos Czuczron, Meinster’s ‘military attaché’, intended to get away with murder and claim diplomatic immunity. Jean-Claude Van Damme was flying on drac-wings among the quarry, a three-picture deal depending on his ‘surviving’ the night. If any vagrants had slipped through the LAPD’s park clearance operation, they were fair game.

From Bronson Canyon, one of his favourite spots in the city, Alucard commanded the park. In this powerful psycho-cultural nexus, John Wayne lifted Natalie Wood at the end of
The Searchers
and Kevin McCarthy kissed Dana Wynter in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The space-helmeted gorilla of
Robot Monster
and the Venusian fanged turnip of
It Conquered the World
had lurked in the tunnel that was usually shot to look like a cave. The Batmobile roared out of it in that ’60s comedy show which pretended Batman was a warm millionaire in a mask. Los Angeles was haunted by the movies shot here.

Media presence was concentrated around the Observatory from
Rebel Without a Cause,
where
Entertainment Tonight
were doing ‘info-tainment’ interviews with familiar faces. Alucard had lined up David Mamet to deliver a soundbite lecture on the noble kinship of hunter and prey, claiming one was never more alive than during a potentially fatal stalking even if you were technically dead. Mamet could dress it up more credibly than Robert Bly, and had enough screen credits for it not to seem like a joke. He might come in for a dialogue polish on Rafkin’s rewrite of Rifkin’s rewrite of
The Rock.

Holly and Penny were in the undergrowth somewhere, operating independently. Penny said her pupil learned more refinement every night. She could be trusted to cover her tracks. The girl needed to feed often, having never tried to resist her red thirst, but was becoming more discriminating. From different ends, Exley and Visser had erased her from law enforcement databases. Records of the crime spree of the late Christopher Carruthers now listed Holly Sargis as hostage rather than accomplice. Of all people, Quentin from the Video Archives was putting together a script about the killer couple, spinning his survivor status into a first-look deal with Miramax. Jack Martin, slower off the mark to register a treatment, was shut out again. He’d be lucky to get a last-look deal with Troma. Alucard would not figure in any Kit Carruthers films; a fictional cop — Scott Glenn, Fred Ward, Alec Baldwin — would get credit for bringing down the killer and saving the girl.

Alucard knew the Romanians were coming long before he could see them. The Father cloaked his head and shoulders as if flowing from the cavern behind him. Dracula entered the tracery of nerves and veins in his face, sinking into his brain, pulsing through his entire body, penetrating and overlaying, informing and insinuating. Beyond the limits of his sharp night vision, Alucard tracked the movements of minds, as if he were simultaneously himself standing in a canyon and a great bat hovering above the park. By psychic echo-location, he knew the precise courses of dozens of creatures. Feraru and Crainic were slowly following the instructions they had been given. Their thought-tangles were beacons, blazing that blue light the Father associated with lost treasure.

If Alucard let Dracula grow within him, their shared mind would extend beyond the park, spreading throughout Los Angeles, in a sense becoming the city. They would build Transylvania in the desert by the sea, mentacles laid under boulevards like television cables.

Feraru was wondering whether Winona Ryder was old enough to be seeing anyone and what she’d look like with pearly little fangs. The newborn had been disappointed to learn that Jennifer Beals was spoken for. Crainic, more cautious, worried that they were being lured into a trap. Without Striescu, Crainic felt degrees less safe in this far foreign land — though the thug was ready to kill him at a nod from Meinster. It’s just that Striescu wouldn’t let anybody else ice the senior academician.

Someone screamed as a sucker dart stuck to them. Someone else whooped in victory. Crainic had been certain he was about to be destroyed, but it was just part of the game.

Striescu was back in Romania on urgent state business. On June 14th, Bucharest had been invaded by a mixed band of miners from the Jiu Valley and vampires from Bistritz. They came not to stage a coup but in support of the provisional government, who were taking criticism over the slow pace of reform and the way that odiously familiar faces from the Ceauşescu days kept popping up in their old positions. The mob, hardly unruly since it was effectively NCOd by
ex-Securitate
hardmen, destroyed the offices of the two main opposition factions, the Liberals and the Peasants’ Party. On the streets, they collared and roughed up, or simply ‘disappeared’, many ‘trouble-makers’ — mostly students and journalists, with a few vampire-hating priests mixed in. President Iliescu appealed for calm and tried to distract his ‘followers’ with the progress of the national side in the soccer World Cup, but Baron Meinster had authorised a few tactical murders only a wet-worker of Striescu’s skills could be trusted with. When the dust settled, the United
Nosferatu
Party would be in a stronger position to make territorial claims. Alucard’s concert was a distant half-year away. In six months, the situation could change again and again and again.