Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2)

Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2) Page 21

"There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God." The voice of the muezzin pierced the sodden fog of Asher's dreams like golden wire. "Come to prayer. Come to prayer."

Anthea, Asher thought, trying to surface, then slid back into velvet chasms of unconsciousness. He could see her on the train, her profile a milky coastline against the windows obsidian sea. "Ernchester has never trusted trains," she said, and then her pale face, her white hands, turned to the marble bones of the grave steles beyond the Adrianople Gate, the dark of her dress and hair to the black cold of night.

Through brittle moonlight he saw a man walking, small and stooped in his old- fashioned clothing, but moving from gravestone to gravestone with the flitting lightness of the vampire. In the open ground he stopped, like an indrawn breath. Asher felt the presence of the shadow without seeing it, but in his dreaming it seemed to him that he smelled again the rank mixture of blood and mold that had overwhelmed him in the darkness of the dry cistern. Ernchester moved, turning as if to flee, but as he turned, the shadow was before him. The air stirred with vampire laughter.

Do you think his favor is now off this man, and he is ours?

The voice slipped into the dimming scenes of his dream, as if the wind had said it, but he knew what it was. He fought, panicked, to wake, struggling back out of the abyss.

"Did he want him dead, he'd be dead, not here," grumbled the voice that he recognized as one-eyed Haralpos.

"Wake him," the Baykus Kadine giggled. "Wake him up and ask."

Wake up! he screamed at himself. Wake up, they're all around your bed! Sleep was a black velvet pillow over his face. Maybe his body realized that if he woke, he'd hurt.

"Maybe he should be kissed," Pelageya said in her deep voice, "like the damsel in tower?" Something that might have been fingernails trailed across the bare skin of his chest.

The whispering blurred, blended. He thought he saw the dim golden outline of the open door to the corridor outside, the subaqueous flicker of the pierced brass lamps, but he could not see the vampires around him at all. Only the red glint of their eyes.

"Maybe he knows where the Bey has gone?"

"What makes you think he might?"

"Someone had to bring him here..."

"We have to find him..."

"And tell him what?" Zardalu demanded scornfully. "That some worthless Armenian dog has been found with his throat slit?"

"Bled..."

"In a church..."

"The man was a priest..."

"Then he deserved it, whoever did it to him."

"He wasn't the only one. There was the old fig seller in the Koum Kapou..."

"He is getting insolent, our Shadow Wolf." Zardalu spoke the name in Turkish, Golge Kurt, the words harsh and guttural in the flow of his court Osmanli. "Now our Bey must come out of this foolish hiding, must walk the nights again and stop crouching here with his dastgah and his almanya infidels..."

"And if he doesn't?"

"That kind of murder is stupid, senseless, leaving his kills to be fallen over. No wonder the Bey has told us to find this intruder Golge Kurt, to kill him..."

"What do you expect of a peasant who thinks he's a soldier because some other jumped- up peasant has put a gun in his hands?"

"We must find the Bey..."

"... find him..."

He didn't know if they'd ever really been there. It seemed to him that he woke with a kind of start to find the chamber empty. The door still stood open, outlined in gold, and against the plastered walls the patterned spots of the lamp still wavered like an insubstantial scarf.

You know nothing of this matter, Olumsiz Bey had said.

And Charles, I love her unto death, and beyond.

He thought he knew where Olumsiz Bey could be found, and his heart turned over, sickened with shock and pity.

"There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God." The voice of the muezzin echoed dimly through the window lattices, as the ridiculously overdone grandeur of the Constantinople sunset bled to death in the west.

She could barely keep her hands steady, so it wasn't easy to achieve a proper symmetry of her coiffure. And in any case, thought Lydia, keeping her mind on what she was doing as if it were a dissection-with a kind of cool, inquiring deliberation-in any case her hair had never taken the fashionable curls necessary for a coiffure a la grecque. In her current mental state she'd be lucky if she didn't singe half of it off with the curling irons.

She was trying not to look at the envelope marked with the Hapsburg crest, lying on the table beside her.

Not that she needed to. She knew every word of the few lines written inside.

