Anno Dracula 1918 - The Bloody Red Baron (28 page)

Ball shivered in Winthrop's embrace but his slow blood continued to flow. Then, he came apart completely. A bad taste hit Winthrop's mouth at the instant of true death. Ashes fell away from his face.

He coughed, trying hard to keep the lumpy stuff in his stomach. His mind was cleared as if by a dose of salts. His eyes quickened, catching dozens of tiny movements. It was a sensation he associated with the early, pleasant stages of being drunk on champagne.

Ball looked as if he had been dead and forgotten for years. He decomposed drily. His head shrivelled to a thinly parchmented skull. It was detached from the body.

To turn vampire, you have to drink vampire blood at the same time as a vampire is drinking your blood. What he had done with Ball would not make a new-born of him. He was just like those old fools who dose themselves with vampire bloodsalts to retain their vigour. But he did feel changed. His knee ceased to trouble him, and the wire-gouges on his wrists healed over. His weariness was washed away and his hunger soothed.

'Come, civil night, thou sober-suited matron, all in black,' quoted Mellors.

'Romeo and Juliet,
very good for a grammar school oik.'

'Which of you said that?'

It was strange: as if Albert Ball had spoken through Edwin Winthrop. In his mind, Winthrop remembered flying. Not his own memories, but those of the vampire.

'Both of us, Mellors, and a very good day to you.'

Winthrop stood up and stepped out of the shadow, keeping the wall still between him and the cave mouth. Sunlight did not hurt him, though his face tingled as if he had the beginnings of a tan.

'Ah, it's Winthrop, the observer. Do you plan to run off and leave your comrade. Surely, that's not cricket, not the school spirit.'

'Ball is dead,' he said, not sure.

There was no answer. Then, a shot dislodged some bricks.

Taking the camouflage netting, Winthrop wrapped Albert Ball's skull carefully. It made a bundle about the size of a football. He owed it to the vampire to carry his head as far as possible.

With his bundle under his arm, Winthrop launched himself at the side of the crater and scrambled upwards. Shots dug into the dirt yards either side of him. Then, a
push
at his side.

'A palpable hit,' Mellors shouted.

He gained the lip of the crater and threw himself over it, rolling downwards and lying flat in the blighted plain. Examining his side, he found that the troglodyte chieftain's shot had punched through his loose Sidcot without touching his body.

'You'll have to do better,' he shouted back in farewell.

Even more than in the crater, Winthrop kept his head down. Now he was exposed to snipers from both lines. Anything that moved in No Man's Land was in season. A bombardment had started. The British were hammering the Germans, which was fortunate. Shells whizzed across well above Winthrop's head and landed near the Boche trenches. That should keep German riflemen concentrated on other things.

He felt a stick in his hands, wind in his face, the thrill of a spin. For a moment, he saw the blue of a summer sky, tracer bullets flaring. He smelled burning castor oil, pouring out of the engine of a Sop with Camel. Shaking Ball's memories from his mind, Winthrop got to his feet. After an experimental crouch, he stood gingerly.

Nobody shot at him. There was a strange peace. He was tiny and insignificant in this continental killing field. Nobody would notice him.

He walked away from the shell-crater and the troglodytes. By day, the paths between the barbed wire and the rubble-pits were easier. He darted from cover to cover, tacking towards the lines.

For the first time since the Richthofen creature had swooped at the Harry Tate, Winthrop felt it possible that he might survive the next few minutes. He might live a long life, if not a happy one. But he had business to take care of yet. First, he had to tell Beauregard about the bat
-staffel.
Then he had to get back in the air.

He was running, tasting the powdery breeze. It was easy to imagine leaving the ground, and being swept up into the clouds, there to joust with the dark knights of the sky.

He saw a wall of mottled sandbags, topped with swirls of barbed wire. He was moments away from the trenches.

He thought of the score that he must live to even.

Hurdling the wire with a new-found agility, he sailed over the lip of the trench and crashed down. He bent as he landed, coming down on his feet like a cat, and stood up straight.

'Blimey,' said a startled Tommy.

Winthrop handed over his bundle to the soldier, telling the warm man to take good care of it.

