Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Anno Dracula #3) 6

MR WEST AND DR PRETORIUS

The remains were kept on the lowest level of the central morgue. From preserved scraps of mural, Genevieve guessed the building was built upon the foundations of an ancient Roman institution. Maybe this was where they'd brought gutted gladiators for primitive experiments in anatomy. More likely the place, like everywhere else important, had once been a brothel.

She passed down through rooms with pull-out drawers for the dead to rooms where corpses were strewn haphazardly on gurneys. Victims of age, disease, violence, and accident lay untroubled, bumped to the back of the queue by the vampire murders. Though she had only the slightest acquaintance with any of the victims, the destruction of seven elders  -  eight, if Dracula were included  -  made her think about her own mortality. If she'd left the party earlier, she might have had her own encounter with the Crimson Executioner. All the victims were of an age to have outlasted generations of fearless vampire slayers, to have survived many assassination attempts. She had no reason to think she'd have had any better luck if the man in red had come for her with a silver-bladed axe.

A trick of acoustics meant there was a constant background whispering. The voices of doctors and coroners, policemen and grieving relatives, were picked up on the building's internal wind and circulated in a sinister susurrus that sounded dreadfully like the massed complaining of the dead. Born in an age where squeamishness was unheard of  -  her human father was a surgeon who had worked on battlefields, and she'd been his apprentice  -  and having lived through centuries too often marked by grue, Genevieve was not easily affected by empty flesh vessels or bothered by thoughts of angry spirits.

This place, however, made her skin crawl.

Through curiosity as much as duty she had consented to the request relayed from the police via the French consul. With the sudden exodus of elders from Rome, she was apparently the only person within reach who could legitimately identify the body. That she'd already done so at the scene of the crime made the whole business redundant, but forms had to be filled in and the identification made in the presence of an official witness.

Sergeant Ginko guided her through the labyrinth of the morgue. He grumbled sourly that if pressure had not been brought from above to have so many policemen at the Palazzo Otranto, then the Crimson Executioner wouldn't have had such an easy time of it in the city. She doubted that any number of men would have prevented the killings.

From his white-belted blue uniform and white beret, she knew the Sergeant was with the polizia, the state police. They had responsibility for violent crime, but a rivalry existed with the carabinieri, the red-trousered military police, who tended to boast that if it were down to them, none of this would ever have happened. Both the polizia and the carabinieri sneered at the vigili urbani, the municipal police, who wore blue in winter and white in summer and chiefly made a hash of directing traffic.

They came into a room the size of a swimming pool, lit like an American pool hall. Banks of shrouded lights hung over long tables. Two men worked among the dead. Genevieve understood specialists had been called on to do the forensic work.

Ginko introduced her to Mr Herbert West, of the Miskatonic University, and Dr Septimus Pretorius, who was attached to no institution. Neither gentleman gave her more than a nod. They were absorbed in examining a strew of ashes topped by a wig of long black hair and dotted here and there with teeth or tiny bones.

West was a whiny little American, with a boyish face and a fragile demeanour. A splatter of blood smeared one lens of his glasses and streaked through his tidy hair.

'Were enough blood spilled on these ashes,' West argued, 'I believe Luna Mora would coalesce and walk again. Nodes remain even on a microscopic level which could link up and recreate her body. Of course, consciousness has flown forever. We could merely reconstitute and reanimate something with the shape of Luna Mora, not the person herself. For that, we should need the physical brain, the seat of reason.'

Dr Pretorius snorted like a dowager who notices a niece using the wrong fork. He had the face of a disapproving gnome, and a bird's nest of fine cottony hair. His white smock was immaculate.

'You are a buffoon, West,' he said.

West spluttered, but made no reply. His face reddened.

'This is dirt, nothing more,' Pretorius decided, flicking some off his fingers. 'Much of it is street grime swept up with the remains. Would our lady elder care to be revived with layer after layer of dog faeces or petrol smuts shot through her body? I think not.'

'You misrepresent my views,' West said.

'We have an elder here,' Pretorius said, acknowledging Genevieve with a yellow smile. 'Shall we call upon her expertise, West? Shall we ask her whether she would be happy to be summoned from eternal night to find shards of cobblestone incorporated into her body like malignant tumours? Or shall we merely settle the matter by admitting that you are an incompetent blockhead?'

West turned away. Pretorius allowed himself a tiny twitch of triumph.

Sergeant Ginko began: 'Mademoiselle Dieudonne is here to...'

'Identify the corpse of Count Dracula,' said Pretorius. 'I know. Welcome, lady. Would you like some gin?'

He shook an unlabelled bottle of clear liquid.

'It's my only weakness,' he said, taking a swallow.

Genevieve shook her head.

'Pity. Very good for you, gin. You vampires don't drink enough, you know. Rely too much on the meagre sustenance of blood. You should all have at least a pint of gin a month. And weak tea. Or else you dry up inside. Like frogs away from water. Very nasty.'

West pushed his glasses up over his forehead. His watery eyes passed over her and he came close to look. His fingers prodded her face.

'Remarkable, remarkable,' he mused. 'The lividity, the pliability, the evident...'

