Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Anno Dracula #3) 6

THE LIVING

They ascended in the cage lift, a contraption of polished brass and lattice wood. Genevieve hesitated outside the apartment, apprehensive for her friend. She held her keys and looked at Kate, wondering how to phrase her concerns.

'It's been several years, hasn't it?' she said.

'Charles was in his late nineties the last time I saw him,' said Kate. 'He was already old. I shan't be shocked or upset.'

Genevieve wasn't so sure.

The warm aged and died. She did not. Though she'd had centuries to get used to, it left her often bewildered, blinking back tears. Surely, a whole life couldn't run past so swiftly. It wasn't fair.

Carmilla Karnstein, a vampire girl Genevieve had known in the eighteenth century, grieved for lost friends as if the warm were her pets, grown suddenly ancient in dog years during the eternity of a human childhood. Carmilla was gone too now. Twice. It had never apparently occurred to her that her favourites wouldn't have died if she hadn't been so fond of them that she had to have so much of their blood. That had been the death of her.

Treating the warm as pets or cattle was one way elders coped with estrangement from human time. In this century, with so many nosferatu about, things should have changed. But Genevieve worried that she couldn't change. Evolution was something one's successors dealt with. Vampires like Kate Reed should tackle those issues.

'He's past a hundred, Kate,' she said.

'I'm not so very far off it.'

'You know it's different for us.'

'Yes. I'm sorry. That was a silly thing to say.'

Genevieve opened the dark-wood double doors. They were nine feet tall, more appropriate for a castle than a flat. Romans liked impressive entrances.

'Come in, come in,' she bustled.

Kate stepped over the welcome mat and put her suitcase down. She looked around the foyer, admiring bookcases and brass lamp-fittings.

'Very Victorian,' she said, 'very Charles.'

Genevieve kept bowls of dried rose petals, for the scent.

'Come through,' she said, leading Kate around the corner of the passageway, toward the study. The apartment was spacious, but the corridors  -  and the kitchen and bathroom  -  were cramped, squeezed into the plan between two large bedrooms, the study, and a dining room.

The french windows were open, and evening breeze stirred the curtains. The last of the sunset threw an orange veil over the city.

'Charles likes to sit on the balcony,' Genevieve explained.

There was some fussing outside.

'Charles-Cheri,' Genevieve said, quite loudly. 'Kate is here.'

She left Kate and stepped out onto the balcony. Charles had managed to turn the bath chair around with slippered feet, but his fingers couldn't get a grip on the rims of the wheels to move it forward. He was frustrated with the failure of his hands, but more amused than irritated. He accepted frailty as he had always accepted strength, as a comparative thing.

Without needing to be asked, she wheeled Charles into the room. Kate waited, eyes watery behind thick glasses, fidgeting with the seam of her tartan skirt. He smiled, and his age-lines stretched. He looked oddly childlike, almost a baby.

Kate flew at him and went down on her knees. She took his hands in hers  -  making him wince with her uncontrolled vampire grip  -  and laid her head on his lap.

'Charles,' Kate sighed, 'Charles.'

Charles managed a coughing laugh.

'Stand up and let me look at you,' he ordered.

Genevieve turned on the electric lights. Even after decades, she felt she ought to be reaching for a taper to light the candles. Sometimes, she'd try to twist a light switch as if it were the key of a gas lamp.

'I'm not sure that hairstyle is becoming,' Charles clucked. Kate's hands went to her exposed neck. 'It's more like a haircut.'

Kate blushed, freckles darkening. She held herself rather awkwardly, refusing to believe she might in a certain light be appealing. Victorians were prejudiced against red hair, so she'd been taught to be ashamed of her looks. Now tastes had changed and she might pass for fashionable. She was petite enough for the New Look. Even spectacles weren't the disfigurement they'd once been considered.

'I had short hair when I was warm,' Genevieve said. 'It was the fashion. Jeanne d'Arc set it.'

Charles thought about that. 'You were one of those girls who passed as a boy to go to sea and become a pirate. Kate is in a more respectable profession.'

'Many would disagree with you, m'darling.'

Kate got off her knees and kissed Charles.

Genevieve had a pang. Her nails became fractionally more like claws.

Thinking about it, she knew Kate had earned her kiss. She'd been there when Genevieve hadn't. While Genevieve had avoided the twentieth century, Kate had been a part of it and stuck by Charles through the nightmare years.

