Working with La Marmoset, Sophy Kratides was learning to be a detective.
The skills would be an asset in her chosen profession. You can't kill a man if you can't find him first.
She remembered Michel Falke.
He must have been added to the guest list of the opera ball by his old student friend Anatole Garron. To send an invitation, the Management must have a Paris address for him.
She returned to the Opéra. The house was dark tonight out of respect for Garron. Tomorrow, Così Fan Tutte would be hauled out and run as a fill-in until Le Vampire was ready… or replaced by something less cursed. Monsieur Richard and Monsieur Moncharmin wouldn't want to lose two nights' ticket revenue on the trot, so another way of paying tribute to the luckless Giovanni Jones would have to be found.
The administrative section of the building was deserted. Thanks to La Marmoset's lesson in basic lock-picking, she easily got into Monsieur Rémy's office. The efficient secretary kept a cabinet of address cards. Dr Falke had his place in the F section.
The Viennese wasn't staying at a hotel. He had a private address on Rue des Martyrs.
In Dressing Room 313, Sophy put on a long, burnt orange coat with a concealed inside pocket tailored as a holster for a Colt Thunderer revolver. She also clipped a throwing knife to her garter and found a not-too-dreadful hat to match the coat.
If this was really a vampire hunt, should she find a crucifix?
Raised in the Orthodox faith, Sophy thought Catholic religious objects were frivolous gewgaws. They made them too pretty, as if compensating for spiritual hollowness. Crucifixes represented execution by torture and shouldn't be ornate trinkets. She had a notion that if these charms were to be of any use, you had to believe strongly in them… and she hadn't believed in anything much since God and Sherlock Holmes let her brother die.
If she had to kill a vampire, she'd improvise a stake from a broken chair leg or something. She could readily believe in jagged wood.
She stuck the card she had taken from Monsieur Rémy's files in the corner of a mirror.
'Tell the others where I've gone,' she said.
No answer came. Though, in the dead silence of the empty house, she might have heard a rattle of strained breath. She assumed – a little superstitiously, she admitted – Erik was always listening.
'Thank you,' she said, and left.
It was past eleven o'clock, but the streets were still busy. The character of the crowds was changing from gaiety to desperation, convivial merriment to aggressive drunkenness.
Before she'd even hailed a fiacre, a man contrived to stumble against her and put his hand into her coat. He sought a soft bosom but found a hard revolver and was drunkenly puzzled. She broke two of his fingers and left him yelping.
Dr Falke's address turned out to be a private courtyard between two restaurants. The lawyer's Paris address was a three-storey house with shuttered windows. The front door lock was more of a challenge than any at the Opéra. La Marmoset hadn't yet given Sophy the advanced burglary course.
She stood back and looked up at the building.
Something struck her as odd.
There were two main drainpipes. It had rained a little early in the day, and one pipe was trickling water into a grate. The other was dry. She examined the outlet and found it dusty inside. The pipe wasn't connected to a gutter. Feeling the brickwork around the pipe, she found indentations artfully contrived to look like random cracks. They were foot-holds and the pipe was the central column of a disguised ladder.
Taking care, she scaled the building. The ladder was designed for someone with longer limbs – and probably not wearing a dress – but she reached the roof with relative ease.
Now, she was up in the territory of Les Vampires.
She took a moment to look at the lights of the city. The hubbub of the streets was muted here, but the wind more cutting.
The roof of Falke's building was unusual, a flat area surrounded by walls of sloping tile. The main feature was a large circular skylight – a swirly star pattern, individual panes between brass spokes.
Creeping across the roof, Sophy looked down into the building.
No lights were on in the room below. She could barely discern shapes.
She found a lever which worked pulleys and chains. The skylight irised open, and a spiral staircase corkscrewed up from below to afford easy access to the house. She took a moment to admire the ingenious design. Like the invisible ladder, this was custom-made.
With the skylight open, she heard sounds from below, deep in the house.
