Anno Dracula (70 page)

‘Holly helped,’ said Kate. ‘With Gorse. It wasn’t just me.’

‘I know.’

‘I found a lot of strange things in her. About people we know.’

Holly was not in as bad a state as Kate had been, but was out of action. She was still trying to change. She ran through other faces but couldn’t manage any with any conviction.

‘I’ve a lot of her in my head,’ said Kate, thumping herself above the ear with the heel of her hand. ‘Too much.’

‘It passes.’

‘I should bloody hope so.’

She wondered if Holly-as-Kate would have convinced her to support the Count. That was what her job had been, no matter what else Gorse tricked her into. Geneviève tended to go along with things, to follow the principled examples of her friends rather than take on her own. She had been led by Charles, by the gumshoe, by Kate. With a persuasive argument, would she have settled in for an eternity as a minion or a court ornament?

She hoped not. But she would never know.

‘Good grief,’ said Kate. ‘Holly knows Penny!’

Geneviève had lost track of Penelope Churchward, though she knew she lived in the States these nights.

‘It’s “Bad Penny Blues” all over again,’ said Kate. ‘That girl has made more trouble than anyone else of her generation. She was a horror as a child, you know. Next time I run into her, I’ll give her such a bollocking! And I don’t care if her family did have more servants than mine in 1885.’

Sometimes Geneviève felt she’d come into the story too late to understand it. She had met Charles through John Seward, after the deaths of Pamela, Charles’s wife, and Lucy, Dracula’s first English get. The two women, one dead in childbirth in India, the other the first step in the Count’s rise to power, were vivid memories for Penny (Pamela’s cousin) and Kate, but shadow-ghosts to Geneviève. She’d only known Dr Seward and Mina Harker after they’d been changed by Dracula, and she had barely met Lord Godalming, Seward’s rival with Lucy and Penny’s father-in-darkness. These people had grown up together, in an intricate tangle of warm relationships and rivalries. The only Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris or Abraham Van Helsing she could imagine were fictionalised characters from Bram Stoker’s book, though she had a sketchy idea where Stoker and his wife, Florence, fitted into the jigsaw too. Charles had been more than half of her world while alive, but she could never follow his part in this extended true-life soap. That gave her something in common with Dracula: he had sliced his dragon’s sword through the Gordian knot and let the ends fray.

Kate, invigorated by fresh blood - in fact on a little drac high - sorted through Holly’s bag.

‘This is mine,’ she said, opening it. ‘She even has my passport. And my rent-book. Damn, but I’ll have lost the flat. It’s months since I paid rent. What is it, June? July? It was January when she did for me. Ah-hah. Traveller’s cheques. American money. Credit cards in several names. Prickly little Holly owes me some clothes, I think. And a selection of Los Angeles luxuries. I’ve never been here before, you know.’

‘I have,’ said Geneviève.

She had human connections too, to the living -Jack Martin, the Dude, the Lieutenant, Kenneth Anger, Iorga - and the dead - the gumshoe, Moondoggie, Orson Welles, Nico, even Gorse. Here, Kate would have to pick up the threads as she went along. It was a mistake to think, as Dracula had done for a while, it possible to live outside the world, imagining master-slave as the only possible relationship. Just by walking into a bar, you initiated a dozen stories, in which you were a star or a walk-on.

Kate found the invitations for the screening of
The Rock.

‘I think we should go to this,’ she said. ‘To show him we’re still here. That we can’t be touched.’

Geneviève wasn’t sure.

‘I don’t mean “can’t be touched” like that. Of course we can, Gené. We’ll have to be on our guard. But we’ve warred against him before and survived. Just because the world has forgotten what he’s like, there’s no reason that we should go along with it. What would Charles have said?’

‘“Never surrender.”’

‘Indeed he would. And indeed we won’t.’

