by Kim Newman
‘She entered a convent,’ said La Marmoset. ‘She suffered a general disappointment in Frenchmen.’
‘Shame,’ mused Bec. ‘I’ll leave you ladies be now. Shall you be wanting coffee and petits fours?’
‘We’ll rough it, Inspecteur, thank you.’
Bec lingered a moment as they settled in armchairs, then shut the door on them, chuckling to himself.
‘What funny is?’ asked Madame Van Helsing.
‘This room is for the convenience of officers of inspector rank and above who entertain their mistresses in work hours,’ said La Marmoset. ‘They’re usually listed in the visitors’ book as “confidential informants”.’
‘Oh,’ said the Professor, disapproving.
La Marmoset shrugged. ‘Men,’ she said.
An ugly lump of statuary on the coffee table represented plump, naked Leda in the grip of a visibly concupiscent swan. A large, indifferent painting over the mantel depicted the abduction of the Sabine women – or rather, the revels in the Roman camp on the evening after the abduction of the Sabine women. Unorna had seen less scandalous display at the Witches’ Sabbath on Walpurgis Night.
‘That daub was confiscated on the orders of Chief Magistrate Barrière,’ said La Marmoset. ‘This is where they keep confiscated obscene materials.’
Unorna had thought Paris less hypocritical in this matter than most cities. Even Keyork Arabian had asked her to get hold of ‘French postcards’ for his private collection. She could probably lay her hands on specimens from this stock that the old magus would appreciate.
In this room, even the paperweights were pornographic.
‘Hah,’ said Madame Van Helsing. ‘Why here are you? I wish intercourse with Raoul d’Aubert.’
La Marmoset didn’t smile, though her lips twitched.
‘Would you mind if we talked in German?’ La Marmoset asked the Professor. ‘My friend is from Bohemia and finds French hard to follow.’
‘I have no objections.’
Unorna’s French was fine, but it would be a relief not to have to endure the Dutch woman’s strangulated syntax. She was bound to speak better German.
La Marmoset had cleverly diverted an argument. Madame Van Helsing was thinking about the language in which this interview would be conducted, not of whether there should be an interview at all.
Unorna looked around the room. Madame Van Helsing’s ghost-child sat in a corner, playing cat’s cradle. She smiled at the spirit but got no response.
‘What is she staring at?’ the Professor asked La Marmoset.
‘I apologise,’ said Unorna. ‘It’s been a distracting evening. You mustn’t mind me.’
La Marmoset pressed on…
‘At your lecture, you talked about an earlier vampire scare. You suggested, before the interruption, that your husband was responsible for that panic… and its tragic outcome.’
Madame Van Helsing nodded.
‘We believe these current murders are connected with that business. The dead men – Camille de Rosillon, Anatole Garron, Giovanni Jones – were your husband’s students, were they not?’
‘More than students – his disciples. A blasphemous notion, of course, but Abraham is given to such self-flattery.’
‘There were others?’
‘In Le Gang de Schubert? Yes – Raoul d’Aubert, Michel Falke, and… the girl. She wasn’t a student, of course. Not at the Sorbonne. She joined Le Gang to sing the women’s parts. They began as a music society. German music, not French.’
That explained the name.
‘Your husband lectures in medicine. He specialises in diseases of the blood…’
‘Diseases of the Blood and Soul. His book. Yes, he teaches medicine, but does not practice… though he is now in England, consulting at an asylum – the best place for him, in my opinion. His friend John Seward, another acolyte, called him to treat a young lady with pernicious anaemia. She has, of course, died… but Abraham is still in London, making trouble for those who loved her. Few would seek out a doctor with such a poor record. All his patients die.’
‘His other speciality is the occult.’
Madame Van Helsing looked disgusted.
‘I cannot deny it. After the death of our son, he turned away from science… and looked for answers in fairy dust. I’d rather it were absinthe, opium or barmaids. He has sought truth and found only pain. And he hurts others.’
