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 proven 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 locomotives 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.
Could he have summoned a vampire to dispose of his arch-enemy?
'Want to go into your dance?' prompted La Marmoset.
She hadn't wanted to risk it – for obvious reasons – in a citadel of the unhappy dead like the Morgue. This wasn't an ideal situation, either – but Unorna felt obliged to make the effort.
'It'll look like I've fallen asleep,' she told La Marmoset and Sophy. 'Don't let me fall off my chair and do myself an injury.'
They promised to look out for her.
Unorna sat back and opened her mind to the vibrations in the hall.
She did not intend to enter a full trance, merely to test the aetheric waters.
She rose above herself and looked down.
There were ghosts in the room.
Some chairs were occupied by indistinct forms, tethered here because they lacked the will to go anywhere else. The locomotives in the photographs puffed. All these ghosts seemed made of steam…
The ghost of the railwayman's lost arm was attached to his shoulder, a transparent tube with an inflated glove at the end of it, flapping like a flag in the wind. His friend's face wasn't handsome under his blur of scarring, though. A bright eye shone through his patch. The fellow might be faking it for a pension.
Giovanni Jones was red from head to foot, and dripping. Blood invisible to everyone else – and to himself – seeped from every pore, and pooled around his shoes. The residue of undetected crime. Bat-winged imps buzzed around the singer. If he were stalked by the bloodless shade of Anatole Garron pointing and intoning 'Thou art the man!' Jones could not have looked more guilty.
Unorna knew even the police thought it worthwhile to have a long, hard talk with the man who most loudly expressed the opinion that the Great Anatole ought to be killed on the night he actually was. La Marmoset admitted most murders could be solved by arresting the victim's worst enemy – but cases like that seldom came to the Agency. They were called in when it wasn't so simple. Jones was on friendly terms with Camille de Rosillon, who had died before Garron inherited the kilt of Macbetto. If Jones were the vampire, he must have another motive. Unkind critics often pointed out how poorly cast he was as seducers like Don Giovanni or fighters like William Tell. It was hard to believe the balloon-shaped baritone spent the after-hours crawling up walls or leaping between tall buildings.
He was guilty of
something
, though. Then again, so was everyone.
Before coming to Paris, Unorna gave little thought to crime. Her interest in sin was spiritual rather than legal. Working with the Opera Ghost Agency changed her mind. Her sisters had been hurt, spiritually and physically, by men. Crimes had been committed against them.
They were good at what they did because the memory of pain was a spur. La Marmoset, Angel of Light, had a mania for finding out how a thing had been done and who was to blame. Sophy Kratides, Angel of Vengeance, was set on the righting of wrongs through bloodshed.
What Angel was Unorna?
She thought of herself as the Angel in a Mist. It was not necessary she knew everything… or that she turned the wheel of justice. She was here to help when matters weren't clear, when light could not be shone and vengeance was futile.
Erik called her the Angel of Magic.
Her path was solitary, but at this stage she needed to be with others. She was learning.
She sank back into herself.
The room was slightly less sparsely populated than before, but there were still more empty seats than occupied.
'What have you seen?' Sophy asked.
'Gio Jones, covered in blood,' she whispered.
La Marmoset made a face. 'This is in a dream, right?'
Unorna allowed that it was not literal blood.
La Marmoset shrugged.
'The fellow at the back is wearing an eyepatch over a good eye,' Unorna said.
'I know,' said La Marmoset. 'He's someone in disguise. His scars are crepe.'
'Any ideas?'
La Marmoset inclined her head. 'Ayda's from Les Vampires, checking up on us… so he's not one of them, unless he's checking up on her. He's too good at make-up to be a policeman, so he might be another consulting 'tec, out to rook us of our fee. Or he could be someone from the opera company.'
'I think I've seen him before, with more of a face.'
'Or less of one,' said Sophy, oddly.
Under Unorna's influence, she was starting to have insights. Or starting to think she was.
