‘Bad people shootez moi et Rivets,’ Burlesque tried to explain. He looked to Rivets. ‘What the fuck’s the Frog for “shoot”?’ he asked.
‘Fuck knows, Burlesque,’ shrugged Rivets unhelpfully, ‘but ask the tart wevver she’s got any blokes’ togs. I feel a proper muffin standin’ ’ere in just me undies.’
Burlesque made another attempt. ‘Mal homs visitez l’apartement de mon ami, Rivets. Ils …’ He stopped, brow furrowed, and then put the first two fingers of his right hand together and, as he had done as a child when he played soldiers, mimicked the sound of gunfire. ‘Bang, bang,’ he said, pointing his fingers at Odette.
Odette frowned in concentration and her ruddy face tightened as she tried to understand what Burlesque was attempting to communicate. ‘Des scélérats? Lesquels?’ (‘Bad men? Which bad men?’)
‘Oh, I dunno, les UnFunDaMentalists … les hommes dans l’armée de Reinhard Heydrich. Any’ows, avez vous some clobber pour mon ami, Rivets?’
Amazingly, Odette seemed to understand. She disappeared off into her bedroom at the back of the house and returned with an armful of clothes which she handed to Rivets. ‘Voici quelques vieux vêtements de mon oncle. Lui aussi est nain, donc ils seront probablement à votre taille.’ (‘Here are some of my uncle’s old clothes. He is a midget too, so they’ll probably fit you.’) Rivets grabbed the clothes and ducked into a corner to get dressed.
Odette turned her attention back to Burlesque. ‘Et maintenant, Burlesque, occupons-nous de toi. J’ai l’impression que tu es blessé.’ (‘And now let me attend to you, Burlesque. I understand that you are hurt.’)
Before Burlesque could protest, Odette had grabbed him by the arm – by ABBA, the woman was strong! – and manoeuvred him over to the table and nearer to the lamp. With a firm shove, she pushed him down so that he was now leaning over the table with his damaged arse up in the air. ‘Non, non,’ he protested. ‘Give over, Odette, c’est bon. It’s just a wound de SAE …’
Odette ignored his shouts, whipped his braces off his shoulders and yanked his trousers down to his knees. It took a lot to nonplus Burlesque Bandstand but having his strides pulled off by a besotted French tart almost did for him. The one blessing was that today was Sunday, the day he put on his clean linen. If all this had been happening on a Saturday, he would have died of shame.
He felt Odette easing his drawers down over his arse, and crouching forward to get a better look at the damage inflicted by Zolotov’s shooting. After a moment, she straightened up. ‘Ce n’est q’une égratignure’ (‘Oh, it’s nothing, just a scratch’) she announced and then gave Burlesque a quite unnecessary pat on the bottom. ‘Oh! Quelles jolies fesses tu as!’ (‘Oh! What a nice bum you have!’) She giggled again, breathed an ‘Un moment’into Burlesque’s ear, and disappeared back into her bedroom.
‘I fink you’re made up here, Burlesque, me ole cock,’ commented Rivets as he stuffed some old newspaper into the boots Odette had given him to make them fit better. ‘That Odette bird couldn’t get yer pants down fast enuff.’
The pain infecting his arse and the ridiculously vulnerable position he was in provoked a stream of abuse from Burlesque. He had just paused in his haranguing of Rivets when he discovered just how vulnerable he really was. The front door suddenly flew open and a gust of cold air whisked around Burlesque’s exposed SAE.
He looked over his shoulder and, for the second time that evening, he knew he was a dead man. Standing in the doorway were two of Maurice Merriment’s associates from the Rookeries, the larger of the two being a truly evil bastard who went by the name of Stan Shoreham. He sauntered into the room and pointed a large revolver at Burlesque’s arse.
‘Hello, Burlesque, ’ow you diddlin’? Count Zolotov sends ’is compliments an’ wonders wevver you would like to join ’im for a scraggin’. Your scraggin’, that is.’ Shoreham laughed. ‘After you’ve given that table wot for, ov course. Gor, Burlesque, fings must be rough iffn you’ve been reduced to fucking furniture. Wot you an’ your lady-love ’opin’ for as a result ov your couplin’? A nice set ov side tables, perhaps?’
