“I do not know what these symbols mean,” she said, a laugh in her tone that contradicted her words, “but I have not seen anything like them for a long, long time. Not since the days of Sir Isaac, in fact.”
Call guessed that ‘Sir Isaac’ was Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of his age, possibly the greatest English scientist of any age, who had been a fully paid-up alchemist and believed that to be the true purpose in his life rather than the mere propagation of the laws of gravity.
“Knew him, did you?” he asked out of the side of his mouth.
“Not biblically,” she replied, smiling. “I cannot speak for Cyrano. You will have to ask him yourself, when you find him.”
Reminded of why they had come to this place, they allowed themselves to be swept along by tides of the shiny, seemingly happy people who had come to The Russia House to have the best night out in town. They moved in and out of the two gaming rooms on either side of the foyer, seeing no reason to expect to see anything helpful where gambling fever so loudly reigned. The stairs down to the basement rooms with their unknown pleasures were guarded by plum coloured velvet ropes slung between gilded ring bolts in the walls.
The Cossacks, who stood beside them, were as grim and intimidating as their colleagues outside. Roxane picked up two flutes of champagne from a tray as they passed and gave one to Call. It was good champagne, which surprised him when he allowed a small sip to evaporate on his tongue. Didn’t all clip joints serve only fizzy flavoured water?
“I thought alcohol had no effect on you,” he said.
“It doesn’t,” she smiled, taking a sip. “But I know how to act as if it did.” She tossed the rest of the liquid down her throat, laughed in a loud, almost hysterical way, and exchanged her glass for a full one. “Let us look further,” she commanded, and went to the huge staircase that dominated the far end of the foyer. There appeared to be a system of ascending on the right and descending on the left.
The sound of laughter was even louder than that of the music coming from the two rooms on either side of the first floor corridor. Call had never been a good dancer, never enjoyed it, never been able to let go of his inner puritanism and self-consciousness to let himself go the way Marion did, the way the occupants of those rooms did.
Roxane glanced into the dance halls but did not go inside, walking to the end of the corridor and then turning around to double back and return to the staircase. As he walked with her Call realised she had not expected to see anything in there, believing what she wanted was somewhere else. Had she sensed something he had not?
The rooms on the second floor were smaller than the gambling dens and the dance halls. There appeared to be some device or other at the entrance to the second floor corridor that damped the sound of music and ever so slightly hysterical pleasure from the lower floors. The Cossack occupying the entrance to the corridor glanced at Call and Roxane, and then indicated with his head that they could enter.
The rooms they passed by were less well illuminated than those on the lower floor, smaller, more intimate, although all the doors were open for them to see inside. The revellers within all seemed to be in a greater state of dishabille than those they had seen before, and none seemed particularly prudish to Call. Each to their own, he supposed, shrugging disinterestedly.
Roxane slowed down to take a look inside the last room on their right. Whatever she saw made her pick up the pace again and almost hurry towards the doors at the end of the corridor. Call followed, but only after taking a more leisurely glance, before he, too, stepped it up.
The furniture of the room was dark maroon and gilt, matching sofas and chairs, arranged in a loose circle around a very large, very ornate hubble bubble pipe. There were five occupants, four sitting on the chairs, one crouched on the floor, a fine gold chain attached to the collar around her neck being held by a tall, slender blonde woman who was not quite as beautiful as she thought she was.
Had she been a combination of the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa and Audrey Hepburn she would not have been that beautiful, because none of them had the cruelty he saw in her expression, her eyes, even at a cursory glance. It was not her who interested Call, however, but her pet.
The blonde hair had been shorn until it was only a little longer than stubble, and she was thin almost to the point of emaciation, but there was no doubt in his mind that she was Rosa Jane Mason, the girl in Cyrano’s photograph, the girl whose parents wanted him to find her and bring her back to them. That was something that was never going to happen, anyway.
“Why didn’t you say something?” he asked Roxane. “You knew they were here.”
She looked at him somewhat scornfully. “I thought you were the fearless vampire hunter. Surely you were aware of them.”
“Maybe my senses have been knocked a little bit out of whack by all the heavy duty glamour you’re giving off.”
He spoke without thinking, and realised that what he said was true. All vamps had glamour, the ability to deceive, to make humans see what the vampire wanted them to see rather than what was actually there to be seen, probably other vampires too, although he had never asked.
“Let me tell you something else, Mr Robert Fearless Vampire Hunter Call, it was my glamour that prevented them from seeing you.”
He was an inch from turning on his heel and walking away from her. When he got out of The Russia House he would start to run away, and he would go on running as far as he possibly could, until he came back to this place. When he got there she would be waiting for him, if he was lucky. If he was unlucky, she would have found him before then and he wouldn’t come back at all. “You may not have noticed, but they’re all smashed out of their skulls on that stuff they’re smoking.”
She raised her champagne flute in a toast, then swallowed a mouthful. “Your human intoxicants have no effect on us. Remember?”
