Blood Maidens (James Asher #3)

Blood Maidens (James Asher #3) Page 16

SIXTEEN

The train for Berlin would leave at a few minutes to one. Asher stood for a short time, turning the envelopes over in his hands. Expensive paper, stiff and watermarked – at least three shillings a packet – and good quality ink. In keeping with the ‘von’. Almost certainly a Prussian Junker. And from contact with him – over a period of two years, ending in April of 1910 – this Madame Ehrenberg had gone on to St Petersburg and Benedict Theiss, presumably with M’sieu Texel in tow.

Had the Köln vampires been with Ysidro, when he’d searched Petronilla Ehrenberg’s house?

And if they had, had their presence – or simply a lack of training in the secret arts – kept Ysidro from making a thorough search? Asher reached into his jacket to touch the envelope still tucked into the secret pocket in its lining, the last letter that Ysidro had written to the Lady Irene Eaton in her days as a living woman . . . the letter she had kept, not in her desk with the others, but behind a wall panel in her bedroom. Would Ysidro have searched further, had he not been interrupted by the arrival of the Petersburg vampires? Would he have known where to look?

The tram that Asher took out to Neuehrenfeld was filled with laborers heading to work on the newest installment of fortifications that the Kaiser had ordered to defend the city against France’s inevitable attempt – once The War that everyone was expecting got started – to retake it from the Germans who had seized it from them. Asher listened to them, the desultory complaints about the military, bellyaching about one’s wife or one’s children, and, Have-you-got-a-cigarette? in the sing-song Kölsch dialect. Some of the men joked with the charwomen and laundresses on their way out to the homes of the wealthy in that stylish suburb, the cooks who lived in town with husbands who kept taverns or drove cabs. They stayed on as the men got off, the men making their way towards the embankments of torn-up earth, the mountains of brick and concrete where the guns would go. As he watched them clamber over the muddy earthworks, Asher wanted to scream after them, You don’t understand what it will be like . . .

But it wasn’t they who would have the power to do anything. In another few years, it would be they, he thought, who would be manning those emplacements against the oncoming French. Who would mow the Frenchmen down like wheat before the Reaper’s scythe.

He closed his eyes. And it’s up to me, to make sure they – and the people who live after the war – don’t have officially-sanctioned vampires to contend with as well.

Petronilla Ehrenberg’s house reminded him a good deal of Lady Irene Eaton’s: opulent, discreet, set back from the tree-shaded semi-rural roadway behind a high wall. Easy to hire servants to come and clean in the daytime; a pleasant place in which to maintain a night-time life. He put in three-quarters of an hour just observing the street, the neighborhood, and most especially the patrol patterns of the local constables. The last thing he needed was to be arrested in Germany within half a mile of a major military fortification against the French.

He let himself in with his picklocks, through the rear door.

It took him just under ninety minutes to find what he sought.

If the woman was working with German Intelligence, they would have given her advice on where to conceal things . . . If they had, she hadn’t taken it. He found none of the usual safes and sliding panels of which the Auswärteges Amt was so fond. But he’d had experience enough with amateur agents to have learned all the myriad places where financial documents were likely to be kept – from loose floorboards under corners of rugs, to trunks tucked away in the attic. And financial documents would mean a box. Thank God it’s not a railway ticket I’m looking for, or a lost will, like a detective in fiction. And she would have taken into account that whoever cleaned the house was there when she was unable to supervise . . .

That probably meant purpose-built concealment.

After investigating the floorboards of the attic – à la The Sign of Four – and the darker nooks among the rafters there, he worked his way systematically down the attic stairs, then those of the third floor, which were uncarpeted. The stairs from the second floor to the third were ill lit and covered with cheap drugget, and he checked top and bottom steps first . . . and found the drugget at the top was not nailed, but held in place with a batten, screwed only at the ends.

The cache was under the hinged second step, neatly folded in a couple of boxes that had once contained shoes.

