Anno Dracula (29 page)

‘Who’s that up there, Nico?’ shouted one of the other girls.

Nico? Not the famous one, Geneviève supposed.

‘Who?’ the girl asked, out loud. ‘Famous?’

Nico - indeed, not the famous one - had picked the thought out of Geneviève’s mind. That was a common elder talent, but unusual in a newborn. If she lasted, this girl might do well. She’d have to pick a new name though, to avoid confusion with the singer of ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’.

‘Another one of us,’ the starlet said to the girl in the pool. ‘An invisible.’

‘I’m not here for a part,’ Geneviève explained. ‘I’m here to see Mr Welles.’

Nico looked at her askew. Why would a vampire who wasn’t an actress be here? Tumblers worked in the new-born’s mind. It worked both ways: Nico could pick words up, but she also sent them out. The girls in the pool were named Mink and Vampi (please!), and often hung with Nico.

‘You’re old, aren’t you?’

Geneviève nodded. Nico’s transparent face showed eagerness.

‘Does it come back? Your face in the mirror?’

‘Mine hasn’t.’

Her face fell, a long way. She was a loss to the profession. Her feelings were all on the surface, projected to the back stalls.

‘Different bloodlines have different qualities,’ Geneviève said, trying to be encouraging.

‘So I heard.’

Nico wasn’t interested in faint hopes. She wanted instant cures.

‘Is that Mademoiselle Dieudonné?’ roared the familiar voice.

‘Yes, Orson, it’s me,’ she said.

Nico reacted, calculating. She was thinking that Geneviève might be an important person.

‘Then that’s a wrap for the evening. Thank you, people. Submit your expenses to Oja and be back here tomorrow night, at midnight sharp. You were all stupendous.’

Oja was the woman with the clipboard: Oja Kodar, Welles’s companion and collaborator. She was from Yugoslavia, another refugee washed up on this California shore.

Welles seemed to float out of the swimming pool, easily hauling his enormous girth up the ladder by the strength of his own meaty arms. She was surprised at how light he was on his feet.

He pulled off his putty nose and hugged her.

‘Geneviève, Geneviève, you are welcome.’

The rest of the crew came up, one by one, carrying bits of equipment.

‘I thought I’d get Van Helsing’s mad scene in the can,’ explained Welles.

‘Neat trick with the girls.’

The twinkle in his eye was almost Santa Clausian. He gestured hypnotically.

‘Elementary movie magic,’ he said. ‘Georges Méliès could have managed it in 1897.’

‘Has it ever been done before? I don’t recall seeing a film with the device.’

‘As a matter of fact, I think it’s an invention of my own. There are still tricks to be teased out of the cinema. Even after so many years - a single breath for you, my dear - the talkies are not quite perfected. My little vampires may have careers as puppeteers, animators. You’d never see their hands. I should shoot a short film for children.’

‘You’ve been working on this for a long time?’

‘I had the idea at about seven o’clock this evening,’ he said, with a modest chuckle. ‘This is Hollywood, my dear, and you can get anything with a phone call. I got my vampires by ordering out, like pizza.’

Geneviève guessed the invisible girls were hookers, a traditional career option for those who couldn’t make a showing in the movies. Some studio execs paid good money to be roughed up by girls they’d pass over with contempt at cattle calls. And vampires, properly trained, could venture into areas of pain and pleasure a warm girl would find uncomfortable, unappetising or unhealthy.

She noticed Nico had latched on to a young male assistant and was alternately flirting with him and wheedling at him for some favour. Welles was right: she could have a career as a puppet-mistress.

‘Come into the house, Geneviève,’ said Welles. ‘We must talk.’

The crew and the girls bundled together. Oja, as production manager, arranged for them to pool up in several cars and be returned to their homes or - in the case of Nico, Mink and Vampi - to a new club where there were hours to be spent before the dawn. Gary, the cameraman, wanted to get the film to the lab and hurried off on his own to an all-night facility. Many movie people kept vampire hours without being undead.

