Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Anno Dracula #3) 6

THE PARTY

She wore black velvet. The gown left her shoulders bare but swept to the floor like a train. It was heavy, but Genevieve could carry the weight. An unappreciated advantage of vampirism was the ability to dress spectacularly but comfortably in outfits that would choke, constrict, strangle, or hobble a warm woman. She didn't wear the veiled hat that went with the dress, which she had needed at the funeral.

Since the funeral, she hadn't been out of the apartment for more than an hour. As she left, she picked up Charles's invitation as well as her own. It might be amusing to give it to a random stranger, and let them enjoy il principe's hospitality. Then again, the welcome of Dracula had occasionally proved fatal. He was probably over his craze for nailing guests' hats to their skulls or impaling lieutenants who complained about the stench of the dying, but it was best not to take chances.

The invitation specified that transport would be provided to Fregene if she were to be at the Piazza del Quirinale between six and ten o'clock. It transpired that a fleet of cars was going back and forth to and from the Palazzo Otranto for guests who chose not to make their own way.

She was sharing a Daimler with people she didn't know. Jeremy Prokosch, a Hollywood producer with crimson glasses and a little red book for jotting down ideas; Dorian Gray, the Italian actress not the English libertine; Dr Hichcock, one of il principe's personal physicians, and his silent wife, one of the many women of fashion who made herself up to look as much like Princess Asa as possible; and an unhappy-looking hollow-cheeks named Collins.

Genevieve would have been interested in talking with Collins, a rare American vampire, but Prokosch delivered a showbiz monologue. Apparently, he'd just missed being in the car before, with Orson Welles, who was playing Argo in the Argonauts film, and John Huston, whom Prokosch wanted to hire for a movie of I Am Legend with Charlton Heston. She hadn't seen any of the films the producer had made. They were mostly about orgies, but based on classical (out of copyright) sources.

'The best way to keep costs down on a costume picture is to cut out the costumes,' Prokosch said.

Collins tried hard to smile at her.

'Have you ever done any modelling?' the producer asked.

'Not recently,' she said.

By the time the car pulled up outside the Palazzo Otranto, night had fallen. Genevieve felt as if she'd been clubbed over the head with a rolled-up copy of Variety. There was a delay in escaping from the Daimler because the official door-openers were trying to prise Orson Welles out of the car in front. Welles, bearded and enormous, couldn't stop laughing as he wriggled like Winnie the Pooh stuck in Rabbit's hole. Finally, John Huston stabbed a lit cigar against Welles's enormous backside, and the spherical genius was ejected like a ball from a cannon.

Prokosch produced a script from under his cummerbund and scuttled off after Huston. Genevieve wished him 'boffo boxo' and stepped out of the Daimler. She looked up at the palazzo. Very nice. More baroque than gothic. Swirly columns and uncontrolled ivy.

'It looks like a big onion,' she remarked, to no one in particular.

She joined the human stream flowing toward the huge doors. A cadre of warriors, with fur-trimmed armour and teeth like cashew nuts, checked invitations and waved in the guests. Paparazzi crowded around the Tartars but were discouraged from getting in the way. Broken cameras, indeed broken photographers, littered the driveway. She saw a pest dashed against a solid-stone wall.

Her invitation passed muster and she was allowed in. She drifted along a corridor which opened into a ballroom the size of a cathedral. An all-girl orchestra played dance music by Nino Rota, under the direction of a skeleton-thin figure whose face was a blank mask. A buffet was set out on two hundred-yard tables, offering cold meats and salad for the warm and a selection of still-living animals for the undead. Waiters and waitresses, healthy warm folks, paraded with bare necks and wrists, spigots already inserted into their veins. She accepted a measure of human blood and sipped.

Scanning the room, she recognised many guests: Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones, representing the Queen; John and Valerie Profumo, representing Lord Ruthven; Senator John Kennedy and Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, representing America and hating each other; Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren; Alberto Moravia, the author; Gina Lollobrigida and General Mark Clark, liberator of Rome; Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin; Pier Paolo Pasolini, the poet; Jonas Cord, the aviation millionaire; Rita Hayworth and the Aga Khan; TotȰ, the Italian clown; Moira Shearer and Ludovic Kennedy; Enrico Mattei, head of the state petroleum concern; Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist Party chief; several screen Tarzans, and the genuine Lord Greystoke; Ze do Caix?o, the Brazilian celebrity undertaker; Magda Lupescu, a vampire once famously the mistress of the King of Romania; Mrs Honoria Cornelius and Colonel Maxim Pyat; Salvador Dali, sporting long curved fangs like the mirror of his famous moustaches; Edgar Poe, the screenwriter; Dr Orlof, the controversial plastic surgeon; Yves Montand and Simone Signoret; Lemmy Caution, the American adventurer; Gore Vidal, whose work she admired; Amintore Fanfani, the just-deposed government bigshot; Michael Corleone, the olive oil tycoon; Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, an ex-fascist with ambitions; and, representing the Vatican as unobtrusively as possible, Bishop Albino Luciani.

And the elders: Saint-Germain, the famous enigma; Karol Lavud, back from Mexico; Armand of Paris, the theatrical manager; Gilles de Rais, called barbe-bleu; Baron Meinster, the golden-haired toady; Sebastian de Villanueva, disgraced alchemist of the Manhattan Project; Elisabeth Bathory; Drago Robles; Innocente Farnese; Faethor Ferenczy; Don Simon Ysidro. There was even a clutch of elders who held themselves apart from the rest, like a separate species entirely: Edward Weyland, Joshua York, Miriam Blaylock, Hugh Farnham. One octopoid shape-shifter went so far in dissociating itself from humanity that it claimed to be a native of the planet Mars. If any of the secret societies dedicated to the memory of Abraham Van Helsing were to stage a terrorist attack, they might practically exterminate the breed.