A small, bald man took the podium and introduced himself as Henri Paillardin of the Society for Rational Psychical Research.
'I have investigated many a haunting and can report that, invariably, it comes down to something up with the plumbing… or doses of strong spirits of the drinkable rather than the intangible kind. Our proud motto is 'There Is Always an Explanation'. With great pleasure, we welcome the distinguished Professor Madame Van Helsing of Leiden…'
The lecturer made an entrance to polite applause.
She wore a tweed caped overcoat and a matching skirt.
A little ghost boy trotted about five feet after her. Unorna had noticed him at the ball – he was attached to Madame Van Helsing. A dead son, probably. Not an uncommon form of haunting, and relatively benign. In most cases, a vague sense of presence serves to soften the curse of grief.
As the Professor approached the podium, a reedy fellow darted out and thrust an open book at her, also presenting a reservoir pen and beseeching the distinguished visitor for an autograph.
She examined the book, which bore the title Ziekten van den Bloed en Ziel.
'I write this not,' she snorted. 'Ordure of a horse, it is.'
'But… but…' gasped the bibliophile, pointing to the name Professor Van Helsing, embossed under the title.
'That my husband is.'
The autograph-seeker's face fell and ink squirted out of his pen onto the floor. He wrapped his book back up in brown paper and left the room.
'So it's started well,' said Sophy.
M. Paillardin coughed to cover embarrassment and whipped up more applause, which was grudging this time.
Madame Van Helsing climbed the podium. Her tame ghost sat on the floor, playing with a phantom cup-and-ball toy.
'There are such things not,' said Madame Van Helsing. 'Such things not… as vampires.'
Several hands shot up.
'We'll take questions at the end of the session,' said Monsieur Paillardin.
'Such things are, however, as vampire rumours. And they do much harm. Some among you may think it amusing to believe, or pretend to believe, in vampires and goblins…'
Madame Van Helsing took the same line on the undead as La Marmoset and Dr Dieudonné. Unorna was not prepared to go so far. She had not met a vampire – that she knew of – but had seen things which would shake a Society for Rational Psychical Research. In Norway, she had certainly met a goblin.
'These madnesses come in fashions. Don Quixote tilted at windmills in the belief that giants they might be… irresponsible pseudo-scientists now put about romances which would inspire a modern-day Quixote to chase after vampires. Corpses animated by demons, who blood drink and in coffins rest by day. Where is there harm, you might ask? Here – here there is harm!'
The Professor rattled the podium, gripping fiercely.
'There is a vampire delusion running among us now,' she continued. 'All Paris knows of the dead men drained of blood.'
'It's a publicity stunt for the Paris Opéra,' shouted someone at the back. 'They're putting on Le Vampire…'
'Publicity for Le Vampire's not much good if you haven't got a Lord Ruthven,' said Sophy.
'It should be banned, I say,' said a tiny, angry-looking woman. 'No good will come of it. Think of the children. You tell 'em, Prof. No good.'
'Regrettable is it that vampires parade on stage,' agreed the lecturer. 'Regrettable more is that to the stage they are not confined.'
The little ghost boy nuzzled the Professor's skirts like a kitten. She was insensible to his presence. Unorna wondered at the effort of will it must take to ignore an attendant spirit like this. She was certain the child would be apparent to Madame Van Helsing if only she paid attention.
'What about the Black Bat of the Rooftops?' asked Rival.
'A foolhardy adventurer in silly clothes,' said the Professor.
'The two dead men, drained of blood, grinning like it was Christmas, throats gashed by sharp fangs…'
'Murders plain ordinary.'
Two more people got up and walked out.
'This in Paris has happened before… with tragic outcome. Twenty-five years ago, inspired by a course of lectures given at the Sorbonne by my deluded husband, this city set out to find a vampire who did not exist… Innocents were accused. The mob was set off. There were tragic outcomes.'
A coughing started up in the room. Giovanni Jones seemed to be choking on that bone again.
