Anno Dracula 1918 - The Bloody Red Baron (29 page)

'Your line is important.'

'Strictly, I am not solely of her blood. Under the supervision of Professor Ten Brincken, I have taken another as my father by proxy. I am of the Dracula line.'

He was not boasting but stating a fact.

'Are you greatly changed?'

'I am Manfred von Richthofen still. Most of those cups I won before I became a shape-shifter.'

'You flew in an aeroplane then?'

'An aeroplane is merely a gun with wings. Now I am my own weapon, my own instrument. Like the hunters of old.'

'Do you regret not living longer before turning?'

'I have never died.'

'But there are aspects of warm life lost to us. You set them aside before you could truly have known them.'

'War was coming. It was my duty to turn. Germany needed vampires of good lines.'

Maybe this empty man was the daytime shell and the giant Poe had seen was the
real
Red Battle Flier. This interview was like trying with thick gloves to pick up pins from a marble floor. Whenever a possibility was touched, it skittered away under a chest of drawers.

'After turning, you joined the lancers.'

'The First Regiment of Uhlans. I saw combat in '14, but the lancers were finished. This war has no place for cavalry.'

'So you exchanged your horse for an aeroplane?'

'I transferred to the Signal Corps and entered the Imperial Air Service as an observer. I made the decision to become a pilot. The position offers more opportunities for honourable service.'

'And sport?'

Richthofen considered a moment and gave a single nod. In a few minutes of unexpressive talk, he had disposed of an entire life up to the point when he found the vocation that made him famous. Poe had the bald facts of official record and tiny chinks of illumination that suggested a strange human story. It might be possible to frame the life of Baron von Richthofen as a tragedy. That was not what Dr Mabuse wished of the book.

'You spoke of dying, Herr Poe. As I said, I have never in truth been dead. But it seems to me now, looking back, that I was truly born not when I left my mother's womb, not when I drank Perle's vampire blood, but when I won my first victory. It was as an observer. I downed a Frenchman.'

Poe looked at the trophies.

'There is no cup. That aeroplane fell on the wrong side of the lines. The victory was not confirmed.'

'Does that bother you?'

Richthofen shrugged. 'One should receive credit that is one's due. An officer's word of honour should be accepted.'

'Why did you become a pilot?'

'So I could rely on myself. I lost kills because my pilot was not skilled enough to get me into position for a clean shot.'

Early in the war, observers - who were responsible for the guns -were the hunters. Pilots were in the same class as chauffeurs or beaters. Only after Boelcke laid down his famous
dicta
did the special skills of the flying warrior become generally appreciated.

'It is every man's dream to fly.'

Again, Richthofen was unaffected. 'As I believe I mentioned, I do not dream.'

'You are remarkably level-headed for a man on such intimate terms with the miraculous.'

The Baron had no answer.

'The world you were born into has changed beyond recognition. First, Dracula. Then, the war ...'

'The world is beyond my control. I have only myself. I have not changed. I have only become more myself.'

'You're an angel, Miss Reed,' said Dr Arrowsmith, gently squeezing the hand-pump. 'I wish we had a dozen of you.'

She was drowsy, as if slipping into vampire lassitude. The hollow needle in the crook of her elbow was an icy tick. Her already blurry vision dotted with smudges of grey fog. She could not feel her toes. Her fingers tingled. Her blood surged through rubber tubing, filled the valves of the pulsing pump, and disappeared into another tube, flowing into the patient's arm.

Vampire donors were prized at the military hospital in Amiens. The restorative power of their blood was remarkable.

Arrowsmith, a warm American whose face was prematurely scored with worry-lines, stroked her hair. He did not show he felt the chill in her but could not have failed to.

'We have taken enough from you,' he said, ceasing to coax the pump. 'We must be wary of going back too often to the well.'

Kate tried to tell him to go on. She wasn't even unconscious. Her body could regenerate its blood within an hour, especially if she fed.

On the other cot, the patient - an American captain, Jake Barnes -was mummified in bandages. The only inch of his skin exposed was stuck with the transfusion needle. Barnes was a new-born, his power of regeneration not yet developed enough to heal the wounds he had sustained. Hung on the wire during a bombardment, he had been pelted with a hailstorm of bullets, lead and silver. There was little left of him to save.

