Countess Dracula (13 page)

Nayland had the image of a perfect girl in mind: someone not so attractive, someone who would be glad of the business and not ask too many questions. It took him half an hour before he found her, by which time he had his cover story well prepared.

‘Hey honey!’ he called. ‘You got time for a party?’ He had pitched his accent with a New York Bronx flavour. He’d always struggled with American accents, even after all these years, and the more obvious they were the easier.

She was leaning against the closed door of a bakery. No doubt the warm air that sidled up from the vents would keep her warm in the early hours when business got slow and the chill descended. It was hard to guess her age, so thick was the makeup she had applied in order to cover the traces of acne scars. Maybe late twenties, Nayland decided, but pretending to be five years less. Looking at her teeth when she came closer, he saw they were the yellow of a stained toilet pan and as crooked as a drunk’s. He decided that she smoked compulsively, probably not just tobacco either.

‘What sort of party?’ she asked.

‘Nothing too major. Two or three friends of mine have rented out a little farmhouse up in the Hollywood Hills and we’re all bringing a girl each, you know, to liven things up a bit.’

‘Up in the Hills? That’s too far.’

‘You don’t like to travel? It’s nice up there. I’ll pay you for your time.’

‘I’ll be gone all night.’

‘So I’ll pay you for all night. Better for you – no need to be hanging around this place for hours. We’ll have a few drinks –’ Nayland took a guess, ‘– plus some dope if you like that kind of thing. Gary’s our guy for that, the stuff he gets … Jesus, it’s like the herb of the gods or something. Anyway,’ Nayland just kept talking, acting casual, ‘if you don’t want to make a night of it then that’s up to you. Is there anyone else around here that might feel differently?’

‘I like to smoke,’ she said, still undecided but clearly wavering.

‘Who doesn’t? Am I right? Anyway … I need to be getting over there before they’ve nabbed my share, so if you can tell me where I might find someone else I’d be obliged. Hell of a shame, I have to say, honey: you have beautiful hair …’

Her eyes lit up even brighter and Nayland felt like a heel. Here he was, trying to lure her with drugs, when all it took to melt her heart was a compliment. ‘My mom always said my hair was my best feature.’ She ran her fingers through it. It was as yellow and sickly-looking as her teeth.

‘Your mom was right.’ And where was she now? Nayland wondered. ‘Beautiful.’ He built in a small pause, a moment in which to reflect. ‘But I really got to go.’

‘I suppose I could come,’ she said, ‘as long as you pay the full rate.’

‘Money’s no problem,’ he said. ‘What are we talking here? What do you normally earn? Couple of bucks an hour? How about we call it twenty straight? Extra compensation in case you missed a good night.’

The girl sighed. ‘Hell, for twenty bucks you can drive me to San Remo, I guess. I got bills and that’s the sort of money I can’t afford to turn down.’

Nayland reached for his wallet and pulled out the money. ‘Let me give it to you up front, that way it’s done. I’ll drop you home in the morning, too – I’ve got to head back this way as it is. In fact, I’ll throw in breakfast somewhere. I don’t know about you but I can eat like a horse the morning after …’

She climbed in. ‘I don’t eat much,’ she confessed, then looked awkward as if admitting to some kind of failure. ‘But there’s nowhere good to eat around here.’

Nayland could believe that – unless you were a rat, at least.

‘I get you, the stuff some places serve … I think Len was bringing some barbecue so we’ll have something to take the edge off the booze when we get there.’

‘So, you in town long?’ she asked.

‘A flying visit, just meeting up with the guys and then heading back east.’

She nodded, well-trained enough not to push it too far with the questions. If a client wanted to talk then they talked: the last thing most of them wanted was the third degree.

Nayland made it easy for her, filling the journey with a fabricated life story, role-play taken to the nth degree. He told the girl about a messy divorce in New York, a woman who had tired of his weeks on the road, selling cleaning products to housewives. He told her how this had been a rebirth, how he now relished his time away, free as a bird, able to go anywhere and do anything. He realised, even as he was speaking, how much of this was wish-fulfilment on his part but once he’d started he found it impossible to stop. Besides, as long as he kept talking she couldn’t talk herself and the last thing he wanted was to know anything about her. Let her be two-dimensional. Let her be a cypher. A bit player. If he allowed her to become real he would only feel more guilt.