'Now, if you would be so good as to guide me to a field telephone, I have a report which must be made.'

The infantryman looked down at the bundle, which was trailing loose. A bony face was disclosed.

'Blimey,' the Tommy reiterated. 'Blimey.'

Richthofen kept him waiting well into the afternoon.

There was no reason for the delay. It was simply the habit of
junkers
to have vassals loiter. Poe supposed the flier had little interest in their collaboration. He must co-operate because he had been so ordered by General Karnstein. For Kaiser and
Vaterland,
Manfred von Richthofen would consent to be made immortal by Edgar Poe. To a physical immortal, perhaps the prospect was insignificant.

The Baron's private quarters were not quite spartan but hardly seemed the lair of a great warrior. There was an orderly desk where Richthofen sat to write terse, accurate, tedious reports of aerial exploits. In the last few days, Poe had examined numberless dreary documents. He understood why the Baron was not to be entrusted with the writing of his own memoirs.

Without permission to sit, he paced the room. On the mantel was a row of shining cups. Poe was drawn to the bright things. Each trophy bore a tiny plate, engraved with a formulaic notation: a number, the details of an Allied aeroplane, another number, a date.
11. VICKERS. 1. 23.11.16.
Each commemorated one of Richthofen's victories. The first number was the running total of the hunting bag, the second indicated how many had died in the downed aircraft. Every twentieth cup was double- sized.

There were about sixty of them. That was incorrect. Richthofen's score stood at nearly eighty.

'A silver shortage. The manufacturer made a special case for some months, but there was a tightening of regulations.'

Richthofen had come into the room without Poe hearing him, no mean achievement. He stood in completely human shape, calm and compact. Poe would never have discerned godlike potential in this ordinary soldier but could not forget what he had seen in the tower. Inside the Baron nestled the leather angel of the skies, the perfected vampire form.

'The tradesman offered pewter as a substitute but I took the opportunity to discontinue commemorating my kills with gaudy things. I know in myself my worth. Trophies have come to seem vulgar.'

Poe touched a cup. His fingers stung.

'Real silver?'

'I should give up these baubles for scrap. I'd rather have silver bullets in my guns than silver cups in my den.'

Few vampires cared to have silver around them. It showed daring. If Poe were to grip one of these trophies firmly, his hand would shrivel.

Richthofen stood beside him and regarded the cups. Each marked one or more dead. Goring, the recording officer, impressed upon Poe the arcana of the 'score'. Strictly, only victories over aircraft counted, not the number of dead or downed. A flier could claim a victory by sending a vanquished pilot to a prisoner-of-war camp. Few of Richthofen's cups bore a zero. His victories were kills. Oswald Boelcke, who formulated the tactics of aerial combat, liked to aim for the enemy's engine and let the pilot live. Richthofen always went for the throat. For him, a bloodless victory was no victory at all. Only a kill counted.

'They do not blur and become one. I remember each. I have made reports.'

Boelcke was truly dead, though not in combat: his aeroplane had crashed in mid-air into one of his fellows' machines.

The Baron sat at his desk, at attention even in repose, and indicated a chair. Poe folded himself into it. He was conscious of his shabbiness beside the correctness of the flier. Richthofen's uniform was pressed to perfection, knife-edge creases and drum- tight jacket ready for inspection. Poe's trousers were almost out at the knees. The buttons of his old waistcoat were mismatched.

'So, it begins, Herr Poe. Your book.'

'Our
book, Baron.'

Richthofen waved an indifferent hand. He had the short nails and stub fingers of a cowboy, not the languid extremities of an aristocratic idler.

'I do not care much for writing. Or for writers. A cousin of mine has formed an unsuitable attachment with an English writer of repulsive reputation. A Mr Lawrence. Have you heard of him?'

Poe had not.

'By all accounts, he is a horrid fellow, dirty from coal mines and animal habits.'

Where to begin? Perhaps it was time to borrow from that queer Jew, Freud. 'Tell me of your childhood, Baron.'

