by Kim Newman
Having rid herself of Mr Calhoun, she was on the point of becoming the unknown’s sister – famous for being no one, for being dead, for losing all which could be lost.
Then, alone, she heard music from beneath the city – an impassioned solo organ recital, distorted eerily by echoes, broadcast by sewer outlets. Later, she would learn that the piece was ‘Don Juan Triumphant’, from Erik’s perpetually reworked, never-finished opera.
She knew of the Opera Ghost Agency and realised now that there was a place for her on its lists. The next day, she approached the Persian at the Café de la Paix. She wore one of her favourite disguises, though it was in truth a disguise no longer – a black veil and widow’s weeds. In introducing herself, she hesitated only when it came to giving her name.
‘I am… La Marmoset,’ she said. ‘Yes, that will do.’
The Persian didn’t press her. He had also misplaced any real name he might once have had.
She was first called La Marmoset by men – gendarmes, detectives, criminals, magistrates – who resented her involvement in what they took to be their business. To them, she was an interfering monkey. Nothing but a nuisance in skirts – clingy, chattering, agile and facetious. Each and every one of those men had come to speak the name with respect and even fear.
‘You were expected, Madame,’ said the Persian. ‘It is Erik’s pleasure to accept you as an Angel of Music.’
At that time, the Opera Ghost Agency was assembling a new trio.
In Dressing Room 313, La Marmoset was introduced to Sophy Kratides, whom she had once glimpsed from afar…
That had been a memorable morning. Frederick Hohner, condemned wife-murderer, was to be executed in rue de la Roquette, just outside La Grande Roquette Prison. As he climbed the steps to the guillotine, he was felled by a rifle-shot from across the prison yard. With his first conviction secure, the state had not troubled to prosecute Hohner on other charges… leaving seven women, at least, unavenged. La Marmoset reckoned the family of one of his other victims must have decided on a point of honour that he should pay for them too.
On the same principle, La Marmoset – present in the habit of a nun – made a show of drawing a pistol and firing in the direction of the perch from which the fatal shot had come. The response was a bullet in the dirt at her feet.
It was like one of those duels where the parties have thought better of some silly quarrel and choose to discharge in the air then share breakfast. Both women could have made their shots tell.
Neither Queen of Detectives nor Mistress of Assassins felt a need to take the matter further. The inquest was less a formality than usual. The executioner complained of blown-out brains spattered all over his nice shiny blade. The Sûreté wittered about tracking the killer’s client but didn’t put in any work on the case.
Justice had been served.
The Persian left the two new Angels alone together, though both assumed Erik was listening.
Sophy did not look like an assassin, which was among the reasons why she was a very good one. She had thick, dark hair and a way of arranging herself side-on to present a slender target. She could turn up an inner light that made her a centre of attraction in any room, and fade it down to become all but invisible. An enviable knack – to let people see but not notice you. La Marmoset usually had to employ the more tiresome, limited method of wearing a dress and hat which matched the wallpaper.
La Marmoset raised her veil to show her unadorned face. Sophy looked at her, from several angles, and nodded.
‘Nice,’ she said, ‘but it isn’t you.’
La Marmoset knew what the other woman meant and wasn’t offended.
The matter of Mr Calhoun was raised.
‘Your husband, you…?’ The Greek woman made a twisting gesture with her hands and a kkkrrkkk sound at the back of her throat.
Knowing she needed Sophy’s trust, La Marmoset gave a single nod.
‘Good,’ said Sophy. ‘Me also. He was no husband, my Harry Latimer, but… you know how such things happen.’
La Marmoset did.
‘Your Mr Calhoun – justice was served?’
La Marmoset thought about it.
What had separated her from a policeman or an examining magistrate was that justice and law were beside the point. As a detective, she was interested in truth alone. What was done with truth was up to others. It had not been her decision to prosecute Frederick Hohner only for the crime which could easily be proven against him.
With Mr Calhoun, that was changing. She had tried and convicted and carried out the sentence herself.
‘A court might not think it, but… yes. Justice was served.’
‘Good. With Kemp and Latimer, also. We are friends now.’
The women embraced.
Both had crossed lines, from victim to avenger, from detective to (she admitted) murderess. Sophy had become more herself – indeed, only herself – after being taken for granted by men who presumed on her. They hadn’t noticed Sophy in the corner as they argued about arrangements concerning her without consulting her. Even Paul Kratides didn’t think to ask his sister whether their money was more important to her than his life. How surprised had Latimer and Kemp been to wake up with knives twisting in their bellies? Did they even realise who was ending their wicked lives?
With less clear-cut right on her side in the matter of Mr Calhoun, La Marmoset had become no one… though she saw her friend, in tiny moments of inaction, envied her fluid identity, her ability to take off one mask and put on another. For Sophy, there was too little joy in justice. The Opera Ghost Agency, which at least required her to do things other than kill people, was drawing her out of the numbed shock she still felt at her brother’s murder.
La Marmoset and Sophy had worked together on complicated matters and, at the conclusion of every case, agreed.
Justice was still served.
Sometimes, it was down to Sophy to serve it. La Marmoset had never seen anyone better with a pistol or knife. Or at the tidying-up after.
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 t
hemselves.
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 ca
nnot 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.’
IV
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.