He kept his eyes on the road, not even wanting to commit her face to memory, and by the time he reached the dirt track for the barn he was in the middle of a nonsensical story about the time he had spent working as a sailor in his youth.

‘This the place?’ she asked. ‘It looks kind of remote.’

‘It sure is,’ Nayland admitted. ‘That’s the way we like it. That way we can make all the noise we want and nobody complains.’

As they pulled up outside the barn itself the girl was truly beginning to have doubts. ‘There’s no sign of anyone else,’ she said. ‘You sure you got the right place?’

‘Sure I’m sure,’ he insisted. ‘They’ll just be inside.’

There was a slight flicker of light coming from beyond the shuttered windows so she could almost convince herself that he might be telling the truth. She got out of the car, walking just behind him as he headed towards the main door.

‘Hey guys!’ he shouted. ‘Hope you didn’t start without us?’

Nayland opened the door and the silence on the other side was a damning answer to his lie.

‘I don’t like this,’ the girl said from behind him. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Honey,’ he said, trying his best to make the tone of his voice match the sweetness of the word, ‘you worry too much.’ He held out his hand and beckoned her to take it. ‘What’s to be scared of?’

Cautiously, she took his hand. He yanked her violently towards the open doorway and shoved her inside. Pulling the door shut behind her, he leaned against it and tried not to listen as she began to scream.

The door shoved against him as she pushed it desperately, trying to escape, but he held fast. As a solid crunching noise silenced her screams he realised he had been holding his breath. He let it out, gasping in some night air.

‘This the best you could do?’ came Elizabeth’s voice from the other side of the door.

‘She’s got blood in her,’ he said. ‘What more do you want? I’ll wait in the car.’

‘You sure you don’t want to watch?’ she asked and he gritted his teeth at the perverse humour in her voice.

‘This is your business,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any part of it.’

Nayland walked over to the car, his whole body shaking as the reality of the night’s affair crashed in on him and knocked away the foolish games of his constructed persona. A sudden rush of nausea forced him into the shadows beneath the orange trees where he threw up amidst the smell of blossom and warm earth.

He could faintly hear the sound of blood splashing against the inside of the tin bath, like a rainstorm on a corrugated-iron roof. This helped his sickness not one jot and he was trapped there for all of five minutes, dry-heaving under the umbrella of the night sky’s beauty.

Once he was sure he could move, he went to lean against the bonnet of the car and fumigate his mouth with a cigarette.

Eventually the barn door opened and Nayland looked up.

Elizabeth was silhouetted against the gas lamps that she had lit inside.

‘You finished?’ he asked.

She walked forward, escaping the illumination of the lamps and letting the moonlight catch her. She was naked, her skin still streaked with blood. She looked like a freshly born animal.

‘How do I look?’

Nayland didn’t know what to say. Elizabeth was a nightmare, but one of such sensuality that he found he wanted her anyway. She was a monster, the fruit of her butchery drying in the light night breeze. Beauty daubed with horror.

‘You look like you,’ he said, truthfully.

‘Good,’ she replied, lying back in the dust of the ground in front of the barn. ‘So come over here and fuck me.’

Later, Nayland helped Elizabeth to store a couple of large clay jars in the far corner of the barn. He knew better than to ask her what they contained. She kept a small bottle to take home.

‘I thought it had to be fresh,’ he said.

‘Who knows? That’s what I need to find out. The effect is so short-lived. I need to see how long I can make each body last.’

‘Let’s hope it works – we can’t be picking up a new hooker every day.’

‘If only there was someone who could deliver.’

He looked at her, disapproving of her casual joke.

‘Don’t lecture me again, Frank,’ she said. ‘I’m not in the mood. Let’s just go home, get dressed up and show the world what we’re made of.’

And what might that be?
he wondered.
Blood and tears and all things evil
.

Nayland kept silent. He was beyond argument now: he had made his bed and the dry earth of it was still smeared across his knees.

They got in the car and he drove them back towards the main road.

