Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha Read Online Free PDF Page B

silver Aston Martin parked outside the apartment building. It attracted the awed interest of two small children. Beauregard deduced the guest expected at dawn was on his way up.
    He heard Geneviève answer the door and admit his caller. She did not approve of his consenting to this interview.
    She showed the guest onto the balcony and withdrew into the flat to make a racket, needlessly tidying. He understood her point, but had agreed to talk with the visitor as much out of curiosity as duty. If he was to be pumped for information, he would be paid in kind. Taking an interest was a way of proving to himself that he was still part of the world.
    The vampire spy stood on the balcony and lit a cigarette with a Ronson lighter, flame reddening his forceful face. He exhaled smoke and looked down on Beauregard. His quizzical smile exposed a prominent fang.
    ‘The name’s Bond,’ he said, with a slight Scots roll. ‘Hamish Bond.’
    ‘Good morning, Commander Bond,’ Beauregard said. ‘Welcome to the Eternal City.’
    The new-born took a cursory look across Parco di Traiano, taking in the ruin of Nero’s Golden House (one of Rome’s many monuments to megalomania) and the jagged edge of the Flavian Amphitheatre, the Colosseum. Beauregard noticed with sadness that Bond was not taken with the scenery. Duty ought not blind one to the view. Indeed, it was the duty of those in their shared profession to pay attention.
    Though travelling under his naval rank, Bond was out of uniform, dressed as if for baccarat at Monte. His white Savile Row dinner jacket was perfectly cut, loose enough to suggest to the observant the possibility of a shoulder holster. Beauregard knew exactly what this man was, even what was in the holster. A Walther PPK 7.65mm, worn in a Berns-Martin Triple-Draw, clip of eight lead-jacketed silver bullets. Nasty thing.
    The breeze played with a stray comma of Bond’s black hair. Smoke tore from his cigarette, a handmade Balkan-Turkish blend with three gold bands. Too distinctive for a fellow in his line, too memorable. Those custom gaspers suggested an attitude. Here was a vampire who knew how to shrug in a dinner jacket without rucking the collar, wore shirts of sea-island cotton and could draw a pistol as easily as he pulled his Ronson from an inside pocket. One would think he wanted to make an impression, to strike a pose for the gun-sight.
    Charles Beauregard hoped he had never been like this.
    If any Crown servant deserved a retreat to private life, Beauregard was that man. Yet the Diogenes Club — British Intelligence, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms — was not an institution from which retirement was uncomplicated. For one thing, the notion that members might have a private life was discouraged. He had served the Club, rising on occasion to its highest office, for the best part of a century.
    He looked out into brightening daylight, studying the view Bond had already dismissed, finding it a source of endless fascination. This city was older than them all. That was a comfort.
    ‘You’re something of a legend, Beauregard. I trained under Sergeant Dravot. He donated the blood for my turning. It’s a good line. He speaks often of you.’
    ‘Ah yes, Danny Dravot. My old guardian angel.’
    Beauregard discerned an echo of Dravot in Bond’s rich voice, even in his relaxed but ready stance. The sergeant turned out sons-in-darkness with some of his calibre. Under the polish, Bond would be a good man, a reliable operative.
    Dravot, turned vampire in the 1880s, would be a sergeant until the end of time. And would remain at the disposal of the Diogenes Club.
    So much of Beauregard’s life, of the considerable weight of memory anchoring him to his bed and chair, was bound up with that unassuming building in Pall Mall. If, as was increasingly the case, his mind drifted, a past of photographic vividness would blot out the fuzzy present. Often, he found himself back there: India in 1879, London in 1888,