For a brief moment he felt very cold, imagining the gang standing behind him with their hungry eyes and him all unaware of their presence. He shook himself free of the suspicion. After all, he was masked by Roxane’s glamour. Whoever the gang were, whatever they were, unless they were more powerful than she was they had no idea they were there. What was it about her that made him forget even the most basic knowledge of vamps and how to get the better of them? He would have found them even if she had not tagged along. They could not hide from him.
She slipped her arm through his and skipped off towards the staircase. He could just as easily have resisted the north wind on a February night in the Orkneys. “Come along, darling,” she announced in a voice everyone in The Russia House could have heard, even above the cacophony. “I’m bored. Take me somewhere exciting, somewhere there is action, somewhere that’s alive.” She smiled brightly at the faces turned in their direction.
He tried to protest that it had cost him enough to get in there that they should at least have another glass or two of the ‘free’ champagne, but there was nothing he could do but go along with her. As they swept down the stairs he glanced upwards and saw the red eyes of several CCTV cameras following them and imagined Rasputin sitting in some darkened room up beneath the eaves, watching them with icy displeasure. He shivered.
Attracting the attention of a creature like that was never a good idea, but the chances were he would never see Rasputin again - whereas a much more immediate threat to his well-being held onto his arm and was calling him ‘Darling’. Sufficient unto the day, and all that jazz.
Chapter Ten
Call was not at all unhappy to see that Rasputin and his suited goons were gone from the club doors when they got there.
The Cossacks still stood there, watching the somewhat abbreviated queue of revellers desperate to be admitted to the Russia House. He took Roxane’s arm and escorted her down the steps.
As they went, she leaned close to him, as though listening to whatever he was not whispering into her ear. Then she flung her head back and laughed unrestrainedly in response to whatever morsel of scabrous, scurrilous go
ssip he had not just shared with her. As they stepped down onto the pavement the powder-blue Rolls Royce that had delivered her to the club drew up at the kerb. The uniformed driver jumped out and ran around the back of the car to open the rear passenger door for her. Call bent his head to follow her inside.
“Go to the rear of the club,” she hissed, pushing him away. He would have staggered backwards had he not been holding onto the doorframe. “Watch if they leave that way.”
He did not ask who ‘they’ were. “What if they come out the front way?” he complained. He was not dressed for standing around outside in the early hours of the morning.
She glared at him, her expression daring him to ask her another question that suggested she was stupid. “I shall watch the front,” she assured him. “Just be sure you don’t miss them if they leave by the back door.” He opened his mouth to tell her of his observation that afternoon that nobody would leave The Russia House by the back door unless the management agreed to it but simply pushed the door shut and backed away from the car. From what he had seen just a few minutes before those vamps were very much in the management’s good books.
The driver quickly closed the door and hurried back to the front, holding down his cap with his right hand. The Rolls eased forward and drove off out of sight.
Call crossed the road and hailed a passing cab, giving another disappointed cabbie a tenner for his trouble when he told him to pull over when they had gone two hundred metres west, and out of sight of The Russia House. Then he retraced the route he had taken that afternoon and arrived at the rear of Kensington High Street. He stopped some way before he reached The Russia House.
The entire area was flooded with enough bright white light to illuminate a large stadium. It required little imagination to picture automatic weapons tracking anyone or anything that entered that exclusion zone.
He ducked into a doorway on the opposite side of the lane, deep enough to allow him to stand entirely in shadow but not so deep he could not see the entire rear elevation of the club. He settled down to watch what happened. Nothing happened. Nobody came and nobody went. None of Rasputin’s goons slipped outside for a crafty fag and a slug of vodka.
After a while he began to feel more uncomfortable by the minute. The soles of his feet stung. The small of his back ached no matter how he stood. His bladder felt more as though there was an electric wire running through it with every passing moment, so much so that he had to slip out and into another doorway, where he could relieve himself, and then return to his hiding place. He could smell that this was not the first time someone had used the doorway as a toilet, and he doubted it would be the last.
Dawn was kissing the rooftops with light when his phone buzzed in his pocket and brought him back to full consciousness. When had he switched it to silent ringing? He did not remember. By the time he fumbled it out and to his ear the caller had gone, leaving just a text message.
‘Following. East. Will Call.’ For crypticism this set a high standard, and there was no name attached, but the sender had to be Roxane. He put the phone back, assuming she would call again when she had a more definite destination to share.
‘East’ in London covered a multitude of sins and other things. With no reason to remain, he yawned hugely and stretched, cracking his knuckles against the dirty brick walls. The sudden pain drove away any inclination to slumber. He slipped away the way he had come.
When he arrived in the High Street it was as empty as it ever got, which was not really at all empty. People and vehicles moved in all directions, whether making their way home after a night out – or servicing those enjoying a night out in all the many ways they demanded to be serviced, or coming to do a long day’s work with an early start. He thought of flagging down a cab but decided he had put enough of his hard earned cash into the wallets of London’s finest for one day. He would walk home. The exercise would do him good, work out the kinks and make him ready for a good day’s sleep. Besides, London was at its best in the early hours of a fine day.
