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Dr Falke was so terrified by the apparition that Unorna could feel the psychic backwash from outside the room. She went cold with someone else's fright.
This house was permeated with fear and rage, and shame and cruelty. It had shouted at her in the courtyard, before La Marmoset picked the front door lock. It was worse inside. How could others not
feel it? Most people didn't, she knew… it was as if they were deaf or blind from birth and never understood the sense they were missing.
For all its horrors, the house in Rue des Martyrs had no ghost.
Not until now…
La Marmoset, the dead-alive image of L'Inconnue de la Seine, came as a shock to the man they knew to be the vampire murderer… but Falke had expected her for years. He had even been piqued that the dead woman cared little enough to haunt him. Along with terror was strange joy, a hope of some outcome beyond imagining.
Falke had confessed to killing Caralin Trelmanski. He wouldn't be the first murderer to stay in love with his victim. Did he see this revenant – La Marmoset wearing that sad smiling face – as a chance to take back what he had done?
No, it was stranger than that. Falke's story was more of a tangle.
From what Madame Van Helsing said and the scraps of clues La Marmoset put together, Unorna had an idea of what had happened twenty-five years ago to drive the man mad.
Even now, with a corpse in the bathtub and a good friend barely saved from a hideous death, she felt sorry for Falke. He wasn't a true vampire, just a tinkerer with an inescapable mania for revenge. Against his friends, whom he held responsible, but against himself too – for willingly believing what he was led to believe, for acting out of a deep-seated urge to kill the woman he loved. Unorna understood that the black seed was in him all the time. That he thought Caralin a vampire was an excuse, not a motive. The impulse to hurt or kill was there already.
Michel Falke sat on his piano stool, just staring.
La Marmoset glided across the floor – taking tiny steps under her long dress – and reached out. He gripped her wrist and pressed his cheek against her hand.
Unorna stepped into the room.
Sophy was wrapping a torn strip of cloth around her scratched hand. She was otherwise unharmed.
The corpse in the bathtub was Inspecteur d'Aubert.
'What do we do with him?' Unorna asked.
Sophy drew a thumb across her throat.
Unorna wasn't sure she was ready to go that far. Sophy already had the beginning of a retinue of ghosts – smoky, indistinct, unindividuated. Her kills, either spirits or memories. The more ghosts there were, the more likely it was that Sophy would sense them. She wasn't as spirit-blind as La Marmoset or Madame Van Helsing. Eventually, she would feel their unwelcome touch.
There were consequences beyond the legalities. Murder was not good for what was called karma in the East. Unorna had qualms about coldly executing this murderer, though he would doubtless go to the guillotine if handed over to the police and courts. She didn't want Sophy or La Marmoset to add to burdens which could become crushing. Killing his friends hadn't made Falke better. He was more a wretch now than before.
'There must be another way,' she said.
La Marmoset stood back from Falke.
He slid off the stool and rat-scurried across the floor, reaching for a peculiar black device: a leather bag with steel-tipped tentacles.
'Don't let him use that,' said Sophy, sharply. 'It's the vampire-machine! It's how he kills them.'
Too late! Falke hugged the thing to himself, and jammed two spikes into his own throat. The bag began churning and writhing. Some device inside was pumping.
A dribble of blood came from a long, trailing tube.
Unorna and La Marmoset tried to wrestle the device off him, but he held on tenaciously.
Even Sophy joined the effort.
Falke coughed, spitting blood. The spikes were fish-hooked deeply into his neck.
They managed to get Falke off the floor and onto a divan.
'There must be a switch,' said La Marmoset.
She tugged at tubes, but the contraption kept working. The floor was slick with blood.
Unorna sensed other presences in the house. Not ghosts, but perhaps not fully living people, either. Shadow-folk… masks.
She heard a susurrus of hissing.
In the doorway stood the Countesses Dorabella, Clarimonde and Géraldine. They wore flimsy, immodest gowns and were barefoot, but it was obvious they were dangerous.
They might file their teeth and sharpen their nails. Or else they grew fangs and claws.
Quick as cats they were, and just as nasty when crossed.
'Stand down, Angels,' said Countess Dorabella. 'We're here for him.'
La Marmoset turned to them. The face of L'Inconnue gave them pause.
'It's just a woman, dressed up,' said the Countess Géraldine. 'That detective.'
Sophy had a gun in her hand. The Countesses laughed at that.
