Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (19 page)

Santona sat cross-legged on a canopied palanquin, her barrel-body swaddled in many-coloured shawls, neck and wrists heavy with jewellery. She was an old woman, though her face was unlined and her oiled ringlets were youthfully dark.

Two more
morti viventi
attended the fortune-teller.

‘They were ’
ndrangheta
,’ Santona explained. ‘From Calabria. Criminals. They tried to move North, but brought this taint with them. Most don’t last long, but I have trained these and make use of them.’

‘I’m Katharine Reed. From Ireland.’

She extended her hand, but Santona didn’t shake it.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘You are in this city for the dying.’

Cabiria crossed herself.

‘That’s as may be,’ Kate said. ‘Just now, I’m looking for a little girl I saw in Piazza di Trevi. A witness to a crime.’

‘The man in the red hood. He is like these ’
ndrangheta
, only a servant. A tool. There was no little girl.’

‘I didn’t imagine her.’

‘You didn’t see
her.
You saw a reflection.’

The fortune-teller must have been skimming her mind. Some warm wise women had a little of that vampire sense.

‘Reflections can mislead.’

Kate had thought that. Something still bothered her about the scene. Had she misunderstood what she saw?

‘Was she a dwarf?’ she asked.

The ripples in the water could have made a child’s face of a withered mask of age.

Santona laughed and shook her head. She held out a hand.

Kate produced five hundred lire, which disappeared. The fortuneteller had snatched it.

‘Not everything can be revealed.’

This was what she expected from a proper con woman. Pointless mystification and disappearing money.

‘You shouldn’t look for this girl. She will find you.’

‘She’s looking for me?’

‘You have shared something.’

Kate shuddered.

‘You have troubled the Mother. This is important.’

‘The girl’s mother?’

Santona shook her head, insistently. ‘No, Rome’s.
Mater Lachrymarum.
She has always been here, under and around us.’

‘The Mother of Tears?’ Kate remembered her Latin.

The
’ndrangheta
were disturbed. Red-orange trickles slipped through their muzzles onto much-stained lapels.

‘There are tears everywhere,’ the fortune-teller said. ‘The stones of the city pour forth tears.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Enough. This is all. You have been warned.’

More money was required to end the interview. Kate handed it over. She wondered if Cabiria would get a cut.

Santona shut her eyes and lay back on cushions. One of the ’
ndrangheta
massaged her forehead, pickled fingers working away at her temples.

Cabiria tugged Kate’s arm. They were required to leave.

* * *

A small crowd of the walking dead had gathered around the Ferrari. Marcello kept them back with pages of
Osservatore Romano,
rolled into torches and set alight. When one burned down, he’d shoo the ash away from the car and light another.

Morti viventi
had stumbled out of their holes. These weren’t under Santona’s spell or muzzled. Some were red-mouthed, others hollowchested and hungry. Many were feeble and fell apart with a kick, but some had prospered, perhaps through cunning, and retained strength in their limbs and jaws. They were dangerous.

Marcello was relieved to see her.

‘They took a little boy last night,’ Cabiria said. ‘An orphan. He said his father was an American. He was fast but he got tired. They ate his stomach out.’

Kate wondered why Cabiria was telling her this.

‘He has risen tonight. That is him. Dondi.’

Among the
morti viventi
was a child in baggy shorts, with an oversized American soldier’s cap. As if he’d heard his name, he turned to look. Olive eyes glittered, but only with wetness. His t-shirt was torn away from his scooped-out belly, and his mouth was chewing.

‘They first try to eat themselves,’ Cabiria said.

Kate felt sick.

As she walked through the loose crowd,
morti viventi
backed away from her. Whatever they craved didn’t run in her veins.

A woman-creature sniffed at Cabiria, who squealed. Kate took the
morta viventa
by the chin, which detached with a snap. A long dog-tongue dangled. Embarrassed at what she had done, Kate gave her back her jawbone.

Nothing could be done for these revenants.

Were they indeed dead souls, all reason and person fled from reanimated carcasses? Or should she feel pity for the spark that might be left behind?

Perhaps, in the end, all undead became like this.

Was she the same person she’d been when alive? Or did she just mislead herself that she was? Had Katharine Reed flown off to Heaven or elsewhere, leaving behind a shell that could deceive itself into pretending to live out her life?

No.

She looked into the empty angel eyes of the newly risen Dondi and knew she was different from him. Kate still felt, still fought. If there was a kinship, it was more tragic. The
morti viventi
might have a distant awareness of their situation. Kate was weak-kneed with useless love, empathy with something that felt only hunger and pain.

‘You can kill them easily,’ Marcello said. ‘Smash their heads. If their brains are broken, they stop moving.’

‘That’s not the same as being dead.’

He shrugged and lit up the sports pages.

‘Please,’ said Cabiria. ‘He was my friend. When I was ill, he… he stole for me.’

‘She wants you to kill it,’ Marcello said.

‘Like a sick dog. To be put out of his misery.’

Kate was crying. She hoped her tears were not bloody.

Cabiria hugged Dondi, who was only just shorter than her, and tried to cradle his head. He opened his mouth wide, to bite into her tiny breast.

Kate took him away from Cabiria and twisted his head around. The spine snapped, but it wasn’t enough. Head on back-to-front, Dondi crawled toward them, jaws working like mandibles. He was drawn to living flesh, like a bee to pollen. His brain was purged of all that made him human, but there were still instincts.

Sobbing now, Kate found a stone and battered the dead boy’s head to paste. The body twitched, but ran down. Whatever had remained seeped away.

It took her a moment to compose herself.

‘We must go, Cabiria,’ Kate said. ‘Will you be safe?’

