Anno Dracula (61 page)

Stallone, in his
Rocky
robe, sat to one side in a canvas chair with his name stencilled on the back, paying attention. After Cameron took a few hours of solid beating in long-shot, the star would be needed to step in for bloodied, determined facial close-ups. Cross-legged on the concrete beside Stallone was a writer on a dog-leash, scribbling on a note-pad and passing torn-off pages up to his master. The ‘additional dialogue’ merchant had been ordered to come up with five possible laugh-lines for Sly to snarl after killing the corrupt chief guard. So far, none of his zingers had zung.

‘Does this take you back?’ asked Alucard.

‘My cell was a white room,’ said Gorse. ‘Not very gothic. Not like this at all. The real punishment is the boredom.’

The Father had spent centuries in his castle, doing nothing. And that was how he had ended up.

‘This is the movies,’ said Alucard. ‘We make it better than it is.’

‘Less boring, I hope.’

The rough-cut had previewed in Sherman Oaks. The test audience got fidgety in the third act. Stallone had insisted on a scene where the hero tells Sharon Stone about his dead family. The kids in the valley shouted ‘fast forward fast forward’ as Sly sobbed through a speech he’d written himself. He read dialogue as if chewing raw hamburger. They’d rather see bad guys buying it than listen to an Oscar clip, so Brion James was getting a more elaborate death scene.

‘In Alcatraz, the convicts are separated and doped,’ said Gorse. ‘Buried in their coffins and fed hygienic rat-blood dosed with god-knows-what. It’s depressing, more than anything else. Not many punch-ups or escape attempts. In ten years, I didn’t see any of the women prisoners. And nobody ever,
ever
calls the place “the Rock”.’

‘Quibbles, Ernest. They won’t show this movie in prisons, so we have latitude about the details.’

‘Whatever you say, Johnny.’

‘That’s right. Whatever I say.’

Gorse coughed and lowered his voice as if someone was listening.

‘Holly called in last night from a secure payphone. The Baron’s on his way back to bat-land, happy as a sandboy. She arranged for him to meet Josie Hart, a trick I’d love to have seen. Our
soi-disant
King of the Cats was star-struck and delirious to learn that Josie and her girls would be reforming for “his” concert. He’s requested that they cover “He’s a Rebel”, apparently a favoured pop pick in his circles. I like ska, myself. Our Girl Friday has a few more Patty Rice meetings to take, then she’ll be back in her own self. The coup is shaping up nicely. All the right people here and in Romania have been oiled with
baksheesh.
I say, Johnny, are you really going to let that little
pouffe
take over a country?’

‘Why not? I don’t live there.’

‘Good point.’

‘It’s just dirt, Ernest. Not even real estate. You could exchange a square mile of Beverly Hills for all of Transylvania, have Moldavia thrown in as a freebie, and still feel cheated.’

‘I’m sure you know what you’re doing.’

‘So am I.’

An assistant director looked at Alucard for approval, received the nod, and called quiet on the set. Neville called action and Brion James whanged his cattle-prod down on Cameron’s pipe. The electrical effect didn’t work properly first time, so they tried it again. There was a satisfying shower of sparks. After four more takes for luck, they went on to the next set-up. A make-up crew came in and fixed short ends of pipe to James’s forehead and the back of his skull, for the pay-off shot of the guard’s death.

‘“You need that like a hole in the head”,’ read Stallone. After a pause, everybody laughed. ‘There’s something familiar about that.’

Alucard knew what it was.

‘That was in Adam Simon’s script,’ he said. ‘Cut it out. Say “I told you there was one thing you’d have to get through your thick skull!”’

Stallone laughed and wrote it down.

‘Why don’t you ever have ideas like that?’ he said to the writer, kicking him.

‘I hesitate to bring up the subject,’ began Gorse, ‘but...’

‘She’ll be seen to, Ernest. Don’t worry. For the moment, I want her alive and around. So few people will appreciate what it is we’re going to do. Your friend Geneviève is one of them. This is show business, my friend. Above all else, we need an audience.’

