by Kim Newman
Inspecteur d’Aaubert was also on the front row, but on the opposite side of the room. He still wore his dress tunic, with his plumed hat on his lap. The policeman hadn’t shaved this morning, and looked in a sorrier state than his old friend on the table.
It did not take a Queen of Detectives to deduce that Raoul d’Aubert was unhappy at the involvement of the O.G.A. He would be unhappier still if told who was paying their bill. Urgent, delicate negotiations had been conducted with his superiors, and the Agency were recognised consultants on the murders. The Sûreté would likely come in for a severe press barracking about the vampire. The promised early arrest in the de Rosillon case hadn’t happened and Inspecteur d’Aubert was seen drunkenly singing Schubert with the victim an hour before the second murder.
La Marmoset felt sorry for the luckless flic, but also noticed his furtive, almost sneaky attitude. Little in his prior record suggested the ineptitude d’Aubert had shown on this case, and he was rigidly suppressing a bad case of the shakes. He looked more like a suspect than the investigating officer.
D’Aubert knew both victims. He had been at the Sorbonne twenty-five years ago, a contemporary of de Rosillon and Garron. Perhaps he was deliberately following a false scent in his war on Les Vampires? The Grand Vampire was an awfully convenient culprit. He was guilty of so much else it wouldn’t even be much of a miscarriage of justice if he got his head lopped off for these murders.
‘Dr Dieudonné,’ said La Marmoset, raising a hand, ‘may I ask a question?’
‘If you don’t mind it being set down in the record,’ said the coroner.
A gnomish secretary was transcribing everything in shorthand.
‘Not at all,’ said La Marmoset. ‘Would you say Anatole Garron met his death in exactly the same way as Camille de Rosillon?’
‘I would.’
‘It follows that both were killed by the same person?’
‘It is most likely. Though the method is sufficiently unusual that it might be a system practised by a group or cult, like the Thuggee stranglings of India.’
‘A group or cult like Les Vampires?’ prompted d’Aubert.
‘We’re familiar with the handiwork of that society in this building,’ said the doctor. ‘They aren’t usually this imaginative. Generally, their creativity goes into masks and costumes. When it comes to killing, they favour tried and tested methods. Guns, knives, poison, blunt instruments.’
‘Were the dead men bitten?’
‘I see where you’re going, Mademoiselle La Marmoset… and you raise an interesting ambiguity. In both cases, the throat was cut with something sharp, like a straight razor or a bayonet. The wound was sawed, as if merely inflicting fatal injury weren’t enough. In my notes on de Rosillon, I floated the suggestion that this might betoken a need to punish the victim or assuage some sadistic impulse. Those remain tenable theories, but in the case of Garron, I notice something else pertinent to your question…’
Dr Dieudonné indicated the neck wound, which was deep enough to show the bone.
‘It strikes me that the severe cutting of the throat might serve to conceal or erase another wound. Perhaps not fatal, but highly telling.’
‘A bite?’
‘I should say a puncture or punctures. With Garron, there’s a discoloration here, at the edge of the wound…’
She tapped with a scalpel. The audience craned to look.
‘It’s slight, but there’s something here. This was definitely not made with the same weapon that slashed the throat. Perhaps – I say perhaps – it is due to a bite. There’s an inflammation which even suggests venom, as if he were bitten – let’s use that word with caution – by a snake or stung by an insect. The lack of blood to test means it’ll be difficult to determine if this is the case or not.’
‘Mosquitos are the vampires of the insect world, are they not?’ ventured Rochefort of L’Intransigeant.
‘Rare in France in September,’ said Dr Dieudonné. ‘And I should say I can’t rule out the possibility that this wound is entirely unconnected with Monsieur Garron’s death. He could have nicked himself shaving or been pricked with a tie-pin the day before he was killed. I will look again at the Count de Rosillon and see if I can find any similar marks.’
The coroner looked at her audience.
‘Can I make an appeal – which I know the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate will blithely ignore – that we do not use terms like “vampire” overmuch? These are appalling crimes. Two men have been done to death. Ascribing the murders to monsters out of childhood fables does a disservice to all-too-real victims. It is beyond my duties to dictate the course of the investigation, but I would respectfully warn against wasting time looking for bat-creatures when a cunning, contemptible human murderer is at large.’