Her bloodstream connected with Barnes's, troubling her with flashes of his life. In her guts, she felt the stinging bites of silver bullets through a long night. It was hours before Barnes's comrades crept out to take him down. Despair had twisted his mind. She felt it like a poison.

Arrowsmith carefully took the needle out of her arm and pressed the open vein with his thumb. Her tiny wound healed over in an instant. The doctor examined the spot.

'Not a mark. A little miracle.'

Arrowsmith had little experience with vampires. There were relatively few American undead. Barnes had been warm on the ship over, but turned in Paris. He thought the vampire state would better his chances of surviving the war. With distaste, Kate pictured the mindless can-can nymph who had turned him. Barnes might not be satisfied with the shape of his survival. His jaw was shattered, silver shrapnel embedded, spreading gangrene. He'd not be capable of feeding himself in the near future. He'd be dependent on medical transfusions. He was, in many senses, no longer a man.

The doctor saw to his patient. Barnes could not talk, of course. His eyes shone angry and pained through slits in his crisp white mask. From their communion, Kate knew Barnes yearned to be allowed true death. Should she pass on his wishes to the doctors striving to keep him alive?

She tried to sit. Her head, a hundredweight of lead, dragged her to the pillow. She was weaker than she had thought. On the too-short canvas cot, feet stuck out beyond the sheet, she tried to summon her strength.

Arrowsmith was concerned. 'Be careful, Miss Reed. You're not right, yet. Don't try to talk. Rest. You've done enough today. Because of you this man will live.'

Her mouth opened and closed, but she had no words. Essentially, that was her problem. The war left her without words.

She knew she should not allow herself to feel so, but something had broken off with Edwin Winthrop's death. They had not been close but they might have been. It was not the truncation of a past that bothered her but the curtailment of a future.

Frustrated and exhausted, she had turned her body over to the Red Cross. As a bloodmilk cow, she was useful without having to take action, without having to think, without having to care.

When the war began, the first fought with significant numbers of vampires on both sides, it was assumed the undead would make unvanquishable, all-conquering soldiers. In magazine serials,
nosferatu
hordes swept across Europe, establishing tyrannies of centuried elders. As armies mobilised and diplomats manoeuvred in the summer of 914, Saki's
When Vlad Came,
with its imaginary reoccupation of Britain by Dracula's vampire knights, was popular in railway station bookstalls. Hector Munro, 'Saki', was truly dead now, a Royal Fusilier shot by a German sniper.

She looked at the high ceiling. It was a grubby white, lightly spattered with blood no one could reach to scrub away. Fizzing electric lights hung from brass chandeliers, wires wound round wax-crusted candle-sconces. Before the war, the hospital had been a government building.

In the European stalemate, as the war of mobility turned to a face-off between entrenched positions, vampires did not prove all-conquering or invincible. But they survived injuries fatal to a warm soldier. It was an unappreciated curse of the undead. For a vampire, there were few 'Blighty' wounds, not mortal but dire enough to earn honourable discharge and a passage home. Aside from the odd Jake Barnes, a vampire who survived his wounds was liable to recover and be returned to active service. A good many preferred to stay warm and take their chances. The war was a plague of fire and silver. Its scythe swept away hundreds of thousands of new-borns along with their warm cousins.

In a hundred years, with Kate's blood in him, Jake Barnes might be ready to fight again.

Her bath chair was wheeled into the conservatory. Moonlight flooded down upon the row of convalescents. The illumination was a proven restorative for sorely wounded vampires. Kate did not feel it herself.

She was willing to give more blood but Arrowsmith ruled it out. She did not want to be left to herself, to think. She wanted to be useful.

Next to the swaddled mummy of Barnes sat Lieutenant Chatterley, who had received Kate's blood yestereve. Another rare Blighty case, his lower body had been blown to pieces. Though new bone-shoots sprouted from the stumps of his legs, they were dead. His body would become whole but he would not have the use of it. He contemplated his lack of reflection in the moonlit glass of the conservatory windows.

'Clifford, good evening,' she said to the Englishman.

