Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (23 page)

She opened
Dracula.
It was signed to Charles, by Kate. How was Kate? She had been in a bad way at the funeral, puffed up with too much blood, befuddled by grief.

Stoker was dead by the time his book could be openly published. There was a falling out between Kate and his widow, Florence. This edition, with Kate’s never-reprinted Introduction, was a valuable curio, but it also had other significance.

She decided to keep it. She knew Charles wouldn’t mind.

The book fell open. An oblong of card and a folded paper had been put between its pages. The card was the invitation to Dracula’s Engagement Ball, two nights from now. The paper was a memo, written sometime in Charles’s last two days, maybe on the day before his death.

An alliance, cemented by marriage, between the House of Dracula and the House of Vajda will establish, for the first time this century, a standard under which vampire elders can gather, probably in pursuit of temporal political power. Already, many of the great fortunes of Europe are in undead hands. If Dracula returns in triumph to Transylvania, an empire will rise again. Princess Asa Vajda is a tyrant manqué, evidently with ambitions to become the nosferatu Eva Perón. The unknown factor in this alliance is, as ever, Dracula himself. From close study, Edwin, I should say that our Count has…

The memo was unfinished. There was nothing in it Winthrop did not know. But since it was obviously intended for him, she would pass it on. He’d returned to London, but Bond was still in Rome and could probably be prevailed upon, out of gratitude for his life, to become a postman.

She wondered what observation Charles had formed but not set down.

She tapped her teeth with the invitation. Should she go? The last time she’d been invited — with Charles — by Dracula to a palace, an empire had fallen and there’d been a great deal of fire, bloodshed, and kerfuffle. Of course, this was likely to be less interesting.

She had the dress, though. Suitable for funerals and weddings. Only worn once.

18

FREGENE

O
utside the city, Kate encouraged Marcello to let the Ferrari loose. It wasn’t a long drive but the roads widened enough to allow the car to get up speed. She wanted to travel fast. Wind hammered her face, pressing her swollen skin with invisible fingers, jamming behind her spectacles into her open eyes.

Her head didn’t clear. She told him to go faster. Ever the willing slave, he obliged. Sheep scattered. It was hilarious. A shepherd’s curses were lost in their wake.

They rounded a corner. The Palazzo Otranto stood on its promontory peak, suitably ancient and sinister. A gentle slope led down to the beach. For the Engagement Ball, Dracula had declared a holiday. The town was like a carnival, full of pale people in elaborate costumes.

She ordered Marcello to cruise along the seafront. This was not like Brighton or Blackpool. Vampire women exposed dead-white bodies in swimming costumes that would never get wet. Servants scuttled along with parasols the size of the big dish at Jodrell Bank, keeping circles of safe shadow over their mistresses. There was music and dancing and feeding and drinking. Kate was one of them, a vampire bitch with a human lapdog, crab-crawling across the beach, teeth and claws clicking and clacking, leaving a snail-trail of blood. All faces were skulls, cheekbones and teeth gleaming, eye-sockets empty. All voices were shrill, shrieks of cruel laughter. The sun bleached everything to the colour of sand.

Marcello was afraid of her, could deny her nothing. That made a change. Usually, Kate was the person denying nothing, empty when abandoned. For once, she was free to think only of herself, her desires and dreams. To hang with the rest of the world.

She vaulted out of the Ferrari, limber with the quickness of the blood in her, and landed like a cat, even in heels. She had found a black and tiny Piero Gherardi gown and tossed away most of her
lire
on it. She wore it with scarlet scarves that matched her hair.

People on the beach took notice of her. Some boys who were hauling a sea creature out of the surf turned to whistle. She posed like Malenka, wind whipping her scarves like squid tentacles. She wanted to roar, like a lady panther. The boys throbbed with blood. If they came near her, she would rip them open with love.

Marcello parked the car, and came after her, one hand cupped around a cigarette. He was being impatient, practical, hustling her on, telling her not to pay attention to the sea-boys. He was acting like her father.

She slapped him, to teach him a lesson. Infuriatingly, he gave her a ‘well, if that’s how it is’ shrug. The slap was a mistake, too obvious. She exerted her control over him, reaching out through his blood, turning his arteries into puppet strings, jerking him to her, inflicting a sharp kiss on his mouth. He surrendered, which irritated her more.

She was tiring of him. No, of this. Her head was spinning. She had been in this whirl for days now. Weeks?

She didn’t want to think of loss. She nipped Marcello’s neck and scraped some of his blood onto her tongue. The rush made things better again, for the moment.

The boys cheered Marcello. He managed a smile and a wave.

Kate had his complete attention. But he held back something. He surrendered his blood and his body, but a ring of ice surrounded his heart. She knew what he was thinking, but rarely what he was feeling. He must love her. By his actions, by his words, she could tell. His love was a cloak, a protection. She might not want or need it, but it was there.

The boys dragged their sea monster up the beach and dropped it in tribute to her. It was a living wing, with a long, barbed tail. A single eye, lashless and round, looked up at her, clouding over. What did this dying thing see?

She knelt in the fine sand — careful of her dress — and touched the cold, scaly skin. The creature was aflap with the last of life. Its wriggling, departing spirit disturbed Kate, brushing past her as it fled. Any movement now was mechanical.

‘It’s dead,’ a boy said. ‘You can tell by the eye.’

The eye was a white marble.

A spell of dread passed over Kate’s mind. She had missed something important.

