Magistrates of Hell (16 page)

‘Did they work?’

‘Yes.’ The old scholar’s voice came out thin, like wire stretched to breaking point. ‘We watched – we waited . . .’ He walked on for a time, crippled hands jammed into the pockets of his long teal-green coat. Asher heard him trying to steady his breath.

‘When was this?’

‘August of 1911. A few months after you came through Prague. Then one morning Matthias didn’t come to my house. A few days later I heard there had been an arrest of the Young Hungary group. He escaped, his friends told me. Escaped and fled the country.’

‘So you started watching,’ said Asher, after long silence. ‘Watching in the medical journals, in newspapers, for some mention of a creature somewhere in the world that could have been him.’

‘What could I do?’ Karlebach stopped on the pavement, flung out his arms, his voice a cry of despair.

‘Did you hope to be able to help him? To reverse the process?’

‘I don’t know what I hoped, Jamie.’ They crossed the street to the hotel doors, absurd in their neo-Gothic splendor in the cold sunlight. ‘I only knew that I could not desert him. And that I could not seek him alone.’

Liveried footmen sprang to admit them. At the desk the clerk handed Asher a note from P’ei Cheng K’ang, with an enclosure – duly translated – proposing a meeting with An Lu T’ang in two days’ time in the Eight Lanes district. Another note, from Sir Grant Hobart, asked to see him at three that afternoon.

Asher turned back to his companion. ‘Was this what you were asking about last night at the Austrian Legation?’

‘Shipping records.’ Under the heavy white mustaches, Karlebach’s lips twisted. ‘So you see I did pay attention after all to all your talk of spying, my old friend. And yes, a man who could have been Matthias “jumped ship”, as I believe the phrase is, from the
Prinz Heinrich
at Tientsin last November, after signing on in Trieste in September.’

They paused at the foot of the stairs.

‘When the Greeks said that Hope was one of the things that came out of Pandora’s Box, Jamie, with all the other griefs and woes and pains that are the punishment of humankind, they never meant to describe it as the single ray of light in those clouds of stinging darkness. That was a myth invented by nursery maids, so they could tell that story to children without breaking their little hearts. Hope is the worst of those devils, the cruellest thing that the gods could think of to give to man.’

He turned in silence and preceded Asher up the stairs.

‘
Damn it, Asher, what the hell are you playing at?’ Hobart looked up from his papers the moment the Chinese manservant closed the study door behind Asher. ‘When I said get Rick off this damnable lie, I wasn’t giving you carte blanche to go poking your nose into backstairs gossip!’

P’ei
? Or had one of Richard’s three jolly companions mentioned to Richard that he – Asher – had been asking about Hobart Senior’s diversions . . . and about his servants?

‘A British court isn’t going to let your son off a murder charge if his only defense is “it must have been the Chinese”.’

Hobart still had the same quarters he’d occupied before the Rebellion: eight rooms around what had been a minor courtyard in the rambling old palace that the Legation had originally taken for its own. The red pillars had been repainted and some of the soot stains removed from the ceiling, but the gold on the ancient rafters had never been touched up. The courtyard outside, spotlessly tidy, was bare of the flowers, trees, caged birds or kongs of goldfish that so many old China hands adopted to transform this strange architecture into a semblance of home.

The Senior Translator jerked to his feet and flung his pen down on the desk. ‘They would if you’d do your job instead of swanning around the hills chasing ghost stories!’

‘The job you gave me is to clear your son,’ Asher returned calmly. ‘Part of that process is to find out who would want to implicate Rick in so hideous a crime, and in order to learn
who
, one has to ask
why
.’

‘
Why
?’ It was a fair imitation of someone who didn’t understand what Asher was talking about, but Asher could see fear widen Hobart’s eyes. The harsh voice stammered a little: ‘What d’you mean,
why
?’ Then he waved his arms, raised his voice to a shout. ‘You can’t tell
why
a Chinese will do anything, you bloody imbecile! They don’t think like we do! This is a people who believe magic headbands will make them invulnerable to bullets, for God’s sake! Who believe their dead ancestors will arrange favors for them from the afterlife!’