'The extent full of those horrors have never revealed been. When I began my research into the scare, it was only a horror historical… but now, with the fresh killings, it has become a horror present. We must not again let happen the worst.'
Jones was doubled over now, racking with coughs.
Ayda fetched him water from a jug on a sideboard. He looked up, clutching his stomach. Blood was dripping from his lips.
Unorna started.
'Yes,' said Sophy, 'I see it too. It's real this time.'
Jones brushed aside the jug, which exploded on the floor, and tried to stand.
Madame Van Helsing and Monsieur Paillardin looked at this interruption with annoyance.
Jones got to his feet. The blood was all down his front now.
His eyes were wide with pain, but he was smiling.' Sacrebleu!' gasped the one-armed old railwayman. 'He's a bloody vampire!'
La Marmoset andUnorna warily approached the stricken Giovanni Jones.
Sophy Kratides held back. When there was commotion, someone had to pay attention to everyone else in the room. Commotions were also distractions.
The suspicious one-eyed railwayman assumed a savate stance. Grey powder shook out of his hair.
Madame Van Helsing frowned at the interruption.
M. Henri Paillardin of the Society for Rational Psychical Research fainted dead away in terror. He seemed to have run out of rational explanations.
Ayda Heidari had a small pistol in her hand.
Fair enough – Sophy slid a jack-knife out of her sleeve.
Jones flailed, beating away people who might have helped him. His eyes were red as his shirt-front.
The smile was widening, as if fishhooks inside his cheeks were tugging his lips.
He was a big man – well-cushioned but towering, surprisingly powerful. His lungs were capacious enough to produce a voice which filled the auditorium of the Paris Opéra, after all. La Marmoset ducked under his elbow and tried to get a hold on him.
Croaking, he pushed her away.
He would not be told anyone was trying to help. He saw only enemies around him.
'This outrageous is,' declared Madame Van Helsing. 'I must be let finish. Heard must be truth.'
That ship had sailed and sunk, Sophy thought.
Jones blurted up a mist of blood. He roared and charged like a blinded bull elephant, ploughing across the room, knocking chairs and patrons aside. The plainclothes policeman got tangled up in his chair and fumbled for a whistle.
The doors were flung open and Jones staggered onto the street.
La Marmoset gave Sophy the nod. She was best placed to follow.
Pulling on her coat and scarf, Sophy left the railwaymen's institute.
A trail of blood was on the pavement.
She wasn't the only person following the tracks. In the gutter, she saw an eyepatch and a half-mask of crinkled crepe.
The fake railwayman had a head start.
She walked briskly down the street. If she ran, she'd attract attention. Someone would get in the way.
The institute was near the Gare du Nord. Crowds were coming to and from the station even in the middle of the evening. She lost the trail amid so many scything feet and sweeping dress hems… but found it again, only to realise that it petered out.
Was Jones poisoned or possessed?
The frontage of the station was illuminated like a theatre. Carriages were lined up for disembarking passengers.
She found the railwayman's old coat stuffed into a street waste bin.
Crowds passed on all sides. Her quarry had got away.
'That lady's got a knife,' said a small child in a sailor suit, pointing.
'Don't be silly,' said his mother. 'She's much too respectable. Look at her.'
Sophy had jammed her knife up her sleeve.
She had lost Jones and his other pursuer, though. She did not like to lose people – unless it was on her terms.
La Marmoset would probably be able to identify the fake railwayman from his coat. Perhaps he had stained it with a unique blend of tobaccos or had his name written in onion-juice in mirror writing inside a pocket. By the time the Queen of Detectives had made her deductions, it would be too late for some poor soul, though…
She was being unfair, she knew. Not all Great Detectives were alike.
Under the coat, she found the imposter's clay pipe. She noticed the bowl was empty and still white. Picking the thing up, she found it wasn't a real pipe but a disguised blowdart gun. So, Giovanni Jones had been stuck with something poisonous.
At least she had learned – detected– something, even if she'd lost the trail.
