James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (10 page)

Crossing the great floor of the station under the weak gray daylight of the glass ceiling, Asher tried to remember who was in charge in Vienna these days. Perhaps no one he knew. Streatham had been right about the reorganization, of course. Fairport, at least, would still be in Vienna, unobtrusively operating his safe house out at his sanitarium in the Wienerwald, peddling rejuvenation to bankers and stockbrokers’ wives, fussy and trembly with his ill health and his cotton gloves and that fanatic glint in his pale blue eyes.

Asher smiled, recalling the three days he’d spent with that comic-opera hypochondriac, journeying to some remote Czech village so Fairport could interview a peasant brother and sister who were contemporaries of his own great-grandparents, and so Asher could trace local variations of the verb byti or biti—and have a look at a forest road leading into Saxony that, for no good reason, had been widened and repaired with funds from Berlin. The old man hadn’t taken off his gloves for the entire trip, had warmed the snow water of the streams because it was better for the liver, and had brought his own food, his own sheets, his own soap. The local peasants had shaken their heads and given him names of their own—“the laundry maid” and “Grandmother English”—and the innkeeper at one village had taken Asher aside and gravely asked if it were true that in the City—meaning Vienna—they had doctors who could cure people of such ailments. Asher had been hard put to explain that Grandmother English was such a doctor.

He grinned at the memory and settled into his compartment again with a feeling of having successfully dodged through a complicated obstacle course. In addition to sending the telegrams, he had purchased the Neue Freie Presse and two spring-operated children’s toys: a bear that clashed cymbals when wound with a key; a donkey whose four legs moved so that, if carefully balanced, it would more or less walk. He put them through their paces on the table, deeply and gravely entertained.

Other passengers were reboarding, armed with fresh books, magazines, newspapers, candy or pastry. Through the window he glimpsed the man who had to be the jealous Steffi and his fairy-like Viennese girlfriend, her arms full of fresh flowers, and smiled a little at the capacity of humans to believe what they wish to believe.

There was a beautiful dowager in an impeccable Worth suit, trailed by a cowed-looking maid and three little black French bulldogs; a white-bearded gentleman with the face of a warrior monk, and a boy who might have been his grandson or a servant hurrying in his wake. Karolyi, clean-shaven and fresh, a winter rose in his buttonhole, strode lightly along the platform, pausing to remove his hat when he spoke to a shabby girl selling peanut brittle. Asher saw by the girl’s face that he’d considerably overpaid her, and remembered the brassy-haired whore again, tied to her chair. He wondered if the police had found her body yet.

Why Ernchester?

His mind gyred back to the question as the train rocked into motion once again.

Why an Englishman at all? Had the Vienna vampires refused to cooperate with an Austrian offer? Not as odd as it might sound: the Viennese, in Asher’s experience, had their own rationale for doing things, an idiosyncratic frivolity that could encompass any reason from Czech or Hungarian—or Serbian or Moldavian or Venetian—nationality to a personal opinion that the Emperor was an old fuddy-duddy whom they disdained to serve.

And indeed, whatever promises the government made, Asher knew the vampires were right to guard their anonymity. Having been a spy for seventeen years, he knew too well that no government—certainly not his own—could be trusted to keep any promise it made.

It still didn’t explain why an English, rather than a French or a German, vampire had been approached.

Or had they? He paused in the act of dismembering the key-wound bear, a half-farcical vision rising in his mind of the sealed baggage car stacked high with coffins and trunks in which slumbered the vampires of Paris; of himself, strolling innocently into the restaurant car to face table after table of chalk-white, bone-thin faces and a sea of eyes that burned like actinic flame.

When it came down to it, what the hell was he going to do once he reached Vienna? Try to hand the problem over to another incompetent and reluctant Department head? Get some other young novice killed?

He unfolded his bunk, undressed, and slept again, to wake from uneasy dreams with the sensation he’d had in dealing with vampires before, of having had his mind momentarily blanked. In silence he swiftly rolled from his bunk, the compartment around him lit only by the yellow glow from the passage leaking around the edges of the curtain. It showed him an empty compartment—certainly there was nowhere to hide, for there was barely room for one person, let alone two—and he pressed his face to the edge of the door, moving the curtain just enough to see past it.

