Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2)

Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2) Page 16

"What was it you were afraid of, in the seraglio?" Ysidro did not turn. Upon bringing the women back to the house on Rue Abydos, he had uncharacteristically made sure that Margaret got safely to bed, then gone to the floor below to sit in the parlor's projecting bay, a sort of balcony that overlooked the front door. For nearly an hour Lydia had been aware of him there, as, still in her evening frock, she drank the aromatic tea Madame Potoneros brewed for her.

It was late, close to three. The near-riot in the Armenian quarter had forced a long detour through the market district to the old Mohammed Bridge; even then, winding their way up the steep Rue Iskander, they could hear the distant cries, the breaking of glass, the shots. Sitting quiet between Margaret and Lady Clapham, Lydia had pulled her cloak closer and wondered if she'd ever feel warm again.

There was still no emphasis, no rise or fall, to his voice. "So you, like Margaret, suppose me to have been in peril? I thought better of you, mistress."

"Well, I do know you're perfectly capable of avoiding any twelve saber-wielding eunuchs out to protect the Sultan's name from dishonor. So what were you afraid Margaret had encountered?" She thought it through, then asked, "Another vampire?"

He tilted his head a little. Late-risen moonlight edged his profile in watery milk. "Her name is Zenaida. I went to the seraglio to speak to her, before ever I knew Margaret had followed."

His hands, lying one atop the other on the window's sill, seemed about to move, then subsided again into quiescence, the echo of some gesture pared away by time. "She has been there a long while, and no longer recalls the name of the Sultan for whom she was first bought in the markets of Smyrna. Perhaps she never knew it. Like most of the Sultan's women, she was cunning but stupid, and uneducated as a peddler's donkey. She told me many of the odalisques still think she is a living woman, some forgotten Sultan's kadine!'

"And you think she may know something about... about Ernchester? Or James?" He sat on an old chest that did service for a low table in the bay; she leaned against the corner of the wall. The windows were open behind their lattices, and listen as she would-she could not keep herself from doing so-she did not now hear any sound from the slums that lay all along the foot of the hill. Smoke still gritted in the air.

"That," the vampire agreed quietly. "And other matters."

He gazed for a few moments more in apparent disinterest through the carven screens to white walls and tile roofs. The City of Walls, with its minarets and domes, its markets and its filth, was no more than a great shoulder of tucked velvet across the water in the night.

Then the yellow mantis eyes shifted to hers. "My senses, my perceptions, my ability to touch the threads of thought and scent and heat which move upon a city's air-these have suffered from lack of their proper feeding. Nonetheless I should be able to feel some of what takes place in the lives of night-walking things. If not from here, from the gatehouses of the palace where I stood tonight, from the hill of the Aya Sofia, where all the dreams of the city come together like light in a glass. And I do not."

Lydia pushed her spectacles up onto her nose. She'd taken off her gloves and her pearls, and the silver shone on her throat and wrists like looped links of ice.

"And the last thing you needed was a couple of silly heroines to look after," she said, rueful and shy.

His head moved again, once, and his eyes met hers with that brief flicker of human amusement. In the street below a dog barked, the gruff shrillness picked up in another alley, and another, as all that starveling horde felt called upon to comment and reply. Ysidro waited them out, listening as if he could distinguish some clue within the sound.

"I walked in Galata last night when I left you here," he said in time. "I crossed the bridge to Stamboul and sought out the other quarters where the Armenians live, down seaward of the Burned Column and in the poorest quarters along the walls. It is there, you understand, that the vampires will hunt, among those whose deaths the Turks count as less than the scraps I feed my cats. The miasma was thick there, the sense of diverted attention, of watching through smoke, though the night was clear. It was like the veil we lay over human eyes and human minds, but the veil was of a different quality, a different texture, wrought to shield a different kind of mind.

"There is war between vampires in this city."

Lydia recalled the elaborate precautions in Ysidro's London house-or one of his London houses-and it occurred to her that human incursion might not be the only threat against which he protected himself.

"You think one of the Master of Constantinople's fledglings is... rebelling against him? Trying to overthrow him? And summoned, or blackmailed, Ernchester here to help him?"