It was a very happy Odette who rifled through the medicine cabinet hanging on the wall of the bedroom, hoping that would be where her uncle kept his bottle of tincture of iodine, which she judged would be just the thing to clean poor Burlesque’s wound.
And she was happy because all of a sudden her life had become so very exciting. Running a meat stall in Les Halles was all well and good, but it wasn’t terribly romantic, and Odette was, under her somewhat forbidding exterior, a true romantic. What she most certainly did not want to do was spend the rest of her life standing knee-deep in offal, gutting chickens and skinning cows. No, she wanted to go on adventures, to right wrongs and defend the weak, to vanquish dragons and to be swept off her feet by handsome princes and all the rest of the good stuff that proper heroines did.
Of course, Burlesque wasn’t quite as dashing as she’d imagined her Prince Charming would be, but she liked the idea of having a man who was something of an outlaw, forever fighting the bad guys and saving damsels in distress.
Not that Odette had ever been in distress. No one fucked with Odette Aroca unless they had a deep desire to be hospitalised. But she knew that men preferred women who were a bit fluttery and in need of rescuing, rather than those, like Odette, who were a dab hand with a blackjack and had been known to lay a GrandHarm out with one forearm smash.
So, determined to emphasise her more feminine aspects – notably her cleavage – she had just decided to change into the floral frock her mother had bought her the previous summer, the one her father always said made her look like an armoured steamer disguised as a rose garden, when she heard voices coming from the next room.
Angry voices.
It took very little intellectual effort on Odette’s part to realise that the ‘bad men’ Burlesque had been so worried about had made a surprise visit. This made her cross. She had been waiting a long time for Prince Charming to come into her life and now that he had, she was buggered if anyone was going to take him away from her.
She decided to play out the role of one of the heroines in her favourite penny dreadfuls: she’d fight for her man, and then afterwards, when he was impassioned with gratitude, she would allow him to give her a really good seeing to. As she reached for her shotgun, Odette smiled. Life just kept right on getting better and better.
*
The two men’s laughter stopped abruptly as Odette pushed her way back into the room with a large double-barrelled shotgun in her hands, the muzzles pointing squarely at Shoreham.
Shoreham wasn’t impressed. ‘Fuck me from ’ere to Fenchurch, Burlesque, is this your Froggy bit on the side? Bit ’ard-lookin’, ain’t she? I fink I’d sooner fuck that table than give ’er one. Still, I bet yor just doin’ your best for the old intense cordial, right?’
For such a big bloke, Shoreham moved fast, but not quite fast enough. As he whirled his revolver around to shoot her, Odette pulled the trigger and the right-hand barrel of the shotgun flamed. The shot took Shoreham plumb in the centre of the chest and sent his lifeless body flying hard against the front wall, his head cracking a windowpane as it snapped back.
Shoreham’s partner was slower to react. Maybe it was being sprayed with offalised SAE that slowed him down but he hadn’t even begun to drag the pistol out of his jacket pocket before Odette let loose with the second barrel. The shot blew a chunk off the left side of his face, leaving him a gasping wreck.
Burlesque was up off the table, and had his trousers back on in an instant, knowing that it was a penny to a pound that the sound of the firing would bring more of Zolotov’s gang running. He shouted for Rivets to help and together they quickly rifled Shoreham’s pockets, extracting his passport, his billfold full of guineas and francs – Zolotov obviously paid well – and a box of spare cartridges for his pistol. Satisfied that there was nothing else worth nicking, they turned their attention to the man with the ruined face. Here, wh
at Burlesque wanted was the man’s jacket and coat. They might be a bit small but they were serviceable, and would make him a damned sight less conspicuous than if he went wandering around Paris in his shirtsleeves. That the coat was spotted with the remnants of the man’s face, he’d just have to live with.
It was a little difficult pulling the coat and jacket from the dying man but, fuelled by a desperate energy and with a callous disregard for the man’s groaning, Burlesque finally managed it. As he buttoned himself up, he saw that Rivets had commandeered the coat from the back of Stan Shoreham’s body: it hung down to the boy’s boots and looked faintly comical, but as Rivets explained it was ‘better to look like a twat than ’ave yer nuts freeze orf’.
After taking a quick look to check that the Bulldog pistol he’d lifted was loaded, Burlesque turned to say thank you and goodbye to Odette.