A wheezing, gurgling noise… and someone playing the piano. Für Elise.
She crept quietly down the spiral staircase. She drew her Colt and tapped around walls until she found a door.
Beyond was a dimly lit corridor. She paused as her eyes got used to the gloom.
The piano sounded louder and the other noises more disgusting.
She didn't need Unorna's extra senses to know something was more than wrong here.
She turned a corner and came face to mask with the Black Bat of the Rooftops. Its cloak wings were folded and it hung upside-down from a rail. The huge-eyed helmet looked as much like an insect as a bat.
She nearly shot the creature, but realised she was only facing an empty costume and held fire. The wings were soft leather.
There was more than one costume – a whole rack of them. Including the carnival bat outfit Falke wore to the Opéra ball. If, as seemed certain, Falke was the Black Bat, that masquerade had been an impudent gesture.
On a rack by the costumes were tools – grapples fired by pistol devices, long coils of thin black cord, knives with blades serrated like batwings, things that looked like musical instruments or torture devices, a collapsible sniper rifle she rather envied, fat black smoke-bombs with little batwings, wire nooses.
She saw how the war of the roofs was fought.
Along with the gurgling, she now heard thumping and strangulated screams. This was at least one floor below.
She found stairs and hurried down.
At the end of a corridor, a door was open a crack. Bright light seeped out. The music and the noise came from beyond.
She peeped through.
Across from the door, a man sat at a piano playing Beethoven, coat-tails flopped back over the stool.
Angling herself, she saw to one side of the room. Another man thrashed about in a bathtub, leaking blood. Something like a black octopus was wrapped around his neck, the sac pulsing and fang-spurs penetrating his jugular vein.
She kicked the door wide open and fired into the ceiling.
A sprinkling of plaster fell on the carpet. The pianist stopped and spun round on the stool.
Michel Falke smiled as if she were his welcome guest for a late-evening rendezvous.
The man in the tub was Inspecteur d'Aubert.
The exsanguinating thing wasn't an animal but a contraption. It resembled a set of black bagpipes. Blood sucked out of d'Aubert's veins was discharged through a long rubber tube which fed into the plughole. The policeman was bleeding out into the plumbing. No blood pooled around the victims because it went down the nearest drain. That explained the rats, too. They swarmed beneath the murder sites to feed on the run-off gore in the sewers. As a mere side-effect of these crimes, Paris would have to cope with rats with a taste for human blood.
D'Aubert's face was white and his eyes dull, but he smiled as Jones had done. That calming poison was in him.
The thrashing was just mechanical now.
'Miss Kratides, isn't it?' said Falke. 'I knew one of you would find me. I expected your detective friend. Or one of the Grand Vampire's brood. They don't care for the competition.'
Sophy wasn't the sort of idiot who needed to listen to an explanation.
She shot Falke in the heart.
A loud clang sounded and Falke's starched shirtfront shredded to show battleship plate. Her ears rung. She'd be hearing that for days.
Moving fast, Falke came and took her Colt away. In a trice, he had her knife from her too.
She kicked his shin, but hurt her foot. He wore chainmail long-johns. His evening clothes were cut for a larger man, to allow for armour. A red-eyed black bat was painted on his bullet-dented chest-plate.
He picked her up and plumped her down on a sofa.
She watched as he detached the vampire-machine from d'Aubert, and wrung the last blood from it. The sac churned with a clockwork mechanism which he shut off. She had noticed how cleverly his clothes and gadgets were made. If he ran them up himself, he was one of the geniuses of the age. He kept his inventions for himself rather than share them with the world. Mostly, he used his toys to kill people.
Not that she had any qualms about that as long as the proper people got killed.
'I know about you, Miss Kratides… Sophy, if I may. I have made a study of the shadow-people of Europe. There are more and more of us, haven't you noticed? I think myself lucky you were the one who found me… for you are uniquely likely to understand what I have been doing as Die Fledermaus. The wretches I bled out cheated justice – they were the murderers and I their executioner! I worked long and hard to punish them as was fit.'