Something small and furry darted between her feet. And another one. There were squeals and squeaks all around…rats! Speeding towards the station, whiskers twitching, cramming into the gutters and grates, as if summoned by a rat-horn inaudible to human ears. The vampire's familiars.
'There are people up there,' said the observant little boy. 'On the front of the station.'
'Ridiculous,' said the mother. 'The nonsense I have to put up with!'
'But, Maman…'
The child was hauled away, wailing at the injustice.
Sophy looked up and saw the sharp-eyed lad was right again.
Surmounting the station were nine commanding statues: eight representing destinations in other countries, the central figure standing in for Paris herself. Below, on the façade, fourteen more modest statues represented less important cities; on a narrow ledge between these minor arcana, under the great clock, people were struggling.
Giovanni Jones… three women in white, agile like acrobats… and a masked man, all in black with a billowing cloak.
The women were the Countesses Dorabella, Clarimonde and Géraldine. Up to no good, Sophy would be bound – though she hadn't expected their high-living would stretch to high-flying.
Were they more familiars of the Black Bat?
Sophy couldn't read the situation.
The struggle was a mess. She couldn't tell whether the Countesses were attacking Jones while fighting off the man in black, or the victims of a combined assault by the vampire singer and his dark master, or were getting between the two strange men, to protect one from the other, or keep them apart for their own ends.
She was the wrong Angel for this. La Marmoset or Unorna would both know what they were looking at.
Others in the crowd had happened to look up. Soon, everyone on the street was staring. Whistles sounded, so the police were on their way too.
'The vampire… the vampire…' went the whisper, which became a cry.
Yes, but which was the vampire?
Gasps of alarm rose as Countess Clarimonde lost her foothold and tumbled backwards… then gasps of wonder, as she seemed to catch on invisible wires and propel herself up to get a firm grip on the neck of the statue representing Rouen. She held on so hard that the crowned head came off. She caught the stone head in one hand and bowled it like a cannon-ball at the man in black. He deflected it with one ribbed cape-wing, and it smashed through a window. Shards of glass pattered down onto the pavement and people backed away.
The other Countesses grasped perches with their toes and clawed at the Black Bat with dagger-nails.
Were these really the frivolous playthings of a Romanian nobleman? They were more like harpies!
Jones dangled, limp as a deflating gas-bag. His braces were hooked on the sword-pommel of the statue representing Lille. He still smiled.
The man in black wore a snarling mask with shiny dark glass over the eyes and flared batwing ears. His chin and mouth were exposed.
All the better to bite you with?
Sophy assumed the Black Bat had worn the railwayman disguise.
His intricate cloak-wing contraption reminded her of a Da Vinci drawing. He wore a tight tunic with double rows of shiny buttons. Odd implements hung from a tool-belt. His boots had springs in the heels and his gauntlets had suction cups in the palms. The outfit should have been unwieldy, but he moved with practised ease, swatting the bothersome women.
The Countesses were barefoot, their shift-like evening dresses hiked up over their white limbs.
They already had admirers below, for their déshabillé… and the possibility that jewels might fall from their tiaras into eager hands.
How had they got up there?
Sophy scanned the front of the station, and saw a ladder…
She ran towards it.
Countess Géraldine got her hands around the throat of the man in black, hissing at him through gleaming teeth. Ungallantly, he punched her in the ribs and she sailed off into space, only to be caught by Countess Dorabella.
This seemed a personal fight.
Sophy had almost got to the ladder when Giovanni Jones's strained braces snapped. The big baritone fell onto a carriage, crushing the wooden roof. The startled horse reared and neighed, and the coachman had to fight to keep the beast from bolting.
Looking up, she saw the Countesses leaping from statue to statue, and the Black Bat silhouetted against the sky. He was on the cornice, next to the great shield-bearing statue of Paris. His cloak-wings spread and he launched upwards, catching the wind like a kite. He flew out of sight.
The Countesses were gone too – through the broken window into the station.