He looked queerly at her. 'Do I know you? Were you one of the nurses?'

She shook her head.

A tic pulled at Chatterley's mouth. 'You're
her.
The elder?'

'An elder? Hardly. If I'd lived, I wouldn't even be dead yet. Probably.'

Chatterley would not thank her for his life and his dead legs. Like Barnes, he had a bitterness in his blood. He turned away, face to the moon. She had a touch of him also in her mind. From Barnes, she had only recent impressions, of Paris and his turning. From Chatterley, she had vivid pictures; a colliery wheel rising over a stretch of forest, a country house and grounds.

Kate was too tired even to feel any rejection. She could give nothing anyone wanted.

A pretty warm nurse fussed around Chatterley and Barnes. Neither showed interest.

'We've found you a cat, miss,' the nurse said to Kate.

Kate was too exhausted to fake a smile of gratitude. A cat would ease but not slake her red thirst. There would be little pain in a cat's life. She would drink without tasting agony.

'Thank you.' 'You're welcome, miss.'

The nurse did a tiny but perfect curtsey. She must have been a maid before the war. Kate noticed healed bites on her neck.

When warm, Kate had once been fed upon, by Mr Frank Harris, and she had died of it. Her memories were of turning, not of being food and drink for another. Now, she imagined she felt as the nurse must feel after letting her vampire lovers bleed her. She was empty.

'Someone to see you, miss ..."

Kate had been in sleepless reverie. In the fogs of the '80s, dodging Carpathian Guards, scattering leaflets ...

She stirred like a very old lady, bones creaking, limbs stiff. She could not turn in her chair, but she saw a shadowy reflection in the moonlit windows. A man in uniform stood with the nurse, leaning on a crutch.

The nurse wheeled her bath chair round. The visitor stepped into pale light. Kate felt a silver spasm in her heart.

'Miss Mouse,' Edwin said, 'you look like you've seen a ghost.'

'There is nothing here,' Ewers said, tapping the folder of notes. 'Nothing at all.'

At Malinbois, a tiny room had been found for him, a cubic bubble in stone. He was issued with a desk and chair, paper and pens. Each night, he was required to sign a requisition form and exhibit a burned-down stub before he could receive a fresh candle.

Poe sat, collar loose. Ewers stood, bowed by the low ceiling.

'I had hoped for an opening chapter,' Ewers said sniffily, 'and a plan of the entire work.'

Poe had hoped for a great deal more. By now, he should have half-completed the slim book Dr Mabuse required of him.

'Have you enjoyed much opportunity to converse with the Baron?'

Ewers was surprised by the question. Unnerved by fliers, he avoided them.

'He is not communicative,' Poe elaborated.

If it were allowed, Ewers would have been angry.

'The Baron has not co-operated? Have you been denied interviews?'

'No, it's that... as you say, there is nothing there.'

When he looked at a blank sheaf of paper, Poe saw the grey- blue eyes of Manfred von Richthofen.

'You are purportedly noted for imagination. Where there is nothing, you must make something.'

This commission was proving damnable. Wonders and marvels were eternally out of reach.

'The Baron is, I should say, a cold man,' Poe ventured. 'His reserve is an obstacle to progress.'

'I'll tell Karnstein. Richthofen will be ordered to be forthcoming.'

4I doubt if orders will help. It is not that the Baron is unwilling but that he is unable. He is not much in the habit of thinking. I sense he wishes not to ponder the darks of his life. Perhaps this is how he has been able to survive. On an unexpressed level, he fears that if he looks down, he will fall ...'

'Alienist nonsense, Poe. The man's a hero. Heroes have stories. Find his story.'

Ewers stood straight to look down on Poe. As he left, he bumped his head on the lintel.

Poe was enough of a fixture at the castle to pass unnoticed in the hall where the fliers gathered to pass the hours of daylight. Perhaps he could find the Baron's life from his comrades. Each must have some story, some insight, which could colour the narrative.

'As recording officer, I must be strict with myself,' Hermann Goring declaimed. 'My victory is confirmed but I may not claim a kill. Ball did not die in the crash but at dawn. The British are sparing with details. It seems he was injured. The sunlight finished him off.'