ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE

She wheeled his bath chair onto the broad balcony and positioned it in deep shadow. Beauregard welcomed the enfolding darkness as if it were a comfortable blanket. At his age, direct sunlight would kill him faster than it would Genevieve, and she was a vampire. She left his tea within his reach. Green gunpowder. He practically lived on the stuff.

From shade, he looked out at the grey light, down into the Via Eudosiana. This early in the morning, the misty haze  -  almost scented fog  -  was not yet burned away. It was already hot, promising a day in which flat loaves could be baked on sun-warmed flagstones.

A sleek, 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 Genevieve 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, France in 1918, Berlin in 1938.

Faces and voices were clear in his mind. Mycroft Holmes, Edwin Winthrop, Lord Ruthven. Genevieve, Kate, Penelope. Lord Godalming, Dr Seward, the Prince Consort. The Kaiser, the Red Baron, Adolf Hitler. Sergeant Dravot dogging his steps. Dracula fleeing time and again, always finding a nest, never letting go.

He remembered his silver-plated swordstick. Had that been as ostentatious as Bond's Walther? Probably.

Now, it was not a question of drifting. It was a matter of casting, of trying to recall. That, infuriatingly, was more difficult. The game pie served at Simpson's in the Strand in 1888 came instantly to mind, the memory hot in his dry mouth. But he couldn't remember what was for supper last night.

'Head Office assume you've kept an eye on Dracula,' ventured Bond. 'It'd be out of character for you to let go. Especially with him so nearby.'

'Head Office?'

The jargon amused Beauregard. In his day, the slang was different. Before he was one of them, they were just the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club. Then a faction of cricketers took to calling them the Pavilion. For a while, it was the Circus. The Cabal consisted of between one and five people, usually three. In the 1920s and throughout the last war, called back from his first stab at retirement, he had sat at the head of the table. Now, young Winthrop  -  'young'? He was sixty-three!  -  occupied that chair.

'I beg your pardon, Sir.'

He had been worrying at his memories too hard and floated away from the present. He must concentrate. He should get through this quickly, if not for himself then for Genevieve. If he overstrained, she became upset.

She should know he was dying. He had been about it long enough.

'Yes, Commander Bond,' he replied, at last. 'I'm still interested. It's a hard bone to let go.'

'You're considered the authority.'

'Flatter the old duffer, eh?'

'Not at all.'

'You want to hear about him? Dracula?'

If he were to publish his memoirs  -  an enterprise from which he was forbidden by law  -  they would have to be called Anni Draculae  -  'the Dracula Years'. The exile of Palazzo Otranto was the defining influence of his overlong life. The thing he most regretted about death was leaving the stage before the Count, not being there at the King Vampire's finish.

'Dragulya,' he repeated, drawing out the name, as Churchill always did. 'What would this century have been like without him? You've read Stoker's book? About how he could have been stopped at the beginning?'

'I don't have much time to read.'

Too busy running after warm wenches and getting into scrapes, Beauregard would be bound.

'A mistake, I think, Commander Bond. But then, I've had a great deal of time. I've read everything about Dracula, fact and fiction. I know more about him than anyone else alive.'

'With respect, Sir, we have people close to Dracula, who've been there for centuries.'

One of Winthrop's idees fixees was recruiting vampire elders to spy on their principe. So, Diogenes had finally pulled it off. There were moles in the Carpathian Guard.

'I said alive.'

He chuckled. That made his chest hurt. His laugh turned to a cough.

Genevieve, supernaturally attuned to every wheeze and creak, parted the curtains and stepped through the french windows. In a sleeveless cream polo-neck sweater and violet toreador pants, she was a beauty. Spots of colour on chalk-white cheeks showed her anger. She shot a chill look at Bond and knelt by Beauregard, clucking like a French governess. She made him lift his mug to his mouth, forcing him to take a swallow of the tea he had forgotten.

Unembarrassed, Bond leaned against the balcony, smoke pluming from his nostrils. Thin sunlight glinted in his hard eyes. He would have had to learn cruelty to serve Diogenes. Maybe he'd always had the knot inside him, waiting to be undone. He had been recruited warm and turned scientifically through tubes and transfusions, then trained and shaped to be the weapon required for the job. That was another of Winthrop's ideas.

'Charles-Cheri, you mustn't go on like this.'

Genevieve didn't scold or whine. She made a charade of fussing but understood exactly how much she could do for him and how much she could not. She laid her head briefly in his lap so he would not see the beginnings of pink tears in her eyes. Her honey-blonde hair spilled over his thin, heavily veined hands. His fingers stirred with an impulse to stroke her.

Bond looked at them.

With a flash of the insight Beauregard had developed in his career, augmented by the traces of herself Genevieve had left in him, he knew what Bond was thinking. A dutiful grand-daughter. No, great-grand-daughter.