"It could be that," agreed Ysidro. "It can happen so, though as a rule a master as old as that of Constantinople will show more care in who he makes into his fledgling. Or a newcomer has arrived from the outside, in flight from his or her own master vampire, and seeks to take over mastery of Constantinople himself. This he will find no easy matter."

"Ernchester?"

He made a conceding movement with his eyebrow that three hundred years ago might have been a shrug and a gesture. "In truth I find that a morsel hard to swallow, particularly given the fact that he must have known the master of the city in life. Yet war there is. Charles plays some part in it..."

"And since Karolyi knows about it," Lydia said thoughtfully, "he's going to try to make of it what he can. Would it have been he who was behind James'... disappearance?"

"I think it likelier he engineered this incident with the palace guard."

Ysidro's white hand moved upon the windowsill. "Behold the timing of it. He was taken up in the morning, when a living man would have the most time to question him or to act in his absence. He was taken up, too, outside the Grand Bazaar, where he is known to have been speaking to the tellers of tales. So his dwelling place was unknown. Karolyi did not reckon on James' friendship with your golden barbarian, and he did not have time to get him into his own hand before he was released. I think," he added, "that this Karolyi knows something of what is taking place, but not all. And I think that if it was his goal to get James into his hand, rather than simply to kill him, it was to find Anthea through him."

"So they were still together."

"So it appears." His hand moved in the shadows again, and Lydia saw that he had wrapped a thick cashmere lap robe over his morning coat, as if to ward off the chill of the autumn night. "In two nights' wanderings I have found no sign of Anthea hunting, and Zenaida has seen nothing of a strange woman in her own quest for midnight blood. This could mean that Anthea is in hiding somewhere, or that she has been taken, either by Karolyi or by the Bey, the master of the city... or by this adversary, be he rebel fledgling or interloper. And where Charles may be..." He shook his head.

"It is an ancient city, and very great. Veiled as it is-and Zenaida says this mist or illusion settled upon it shortly after the gunfire and riots of the army coup, not that she had the smallest knowledge or interest in the Sultan's overthrow-there are an infinity of places to hide. Zenaida says that she knows not where the Bey is, nor knows she of any other vampire. She says that she does not mind, never having cared for the dominance of the Bey."

Lydia gazed in silence for a time into the night beyond the lattices, the moon- soaked city and the silver-flecked waters that lay between. At last she said, "And she knew nothing... would know nothing... of Jamie?"

Ysidro made no reply.

My master told me to show you the place, the boy had said.

"Would it help to find the hiding place of the master of the city?" He gave her a glance of inscrutable irony, as if to say, As you found mine? "He will have many, you know. In a war among vampires, he will be moving his sleeping place nightly."

"I understand," Lydia said. "But it will give us a starting place, and if we find out what we can find out, clues lead to other clues. About Anthea or Ernchester, or... or Jamie."

"Always provided Jamie is not lying with a cut throat at the bottom of the harbor."

"If I were willing to accept that without further investigation," retorted Lydia, "I might as well go back to London."

He inclined his head, though whether in mockery or apology she did not know.

"Anyway," she went on after a moment, "I obviously don't have Jamie's training in questioning storytellers, aside from not speaking any... is it Turkish they speak here?"

"Turkish and Greek in the streets. Arabic among the scholars, Osmanli at the Sultan's court."

"Since there doesn't seem to be any central depot of records, I think I'm going to have to have tea with German businessmen and ask them about native clients, and try to spot some kind of oddity in payment. My German isn't wonderful, but last night most of them seemed to speak very good French. I wonder if I can get on the good side of someone at the Banque Ottomane? Or the German Orient Bank?"

She straightened her shoulders, the words themselves giving her courage; she spoke as if sorting a hand of cards, seeing what she had and what she needed. "Extensive use of middlemen and corporations that don't seem to have any raison d'etre beyond paying the bills of one or two households; payment in gold or credit rather than silver; clients who either never appear at all or only appear after dark. That sort of thing. The purchase of housing that has some kind of multilevel cellars or that's built over old crypts, like that cistern we passed through. Maybe corporate credit funneled through the palace with instructions not to check too closely into bona fides?"

She fell silent, watching his face, which was without expression. His silence lay on her heart like plates of lead.

Then he said, "Did we but find one of his bolt-holes, it could be watched. Not a safe occupation, even with the illusion which veils this city, but as you say, clues lead to other clues, and it is clear to me that more than finding Charles, more than finding Anthea, it is necessary to learn what is happening in this city. If Karolyi is here, there is still bargaining going on."

