Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2)

Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2) Page 5

A waltz from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet had been popular in Vienna the year Asher spent in and out of that city. Closing his eyes to the lulling rock of the train, Asher could hear it again, drawing in its colored wake the bright glimmer of gaslight in the Cafe New York on the Opernring during Carnival season, the sparkle of snow on the pavements, the slurry patter of French and Italian and Viennese German all around. Court gossip and psychoanalysis, music and politics and whose wife was betraying whom. Thirteen years later it was still as clear as yesterday.

Young matrons in their masks and costumes questing nervously for unspecified excitement. Uniformed officers, gay in swords and spurs and braid.

Francoise.

"Nothing here is as it seems," she had said the night he walked with her to the cafe after a St. Valentine's Ball given by her brother; and that, at least, he had known was true about himself.

She was a thin-faced woman of his own age, his own height; though to be thirty- five and almost six feet tall, and of a strong cast of feature, had always been something only considered attractive in men. Her brother was a director of the biggest bank in Vienna and owned farms, vineyards, blocks of flats in the Seventh District. His wife, the second daughter of a baron, had been trying for years to marry Francoise off in diplomatic circles.

Asher wondered if she had ever married. Had ever trusted another man.

"People pass the days away in cafes like this, sipping coffee, reading the feuilletons, watching the world go by." She moved one shoulder in a graceful shrug, her smile rueful and a little sad. She was a biscuit-colored woman, but the emeralds in her ear-rings caught sparkling echoes in her eyes. "Outsiders think it's all very relaxed, very gemutlich, but it's really because most of the people here live in one-room apartments, they and their families together, and they can't stand the smell of cooking and dirty diapers and the arguing of their children. So they come here and look leisured and carefree because that is exactly what they are not.

"We here in Vienna have a hundred separate degrees of nobility and bureaucrats, titles and order and neatness and rules, and underneath, the Slovenes and Serbs and Czechs and Moldavians and Muslims are all clamoring to have their own nations, their own schools, their own languages, their own crowns. They bomb and shoot and riot and scheme with the Russians and the British and whoever else they think will help them break free."

Her big hands in long gloves of ivory kid darted, as if forming illustrative patterns that Asher could not see. He had first encountered her at a Twelfth Night ball in his guise as a professor of folklore. Folklore was always popular in Vienna, the more bizarre the better, and in exchange for arcana on Japanese werewolves and Chinese milkweed fairies, Asher had met a number of the aforesaid Serbs and Czechs and Moldavians and was beginning to find out just who they were scheming with on the subject of riots, bombs, and freedom from Austrian control. He hadn't really needed to seek out Francoise a second time.

But he had.

"When we complain," she went on, "it isn't really a complaint. When we weep, it isn't necessarily out of pain; and when we dance, it isn't always for joy. Yes isn't really yes, and no is seldom no, and the palaces you see mostly aren't really palaces, and everyone talks about everything except what really consumes their thoughts."

Her dark brows drew down over those bright green eyes as she considered him, skirting the brink of questions that she wasn't sure she wanted answered or even asked.

"We don't always know whether what we're seeing is real or a mask."

Asher's eyes had met hers, and he hadn't known what to reply.

I spoke to you last week to find out which of your young officer friends are deepest in debt.

I'm here to learn things that could get your armies defeated, your country disgraced, your friends and nephew killed.

I think I love you.

He wasn't sure just when that last had happened.

For a time they regarded one another without masks. Even now, looking back on it from the edge of dreaming, Asher didn't know what he would have said, had she asked him then.

But she smiled and put her mask back on, and held out her hand. "It's the 'Waltz of the Flowers,' " she said. "Do you dance?"

He had never been back to Vienna.

He pulled himself brutally from the edge of sleep. It was too early to sleep. The lights of Paris were barely behind them: St. Denis, Gagny, Vaires-sur-Marne spilled firefly glints into the indigo dark. Asher sipped the cafe noir he'd tipped the porter to bring to his private compartment-the compartment he'd managed to secure at the last possible moment, leaving himself again, he reflected dourly, with only five pounds in his pocket.

