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solicitation.
    After a few uncomfortable nights in Communist-approved beer halls, she had learned to stay in her hotel room while in Bucharest. People here had memories as long as her lifetime. They crossed themselves and muttered prayers as she walked by. Children threw stones.
    She stood at her window and looked out at the square. A patch of devastation where the ancient quarter of the capital had been, marked the site of the palace Ceauşescu was building for himself. A three-storey poster of the Saviour of Romania stood amid the ruins. Dressed like an orthodox priest, he held up Dracula’s severed head as if he had personally killed the Count.
    Ceauşescu harped at length about the dark, terrible days of the past when Dracula and his kind preyed on the warm of Romania. In theory, it kept his loyal subjects from considering the dark, terrible days of the present when he and his wife lorded over the country like especially corrupt Roman Emperors. Impersonating the supplicant undertaker in The Godfather, Francis had abased himself to the dictator to secure official co-operation.
    She turned the wireless on and heard tinny martial music. She turned it off, lay on the narrow, lumpy bed - as a joke, Fred Forrest and Francis had put a coffin in her room one night - and listened to the city at night. Like the forest, Bucharest was alive with noises and smells.
    It was ground under, but there was life here. Even in this grim city, someone was laughing, someone was in love. Somebody was allowed to be a happy fool.
    She heard winds in telephone wires, bootsteps on cobbles, a drink poured in another room, someone snoring, a violinist sawing scales. And someone outside her door. Someone who didn’t breathe, who had no heartbeat, but whose clothes creaked as he moved, whose saliva rattled in his throat.
    She sat up, confident she was elder enough to be silent, and looked at the door.
    ‘Come in,’ she said, ‘it’s not locked. But be careful. I can’t afford more breakages.’

7

    His name was Ion Popescu and he seemed about thirteen, with big, olive-shiny orphan eyes and thick, black, unruly hair. He wore an adult’s clothes, much distressed and frayed, stained with long-dried blood and earth. His teeth were too large for his skull, his cheeks stretched tight over his jaws, drawing his whole face to the point of his tiny chin.
    Once in her room, he crouched down in a corner, away from the window. He talked only in a whisper, in a mix of English and German she had to strain to follow. His mouth wouldn’t open properly. He was alone in the city, without community. Now he was tired and wanted to leave his homeland. He begged her to hear him out and whispered his story.
    He claimed to be forty-five, turned in 1944. He didn’t know, or didn’t care to talk about, his father- or mother-in-darkness. There were blanks burned in his memory, whole years missing. She had come across that before. For all his vampire life, he had lived underground, under the Nazis and then the Communists. He was the sole survivor of several resistance movements. His warm comrades never really trusted him, but his capabilities were useful for a while.
    She was reminded of her first days after turning. When she knew nothing, when her condition seemed a disease, a trap. That Ion could be a vampire for over thirty years and never pass beyond the new-born stage was incredible. She truly realised, at last, how backward this country was.
    ‘Then I hear of the American film, and of the sweet vampire lady who is with the company. Many times, I try to get near you, but you are watched. Securitate . You, I think, are my saviour, my true mother-in-the-dark.’
    Forty-five, she reminded herself.
    Ion was exhausted after days trying to get close to the hotel, to ‘the sweet vampire lady’, and hadn’t fed in weeks. His body was icy cold. Though she knew her own strength was low, she nipped her wrist and dribbled a little of her precious blood onto his white lips,