Only Jones was left behind.
Sophy got to the carriage just as the singer rolled out of its wreckage like several sacks of potatoes.
He was still smiling. His throat wasn't cut but pierced – two deep holes gouged into his jugular vein.
'Ho, let me through,' said a woman. 'I'm a doctor.'
'It's not a doctor he needs,' Sophy said.
'He needs the kind of doctor I am,' said Geneviève Dieudonné. 'I'm the coroner, remember?'
Sophy looked at the French woman, who knelt by the body.
She pulled on thin white cotton gloves and touched the neck-holes with the tips of two fingers.
'I thought as much,' she said. 'The murderer was in too much of a hurry to make a mess of the throat this time, so we can see the real fatal wounds.'
'A vampire bite?'
The coroner flashed a sharp smile up at Sophy. 'There's a resemblance to the traditional two little punctures, isn't there? Lord Ruthven and Mircalla Karnstein couldn't have done it more neatly… or obviously. Because they're not so little, these punctures. They are, in fact, enormous.'
She easily slid her fingertips into the wounds, then took them out again.
'Imagine having teeth this size,' she said. 'You'd never be able to close your mouth.'
Gendarmes gathered around, accepting the coroner's authority. La Marmoset and Unorna were also here. Drawn to the station by the hullabaloo, they'd witnessed the aerial spectacle.
Dr Dieudonné took hold of Jones's face, feeling the stretched cheek muscles.
'Here's that smile again,' she continued, 'and the lack of lividity which suggests enormous loss of blood.'
'He was poisoned,' said Sophy. 'Shot with a blow-dart.'
'Poisoned and bled out,' said Dr Dieudonné. 'A touch excessive, though it squares with the possibility of venom in the wounds of the other victims.'
'Was the old railwayman a vampire?' asked Unorna. 'Did you see?'
'He flew away,' said Sophy. 'His wings were mechanical.'
'That explains a lot,' said La Marmoset. 'We've been chasing a very ingenious, inventive fellow. But it's stage magic, not sorcery.'
'The Countesses don't use tricks, though,' put in Unorna. 'They could hardly have secretly strung the front of the Gare du Nord with the invisible wires they use in the circus. And those are never
really
invisible.'
'I don't know about the women,' admitted Sophy. 'But the bat-creature of the rooftops is a human man. Madame Van Helsing said his clothes were silly, but she's wrong. They're very clever.'
Dr Dieudonné stood, brushing dust off her knees.
The coroner looked at Sophy, La Marmoset and Unorna, smiling brightly, eyes a-glitter behind dark spectacles.
'You're those Opera Angels, aren't you?'
In La Marmoset's previous experience, coroners sat in their nice cold morgues and waited for bodies to be delivered before involving themselves in criminal investigations.
Geneviève Dieudonné was a new breed, evidently. She preferred her murder victims fresh-killed, and was interested in things beyond the simple – or, as in this case, not so simple – means of death.
She was unusual in several ways. Most of them suspicious.
Dr Dieudonné kept turning up in l'affaire du vampire, like a new-minted silver coin in a purse full of dull brown change. At Garron's autopsy, La Marmoset saw how deft the doctor was. Now, she noticed she was also
quick.
Standing over the bulky body of Giovanni Jones, the coroner had already made notes, which – with a trace of ghoulish excitement – she was eager to share with the Opera Ghost Agency.
'As I was telling your colleague, the murderer didn't have time to finish with this one. Perhaps now we can see what he's really up to.'
'He?' prompted La Marmoset.
'Murderers are usually he…'
Sophy snorted at that.
'Vampires can be women,' said Unorna. 'The Karnstein case…'
'I'm aware of it,' said the coroner, off-handedly. 'If there was such a person as Mircalla Karnstein, she wasn't typical. Your usual vampire is a fatal man. Lord Ruthven, Sir Francis Varney, Arnold Paole, Ezzelin von Klatka…'
Dr Dieudonné seemed as eager as Saartje Van Helsing to dismiss the existence of vampires… unless they were men. In which case, she'd happily hoist the lot of them on poles.
