Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (28 page)

She had been questioned several times. Someone was supposed to be getting in touch with the Irish Embassy. Mostly, she was left alone, with orders to think hard.

For the moment, she was a witness. Not a suspect.

When they had told her Dracula was dead, she’d let out an instinctive hallelujah of unlovely gloating. That hadn’t made a good impression, especially since she was still plastered with the deceased’s congealing blood. Even now, the last rinds clung stubbornly to her hair and under her nails.

She didn’t even know whether she was guilty or not.

Objectively, she was the assassin type: idealistic, obsessive, frustrated, prone to fits of emotion, equipped for violence. On the night of the murder, hundreds of witnesses saw her pick a drunken fight with the dead man’s fiancée. She had a long history of enmity with the House of Dracula. As a reporter, she’d have picked herself as the likely killer.

But surely she would remember?

No news was allowed through to her, but she could imagine how the world was reacting. Those who thought her guilty would be sharply divided: Dracula’s supporters calling for her public impalement on television, his enemies hailing her as a heroine and a saint. It should have been Geneviève. She was better fit to handle all this.

What stopped Silvestri charging her? The pounding in her head didn’t entirely blank her intuition. The Inspector didn’t think she’d done it. Marcello had told her the policeman specialised in those very Italian murder cases where nothing was ever what it seemed and weird combinations of suspects with twisted motivations perpetrated unwieldy, unlikely and baffling atrocities. His usual quarry were black-gloved, hooded fiends who took straight razors or strangling cords to fashion models or nightclub hostesses to pose as sex killers but actually sought contested inheritances, double indemnity insurance claims or to preserve the reputations of even more unpleasant relatives. To Silvestri, the victim’s worst enemy found at the scene of the crime covered with his blood and with the deceased’s wallet in his back pocket was obviously an innocent red herring.

She tried to think back.

Dracula’s tomb was elusive, but more and more she found herself going over the past. It was all there somewhere.

In 1943, she had walked across most of Sicily in the wake of General Patton’s armoured forces. ‘Operation Husky’ met little resistance from Italian troops on the island — King Victor Emmanuel had just dismissed Mussolini, and Pietro Badoglio was negotiating Italy’s change of sides — but 40,000 German soldiers put up a desperate fight.

The press tagged along with the second or third wave of liberators. Chain of command wouldn’t let Kate up front in the fighting like Ernie Pyle. By the time she got anywhere, it was supposed to be pacified, suitable for writing-up as a morale-boosting victory. She was encouraged to file stories about Sicilian-American GIs visiting relatives in the old country, being welcomed as saviours with picturesque peasant feasts.

Actually, she saw the bureaucratic mess of a changeover from failing fascist authorities to a provisional Allied military government and then to whoever could best exploit the situation. Most of the partisans who assisted the Allies turned out to be mafia
soldati,
clawing back territories Il Duce had wrested from them. In order to make the campaign swift and successful, the Allies were prepared to make use of the likes of the bandit Salvatore Giuliano and the gangster Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. She saw unsmiling Sicilian villagers waving flags at gunpoint to give a welcome to ‘exile son’ Luciano, and wept to see not liberation but an exchange of oppressors.

‘You brought them
back,’
spat an old woman.

Kate always remembered that peasant, face worn, back bent, sons and grandsons dead on all sides. To her, the Germans (only recently hostile) were alien beings, unpredictable and implacable as the weather. The mafia, whom she was now expected to welcome, had been around all her life. They were people she could hate, arrogant and quixotic, suddenly violent, always demanding more tribute.

An American officer confided in Kate that he couldn’t understand these people. ‘They’re free. What more do they want, blood?’ Then he realised what he had said and tried to apologise. Two nights later, she bled him anyway, though she never slept with him.

The disbelief and disgust of the old woman stayed with her.

In the Balkans, it must have been worse. There, the Allies installed not mafia
capi
but elder vampires, grave-mould scum out to reclaim their castles and feed off the grandchildren of the villagers they’d slaughtered in years gone by.

‘You brought them
back.’

She still shuddered at that.

* * *

‘Have you found the little girl?’

Inspector Silvestri had heard that before.

‘It was the girl from Piazza di Trevi. She must be a part of this. I think she’s mixed up with the Crimson Executioner.’

The policeman sighed.

‘Il principe
Dracula was not killed by
il Boia Scarlatto.’

He stated it as a matter of fact. Kate was surprised.

‘On the night of the party, the night Dracula died,
il Boia Scarlatto
was seen more than a dozen times in Rome. He was in a frenzy. Seven elder
vampiri,
all on their way to or just returned from Fregene, are dead by his hand. He has grown bold. Most were killed in public. The assassin and an elder named Anton Voytek fought like wrestlers in Piazza dei Qinquecento, outside the railway station, causing much damage. Voytek’s heart was torn out and tossed to the dogs. The other dead are il conte Mitterhouse, Webb Fallon, Richmond Reed, il conte Oblensky, Lady Luna Mora, and a Madame Cassandra. There may be more. It’s difficult to identify heaps of ashes. The thing is that all these died in Rome, not the Palazzo Otranto.’

‘How convenient.’

‘Indeed. It has occurred to us that there might be an army of identical assassins. In that case, who is their
generale?
This lost child of yours?’

‘She wasn’t a vampire.’

And yet, she wasn’t warm either, not in the sense Kate understood.

‘Sometimes the Devil looks like a little girl,’ she said.

Silvestri threw up his hands. ‘You can’t expect me to arrest
il diavolo.
Besides, he was put on trial once before and sentenced. The American law of Double Jeopardy must apply.’

‘Very well, I confess. I am the mastermind. I decreed the deaths of all elders in Rome. I personally destroyed the King Vampire. Now I am Queen of the Cats and shall reign throughout the eternal night.’