The Rock
wasn’t the worst vampire movie ever made. It wasn’t even as bad as that ’80s atrocity
Bat-21,
much less
The Vampire Happening, The Lost Boys
or - from what Geneviève had seen of it -
Debbie Does Dracula.
However, it was, in her view, dreadful. Reel after reel of straining, oiled muscles - with ‘funny’ lines after each spectacular killing. If not for a ridiculous shower sex scene with a new blonde actress, it could be mistaken for an amazingly well-budgeted gay porn movie intercut with butcher’s training film clips. After screening buzz was that
The Rock
would blockbust Labor Day opening weekend records and stay on ‘legs’ well into the fall. It was the tentpole of the summer release schedule.

Outside the DGA cinema, a hyperactive, dark warm man was discreetly restrained by wrestler-shaped vampire bouncers in custom tuxedos. He begged departing audience members, all dressed up for the post-movie bash, to tell him if his credit was on the film. He said his name was Adam Simon. Geneviève couldn’t recall if he was listed, but she’d ducked out of the endless credits crawl to avoid the Frank Stallone song ‘Blood is Thicker Than Water’.

A tide of industry invitees was directed towards a cavernous ballroom where smiling, mostly fanged staff in prison uniforms - abbreviated convict denims for girls, fetishist guard leathers for boys - offered trays of canapés. Beverages for all tastes were served in battered tin cups, suitable for scraping across the cell bars to start a riot. Geneviève and Kate both took ‘hot shots’, measures of blood and vodka produced not by déclassé mixing in a vat, but in a human shaker. The donor downed dangerous levels of spirits and was bled as soon as the alcohol hit his or her circulatory system. Another high life variant involved injections of a Holmesian seven per cent solution of cocaine or, in clubs like the Viper Room, heroin or Bowles-Ottery ergot. It was smooth and expensive, usually reserved for the ‘upstairs’ stock of the wealthiest Hollywood vampires. Here, gallons flowed as if from the base of the throne. People who should have known better were lapping it up. Kate pointed out a couple of grimacing warm party-goers sampling vampire fare just because it was otherwise prohibitively costly

On a dais a swing combo in arrow-patterned tuxes played prison-themed tunes in fashionable-again arrangements: ‘Riot in Cell Block No. 9’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’, ‘Rubber Bullets’, ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, ‘Working on the Chain Gang’. The Johnny Favorite Big Band, surprise hit of the Concert for Transylvania, was popular again, especially among American new-borns for whom the 1940s were the farthest reach of living memory. Fair enough, Geneviève supposed. She single-handedly kept in business a company which released French mediaeval
chansons
on CD.

Another glittering event. Everyone in sight was famous or beautiful or both. Movie stars, political figures, vampires. Popes and popsies. That put her on her guard. Some of the guests had been at Buckingham Palace in 1888 and/or Palazzo Otranto in 1959. Dracula balls tended to begin with lavish hospitality and dancing, then go on to heads stuck on spikes and the secret police pursuing early leavers.

Holly was in the crowd, wearing her own face for a change, sporting a secret-agent earpiece and a tailcoat cut to conceal a shoulder-holster. The shapeshifter had Gorse’s old job, head of security for Alucard Industries. She had profited from the Overlooker’s true death.

Kate, given height by heels, was accosted by a greying bear Geneviève recognised as Francis Coppola. The director, bludgeoned by
The Rock
, forgot to be surprised that Kate was in Los Angeles.

‘Do you remember that boy?’ he asked.

Kate nodded.

‘I’m making
Part
2,’ he admitted, glumly. ‘Then I’ll do one from the heart.’

‘God, Francis, please, don’t,’ said an industry figure, a sinewy woman in a red sheath dress and a dye-job buzzcut. ‘Not again.’

‘I liked
One From the Heart,’
Kate said, quietly.

Coppola sweetly kissed Kate on the cheek, and was dragged away by the bloodsucking producer. Back bent and weary, he allowed himself to be shown off, to own up that he had signed on for the next Alucard production. There were more ways of feeding off the warm than the obvious.

Two producers, an American named Dragon and a European named Drakoulias, tried to tell Geneviève and Kate they would be good for a picture they wanted to produce in Prague. Kate, a bit tipsy, strung them along, playing up her accent (as she always did when flirting) and refusing to say whether or not she was an actress or had an agent, before admitting neither of them showed up at all well on film.