But on the Paris-Vienna Express it was imperative that he travel first class if he wanted access to the car where Karolyi and Ernchester would be. He knew himself incapable of remaining awake another night in second class. In first class he would be safer, less likely to be seen by either Ernchester or Karolyi. Karolyi.

Nothing here is as it seems to be.

That same Carnival evening he'd seen Karolyi surrender a dance with the most attractive heiress in Vienna that season to go outside and stop a carter from whipping his horse. Francoise's comment had been, "Laying it on a bit thick, no?" And, to Asher's raised brow: "You must have noticed he only does such things where others will see." Asher had noticed, but to his knowledge, no one else had, save Francoise.

He hadn't had time to telegraph Lydia. Nor Streatham, telling him Cramer was dead.

Streatham would have left his office at six anyway, Asher reflected sardonically, and wouldn't be back till twenty minutes past nine in the morning.

Dear God, had it only been that morning?

When he closed his eyes, he could see the brassy-haired prostitute, back arched like a bow above the seat of the chair, flopping and kicking her legs as her body gave up its life.

Could see the dark glitter of Cramer's blood where the rats had gnawed his face. He feared his dreams, but they drank him in, like water flowing down into darkness.

He thought, I've been in this room before. When have I been in this room? Beyond shrouded windows rain streamed down, sodden and heavy; if there had been furniture in the room once, all had been cleared, but for a table at one end.

Shawled with drippings, the guttered stumps of candles burned in tall holders, two at the head, two at the feet, and their light made daffodil thumbprints on the velvet pall that draped one end of the table like a thrown-back counterpane and winked in the jeweled leaves of a coronet set in the black cloth's midst. The dream had the taste of very distant memory, and he somehow knew that it was deep, deep in the night.

A woman lay on the yellow marble floor before the table, like a second pall dropped by a careless servitor, awkward in corsets and bum rolls and strange pennoncels of ribbon. Her hair was black, except where the candle flame breathed on it a cinnamon light. Its puffs and volutes, like those of her clothing, were in tangled disarray.

"Anthea." Another woman came down the room's length, passed within touching distance of Asher, or where Asher would have been had any of this ever really occurred. "Anthea, you must come to bed." Even drugged with sleep, Asher identified the longer vowels in come and bed, the elongated ou, and thought automatically, Late seventeenth century. This new woman also wore black. Against ebon lace cascading from high combs, her face seemed lifeless, her eyes swollen and red. " 'Tis long gone midnight, and the mourners away to their homes." She knelt in a sighing waterfall of back-draped skirts and touched the prone woman's arm.

"How can he be dead?" It was a deep voice for a woman's, low but very clear. There were no tears in it, only a tired wonderment, as if she really wanted to know. The odd thing was that Asher recognized it but remembered a modern pronunciation, unlike the one she used now.

"I don't... I don't feel as if he were. Did I walk up the stairs, would he not be waiting at the top?" A ribboned fontange snagged in her hair, tilted drunkenly as she raised her head, then slithered to the floor unheeded. Though he was at least twenty feet from her, Asher knew her eyes were the color of last autumn's oak leaves, matted at the bottom of a pool.

"I felt so, when my Andrew died." The other woman put a hand to Anthea's side to help her up. Anthea rose unsteadily, tall and wholly beautiful though her clothing was askew from lying on the floor. The flesh of her breasts rose in creamy mountains above the flattening of her bodice, and small shadows marked the paler line of her collarbone, the curves of her broad-set cheeks. "Believe me, my darling," said her friend, "he is dead."

Slowly, like a very old woman, Anthea stepped forward, reaching to touch the velvet pall where, Asher realized, a coffin had lain. Her voice was very small, like a child's. "I don't understand what they expect me to do without him." She turned and walked the length of the room, as if she did not see her friend who followed in her wake. Certainly she did not see Asher, though her black skirts brushed the tips of his boots and he smelled the musky blend of ambergris, funeral incense, and womanhood that sighed from her clothing. Her tall lace headdress lay on the floor where it had fallen, like a broken black rose.