Dr Dieudonné was impassioned and rational.
‘What about his smile?’ asked Grévin of Le Charivari, without looking up from his sketch-book.
The dead were usually slack-faced, but Garron was smiling broadly. With no colour in his cheeks and lips, it was a strange, pale smile, but a smile nevertheless. His death mask might set off another craze. Considering his fame, would he become Le Connu de la Scène, named and notorious successor to L’Inconnue de la Seine?
‘I noted a similar expression in the de Rosillon case. An unusual circumstance. I can’t think what would account for it.’
‘I can,’ said a voice from the back of the room…
La Marmoset turned and saw Dr Falke, dressed as if for a promenade, with a mint-striped stock and pearl stickpin. He gestured for attention with a silver-topped cane. The Viennese lawyer had expressed an interest in the de Rosillon case. Now, with another old friend on the slab, he popped up again.
What a helpful fellow, she thought. Helpful fellows always bear watching.
‘Would you share your insight, sir?’ suggested Dr Dieudonné.
‘With pleasure. Vampires have proverbial powers of fascination, do they not? Before they strike, they beguile – like the cobra…’
A reptile known for venomous fangs, La Marmoset remembered.
Most of the room had turned to look at Dr Falke. Pens scratched down notes.
‘Could it be that these men were sought out by deadly seductresses? It would account for their state of undress as well as their expression of ultimate bliss. Might the victims not welcome – even enjoy – the attentions of their murderess? If we must look for a vampire, we should seek out a female of the species.’
For the first time, Dr Geneviève Dieudonné was shocked.
One might almost think she was accused of being the guilty night-creature.
X
THE THEATRES WERE getting smaller, Unorna noticed… as if the walls were closing in. Over the last twenty-four hours, she had gone from the cavernous auditorium of the Paris Opéra to the bijou lecture room in the Morgue.
Anatole Garron starring in his last Macbeth… and his own autopsy.
Had she had a premonition of his death?
Honestly, she wasn’t sure.
She had known something was wrong – but, as La Marmoset liked to point out, something was always wrong. Even with Garron dead on a table, opened like a fresh-caught fish, she couldn’t be sure the something wrong was this. For one thing, her feeling hadn’t gone away. Usually, when she scried mischance, the premonition became more insistent as the fated event drew nearer, as if a screw were being tightened or a flame turned up… and a gush of release – almost of relief – when the worst was over, like a dish of ice-water tipped down the back of her neck. The cold splash hadn’t happened. Something was still wrong… which, translated to detective language, meant she was sure the murderer was not yet done.
Prophesying more blood spilled was like saying the sun would come up tomorrow morning. It wasn’t clairvoyance – it was a safe bet.
Always sceptical, La Marmoset needled her with specific questions she could only answer vaguely. Until she gave the name and address of the murderer, she was of no p
roven use to a Queen of Detectives. Sophy was almost superstitiously accepting of her gifts. Occasionally, when she thought she wouldn’t be noticed, the woman would touch Unorna’s hair or coat for luck. Neither understood what it was like to be Unorna, though Erik might have an inkling.
She believed he was born with extra senses to make up for the lack of a face.
The Paris Opéra was a cacophony of sensations. Even empty of all but night-watchmen and rats, the house sang to Unorna. Constructed with acoustics in mind, the Palais Garnier contained and amplified everything said, done or felt under its roof. She had to fix on a calm centre and hold firmly not to be overwhelmed. Though she dare not mention them to her living Phantom, she sensed ghostly presences – human and otherwise – in every corner.
Faust, Marguerite and Méphistophélès were as real to audiences as the singers who took the roles. If not more so. After enough performances, the characters grew ghosts which jostled the spirits of the dead. She envisioned spectres of divas who died on stage, blood pouring from their mouths, and sensed the chill shades of actors who quietly dropped in a far corner of the house while the stage-manager hurried to get understudies into costume.