Behind them the mantelpiece clock chimed four; seagulls cried in the darkness outside. Ysidro went on, "You have catalogued already those things I will alter in my own arrangements, when I gain London once more. Quest among your German businessmen for word of purchase of either a great quantity of silver bars or silver- plated bars. If there is war among the vampires of this city-if the master of the city seeks to summon and imprison Ernchester-he will need a place to put him. And seek also," he added, "for someone using the roundabout financial methods of which you speak to purchase and install modern central heating in one or more old houses."

"Central heating?" The absurd picture rose to her mind of the cloaked and sinister West End stage Dracula deep in conversation with Herr Hindi about soft- coal hummers and double-heating, self-feeding base-burner anthracite models, only ninety-seven marks plus shipping costs...

"If there is a challenge to the Bey's power, chances are good that it is because the Bey himself may be growing... tired. Brittle. Losing his grip. A thing one seldom considers of the Bey," added Ysidro, "but a possibility. It happens, in time, even to the Undead. When this chances, vampires suffer cold and joint ache. Winter is coming on. This city will be under snow. A master fighting for his position, refusing to admit the drag of darkness in his soul, might well heat one or more of his bolt-holes for his own comfort, particularly if it has been his custom to use the living as servants."

He had been watching the darkness of the street. Now he turned his attention fully toward her again, a ghost-shape in the gloom. "You understand," he said, "that though clues of this kind may lead us to Ernchester or to the heart of this affair with Karolyi, you may not find your husband, mistress."

She looked down at where the moonlight lay on the shawl over her arms. "I understand. I'd been hoping," she went on after long silence, her voice low, as if speaking to herself, "that when I went to the embassy yesterday afternoon-Saturday afternoon-that Sir Burnwell would say something like, 'Oh, of course, he's staying right across the way at the Pera Palace.' And the day would finish with Italian ices on the terrace and telling stories in bed half the night."

She drew the shawl's long fringes through her fingers, to keep them from trembling.

"You have never been alone, then."

It wasn't what she had expected him to say-if anything at all-but it was true.

She nodded without looking up.

"Well, I felt I'd been alone for years and years, before I knew him. But I expect most children feel that way. And I knew him-I mean, he was in and out of Uncle Ambrose's house- when I was fifteen, sixteen. I don't remember a moment of falling in love with him, but I remember knowing there was no one else I'd rather live with. I remember crying because I knew they'd never let me marry him. I was underage. And he wouldn't ask. He didn't want me to be hurt in a family row. He didn't want me to lose my inheritance over him."

"I daresay your father put his own interpretation to that." The soft voice was like the wind flowing down an empty hall. "What happened?"

"Father disinherited me over my studies. Jamie was away in Africa. That was during the war. Someone... someone said he was dead. I was terrified because I didn't know if I could succeed in an actual practice. Most women have a terrible time. My research is sound, but pure research would be out of the question, and I... I didn't know if Jamie was coming back. But without him I didn't care, really, what became of me. When he came back he asked me to marry him because I hadn't any money, and Father permitted it. Then later he changed his will again."

"But you never thought of giving up your study?" The vampire sounded amused. Lydia raised her head, shocked. "Of course not!" He was regarding her, she found, with a curious, unreadable intentness in his sulfurous eyes. For a moment she thought he would speak, but then like a ghost he seemed to withdraw a little from her.

"In truth," he said, "we can only do what we can. I spoke not to crush your hope, mistress, but only to warn you that not all grails are found intact. Nor, indeed, found at all."

"No," Lydia said softly, "I understand. Thank you."

He rose. She held out her hand to him, as she would have to a brother if she'd had one, or a friend. After a moment he took it, his thin hand emerging from the dark folds of his lap robe like Death's, oddly bereft of its native scythe, fleshless knuckles and fragile bones dry as bleached bamboo under her touch.

She'd taken down her hair while drinking her tea; its natural straight-ness had almost destroyed the remains of earlier curls, so that it lay in unswagged cinnabar heaps on her shoulders and back, like seaweed on a beach after a storm. With her free hand she propped her spectacles again, a schoolgirl's gesture.