'…rotting dead-alive aristocrats, leeching the blood of peasants. It's easy to see how the tales got started. The myth is a caricature of social injustice, is it not? Vampire stories tell us the rich are literally apart from the rest of humanity. Not really people, but monsters or devils. Predatory parasites. Spreaders of venereal disease. I'm surprised Émile Zola hasn't written a novel about vampires.'
The gendarmes strung ropes to keep back badauds, the specific breed of Paris bystander who gather and gawk at any opportunity. Word spread that the vampire had struck again, and this new victim was also a famous opera singer. When people heard which famous opera singer, interest faded into disappointment. It would have been so much more titillating and horrifying to see the Great Anatole dead in a gutter than the plump has-been Giovanni Jones. Even in obituaries, he was upstaged.
'I'd like to get Monsieur Jones to the Morgue now,' said Dr Dieudonné. 'With every passing moment, he can tell us less.'
La Marmoset realised what struck her as strange about Dr Dieudonné. The coroner thought like a
detective.
'Surely, he can't tell us anything any more,' said Sophy.
La Marmoset and Dr Dieudonné looked at her with similar indulgence.
'She means the condition of his corpse gives things away,' said Unorna, 'not that he can literally talk. You know, it's what she's always looking for… clues.'
The police requisitioned a luggage cart from the station. Dr Dieudonné supervised as two brawny gendarmes tried to heft the literal dead weight off the flagstones. Giovanni Jones was not easy to get a grip on.
There was no dignity in death.
At last, the sweating flics wrestled Jones into the cart. His arms and legs flopped over the sides.
A keening moan came from his open mouth.
La Marmoset jumped. Several in the crowd screamed.
'He's not alive,' said Unorna. 'I can tell.'
'Just wind from inside,' said Dr Dieudonné, pressing fingers against his chest to be sure there was no heartbeat. 'Not uncommon, but you never get used to it.'
'You said the throat-cutting might be to hide the real killing wounds,' reminded Sophy, pointing to Jones's neck.
'Yes. Here they are, fresh and unobscured. A breakthrough in the case.'
'Isn't there another possibility? That the vampire drank the blood of the earlier victims, then cut their throats… to
stop them coming back!'
La Marmoset looked at Jones. Was something stirring inside this hulk?
'One way to become a vampire is to be bitten by another vampire,' said Unorna.
'It doesn't work like that,' said Dr Dieudonné. 'Just being bled doesn't pass on the condition. There must be an exchange of blood. Even that doesn't always work.'
'You sound as much an expert as Madame Van Helsing's husband,' observed La Marmoset.
Dr Dieudonné regarded La Marmoset shrewdly. The living snagged her attention less easily than the dead.
She paused for thought. Then smiled.
'In my profession,' she said, 'you learn gruesome things. Facts and fables. Little suitable for polite company. As you can imagine, I don't entertain much.'
'You're not married?'
'No. Odd, that. You're… widowed?'
'Separated.'
'My condolences… or are congratulations in order?'
'We're all better off without Mr Calhoun.'
La Marmoset thought she and Dr Dieudonné had the measure of each other.
'Delightful as this has been, ladies, I must accompany Monsieur Jones to the Morgue. If you run into Raoul d'Aubert, you might tell him about these developments. I'll work through the night and get my report on his desk by morning. I'm a little surprised he's not here already.'
So was La Marmoset.
D'Aubert had known Giovanni Jones… and Camille de Rosillon and Anatole Garron. They were university contemporaries. As was the Austrian lawyer, Dr Falke.
The vampire was fishing in a small pond.
The police carted away the corpse, making slow progress through the terrified, fascinated crowds. Dr Dieudonné scrounged a tarpaulin to throw over the dead man.
The coroner turned and saluted the Angels, then was on her way.
'There's something about that woman,' said Unorna. 'Chilly.'
