The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life (21 page)

When early evening came the maroon-colored brougham once again pulled up outside our house on Bond Street and Lady Dunaway stepped out. Cook was waiting with me at the front door, but Ursula had bid me a reserved
au revoir,
and had retired to her room. I was dressed in my black evening waistcoat with my gold watch chain hanging elegantly from pocket to pocket, wearing a bowler hat, and carrying a brass-knobbed walking stick. I had even doused myself liberally with Pinaud’s Lilac Vegetal, a habit I hadn’t indulged since my wife, Camille, had died. My luggage consisted of a large traveling trunk, two carpetbags, and a hatbox.

“Good evening,” Lady Dunaway greeted happily, still dressed in her familiar ulster, cape, and two-peaked cap. She carried a small leather gripsack in her hand, and a silver sovereign-and-half-sovereign case. “So this is what you’re taking?” she said, pointing with her long, gloved finger.

“Yes.”

“This is my luggage,” she said, holding up the single leather gripsack. “I’ll get Ferguson to load your trunks.”

Cook sobbed endearingly.

After everything was loaded we took our seats in the carriage. “We must bid my lovely brougham good-bye,” Lady Dunaway murmured wistfully as we waited for the driver to climb onto his perch. “I’ve already sold it, and Ferguson will take it to its new owners as soon as he’s dropped us off.”

I smiled consolingly as the carriage started up.

As I waved to Cook I looked up at the dark bricks of the house; at the wooden portico of the door and the window above it, surrounded by a low parapet of wrought iron. The last remnant of late-afternoon sun shone brightly upon the façade, but still it seemed unusually brooding and somber. I noticed there was more ivy than I had recalled spanning its walls, weaving around window frames, and biting into the very cornice of the brick. As the old Victorian terrace house receded into the distance, there, behind a frame of tendrils and green leaves, and half-hidden by the panes of the oriel window, I saw Ursula watching.

It was twilight by the time we reached Dover, and I wondered if the Neapolitan hearse was still sitting, silent and empty, in the storage lot. Or whether young Inspector Inglethorpe had had it confiscated, to be sold, a macabre surprise, at some police auction. It had been such a warm day that there was steam rising from the water, and in the waning light there was something Stygian about the scene, like a Doré engraving of Virgil leading Dante on his raft. We crossed the Channel in the good ship
Strait of Dover
Our accommodations were sumptuous, our cabin being of red plush with tasseled fringes on all the windows and sliding glass doors, and equipped with a shiny brass samovar. We first set foot on French soil at Dunkerque. I spoke French very well for an Englishman, having grown up with a number of French
au pair
girls in the house. I had visited France once before, with my father. I found myself oddly inspirited by this second visit, as if it were really my first. The train ride from Dunkerque took the longest, and it was in the early morning that we arrived at the Gare du Nord in Paris.

The city was breathtaking. The sun had not yet risen over the horizon, and yet, already the sky was aglow, a deep and refulgent orange. It seemed more like the vermilion of sunset than morning, the rich, oily hue of Seville oranges. On the horizon and cloaked in this golden mist were the spires of ancient churches, and the delicate ink lines of trees. In front of this was a panorama of blue-tiled roofs, crumbling stucco, and leaden cupolas. Everything was covered with the patina of corroded copper, and the grimy wash of a thousand rain gutters. Behind us gleamed the dirty white basilica of Sacré Coeur, and ahead, in the very middle of the fairy kingdom, loomed the most impressive sight of all, a silhouette that had not been there the last time I had visited Paris—an awesome fairy spire.

“So that is the work of that clever engineer we’ve been hearing so much about,” whispered Lady Dunaway, “that Monsieur Eiffel.”

I scarcely heard her, for I was much too busy contemplating what was before us. Hidden behind that somnolent postcard were all the bistros and mirror salons, sad ladies sipping absinthe, dandies and manifesto writers, intellectuals and
clochards
that comprised the mystique of the city. Something inside me told me I was looking at history, in some sense, in some form. This was the Paris of Baudelaire and Renoir, of the Symbolists, the mystics, and the Decadent artists. I wondered if somewhere out there, in some unknown flat, slumbered my little Camille.