‘I suggest you attend a spiritualist seance in any corner of London,’ said Asher, ‘if you want to see people having conversations with their dead ancestors. And talk to the French High Command if you want to hear about how military elan is going to trump German machine guns. Police work is police work whether you’re in Peking or London, and unless one or the other of us can come up with a specific reason why some particular Chinese would want to see your son hang for murder, what a London judge is going to see is your son’s tie around the throat of a girl who was forcing him into a marriage he didn’t want.’

Hobart opened his mouth to shout something further, but Asher held his eyes, familiar with his temper from those months of tutoring. Determined not to lose his fifty pounds – and with it, all chance of completing his studies – Asher had dodged thrown books, sidestepped physical violence, and plowed head-down through a near-constant deluge of profanity. The curious thing had been that in his calmer moments, Hobart didn’t seem to recall clearly what he had said or done. He’d excuse himself in the most general of terms –
that’s just my way, you know
. . .

Was strangling a fourteen-year-old girl in the bedclothes while you sodomized her ‘
just my way
’ as well?

‘You know Eddington isn’t going to be satisfied with “it must have been some Chinese”.’ But unspoken between them hung the words
YOU tell ME why the Chinese want to see your son hang
.

Or why they want YOU to see your son hang
.

Hobart cleared his throat. Blotches of red stood out on his cheekbones, like badly applied rouge. ‘You’re right, of course.’ He sat again at his desk. ‘Problem is, you can’t tell – no white man can – which of those Chinks is working for which tong or gang or Triad or family or for the bloody Kuo Min-tang. Sure, they may give you some story about . . . oh, I don’t know, revenge or protecting someone or . . . or family honor . . . But how can you tell it’s true? The only thing I’m asking you to do is find some kind of hard evidence – something a judge will believe – that it wasn’t and couldn’t have been Rick. It doesn’t have to be the truth—’

He waved impatiently when Asher opened his mouth to speak.

‘Just do
something
, understand? And don’t waste your time with the Chinese.’

Asher had heard that tone any number of times from his superiors in the Department, upon those occasions that he’d asked for permission to look into what had later turned out to be some murky Departmental jiggery-pokery. He knew he wasn’t going to get any further.

‘And it isn’t my business,’ he said to Lydia later, holding Miranda in a corral formed by his legs while Lydia sorted through the pile of notes – execrably translated – that Count Mizukami had had sent over that afternoon from the Peking police department. Arranged in neat stacks on the parlor’s marble-topped table, they concerned all cases of disappearances or unexplained deaths in Peking from March – when the last of the ‘beheading squads’ had finished their post-riot rounds – up through May of that year, which was as far as his clerical staff had gotten to date. And, to date, they had proved nothing except that Peking had too many beggars, too many peasants flocking into the city from an impoverished countryside, and too many criminal gangs waging war upon one another for the police to keep adequate track of.

He went on, ‘I honestly don’t think Hobart’s going to go to the Germans and peach on me. He’s a beast – and I suspect, mad nor’nor’west where women are concerned – but my experience of him is that he’s never been anything but steadfastly loyal to the Empire.’

‘Will you go visit this An Lu T’ang who got Sir Grant his girls for him?’

Asher was silent for a time, while Miranda pulled herself up to an unsteady standing position, clinging to his knee. ‘I don’t know. Ten to one if I acquired proof of Hobart’s activities, it still wouldn’t clear Richard. I’d only be told to shut up and sit down by Sir John Jordan. Not because he thinks Hobart has the right to give rough handling to Chinese girls, but in the interests of diplomatic respectability. To say nothing of the fact that Hobart probably isn’t An Lu T’ang’s only customer in the Legation quarter.’

Lydia made a face. ‘But you can’t let the boy be punished. And you can’t leave Hobart at large.’

‘I won’t.’ He heard his own voice say the words, with a slight sensation of surprise at how completely he meant them.

‘Do you think Richard knows about his father?’

‘I’d bet almost anything I own that he doesn’t. Why would he?
How
would he?’ Asher disengaged Miranda’s small fingers from his watch chain and dug in his pocket for a copper Chinese coin. ‘Hobart came out to China in 1884 and went home just long enough to court, marry, and inseminate Julia Bunch. He left England three weeks after Richard was born and returned once every five years thereafter. Much of that time the boy would have been at school. I’d be surprised if Richard has spoken to his father above fifty times in his life.’