If you would save your husband's life, meet me at the Burned Column at 3:00 today. One close to you is a servant of the Bey-tell no one, but do not fail or your husband will be dead before dawn. Trust me. Karolyi.

Trust me.

Lydia had seen the Burned Column two days ago, when Razumovsky had detoured past it after the excursion to the bazaar. It stood-a massive monument of Byzantine porphyry, its bronze horseman blackened by ancient smoke-in the center of the old market district, a labyrinth of courtyards, alleys, warehouses, and crumbling, disused baths in the most ancient part of the city.

It was exactly the place she would choose for a kidnapping, if the victim were to be snatched up and quietly chloroformed. When the note arrived that morning, her immediate thought had been, What on earth does he take me for? He must have realized, she thought, that she would be of no use to him, and was in a position to interfere with his plans.

The certainty that she was right hadn't made it any easier, during tea with Lady Clapham, to listen to the embassy clock strike three.

And if Herr Jacob Zeittelstein wasn't at the reception of Herr Hindi's Turkish partner tonight-if he hadn't returned from Berlin as expected that afternoon-she didn't know what she would do.

It was Wednesday night. James had been missing for a week. She closed her eyes, her hands trembling so much that she had to lower them, the iron cooling in her grip. Dear God, let me find him, she prayed. Dear God, show me another clue if this one fails...

Ice, she thought immediately. She seemed to hear Razumovsky saying, above the clamor of the Grand Bazaar, Someone always knows...

If Herr Zeittelstein had gone to Berlin to fetch a piece for the refrigeration plant, it stood to reason Olumsiz Bey would be buying ice. It might take a few days to trace...

I can't afford a few days! she thought despairingly. Jamie can't afford a few days!

There was a noise behind her. She opened her eyes with a start, the distorted panic of too little sleep flooding her...

Margaret stood reflected in the mirror, hesitating in the doorway behind her, blinking in the latticed sunset light.

Lydia's stomach contracted in rage and dread. Not before a party, she thought despairingly. I don't think I can take another scene...

She pushed up her glasses and turned in her chair. Her red hair spilled, an untidy river, down her milky shoulders. She knew she should say something neutral, unargumentative: Hello, Margaret, or, Did you find what you were shopping for this morning? The governess had been gone when Lydia woke up. But she felt too tired to frame the words. She only looked, and Margaret occupied herself for a few minutes straightening the lace on the edge of her house mitt as if it were the most important task of the day.

Then Margaret looked up. "Mrs. Asher-Lydia-I'm... I'm sorry."

From the time she was five years old, Lydia had been trained to smile and say, It's all right. Her upper arms were crisscrossed with sticking plaster and dressings. She'd told Dr. Manzetti-and Lady Clapham, who'd recommended the physician and gone to him with her that morning-that she'd been attacked by dogs. Against the sharp points of her collarbone, the knobs of her wrists, the silver chains that had saved her life felt heavy and cold.

She couldn't even ask, Why?

The sonnet she'd found had told her that.

She had lain awake thinking for a good part of the night, and found that the memory of those lines still made her heart beat swift and heavy with an emotion she couldn't define. Nothing at all like she felt for James. All her fear of Ysidro had returned, in strangely transmuted waves. Nothing at all like what she knew, or had ever known.

Grief- stricken, silent, Margaret gazed at her with tears in her blue eyes. Lydia felt the anger within her ease.

"You're afraid for him," she said carefully, "and you want to help him. You're afraid that he will die because of the promises he made to me."

Margaret turned brilliant, blotchy red, and looked down at her gloves again; tears crawled slowly from beneath her heavy eyeglasses. This woman had tried to kill her, thought Lydia wearily. Why was she sparing her?

She knew the answer to that, too. Because Margaret had locked the door behind her, not only for the sake of the sonnet, but because she was Lydia Willoughby, heiress; because of all the sonnets no one ever wrote to the Margaret Pottons of the world.

"I'm so sorry," Margaret whispered. "I'm so sorry. I don't know what came over me..." She turned to flee, but stopped and turned back, standing, head down, to take punishment.