'I don't know,' said La Marmoset. 'I get the impression that if any of us weren't here, she'd have a job with the Opera Ghost Agency. Whatever it is about her… we all have a touch of it too.'
'From what I saw this evening, I shouldn't be surprised if Erik sacks us and hires the Countesses,' said Sophy.
'I envy them,' said Unorna. 'Where they come from, they don't have to pretend not to be what they are. They're indulged, protected. We're out in the wild.'
'What are they?' La Marmoset asked.
'Children,' said Unorna, 'of the night… and what a racket they make!'
La Marmoset hadn't taken the Countesses seriously – but this skirmish with the Black Bat showed them to be formidable. She put them back on her list of suspects.
'So, Detective Majesty, where next?' asked Sophy.
'Police Headquarters, obviously. We need to see Inspecteur d'Aubert.'
Sophy – who didn't like the police – pouted.
'I don't see why,' she said. 'Erik went above his head to get us on the case. We aren't civil servants. We don't need to report to him.'
'We're not reporting to him. We're interviewing him. Three of his classmates are dead… which makes him either the most likely next victim or a prime suspect.'
Sophy couldn't disguise her pleasure at the thought of a dead or arrested police inspector. But La Marmoset thought it best not to take her into a nest of gendarmes, and there was another lead to follow.
'Unorna and I will run over to the Préfecture now. You see if you can find Dr Falke. He's been in and out of this business too, so he's another candidate for either the Morgue or the guillotine. I'm starting to put together a puzzle picture… it seems to go back twenty-five years.'
'To d'Aubert's student comrades?' prompted Unorna.
'Yes, and Madame Van Helsing's Paris vampire scare. We should find out more about that.'
Thanks to the Communards burning down the Préfecture de Police and its archives – a loss criminologists lamented more than the destruction of the Library of Alexandria – it was frustratingly difficult to find accurate details of cases before 1871. Setting aside whatever nonsense appeared in the sensationalist press, La Marmoset usually had to rely on the shaky memories of old thief-takers and older thieves.
'Right ho,' said Sophy. 'Meet you back at the Opéra. Remember to keep looking up. The bat flies!'
She pointed at the sky.
When La Marmoset looked back down again, Sophy was gone. She practised tricks like that. Good girl.
La Marmoset and Unorna took a fiacre back to Île de la Cité. The new Préfecture was on Place Louis Lépine. A former barracks, the building was fortified enough to hold off a concerted attack from the streets. No one was going to burn this one down.
Of course, if the enemies of order were flying these days, they'd have to bar the upper windows and skylights.
Walking into the front hall, La Marmoset was greeted heartily by comrades. Once, she'd seen more of this place than her own home. She'd spent nights in the cells, in disguise as a rowdy tart, worming secrets out of other prisoners, and once even aiding a daring escape. She'd used the shooting range in the basement and the observatory on the roof. She'd had her own office, and established an elaborate identity as her own flirtatious secretary, Mimi Bienville. More young officers asked to step out with imaginary Mimi than her real boss.
Signing in at the front desk ahead of them was Inspecteur Bec. A bald, jolly fellow with a prominent moustache and an even more prominent nose, he was a policeman who'd rather let a bank robber get clean away than work a minute past his allotted shift. When assigned a case, his first impulse was to find another officer to take it off his plate. Amiably perplexed by crimes, he felt no personal enmity for law-breakers and seldom troubled to make an arrest or turn over a dossier to an examining magistrate. Nevertheless, he was frequently decorated and promoted. He cheerfully gave the impression that the police budget was perfectly adequate and crime no very great problem, which made him more congenial to superiors than detectives who had the poor taste to frighten politicians with talk of criminal conspiracies like Les Vampires.
'Hullo,' said Bec, spotting La Marmoset. 'I thought you were retired. Have you come to report your husband missing, ha ha ha?'
He must be the last man in Paris not to know that Mr Calhoun actually was missing.