Silvestri chuckled.

‘But you are innocent, Signorina Reed.’

‘Prove it.’

‘Show me your hands.’

Surprised, Kate laid her hands on the desk between them. The Inspector took her hands and turned them palm up.

‘A silver scalpel was stuck into Dracula’s heart.
Argento
. That killed him. The decapitation was only a flourish. He was killed by another
vampiro
— which also rules out
il Boia Scarlatto
— and your hands aren’t scarred. Silver is like hot iron to the undead.’

‘I could have worn gloves.’

‘And still got your hands bloody? So bloody that you would have red stuff under your nails?’

Kate was self-conscious and made fists, trapping Silvestri’s thumbs. She could have ripped them off if she’d been so inclined. She let him go.

‘There was also skin on the scalpel. A residue.’

‘I heal fast. Even after silver.’

‘You didn’t have any weal on your palm when we found you that night. I observe too.’

‘I take it you’ve asked for a show of hands?’

‘Many
vampiri
were at the engagement ball. Few have chosen to remain in Italy for the funeral. And who can blame them?
Il Boia Scarlatto
is the Grim Reaper with a silver scythe. Incidentally, are you an elder?’

‘I should think not. I’m not even a hundred.’

‘A thousand pardons, Signorina. But the question had to be asked. I should not care to release you into peril.’

‘You’re releasing me?’

‘Discreetly. Your name has not been made public.’

Kate was grateful for that. She knew the pandemonium her life would become if her part in this were generally known. Her colleagues of the Fourth Estate would scent blood in the water and descend on her in a feeding frenzy of pestering questions.

‘Thank you, Inspector. You are a wise and a good man.’

‘Perhaps. I am also, unless these murders are cleared up, soon to be a traffic policeman on the island of Lampedusa.’

He shrugged, and let her out of the interview room.

Someone — Marcello? Geneviève? Geneviève — had retrieved some clothes from the
pensione
and sent them to the police station on Piazza Venezia, so she did not have to change into the remains of her party dress to be let out.

It was early evening, the sky purple. On the steps of the police station, she drew breath. She had looked forward to something other than the stale air of the cell.

A cry went up from across the piazza. A horde of pressmen, who had been lounging by the Victor Emmanuel Monument, rushed up at her, hastily grabbing cameras, microphones, and notebooks. Flashbulbs exploded, questions were gabbled in many languages. Light and noise assaulted her.

She covered her eyes.

25

THE ORDER OF THE BOOT

P
rincess Asa Vajda was on her knees at the foot of her bed, face pressed to the eiderdown, hair a thistly tangle. The coverlet was streaked with bloody tears.

Tom tried warily to get her attention. The last time he’d been sent to ask after the Princess, she’d tossed a Fabergé Devil Egg the size of a hand grenade at him. The door was dented and the bauble lay unnoticed on the thick carpet, its surmounting inverted cross bent out of shape. It was priceless but in hideous taste.

‘Princess,’ he said.

Asa’s back was racked with sobbing. She was like a dark Ophelia, driven out of her mind with grief.

‘Princess,’ he insisted.

She looked up from the eiderdown. Ropes of hair hung like seaweed over her eyes. Smudges of blood were smeared on her cheeks. She’d chewed her lush lower lip. There was even a little water in her tears.

‘Penelope… Miss Churchward… wondered if you would like to come down, and have tea. The police have left.’

Inspector Silvestri was tactfully refraining from pressing the Princess for an interview. But the cops came back to Fregene every day and had still not finished their investigation of the scene of the crime. Many areas of the Palazzo Otranto were roped off and guarded.

Asa’s hands crawled over the bed like white spiders. Tom tensed, in case she was looking for another weapon. Instead, she stood up. She’d been wearing the same soiled white gown for days, the wedding dress she was cheated out of. The garment would do for a shroud.

The room was musky with an odour of the dead. A basin of shrivelled violets stood beside the bed.

The Princess ran fingers through her hair. Her knuckles caught on snaggles and knots. She was not fit for society.

The dead bitch fastened Tom with a mad stare. He was proof against her fascinations. Penelope had overwhelmed him totally. It was not that he had the strength to resist an elder like Asa, but that he had no will of his own to be dominated and broken.

Asa gave up.

‘Tea will be served in an hour,’ he said. ‘Company is expected.’

What he felt for Penelope might be love. He’d once assumed he wasn’t capable of love, frankly doubting the emotion everyone talked about actually existed. Now his whole person was wrapped up with another, a dead woman at that. His contentment and ease of mind were dependent on her moods. If he hadn’t been in such a daze from the bleedings, he’d have been terrified to have stepped so far off the track. Now he understood why people spoke of ‘falling in’ love rather than ‘ascending to’ it. He was plummeting.

She was in the Crystal Room, working at a paper-strewn desk. In late afternoon, the sun didn’t shine into the room, but she still wore a wide-brimmed hat and dark glasses. The murder of
il principe
had thrown the rest of the household into a panic, but Penelope showed an English cool head. She coped with everything from an avalanche of condolence cards to easing relations between the cops and the Carpathian Guard.

‘I’ve told Princess Asa about tea,’ he said.

‘Will she come down?’

‘I don’t know.’

Penelope’s mouth narrowed. ‘Very well. Come here, would you, Tom?’

This time, he would not obey. He was determined. But he found himself standing by Penelope’s desk, a schoolboy summoned to the headmaster.

She stood, bent back her hatbrim, and stuck her mouth to his neck. The electric shock of penetration came, and a little more of him flowed into her. She swallowed, dabbed her lips with a hankie, and sat down, looking again at the ledger open on the desk.

Tom swayed a little, unsteady on his feet. He was not sure if he was dismissed.