Elizabeth rose up in her seat, fishing between her legs. She pulled something out and laughed as she recognised it in the pale light.

‘You lost this,’ she said, tossing his false beard onto the dashboard. ‘When you wear it next you can lick your lips to remind yourself of me.’

Fabio was not quite the liar that most people took him for. He had indeed started his life in Sicily. Like so many in Hollywood he had dragged himself up from simple beginnings: born into a life of penury, the son of a greengrocer and a woman who embroidered with needles as sharp as her tongue. He had been only too eager to see the back of the place and had run away at sixteen for a fresh start in America. While he certainly exaggerated his connections with the world of organised crime, he had served his time in the business during his youth. Running for the Cocozzas, doing odd jobs, making deliveries. He never sank too deep into the life, not through any great sense of morality but rather because he wasn’t very good at it. He’d been too small and fat to intimidate anyone (the one time he had been sent to deliver a ‘message’ to a late-paying client, the man had taken his baseball bat off him and beaten him to a pulp with it). His bosses had been lenient: in fact, they hadn’t been in the least bit surprised when he’d come crawling back with loose teeth and a face that looked like a bullet wound. They’d expected it.

‘Fabio,’ said Giuseppe Avati, a man who would one day fry like overcooked bacon in the electric chair for innumerable counts of murder, ‘this just ain’t your line of work.’

Which was how Fabio had ended up making his second fresh start. While he was no use at convincing people with his fists, his tongue had considerably more effect and he began to make money working as a salesman. Handling everything from encyclopaedias to stockings, he found that he could charm people and therefore sell to them.

Then, one day, he looked up at the billboards outside the Regent Theater in New York and decided there was a new product on the market, one that he liked very much. The business seemed childishly simple to him: you found someone beautiful and you sold them to the studios, you wrapped them up in a fiction, you told stories, you made audiences fall in love. People were simple and it was no more difficult to press the right buttons in the entertainment industry than it was when you had a suitcase of nylons to shift.

Fabio styled himself as a manager rather than an agent. He worked better with the personal touch and sitting in an office peppering studios with head shots and résumés was not his style. He had gathered a select list of actors over the years, always taking them when they were unknown and then building a story around them, developing them and promoting them until they became something so much bigger than they really were. This had stood him in good stead and he’d always been sharp enough to lift thirty per cent on all the deals he arranged, a high commission but one that he could justify when the actor was suitably hungry for what he had to offer.

The years went by and his childhood in Sicily now seemed a long way away. Still, at heart he was a rural creature, a man of limited origins. However much he played the role of the civilised urbanite that was what he held at his core.

All of which helped to explain why his first response on seeing Elizabeth that night was to cross himself and offer up a prayer to a God whose phone number he had lost many years ago.

Fabio was sitting in the lounge of the Crystal Heart, a new club that had managed to cut itself a slice of the local glitterati’s custom and become a hot destination for those looking for fun before midnight. In his opinion, the reputation of the place wouldn’t last. Its decor was too contrived and its staff too easily pleased by the sight of a Fairbanks or Pickford taking a table. Treatment of stars was a tricky business: you had to show that you knew who they were but you should never fawn too hard – that was the job of the audiences – and the moment a busboy was allowed to ask for an autograph the place was destined for the dogs. Exclusive clubs were where stars went to get away from that sort of thing.

That moment had yet to come. For the time being the Crystal Heart was the place to be.

The band had a great deal to do with it. They beat good rhythm and the horn section had a sensuality to it that would have had Martin Quigley shedding his trousers and making a beeline for the dance floor.

That was where Fabio saw Elizabeth, spinning at the centre of a crowd of adoring onlookers.

At first he was quite convinced that it wasn’t Elizabeth at all – couldn’t be, in fact – but he spotted Frankie Nayland brooding at a table in the corner and, as much as his eyes doubted what they were seeing, he had known the woman long enough. This was the Elizabeth he had first met, the firebrand, the sex siren. He had had no doubt that he could make a star of her – she was halfway there already. She had that rare ability that could never be taught: she made people stare. You just couldn’t take your damned eyes off her. She was having the same effect on him now. He watched her dance as if she was the only woman in the room.