III

The Persian knew Les Vampires would have operatives in disguise on the hotel staff, in the café attached to the Libre Échange, idling in the streets outside, and dressed in leotards painted red to match the roof-tiles on which they lay. La Marmoset, veiled discreetly, sat in the foyer of the hotel, as if awaiting a lover who had foolishly stood her up. No vampire would get past her trained detective's eye. Sophy, dressed as a maid, was on the third-floor landing. The Persian pitied the philanderer who made unwelcome advances. It was an easy mistake to make. Monsieur Morillon insisted female staff wear farcically short skirts and sheer black stockings, to foster the air of amatory adventure. It was a wonder no free-roaming husbands had been stabbed in the two hours Sophy had been on duty.

In the evening before the momentous midnight, the Persian and Vénénos supervised as La Marmoset and Ayda Heidari, a pretty young Peruvian vampire, made minute examination of Suite 13. Two-way mirrors were covered and vents which might carry conversations to listening ears were blocked. It was determined that eavesdropping midgets did not lurk under the chaise longue. The suite was clear

Neither éminence noire would wait upon the other. Both were set to arrive at the last – not the first – chime of midnight by the ugly carriage clock in the suite. Erik climbed up from the sewers through the hotel's kitchens and the Grand Vampire slipped down from the rooftop via a skylight and rope ladder.

As the twelfth chime tinkled, both appeared in Suite 13.

Though they should have been used to this, the Persian spilled his Anis and Vénénos bit through his cigarette.

Phantom rose through a trapdoor in the floor Ayda had found under the rug but thought locked. Vampire descended from a false cornice La Marmoset had noticed but deemed it best not to mention. Behind masks, mystery men were bad-humoured about losing face. Those who would serve them learned this swiftly.

Hollow laughter echoed through the suite. Erik and the Grand Vampire were pleased with themselves.

They wore evening dress: the Phantom with a blank white mask, violet gloves and a wide-brimmed black felt fedora; the Vampire with a bandit domino, a shock of white crepe hair and a beaverskin topper. Erik's jet-black opera cloak was lined with scarlet silk. The Vampire's caped overcoat had a serrated batwing collar.

Though Monsieur Morillon provided a full table of delicacies and a selection of beverages, neither principal cared for refreshments. Seeing the Vampire's alarming filed teeth, the Persian remembered why Erik never let anyone see him take food or drink. With his lipless mouth, he must slurp like a dog or pour measures straight down his throat. And – too late! – it also struck him that, considering how advancement was gained in Les Vampires, a sensible precaution would be to drink nothing in the company of a Vice-President in Charge of Poison.

Had the Anis been unusually bitter?

'To the point, my friend,' began the Grand Vampire, 'you are aware of the death of Count Camille de Rosillon?'

Erik nodded.

The Count, attaché to the Embassy of the Baltic Principality of Pontevedro, was one of those mildly ornamental fellows who flit between balls, engagements and duels. He was so elaborately useless everyone took him for a spy. Erik, who made it his business to know, was aware of the Count's deepest secret – he was entirely as trivial as he seemed, and not in the employ of any domestic or foreign intelligence agency. De Rosillon knew the latest dances before his rivals and was only too eager to teach them to a pretty young wife or daughter or maid or secretary. It was no surprise he should wind up naked with his throat cut, wrapped in silk sheets and stuffed into the laundry chute of the Hôtel Meurice. What was surprising was that the sheets were unstained. When Dr Dieudonné, the lady coroner, cut open his veins, scarcely a drop of blood remained in his body.

'You know what they are saying about the case?'

Erik chortled, an unnerving sound.

'The pretty little things of the corps de ballet whisper that de Rosillon was killed…by a vampire! The body was discovered by trap-setters called in to deal with a sudden invasion of rats from the sewers beneath the hotel, and everyone knows that where the nosferatu go there follow great swarms of vermin.'

The Grand Vampire scowled.

'…And can you guess what that fathead of a policeman, Inspector d'Aubert, has concluded?'

'Spell it out for me.'

'This d'Aubert – curse his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather before him! – makes the ridiculous assumption that we – Les Vampires– drank the blood of this de Rosillon fellow. In short, he thinks we are vampires!'

'Some say I'm a ghost.'

'That's not been disproved,' put in Vénénos, unhelpfully.

Erik turned to glare through his mask's eyeholes at the Vice-President in Charge of Poison. Vénénos paled, as if he'd accidentally sampled a drink he had intended for someone else.

'Do not be impertinent,' snapped his chief.

'I see your problem,' Erik conceded. 'You have cultivated a certain…reputation. Now it has turned around to bite you.'

The Grand Vampire warmed to the subject, spots of colour in his chalk-white cheeks.