Ignoring my silence, Lady Dunaway hailed a cab, and we were soon clattering down the Rue du Faubourg. When we reached the quai the sunlight shimmered like molten bronze upon the Seine, and we could see the smoky hulk of Notre-Dame with Saint-Chapelle beside it. Several tugs churned sluggishly by the two sleeping islands, and already fishermen and tramps lined the bank. So these two islands were the oldest part of Paris, already settled when the Romans invaded Gaul. “
Numero quarante-sept
Quai d’Anjou,” I told the driver as we turned onto the spidery steel bridge that led to the Île Saint-Louis.

The Hotel Madeleine was a modest four-storied stucco building, ivy-clad and lined with trellises of espalier fruit trees and vines. It wasn’t as palatial as some of the other hotels on the island—the Hotel Lambert or the seventeenth-century Hotel de Lausun down the street—but it was fashionable and served an upper-class clientele. It also overlooked the quai and provided a clear view of the tree-lined Left Bank on the opposite side of the Seine.

As I stood gazing out the window of my room I wondered which of the hundreds of houses and flats that cluttered the Île Saint-Louis might contain a household of vampires. Who had sent the stone hand back to the British Museum? Was there a community of Niccolo’s kind on this speck of land in the middle of the river in the very heart of Paris? Or had Niccolo and Lodovico merely stopped here on their way somewhere else? Question after question spun through my brain as I slipped beneath the flowered Jacquard coverlet of my modest oak bed and fell asleep.

Later that afternoon Lady Dunaway and I went over everything we knew about the vampire that might help us io our search. We pondered the fact that they never ate and never needed medical doctors, but these insights seemed futile. How could one determine which of several hundred households was not buying groceries or visiting physicians? We considered going to the census bureau to investigate the mysterious
Daysa,
and explore the possibility of his or her having a son, but we resolved that this was ineffectual as well. Not only were there too many
Daysas
in the city to check on, but also the irregular rules of French names made the number of possible spellings endless. Were we looking for Monsieur or Madame
Daysat, Deizad
, or
Dessat?
There were too many possibilities.

At last we resolved that the idiosyncrasy of the vampire that would be the most readily apparent was the hours they kept That evening we began our search. Lady Dunaway kept notes in a small book of red Morocco leather. Beginning at midnight we meticulously strolled down every street of the tiny tie Saint-Louis, carefully noting every house whose lights were burning. It took us an hour and a half to complete the exercise. We repeated the search at three in the morning, and once again at half past five, scarcely an hour before dawn. All those houses whose lights had been turned off in one of the ensuing surveys were marked off our list. After our third and last walk we had a total of thirty-seven homes whose lights had been on all night.

“It’s no use,” I told Lady Dunaway as we sat in a little all-night café and watched the sun rise once again over the Seine. “Everyone in Paris stays up all night.”

“But everyone can’t stay up all night every night,” she said, opening the little red book and surveying the names.

“Don’t be too sure. Throughout most of his career Balzac drank thirty cups of coffee every evening and worked an average of eighteen hours.”

“Surely the Balzacs in this city must be in the minority.”

“As I say, don’t be too sure.”

“But we must continue. Surely if we go out again tonight we will eliminate a few addresses.”

I sighed and began to massage my ankle. “Again tonight! And what if we cross off half a dozen names? Are we going to go out again tomorrow night, and the next night as well? My legs are not going to hold out for too many evenings. I’m afraid this method is much too strenuous.”

She rested her head in her hand and sighed as the waiter brought us two very welcome cups of
café noir.

“You’re right,” Lady Dunaway said dejectedly “But we can’t just give up. What are we going to do?”

We both sat thinking, and it was only after absentmindedly downing half of my steaming coffee that I realized I had severely burned my mouth. Balzac be damned, I thought to myself.

Suddenly Lady Dunaway squinted her eyes behind her thick glasses and I realized she had thought of something. “I’ve got it!” she said, sitting up and then leaning closer to me.

I shoved my coffee away and listened.

“We are working on the premise that the vampire is a completely nocturnal creature, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So what we have to do is find those houses whose lights burn all night every night, correct?”