But Odette was obviously not of a mind to be said goodbye to. While Burlesque and Rivets had been frisking the two bodies and removing the coats, Odette had been busy putting on her own coat and stuffing various bits and pieces into a voluminous carpet bag. The message was very clear: as far as Odette was concerned, wherever Burlesque was going, she was going too.
Burlesque looked at her and shook his head: ‘Non, non, Odette, vous can’t comez. Il est très dangerous. Beaucoup de bad men. Lots of killing. Much bang, bang, fucking banging.’ He put his two fingers together and again mimed shooting with a pistol.
Odette smiled, nodded enthusiastically and then pulled a very businesslike revolver out of her pocket and brandished it with a really quite remarkable flourish. She pointed it at the two bodies. ‘Bang, bang,’ she said, laughing.
Burlesque didn’t have the energy or the vocabulary to argue. As he stepped around the bits of liquidised body puddling Odette’s living-room floor, he wondered who he should be more afraid of: Zolotov and his gang of rippers or this murderous French sort he would be traipsing around the Quartier with.
17
The Moulin Rouge: Paris
The Demi-Monde: 13th Day of Spring, 1005
Copy of PigeonGram message sent by Doctor Jezebel Ethobaal
on 14th day of Spring, 1005
Here we go again, thought Norma, as she ran through the darkened streets of Paris. It had been only a few weeks ago that she’d been running from Archie Clement, and her capture then had precipitated all the misery she had endured since. But she was determined about one thing, that whatever those creatures were – and she was still coming to terms with Vanka calling them vampyres – that had attacked them outside the Bastille, she wasn’t going to let them take her. Her sole comfort now was that she had Vanka with her. She might not like him – there was too much of the sharp about him for that – but he was one hell of a guy for getting out of tight spots.
As they raced along, Norma tried to get focused. Survival needed a clear head. But as she scuttled down the dark alleyways leading away from the Bastille, it was difficult to remain calm: she’d seen what that tall, skinny vampyre bastard had done to Godfrey de Bouillon, and it hadn’t been pretty.
Thinking about that broke her concentration and as she hurdled the body of a drunk lying across the pavement, the hobnails decorating the soles of her boots skidded on the rain-slick cobbles and her leg buckled awkwardly, the knee the Witchfinder had smashed with his cane cracking ominously.
Fuck!
She was back on her feet in an instant, trying to hobble on, trying to ignore the leg, trying to stifle her sobbing. Vanka grabbed her by the elbow to support her, all the while urging her forward. ‘We’re close now. As best I can tell, the Moulin Rouge is only a few streets away.’ He tapped a finger on a poster pasted on a wall. ‘An old friend of mine is performing there.’
The Moulin Rouge?
Norma didn’t have a chance to think on this any further as a stabbing pain tramlined up her leg, radiating out from her wrecked knee. ‘I think my leg’s gone, Vanka,’ she gasped.
There was the sound of a shot behind them and a brick just above Norma’s head shattered under the impact of a bullet, spraying fragments into her face as it disintegrated. Galvanised by the near miss, Vanka hauled her down a side alley, the pair of them bouncing off the walls of the narrow passage as they ran. Ignoring as best she could the pain in her knee, Norma lengthened her stride, trying desperately to put distance between herself and the gunman.
This is ridiculous. Why is it me who always ends up running from the badniks?
Just as she decided that her leg was a goner, Vanka ducked them into a darkened doorway and placed his finger to his lips, signalling that she should be quiet. Norma didn’t need telling: she stood silent in the darkness, coated in sweat and feeling like shit, waiting for a vampyre to come and kill her.
Déjà vu times two.
Even by the fucked-up standards of the Demi-Monde, it had been a weird day. Whilst she knew the Demi-Monde was a very trippy place, she had never expected to meet vampyres wandering around the ville! Vampyres didn’t exist in the Real World, so how could ABBA have modelled them? It didn’t make sense. And then there was all that screwball stuff with Ella Thomas announcing that she was the Messiah. The Demi-Monde was fast becoming not only weird but downright spooky.