Remembering it later she had the impression that he'd said something else to her- or maybe just spoken her name-and that his cold hand had brushed her face, pushing back the flame of her hair from her cheek. But that wasn't clear to her, as if she'd dreamed it. Perhaps, she thought, she had.

It did occur to her that it was not at all like Ysidro to be concerned whether her hopes were crushed or not.

The street of the brass sellers lay four or five aisles in from the main entrance of the Grand Bazaar, according to the dealer in attar of roses of whom Lydia made her inquiry... "Or more or less," added the man in excellent French; the beaming smile that split his dark face reminded her forcibly of a discolored and incomplete set of piano keys. "But for what does la belle mademoiselle want brass? Pfui, brass! It is attar of roses, the incomparable essences of Damascus and Baghdad, which delight the heart and offer the gift of sweetness to God.

Only thirty piastres... That wretched cheating son of an Armenian camel driver is going to charge you more than fifty for a brass thimble that won't be brass at all, but cheap tin with a brass wash no more substantial than a Greek's sworn word... Thirty piastres? Fifteen!"

Lydia smiled, curtseyed, murmured, "Merci... merci," and with Slavonic clairvoyance Prince Razumovsky, enormous in exquisite London-cut mufti, appeared at her side and said, "Come along, come along," steering both women-Margaret hanging back for one more sniff of a painted ointment pot-into the crowd. "Can we go back there?" Margaret asked diffidently of His Highness. "When we've found the storyteller, I mean? True attar of roses costs ten or twelve shillings for a flask that size back home."

She craned her neck, trying to look back between a jostling pair of German businessmen and several drab-uniformed soldiers at the tiny stall with its magic rows of twinkling glass. The shopkeeper gave her another demolished smile and a wink as bright as his wares.

"My dear Miss Potton," the prince smiled through the Colchian fleeces of his beard, "twenty feet from this spot you can buy a flask that size for two piastres, if you look sufficiently indifferent. It requires practice. Hold in your mind the image of a room-a building!-filled with such flasks... or, rather, think of having to carry a veddras of the stuff-about three of your gallons-up a steep hill, and then go back for another, and another, and another..."

Margaret giggled and blushed, and someone else cried out in awful Greek-accented French, "Madame, Madame, here all the perfume, all best roses of land of nightingales...!"

The light that suffused the bewildering mazes of the Grand Bazaar was never direct, falling as it did through windows high in the vaulted ceiling, and in the pale green archways the voices of every nation from the North Sea to the Indian Ocean swirled like soup. There were no genuine spots of light, nor actual shadows, but a dizzy kaleidoscope of color that shifted too quickly for Lydia to guess at distant things-the contents of the shops they passed, the faces or nationalities of men who seemed, at a distance, to be only swirls of white or dark or colored robes. As they passed close they came into focus: swarthy Turkish men in pantaloons sitting on floors to bargain, talk, drink glasses of scalding tea; Greek men in wide white skirts and bright caps or women in close- fitting, dowdy black, arguing with shopkeepers at the top of their lungs; porters bent matter-of-factly under superhuman loads; Armenians in baggy trousers, Orthodox priests and thick-bearded Jews in black gabardine and prayer shawls. Young boys shouted offers of shoe shines or guides to the city, or dashed importantly through the jostling shoppers bearing brass trays on which rested single glasses of tea. The air was redolent of sweaty wool, garlic, carpets, dog, and sewage.

Down the aisles that branched from side to side, Lydia glimpsed wares at which she could only guess: coats of karakul and astrakhan, carpets of blue and crimson, shawls, bright-flashing glass, hanging racks of silver earrings, bolts of prosaic wool alternating with gauzy rainbows of veils. Every time a beggar came whining up to them-hideously disfigured, some of them, freaks who would have been confined to fairs anywhere in Europe-every time they passed strolling groups of soldiers who whistled and rolled their eyes, Lydia was heartily glad she'd asked the prince to act as their protector and guide.

He'd been right. This wasn't England. It would have been madness to investigate alone.