There was an after-buzz in the air. Geneviève wondered if it was genius, or had some of the crew been sniffing drac to keep going. She had heard it was better than speed. She assumed she would be immune to it, and anyway even as a blood drinker - like all of her kind, she had turned by drinking vampire blood - she found the idea of dosing her system with another vampire’s powdered blood, diluted with the Devil knew what, disgusting.

Welles went ahead of her, into the nondescript bungalow, turning on lights as he went. She looked back for a moment at the cast-off nose by the pool.

Van Helsing’s mad scene?

She knew the subject of Welles’s current project. He had mentioned to her that he had always wanted to make
Dracula
. Now, it seemed, he was acting on the impulse. It shouldn’t have, but it frightened her a little. She was in two minds about how often that story should be told.

Welles did not so much live in the bungalow as occupy it. She recognised the signs of high-end, temporary tenancy. Pieces of extremely valuable antique furniture, imported from Spain, stood among ugly, functional, modern sticks that had come with the let. The den, the largest space in the building, was made aesthetically bearable by a hanging she put at sixteenth century, nailed up over the open fireplace like a curtain. The tapestry depicted a knight trotting in full armour through forest greenery, with black-faced, red-eyed-and-tongued devils peeping from behind tall, straight trees. The piece was marred by a bad burn that had caught at one corner and spread evil fingers upwards. All around were stacks of books, square-bound antique volumes and bright modern paperbacks, and rickety towers of film cans.

Geneviève wondered why Welles would have cases of good sherry and boxes of potato chips stacked together in a corner, then realised he must have been part-paid in goods for his commercial work. He offered her sherry and she surprised him by accepting.

‘I do sometimes drink wine, Orson. Dracula wasn’t speaking for us all.’

He arched an eyebrow and made a flourish of pouring sherry into a paper cup.

‘My glassware hasn’t arrived from Madrid,’ he apologised.

She sipped the stuff, which she couldn’t really taste, and sat on a straight-backed gothic chair. It gave her a memory-flash of hours spent in churches when she was a warm girl. She wanted to fidget.

Welles plumped himself down with a Falstaffian rumble and strain on a low couch that had a velvet curtain draped over it. He was broad enough in the beam to make it seem like a throne.

Oja joined them and silently hovered. Her hair was covered by a bright headscarf.

A pause.

Welles grinned, expansively. Geneviève realised he was protracting the moment, relishing a role. She even knew who he was doing, Sydney Greenstreet in
The Maltese Falcon.
The ambiguous mastermind enjoying himself by matching wits with the perplexed private eye. If Hollywood ever remade
Falcon
, which would be a sacrilege, Welles would be in the ring for Gutman. Too many of his acting jobs were like that, replacing another big personality in an inferior retread of something already got right.

‘I’ll be wondering why you asked me here tonight,’ she prompted.

‘Yes,’ he said, amused.

‘It’ll be a long story.’

‘I’m rather afraid so.’

‘There are hours before dawn.’

‘Indeed.’

Welles was comfortable now. She understood he had been switching off from the shoot, coming down not only from his on-screen character but from his position as backyard god.

‘You know I’ve been playing with
Dracula
for years? I wanted to make it at RKO in 1940, did a script, designed sets, cast everybody. Then it was dropped.’

She nodded.

‘We even shot some scenes. I’d love to steal in some night and rescue the footage from the vaults. Maybe for use in the current project. But the studio has the rights. Imagine if paintings belonged to whoever mixed the paints and wove the canvas. I’ll have to abase myself, as usual. The children who inherited RKO after Hughes ran it aground barely know who I am, but they’ll enjoy the spectacle of my contrition, my pleading, my total dejection. I may even get my way in the end.’

‘Hasn’t
Dracula
been made? I understand that Francis...’

‘I haven’t seen that. It doesn’t matter to me or the world. I didn’t do the first stage productions of
Macbeth
or
Caesar
, merely the best. The same goes for the Stoker. A marvellous piece, you know.’

‘Funnily enough, I have read it,’ she put in.

‘Of course you have.’

‘And I met Dracula.’

