Anne Billson - Suckers

'Neither.'

'Don't lie to me. You were following her tonight, yes? How much do you know? Who is the guy?'

'And who the fuck are you?' I asked, outraged. 'Why don't you tell me what's going on?'

He said he would, all in good time, if only I behaved myself and sat quietly in the passenger's seat. On the way to Kensington Church Street we stopped several times at red lights. I had several chances to open the door and make a run for it, but something held me back. I had already decided that if I was going to be horribly murdered, it would have happened already, back in the cemetery where it had been nice and quiet. In fact, I had the feeling the man with the foreign accent had probably saved me from being horribly murdered. Not for the first time that night, curiosity got the better of me. I snatched a couple of sideways glances at him as he drove. He was dressed in brushed-denim flares and a brocade jacket, but something told me he was not of the peace and love persuasion. He had longish straw-coloured hair with sideburns, a beaky nose, and wire-rimmed spectacles. The hair looked bleached. I decided I didn't like him one little bit.

We parked in a side street. He frogmarched me to an anonymous brown door and pushed it open. Inside, a steep flight of stairs led downwards. I hovered warily. 'Well, go on,' he said. 'I have no sinister intentions. Here is the only place I know that is open at this hour. London is bad like that.' I started down, and he followed.

We were greeted at the bottom by a man in a shabby dinner jacket who asked to see a membership card. The man with the foreign accent said he'd forgotten it, but dropped several different names and that seemed to do the trick because we were waved in. It was a drinking club, unremarkable apart from its opening hours, decked out in peeling brown and maroon like any shabby old bar in urgent need of refurbishment. There were three or four middle-aged couples sitting around, talking quietly in advanced but practised states of inebriation. I slid into a corner booth and my companion, if you could call him that, fetched a bottle of red wine and two glasses. I sniffed the wine.

'It is not so bad,' he said in an offended tone. 'It is not German.'

'But you are?'

'My name is Andreas Sigismund Grauman.'

'Dora Rosamund Vale,' I said. We shook hands.

Andreas Grauman was not a vampire. He told me later that Violet called him her 'Hatman'. He never wore hats, he said. It was an ancient Moldavian term meaning Commander-in-Chief. He said this with a straight face, and I couldn't for the life of me tell whether or not he was having me on.

He was one of the creepiest people I'd ever met, but I was naive enough to think I could pump him for information. We circled each other warily for a while, smoking cigarettes ( his cigarettes — I'd long since run out) and sipping wine, each trying not to give too much away while trying to find out how much the other knew. I got the impression that none of this conversational shuffle was strictly necessary — he was teasing me and enjoying it. I asked how long he'd known Violet. He told me they had a sort of working partnership which went 'way back'. Meanwhile, he was trying to find out more about the 'guy'. 'Do you know that guy? Is he your boyfriend?' I assumed he was referring to Duncan, and said no, we too had a sort of 'working partnership'.

Grauman grinned sarcastically. 'We are not getting very far. Why don't you tell me? You can trust me, you know. I am on your side.'

'Oh yes,' I said.

He gazed at me earnestly. 'You want to have your boyfriend back. I want you to have your boyfriend back. So — we both want the same thing.'

I squinted at him through the smoke from my latest cigarette. 'Don't tell me that woman — that thing — is your… mistress ?'

He laughed. 'No, no, no. That would be like die Blutschande . Like fucking my own mother. But Livia is very precious to me, like my favourite aunt, and I do not want her to continue to meet with your friend. It is bad for her, you understand. Bad for health, bad for business. There are certain things she must do while she is here in London, and she is not doing them. Because of him. He is fucking everything up.'

'Livia? That's her real name?'

'She has many names.'

'How old is she really?'

He leaned forward conspiratorially. 'I tell you what. I tell you her age, and you tell me all about your boyfriend.'

'Not a very good bargain. You tell me her age and where she comes from and where she gets her money from.'

'OK.'

'And you go first,' I said.

He didn't know exactly how old she was. She either habitually lied about her age, or had genuinely lost count. But he put it at somewhere between two and three hundred years.

'Fernand Khnopff,' I said, more to myself than to him.

He stared at me in amazement. 'You have seen that painting?'

'I've heard about it.'

He looked grim. 'Well, there you are. It is like I told you. She is becoming careless.'

'Go on.'

She came originally from Moldavia, he said, which was now a part of the USSR. She had led a normal, respectable life as a daughter of Bogdan until, in a port on the Danube, she encountered a certain Italian aristocrat.

'Then what? Who was the aristocrat?'

'I have told you my story. Now you tell me yours.'

'You haven't finished. Where does she get her money?'

He sighed. 'There is a very old man who lives in Colorado, in the United States of America. He is extremely rich. There is another old man who lives in a castle in Mexico. He too is a millionaire. There is an old woman, I think, who owns a small island off the coast of Japan. There are others, I am not sure where — maybe in the Aegean, or Nepal. But I know they are all very old, and all very rich. They give her money.'

'Why?'

'Because they are vampires too.'

'Good Lord. How many vampires are there?'

'Not many. Like many species, they face extinction.'

'Why don't they spread it around, then? Bite more necks?'

Grauman sighed, his eyes glazing over. 'It is not so simple, not like in the movies. One bite may be enough to infect you, but it will not bestow on you the full range of powers. That process is long and arduous, and extremely dangerous, as the recipient will hover on the threshold of death for six or seven days, while fluids are still being exchanged. And, so long as this recipient exists, the original vampire is unable to bestow his or her gift on another. At least, not in its entirety.'

'How inconvenient.'

'Yes, it is. Most inconvenient.'

'So what is Violet being paid to do?'

His eyes snapped back into focus. 'I have kept my part of the bargain,' he said pleasantly. 'Now you will keep yours. Tell me your story, or I will break both your arms.'

I looked at him to see whether he was joking, but I didn't think he was. 'What was it you wanted to know again?'

'Tell me about your boyfriend. What is his name?'

I sipped some wine. 'Duncan.'

He snarled. For a second I thought he really was going to lean across and break my arm. 'Duncan what ?'

After the first shock of waking up to find him there, I had found him simply creepy. Now he was beginning to frighten me again.

'Duncan Fender,' I said.

A look of such ferocious anger crossed his face that I quickly estimated the fastest route to the door, just in case I had to make a run for it. But then he sighed and sat back and lit another cigarette.

'Duncan Fender,' he said. 'I thought as much.'

I saw a lot of Andreas Grauman in the next few weeks. Or rather, he made sure I saw a lot of him. He was keeping tabs on me, but I was careful not to give too much away. I refused to tell him where I lived, for example — I didn't want him springing any nasty surprises. But it was true I was spending more time in W11 than in NW1. I had a friend called Matt who was attempting to run a tiny independent record company from a couple of rooms at the dingy end of Blenheim Crescent. I talked him into giving me a set of keys so I could use the place as a makeshift base at night. It was somewhere to make coffee, chop up sulphate, and smoke cigarettes — all fast becoming my favourite hobbies. And it was only a short walk away from Duncan's.