Unorna looked to Sophy. 'Looks like Les Vampires' hired another trio'
'Les Vampires did not hire us,' said the Countess Dorabella. 'We are neglected by a brute of a husband, and must lower ourselves to paid employment. They set you to catch the murderer and he sent us to hunt the Black Bat of the Rooftops. It turns out our quarries were the same.'
'We found him first,' said the Countess Géraldine.
'We found him best,' said Sophy.
'We will take him from you,' said the Countess Dorabella. 'He is ours.'
'We'd like to see you try,' said La Marmoset.
All three Countesses hissed through bared teeth at that. Unorna saw they were strong, heartless and determined.
And out for blood…
So, she decided to give it to them.
She picked up the gushing outflow tube of the vampire-machine and aimed it like a hose. A jet of blood squirted across the room. She played it across the Countesses' faces. It got in their mouths, their eyes and their hair. It striped across their gowns, which clung stickily to them.
The effect was extraordinary.
The Countesses' eyes seemed to come alight with red flame. Suddenly, they were mad – like kittens doused with burning oil. They shrieked and tore at each other, licking and biting and frothing.
La Marmoset and Sophy hauled the shaking Falke upright. Unorna was able to direct the fountain blood more squarely on the Romanian women.
Savage Carpathian she-wolves would have served each other more mercifully.
The Countess Dorabella had the Countess Clarimonde's eye out; the Countess Géraldine's mouth was clamped around a red weal on the Countess Dorabella's upper arm, teeth worrying the wound; the Countess Clarimonde had her talons out and was shredding the back of the Countess Géraldine's gown.
Falke, incidentally, was a dead weight.
Nothing more could be done for him… or to him.
'There's a way out through the roof,' said Sophy.
They left Falke and the Countesses in their bloody mess and hurried upstairs.
La Marmoset took off her wig and peeled away the face of L'Inconnue. For a moment, Unorna saw her real face – unmemorable as it was – but as she walked along the passage she applied paint and freckles to create a new mask. An unfamiliar woman emerged – a secretary or shopgirl.
Sophy lingered a moment by a rack of cloaks, helmets and devices.
'His wings,' she said. 'And other things we could use.'
A noise from below suggested the Countesses might have settled their differences and tired of the stale blood of the dead. They would be coming for a reckoning.
'Angels with wings,' mused La Marmoset.
The Countesses, spattered with blood, were at the end of the passage.
Sophy took a bat-winged ball from a rack, twisted its top, and pitched it. It burst to release clouds of thick, foul smoke. The Countesses choked on it.
Leaving behind the rest of Falke's gear, Unorna, La Marmoset and Sophy made it up through a skylight onto the roof.
The sun was rising. Unorna had an idea this would confine the Countesses – night-birds, or bats or whatever – to the shadows of the house. They could pursue no further. When they recovered from blood delirium, they might or might not want to take up the fight again. She thought it most likely they'd tell themselves it was a draw and leave well enough alone. The Angels would have new stratagems to deal with them if they pressed the matter.
'Is it over?' asked Sophy.
Unorna looked to La Marmoset.
'This is an act curtain,' said the Queen of Detectives. 'But the opera never ends.'
The Cafe Saint flour Musette, once the haunt of Le Gang de Schubert had become better known as the Brasserie des Martyrs, patronised by Baudelaire and Vallès. Now, it was the Divan Japonais, decorated in a supposed Japanese style which strayed all over the Orient. The crockery was Chinese willow-pattern. The waitresses wore hobbling kimonos. Tiny trees grew out of porcelain pots. Paper lanterns hung from the ceiling.
La Marmoset thought it appropriate to have this meeting where she now knew the story began. Dr Falke's house was only a few minutes' walk from his old watering hole. He had never really got beyond his student days.
As befits a Phantom, Erik hadn't deigned to communicate since the conclusion of the case, but the Persian assured the Angels that their patron was pleased with the outcome. He didn't hold the deaths of two baritones against them. The Opéra could always find more baritones.
The Grand Vampire had no cause to complain. He had hired the O.G.A. to stop Inspecteur d'Aubert's campaign against Les Vampires. Being dead, he was no longer making a nuisance of himself. Inspecteur Bec, his replacement, was a more live-and-let-live policeman. If Les Vampires didn't bother him, he was inclined to leave them alone too. The Sûreté had learned its lesson. It was a devil to make charges stick when witnesses suddenly became scarce and even the sorely aggrieved were unwilling to co-operate in cases against the organisation.