She was by far the older, but he wore all the years she had cast aside. Genevieve was turned in 1432, at the age of sixteen. After five centuries, she seemed no older than twenty. Provided you didn't look too closely at her eyes.

It took him frustrating seconds to remember exactly how old he was. He was born in 1853, had received a telegram from the new Queen in 1953. The year was now...? He got it, finally, as always: 1959. He was 105 years old; 106 next month, August. He might not exactly look his age  -  another effect of her kisses, he knew  -  but he was undeniably old, inside and out, a living ghost of his younger selves.

He had almost outgrown pain. Ten or twenty years ago, he was stricken with all the aches and pangs of age, but they had faded. His body was losing the habit of feeling. Sometimes, he felt exactly like a spirit, communicating with the world through a half-witted medium, unable to get his message across. Only Genevieve understood, through a species of natural telepathy.

He controlled his coughing.

'You had better leave,' Genevieve told Bond, firmly.

'It's all right, Gene. I'm all right.'

She looked up at him, blue eyes penetrating. The trick with Genevieve was to not lie. She could always tell. Pamela, his wife, had been the same. It was not just a vampire trait.

The trick was to tell his truth.

'You can't let it go either, my dearest,' he said.

She looked away and he stroked her soft, fine hair. The electric touch took him back, to their first time together: her teeth and nails tracing trickling patterns on his skin, her cat-tongue tingling the love-wounds.

'Our Genevieve was the first woman to set foot inside the Diogenes Club, Commander Bond, the first to face the Ruling Cabal. Does that seem archaic to you? Mediaeval?'

'Not really.'

'You should be quizzing her. She hasn't let the bone go, either, the Dracula bone. And she's better able to do something about him than a living fossil like me.'

'He should be dead,' Genevieve said. 'He should have been dead a long time. Truly dead.'

'Plenty would agree with you,' said the new-born.

Genevieve stood up and looked at the young vampire's blockily handsome face. He had healed scars.

'Plenty have had opportunity to end it. To end him. Once, we... you know that story, of course  -  an old tale, tedious to you. Ancient history.'

Beauregard understood Genevieve's bitterness.

In 1943, it had been expedient for the Allies to come to a dark accommodation. It had taken Edwin Winthrop to negotiate the Croglin Grange Treaty, which brought the King Vampire into the war. The younger man, unfettered by what he sometimes called 'Victorian notions', was willing to take the responsibility and the opprobrium on himself. Despite everything, Beauregard had approved the policy. Even Churchill, detesting Dracula as he did Hitler, went along with the alliance, though he never shook the Count's hand. Beauregard had, turning away from the King Vampire's dagger smile. His personal defeat, willingly given, was in the name of a greater victory.

It was as well that Genevieve was in Java then, remote from the tides of history. She would have tried to rip out Dracula's throat.

'In this century, you've never understood Vlad Tepes,' said Genevieve. 'You've always thought he could be appeased and accommodated. He's never been a politician, like Lord Ruthven. He's a mediaeval man, a barbarian. His throne is raised upon a mountain of skulls.'

The wars of this modern age were different from those of earlier centuries. Partly because of new armaments which made conflict on a worldwide scale not only possible but inevitable, and partly because of the Changes  -  the spread of vampirism begun by Dracula's emergence into the Western world. Without vampires, Beauregard was sure there could never have been Nazis; if anyone was Dracula's heir, it had been Hitler. Though the Final Solution applied as much to vampires of the Dracula line as to Jews, Hitler had intended to turn once his Reich was absolute, to last the full thousand years. The creation of an undying master race by science and sorcery was a German project dating back to the First World War, ironically as much Dracula's vision as Hitler's. If the Nazis hadn't excluded his bloodline from the register of purity, Dracula would have sided with them.

'You made him your ally,' Genevieve said, coldly.

Bond shrugged. 'Stalin was our ally too, and the Devil Incarnate after Yalta. Politics aren't my department, mademoiselle. Cleverer brains than mine struggle with that. Mine is but to do or die, preferably the former.'

'You've died once, obviously.'

'Of course. You know what they say...'

'No. What?'

'You only live twice.'

Genevieve stood, hand resting on Beauregard's shoulder. He was her last tie, he knew. When he was gone, what would she feel free to do?

'Pardon me for being blunt, Commander,' she said, 'but some of us have less time. What exactly are you here to find out?'

The spy couldn't give a straight answer. Winthrop was still thinking in zigzags, and his agent might not even know the point of his mission.

'I'm writing a report on the Royal Engagement.'

'You are perhaps a gossip columnist?'

Bond smiled, showing sharp teeth. With the beginnings of amusement, Beauregard saw the new-born was taken with Genevieve. If she worked him properly, she would have a conquest.