She'd slept uneasily for the few hours after Ysidro's departure, prey to troubling dreams. Part had concerned the harem, with its smelly little cells, its cramped windows blocking out all view of the city, of the sea, of the sunlight had it been day: The walls sweat with their pettiness, their boredom, and their tears. She'd dreamed of wandering in that darkness, looking for someone, the rooms growing smaller and smaller around her while she felt the waiting presence of something lying very still on a burst and stinking divan, listening for her footfalls with a smile on what had long ago been its face. Once, very briefly, she'd had a fragmentary image of a Gothic tower in a thunderstorm, the lightning lurid as a carbon-arc flare over seas of churning heather, the rain poundmg in a deserted courtyard-rain that somehow only barely dampened the white dress, the raven curls of the woman who stood at the tower's gate, gazing with expectation across the wilderness of the heath. Lydia, in the shelter of a broken shed on the other side of the court, had not been wet at all by the rain, though she smelled the soaked earth. She thought the woman was waiting for a horseman. Turning her head, she saw Ysidro nearby, almost invisible in the shadows, dressed as he had been on the balcony, in morning coat and striped trousers with the lap robe held close about his shoulders. His head was bowed, his colorless eyes closed as if deep in concentration, his face the face of a skull.

The dream image snuffed like a guttering candle, and waking, Lydia had heard Margaret crying, muffled, angry, and hurt. Margaret had had very little to say to her that morning and would not meet her eyes. Since their meeting with Razumovsky over a late breakfast, she had addressed all her remarks to the prince, giggling at his flirtations and responding cheerfully to his effort to draw her out.

There seemed to be storytellers everywhere. They sat on dirty rugs and blankets, swaying with the rhythm of their tales, spreading their arms, using their voices to conjure thunder, rage, love, and wonder. Children and teenage boys sat around them, listening eagerly, and even grown men and a very few black-veiled women stood with the air of those in no hurry to leave. Lydia moved toward one and peered shortsightedly at the wares in the surrounding booths. Lady Clapham had told her that each man had his regular pitch, and the man who worked the street of the coffee merchants would no more dream of shifting to the street of the slipper vendors than she herself would have considered walking uninvited into her neighbor's house in Oxford and appropriating her neighbor's nightgown and bed.

It was simply Not Done.

As she edged her way a little into the crowd, trying to see past the dark backs of the Greek ladies, a man put his hand on her shoulder and said, "Madame Asher?"

She turned, looking up slightly at the Adonis face, the beautiful dark eyes, of a tall man who moved like an athlete within his tobacco-colored suit. At this distance she could see the close-clipped mustache, the long eyelashes, the pearl buttons of his gloves as he bowed to kiss her hand. He wore a gold stickpin in his cravat, a winged griffin that seemed to regard her with a single, baleful ruby eye.

"I've seen your husband," he said quietly, and, while her breath was still stopped with shock, he added, "Permit me to introduce myself. I am the Baron Ignace Karolyi, of the Imperial Diplomatic Service. May we talk?"

He led her out of the crowd, into the dimness before a shop front where an elderly Greek sewed slippers of colored leather and gave them-most uncharacteristically for a merchant of the Grand Bazaar-not so much as a glance. It occurred to Lydia that Karolyi must have paid him in advance for his disregard.

"Is he alive?"

Karolyi nodded. Although she knew he must be at least thirty-five, he seemed younger and radiated a kind of earnest intensity, like a youthful charmer who has put his charm aside to speak of important things.

"Though I cannot guarantee how much longer that will last. He is in the hands of..." He hesitated artistically, studying her face, like one who debates with himself how much of what he says will be believed. And yet, she realized, he was actually watching her, trying to guess how much she knew.

Like Ysidro playing picquet, she thought, peeking at the stock cards and wondering what to appropriate and what would do him no good. Her heart beat harder and she thought, Jamie will die if you botch this up.

"He is in the hands of a man called Olumsiz Bey," he went on after a moment. "A Turk. A truly evil person. Tell no one," he added quickly, as Lydia pressed her hands to her mouth and widened her eyes as Aunt Lavinia generally did before crying out in horror at the presence of death-dealing spiders or the perfidy of the children of her neighbors. "What exactly did he tell you, Mrs. Asher, that brought you to Constantinople to search?"

He must have been talking to Lady Clapham. She wondered how much that redoubtable woman had seen fit to tell him-how much she would have considered not worth the trouble of hiding.