Through Kurt Barlow, Alucard sub-contracted travel arrangements to the Shop. As a precaution, he had Newcastle set up a Church of Immortology fall-back for every leg of the long journey from Beverly Hills to Castle Dracula. Commodore Winton maintained a private fleet of ships and planes, crewed by ‘fully-ascended nyctlapts’ in uniforms copied from 1950s kink erotica and Disneyland, Bettie Page short shorts and Donald Duck sailor hats.

On December 20th, the day before the concert, Alucard flew in an unmarked private jet - with Gorse, Iorga and Crainic - from Los Angeles to a government proving facility in Florida. There, the party transferred to an ‘experimental’ naval transport rocket-plane and made a sub-orbital swoop across the Atlantic, touching down on the USS
Philip Francis Queeg,
a carrier with the US Sixth Fleet, at sea off Cyprus. Alucard, as a personal quirk, preferred his pilots to be warm professionals who didn’t think they were immortal.

The
Queeg
was a Shop cover, the only ship in the Mediterranean paying more attention to Central Europe than the developing situation in the Persian Gulf. Alucard’s deal with the Shop was that his venture should be over before George Bush’s deadline for Saddam’s withdrawal from Kuwait came at the end of the year. It ought to be a nice little work-out before the allies took on Iraq.

He was able to run a spot-inspection of the Bat-Soldier Corps. As producer of
Bat-21,
he was an honorary member of the elite cadre. He found the flyboys (and girls) below-decks in an oak-lined cabin the size of a ballroom, playing ping-pong faster than the human eye could track or composing letters home to families who couldn’t know how much their kids had changed in the service.

Captain Gardner, an old World War II hand who’d personally bested the last of the
Bat-Staffel
mutants Hitler inherited from Dracula, was quietly prepared for action. Alucard said it was unlikely to come to much. The idea was that the Bat-Soldiers were a contingency in case coup and counter-coup got out of hand. Banshee, Penny’s sometime ‘friend’, was gung-ho for US intervention and a rematch with ‘Meinster’s Monsters’. Czuczron, an old Carpathian Guard blade, had assumed command of the Transylvania Movement Bat-Soldiers - he was Meinster’s paid-for poodle and needed to be watched. Banshee asked after Penny and Alucard told the flyboy she was already at Castle Dracula, working behind the scenes to keep the performers out of each other’s throats. Actually, he had Penny in Romania to keep Holly grounded. The shapeshifter was juggling the identities of Patricia Rice and Josie Hart, both of whom had a lot to do during the concert.

The President, intent on Saddam Hussein, still hadn’t signed off on any military action that might be necessary, but Jedburgh was primed to invoke the Shop’s secret protocols and go right ahead with World War III - or, at least, World War II, Part II - anyway. The man from the Shop was swanning around the deck in rumpled naval whites and a cowboy hat, scanning the horizon.

‘Fool Georgie Bush thinks he’s runnin’ the country, Johnny-Boy,’ Jedburgh told Alucard. ‘This Iraq situation is his chance to be Gary Cooper. He ain’t lettin’ that slip, not after four years of sidekickin’ Ronnie like some preppy Gabby Hayes. He ain’t gonna let no pore little innocent Kuwaiti squillionaires suffer under any invader’s yoke, even if they are neo-mediaeval tyrants in Gucci robes who’d sell their own grandmammies for a buck-fifty and all the camel-dung they can smoke. Georgie is watchin’ out for Saddamite patrols, Johnny-Boy, and hearin’ Tex Ritter sing “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’” through his deaf aid. He’s Company from way back, so he ought to know goddamn better. They all forget, once they get in that oval office, what their job really is. Think they got a mandate from the American people to go their own way and the hell with the big picture. Except for darlin’ Ronnie. He stood up and read his lines like he was supposed to, even when the script said he had to take a bullet. I purely do miss Ronnie the Ray-Gun, Johnny-Boy. After the nightmares we had keepin’ Lyndon Blow-Job and Slippery Dick in line, not to mention Jimmy-Earl Moron, Ronnie was the Prez who knew his goddamn place.’

At midnight, Alucard’s Huey, a CH-46 Sea Knight, took off, circled the
Queeg,
and set a course for Romania. Within sight of the
Queeg,
the helicopter was brushed by two large bat-shapes, wavered a little in the air, and blew up.

Jedburgh covered his eyes with his hat.