No bank books – she’d taken those with her. But banking records, going back for decades, detailing property transfers, deeds of gift, investments . . . all those things whose counterparts Lydia was searching for, even now, through the records of every German bank in St Petersburg that Prince Razumovsky could bribe or command. The first box held the older records, commencing in 1848, probably shortly after Petronilla Ehrenberg became vampire – only the name she used then was Petra Ehrenberg. In the 1870s, she’d transferred everything to a ‘niece’ called Paulina, and it was as ‘Paulina’ that she’d bought this house, which was deeded – along with other properties in Köln and elsewhere, and considerable railway and shipping stock – to ‘Petronilla Ehrenberg’ in 1896.

In the second box he found more recent records, pertaining to a dozen trips to Berlin between October of 1907 and April of 1910. In November of 1909 – when winter would reduce the daylight there to a few hours around noon – there had been a trip to St Petersburg, followed by the purchase, through three sets of agents, of the deconsecrated monastery of St Job, on the north bank of the Neva, at that city’s edge. At the same time she had bought a town house on Sadovaia Oulitza – not very far from the Lady Irene – and started to purchase rental property in the Vyborg-side, including a small building described as a ‘former factory’ on the Samsonievsky Prospect. There was also the counterfoil for a Deutsches Bank draft of fifty thousand francs, to Dr Benedict Theiss.

The last purchases recorded in the shoebox were made in April of 1910. That was about the time, Asher recalled, that the Master of Moscow had said that the ‘interloper’ had appeared in St Petersburg, to complicate further the squabbles of the vampires there.

Why St Petersburg? Because Theiss was there? He selected the documents pertaining to the Russian city, and a few others, then replaced the shoeboxes, the tread of the step, the drugget, and the batten, gathered up the oil lamp he’d brought with him from downstairs, and descended to tidy up after himself and take his departure. Or because the vampires of that city were at war with one another and could be skilfully played off against one another by an interloper . . .

But how had she known that? As far as he could tell, the Russian capital was the only other city she had visited besides Berlin, either in Russia or elsewhere. Had that been the choice of her Berlin spymaster von Brühlsbuttel? And if so, was it a coincidence that St Petersburg was one of the few cities in Europe in which an interloper could establish herself? Or had he – or she – known about the quarrel between Golenischev and Prince Dargomyzhsky, and if so, how?

Ysidro might know, if any of the other vampires had contact with German Intelligence. The twelve fifty-eight train – he glanced at his watch, and then at the daylight in the windows as he finished tidying away all trace of his visit – would reach Berlin before full dark fell in that northern city. Asher tried mentally to calculate how much light would linger in the sky at nine thirty – too much for stars to appear, which probably meant it would not be safe for vampires, even those as old and as tough as Ysidro. It was going to be a very close race, upon arrival in Berlin, to deliver coffin and luggage to that jewel-box eighteenth-century apartment on the Potsdamer Platz and get the hell away before the local vampires were up and around. Presumably, Asher reflected, he could write a note on the train and leave it lying on top of the pile before he ran for it.

When he returned to Ysidro’s town house in the Ältstadt he parceled up the papers, and he posted them to Lydia at Prince Razumovsky’s when he went out to find a cab. With solid information about St Job’s and the house on the Sadovaia Oulitza – both purchases employed the Deutsches Bank as an agent – it shouldn’t be difficult for Lydia to track Petronilla in St Petersburg, and so have information about her whereabouts by the time he himself returned there.

Dealing with Sergius von Brühlsbuttel in Berlin would be another matter. Arriving at the Kölnischer Bahnhof, Asher turned the matter over in his mind as he paid off the porters to take the trunks to the baggage area. He had the sense of working one of those schoolboy conundrums about the fox, the goose, and the bag of corn: if he and Ysidro spoke to the man together, it would bring him – Asher – to the perilous attention of the Berlin vampires; yet he doubted Ysidro had enough knowledge of the inner workings of the Intelligence game to be able to spot evasions and lies.

Under the high, glass-and-iron roof, the train platforms seethed with activity: three officers in gray jackets detraining yet more workers for the fortifications, wandering parties of lost American tourists – in clothes like those they couldn’t be anything but Americans – and the usual confusion of hawkers selling newspapers, candy, ginger pop, pinwheels. The officers glared at a priest in black clericals – though Lutheran Prussia had annexed Catholic Köln nearly a century ago, the religious hatreds persisted. A stout English female tourist – surely none but an Englishwoman would presume to lecture a fully-uniformed German railway conductor – was insisting upon an explanation about something, red-backed guidebook in hand.