“Yes!”

“The problem is that it’s too much work to discover those houses by looking for them ourselves. So what is the answer?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“
Gaz
...” she said in her most svelte and languorous voice.

“Gaz?”

“Why didn’t we think of that before? Surely a household that is awake all night every night uses their gas jets more than anyone else, more
gaz.
We just go to the Services en Commun and get a list of the private residences that use an abnormal quantity of
gaz
every month.”

I was about to congratulate Lady Dunaway, but she had already snapped the little red book shut and was off.

At the Services en Commun she once again utilized the lack of timidity and the ability to think on her feet that she had demonstrated at the British Museum. It was through bribery that we obtained a list of the several hundred abnormal
gaz
consumers in the city and chose the twenty most extravagant of those to begin our search. To our dismay, none of them were on the Île Saint-Louis.

As we traveled around the city it was easy to eliminate most of the extravagant
gaz
consumers. Quite a few of the “abnormal” private residences were immense seventeenth- and eighteenth-century homes. We didn’t exclude the possibility (indeed, probability) that beings who were several centuries old might have accrued great wealth, but there were other reasons to mark such households off our list. The foremost reason was that our cab driver, a very knowledgeable chap, was familiar with the vast majority of those residences, and could tell us about their owners. Usually they were remnants of royalty or political figures, well known throughout Paris, and not known for their exclusively nocturnal habits. However, there were a few residences that our driver could not identify, and those we eliminated by another method. Using figures provided by the Services en Commun we were able to determine how much
gaz
a household of the size in question should use through normal consumption, and thus leave them off our list as well. By late afternoon we had narrowed the possibilities down to four households. The first two of these we crossed off because when we knocked at their doors, their owners answered, albeit in their evening robes, but squinting and grumbling in the full of the afternoon sun, nonetheless.

It was at the second-to-the-last residence that we had some luck. Lady Dunaway knocked at the door.

It opened slowly.

“
Oui?
” answered a tall and emaciated butler with an ivory complexion and sunken eyes.

“Is Madame de Beauseant at home?” asked Lady Dunaway.

“Madame sleeps during the day,” he replied and began to shut the door.

Lady Dunaway planted her foot firmly across the threshold. “Wait, I am one of Madame de Beauseant’s relatives. Could you tell me when I could visit her?”

The butler looked highly skeptical. “Madame de Beauseant hasn’t mentioned any relatives.”

_ “Yes, but she’ll want to see me,” Lady Dunaway returned.

“Madame de Beauseant never receives guests,” the butler returned and once again struggled to close the door.

Lady Dunaway stood firm. “Not even if the guests have information that is crucial to Madame de Beauseant’s safety?” she asked.

Suddenly the butler became frightened and agitated. “What do you know?” he asked, gripping her arm with his skeletal hand.

“That is between Madame de Beauseant and me alone. Now will you arrange a meeting between us?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said when suddenly a police carriage pulled up behind our cab and several policemen rushed up the steps. The butler violently pushed Lady Dunaway back, slamming the door, and her plaid cape and ulster billowed out as she fell backward into my arms. Ignoring us, the policemen broke down the door and within several minutes, amid screams and curses, they dragged a very fat woman with intense red hair and a burgeoning cleavage, dressed haphazardly in night clothing and evening coat, into the street.

“
Voilá le collier!
” she screeched as she reached into her cleavage and flung a sparkling diamond necklace in the face of one of the policemen. “
Voilá le collier!
” She fell heavily upon the pavement and tried to crawl away but one of the officers grabbed her small white foot, and amid a flurry of arms and legs she was loaded into the police wagon.

“
Merci, en tout cas
,” the butler said, shrugging as he propped the broken door back up in its frame.

Lady Dunaway straightened herself and frowned as she squinted at the sun. “
Elle n’était pas vampire
,” she murmured.

The last address on the list was a large gray stone house on the Avenue Victor Hugo with oriental wrought-iron grates in the windows, pink granite keystones, and a number of short and luxuriant lime trees in front of it. The lime trees were in full blossom and rained down their white fluff like snow, an incongruous sight in the balmy June afternoon.