'A generation ago, the foremost criminals of France were the Black Coats,' said the Grand Vampire. 'Crude robbers, brigands and extortionists, but well organised, disciplined and with a dramatic flair. A story got around that they were in league with the Devil. Those who even thought about crossing them were struck dead, and so forth. I needn't tell you how that trick works. When our society rose in competition with the Black Coats, we needed to be more fearsome, more ruthless, more supernatural. So, though we are no more undead than your boulevard apache is a Red Indian, we declared ourselves Les Vampires. You may remember there was a vampire craze at the theatre, early in the century…'

'I know the opera Der Vampyr, by Heinrich Marschner, first given in Leipzig in 1828,' said Erik. 'A mediocre piece, but it had its vogue.'

'I don't go to the opera myself. Big draughty houses and fat women singing words no one can understand… I prefer cabaret.'

The Grand Vampire was fortunate not to find a stake thrust through his heart. Erik let him continue.

'So, we took the name vampire. We encouraged the belief we were monsters of the night, all-seeing, undefeatable, bloodthirsty. The Black Coats went into decline. Who in this day and age is afraid of their grandfather's moth-eaten greatcoat? Who is not afraid of vampires? For twenty years, we have proudly declared ourselves children of the night… We have drunk thickened red wine from gold goblets at black masses, we have slept in coffins, we have shunned daylight. And we have cut throats wholesale and tossed bled-out bodies into the Seine.'

'You have convinced me of your innocence,' said Erik, dryly.

The Grand Vampire showed all his white, sharp shark teeth.

'This Inspector d'Aaubert is in charge of the de Rosillon exsanguination,' he said. 'It is just the sort of case a flic who wishes advancement dreams of. A culprit – preferably a whole mob of 'em – will go to the guillotine for this little killing. And the Sûreté has declared war on Les Vampires.'

'Inconvenient for you, I imagine.'

'They have little chance of convicting any of us…'

'Of course,' Erik allowed, magnanimously.

'…but takings are down, across the board. Raid after raid cuts into business. Houses of vice are empty. Smuggled goods pile uncollected on the docks. Robbery in the street is impossible with all these extra vigilance patrols. The bold gendarmes grow bolder. They run us in, my friend, they run us in…'

The Grand Vampire sounded weary. He was not the first to hold his title. If things didn't go their way, Les Vampires were prone to getting rid of chiefs. Vénénos obviously wondered how he'd look in a domino and a beaver hat.

'It's not just the police, Monsieur le Fantôme,' the Grand Vampire continued. 'The rooftops of Paris are ours, as the caverns below the streets are yours. Among the chimneys we have mapped out boulevards and squares, highways and hostelries. For a month now, there has been a trespasser on our patch. Almost nightly is he seen. A creature with great black wings and eyes of fire. Fearsome are his talons and fangs. He squats among the gargoyles of Notre Dame, scanning crowds below for prey. He leaps – or flies – across wide streets, silhouetted against the moon. Or crawls head-down like a lizard, on the frontage of the Louvre. Three nights ago, the attention-seeking nuisance was spotted above the rue de Rivoli, near the Hôtel Meurice. The next morning, de Rosillon was found. D'Aubert insists this amateur is one of us. He forgets – or it suits him to forget – that we of Les Vampires are not seen.'

Erik nodded. He himself was more often heard than seen.

'It may be that this Black Bat is a meddler rather than a murderer,' continued the Grand Vampire, 'but he exists, and he's mixed up with de Rosillon. Yet the police harass us, rather than look out for this jumped-up rooftop rapscallion.'

'You have my sympathies, Monsieur le Vampire,' said Erik. 'You are in a cleft stick. You can't publicly declare your innocence of this murder because your enterprise depends on people thinking you might be capable of crimes like this.'

'You have it exactly.'

'A pretty conundrum indeed.'

' Les Vampires
should like to engage the Opera Ghost Agency to solve this murder – at your usual rates – and hand the culprit over to justice.'

'Is that all?'

'Of course, we'd do it ourselves,' the Grand Vampire declared, with a dismissive wave as if referring to a chore as simple as coshing a priest or dynamiting a charity hospital, 'but we have principles. We can't assist the police. There would be scandal.'

Erik fell silent and shut his eyes.

The Persian knew he had not fallen asleep. He was thinking.

'No,' he said, at last. 'With regret, we cannot take your case. Simple murders are outside our purview. The Sûreté are surprisingly good at solving them…'

The Persian conceded that this was generally the case, though the French police had their limitations and blindspots. The former Madame Calhoun and the in-all-but-name widow Latimer were walking around unarrested and unguillotined. Even the washerwoman in the counting-house of Les Vampires had shoved a postman down a well to prove herself qualified for her position.

'The Sûreté believe they have already solved this murder. They believe I am the murderer. They will look no further for their culprit.'

'I see their reasoning. Again, my sympathies.'