About as many times as I spoke to my own
, he reflected, with a wry regret that wasn’t precisely sadness. It was the way most people he knew had been raised. Presumably, if his father had known he and his wife were both going to die while their only son was thirteen years old he’d have made a greater effort to spend more time with him, if only to more firmly inculcate into him the vital importance of not letting down the standards expected of the Better Classes, and the paramount necessity of knowing all the Right People in order to further one’s career.

That pedantic, fastidious scholar – whom Asher still thought of as ‘old’, though he’d been just forty at the time of the accident – could have secretly been Jack the Ripper or the King of the Cannibal Islands when he’d go ‘up to Oxford’ or ‘down to London’ from Wychford, and no whisper of it would have reached his children’s ears.

All those children he saw in the
hutongs
, who darted in and out of courtyards full of laundry and goldfish and uncles and grandmas . . . Asher shook his head, prey again to that curious sense of visiting another planet.

‘Do you think Hobart will make some other kind of trouble for you?’

‘I hope he’s not that much of a fool.’ He held the coin between his fingers, made it vanish, and sat gravely while Miranda investigated every finger separately and probed with her tiny hand down his cuff. ‘If he takes it into his head that
I
might peach on
him
, he may try to do something that will get me thrown out of China – hence the thirty pounds hidden in the generator room. I might have to go lie doggo at Wu’s.’

‘I knew I should have married Viscount Brightwell’s son.’

‘You’re the one who insisted on coming to China . . .’

At that point Karlebach knocked on the suite door, bundled in his long old-fashioned coat and bearing a satchel which contained a dark lantern, branches of wolfsbane and hawthorn, and a dozen of vials of his arcane potions. Over his shoulder he carried the discreet case of his new shotgun, and his pockets rattled with ammunition.

Asher glanced at the clock. A little past four. In an hour it would be dark.

Ito would be waking up.

‘If this samurai does not flee there tonight,’ Karlebach asked as they crossed the lobby to the hotel’s front doors, ‘might this Japanese – or your own ambassador – gain us entry to the old palace pleasure-grounds around the – what are they called?’

‘The Golden Sea,’ Asher replied. ‘President Yuan’s taken over that whole enclosure for his own palace, so I doubt his guards will look with favor on two
ch’ang pi kwei
wandering around peering into grottos with a shotgun. But by the same token, they’d probably kill – or try to kill – any
yao-kuei
they saw . . .’

‘If they don’t try to hire them,’ said Karlebach grimly.

‘In any case, didn’t you say that the Others – at least in Prague – avoid lights and people? Right now Lydia is concentrating her research around the “Stone Relics of the Sea” – the two lakes that lie to the north of the enclosure. They’re open to the public, but many of the temples and tea houses around them have been deserted since the Revolution.’

‘It would be worth my time to visit them, while you finish making your map of the Shi’h Liu mine.’ Karlebach reached back to touch the leather-wrapped shotgun with the affection of a lover. ‘How much longer until you have enough of a map for us to go down and find where these things sleep?’

‘
If
they sleep as vampires sleep,’ corrected Asher. ‘We don’t know that they won’t wake up the moment they hear us coming – or
feel
us coming, as the vampires feel the living, even in their sleep.’

And if the
yao-kuei
had taken up some kind of residence near Peking’s lakes, reflected Asher as the two rickshaws spun their way toward the rear gate of the Japanese Legation, what would the vampires of Peking make of that? Always supposing that the Magistrates of Hell weren’t behind these creatures to begin with.

He folded his hands within their gloves, watched the shopkeepers lighting the first lanterns of the evening against the autumn’s early twilight.
Their presence hangs in the air like smoke
. . .

And fear of them had driven the old Jesuit vampire to hide underground for nearly three hundred years.

Asher and Karlebach left their rickshaws at the rear gate of the Japanese compound on Rue Lagrené, followed the narrow line of neat brick bungalows: a tribute to the determination of the Japanese to become a Western power rather than be subjugated and chewed up piecemeal as China had been. The dwellings of its diplomats and attachés had nothing in them of the horizontal architecture and encircling verandas of Japan. They could have been imported whole from London or Berlin or Paris, like the solid walnut chairs that decorated Count Mizukami’s parlor. Electric light streamed from sash windows; men in royal-blue uniforms, or the discreet gray or black mufti of European suits, climbed front steps, knocked at doors . . .