From somewhere out in the darkness there came the sound of boots scraping on cobbles. Norma froze, trying to still her panting breath. There were shouts in a strange language, the voices angry. The vampyres were searching for them … kicking over dustbins … rattling doors. Norma looked around for a weapon: a stone, a stick, a bottle – anything to even up the odds. It was then that she noticed the fog seeping around her ankles.
Fog? No wonder Bela Lugosi and his buddies were so desperate to find them; give it another couple of minutes and she and Vanka would be lost under the swirling fog. All they had to do was stay hidden, stay quiet and let the pea-souper save them from their would-be assassins. Norma gritted her teeth against the fire burning in her knee and waited. Long, torturous minutes slumped by. Then …
‘Okay,’ whispered Vanka, ‘I think they’ve gone.’ He pushed himself out of their hiding place, took a quick look round, announced that the fog was now so thick that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face and then the pair of them took off at a crouching, loping canter. A few hundred yards later they rounded a corner and there, shimmering in a blaze of gaslight that cut through the thick fog, stood the Moulin Rouge.
‘Gee whiz, Vanka, I gotta say, your dress sense has sorta nose-dived since the last time I saw you. Looks like you’ve just taken a runaway powder from the Bastille,’ pronounced Josephine Baker, as she sat, flawlessly elegant as always, watching her two guests drink their coffee.
‘That’s because we have just escaped from the Bastille.’
‘Yeah, I know, I got a message telling me about it a little while ago.’
Vanka frowned. For anyone to know the details of their escape so quickly meant that they were plugged into a really efficient intelligence system. Vanka wondered just who Josephine Baker really was, because she certainly wasn’t just the dancer she pretended to be.
‘So who’s the nouvelle frail?’ asked Josephine, nodding towards Norma. ‘Hot dog, Vanka, you sure ain’t big on monogamy; you change your squeeze with the breeze.’
‘This is Miss Norma Williams, and she’s not so much a friend as an encumbrance.’ Immediately the words were out of his mouth Vanka regretted them. It was a cheap shot which was rewarded by Norma’s cheeks colouring.
‘That’s right, Vanka, I don’t have any friends do I? But then, neither do you, so maybe we deserve each other.’ She gave Josephine a wan smile. ‘Ignore Vanka, Miss Baker, and may I thank you for taking us in.’
‘Any time, honey. Any opportunity to take in the famous Vanka Maykov.’ Josephine gave Norma a wink. ‘But like always, Vanka baby, your coming has, like, precipitated my going.’ She waved a hand towards the men and women busily packing crates and trunks, hauling down props and pushing rails hung with costumes around. The Moulin Ro
uge looked like it was being dismantled.
‘End of the season?’ suggested Vanka.
‘A big no to, Vanka. It’s endsville for the Quartier Chaud, more like. Word is, the ForthRight Army will be coming through the gates of Paris early tomorrow, and as they come in yours truly will be exiting stage left. Thanks to you, Vanka, I had a taste of what those Checkya cats are like a couple of weeks back, and I only got them off my black ass because of my diplomatic passport – and because the Mayor of Berlin didn’t want his wife to dig that he’d been mixing and mingling with a frail of the Shade persuasion. And talking of Shades, I’ve got some good news for you, Vanka baby: Ella made it outta the Bastille okay.’
Vanka let out a sigh of relief. All he’d been thinking about since he and Norma had escaped the prison was whether Ella was safe.
‘I don’t know what sorta shape she’s in, they worked her over real good when she was in there. Got some bad guy in from the ForthRight called Mengele who hooked her up to a galvanicEnergy engine and turned it up to the max.’
‘They tortured her?’ Now that was something Vanka hadn’t realised. Maybe that was why she’d been acting so strangely.
‘Yeah. She’s really pissed off Heydrich, who put the word out that Torquemada should get hot and heavy on her ass. Man, that cat is all white and spite.’
‘But she is okay.’
‘Don’t sweat, Vanka, your girl’s fine as wine.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You laying a line on me?’
‘Would I do that?’
Vanka sat for a moment struggling with conflicting emotions: anxiety that the girl he loved had been tortured and relief that she hadn’t been permanently harmed. It took a long swig of Solution to calm him down. Obviously worried that he was sipping more Solution than was good for him Josephine waved to a waiter, and had their coffees refreshed.
Vanka thought this a a good sign: if Josephine was going to boot them out, she’d hardly be worried about more coffee.
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