And yet, he thought, the Prussian officer would have to be dealt with quickly. Even twenty-four hours in Berlin was too long – the chances that someone would recognize him, among all those he’d known in that city, were simply too high. Asher stopped to buy a newspaper, trying to sort out in his mind some way of speaking with Ysidro tonight . . .

‘Herr Professor Ignatius Leyden?’ A hand fell on his shoulder from behind.

If they know my old alias they won’t be alone.

It was the first thought that went through his mind. And then, They’ll search the trunks.

But he was already moving as he thought. Like the bacillus that turned mortal flesh to vampire, once the Department was in your blood, there was no returning to what you had been. In the same motion he struck aside the gripping hand, swept the foot out from under the nearest policeman (I was right, he isn’t alone . . .), and dodged between the other two and into the thick of the crowd.

People were shoving, shouting, demanding what was going on, and Asher ducked behind a news-stand, then walked – unhurriedly, he’d put distance between himself and those who knew what he looked like – to the nearest barrow of luggage, and behind its shelter slit open two carpet-bags (the first contained a woman’s dresses), and pulled out a man’s gray tweed jacket. It didn’t fit, but the color was different from his own; he transferred Ysidro’s letter to his trouser pocket, stuffed his jacket into the bag, discarded his hat . . .

They were searching the trains.

It was nearly one. The train would be leaving in minutes. Just get the luggage loaded. If he wakes in the left luggage shed in Berlin he’ll emerge knowing something went wrong . . .

Asher started towards the train, but saw the police already aboard it. Others were converging on the platform. What I need is a porter’s uniform . . . The midday crowds were too thick, and half the width of the station separated him from the porters’ rooms, he’d never make it . . .

Then he saw, striding along the platform with a paper cone of peppermints in her hand, a familiar dumpy figure in black.

‘Mrs. Flasket!’

‘Why, Mr Berkhampton!’ Her toothy smile sparkled with pleasure. ‘Are you also on your way to Paris? What on earth is the commotion—?’

From his trouser pocket Asher produced the train ticket, the baggage checks, and nearly every franc and rouble he had taken from Lady Eaton’s secret cache. ‘Will you go to Berlin?’

‘I beg your—’

‘Now, this minute, on that train.’ He pointed. ‘It leaves in two minutes. When you reach Berlin, hire a cab and a porter and take this luggage –’ he slapped ticket, checks, and money into her surprised hand – ‘to this address.’ He added the papers Ysidro had left beside the stack of envelopes that morning. ‘See that every single trunk is safely bestowed there – they can just be left in the front room, just not piled on top of one another – and then lock the door, get out of the building as quickly as you can, and don’t go back there again, ever. Will you do that?’

‘Mr Berkhampton.’ Honoria Flasket’s heavy eyebrows pulled down sharply. ‘There are over ten thousand francs here—’

‘Will you do it?’

‘Of course. But—’

‘Go. You can’t be seen with me. Those are the trunks there, those buff ones with the brass. There are four of them, one is extremely heavy. Get them to Berlin.’ He gave her a little push in their direction, then immediately walked away.

To her credit, she strode off in the direction of the trunks, without looking back.

God loves an Englishwoman.

Asher glanced towards the great doors that led out onto Opladenerstrasse – he knew he could get a later train to Berlin; he had left himself just enough money for that – but he saw the police, accompanied now by two railway officials and two of the artillery officers he’d seen earlier, heading towards the baggage shed as well. Just for an instant he heard Solomon Karlebach whisper in the back of his mind, Kill him, even as he heard the crash and roar of long-range artillery pounding Mafeking, smelled the sour mustardy stink of the yellow gas that had filled his dream . . .

Saw the bank-draft counterfoil transferring fifty thousand francs from the account of the vampire Petronilla Ehrenberg to that of Benedict Theiss, Teutonic student of blood and folklore . . .

He walked back along the platform, as if trying to look inconspicuous, and someone shouted, ‘That’s him.’

He ran, not fast, and they were around him. He heard the train whistle scream from the Berlin Express, and the chief plain-clothes policeman said, ‘Somebody see if he has luggage . . .’

There was nothing for it. Asher turned in the grip of the man who held him and smashed his fist into the man’s jaw with the whole of his strength.