‘There’s always video,’ said Dragon. ‘New media will be big. Have you heard of the Internet?’

‘Digital imaging,’ said Drakoulias, sagely.

Racquel Ohlrig, a stunning and practised creature, swanned across the room in a silver dress that defied several physical laws. Since her ‘rescue’ from the Immortologists, Racquel had done vampire porno (as ‘Rac Loring’), made a John Waters movie, cut a few records, rustled up mainstream actress credits, appeared on calendars, and become a club diva. She’d be around forever. Geneviève thought that if she and the gumshoe had left the girl with Winton’s hucksters, she’d be running the Church by now.

By the wet bar, Penelope Churchward was talking urgently with a waiter. She was back in Dracula’s orbit, which wasn’t exactly a surprise.

Kate and Geneviève stuck together, watching each other’s backs. It was likely this new Count still thought they were worth murdering. Crosby, the girl from the Le Reve, was with Holly’s security team, a killer-in-training. Now the Gorse business was done, who knew what orders she’d have? Again, Dracula was gathering his people. General Iorga and Diane LeFanu were here, and, representing Lord Ruthven, Caleb Croft. Among the movie stars and studio execs were Carpathian officers in blinding white uniforms.

Flanked by squat African-Americans with silver-plated guns was the Leopard Lady of Baltimore herself, Georgia Rae Drumgo. Drac Witch of the East, even without Willis Daniels or Geneviève on tap. She had turned vampire. Spotting Geneviève, she showed that her new fangs matched her tiger-striped sheath dress. The bodyguards were just for show - Georgia Rae was the fiercest predator in her pride.

This time, the Kingdom of the Cats went beyond politics, beyond crime, extending into the media, finance, manufacture, information -everything. Dracula wanted to own the culture.

‘When he comes on stage, will he be a head on a stick again?’ asked Kate.

That was too much to hope for.

There he was, suddenly. In the crowd. He didn’t seem to have made an entrance, just appeared. Buzz spread through the guests. Heads turned.

It was Dracula. Young again. Full of plans.

She had no doubts about that.

The Count wore black Armani. Not a speck of colour about the ensemble. His perfect hair and trimmed goatee were as black and smooth as the expensive fabrics of his superbly cut shirt and jacket. His face was white as polished bone. He was no taller, no more beautiful, than the people who stepped aside for him, but he had Presence.

In London, he’d been a monster. In Italy, he was a relic. The
idea
of Dracula, too huge to contain in a human shape, had exploded out through his eyes and mouth. He’d drunk so deeply that drops of blood welled up through his pores. There’d been a terrible untidiness about that Dracula, a barbarian stench, a wrecker’s blundering. Here, the King of the Cats had it together, locked down tight. He was compact, controlled, concentrated. His resurrection had not just been about coming back, but coming back in a shape that made sense for the turn of this century and, horrible thought, the foreseeable future. This Dracula had a Project.

He was with the blonde from the film. Sunburst flashbulbs went off. The blonde would register. He would be a black outline, an absence.

Dracula looked at her. At them.

He smiled. He knew he was in complete command, that he was unstoppable. Yet he’d been stopped before. He knew they still stood against him and respected that. He valued his enemies above his friends. He believed in hatred, trusted it more than love. Enemies couldn’t fail or betray him. They kept him sharp.

‘He’s a monster,’ Kate breathed.

Geneviève nodded.

‘And we’re the only two left. He owns everyone else.’

Geneviève didn’t want to agree. But was worried that she would have to.

Then, slipping like a fish through the crowd, Adam Simon ran at Dracula. The hefty bouncers barrelled over guests as they tried to catch him. Simon held a bowie knife, an improbably hefty instrument. That long fat blade suggested the late Jim Bowie was compensating for something.

‘You stole my movie,’ he shouted.

Dracula’s face was benign, puzzled. Among so many victims, he couldn’t remember this one.

‘Who
is
Adam Simon?’ Geneviève asked.

Kate shrugged.

Simon shouldered aside Sylvester Stallone and made a leap at Dracula. His bowie slashed in an arc across Dracula’s single-button black jacket and ruffled black shirtfront.