Everywhere in the building, she was aware of a psychic maelstrom: ambitions, heartbreaks, cruelties, and ecstasies. Transcendent talents, vaunted or thwarted. Deluded hacks, crushed and discarded. Great loves and hates, betrayals, ravishments, murders, bitter rivalries, unacknowledged parentage, heroic sacrifice, profound despair, soaring genius and eternal damnation – enacted broadly on the stage, played more intimately in dressing rooms, rehearsal halls and offices. During the Commune, Erik had helped build prison cells and torture chambers in the basements where he now made his home. The ragged dead from those times were silent extras amid the noisier ghosts of the opera.
Inside the house, performers and audience raised a perpetual, invisible riot of emotion. They left much of it behind with dropped programmes and used powder-puffs.
Being a sensitive in this environment was like seeing every page of an encyclopaedia at once. Unorna could only pick up a word here or there.
People who didn’t exude emotion like leaky gas-jets had something deeply and even dangerously wrong with them. Unorna was wary of those she couldn’t read: they were either skilled enough at psychic self-defence to keep up their guards or lacked so much in their souls that they might be capable of anything.
One such was Dr Geneviève Dieudonné. Was the coroner an adept of an occult discipline? Or did she just need to be a particular kind of twisted to do her job?
At the end of her summation, Dr Dieudonné discreetly signalled that the examining magistrate should be woken up and told Anatole Garron had been unlawfully done to death – most probably by the unknown person or persons who had served Camille de Rosillon the same way.
‘My notes will be turned over to the police, and – on instructions from on high – shared with the detective agency who are consulting on the case. My advice, ladies and gentlemen, is to look for a murderer – not a large South American bat. Thank you and good day.’
As they filed out of the autopsy room, La Marmoset turned to her.
‘Could you ask Garron’s ghost to name the killer, Miss Witch?’
Unorna didn’t respond. The detective would only come back with something bitterly funny.
And nothing was comic about the tattered, yowling spirit trailing out of the corpse’s insides. The scraps of the dead man didn’t yet realise what had happened. These might never cohere into a true ghost. Despite the claims of bogus mediums, the dead seldom spoke… except to scream.
It was difficult enough to get a useful answer out of a living man most of the time.
Unorna also kept quiet about what a visit to the Morgue was like for her.
Respectable Parisians walked through display rooms, peering with curious jocularity at the laid-out dead – noticing this one’s angelic calm and that one’s grotesque scrofula; that this girl almost had the blush of life and that fellow must have been in the river so long the fish ate his eyes. She didn’t understand how people who didn’t have to be here could look at the dead like pictures in an exhibition.
How would they like to know that the dead looked back? Seldom kindly.
From the theatre in the Morgue, they travelled – three in a fiacre – to a yet-smaller venue.
Everyone in Paris was talking about vampires. They had agreed they should make the effort to listen.
‘They have vampire stories in Eastern Europe,’ said La Marmoset.
‘Prague is in Central Europe,’ said Unorna. ‘But, yes, Hungary and Transylvania have the most vampires.’
‘I said vampire stories.’
‘I know you did, Miss ’Tec. Don’t leave Sophy out. Greece has even older vampire stories than the Carpathians. Lord Ruthven, in the book, became a vampire in Greece. The opera changes it to Scotland.’
‘There again,’ said Sophy.
‘The opera house has tartan left over from Macbeth,’ said La Marmoset.
‘They may still use it,’ Unorna responded. ‘Le Vampire isn’t cancelled. When Macbeth was announced, Garron was not yet the Great Anatole but just an understudy to Giovanni Jones. If they’ve started on costumes and sets, they’ll not want them wasted.’
‘Misfortune means publicity,’ said La Marmoset, ‘and publicity means ticket sales.’
‘The newspapers have already changed headlines from “Will there still be Le Vampire at the opera?” to “Who will be Le Vampire at the opera?”’ said Sophy.
‘That puts me in mind of a riddle,’ said La Marmoset. ‘All right, here it is… What have we three in common with the Management of the Paris Opéra?’
Unorna and Sophy didn’t know.