'Thanks to Beauregard and people like him, we know a lot about Dracula,' said Bond. 'You're wrong to think we've never tried to understand him. He's been a public figure since the 1880s. We know how he thinks. We know what he wants. It's always been about power. Since his warm days, he's seen himself as a conqueror. He's spread his bloodline to an army of get. Each time he's married, it has been to advance his cause, to build a power base.'

He heard Edwin Winthrop speaking through Bond. This was Winthrop's worldview. Beauregard could not argue with it exactly, but had come to understand  -  during the eras of Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin  -  that the Count was not a unique, or even uncommon, type. The coldest thought that ever settled in him was that Dracula had succeeded after all. Every nation on Earth  -  Great Britain not excluded  -  acted as if it were ruled by the King Vampire.

'The person we don't know about is the Princess,' Bond continued, exhaling more smoke. 'She flits in and out of the records, leaving no significant trace. What Head Office want to know is, why Asa Vajda? She's of the bloodline of Javutich, a near-extinct breed. Dracula has enough history. What he needs, as always, is geography  -  estates, a throne, a fastness. Like most elders'  -  Bond dipped his eyes at Genevieve  -  'il principe is dispossessed, a monied vagabond. Ceau?escu certainly isn't going to take him back.'

Hundreds of Transylvanian vampires, having survived Nazi death camps, were returned to their homeland after the War and promptly killed, with the shameful collusion of the Allies, by their warm countrymen. Nicolae Ceau?escu still conducted a campaign of extermination against vampires who persisted in an attachment to native soil that happened to lie within modern Romania. As terrified as any of his peasant ancestors, the premier took Castle Dracula for his Summer Palace, to show his mastery.

'Princess Asa is Moldavian,' Beauregard said. 'Dracula is a Wallach. Something like two-thirds of the world's vampire elders come from the horseshoe of the Carpathians. If Dracula is to have temporal power again, that's where he must begin, in what is now Romania. When one gets to be very old, homeland comes to mean a lot.'

Genevieve squeezed his shoulder.

'Head Office think along the same lines, Beauregard. But as a dynastic marriage, this doesn't ring true. By rights, Dracula should connect himself with a strong bloodline. Countess Elisabeth of the House of Bathory is an obvious candidate.'

'She's lesbian,' Genevieve put in.

'This isn't a love match, Mademoiselle Dieudonne. You have to admit it's a comedown. Going from the Queen of England to a backwoods hellcat with twigs in her hair and earth in the folds of her shroud?'

'The Count has his odd fancies. Ask Mrs Harker.'

'If it's bloodline he wants, Gene, I'm surprised he hasn't come a-courting.'

Genevieve shuddered. 'Tres amusant, Charles-Cheri.'

Bond shook his head. 'He's up to something. Dracula has never made a move that wasn't for his own ends first and last. But what are his ends?'

'Complete and utter subjugation of everyone and everything,' Genevieve said. 'Forever. There, I've told you his secret. Can I claim my five hundred francs?'

The spy cracked another one-sided smile. Sizing Genevieve up, he thought himself man enough to tame her. Beauregard chuckled again and found himself coughing. It was worse this time, jagged glass rolling around inside his chest. Breathing became a chore.

'This interview is over,' Genevieve insisted.

She knelt by him again, helping him drink, pressing a hand against his chest, willing him to survive. She forgot to hide her eyes. He saw the gathering red at her tearducts.

'Very well,' Bond consented. 'May I call back? If other lines of inquiry dry.'

Beauregard tried to stop coughing. He could not manage it.

'I'd prefer you didn't,' Genevieve said.

He tried to overrule her, but the words wouldn't come. It was best to let her decide.

'Let yourself out,' she said.

'Of course.' He extinguished his cigarette. 'Good day to you both. You can reach me at the Inghilterra.'

He slipped silently through the french windows and left the apartment.

Beauregard allowed his spasm to subside of its own accord. He spluttered, leaking foam from his mouth. Genevieve wiped his face, like his nanny.

As he had come to expect, the pain faded fast. His eyes and ears were still sharp, but he had almost no senses of taste or smell. Only memories.

'Pauvre cheri,' said Genevieve.

She wheeled him inside.

Though he had only lived on the Via Eudosiana for ten years, the apartment was crowded with a century of acquisitions. Bookshelves lined the walls up to the high ceiling. A great many odd objects picked up in all quarters of the globe were collected unsorted in corners. Genevieve often found an African mask or Chinese jade figure in a box or drawer and remarked on its quality or value. He had covertly made an inventory  -  such list-making upset her, he knew  -  and considered who would get the most out of each item. The library would go to Edwin Winthrop.