She did know what he meant… but she also knew you didn't have to put on an attention-attracting costume and invent an entirely new means of murder when the world had enough knives and bullets to settle things with less fuss. Falke might be a genius, but he was also mad.
A pity.
'You work for a man in a mask,' he said. 'Why don't you come and work with me? I've accomplished all I set out to do when I began this, many years ago… but I shan't stop. Others are out there, unpunished.
Les Vampires, for a start. And those respectable men – the politicians, churchmen, newspaper proprietors, soldiers – who have as much blood on their hands as the lowest thieves and ponces. Not just in Paris, but in Vienna, Madrid, London, Rome. So many fat throats and swollen veins, awaiting the vampire's kiss. Think of what we could achieve together. Think of who we could kill!'
She hesitated. Her pistol and knife were on top of the piano.
'Would I get wings?' she asked. 'Like yours?'
She remembered him flapping away from the Countesses, soaring above the Gare du Nord.
'If I am a bat, my dear, you shall be a bird,' he said. 'Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night.'
Dr Falke was eager, embarrassingly boyish. With the last of his old friends dead – and what had that all been about? – he was a merry widower. Suddenly freed from a marriage long gone cold, he was casting about for unsuitable new adventures with a younger partner. Sophy wondered if he'd actually talked honestly with anyone in the last twenty-five years. Especially a woman.
Somehow, she knew this was about a woman.
She glanced at the open-eyed d'Aubert, legs kinked to fit into the tub, uniform soaked with blood, angry sucker-wounds in his neck, mirthless grin showing his teeth.
Falke saw her dart that look and knew she would turn him down. He was mad, but not foolish.
'A shame,' he said, advancing with his vampire-machine, angling the two spiked tubes at her neck. 'But it'll be over soon. If you don't fight, I think you'll find it relaxing. The first needle delivers a blood-thinning agent which is also a mild, merciful euphoric. It's humane. And I shall play, of course. Beethoven for Raoul. Mozart, I think, in memory of the Pamina you shall never be.'
What was it about music and maniacs? Was this just a Paris thing?
She tried to stand, but he got his foot on her stomach, pinning her to the couch.
She flailed, pushing away the vampire-machine, which was convulsing again. The razor-tip of a tube cut across her palm and blood welled.
Falke was calm, regretful, determined. He was enormously strong – twenty-five years of medicine balls and barbells, she'd be bound.
Whatever happened to Sophy, this would not end here. Erik would not let her death drop. Nor would La Marmoset or Unorna.
She was prepared. Her brother had been tortured for weeks and not yielded. She could endure minutes of agony without giving in to terror.
'What do you call a bat without wings?' she asked.
He seemed briefly intrigued, then shook his head in irritation.
'A rat,' she said. 'Just a rat.'
His face froze, as if she had slapped him. Good. He could still be shamed into anger. When punishment came, he would feel it.
Falke ground his shoe into her stomach and aimed the skewer-tipped tubes at her throat. Sophy was aware of her own rapid heartbeat, the pulse of blood, a pounding in her ears.
Then Falke stopped, stricken. He dropped his infernal contraption into her arms, took his foot off her and staggered back against the piano.
He was seeing a ghost.
Sophy sat up, throwing the vampire-machine away like an awkward cushion, and turned.
A figure stood in the doorway. Demurely dressed, in a style a quarter of a century out of fashion, she was young and pale. Her hair was tied back and parted in the centre. She smiled sadly. Her smile opened to show sharp teeth and her eyes flashed red.
Her appearance affected Dr Falke more than being shot in the chest.
'Caralin,' he said, falling to his knees.
The apparition advanced, gliding across the room.
'But you're dead,' he whimpered. 'I know you're dead. I 'killed you!'
The woman stopped, standing over Falke.
Sophy saw who it really was.