Unorna showed Sophy how to take tea in the Japanese fashion. The young woman was well travelled. In Falke's house, she had impressed La Marmoset. At a point when the methods of detection – the rational vision of the world espoused by Madame Van Helsing – were of limited use, her sensitivities came into their own.
The Countesses had left Paris. Apparently, a terse note signed with the letter D had been delivered to the House of de Rothschild Frères, terminating their line of credit. They packed their long trunks, leaving behind heaps of new clothes in lieu of a settlement of their hotel bill, and took an express train to Transylvania to await punishment when their master came home.
Dr Geneviève Dieudonné arrived late in the afternoon, just as the sun was setting. Ayda Heidari, representing Les Vampires in an unofficial capacity, joined the party soon after. All the masterminds – Erik, the Grand Vampire, the brains of the Sûreté – were happy to move on and not think about l'affaire du vampire. It was left to the women to put the last pieces of the puzzle together.
'The case is still open,' said Dr Dieudonné. 'With Bec in charge, I doubt there'll be new developments. I performed Raoul's autopsy, and – thanks to your report – can at least put the method of murder on the record. They showed me that mechanical blood-sponge device, but wouldn't let me cut it up to see how it works. It'll end up a curiosity in some museum of horrors.'
'What about Falke's body?' asked La Marmoset.
'That's a bit of an issue, actually,' said Dr Dieudonné. 'It wasn't where you left it. Most of the evidence you described – the mechanical wings, the masks and cloaks – were gone.'
'He was dead,' said Sophy. 'I'm sure.'
'Are you a qualified coroner?'
'No.'
'Then you're not sure. Though you're probably not wrong. You won't be surprised to learn the most popular theory with the sensationalist press is that the Vampire Black Bat of the Rooftops can't be killed.'
'He's not up there anymore,' said Ayda. 'We would know.'
'There was some delay in having the police go over the house,' said Dr Dieudonné. 'Possibly, other official bodies got there first and rooted around in Falke's treasury of inventions. In which case, in a year or two, Moroccan rebels will learn to fear flocks of night-flying Foreign Legionnaires.'
'I knew we should have taken some of his toys,' said Sophy.
'Do you really want a flying Phantom?' asked Ayda.
Sophy shrugged. La Marmoset knew Sophy was taken by the notion of flight. Falke had offered her wings. She would always wonder what she had missed.
Probably, a painful fall to Earth after the fashion of Icarus.
Even if Die Fledermaus was still somehow alive, he was finished with Paris. La Marmoset had put together most of the story and understood what had driven him mad – his own culpability as much as his friends' cruel joke.
'What about her?' asked Unorna.
The Witch pointed to the wall where, between snarling Japanese demon masks, hung a bas-relief of
L'Inconnue de la Seine… unknown no longer, if only within their limited circle.
Caralin Trelmanski.
'Shouldn't we say who she was?' suggested Sophy.
'We know her name,' said La Marmoset. 'But we don't know who she was. Unorna and I don't use the names we were born with.'
'Or the face, in your case,' said Unorna.
'But that doesn't make us unknown. As L'Inconnue, she's famous… as Caralin, she'd just be nothing. The victim of a prank.'
'More than one prank,' said Dr Dieudonné. 'I looked for her. At the Morgue, we have had several bodies on ice for decades… she isn't one of them. After her face became famous, she was lost. I hate to think of what kind of admirer would steal her, but such things happen. It may be she was taken away to preserve her from the badauds. Falke may have done it, to give her a proper burial or keep her as a memento in a trophy room we've not yet found.'
'Or she could have walked away,' said Ayda. 'And there are such things as… vampires.'
Dr Dieudonné smiled over her tea.
'She had a stake put through her heart,' said La Marmoset. 'Traditionally, that keeps vampires in their place.'
'According to the autopsy report, Falke bungled the impalement,' said Dr Dieudonné. 'He was a law student not a medical student. He shoved his stake through her lungs. Nasty way to die, for a human being…'
'If there are vampires, your group should change its name,' La Marmoset said to Ayda. 'You came out best this time, with a Black Bat of the Rooftops for competition. If you were up against a Mircalla Karnstein or a Lord Ruthven, who knows how it would have ended?'
'We were confident of success,' said Ayda.
'Why?' asked La Marmoset.
'Because, for once, Les Vampires were watched over by Angels.'