For a moment Lydia wondered if the interloper-that animal face, grinning and grinning at her upon those few occasions last night when she had shut her eyes- had engineered Margaret's jealousy, as he'd cast upon her the languor that had stifled her own screams.

She didn't think so. But she guessed it was something Ysidro would do in like circumstance.

And she shivered. She didn't want to think about Ysidro: playing picquet in the train, or bare white feet ascending the damp stone of the staircase before her...

"It's all right," she said.

Margaret looked away and began to cry.

Lydia thought, Damn; bitterly, wearily, knowing that she must give comfort while she herself was exhausted, aching, wondering if she'd whistled Jamie's life to the wind that afternoon by assuming Karolyi's note to be lies, wondering what she was going to do if Zeittelstein wasn't at the reception, wondering how best to charm him if he was... And underlying it all, against her will, aware that she was as drawn to the faded ghost trapped within the vampire immortality-like a mantis in amber-as Don Simon was to her.

"Are you quite sure you're all right, my dear?" Lady Clapham touched Lydia's wrist as they paused in the doorway of Monsieur Demerci's town palace above the darkening Marmara Sea.

Lydia nodded though she felt exhausted. She would have been glad to remain home, as Margaret had done, pleading a headache after the events of last night. Under the opera-length kid gloves and deep festoons of lace on her spinach-green gown, her bandaged arms smarted. The one thing she prayed, blinking at the dazzling electric brightness of the reception room, was that she wouldn't meet Ignace Karolyi amid the moving rainbow of men and women.

"I could do with a little champagne," she confided, as two slim dark servants, incongruous in Western-style livery and powdered wigs, ushered them through the tiled doorway toward the receiving line.

"What you need is brandy," retorted Lady Clapham. "I'll see what I can find." Their host was a Sorbonne-educated Turk in impeccable evening clothes, though the ferocity of his black mustache sounded an uneasy echo in Lydia's mind of the dark face with glittering fangs that had come so close to hers last night. His wife, a younger daughter of impoverished Silesian nobility, reminded Lydia of a highly bred rabbit in a yellow satin dress. She was probably the one responsible for the ridiculous eighteenth-century livery of the servants, and maybe for the electrical chandeliers, the candy-pink glass of the Venetian mirror frames, the tassled raspberry curtains and white and gold Louis XVI chairs, as well. Herr Hindi greeted her and expressed immediate concern: the beautiful Frau Asher did not look well, he hoped there was no indisposition. It comes of all this dull talk of business and jaunting about the old city; of course, a woman's more delicate constitution would be susceptible...

Only concern for her husband, who was to have met her in Constantinople and had not been heard from. Lydia unfurled her spangled Chantilly fan and tried to look interestingly wan without appearing haggard. She had hoped that Herr Zeittelstein might be here tonight. From things her husband had said, she thought that perhaps he and the honored Herr shared a mutual: client, and she might glean some news...

Certainly! Of course! Absolutely! Jacob had only just returned from Berlin that afternoon, he had been rather out of touch but he would be delighted to help in any fashion he could...

And so, indeed, he proved. Jacob Zeittelstein was a youngish, strongly built man who in spite of evening dress looked more like a pipe fitter than his company's representative to the Ottoman Empire. He listened to Herr Hindi's introduction and Lydia's explanation with the air of one who never forgets names, faces, or circumstances and has all information at the tips of his beefy fingers. "My husband mentioned that he was in touch with the Dardanelles Land Corporation, you see," Lydia explained, naming the bank account that had paid out a certified check for eighty pounds to a Freiherr Feketelo on 26 October. According to Razumovsky, Ignace Karolyi had left Constantinople abruptly, mysteriously, and under another name on the twenty-seventh. She had finally tracked it down, just this afternoon. "He said he was meeting someone in the company here in Constantinople, and I was wondering... It's absurd," she added, with a slight duck of her head. "And yet I can't help wondering if they might have heard anything..." She raised her eyes helplessly to Zeittelstein's. "But I haven't any idea who they are, and I can't seem to find out."

"Dardanelles Land?" Zeittelstein's eyebrows shot up. "The mysterious Herr Fiddat?"