This was not what she wanted. She was at the seaside, on holiday. She wanted Punch and Judy, Brighton rock, cream teas. She wanted to find fossils, messages in bottles, driftwood carved into exotic shapes. She wanted to be a girl again, at Lyme Regis, wondering what it was her father wouldn’t tell her about the gaunt, beautiful woman who stood at the end of the Cobb, gazing out to sea. All these years later, she knew exactly what that nameless woman had been feeling. Love and loss.

Cars passed through the town in a sombre procession. The passengers were the more distinguished guests of
il principe
and his fiancée, the fashionable and the fierce.

The palazzo cast its shadow on the sea. Kate looked up, shading her eyes from the setting sun. That was where the Devil lived these days.

It was important that she look on her host’s face. In all these years, in this century of the ‘Dracula
Cha Cha Cha
’, she’d never met him, never seen him. Once, he’d put a price on her head, declaring her a dangerous enemy of the state. But then he had been overwhelmed by a rising tide of more powerful enemies and had (she supposed) forgotten her. She’d felt his touch, though: in the silver sword-scrape sustained in an escape from the Carpathian Guard during the Terror, and the iron treads of the German tank that rolled over her in the trenches. With Charles gone, she was alone in the world with Dracula. They should meet. Perhaps, if things were settled between them, they could both be free. It would all be over.

The uncertain future frightened her. When the music stopped, when the
cha cha cha
was over, what then?

The blood wasn’t burning in her so much now. Blocks of bright colour still overlaid everything, and penumbrae fuzzed around living or moving things. But her mind was coming in to land, plummeting almost.

‘Take me to the palace,’ she ordered.

Marcello gave a nasty little bow and offered her his arm.

19

THE PARTY

S
he wore black velvet. The gown left her shoulders bare but swept to the floor like a train. It was heavy, but Geneviève could carry the weight. An unappreciated advantage of vampirism was the ability to dress spectacularly but comfortably in outfits that would choke, constrict, strangle, or hobble a warm woman. She didn’t wear the veiled hat that went with the dress, which she had needed at the funeral.

Since the funeral, she hadn’t been out of the apartment for more than an hour. As she left, she picked up Charles’s invitation as well as her own. It might be amusing to give it to a random stranger, and let them enjoy
il principe’s
hospitality. Then again, the welcome of Dracula had occasionally proved fatal. He was probably over his craze for nailing guests’ hats to their skulls or impaling lieutenants who complained about the stench of the dying, but it was best not to take chances.

The invitation specified that transport would be provided to Fregene if she were to be at the Piazza del Quirinale between six and ten o’clock. It transpired that a fleet of cars was going back and forth to and from the Palazzo Otranto for guests who chose not to make their own way.

She was sharing a Daimler with people she didn’t know. Jeremy Prokosch, a Hollywood producer with crimson glasses and a little red book for jotting down ideas; Dorian Gray, the Italian actress not the English libertine; Dr Hichcock, one of
il principe’s
personal physicians, and his silent wife, one of the many women of fashion who made herself up to look as much like Princess Asa as possible; and an unhappy-looking hollow-cheeks named Collins.

Geneviève would have been interested in talking with Collins, a rare American vampire, but Prokosch delivered a showbiz monologue. Apparently, he’d just missed being in the car before, with Orson Welles, who was playing Argo in the
Argonauts
film, and John Huston, whom Prokosch wanted to hire for a movie of
I Am Legend
with Charlton Heston. She hadn’t seen any of the films the producer had made. They were mostly about orgies, but based on classical (out of copyright) sources.

‘The best way to keep costs down on a costume picture is to cut out the costumes,’ Prokosch said.

Collins tried hard to smile at her.

‘Have you ever done any modelling?’ the producer asked.

‘Not recently,’ she said.

By the time the car pulled up outside the Palazzo Otranto, night had fallen. Geneviève felt as if she’d been clubbed over the head with a rolled-up copy of
Variety.
There was a delay in escaping from the Daimler because the official door-openers were trying to prise Orson Welles out of the car in front. Welles, bearded and enormous, couldn’t stop laughing as he wriggled like Winnie the Pooh stuck in Rabbit’s hole. Finally, John Huston stabbed a lit cigar against Welles’s enormous backside, and the spherical genius was ejected like a ball from a cannon.

Prokosch produced a script from under his cummerbund and scuttled off after Huston. Geneviève wished him ‘boffo boxo’ and stepped out of the Daimler. She looked up at the palazzo. Very nice. More baroque than gothic. Swirly columns and uncontrolled ivy.

‘It looks like a big onion,’ she remarked, to no one in particular.

She joined the human stream flowing toward the huge doors. A cadre of warriors, with fur-trimmed armour and teeth like cashew nuts, checked invitations and waved in the guests. Paparazzi crowded around the Tartars but were discouraged from getting in the way. Broken cameras, indeed broken photographers, littered the driveway. She saw a pest dashed against a solid-stone wall.

Her invitation passed muster and she was allowed in. She drifted along a corridor which opened into a ballroom the size of a cathedral. An all-girl orchestra played dance music by Nino Rota, under the direction of a skeleton-thin figure whose face was a blank mask. A buffet was set out on two hundred-yard tables, offering cold meats and salad for the warm and a selection of still-living animals for the undead. Waiters and waitresses, healthy warm folks, paraded with bare necks and wrists, spigots already inserted into their veins. She accepted a measure of human blood and sipped.