As he walked his mind drifted back to the days when he had been like everyone else he knew, living in the light and hiding from the dark, but he quickly put away the memories. They were much too painful.
Chapter Eleven
The top floor, beneath the eaves of The Russia House was, indeed, entirely given over to Rasputin’s ‘office’. The roof ran from the front to the back of the building, and the windows that once looked down onto Kensington High Street had been blanked off by internal shutters.
The east facing pitch of the roof, however, had been entirely replaced by glass, as though Rasputin was an artist starving romantically in fin de siècle Paris in his cheap studio with the north facing light. Rasputin had never touched a paint brush in all his long life. When it came to art, he was with Reichsmarshall Goering, religious iconography excepted.
The elevator emerged into the middle of the room, a section of floor moving sideways to allow him entry, and he rose into the room like the climax of a conjuror’s trick. He looked around the room as though he had never done it before or was expecting applause. Of course, there was no-one there to cheer his entry.
He crossed the few feet to a long, black leather sofa positioned beneath the sky light and sat down, carefully arranging his left leg over his right. The skirt of his black robe fell away to reveal he wore knee high boots, black and highly polished. The feet of the boots, though, were a curious shape, much like the remedial boots worn by rickets afflicted children of much earlier times, almost suggesting they enclosed hooves rather than feet. His heels were high.
He relaxed backwards, spreading his arms along the sofa back. Without any obvious indication to suggest why, the front of the sofa began to tilt upwards, raising those curious feet from the floor. As it rose so did a wall of half a dozen large television screens before the sofa coming to life as the sofa came to a stop.
Each screen shows the CCTV feed from one or other of the rooms in The Russia House. Three screens showed the principal public rooms of the club, the casino and the two clubs on the ground floor. The other three showed him private rooms, those not visible to any punter moving around the house unless they were specifically invited into Rasputin‘s sanctum, and none ever were.
One screen showed a flabby middle aged man, naked but for the arrangement of leather straps about his head that resembled nothing more than a horse’s bridle. What appeared to be a maroon rubber ball held his mouth open rather than the metal bit of a conventional bridle. The naked girl on his back held those reins in her left hand while applying the jockey’s whip in her right hand to his reddening flank.
Another naked girl stood before him, fists on her thrust forward hips, poking out her tongue at him, daring him, challenging. Neither girl was yet old enough to have developed much by way of breasts or hair on their pubic mounds. The man had been Cabinet Minister once, Secretary of State for Defence. Now he was the Chief Executive Officer of a publicity shy private hedge capital fund, one of the wealthiest men in one of the richest cities in the world. His cock hung limp between his legs and tears coursed down his face.
The door in the north wall opened and Orloff entered, together with Kirilenko. They had walked up the stairs to this sixth floor. Nobody used the elevator but Rasputin. They considered it to be one of the privileges he enjoyed over them as the club owner, their employer, and would never question it. When they had their own operations they would have something similar for themselves.
Before the door could close behind them a young woman followed them into the room. She was tall and slender; her long, blonde hair tied loosely in what the English termed a ‘pony tail’. She wore a tight black dress that might be called a cheongsam in the Far East, which displayed her figure without showing it and tightly confined her legs above her knees.
As she stepped past him Kirilenko watched her rear rotate as she walked on her absurdly high heels. Rasputin knew exactly what his lieutenant wanted to do with and to her. Let him dream on, or pay l
ike everyone else. She was not a junior management perk. She carried her silver tray to him and put it down on a small table hidden from view by the end of the sofa. Then she broke the seal on the neck of a bottle that was on the tray, containing a viscous, colourless liquid.
She poured this into a heavy cut crystal tumbler and held it out to Rasputin, but he shook his head, leaving her to replace the tumbler on the tray and stand beside him. Her expression had not changed from the one of studied, heavy lidded neutrality she’d worn when she entered. It might have been a mask. Orloff and Kirilenko moved silently behind the sofa so they could stand and see what Rasputin was watching. His free hand slid beneath her skirt, and began to work. She did not respond in the slightest way. She knew better than that.
He pointed at the screens with his curiously elongated forefinger. Suddenly every screen showed the same image, of Roxane flamboyantly announcing her desire to quit The Russia House. There were any number of acceptable reasons to do that, but boredom was not among them.
How could she be bored? Nobody was ever bored in The Russia House, even Rasputin. He studied the woman closely. Did he recognise her? There was a grain of memory grit annoying him, the more so because it defied his attempts to examine it, to turn the grain into a pearl of beautiful recognition. Frustration was not familiar to him. Certainly she was a good looking woman. Had he ever encountered her, he doubted he would have forgotten such a classical beauty.
The man beside her was no more than contemporary vermin, beneath her attention, beneath his. He wound the recording back to see what she had done, what she had seen to cause such a reaction in her. Watching a recording backwards was no more difficult to him than watching it forwards and he watched as she walked backwards along the second floor corridor, paused at the end to talk with the man, then walked to the staircase.
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