Karolyi and Ernchester were walking up the corridor, Karolyi speaking with eloquent gestures of his white-gloved hands, Ernchester expressionless, very small and thin beside him.

“It does not do, you understand, to spend the entire journey in one’s compartment. For one thing, the porters gossip.”

“I see no reason why the prattle of groundlings touches us.” Ernchester’s voice was so low as to be almost inaudible, and Asher wondered why the elongated ou and open-ended ea rang so familiar in his ear. Who had he heard recently, he wondered, speaking with that archaic inflection? “There is nothing in this ‘train’ ”—he spoke the word as if it were foreign to him—“of interest to me. If, as you say, we shall be in Vienna some days…”

They passed beyond his hearing. Asher found his watch, angled it to the slit of incoming light. It was a few minutes past six-thirty, Vienna time. Karolyi must have just released Ernchester from the baggage car, once more replacing a seal with a duplicate. It was the subtle touch of the vampire’s mind on all those in the car that he had felt in his sleep. Outside Asher’s window the Alps glimmered eerie blue under the stars.

He dressed swiftly and stole down the corridor, listening for voices in the other compartments. Silence reigned. Most of them, he guessed, were already at dinner. The lock on Karolyi’s compartment yielded readily to the wire tools he’d constructed from the innards of donkey and bear. He searched deftly, thoroughly, though he knew Karolyi wasn’t a man to leave information lying around. No notebooks, no letters, no addresses. A great deal of money in the valise, which Asher opened after carefully inspecting its lock and frame for bits of hair, wood chips, or gum; he abstracted two hundred florins in notes and also two of the dozen or so duplicate baggage-room seals.

Under the false bottom Asher found ten small boxes of wax and wood, which contained impressions of keys, probably to the baggage car—possibly to all baggage cars in use on the line. Asher pocketed them and replaced the clothing. By the time Karolyi noticed they were gone, they’d be off the train.

The valise also contained two folded Personals sections of the London
Times from successive dates, and these he dared not take away with him. Time was passing swiftly; he didn’t have time to scan them, knowing that there would be no mark on the advertisement. He made a note of the dates, folded them as they had been, and replaced the valise above the velvet seat.

A traveler’s chess set stood on the table, its men neatly ranked for a game. Ernchester’s old-fashioned, fiddlebacked greatcoat hung near the door beside Karolyi’s wide-skirted one; Asher checked the pockets quickly, wondering where the vampire would stay once they reached Vienna.

Back in his own compartment again, he rang for the porter, ordered dinner brought to him, adding with a wink and a couple of francs that he was indisposed. “You wouldn’t have the English Times on board, would you?”

“Certamente, sir,” Giuseppe said, drawing himself up indignantly. “All the newspapers we have for our first-class passengers, of the latest editions.”

“How about last Saturday’s? Last Friday’s, too, if possible?”

“Hmm. That I don’t know, m’sieu. I shall ask, shall look about the porters’ rooms…”

“Discreetly,” Asher said. “You don’t need to bring me the whole thing. Just the Personals.” He raised one eyebrow and tilted his head wisely, and the porter bustled away with the air of one who sees himself an experienced international intrigant.

And perhaps he was, thought Asher. In his position he’d have the opportunity. In any case Giuseppe returned with a much-battered copy of Saturday evening’s Personals, retrieved from the porters’ lavatory, and Asher spent the next half hour scanning it for whatever message had arranged the meeting between the vampire and the Hungarian.

Olumsiz Bey—Front

steps of British
Museum, 7.—Umitsiz

Asher had to read it twice before he realized it was what he sought.

Olumsiz
was Turkish for deathless—or perhaps undead. Umitsiz, for hopeless—or perhaps for the British form of the name Wanthope, the collateral name of the Earls of Ernchester, one of several under which Charles Farren had many years ago willed property to himself.