Richthofen began a recitation, 'I was born on the second of May, 1892. My father was stationed in Breslau with his cavalry regiment. Our family seat is an estate at Schweidnitz. I was named Manfred Albrecht in honour of an uncle, an Imperial Guardsman. My father was Major Albrecht, Freiherr von Richthofen. My mother was the former Kunigunde von Schickfuss und Neudorff. I have brothers, Lothar and Karl Bolko, and a sister, Ilse ...'

Poe interrupted, timidly. 'I have read your service records. Tell me
about
your childhood.'

Richthofen seemed to have nothing to say. In the depths of his eyes, there was (almost entirely veiled) drowning bewilderment.

'I do not understand what you want of me, Herr Poe.'

Poe did not expect to feel pity for the merciless hero. The Baron, though he would never let it show, was lost. Something was missing in him.

'What do you remember? A place, a pastime, a toy ... ?'

'My father told me I was different from the boys of the peasants who worked the land. They were Slavs. Orientals inferior to Prussians. Our family was Teuton, among the first to establish themselves in Silesia.'

'Did you feel different?'

Poe remembered his own childhood, estrangement from his fellows as an American in England.

Richthofen shook his head. 'No. I felt as I always have. I am myself. There has never been any need to question that.'

His backbone was a straight as a ramrod.

'What was your first passion?'

'That of any boy. Hunting in the woods.'

Richthofen was a hunter still. Was it too easy to deem him just a hunter, with no other light or dark to his soul?

'With my rifle, I shot three of my grandmother's tame ducks. I pulled a feather from each as a trophy. When I presented these to my mother, she scolded me. But my grandmother understood and rewarded me.'

'Like George Washington, you could not tell a lie?'

'I was admitting nothing. I was claiming my kills.'

'You saw no wrong in killing?'

'No. Do you?'

The drowning was gone from the Baron's eyes. There was a blue chill now. Poe thought of chips of ice in the streams of the Richthofen estate in Silesia.

'You were educated in Berlin, at a military school?'

Richthofen nodded curtly.'Wahlstatt. Its motto was "learn to obey that you may learn to command".'

'Very German.'

Not a smile.

At West Point, Poe had been desperately unhappy, deprived by his stepfather of the funds he needed to keep up with comrades.

'You must have loved Wahlstatt?'

'On the contrary, I detested the school. It was built as a monastery and furnished like a jail. Not caring for the instruction I received, I did just enough work to pass. It would have been wrong to do more than just enough, so I worked as little as possible. Consequently, my teachers did not think a great deal of me.'

'But you learned to command?'

'I learned to obey.' 'You command this
jagdgeschwader.'

'I pass on orders I am given. Karnstein is commandant.'

It was like interrogating a prisoner of war. Richthofen would give away enough to pass, but no more. A lesson learned at Wahlstatt.

'When you were a boy, did you want to turn?'

'I was raised to know I would be turned in my eighteenth year. It is customary. Lothar, also, turned at that age. Karl Bolko, when he reaches manhood, will turn.'

'How was it done?'

'The usual way,' Richthofen said, brusquely.

'Forgive me, Baron, you must make allowances for my ignorance,' Poe wheedled, damping irritation by recalling the awesome winged creature that lurked within the cold fish. 'I turned in another age, when the change from living man to vampire was a rare, painful thing. I have known the grave and have been shunned as a beast of the night.'

'I did not die. My turning was hygienic. The results were satisfactory.'

New-born vampires usually described their transformations in the half-proud, half-ashamed, entirely excited manner in which the young men of Poe's warmth talked of their first visit to a brothel. To Richthofen, this miraculous metamorphosis was an uneventful appointment with a painless dentist.

'You turned in 1910. What is your bloodline?'

'It is of the highest. My family retains an elder, Perle von Mauren. Her line has become ours.'

This was a common arrangement. With Dracula established in Germany, the spread of vampirism was regulated. In theory, every vampire within the domains of Kaiser and King-Emperor was under the patronage of Dracula. A new-born could not be made without the Graf's permission. Vampirism was a condition to which the nobility were entitled by birth. Many aristocratic families made connections with elders of whom Dracula approved. Women like this Perle von Mauren were advisers, mistresses and governesses.

'How do you feel about your mother-in-darkness?' 'Feel? Why should I feel?'