'Put her down, West,' snapped Pretorius. 'Stop playing with the guests.'

'I maintain that...'

'Nobody needs to know what you maintain, fool. Excuse me, Mademoiselle. Mr West has been pursuing his own crackpot notions for a good many years. He often forgets his theories were discredited before the War and acts as if sense could be made of all this.'

Pretorius indicated the room with a flourish.

'As if making sense were anything but a convenient fiction.'

Genevieve didn't know what to make of Dr Pretorius. Like most scientists who specialised in the theory and practice of vampirism, he was not a vampire himself. He was, however, unnaturally old. She remembered his name from articles she had read at least a century ago and had the idea he had been old then. Whereas Charles had retained the outward appearance of youth for a great many years, Pretorius looked ancient. His hands were arthritic claws and his clear blue eyes nested in wrinkles, but inner steel and fire suggested a vitality that was nowhere near exhausted. Turning vampire was only the most common way of achieving unnatural longevity. A Chinese criminal Charles had encountered a time or two was believed to rely on an elixir tailored to his peculiar physiology. And there were stories of other ancients who still walked the Earth.

West was apoplectic. 'Everything is mechanical,' he shouted, prompting Pretorius to a comical, conspiratorial cringe. 'If we do not as yet understand a process, it is because we have not perceived the rules which govern its working. The dead may walk. This is a fact. There is no magic in it at all. A long-lived, as-yet unidentified virus  -  perhaps mutated by radium deposits in the Carpathians  -  will doubtless prove to be at the bottom of it. If this can be harnessed, then it will be possible for all to survive death at no cost.'

Pretorius smiled. 'How many years, West? How long have you been searching for your virus? The idea is not even original with him, Mademoiselle. He was catamite to a certain Dr Moreau, who laid down much of the groundwork for this fruitless detour. And Moreau was a collaborator with Henry Jekyll.'

'I know,' she said, interrupting the tirade.

She had met Dr Jekyll and Dr Moreau.

'Well, yes, of course you do. Before Jekyll, there was Van Helsing. And there've been others: Alexander Fleming, Peter Blood, Edmund Cordery. All squinting into their microscopes, watching the little red cells go round and round, looking for an answer.'

'Miss Dieudonne,' began West, 'do you think yourself a natural being?'

Pretorius raised a feathery eyebrow and bid her answer.

'No more nor less than I did when I was warm.'

'You see, West, you're on the wrong path. It's not that we don't understand how vampires live. We don't understand how humans live. We can approximate the formulae. We can create life in glass jars. We can reanimate dead tissue. We can try to sell our souls to Satan, for all the good it will do. We can have everything, except an answer that makes sense.'

'I refuse to accept that.'

'Refuse all you may, West. I have been at this a great deal longer than you. I learned many years ago that it was futile to try to explain. The deeper you get, the less sense there is, the more contradictions emerge.'

'You're r-r-regressing to alchemy,' stuttered West. 'What is next, s-s-sorcery?'

Pretorius grinned like a gargoyle. 'If that is the route we must take. But even sorcery is a way of systematising the unknowable. Perhaps we must accept that things do not make sense. The universe is wildly inconsistent, shifting from moment to moment, plunging from catastrophe to creation.'

'Everything can be understood, Einstein maintained...'

'Not at the end he didn't. At the end, nobody claims to understand. Talk all you will of viruses and radium deposits, or of demons and goblins, but the fact is that there are creatures who cast no reflection in a looking glass. That cannot be explained. In the eighty years the world has been forced to accept that there are indeed such things as vampires, that has defeated many a greater mind than yours, Herbert West. Remember Max Planck's Black Blood Refractive Postulate? What would you give for the laws of optics and refraction? Or any other scientific law? Not a farthing. Things that can't be, are. If there are gods, they are mad or idiot. This girl here defies all your attempts to measure, calculate, categorise, define, confine, or constrain. And what are you going to do about it, bleat?'

'You are wrong,' West said quietly.

'I think not,' said Pretorius.

Genevieve's mind was spinning. Something in Pretorius's fervour frightened her. Could be she was really afraid that he was right? She'd outgrown a youthful terror that she might be a damned soul. But if she was not a creature of science, then what was she? What was left?

'To the void,' toasted Pretorius, lifting his gin. 'To the chaos we must learn to love.'

'Mademoiselle Dieudonne is to make an identification,' prompted Ginko, who'd sat through the debate without complaining.

Pretorius reached under a black blanket and produced an object. It was Dracula's head, still unrotted, eyes angry.

'Is this him?'

Genevieve nodded.

'You have to say it,' Pretorius said. 'Officially.'

'That's Dracula,' she said.

'Quelle surprise,' Pretorius said, tossing the head aside like a turnip. 'I don't like to speculate without fully consulting my estimable colleague West, but I think it's safe to say the old bastard's truly dead. Is there anything else?'

Genevieve looked at the Sergeant. He shrugged.

'I think you can leave me to it then,' Pretorius said. 'You'll get my forensic report in the next week. I doubt it will be of any use to you, or indeed anyone. Good day.'

They were required to leave.