‘We’re all looking for a vampire.’
They all laughed.
‘Just the one?’ said Sophy. ‘Witches and Angels come in threes. Vampires might too.’
Unorna, previously, hadn’t laughed much. Her fellow Angels might vex on occasion, but she had learned from them that it didn’t hurt to smile.
‘Hold up, driver,’ said La Marmoset. ‘This is the place.’
They got out of the carriage on Boulevard de la Chapelle and paid off the driver.
They were outside an institute for retired railwaymen. A poster announced: ‘I Do Not Wish to Believe – Fallacies About the Undead Exposed’ – a lecture by Professor Madame Saartje Van Helsing, University of Leiden. The illustration was a black bat with a red X superimposed.
‘Why are we here again?’ Sophy asked La Marmoset.
‘The lecturer’s husband, the more famous Professor Monsieur Abraham Van Helsing, likes to quote our poet Baudelaire, who said “the finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist”. It’s the epigraph of his book about diseases of the blood and soul.’
‘I see,’ said Sophy, not seeing at all.
La Marmoset spread her hands and looked at Unorna.
‘Sophy,’ said Unorna, ‘we have a vampire problem, do we not?’
Sophy nodded.
‘Who in Paris is trying hardest to persuade us that vampires do not exist?’
‘Madame Van Helsing.’
‘Yes… and why is she determined to prove the non-existence of something most people profess not to believe in anyway?’
Sophy smiled, getting the point. ‘A vampire might want us off the scent. That blonde coroner sang the same song earlier.’
Leaving the Morgue, Unorna had noticed Dr Dieudonné in a broad hat and tinted glasses – though the sun was close to setting – in earnest conversation with Inspecteur d’Aubert.
‘She merely hummed the tune,’ La Marmoset said. ‘Professor Madame will make a symphony of it, I believe.’
They went into the hall. A few elderly characters turned to stare – Unorna suspected they were the first women under the age of sixty ever to set foot in the place.
The walls were decorated with photographs of hulking, obsolete locomotiv
es which – according to the whiskery pensioners – were more magnificent than those currently in use. Safety regulations were killing the railways, Unorna overheard. The veteran who expressed this sentiment lacked an arm. The nodding fellow who agreed with him wore an eyepatch and was scalded across half his face. He sucked on a long-stemmed clay pipe.
According to the programme La Marmoset picked up, the hall was used for debates on topics of the day, small social events, amateur theatricals and lectures by distinguished experts in fields of interest. Judging from the sparse turnout, interest in Professor Van Helsing’s field was limited.
Autopsies were a bigger draw than debunking lectures.
Besides the retired railwaymen, who probably came to every event held in their hall, there were few patrons. Jacques Rival of La Vie Française, an inky youth who had been at the autopsy, was here to fill in a boxed footnote to a larger article on the burgeoning vampire scare which would bear the byline of a more established reporter. The Professor’s ‘There are no such things’ quote would be printed in far smaller type than the screaming ‘Can such things be?’ headline.
Even in Prague, Unorna had noticed this phenomenon of the popular press – people who believed in nothing professing to believe in anything, for the sake of a story. Even before teaching her how to draw a basic pentacle, her tutor Keyork Arabian told her that the first lesson of modern magic was never to talk to the newspapers.
Sophy nudged Unorna and nodded to draw attention to Ayda Heidari, who slipped in quietly and sat next to a gent given away as a police spy by the size of his boots. She was not the sort of vampire Madame Van Helsing professed did not exist. That Ayda was here suggested the Grand Vampire was keeping an eye on the investigation. Bored, she stole the flic’s wallet and put it back in a different pocket.
The only real surprise appearance was a tall, wide, soft fellow with a yellow crown of hair and a corset-defeating avoirdupois – the baritone Giovanni Jones, hated rival of the late Anatole Garron.
He did not seem to be the type to be interested in vampires… or, rather, to be interested in vampires not being real. Though, now Unorna saw him here, it came back to her that the official biography in the opera’s brochures mentioned Jones had an interest in weird and arcane matters dating back to his student days, when he had been torn between studies of music and metaphysics.