Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (18 page)

‘I’m dead, Tom,’ she said, piteously. ‘Hold me.’

‘I am holding you, Penny.’

‘Yes.’

They danced on, not missing a step.

Tom knew he would have to tread carefully. He was close enough to see how unstable Penelope really was. She could pose as an ornament, displaying pleasure and amusement in such a way as not to stretch her face out of its beautiful true. But sometimes, there were cracks. And beyond cracks, the chasm.

Princess Asa was behind some of it. For a Victorian to be treated as a vassal by a mediaeval tyrant was humiliation enough. But the Princess was just the most recent irritant. Penelope’s moods went deeper, and her troubles back to the age of Wilde and the Terror.

In the end, it was Dracula. And perhaps her onetime fiancé, this Charles. Tom knew both men were nearby, yet distant from Penelope. Had she come to Rome because of them?

‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ she said, hugging him. ‘It’s unfair of me to go on like this.’

He relaxed. She was thinking about him for a moment, not herself. Excellent.

‘I’m also sorry about this, but…’ She bit his neck, deeper than usual, opening the old bite-wounds. The pain was a shock. Her fingers dug into his ribs. She sucked ferociously.

They were still dancing. Others were bleeding. No one noticed.

For the first time, Tom felt panic.

The dead were dangerous. Really.

She set him down gently on a chair, letting him slip from her hands. He couldn’t move his limbs or even hold up his head. As he slipped into a daze, he saw Penelope dab her lips with a napkin.

She looked as if she had made a decision.

12

DEAD SOULS

M
ore people were in Piazza di Trevi tonight. It wasn’t yet midnight. Couples — other couples, Kate corrected herself — looked at the fountain, tossed in coins, made wishes. There was a policeman on guard.

‘The little girl was standing there,’ Kate said, pointing across the piazza. ‘Where that woman is.’

Marcello tried to brush her hand down, but came up against her vampire strength of wrist.

‘Be careful, Signorina Reed…’

‘Kate,’ she insisted.

‘Kate. It does not do to attract attention. Especially with such creatures.’

The woman sat alone on the rim of the fountain, sucking at a cigarette, legs dangling like a kid’s. Her tiny face reminded Kate of the little girl’s, her blonde hair was cropped short. She wore a ratty fur cardigan, a sweater with horizontal stripes, and a tight, short skirt.

By gesture and ellipsis, Marcello tried to imply wordlessly that this woman was a prostitute.

‘Marcello, don’t be silly. Do you think I don’t know a tart when I see one?’

On the whole, Kate got on well with prostitutes. She’d interviewed dozens, dating back to the Whitechapel of Jack the Ripper. Sometimes, when animals weren’t enough, she had bought their blood. Just now, she didn’t want to think about that.

She concentrated on Marcello. He was annoyed.

The little whore noticed them. She stubbed out her ciggy and dutifully sashayed over, calculatedly manufacturing a smile that didn’t go with the puppyish openness of her big eyes. She was warm, with extensive scabbing around her neckline. Her pallor suggested she made herself available to too many vampires.

‘Ciao,’ she squeaked. ‘I am Cabiria. It means “born from fire”.’

She spoke accented English. Cabiria was the name of the heroine of an Italian film spectacle Kate had seen before the First World War. Obviously, its memory lingered. Since then, Italy had produced fire enough to birth many heroines.

Marcello tried to shoo off the whore, but Kate shushed him.

‘Do you come here often?’ she asked.

Cabiria was astonished by the question.

Kate laughed. ‘I’m sorry. I really mean that. Are you often in Piazza di Trevi?’

‘Sometimes,’ Cabiria said. ‘It is good place. Many tourists come here. Nice men, generous. How you say, big spenders?’

‘I’m after a little girl.
Ragazza.
I saw her here.’

The whore looked shocked and drew away. Kate realised Cabiria thought her a bloodthirsty child molester. Sometimes being a vampire gave the wrong impression.

‘I think I can help you not.’