"Oh, where, when?" She didn't expect a truthful answer to the questions and asked them to buy herself time to think, but she had no need to manufacture the panic, the desperation that she threw into her voice. She had never considered herself to be an actress, but any young lady of good society knew how to exaggerate delight or terror, or whatever other emotion was called for. A number of conversations with Margaret over the past week certainly helped her performance.

She clasped her hands to her breastbone. "Did you speak with him? Did he look well?" Has he been in touch with his own department? Do they know I had dinner with Mr. Halliwell? Why would I have come to Constantinople if I didn't know the kind of danger he was in?

"We did not have the opportunity to speak." Karolyi's voice was soothing, a beautifully modulated tenor with the barest trace of a Middle European accent. An eminently believable voice. "He appeared unharmed, though as I said, there is no way of knowing how long that will last. That is why you and I must talk. When you fled from me last night, I feared some rumor or calumny had reached you. I assure you, Madame..." He made his voice earnest, deeply concerned. "I assure you, such rumors are exaggerations, fed by the enmity of our two countries and the suspicions of men who see only threats wherever they look."

"Fled from you?" Lydia steeled herself, produced her eyeglasses from her handbag and put them on to peer at him. "Last night? Were you at the palace reception last night?"

Under the fine traces of mustache his mouth quirked, disarmed for a moment. With two quick gestures of his forefinger he smoothed the mustache, and Lydia noted the fine cut of the pale tan gloves, French kid at six shillings the pair.

"Baron!" Razumovsky's gray and golden bulk appeared from around the corner of a stall and pushed through the crowd, Margaret scuttling in his wake. Lydia's glasses immediately disappeared from her face and into the folds of her skirt.

"Back from your flying visit to London, I see."

"Prince." Karolyi bowed to the exact depth required of a Russian prince rather than an English one. "A flying visit indeed, but one must dress, you know." He laughed rather vacantly and flicked the lapels of his Saville Row suit. "Are you here with Mrs. Asher?"

He believes I've been taken by surprise, thought Lydia swiftly. If I put this off, he'll guess I had time to prepare.

"Will you excuse us for a few moments, Your Highness?" As the Russian moved off she turned her back slightly and put her hand behind it, signaling-and hoping he saw- with her outspread fingers: five minutes.

"From what Mr. Halliwell said I gather you and my husband weren't exactly friends," she said quickly, keeping her voice fast and breathless to keep from stammering with uncertainty and dread. "But it is all really a... a sort of confraternity, is it not? You are all in the same business, no matter what side you're on." She produced her glasses again and put them on, well aware of the air of scholarly ineffectualness they lent to her face. "Thank you so much for letting me know! I knew-I knew-that Cousin Elizabeth couldn't have been wrong!"

"Cousin Elizabeth?"

"Cousin Elizabeth in Vienna," said Lydia, as if slightly surprised that Karolyi were not acquainted with her family. "She lent my husband twenty pounds a week ago Thursday night, to take the Orient Express to Constantinople. She's his cousin- his second cousin, actually-and she lives in one of the suburbs, I forget the name... In any case I telephoned her when Mr. Halliwell gave me the note from my husband..."

"Note?" The graceful eyebrows deepened in a frown.

"Telling me to return to London. Saying he was going on, he couldn't tell me where. Mr. Halliwell did his best to convince me to go back, and I let him think I was going back, but I knew my husband was in danger of some kind! I knew it." She clasped her hands again, praying that it wasn't obvious that she was shaking all over.

"Why were you in Vienna?" He was running this over in his mind, trying to fit pieces together. Guessing at Ysidro's inscrutability had given her a greater ability to deal with ordinary human expression.

She widened her eyes. "He sent for me." What other reason would there have been? her tone seemed to ask. And, when Karolyi looked gratifyingly skeptical, she explained, "He telegraphed and said there were some medical notes that would need to be analyzed. I am a medical doctor, you know," she added, propping her spectacles and looking as unworldly and harmless as she possibly could. "I do research at the Radcliffe Infirmary."

"And your specialty is?"

"Rare pathologies of the blood." It was nothing of the kind, but unless Karolyi read medical journals, he wouldn't know that. It was the kind of thing they would have sent for her to examine, if they were dealing with vampires.

He evidently didn't, for a look of enlightenment dawned in his eyes. "I see."