'I did that several months ago, Bec.'
'Oooh – come to check up on us, then? I'm sure we shall run the rascal to ground. We're the Sûreté, you know. Perfect fiends for locating missing persons. I believe we have a whole department for it. Who's your pretty little friend? Is she down a husband too, or just reporting a missing kitty-cat?'
'I'm not married,' said Unorna.
'Don't look at me, Mademoiselle,' chuckled the inspector. 'There's a Madame Bec at home and she has very definite views.'
'Unorna has no cat either,' said La Marmoset, impatient. 'Though she is a witch, and ought to have a familiar.'
'Don't we still have laws against that sort of thing? Sorcery and necromancy. Is she turning herself in?'
La Marmoset wondered why the vampire had spared Inspecteur Bec.
'We're here to see Inspecteur d'Aubert,' she said.
'Funny you should ask after Raoul,' he responded. 'I've been called away from hearth and home to cover his shift because he seems to have gone missing. Very unlike him.'
…And very unlike Bec to volunteer for extra duty.
'Madame Bec is in a bate about it because her parents are visiting. I suppose that makes me a suspect in the disappearance. If you'd met my wife's papa, you'd say I had a huge motive to get Raoul out of the way.'
Unorna's eyes rolled upwards. La Marmoset wondered whether Bec was sending her into a trance. Or was she summoning dark powers to give him hives or curdle his cows' milk?
'You've heard that Giovanni Jones has been murdered?'
'We've had reports from half of Paris about a flying monster and three wicked angels,' said Bec. 'Say, that wouldn't be you lot? The Opera Popsies.'
'No – it's another outfit. Tourists.'
'Rum do. This city gets crazier by the minute.'
'It was always crazy. You just learn to see it more clearly.'
Inspecteur Bec looked at her with a smile.
'I daresay you're right, Madame. You usually were. By the way, you're not the first to come in here asking after Raoul. He's popular with the ladies tonight. Another party is waiting for him to come back.'
Bec nodded sideways and La Marmoset followed his direction.
On a hard bench sat Saartje Van Helsing, glum and determined.
'Can you find us a room, Inspecteur?' La Marmoset asked. 'We'd like to talk with the Professor.'
Bec saluted. He was only too happy to dodge another possible case – especially something as noxious and likely to lead to reprimand and recrimination as l'affaire du vampire. He believed in the old gendarme's maxim of only going after the crooks you know you can catch.
'I believe I have just the place for your tête-à-têtes. From now on, we shall call it the Ladies' Lounge.'
In the foyer of the Préfecture de Police was a kiosk selling cigarettes, newspapers and souvenirs. There were similar kiosks in every public building in Paris, from the Opéra to the Morgue. While the beak-nosed bald policeman talked with Madame Van Helsing, La Marmoset went to the kiosk. She returned with a postcard which she gave to Unorna.
'When I prompt you, describe this face,' she said.
Unorna looked at the card. Then La Marmoset took it away.
'Remember, you have great psychic powers.'
'I don't make claims like…'
'Just for this evening, you do.'
Inspecteur Bec escorted Madame Van Helsing past the front desk.
La Marmoset and Unorna followed. They went along a corridor and up some stairs. The policeman showed the Professor through a plain door, then looked back and beckoned La Marmoset.
They were ushered into a windowless room lined with bookshelves and furnished with comfortable chairs and a well-upholstered divan. Books and magazines had long since overflowed the shelves and were piled in stacks where a visitor might trip over them.
Madame Van Helsing was not pleased to see the Angels.
'Raoul d'Aubert I wished to talk with,' she said.
'He's not available at the moment,' said Inspecteur Bec. 'La Marmoset is taking over his duties for the evening. She's our finest lady detective so she will be most suited to handle your delicate matter. Rest assured, she's as dogged as any man… and a sight daintier than our clod-hopping officers. By the way, La Marmoset, whatever happened to that girl who worked for you when you were here… the delightful Mimi?'
'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…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.'