Cabiria smiled a one-sided smile and hitched up her shoulders, pulling her cardigan around her thin body.

‘It’s not far from here,’ she said. ‘My place.’

Kate gave her more money than was sensible. Cabiria looked at it sadly.

‘Make me like you,’ she asked. ‘When I turn, I don’t want to be a zombie. I want still to feel. To be Cabiria, not a woman-shaped dog. Not to be Dondi.’

Kate bit her lip.

‘I can’t,’ she said.

What was she saving herself for? She’d found virginity a ridiculous ‘inconvenience’, and had lost hers twice (when she turned, her hymen had grown back again). She’d drunk the blood of children, had killed when she’d had to (and perhaps when she hadn’t), had loved many.

Why had she not given the Dark Kiss? Why had she not turned any children-in-darkness?

She would have given Charles her blood, had offered to open her veins for him. Why not this warm orphan?

It wasn’t a curse. It was an opportunity. She wasn’t lost to God. She wasn’t lost to herself. It wasn’t death, it was life.

It would be simple.

But she couldn’t.

And she couldn’t explain.

Cabiria smiled sadly again and rubbed her fur collar against her bites.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Ciao,
Cabiria.’

‘Goodbye, Kate.’

Kate kissed Cabiria and got back into the Ferrari. Marcello drove away. Kate didn’t want to look back at the bowed figure trudging away from the
morti viventi,
searching for the warmth of a fire. She didn’t want to, but she did.

13

OLD LOVES

G
eneviève could look after herself and Bond was trained for this sort of thing. Beauregard told himself he shouldn’t worry about them. It was probably not worth Brastov’s while to have them liquidated, as they said in these jargon-happy times. At the very least, Winthrop would insist on reprisals — murdering their top man in London, probably — and that was how cold wars heated up. Unless someone did something stupid, they’d be back before dawn.

Of course, there was always room for stupidity.

He remembered Geneviève hauling him out of Buckingham Palace in 1888, after they had delivered to the Queen the instrument she would use to free herself from Dracula, the silver scalpel of Jack the Ripper. He was badly wounded, and they were surrounded by the most dangerous creatures in Europe. They’d had help, of course, inside and outside the palace, but had only barely escaped.

He’d thought he was going to die. At thirty-five, he’d been better prepared for it than he was now.

‘Charles, I can save you,’ she’d whispered urgently, before biting into her wrist and bringing forth the bright blood. ‘Charles, darling, drink… Turn, and live.’

That was the closest it had come. Her blood spilled on his lips. That alone had probably given him an extra twenty years of youth. It would’ve been so easy to drink. He didn’t even know why he hadn’t.

‘You don’t have to be like
him,’
she said, meaning Dracula. ‘You don’t have to be like
me.
You just have to live…’

He gurgled a farewell, ‘I love you forever.’

And she repeated, ‘Forever?’

Then, with dutiful anticlimax, he got better. He didn’t die and return as a vampire. He just survived his wounds, got on with the work of booting Dracula out of Britain, rose in his profession, fought other battles, got old, got tired, tried to keep up, came to Rome…

Why?

Because of him. Dracula.

It was his duty to stay close to Dracula, to guard against his return to power. When he died, others — Winthrop, mostly, perhaps Geneviève — would take over the task, and perhaps keep
il principe
off the world stage forever.

Forever?

Was anything forever?

He had loved Geneviève in 1888, and he still loved her in 1959. That seemed like forever. Yet he’d never stopped loving Pamela. Loving the dead did not preclude loving the living.

This close to the end, he was still learning. Through reason and emotion, he’d settled an old quandary. Whatever might be true for most of vampirekind, Geneviève was alive in every sense that counted. And she was not alone. Kate too could grow to be that kind of elder.

He wasn’t leaving the world to the walking dead.

Over the years, Geneviève had bled him, passionately at first, tactfully of late, never again pressing her blood upon him. Once, as Geneviève had offered herself to him, he had offered himself to Kate. During the First World War, when she was bled dry, he had given her his wrist and said, ‘Go ahead, pretty creature, drink.’

Then, in 1918, Geneviève was on the other side of the world. At least part of the reason he let Kate bleed him was that he’d missed the sensation, the commingling and draining. He could admit that now. It did not feel like faithlessness.

The communion, renewed on occasion, had given him strength, and Kate too. To her he owed the most, for she’d always jostled for a place in his life, never quite coming to the front. If it hadn’t been for… he and Kate might have…

As much as the Queen, Kate needed to be freed. To be free of
him,
of his distracting presence. Without him, she would grow. Perhaps, of their group, she was the only real hero, because everything was difficult for her.

The strong-arm creature had struck him across the face, probably no more than a swat. It didn’t even hurt. But Beauregard’s brains had taken a good shaking. The lights were going out.

All this thought of the past.

That was dying. This was what dying was like.

At last.

‘I suppose I’m the last woman you expected to see, Charles.’

Pamela?

He opened his eyes and found he was still in his body, in his chair, in his flat.

‘That French person is clearly an inadequate housekeeper.’

She stood at the doorway of the study, looking with distaste at the knocked-over bookcases, the scatter of
golem
detritus, and the disarrayed furniture.

Not Pamela.

‘Penelope. Penny.’

Every time he saw her, it was a shock. Very slowly, she’d lost her girlishness, had sharpened and grown sleeker, into the image of her cousin, his wife. He understood why he had nearly married Penelope, and why that would have been a very great unkindness.

She had fed recently. He could tell from the colour in her cheeks and on her lips.

Had his neglect, as much as Godalming’s blood, turned her into a predator?

She stepped into the room and right-sided some chairs.