"But when I reached Vienna, Mr. Halliwell told me something dreadful had happened and Dr. Asher had had to leave the city suddenly, and gave me his note, telling me to return to London. And I knew he had to be in some kind of danger, especially after Cousin Elizabeth told me he'd borrowed money from her to come to Constantinople all of a hurry. And now they tell me he's disappeared, and I don't know what to do! Oh, Baron Karolyi, if you know anything, can help me in any way...!"

He looked annoyed, as well he might, she thought, but he concealed it well as he patted her hands. "Calm yourself, Mrs. Asher, calm yourself. What have you been able to find out of his whereabouts?"

That, she thought, was what he wanted to know. That, and how much she herself knew.

"Nothing!" she wailed. "I came here to the marketplace because I understand he was arrested near here. I thought that some of the shopkeepers might have seen something, or know something..." She removed her spectacles and blinked dewily up at him. "Prince Razumovsky was kind enough to offer to escort me here, as he knows the language."

Karolyi sniffed, just slightly, and Lydia reflected that Lady Clapham's estimate of the prince's amorous nature was probably correct, if Karolyi would believe that the prince would come here to escort a woman.

"Listen, Mrs. Asher," he said, lowering his voice somberly and leaning down a little to gaze into her eyes. "His Highness may officially be on the side of the English, but believe me, he is not a man to be trusted. Whatever you chance to learn- even small details, even if they sound foolish to you-let me know at once. You and I can pool our resources; together we can find your husband."

You mean you can find the Master of Constantinople's hideouts, she thought, a moment later watching his splendid brown shoulders disappear into the crowd at Razumovsky's approach. Still, she thought, turning with shaky gratitude to her rescuer, she hadn't done so badly. On her first visit to the Grand Bazaar, she had been able, at quite short notice, to sell an almost total stranger a complete load of goods.

As they began to move away, the shopkeeper, who until this time had remained sewing slippers in a corner, got to his feet and padded over to her, and without a word affixed to her collar a cheap brass safety pin on which was strung a blue glass bead, painted with an eye. Then he smiled and bowed, and explained something to Razumovsky at great length.

"For the Evil Eye," the prince said as he led Lydia away.

The street of the brass vendors contained, in addition to innumerable tiny shops where old men tapped and fashioned everything from plates and boxes to enormous long- spouted teapots and life-sized deer, four sellers of fig paste, a man dispensing lemonade from a huge earthenware jug on a handcart, a vendor of sesame candy, and a regiment of beggars.

There was no storyteller.

"Helm Musefir?" the keeper of the largest shop on the row said in response to Razumovsky's question. He was a little man with a beard the color of iron down to his middle, who had not abandoned the old-fashioned clothing with the coming of the reforms. His pantaloons were resplendent in volume and hue, his sashes fringed in tarnishing silver, his slippers purple morocco and curled extravagantly at the toe. His turban was green, pinned with an enormous clasp of shining brass like an advertisement above his brown, good-natured face, and as he spoke he fingered a loop of prayer beads in his hand. "Since Monday he is gone. My wife's cousin has a friend who lives in the room above him; he says he has not been to his rooms, neither he nor Izahk, the Armenian boy who takes care of him and runs his errands."

"Was there a reason for this?" the prince asked. When the brass seller hesitated, Razumovsky gestured to Lydia and explained in the French in which most of the vendors seemed fluent, "This good madame is seeking news that the hakawati shair might have had for her and would deeply value any word as to Musefir's whereabouts."

"Ah." The shopkeeper bowed slightly at the emphasis Razumovsky placed on the word value. "In truth, I do not know. Will the good lady be so kind as to accept..." He held out to her a brass dish of Turkish Delight, pale green in a snowy dust of sugar. "My wife's cousin's friend is also a friend of the landlord's sister, and she says that the hakawati shair was not in debt, nor in arrears of rent. Likewise the boy Izahk's uncle, who frequents the same coffeehouse as my brother-in-law, would have mentioned had the old man been ill. So I do not know."

Of course, thought Lydia, wiping powdered sugar from her fingers as His Highness walked her back through the teeming aisles of the bazaar, no one had seen or noticed James himself. James was like that. But it did not escape her that if James had arrived in Constantinople Saturday evening, he could easily have sought out the hakawati shair Helm Musefir on Sunday-the last day upon which the old storyteller himself was seen.