Kate dabbed her eyes dry with a hankie.

'Look,' she said. 'I'm crying. You'll think me a fool.'

'Not at all,' Charles said, kindly.

'Kate has already got mixed up in murder,' Genevieve said.

'So I've been reading.'

Charles indicated the afternoon editions of Il quotidiano and Paese sera. They lay on a kidney-shaped coffee table, the newest piece of furniture in the room.

'I had to rescue her from the police.'

'Who's in charge of the investigation?'

Genevieve looked at Kate.

'An Inspector Silvestri,' Kate said. 'Do you know him?'

'I know of him. He's reckoned a good man. He caught that couple last year, the ones who left bloodied butterfly brooches on the corpses of their victims. Of course, he hasn't stopped these murders. According to the papers, you saw the Crimson Executioner?'

'Actually, I saw his reflection,' said Kate.

'A fine distinction, but worth making.'

Charles was livelier than Genevieve had seen him for weeks, livelier even than when the British spy was consulting him. She hadn't known that he took an interest in the murders of vampire elders but it didn't surprise her. Was he concerned for her safety? He was occasionally solicitous of her, but she had put that down to the fussiness of advanced age. She'd underestimated him. Again.

'Counting last night's, there have been seventeen murders since the liberation,' Charles told Kate. 'All vampire elders. All in Rome, and mostly in public places. Tourist spots, even. Professor Adelsberg was staked in Castel Sant'Angelo. That lieutenant of Dracula's they used to call Radu the Repulsive was beheaded on the steps of the Museo Borghese. And the Duchess Marguerite De Grand, who was reckoned such a beauty, was destroyed in the shadow of the statues of Castor and Pollux in the Piazza di Quirinale.'

'I've heard of Adelsberg,' Kate said. 'Wasn't he a war criminal? One of Hitler's vampire doctors?'

'It's possible he wasn't a Crimson Executioner victim. The others were real elders, four and five hundred years old, mostly of the Dracula line and with titles and decorations to prove it. The Professor barely had his century. The Israelis may have sent their fellows after him. Or he might have been killed on general principle, by someone with good cause. As you know, that happens when these murderers get a run. Other crimes are laid at their doorsteps. It becomes easy to slip in an unrelated killing. Like hiding a pebble on a beach.'

'As elders go, Count Kernassy didn't seem such a monster.'

Genevieve wasn't sure about that. Kate had only known the Count for a few hours at the end of four centuries of life. Kernassy was one of il principe's Carpathians, and they tended to be a brutal lot. It might be that this one's manners were a bit above the average.

'Still, it's a rum go,' said Charles. 'You wandering into all this.'

'She met someone at the airport and was dragged off on an adventure,' Genevieve said. 'Penelope.'

A cloud of fatigue passed over Charles's face.

'Poor Penny,' he said, quietly. He blamed himself too much for what had happened to Penelope Churchward, for what she had made of herself.

'She does turn up rather like the proverbial bad one,' said Kate. 'Penny, I mean. What's she after doing with Dracula?'

Charles tried to shrug but couldn't lift his shoulders.

It was still a moot point whether Genevieve had stolen Charles away from Penelope, or whether Penny had abandoned him for her father-in-darkness, the ill-remembered Lord Godalming. Genevieve thought neither was entirely true. Charles had left Penelope to her own devices because he felt a greater duty, and Genevieve happened to coincide with that duty. If it had been otherwise, she knew he'd have kept his promise to Penelope, no matter how unhappy it would have made them both.

He was, in many ways, an impossible man.

'Do you see her?' Kate asked them both.

'She has called,' Genevieve admitted. 'Infrequently.'

'I'm not surprised.'

'It was a long time ago,' Charles said, remembering.

Not for Genevieve, it wasn't. And not, she suspected, for Penelope, or for Kate.

At the end of his life, Charles was forgiving.

Kate and Charles had known Penelope well as a warm girl, of course. Genevieve knew her first as one of those new-borns who didn't understand anything. Just after turning, Penelope had drunk bad blood and made an invalid of herself for a decade. A quack who treated her with leeches hadn't helped matters much. If anything, Genevieve  -  working then as a doctor  -  had saved Penelope's life. That had been her duty, so she supposed she wasn't that different from Charles.