"I believe that was the name." Lydia sipped a tiny quantity of Monsieur Demerci's excellent champagne. "They are clients of yours, aren't they?"

"Ha ha!" Hindi trumpeted. "She's up on everything, this clever little lady."

"He," Zeittelstein said, with a puzzled expression. "Not they. As far as I've been able to ascertain, the Dardanelles Land Corporation exists only on paper. Quite typical, actually. All those corporations do is pay money to their founders. Fiddat..." He shook his head.

Lydia felt exactly as if she had-not by chance, but by sheer steadiness of eye and hand- shot an arrow clean into the gold.

She widened her eyes. "What's mysterious about him?"

"Everything. Extraordinary." He shook his head. "It was on his business that I was in Berlin. Having decided, evidently all of a clap, to install refrigeration in the Roman crypt under his palace in the market district, he must needs have it now, at once. When the valve on the ammonia pump proved to have been cracked in shipping, he would not wait, like a normal person, for an express to Berlin for a new one. No. Five thousand francs he paid-almost two hundred pounds!-for me to return to Berlin, myself, in person, the very day the valve was found to be defective, by the quickest possible route. He even paid for the lost business here in this city that it cost me."

"They are very rich, these Turks," Hindi interpolated sententiously. "Ill-got, I'll wager, some of them. Refrigeration works, you must know, my dear Frau Asher, by compression of ammonia gas, much better than the old sulfur dioxide system. Sulfur dioxide-that's a chemical compound-has the inconvenient habit of becoming corrosive and eating up the machinery which stores it. Ha ha!"

"Truly?" Lydia gave him her most radiant smile and timed precisely the turn of her head back to Zeittelstein, cutting off his further explanations with, "And was he pleased to get his valve?"

Zeittelstein shook his head. "I'm not sure, Frau Asher. This afternoon I find nothing but a heap of hysterical messages from his agent... Has your husband ever laid eyes on Herr Fiddat himself, Frau Asher?"

Lydia shook her head. "I thought there might have been some sort of proscription against Mohammedans dealing with Christians face-to-face-not ordinary Mohammedans, I mean, but that he might belong to some... some odd sect of dervishes."

"Not any dervish I've ever heard of," put in Hindi, in the act of neatly shagging hors d'oeuvres from a silver plate proffered by a servant. He grinned at Zeittelstein. "Not that you'd know anything about that, ha ha."

Zeittelstein grinned back. "Well, as far as I know, in thirteen hundred years no Mohammedan has ever had a problem dealing with a Jew." His grin faded and the dark, wise eyes grew thoughtful. "I will say this: his agent's terrified of him. I can hear it in his voice. My own suspicion-and I can't exactly say why I feel this- is that Fiddat is a leper."

"How extraordinary!" Lydia said with a wealth of implied Please go on in gesture and voice and the tilt of her head.

"Nobody that I know has seen him," Zeittelstein continued, and glanced over at Hindi for corroboration.

Hindi tapped the side of his nose. "Very mysterious chap." He turned to catch the eye of their host. Monsieur Demerci strolled obediently over, pausing now and then to smile and speak to one or another of his guests.

"Ja'far, you've never laid eyes on Herr Fiddat, have you? Or visited his palace?"

"Oh, I've visited the House of Oleanders," Zeittelstein said. "I spent the better part of ten days assembling that wretched compressor-brrr, that vault is cold! But always I am met at the door by servants and conducted down to the crypt by them... They stand and watch me while I work."

"According to Hasan Buz-the ice merchant, you understand, madame," Demerci said with a polite bow that made him look considerably less like a Turkish corsair and more like a former soldier made good, "it's the same with his men when they make deliveries. The stuff gets stacked in the corridors-half a ton at a time- and the servants pay them and dismiss them. Hasan has to pay them double. They say the house is cursed."

"Where is the house?" Lydia asked.

