Anno Dracula (57 page)

Shots ploughed into the Formica and chrome. Willis yelped as a silver slug punched through his sleeve and the meat of his arm.

‘Hey, man, mind my threads!’

The dhamps were on Emma or up and about, bumping into one another, too blitzed to pay attention.

Geneviève lizard-slithered across the tile floor as fast as she could manage.

So much for her good black dress. Lorie’s jacket ripped under the arms.

Georgia Rae fired again. Purple-moustache guy got in the way of a bullet and fell.

‘Willis, she’ll kill you too,’ Geneviève shouted.

No use. Blacula’s bitch wasn’t growing any balls tonight.

‘You gotta be
reasonable,
girl!’ he whined. He was up from the table, hopping in frustration and excitement, like a kid who needs the bathroom.

He must see another basement in his immediate future. Mahoney would keep him going longer than Barksdale, but he’d still be used up...

Geneviève back slid into a booth, using the table as a shield, but there was nowhere else to go.

On the whole, she wished she’d stayed with her date.

No... she didn’t. She wasn’t like that. Georgia Rae, of all people, had seen it straight away. Won’t come willing; can’t be broke...

She saw Georgia Rae’s legs - she had leopard-pattern high heels, too - as she marched across the diner. She rapped on the table with the gun.

‘Come out,’ she said.

Geneviève eased herself up from the floor and sat in the booth, fixed table between her and the Leopard Lady. Erzulie Ge-Rouge ascendant. Just now, eyes ablaze, gun smoking, Georgia Rae Drumgo was gunpowder, gelatine, dynamite with a laser beam...

There was no use trying to talk with her.

‘Blast the bitch, why don’t you?’ shrieked Willis.

‘She ain’t goin’ nowhere.’

Geneviève sensed a moment. Georgia Rae didn’t want to draw this out. She’d used her full clip and needed to reload.

The diner door opened and someone wide and whiffy walked in.

‘Hey, honkie, can’t you see we’re closed?’ said Willis. ‘What kind of a jive-ass, mutha-gropin’, toad-lickin’...’

A very loud noise sounded.

The front of Willis’s zigzag eyesore exploded red. His eyes were frozen in surprise.

As Geneviève’s ears rang, Willis slowly buckled — threads of scarlet and gristle seeming to float in the smoke around him — and he fell on the floor.

The drac-heads pushed Emma — who was going to need serious therapy if she lived much longer — away and pounced, crawled and leaped across the room, shoving their faces into Willis’s wound, snorting and licking, feet turning clawed inside confining shoes, teeth so big they cracked jaws and split cheeks.

The newcomer was a gross warm man with a Stetson and a sawn-off double-barrel shotgun.

Geneviève recognised him. He’d been at the restaurant. And around before then. Outside the Barksdale house this morning. She even remembered him showing up in Canada, sitting in court as she gave evidence against Lucien Lacroix.

Georgia Rae had her gun on the fat cowboy. Stand-off. Except... he had one more shell under the hammer and she was empty.

Geneviève slipped out of the booth, quickened by the golden she’d had earlier, and took away Georgia Rae’s gun. She put her teeth against the Leopard Lady’s jugular and pressed enough to leave dimples, then stepped back.

Georgia Rae looked angry enough to kill with her bare hands.

‘Uh uh, honey,’ said the gunman, finger tight on the other trigger. ‘Message from on high. Don’t mess with the mademoiselle. Nod your head to show you understand.’

After a long moment, the Leopard Lady deliberately nodded.

Geneviève spat at Georgia Rae’s shoes. A display of French contempt.

‘Best take your posse and ride off into the sunrise, I reckon,’ said the gunman. He had a grating Texan accent.

With a sweet smile, Geneviève gave Georgia Rae back her empty Glock. The Leopard Lady put the gun in a shoulder black and snapped her fingers. The Mondo Trasho dhampires left Willis alone, and came to heel.

Glaring, Georgia Rae moved towards the door.

‘On high means
West Coast,
Miz Drumgo,’ said the man. ‘Tell Luther... tell everyone you know. Change is coming. Get it?’

‘Got it.’

‘Good.’

Georgia Rae and the dhampires left. Some of the pack were howling and laughing. They didn’t know this was real.

Geneviève checked the waitress. Unconscious, but alive. Behind the counter was a cook with his throat cut. Dead.

Emma Zoole was in shock.

‘Where’s Lorie?’ Geneviève asked.

At the
Sun.
She left a note to call.’

So the roommate she liked was safe. Sweet.

‘I’m thinking of moving out,’ Emma said.

‘We can talk about that later.’

Geneviève turned to the man with the gun, the man from the West Coast. He was gone. The jukebox whirred, though. He must have dropped a coin in one of the table-top selection machines.

Roy Rogers sang ‘Happy Trails’.

‘How about that?’ she said, to no one in particular.

She heard sirens from outside. Someone had called the cops.

Uniforms came through the door. And a familiar detective.

‘Sacre bleu, mon brave. C’est un tableau de
splatter
avec jolies filles
.’

F
rancis had changed. So had Alucard.

He could tell Francis dimly recognised something in him and was troubled, but he made no connection between John Alucard and the boy who had slipped out of Romania under his company’s wing. They had inevitably run into each other around town. He’d decided against green-lighting
Tucker: The Man and His Dream.