Genevieve helped him out of his bath chair onto the day bed in his study. He was so light now that even a warm girl could have lifted him up and set him down like a baby. Genevieve let him do as much as he could under his own steam. Using the last strength in his wasted muscles, he rose from his chair, steadying himself on her arm, then more or less collapsed onto the couch, allowing her to arrange his legs under a tartan blanket.

She smiled sweetly. It was like a pin through his heart. That feeling had not faded.

Sometimes he called her Pamela, and she let it pass. His wife had died after two years of marriage, nearly eighty years ago. The heat made Rome much like the hill country of India, where he and Pam had lived while he pursued what Kipling called the Great Game, the chess match of intelligence and counter-intelligence between the Russias and the British Empire over the disposition of the subcontinent  -  the first Cold War. Pam had said all along that no good would come of it, and had constantly been a thorn about duty, forcing him to question where it actually lay. Genevieve might be the last and longest-lasting of his loves, but he had a clearer sense of his brief time with Pam, of the joy and pain.

Guilt made him love Genevieve the more.

He took her hand and gripped it, squeezing with all the strength he had left.

She kissed his forehead.

It must be a grotesque sight, a young girl with an old man. A song of his youth was 'A Bird in a Gilded Cage'. But Genevieve only seemed young, just as he was beyond old. Anything past a hundred was unnatural. An age for trees and turtles, not men.

'I need you, Charles,' she breathed.

It was not a lie. It was her truth, told in such a way that he could not refuse it.

She climbed onto the couch alongside him. When they lay together, he was still the taller. If her head was beside his, her feet barely reached past his knees.

She kissed his cheek and chin, smooth where she had shaved him an hour ago. Quite a bit of hair remained on his head, thick and white, but he no longer wore a moustache. He owed his hair to her, and probably his eyesight and the majority of his teeth.

She loosened his dressing gown from his neck and undid the top button of his pyjama jacket. She nuzzled the hollow of his throat and moved her mouth, feeling for the old wounds.

He was calm, spasms gone. In his heart, he was aroused. His blood flowed faster. In a way that would have astonished him as a young man, that was enough.

'This is absurd, Gene,' he murmured. 'You're...'

'Old enough to be your great-grandmother ten times over. You're the young lover with the elderly mistress, remember.'

Her fangs slipped into well-worn grooves in his shoulder, well away from the vein. He could never decide whether the tingling darts were hot needles or sharp icicles.

He shook with delight. Her tongue undulated against his skin. He felt her body tense against his and knew his taste was flooding into her.

Once, she would have drunk. Now, she sipped.

No, tasted.

He knew what she was doing. For years, she hadn't been drinking his blood. She opened his wounds and put her mouth to them, taking not substance but sustenance, drawing from his heart not his body.

And she gave him of herself.

He was as much a vampire as she. Genevieve kept him alive with her blood. With the rough, sharp point of her tongue, she scratched away at the inside of her mouth, and dribbled smidgens into his wounds. It was in her power to force him to drink her blood, to turn him into her son-in-darkness, to make him her vampire get. But not in her character.

There were three vampire women in his life, all of different bloodlines. Genevieve, like Kate Reed, could not just take from her lovers. She had to leave something of herself behind, in the mind and body. Everyone she touched was changed by her, affected.

The other one had torn his neck and taken from him with contempt as much as desire. When he thought of her, it was with pity.

How many years did he owe Genevieve?

Her blood had kept him young, without him realising it. Because he hadn't wanted to realise. Now, he knew she was keeping him alive. The men of his family were not on the whole long-lived. An uncle had made it to ninety, and a nephew was still alive at eighty-one. But his father had died, of a Bombay fever, at forty-eight, and both his grandfathers were dead when he was born. For him, 105 was not a natural age.

In their communion, Genevieve sobbed silently, her sorrow coursing through his heart.

'Don't, my darling,' he said, comforting her.

He wanted to raise his hands, to touch her face, to blot her tears, but he was in a daze. His mind still darted, but his limbs were heavy, unresponsive.

'It doesn't matter,' she said.

Now would be a good time, he thought. Her warmth was inside him, would be carried along with him. He imagined himself shrinking inside his worn-out body, spirals of light and dark winding around him. His face arranged a smile.

Genevieve pulled suddenly away from his neck. He felt air on his wet skin.

'No,' she said, suddenly firm, selfish almost.

Through her blood, he had tugged at her. She knew what he was thinking, what he was feeling.

'No,' she repeated, tenderly, imploring. 'Not yet, please.'

His arms worked. They folded around her. He consented to live.

'That man was lying, Charles,' she said.

He knew.

'He doesn't make reports. He's not the type. He acts on reports.'

'Good girl,' he said.

As he fell asleep, lulled by the beat of his heart, he heard the telephone ring.

'Better... answer that,' he breathed.