Unorna had assumed the ghost was a dead son. She fancied the boy smiled weakly.
‘How does your husband hurt others?’
‘He sends them on wild ghost chases. At first, they were humouring him. One of the worst things you can do with the superstitious is indulge the belief but treat it as a joke. It’s playful but dangerous. A delusion set in, wilfully embraced by the boys. They were scarcely out of school, you know. They knew nothing of life. They fancied they were hunting dragons and saving maidens. Then they fancied that the maidens were dragons. Look around at these books, these prints, these statues – men desire women, but hate us too, in a way. We are not real to them, but fantastic creatures. Mermaids, fairies, witches… and vampires. To think of us as such means not considering how we really are.’
In German, Madame Van Helsing was less ridiculous.
Unorna was a witch, but saw what the Professor meant. No man in her life – from the magus Keyork Arabian to her would-be suitor Israel Kafka – treated her as entirely a person. They looked at her queer eyes and saw little difference between her and the pictures in this room.
‘How did they get onto vampires?’
Madame Van Helsing shrugged.
‘Who knows where boys get their ideas… maybe it was the opera? That piece Anatole played in. The story about Lord Ruthven. Then a disease started in the slums… a rash, a fever and anaemia. Children were most susceptible. Few died, but many sickened. The rash, the stigmata, resembled a vampire bite – two punctures, red because the children would scratch off the bandages, no matter what they were told. I was Abraham’s assistant, then. I trained first as a nurse. He studied diseases, but I looked after the diseased. De Rosillon, the worst of the group, played the game first – he said the children must be victims of a vampire. A woman vampire, of course – for who else would prey on children? He said that the monster must be exorcised.’
‘How do you exorcise a vampire?’ asked La Marmoset.
‘This kind of vampire? Soap, better housing and a proper diet will banish the disease in, oh, a hundred years or so. And getting rid of the rats – and, yes, bats – which spread the fever. The kind of vampire my husband believes in? You drive a wooden stake through their hearts.’
‘That’s right,’ said La Marmoset. ‘A stake through the heart. That’s the detail that snagged in my mind.’
Madame Van Helsing looked suspiciously at the Queen of Detectives.
Unorna sat quietly. She knew the popular understanding was simplified. In some regions, the stake was to pin down the vampire alive so its head could be hacked off. To the east, an iron nail through the eye was favoured.
‘My friend, believe it or not, is a seeress,’ said La Marmoset. ‘All through this business, she’s been seeing a face. A face I think you know and can put a name to.’
The Professor shut up. She did not want to say any more.
Unorna opened her eyes wider. She saw Madame Van Helsing notice her heterochromia iridis.
‘Unorna,’ prompted La Marmoset. ‘Who do you see?’
The ghost child seemed to be listening as intently as his mother.
‘A woman… a girl, really,’ said Unorna, remembering the postcard. ‘Pale, white, like marble or wax. Hair parted in the centre, short and tucked away behind the neck. Eyes shut, as if she were asleep. A square-ish chin, strong. And a smile… that smile, you can’t mistake it, closed-lipped like the Mona Lisa, sad and wise and cold… cold like the grave.’
Tears coursed down Madame Van Helsing’s cheeks. The ghost was close, hugging Mama round the waist, head resting in her
lap. Without thinking, she touched his hair, patted him like a dog. She knew he was there, even if she dare not admit it to herself or any other.
‘I know that face,’ said La Marmoset. ‘It’s famous. You see it all over the place. L’Inconnue de la Seine, the nameless corpse from the river. She was found transfixed on a length of wood… at about the same time as your husband’s students were hunting vampires. She’s famous for being unknown, unidentified. She must have been foreign, they said at the time, new to Paris…’
‘Yes, she was Austrian,’ Madame Van Helsing admitted, ‘like Michel Falke.’
Unorna had a sense of being on the lip of a precipice.
‘I see her here,’ she said. ‘She wants you to help her.’