Alucard stared straight at the explosion, seeing the flame-blossom as a pixillated series of still-images, each lingering seconds in his eyes, overlaying the next. Fire and metal rained into the sea. The sun-bright white burst of exploding fuel highlighted the bat-men who hovered like kites at a safe distance.

‘Carpathians,’ said Jedburgh, as if swearing. ‘Usin’ goddamn limpet mines. We taught ’em how to do it, too. It’s Lesson Two of Elementary Airborne Personnel Strategies, all the way back to Eisenhower’s Rocket-Man Program.’

Alucard signalled Gardner and Banshee to scramble after the enemy fliers. They popped wings and took to the air, rising high in seconds, then swooping down. Two more Bat-Soldiers, Iceman and Nikita, stepped into place and spread wings, ready to be deployed at a nod.

‘That took bare face,’ said Gorse.

Alucard agreed.

‘Meinster may be a candy-ass little bastard,’ said Jedburgh, ‘but he’s got some moves on him. I guess you don’t become a vampire elder without learnin’ a little sneaky. You heard what Kissinger said when Baron Meinster went up against Ceauşescu?’

‘“It’s a pity they can’t both lose.’”

‘You did hear? Well, Henry Hawk was wrong, Johnny-Boy. In some wars, everybody loses. That’s the point.’

Gardner and Banshee, flying in formation, went after the Carpathians. The limpet-miners had flapped a lot of miles from their roost - Meinster must have had them on Crete or one of the smaller islands - and were in no shape to outpace a pair of fresh fliers. Jedburgh ordered a flare popped so personnel on deck without
nosferatu
night-eyes could catch the show.

It was swift and brief.

The Americans let one Carpathian go free ‘to tell the tale’ and brought the other - whom Banshee introduced as ‘a loser named Al Ziska’ - back to the
Queeg
, wings ripped and useless.

‘It was Czuczron, sir,’ said Gardner.

Alucard remembered the hearty elder at the Wild Hunt, thumbnail tearing into a girl’s femoral artery as if opening a shrink-wrapped CD. Dracula remembered Czuczron as a useful blade in a melée, but only when the gold was clinking his way. Meinster’s man. Bought and paid for, at least for tonight.

‘Give pursuit,’ Alucard told Iceman and Nikita. ‘Make it good, but let him lose you. Show proper frustration.’

‘Yeah,’ put in Jedburgh. ‘That little bastard just offed Johnny Alucard!’

The fliers were gone in a second, zooming across the sea like darts.

Attention turned to the prisoner.

‘The pretender is dead,’ declared Ziska, an old Carpathian hand, looking from Gorse to Jedburgh. ‘What you do to me means nothing.’

‘The pretender?’ asked Alucard, amused.

Ziska looked at him and saw the Father.

Alucard shifted, mostly inside his skull. Each time it happened, it was faster and easier and more complete.

‘Alexis, you have made a mistake,’ said Dracula. ‘You know what you must do.’

Ziska, shocked into terror, shrugged free of Banshee and Gardner. He couldn’t fly away. He knew better than to beg forgiveness. He raised an arm in salute and levered loose a long bone-spur that projected from his elbow, ripping away the last of the wing-membrane. Blood pattered on the deck.

Dracula looked at the sheared end of the bone.

‘It is well,’ he said.

Ziska took a step forward, bone-dagger raised, then fell to his knees, leaning forward onto the spike, slipping it under his ribs like a
seppuku
samurai, forcing it through his heart. The fire in the elder’s eyes went out. He crumpled into a coherent statue of cinder, ash and dirt. Even his baggy flight suit blackened and flaked.

Dracula filled his lungs and exhaled, a concentrated blast of cold.

Ziska fell apart.

‘Get someone to clean this up,’ said Jedburgh. ‘We’re supposed to be a ship-shape ship.’

The Father folded inside Alucard.

‘That was an attack on American forces,’ said Alucard.

‘Indeed it was, Johnny-Boy. Shop protocols apply. If we want, we can make this a shootin’ war and Georgie can’t bleat about it. So long as the other feller draws first, no court in Dodge is gonna throw us a neck-tie party for pluggin’ him.’

How long would it take for Czuczron to report back to Meinster?

General Iorga came up from below-decks and reported that the real helicopter was ready. He was well aware that Alucard must have weighed up the advantages of putting him on the first Huey, to add conviction.