‘No,’ said Kate, touching the woman’s arm. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. She was lost, I think. I want to talk with her. She saw something. You’ve heard of the murders, of the Crimson Executioner?’

Cabiria crossed herself and spat.

Kate had thought the whore little more than a girl. She was tiny and frail. Her face was unlined and open, almost clownish. But she must have been in her thirties. She was frayed a bit, like her clothes. Kate guessed she’d often been bruised.

‘Perhaps you should see fortune-teller,’ Cabiria suggested.

Marcello snorted. He was trying to move off, to pull Kate away. Kate held still. She was interested.

‘I can take you. It is not far. Near my home.’

‘We have a car,’ Kate said.

Marcello was coldly angry. He didn’t want a whore in his car, the precious red Ferrari (which wasn’t actually his — Penny let him have the use of it for reasons Kate couldn’t understand and was worried about). That decided Kate. The Italian must learn his lesson.

‘Signora Santona is the great fortune-teller of my district.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘I Cessati Spiriti,’ Cabiria said.

Dead Souls. Kate sensed Marcello’s rush of fear.

‘It is impossible,’ he said. ‘Kate, you do not know what such a place is like.’

For most of her life, men had been telling Kate things were impossible, that places were terrible and off-limits. They usually meant that poor people lived there. Or there were shameful circumstances it would be distressing to read about in the papers. If Marcello had known her better, he’d have understood that telling her a place was impossible was the best way of making her want to go there.

‘I’ve been in bad places, Marcello,’ she said. ‘Worse than you can imagine.’

‘Perhaps. But you have never been in I Cessati Spiriti.’

‘It sounds fabulous.’

‘It is not so bad,’ Cabiria said. ‘The dead there are not swift like you,
vampiro.
They are
morti viventi,
slow. You have to watch over your shoulder.’

Kate led them to the sports car. Cabiria was struck with wonder at the machine, and treated it with the reverence due a religious object. ‘Ferrari,’ she repeated, over and over, eyes brimful, relishing the ‘r’-sounds, stroking the mirror-finish of the body. It was a nice car, but Kate couldn’t see what the fuss was about.

Getting three of them into the two-seater was a squeeze, but Kate and Cabiria were smaller than average. Cabiria put on a cloche hat. Kate feared a little for her Dior. Marcello let off the brakes and freed the beast under the bonnet. For the first time since Kate had met him, he smiled genuinely rather than to punctuate boredom with politeness. At the wheel, he was a little boy with a new toy, going ‘broom broom’ under his breath as he drove the Ferrari through the narrow streets at inadvisable speeds.

On the drive across the city, Cabiria told her a little about I Cessati Spiriti, with Marcello adding ominous footnotes. Then a site of fighting between the partisans and the Germans, the once-prosperous district was bombed heavily by the Allies. A famous priest had been executed by the Nazis when Rome was an open city, prompting a minor uprising. After the war, I Cessati Spiriti became a shanty-town, home to the dispossessed, a dozen varieties of refugee, many who wished to avoid the peacetime authorities, and the traditional poor. The unplanned community expanded and collapsed in on itself many times.

Ten years ago, the De Gaspero government initiated a massive public works programme to clear the slums and rebuild I Cessati Spiriti, but the funds allocated were diverted to the mafia. Much of the building work that got done was so shoddy it fell down at once. The population of the district still swelled, flooded by escapees from the drought-ridden South. With them came a new bloodline. An epidemic cluster of the risen dead, brains burned out by fever, prompted much of the warm population to evacuate. A hardy minority stayed behind in the ruins, learning to live alongside shambling
morti viventi.
Cabiria had lived here ever since the War. She seemed quite fond of the place. Marcello, it turned out, had never been here.

As it slid over trackless wasteland, cruising between huddles of patchwork shacks and piles of festering rubbish, the Ferrari must have looked like a spaceship. Kate was reminded of the trenches of France during the German onslaught of 1918. Open fires burned on the wastes like tribal beacons.