A servant, emerging between the heavily carved pillars that lined the reception room, gestured discreetly; Demerci excused himself with another bow and went to speak to the man while Zeittelstein said, "It's in the very old part of the city between the Place d'Armes and the old Sublime Porte, near the Bazaar. If you were walking east along the Tchakmakajitar from the Valide Han, it's the third turning up the hill. The house itself runs into at least three old hems and rambles everywhere, but the door I go through is there. You'd have to walk around the walls till you found the main door, if you wish to speak to Herr Fiddat, but personally," he added, "I wouldn't go there without an escort...and I don't mean Lady Clapham."

"Oh, no," Lydia agreed, her heart pounding fast.

"Great heavens, no!" Hindi cried indignantly. "A European lady to that part of town?"

Tomorrow, she thought, looking around swiftly for the Russian prince. With Razumovsky and a couple of stout footmen from the Russian Embassy... God, don't let Karolyi's note have been genuine! It was lies, it had to be lies, and that business of One dose to you is an enemy was, James had told her, one of the oldest tricks in repertoire.

She wondered if perhaps they should wait until dark to include Ysidro in the party, but common sense told her that even were Ysidro at the height of his strength-which he was not-it would be far safer to enter a vampire nest in daylight hours than by night, even if it did mean going in without an expert's assistance. Besides, Ysidro might refuse to take part in an actual assault. Demerci strolled back, looking worried. "Just a word of warning," he said quietly. "There's more unrest in the Armenian quarter tonight. When you go home tonight, you may want to go through the Mahmoudie and the Bab Ali Djaddessi, rather than through the Bajazid."

Hindi gestured impatiently. "They're not going to call in the army again, are they?"

"I'm not sure. They have not so far. But there have been some rather... odd... murders, and it wouldn't take much to set off rioting again." He bowed again to Lydia. "It sounds ridiculously feeble of me, madame, to ask you not to hold the actions of the army and the government against my people. We are not barbarians, in spite of what you must think. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of us who are horrified at what the army does to the Armenians, and the Greeks, in this city. It is a terrible mistake to put the rifles of tomorrow into the hands of the ignorance of yesterday."

Most of the people at the reception seemed very little worried by the prospect of further noting, as if such matters couldn't possibly concern them: Herr Hindi essayed a few jokes about what one had to deal with in foreign parts. Lydia wondered if this was because they'd already been through so many riots since July or because they mostly lived in Pera, or because they were as absorbed in selling railway stock or army boots or plumbing fixtures as she was, under normal circumstances, in isolating the effects of pancreatic secretions. One or two of the embassy wives called for their carriages early, but Lady Clapham merely said, "Nonsense. Late's better than early. By the time supper's over they'll all have gone to bed and we'll be able to drive straight onto the bridge and never mind going the long way round."

She was probably right, Lydia thought. In any case, Prince Razumovsky-who had a very Russian concept of time-had not yet arrived, and tired though she was, she needed to speak to him tonight. Lydia had the distinct impression that if she went to Sir Burnwell and asked for help in forcing her way into an old palace in Stamboul to find word of Jamie, the result would be a round of polite letters to the Dardanelles Land Corporation rather than the prompt offer of a couple of Cossacks with clubs.

So she waited, too keyed up to do more than peck at the lobster aspic and ptarmigan in green peppercorn sauce, and on either side of her Herren Hindi and Zeittelstein traded head shakings over Mahler's latest symphony and the newest juicy tidbits of the scandal concerning the Kaiser's brother and a Vienna masseur. After supper there was dancing, and Lydia allowed herself to be swept into a waltz by Herr Zeittelstein and a lively schottische by the parson of the American Lutheran Mission on Galata, all the while listening, watching, for sight of His Highness' rich green uniform or the pantherlike grace that even without spectacles she knew as Karolyi.

She had worried a little about leaving Margaret at the Rue Abydos house with only Madame Potoneros and her daughter, though she suspected that unless she herself was there, neither Karolyi nor his vampire companion-companions?-would even try to enter the house. In any case, the bolt on the front door had been repaired, the one on the kitchen wing reinforced with another, stronger lock, and every window festooned with garlic and hawthorn.