‘You can give her a name, Professor,’ pressed La Marmoset. ‘Vampire or not, she haunts this city… and she haunts these boys, now men. She isn’t the who, is she? But she is the why. Her name, Saartje, her name…?’
Madame Van Helsing wiped her tears on the heel of her hand.
‘Caralin,’ she said. ‘Caralin Trelmanski.’
XIV
WORKING WITH LA Marmoset, Sophy Kratides was learning to be a detective.
The skills would be an asset in her chosen profession. You can’t kill a man if you can’t find him first.
She remembered Michel Falke.
He must have been added to the guest list of the opera ball by his old student friend Anatole Garron. To send an invitation, the Management must have a Paris address for him.
She returned to the Opéra. The house was dark tonight out of respect for Garron. Tomorrow, Così Fan Tutte would be hauled out and run as a fill-in until Le Vampire was ready… or replaced by something less cursed. Monsieur Richard and Monsieur Moncharmin wouldn’t want to lose two nights’ ticket revenue on the trot, so another way of paying tribute to the luckless Giovanni Jones would have to be found.
The administrative section of the building was deserted. Thanks to La Marmoset’s lesson in basic lock-picking, she easily got into Monsieur Rémy’s office. The efficient secretary kept a cabinet of address cards. Dr Falke had his place in the F section.
The Viennese wasn’t staying at a hotel. He had a private address on Rue des Martyrs.
In Dressing Room 313, Sophy put on a long, burnt orange coat with a concealed inside pocket tailored as a holster for a Colt Thunderer revolver. She also clipped a throwing knife to her garter and found a not-too-dreadful hat to match the coat.
If this was really a vampire hunt, should she find a crucifix?
Raised in the Orthodox faith, Sophy thought Catholic religious objects were frivolous gewgaws. They made them too pretty, as if compensating for spiritual hollowness. Crucifixes represented execution by torture and shouldn’t be ornate trinkets. She had a notion that if these charms were to be of any use, you had to believe strongly in them… and she hadn’t believed in anything much since God and Sherlock Holmes let her brother die.
If she had to kill a vampire, she’d improvise a stake from a broken chair leg or something. She could readily believe in jagged wood.
She stuck the card she had taken from Monsieur Rémy’s files in the corner of a mirror.
‘Tell the others where I’ve gone,’ she said.
No answer came. Though, in the dead silence of the empty house, she might have heard a rattle of strained breath. She assumed – a little superstitiously, she admitted – Erik was always listening.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and left.
It was past eleven o’clock, but the streets were still busy. The character of the crowds was changing from gaiety to desperation, convivial merriment to aggressive drunkenness.
Before she’d even hailed a fiacre, a man contrived to stumble against her and put his hand into her coat. He sought a soft bosom but found a hard revolver and was drunkenly puzzled. She broke two of his fingers and left him yelping.
Dr Falke’s address turned out to be a private courtyard between two restaurants. The lawyer’s Paris address was a three-storey house with shuttered windows. The front door lock was more of a challenge than any at the Opéra. La Marmoset hadn’t yet given Sophy the advanced burglary course.
She stood back and looked up at the building.
Something struck her as odd.
There were two main drainpipes. It had rained a little early in the day, and one pipe was trickling water into a grate. The other was dry. She examined the outlet and found it dusty inside. The pipe wasn’t connected to a gutter. Feeling the brickwork around the pipe, she found indentations artfully contrived to look like random cracks. They were foot-holds and the pipe was the central column of a disguised ladder.
Taking care, she scaled the building. The ladder was designed for someone with longer limbs – and probably not wearing a dress – but she reached the roof with relative ease.
Now, she was up in the territory of Les Vampires.
She took a moment to look at the lights of the city. The hubbub of the streets was muted here, but the wind more cutting.
The roof of Falke’s building was unusual, a flat area surrounded by walls of sloping tile. The main feature was a large circular skylight – a swirly star pattern, individual panes between brass spokes.
Creeping across the roof, Sophy looked down into the building.
No lights were on in the room below. She could barely discern shapes.