Nearby, a knot of
morti viventi
was encircled by warm feral children who tormented them with flaming torches. From a distance, the walking dead seemed like crippled tramps, easily bested by the fast, vicious kids. One creature got too close to fire and went up like a screeching roman candle. It fell in flames, and two youths battered its head with crowbars.

Cabiria directed them to a street lined by the hulks of bombed-out and patched-up buildings. There were no streetlamps but braziers burned, casting flamelight on bullet-pocked walls. It was hard to believe this was in the same city as Via Veneto, but it was hard to believe Whitechapel was in the same city as Kensington.

It annoyed her that so much of the world was still like I Cessati Spiriti when it didn’t have to be.

‘I live there,’ ventured Cabiria, pointing to a shattered apartment block, obviously hoping one or other of them would suggest dropping by for a ‘visit’. Kate intended to pay the whore for her troubles but didn’t want to take advantage of her services. ‘And Signora Santona lives here.’

Marcello parked by another ramshackle building. It had once been a church. The roof was gone, replaced with polythene sheets. Some windows had patches of stained glass between the beaten tin cans and taped-in cardboard.

‘I shall stay with the car,’ Marcello announced.

Kate couldn’t argue that wasn’t a sensible idea.

Perhaps he’d be attacked by monsters and she’d have to rescue him. That might impress him. Then again, he might blame her for getting him into an attackable situation in the first place. Men were always unreasonable.

Marcello sat in the car, angling the wing mirror so he could look in as many directions as possible.

Kate and Cabiria got out. Standing on the pavement for a moment, Cabiria listened to the wind. There were faint cries. She shook her head and ventured on.

The front door of the former church was boarded up, but a little door at the side led to a staircase that went down into the basements.

‘It is all underground,’ she said. ‘Watch your shoes.’

At the bottom of the staircase was a long, wide corridor. The only light came from an oil lamp somewhere. An inch of stagnant water lay on top of a furry carpet. Rough planks propped on bricks made a walkway, with tributary planks leading into rooms. Nailed-up blankets hung from lintels, edges trailing in the water.

Business was being transacted in some of the rooms.

A scratchy gramophone record was slowing down. A waltz ground to a halt.

Cabiria balanced like a tightrope walker on the planks, arms out. Kate, wearing heels, tottered a little as she followed.

From one room came a growling and chewing. Behind the thin blanket burned a fire that made a fine crosshatch of the weave. Something spurted and splattered against the blanket, and dribbled down. There were swirls of red in the water.

Cabiria pulled Kate on, past that room.

‘Here is the
signora
’s apartment,’ she said.

This doorway had an actual door. It was bright blue, with gold crescents and silver stars. Cabiria knocked on the door and a hole opened in the centre of a painted eye.

‘To see the fortune-teller,’ Cabiria explained.

The door was opened and the women allowed in.

The fortune-teller’s servant was
morti viventi,
the first Kate had seen up close. A cage-muzzle was nailed to his cheekbones, over the constantly grinding jaw. Facemeat was flaking away. Staring eyes betokened no intellect. Kate understood this was a breed of vampire, given to chewing blood out of flesh rather than drinking from the vein. Most people thought of them as zombies. Maybe classing someone as a reanimated automaton, entirely vacated by its former personality, was an excuse not to treat them as human. On this brief acquaintance, she wasn’t ready to argue the assumption.

The servant was dressed in shabby genteel style, a good suit gone to the bad. He had no shoes or socks. His feet were black and ragged.

He didn’t try to eat Kate or Cabiria, but led them into a labyrinth. The fortune-teller’s apartment was large, and full of items perhaps accepted in payment. Stacks of furniture, bundles of books, a pile of broken bicycles, jars of specimens floating in brine, several bedsteads, a surprising amount of scientific equipment, empty gilt picture frames, a rack of rifles. Off in curtained rooms,
morti viventi
performed chores Kate didn’t understand.