The director lived too much in his Silver Fish trailer, commanding sets from inside a chromed cocoon with video-camera eyes, multiple editing benches and womb-like wall-padding. Francis thought of the master of the Miracle lot in terms of his own movies: Pacino’s dead face in the dark at the end of the first
Godfather,
Hackman’s attentive eyes in
The Conversation,
Anjelica Huston’s fingernails in
Captain Eo,
Brando’s snarl as
Dracula
. An interesting collage: Alucard wondered whether he was not Francis’s get as much as Dracula’s, or Kate’s or Andy’s or Welles’s. When Coppola came to Transylvania, he had given shape to a dream, encouraged an unformed vampire boy along a path which led inevitably to this office, to this crown. The Father had turned him, but the movies
made
him. Like all vampires, all predators, all parasites, Alucard needed, loved and despised his prey

Transylvania and Hollywood had marked the face of Francis (no longer Ford) Coppola, as had family tragedies and the collapse of his San Francisco-based Zoetrope set-up. Francis had regained all the weight he’d lost in the Carpathians; but where he’d once been a confident, well-fed Hercules, he now sagged and slumped inside his safari jacket and chinos. There was more grey than black in the still-thick beard that all but covered his cheeks, and some of the grey was grizzling to white. Behind professorial glasses, his eyes were evasive, unable to fix on anything that wasn’t a screen or a monitor.

Francis wasn’t shooting anything at the moment.

Yesterday, in the screening room at the house, Alucard had run
The Godfather, One from the Heart, Peggy Sue Got Married
and
Gardens of Stone.
Pauline Kael wasn’t the only person to say that
Dracula
had sucked Francis Coppola dry. The earlier pictures, even the insane choices, were the work of a filmmaker. The later ones could have been made by anyone with a range-finder. Holly, an innocent eye, liked
One from the Heart
best of all. It touched parts of her life locked away inside her. She had walked out on the film about cemeteries, upset and bored.

Was there anything left?

Just now, Francis sat in the uncomfy chair that had made Adam Simon squirm. The kid had been eager to pitch and too overjoyed at the reception to ask the hard questions. Francis - who’d been an Adam Simon once, grinding out quickies for Corman - was uncharacteristically meek and restrained. He had been summoned for this audience, not had to plead his case for months with Beverly. His gun-for-hire movies were commercially as hit-or-miss as his auteur work. He’d gone to Oklahoma and shot a couple of teenage movies back-to-back on tiny budgets to prove he didn’t need to bankrupt a Third World country to bring in a film. Alucard had cast C. Thomas Howell in
Bat-21
after seeing him in
The Outsiders.

Francis still gave off the scent of death, of being lost. Once he had been the far-sighted look-out at the prow, the only man who knew where the ship was going.

They talked about people they knew.

Alucard told Francis how happy he was with
The Rock,
now Steven E. DeSouza’s punch-up of Robert Towne’s rewrite of Ron Bass’s draft was in. He had firm commitments from Stallone for the con, Connery for the guard and Jeremy Irons for the villain. He had come close to nailing Brigitte Nielsen for the ‘Ratty Cardigan’ character, but an early screening of
Total Recall
inclined him to take a chance on Sharon Stone, who was overdue to break and desperate enough to eat cockroaches on camera. Now Eli Cross was off the project, John McTiernan could be trusted to tidy up after the second-unit directors and the effects and opticals units. Adam Simon was wasting his time pleading with the Writers’ and Directors’ Guilds, but his signature was on the contract and he was legally out in the cold.
The Rock
was shaping up as
the
big release for summer ’91.

Francis ventured no opinion, except to comment that Towne was a better writer than director. Alucard gently tortured Francis by asking whether he might put in a word with his nephew, Nicolas Cage, whom he liked for the small but vital flashback role of the degenerate viper who killed the hero’s family. He was ready to forgive Cage for his bizarre performance as the drac-head literary agent in
Dhampire’s Kiss,
though some had said the actor used Alucard as a model for the semi-vampire character.

‘That’s next year locked down,’ said Alucard. ‘Now I have to think about 1992.’

Francis shifted in the chair. Like a lot of directors who were addicted to cutting, he had a bad back.

‘Do you know what my biggest disappointment was?’

The director shrugged, not knowing where this was going.

‘Dracula,’ said Alucard. ‘No, not the one you made. I just stood back and admired on that. The other one, the one nobody got to see.’

‘Orson’s?’

‘If only... if only...’

Three people in the world had known why Orson Welles walked off the set of his potential masterpiece. Welles was dead, leaving just Alucard and Geneviève Dieudonné.

‘I was on set that day,’ said Francis.

‘I know.’

‘When I heard Welles was making
Dracula,
I don’t know what I felt. No, that’s not true. I was angry and afraid. You can’t know what my
Dracula
cost me. Cost us all. None of us came back from Transylvania unchanged. Talk to Marty or Dennis. For a moment, I thought it’d all be for beans. My picture was going to end up a footnote, like the 1931 version of
Maltese Falcon
with Ricardo Cortez, or that Martin Ritt gangster film everybody said was a bad precedent when I was prepping
Godfather.
Why couldn’t Orson have done
Don Quixote
or
Heart of Darkness?
If he’d signed for
Godfather, Part III,
I’d have given him my blessing and a case of wine. But
Dracula
was too much a part of me. I didn’t want to let it go, let
him
go.’

Alucard shrugged. ‘Then, for you, it was a happy ending.’

‘No,’ Francis insisted. ‘When Orson shut down, I was devastated. I’d been torn up by the idea of an Orson Welles
Dracula
, but when it went away I realised I didn’t care what
Cahiers du Cinema
said about “Francis Ford Coppola’s
Dracula
” in some 1999 century-of-film retrospective. What I wanted was to see the picture that wasn’t made. You understand? Somewhere there’s a magic theatre, in a valley at the edge of the world, where they show movies that are only dreams. The complete
Greed
, the Laughton/von Sternberg
I, Claudius,
Hitchcock’s
Mary Rose.
If that theatre was showing Orson Welles’s
Dracula
, I’d leave everything - the movies, the vineyard, the studio - and wander the world until I found the place.’