Welles raised his eyes, as if that were news to him. Was this all about picking her brains? She had spent all of fifteen minutes in the Royal Presence, nearly a hundred years ago, but was quizzed about that (admittedly dramatic) occasion more than the entire rest of her five hundred and sixty-five years. She’d seen the Count again, after his true death - as had Welles, she remembered - and been at his last funeral, seen his ashes scattered. She supposed she had wanted to be sure he was really finally dead.

‘I’ve started
Dracula
several times. It seems like a cursed property. This time, maybe, I’ll finish it. I believe it has to be done.’

Oja laid hands on his shoulders and squeezed. There was an almost imperial quality to Welles, but he was an emperor in exile, booted off his throne and cast out, retaining only the most loyal and long-suffering of his attendants.

‘Does the name Alucard mean anything to you?’ he asked. ‘John Alucard?’

‘This may come as a shock to you, Orson, but “Alucard” is “Dracula” spelled backwards.’

He gave out a good-humoured version of his Shadow laugh.

‘I had noticed. He is a vampire, of course.’

‘Central and Eastern European
nosferatu
love anagrams as much as they love changing their names,’ she explained. ‘It’s a real quirk. My late friend Carmilla Karnstein ran through at least half a dozen scramblings of her name before running out. Millarca, Marcilla, Allimarc, Carl Liam...’

‘My name used to be Olga Palinkas,’ put in Oja. ‘Until Orson thought up “Oja Kodar” for me, to sound Hungarian.’

‘The promising sculptor “Vladimir Zagdrov” is my darling Oja too. You are right about the undead predilection for
noms des plumes,
alter egos, secret identities, anagrams and palindromes and acrostics. Just like actors. A hold-over from the Byzantine mindset, I believe. It says something about the way the creatures think. Tricky but obvious, as it were. The back-spelling might also be a compensation: a reflection on parchment for those who have none in the glass.’

‘This Alucard? Who is he?’

‘That’s the exact question I’d like answered,’ said Welles. ‘And you, my dear Mademoiselle Dieudonné, are the person I should like to provide that answer.’

‘Alucard says he’s an independent producer,’ said Oja. ‘With deals all over town.’

‘But no credits,’ said Welles.

Geneviève could imagine.

‘He has money, though,’ said Welles. ‘No credits, but a line of credit. Cold cash and the Yankee dollar banish all doubt. That seems unarguable.’

‘Seems?’

‘Sharp little word, isn’t it? Seems and is, syllables on either side of a chasm of meaning. This Mr Alucard, a
nosferatu
, wishes to finance my
Dracula.
He has offered me a deal the likes of which I haven’t had since RKO and
Kane.
An unlimited budget, major studio facilities, right of final cut, control over everything from casting to publicity. The only condition he imposes is that I must make this subject. He wants not my
Don Quixote
or my
Around the World in 80 Days,
but my
Dracula,
only.’

‘The Coppola,’ - a glare from Welles made her rephrase - ‘that other film, with Brando as the Count? That broke even in the end, didn’t it? Made back its budget.
Dracula
is a box office subject. There’s probably room for another version. Not to mention sequels, a spin-off TV series and imitations. Your Mr Alucard makes sense. Especially if he has deep pockets and no credits. Being attached to a good, to a
great,
film would do him no harm. Perhaps he wants the acclaim?’

Welles rolled the idea around his head.

‘No,’ he concluded, almost sadly. ‘Gené, I have never been accused of lack of ego. My largeness of spirit, my sense of self-worth, is part of my act, as it were. The armour I must needs haul on to do my daily battles. But I am not blind to my situation. No producer in his right mind would bankroll me to such an extent, would offer me such a deal. Not even these kids, this Spielberg and that Lucas, could get such a sweetheart deal. I am as responsible for that as anyone. The studios of today may be owned by oil companies and hotel magnates, but there’s a race memory of that contract I signed when I was twenty-four and of how it all went wrong, for me and for everyone. When I was kicked off the lot in 1943, RKO took out ads in the trades announcing their new motto, “showmanship, not genius”! Hollywood doesn’t want to have me around. I remind the town of its mistakes, its crimes.’