Curious. Why Turkish? Asher folded the paper, slipped it into his valise. Deathless Lord. Without Hope. Want-Hope. Wanthope. Deathless Lord…

Quite clearly Ernchester and Karolyi wanted to conceal their transactions. That would fit, if the other London vampires—who must surely read the Personals, nights being long for the Undead—frowned on an alliance. Would Grippen, the Master Vampire of London, know Turkish? Ysidro would, thought Asher, oddly uneasy at the memory of that bleached Spanish hidalgo who had, against the wishes of all the other London vampires, first sought his help. The Ottoman Empire had been a formidable power in the sixteenth century. It was conceivable that Ysidro, a courtier and sometime scholar, would know some of its ancient tongue. Conceivable, too, that the earl would. Certainly likelier than, for instance, Hungarian, which in that era had been the language of barbarians and herders, people without power in the West. Any of the other London vampires would almost certainly know German or French.

A Viennese or Hungarian vampire who had been made in the sixteenth or seventeenth century would very probably know the tongue of the armies that had repeatedly overrun his land.

Asher looked at the top of the paper again. Saturday, October 31—and no copy of Friday’s paper. What, he wondered, had the summons said that made Ernchester so anxious to conceal his movements from the other London vampires, including his wife?

Who was it who called himself the Deathless Lord?

Even at ten in the evening the Vienna Bahnhof was the swarming center of the comings and goings of an empire. Stepping quickly from the train before it had even come to a complete halt, striding along the platform to mingle with the crowd, Asher felt the stab of homecoming—nostalgia, the pain of remembering. There was no city in the world quite like Vienna.

There were backcountry Jews in black caftans, tallis, and side curls being resolutely ignored by their frock-coated Germanic Reform co-religionists, Hungarian csikos in high boots and baggy trousers, a tattered rainbow of Gypsies. There were the Viennese themselves, ladies bundled in linen traveling coats and veils to guard against smuts, brilliantly uniformed men who might have been Lancers or postmen, children clinging to black-clothed governesses, and students in bright-colored caps. French, Italian, singsong Viennese German as unlike as possible from the tongue of Berlin blended with Czech, Romanian, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian…

The air was redolent with coffee.

Vienna
.

Illogically, as he made for the stand where the fiacres would be ranked—where Ernchester and Karolyi would head the moment the customs officials were through with their luggage—Asher found himself holding his breath, fearing that somehow, impossibly, he would meet Francoise.

He had dreamed about her, in his uneasy sleep that afternoon; a dream threaded with waltzes. She was walking along the Schottenring, past the marble and stucco and gilt of the great blocks of flats, through the crystal light of a spring evening. She looked not as she had looked thirteen years ago, but as she must look now, her hair almost completely gray, and lean as certain cats get as they age; rather like a cat in a gray walking suit tabbied with black lace.

I’m sorry, Francoise.

As he watched her, he had been piercingly aware of the ornate bronze gratings in the walls at sidewalk level, brushed by the gunmetal taffeta of her skirt. There was movement in the darkness, he realized, movement beneath the pavement under her feet; whispering in the shadows, eyes in the dark. Waiting only for the coming of night.

They were in Vienna as well.

Francoise, get out of there! he tried to shout. Go to your home, light the lamps, don’t let them in. Don’t speak to them, when they meet you on the pavement…

But because of what he had done, thirteen years ago, she could not hear him or would not heed. She walked on, and it seemed to him that gray mist drifted up through those bronze gratings and breathed after her down the street.

He shook the recollection away. It was not likely that he would meet her—she might not even live in Vienna anymore— and in any case, the love between them was past and done. And there was nothing for which he would trade the prospect of living the rest of his life with Lydia, that copper-haired, bespectacled nymph.

But still there was that ache in his heart whenever he heard the “Waltz of the Flowers.”

“Herr Professor Doktor Asher?”

He turned, startled, halfway to the cab stand, his first thought, Not now! Karolyi and Ernchester would be along in minutes . . -

Two brown-uniformed Viennese policemen stood behind him. Both bowed.

“You are the Herr Professor Doktor Asher who has just come from the Paris-Vienna Express?”

“I am, Herr Oberhaupt.” The old Viennese custom of bestowing titles on everyone dropped immediately back into place, along with the lilting, slightly Italianate Viennese accent. “Is there a problem? I presented my passport…”

“No, no problem with the passport,” said the policeman. “We regret extremely that you are wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of a man in Paris, a Herr Edmund Cramer. Will you be so good as to accompany us to the Rathaus?”