Her appalling contemporary de Rais, a hero of France in her warm days, reminded her she was of an age to style herself an elder if she so chose.

She excited little interest among so many famous faces.

'I'm the only person here I've never heard of,' she thought.

Of course, one famous face was unseen.

Princess Asa Vajda made an entrance, born on a palanquin shouldered by six gilded youths, bat-wing fans stuck into her mountainous beehive. But her fiance had not yet put in an appearance.

Genevieve could wait.

She saw Penelope through the crowd. The Englishwoman looked tastefully pretty in a simple formal dress, hair done up. She wore an expression of exasperated harassment. They made eye contact. Princess Asa swept down on her like a parrot-plumed hawk with a series of demands. She had to concentrate on being reasonable, smoothing over some minor crisis. Genevieve remembered Penelope's tendency to domestic tyranny and wondered if she were repenting her sins here in Otranto, suffering the exact torments she had inflicted on so many servants.

Cagliostro and Orson Welles faced off inside a circle of onlookers and duelled with magic. The warm conjurer bested the nosferatu sorcerer with showmanship, smiling broadly as he used trickery to accomplish his stunts while the Count sweated blood as he worked genuine but affectless magic. Cagliostro had relied for so long on supernatural powers that he was at a loss in this century of everyday miracles. A pretty girl giggled as Welles found a mouse in her cleavage. Spectators tucked long-stemmed glasses into the crooks of their elbows so they could applaud with both hands.

Genevieve was well into her second drink  -  the waiter claimed to be a virgin of a good Catholic family, and his blood certainly had a tang to it  -  when she rounded a pillar and found Hamish Bond, immaculate in white dinner jacket, surrounded by disposable popsies, languidly smoking one of his special cigarettes, instructing a waitress that he wanted her blood with vermouth and an olive.

'Shaken, not stirred,' he purred.

'What a ridiculous way to go about things,' Genevieve said.

Bond cocked an eyebrow at her.

'Mademoiselle,' he acknowledged.

The popsies  -  beauty contest runners-up and orgy extras  -  faded. She liked the effect.

'I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you're here,' said the spy 'You're the type who might turn up anywhere.'

'Weddings and funerals,' she said. 'And hairs-breadth escapes.'

'I've yet to thank you properly.'

'Don't mention it. Have you seen our friend with the whiskers? Brastov is bound to be here. Penelope will have set out a saucer of bloody milk for him.'

Bond's face darkened. He didn't like to be reminded.

'Everybody is here,' the spy said.

'I spotted Villanueva,' she said. 'The defector. Shouldn't you kidnap him? When he skipped behind the curtain, he left those Rosenbergs to take the blame. This must be his first peep in the West in five years.'

'That's Johnny Yank's business. Besides, this seems to be a halfholiday. Otranto is a bit like Spandau prison. Neutral territory, with presences from all sides. When they renewed the Croglin Grange Treaty at Yalta, they agreed to leave Dracula alone but keep their eyes on him. The palazzo has been infested with spies since '44. I shouldn't be surprised if everybody here was a double agent. Except me. And you.'

'Thank you for the compliment.'

'Don't think of it. You're yourself.'

She felt a tiny pang. She knew what he meant. With Charles gone, she had no loyalties except to her own heart.

He sipped his bloody martini.

It had been a gory business hauling him out of Brastov's lair. She had reverted almost to a feral creature, scything through Smert Spionem minions, ignoring bullets, tearing down walls. It wasn't something she cared to do often. It disturbed her to be reminded how easy it was to shape-shift not in body but in mind, to streamline her intellect for mere survival, to set aside empathy.

That scene with Penelope and Kate, at Charles's side, had been a messy afterthought. She'd not settled back into herself, and had been forced to cope with a roomful of volatile emotions.

Bond was completely over it. She'd left him a ragged survivor, but he sprang back together like Wile E. Coyote, donning armour of suavity and brutal polish like his Savile Row tuxedo, ready again to do meaningless battle, to see off the faceless hordes she stubbornly insisted on seeing as inconvenient, bleeding individuals.

Penelope marched past them, intently lecturing a white-faced warm youth.

'I ran into that fellow after you left me,' said Bond, nodding at Penelope's companion. 'Our hostess's American friend. Tom Someone. Something not right about him, you know. Well, more than that. He's got something missing.'

'Like all of us,' she said.

'You're gloomy tonight.'

'The man I've loved since 1888 died this week. That tends to take the wind out of your sails.'

Bond was politely taken aback. He couldn't imagine anyone taking death seriously. It was so much a part of his daily life. Charles had never let himself become like that. The retreat behind callous irony wasn't even a vampire thing; it was a twentieth century thing.

Suddenly, she felt only sorry for this spy

'You'll fall in love too,' she said. 'And she'll die.'

Bond tried to shrug, but froze. He knew she was right. It had happened to him before and would happen again.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'That was needlessly cruel. You're right. It's a half-holiday. We're all dressed up and allowed out. It's a night for dissembling, not for inconvenient honesty.'

He looked at her.

'You're a remarkably beautiful woman, Genevieve.'

She laughed at him, but was flattered a bit.

'Earlier, a film producer asked me if I did any modelling.'

'You couldn't. Too much character in your face.'

'Too much overbite, more like.'

She clicked her sharp teeth.