She found a lever which worked pulleys and chains. The skylight irised open, and a spiral staircase corkscrewed up from below to afford easy access to the house. She took a moment to admire the ingenious design. Like the invisible ladder, this was custom-made.
With the skylight open, she heard sounds from below, deep in the house.
A wheezing, gurgling noise… and someone playing the piano. Für Elise.
She crept quietly down the spiral staircase. She drew her Colt and tapped around walls until she found a door.
Beyond was a dimly lit corridor. She paused as her eyes got used to the gloom.
The piano sounded louder and the other noises more disgusting.
She didn’t need Unorna’s extra senses to know something was more than wrong here.
She turned a corner and came face to mask with the Black Bat of the Rooftops. Its cloak wings were folded and it hung upside-down from a rail. The huge-eyed helmet looked as much like an insect as a bat.
She nearly shot the creature, but realised she was only facing an empty costume and held fire. The wings were soft leather.
There was more than one costume – a whole rack of them. Including the carnival bat outfit Falke wore to the Opéra ball. If, as seemed certain, Falke was the Black Bat, that masquerade had been an impudent gesture.
On a rack by the costumes were tools – grapples fired by pistol devices, long coils of thin black cord, knives with blades serrated like batwings, things that looked like musical instruments or torture devices, a collapsible sniper rifle she rather envied, fat black smoke-bombs with little batwings, wire nooses.
She saw how the war of the roofs was fought.
Along with the gurgling, she now heard thumping and strangulated screams. This was at least one floor below.
She found stairs and hurried down.
At the end of a corridor, a door was open a crack. Bright light seeped out. The music and the noise came from beyond.
She peeped through.
Across from the door, a man sat at a piano playing Beethoven, coat-tails flopped back over the stool.
Angling herself, she saw to one side of the room. Another man thrashed about in a bathtub, leaking blood. Something like a black octopus was wrapped around his neck, the sac pulsing and fang-spurs penetrating his jugular vein.
She kicked the door wide open and fired into the ceiling.
A sprinkling of plaster fell on the carpet. The pianist stopped and spun round on the stool.
Michel Falke smiled as if she were his welcome guest for a late-evening rendezvous.
The man in the tub was Inspecteur d
’Aubert.
The exsanguinating thing wasn’t an animal but a contraption. It resembled a set of black bagpipes. Blood sucked out of d’Aubert’s veins was discharged through a long rubber tube which fed into the plughole. The policeman was bleeding out into the plumbing. No blood pooled around the victims because it went down the nearest drain. That explained the rats, too. They swarmed beneath the murder sites to feed on the run-off gore in the sewers. As a mere side-effect of these crimes, Paris would have to cope with rats with a taste for human blood.
D’Aubert’s face was white and his eyes dull, but he smiled as Jones had done. That calming poison was in him.
The thrashing was just mechanical now.
‘Miss Kratides, isn’t it?’ said Falke. ‘I knew one of you would find me. I expected your detective friend. Or one of the Grand Vampire’s brood. They don’t care for the competition.’
Sophy wasn’t the sort of idiot who needed to listen to an explanation.
She shot Falke in the heart.
A loud clang sounded and Falke’s starched shirtfront shredded to show battleship plate. Her ears rung. She’d be hearing that for days.
Moving fast, Falke came and took her Colt away. In a trice, he had her knife from her too.
She kicked his shin, but hurt her foot. He wore chainmail long-johns. His evening clothes were cut for a larger man, to allow for armour. A red-eyed black bat was painted on his bullet-dented chest-plate.
He picked her up and plumped her down on a sofa.
She watched as he detached the vampire-machine from d’Aubert, and wrung the last blood from it. The sac churned with a clockwork mechanism which he shut off. She had noticed how cleverly his clothes and gadgets were made. If he ran them up himself, he was one of the geniuses of the age. He kept his inventions for himself rather than share them with the world. Mostly, he used his toys to kill people.
Not that she had any qualms about that as long as the proper people got killed.