The Grand Vampire slumped on the sofa and spat out his teeth. His original set had been pulled long ago to accommodate the fangs, but he tired of them. They made his gums bleed.

The meeting at midnight was drawing to an end.

'Little escapes Les Vampires,' said the Grand Vampire, slyly, 'under or above the roofs of Paris. When our sentries reported this bat-creature, we knew that inside the Spring-Heeled Chauve-Souris was a man. Can you guess who we first thought that man must be?'

Erik said nothing.

'You, my dear Phantom,' said the Grand Vampire, gums glistening red. 'You.'

Erik had decided. So the matter stood.

Sophy Kratides cleaned her guns and kept her knives honed.

Inspector d'Aubert announced he was confident a significant arrest would shortly be made in the de Rosillon murder. No one in Paris held their breath.

Lesser vampires were hauled screeching into the sun and locked up. Some elderly criminals put aside vampire capes and dragged their old black coats from the back of the wardrobe. The Grand Vampire went underground.

Small items in the newspapers reported sightings of a bat-shaped man or a man-sized bat. A vampire scare took fire. Women wore garlic-smeared chokers until lovers complained. Godless roués sported silver crucifix tie-pins and carried hip-flasks of holy water filched from the font in Saint-Sulpice.

Many veiled ladies showed up for de Rosillon's funeral. Afterwards, two fought a duel for the right to declare themselves his widow. Neither were hurt badly. Both soon found patrons to soothe their grief.

The Agency successfully concluded small cases. Unorna exposed 'Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana', a fraudulent medium who sold bogus maps to the lost treasure of Monte Cristo. La Marmoset solved a puzzling mystery which began with poisoned pet cats and thwarted an attempt on the life of a popular lady novelist who had just made a will in favour of her English butler.

For her part, and off the books, Sophy mercifully crippled a ponce who signed his name on girls with a branding iron. She left the women to dispose of him as they saw fit.

The Agency disapproved of side-ventures, but justice must be served as she saw it… not according to the dictates of a man behind a mirror.

Sophy was in two minds about masterminds.

But she liked La Marmoset – in most of her persons – and warmed to the strange-eyed new girl, Unorna. She was even fond of the Persian.

The world of the opera house was endlessly diverting. Coming and going by the stage door, she was often taken for a singer or a dancer. Like Erik, she was emotionally attached to the company – fiercely critical of missteps, yet partisan as the longest-serving claqueur. Protective of chorus and corps de ballet, she cast an eye over the crowd of young men who gathered at the stage door, cautioning girls against fellows who struck her wrong.

There were always one or two…

The great success of the season was a revival of Macbeth. Anatole Garron gave the performance of his career in the title role, and was widely praised and toasted. Erik sent a rare note of approval to Garron, who was suitably humbled. As a rule, the Phantom paid scant attention to baritones – or to male opera singers in general – but, like le tout-Paris, he admired the magnificent, murdering thane.

It was adjudged that Garron bettered Ismaël, who had originated the French version of the role some twenty years earlier. Then, the much-awaited piece was a sorry failure. Ismaël lived long enough to fume in silence as his successor took curtain calls. Even Signor Verdi, who would only really be satisfied if he could sing all the parts and conduct the orchestra himself, thought Garron 'quite good – for a Frenchman…'

Wherever Garron went, the cry of 'Macbetto' followed him.

Couturiers put higher prices on tartan. The success set off a fashion for Scottish plaids.

In Dressing Room 313, the Persian read the latest notices. All the newspapers – and some of the newspaper critics– who had dismissed Macbeth as overblown and tuneless in 1865 now declared it a masterpiece. Throughout the run, the raves poured in.

But the house was not entirely happy.

With receipts up, everyone thought they should be paid more – but the Management always said expenses were up in excess of income.

And there were accidents.

'In England, they say Macbeth is unlucky,' observed Unorna.

La Marmoset, who wore a frock coat and trousers, cocked an ear. She was gumming a precise little goatee and moustache to her face. 'In an English theatre, it is not done even to mention the title,' Unorna explained. 'When it must be talked of, actors call it "the Scottish play".'

'Pah!' said La Marmoset, experimenting with a new character – a French literary lion with more opinions than published works. 'The superstition of fools and dullards. For Anatole Garron, Macbeth
has proved lucky.'

'But only at the expense of some other fellow,' said Sophy. 'A detective might suspect someone jostled the hand of fate…'

Opportunity came late in Garron's career. Aside from an early role in – strange to relate – Marschner's Der Vampyr, he had seldom been given star parts. He was so convincing as a vampire, producers were reluctant to cast him as a normal man, yet Méphistophéles, a plum non-human bass-baritone role, was literally out of his range.