"I can summon any into whose eyes I have looked," Ysidro had said to her once during a long game of picquet on the train from Adrianople-they had been discussing Dracula. "To call one to me who is a stranger-to have them put aside silver, if they are wearing it, or garlic or any of the other flowers and woods which sear and blister our flesh-is a more difficult thing."

Lydia shivered, wondering if the Turkish vampire, the interloper of last night, would have been capable of making her take off her silver necklace had he spoken to her on the street some earlier night or whispered to her in dreams. She had warned Margaret about Karolyi and given orders to the two housekeepers to remain until dawn. It was all that she could do, she felt, in the face of Margaret's blotch- faced, white-lipped refusal to accompany her tonight.

Lydia was standing beside the heavily curtained window that looked out over the Roman walls to the sea, scanning the newest comers to the room for the tall form of Razumovsky-and even at this late hour embassy parties and members of the new government were still arriving-when a cold hand touched her elbow and a voice like wind breath said, "Mistress?" in her ear.

Earlier that day, remembering the sonnet, she hadn't known how she was going to speak to him, hadn't even known how she wanted to speak to him. But in the fierce electrical radiance of the chandeliers, he wore his alien, vampire face. It was the face that must show in the mirror-a skull's face of hollow eyes and staring bones within the long web of hair-and that was easier to deal with than the haunting illusion that somewhere in those sulfur eyes lurked the remnants of a living man.

Under his cloak he wore evening dress. She almost asked him if he'd left his scythe and hourglass at the door, until she saw the look in his eyes. "They're making for the house of Olumsiz Bey," he said softly.

"Rioters- Armenians, hundreds of them, crying for his blood..."

"Who...? How do they...?" Then she said, "The ice carriers," realizing it for the truth at once. "Of course they'd know."

"And the storytellers." Ysidro caught her hand, drawing her unseen by others toward the door to the supper room, to the kitchens, to the back stairs. "And the beggars who watch the shadows pass at night. They all know. But they were afraid, until rage and hate at their priest's murder finally drowned their fear. Put this on."

She clutched the folds of the sable cloak, followed him past the unseeing servants cleaning up the plates, past the scullery boys bringing up more ice for champagne... past the footmen and drivers keeping warm by the fire in the stable court and looking up worriedly at the rising and falling of voices beyond the roofs, and the occasional snap of gunfire. "What happened?" She paused in the alley and fumbled her eyeglasses from their case in her reticule-all things leaped into clarity, more fearful almost than the comforting dreamlike blur.

"A priest was killed. And then an old man, an inoffensive seller of fig paste who gave to charity and had more grandchildren than King David. Vampire kills, careless, deliberate. Meant to be found, and meant to enrage."

In the narrow lanes behind Demerci's mansion, rocky and steep as stairs, the voices sounded frighteningly close. Flame reflected on the wood and stucco, the stained and weed-grown walls. Lydia thought, If they find me, they'll attack me just for being European...

It was very hard to think past that fact, that fear.

"Karolyi," she said. "Karolyi and the interloper. After I wouldn't cooperate. All they have to do is follow the mob and let it do their work for them."

Through a gap in the houses, she saw by torchlight a man riding the box of a broken- down carriage-black-robed, gray beard streaming, waving a crucifix aloft. Men all around him raised flaming brands, clubs, the edged and pointed tools of marketplace trades. Women's voices keened like harpies.

"And part of that work," said that cool, disinterested voice in her ear, "will be to kill James and anyone else they find at the Bey's palace. If by chance Charles or Anthea are there, they will likely be imprisoned, and in no case to flee. Was your builder of refrigerators among those at the house just now?" He caught her elbow again as she stumbled, guiding her through a space between houses where a river of filth sucked at her shoes.

"Off the Tchakmakajitar Yokoussou near the Valide Han, he says. Third turning up the hill..."

"I've seen it," Ysidro said. "It was one of many I suspected, but dared not go close enough to be certain." Thin shards of moonlight blinked on shirtfront, cuffs, face, white on black, increasing her impression that she was being hastened along the insalubrious streets of Hell by a skeleton. "With any luck we shall reach the place before the mob, and-if James is in fact still alive-before the Bey decides to kill him to preserve his silence."