'She was the first to tell me I should turn,' Charles said. 'She wanted us to become vampires together. It seemed the done thing, if one wanted to be advanced.'

Kate shot Genevieve an alarmed glance. He was forestalling their carefully composed argument.

'Gene, Kate,' Charles said, looking at them as if they were his ashamed grandchildren, 'I know you don't mean it as she did, but you ask the same thing. The thing I cannot do.'

Kate covered her face, to hide the tears.

'I'm sorry, Kate,' Charles said, touching Kate's elbow. 'It's nothing wrong with you. Or you either, Gene. It's me.'

Despite the strength of his feelings, he was fading before their eyes. Every day, perhaps every hour, he became fainter, a vaguer presence, losing substance.

'You're not too old, Charles,' Genevieve said. 'You can turn. I'm sure of it.'

He shook his head.

'You could be young again,' Kate sighed.

'He grew young,' Charles said. 'Count Dracula. I doubt if he'd much pleasure of renewed youth. He has always struck me as a profoundly sad individual. When he turned, he lost something. Most vampires do. Even you, my undying darlings.'

He looked serene, but Genevieve heard his excitement. His heart beat faster. His brow was dampened. His voice was near cracking.

'Am I so selfish?' he asked. 'To want to leave?'

Later, after nightfall, they sat together, and talked about the past, forcing themselves not to talk of the present and future. Kate prompted Charles to tell Genevieve of many things she had missed during her time away from him this century.

She had realised, of course, how close Charles and Kate had grown in the First World War. Now she saw how they had fixed so much of their hope in Edwin Winthrop of the Diogenes Club, whom she'd spent an interesting weekend with in 1923. She almost regretted not being there in the bloody mud of France, in the thick of intrigue at once absurd and terrifying.

She was a creature of a slower age, where time was measured by seasons, not wristwatch ticks. She had never adjusted to this century of jet planes and Sputniks, of CinemaScope and rock 'n' roll. Charles had lived through more than she ever would and been affected more by it. She recognised her own untouchability as weakness.

Kate would have to do instead. She talked about the Second World War, which she'd seen from the ground as Charles had from maps and despatches. Her commitments were so selfless, to make the world a more just place. Her passion burned with a fierceness Genevieve regretted she could never match. If there was a God, Kate must be closer to Him.

Charles grew tired but insisted on staying with 'the girls', nodding at their conversation, dozing even.

'It looks like Lord Ruthven won't be Prime Minister after the next election,' Kate said. 'He's never really recovered from Suez. But we've thought him gone before. When Winston took over in the war, I swore that was the last of him. But he came back. That's one thing I could do without, politicians whose careers go on forever. Then again, Ruthven is such a chameleon. He keeps fading into the scenery and popping out again as a different person.'

Genevieve asked Kate about new films, plays, books, music. How had London changed? Who had she seen recently? Who was famous?

'The Daily Mirror ran a poll about vampires recently, asking who was the most admired, the most disliked. It was to do with an exhibition at Madame Tussauds. Who do you imagine is the most admired vampire in Great Britain today?'

Genevieve couldn't think. 'Edmund Hillary?'

'Good try. No, Cliff Richard.'

'Who?'

'A pop singer. "Living Doll"?'

Genevieve had heard the song.

'Think of it, Genevieve. He's never going to get old, never going to lose his voice. Would there ever have been a Caruso if Farinelli had still been around? Could Wagner have competed with a hundred-year-old Mozart? In forty years' time, when singers who haven't yet been born should be coming into their own, Cliff Richard will still be there, mooning over his crying, talking, sleeping, walking living doll.'

'They say few vampires achieve distinction in the arts,' Genevieve said.

'There've been exceptions. Trust me, Mr Richard is not one of them.'

Kate tried to hum the song she'd been talking about. Genevieve laughed.

'History is dwindling into a hit parade,' Kate said. 'And we have all been doing the Dracula Cha Cha Cha for too long.'

A bell sounded.

Swiftly, Genevieve answered the door. It was a liveried footman, with a message. Genevieve took it and bade him goodbye, slitting the envelope open with an extruded thumb-claw. Three gilt-edged cards shuffled out. She returned to the main room, where Charles was alert and Kate intrigued.

'We've been invited to a party,' Genevieve announced. 'By Prince Dracula and his intended, Princess Asa Vajda. Now fancy that.'