As Macbeth went into rehearsal, Giovanni Jones – the company's premier baritone – happened to choke on a stew-bone and lose his voice. Jones's Macbetto costumes were taken in for the less substantial Garron, who surprised everyone with his impassioned performance. All Paris applauded… except Jones, who remembered Garron had insisted he try the lapin en cocotte
at the little restaurant in Impasse Sandrié. The bitter, laid-up singer muttered that his successor didn't need acting ability to play an ambitious second-rater who'd go to any lengths to get a king out of his way and steal a crown.

'It's the nature of the piece,' said La Marmoset. 'All the witches and prophecies and ghosts and murders. Gloomy associations. The same with Faust and its devils. Bad things always happen when Faust is given.'

Sophy noticed the Persian shuddering at that.

'So, when Macbeth is playing and a stagehand stubs his toe or a dancer's brother falls over miles from the house or a bit of Birnam Wood catches fire… why, it must be the curse! The hens cluck and cross themselves and spit three times. Yet things are always happening, good and bad. They happen for reasons observable to the trained mind. When mishaps mishappen while a comedy is on stage, no one says dark forces are at work.'

'There are curses,' said Unorna, who was laying out a Tarot deck. 'There are spirits all around.'

'Are there vampires?' asked Sophy.

The Witch of Prague shrugged slowly like a stretching cat. She gave one of her peculiar half-smiles. Her grey eye glistened and her brown eye gleamed.

'I have no reason to believe there aren't,' she said.

Why was the Witch really here? Sophy half-thought her less interested in Erik's reputed magic powers than in the tricks which convinced people he was a ghost.

'There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,' intoned Unorna.

'That's Hamlet, not Macbeth,' said La Marmoset. 'He is overrated, that Englishman. His comedies – ha! – they are not funny. His tragedies – heh! – they are not sad. And his histories – ho! – they are all lies. He is not fit to fill the inkwell of Pierre Gringoire or cut the quill of François Villon.'

La Marmoset was now completely a made-up character. Her hair was oiled and plastered, with a kiss-curl on her forehead. She even seemed to be balding.

Sophy admired her friend's knack of disguise, but – in quiet moments – worried about it too. When she and Paul were little and pulled faces, their English nanny had an expression that frightened them: 'When the wind changes, you'll be stuck like that!'

What would happen to La Marmoset if the wind changed?

Unorna surveyed her scrying cards and frowned.

She gathered them up quickly, shuffled and laid them out again.

Then she meticulously tidied the pack and kept its secrets to herself.

'We are bored, Daroga,' said Sophy. 'Find us something to do.'

'Ah, the Angels are restless,' commented the Persian. 'And, as usual, Erik is occupied elsewhere. I find myself governess to girls who all act as if they've only just celebrated their sixth birthdays.'

The Angels laughed, but it was true.

Left to their own devices, they made mischief.

La Marmoset wrote anonymous letters to the newspapers, naming the culprits in open police cases. She could glance at the briefest report of a crime and pick out vital clues that had been missed. This hobby was not popular with the police… or criminals.

Unorna cultivated carnivorous orchids in a specially heated chamber beneath the boiler room. She fed them on rats bought from the house catcher at five centimes a rodent. From these blooms, she distilled potions which stank out the place.

Sophy threw on a shawl, put a bayonet in her reticule, and went about the city until she spotted a woman with a black eye or a thick lip. She would follow the poor soul to the man – husband, father or employer – who had hurt her, then cut off one of his hands and slap him with it.

'Be patient and Erik will provide amusement… perhaps more than you would like.'

As if invoked, the shadow of the Phantom rose behind the mirror…

Sophy suspected he had ways of knowing what others thought, either by Unorna's method of mental telepathy or La Marmoset's method of observing telltale twitches.

The Angels and the Persian all noticed him at the same time.

'Ladies, Daroga,' he began.

The voice, a forceful purr, seemed to come from everywhere in the room at once. A trick of acoustics, or ventriloquism. Once, when the women thought themselves really alone, Unorna tried to match the effect – but had to admit defeat.

'Tonight, the final performance of Macbeth will be given,' intoned Erik.

Posters were up all over the building with 'Last Night' plastered across them. Scalpers offered tickets at twenty times the listed price. If not otherwise occupied by skirmishes with the police,
Les Vampires would have counterfeited tickets and sold them at forty times the listed price.

'I shall watch the performance,' continued the Phantom. 'As a special concession, you may join me.'

Box Five was permanently set aside for Erik's use.

'Afterwards, there is to be a masked ball to celebrate the great success.'

At the Paris Opéra, Sophy thought, there would be a masked ball to celebrate a great failure… or commemorate the opening of a ham pie.

'I have approved of the production… of Garron… and we shall bestow upon the ball the honour of our attendance.'

Without the triviality of invitations, of course.

'Costumes will be provided for you all. Tonight is the night of Macbetto!'