Steffi, darling, you do realize how dreary you are when you're jealous?" Asher jolted awake, sunlight in his eyes, his neck stiff and the gentle, persistent rocking of the train still tapping in his bones. He slumped back into the corner of the seat again and listened as Steffi-whoever Steffi was-rumbled some reply in harsh Berlin hoche Deutsch as he and his baby-voiced Viennese girlfriend passed down the corridor outside, toward the restaurant car presumably. Asher reached up and switched off the still-burning electric lamp above his seat, then pressed the porcelain button to summon a porter. When he ordered shaving water-accompanied by a tip he couldn't well afford-Asher asked the time.

"It is five minutes past ten in the morning in Vienna, sir," said the man in Italian- accented French. "Ten minutes past nine in Paris. Myself, I should put local time at quarter of ten."

Asher, who had reset his watch to Paris time but had been too exhausted to wind it last night, set it again. "Have they done with serving breakfast?"

"They will have by the time m'sieu has finished shaving." The porter touched his cap. Venetian, Asher guessed. Dark, but with the extraordinary sensual beauty that even the crones of that ancient republic possessed like a birthright. "I could bring m'sieu a little something."

Asher handed him another silver two-franc piece, reflecting that porters on the Vienna Express would undoubtedly pocket anything from dollars to piastres. "You wouldn't happen to know whether the Hungarian gentleman who's traveling with the Englishman is still in the restaurant car, would you? Not," he added, holding up his hand, "that this matter need be mentioned to either of them."

The Italian's dark eyes brightened with interest, and Asher added another franc.

"A matter of family business."

"Ah." He nodded knowingly. "The Hungarian and the Englishman, their light burned on throughout the night, though of course because the curtain was closed I could see nothing of what passed within the compartment itself. But I know that they did not summon me to take down the bunks, and this morning when I go in to ranger the compartment, still they have not been slept in." He glanced meaningfully up at Asher's pristine bunk. Asher had locked the compartment door upon entering last night, and if this man had knocked, had slept through it. When the porter-whose name, he said, was Giuseppe- returned with hot water, a breakfast tray, and coffee, he brought also the information that the Hungarian Herr Feketelo was no longer in the restaurant car. Following breakfast, Asher made his way unobtrusively down the corridor, banking on the fact that Karolyi, like his traveling companion, would sleep during the day. His own compartment was near the head of the coach, close to the accordion-fold bridge leading into the restaurant car. The compartment shared by Karolyi and Ernchester, according to Giuseppe, was close to the tail end. The next car in the train, Asher had already determined, was the baggage car.

It was sealed, but Asher had dealt often enough in duplicate seals and keys-and had seen enough of the sheer preternatural physical strength and agility of vampires- to know that this would present Ernchester no difficulties.

Asher expended several more francs from his dwindling resources on arrangements with Giuseppe to have his lunch also brought on a tray. It was certainly a more comfortable way to see Central Europe, he thought, than dodging around the Dinaric Alps with a price on his head, dogs-and Karolyi-on his trail, a pocketful of incriminating serial numbers from Swiss bank accounts, and a bullet in his shoulder. He listened to the voices passing in the corridor and kept his own curtain closed, watched the dark trees and fairy tale villages of the Black Forest rise and fold themselves over the lift of the Swabian Alps, with the higher gleam of white in the distance that marked the true Alps growing nearer as the train bent southward. At Munich the Express stopped for half an hour to add two second-class cars and another wagons-lits that had come down from Berlin, and Asher risked a dash to the station telegraph office to send two wires, one to Lydia telling her of his altered plans, and one to Streatham, informing him of the death of his agent.

He remained angry over that, not so much at Ernchester and Karolyi-it was, after all, a game they all played-but at Streatham, for assigning the least experienced of his men to a job that he should have known was dangerous. And, though he knew there was nothing else he could have done, at himself. Crossing the great floor of the station under the weak gray daylight of the glass ceiling, Asher tried to remember who was in charge in Vienna these days. Perhaps no one he knew. Streatham had been right about the reorganization, of course. Fairport, at least, would still be in Vienna, unobtrusively operating his safe house out at his sanitarium in the Wienerwald, peddling rejuvenation to bankers and stockbrokers' wives, fussy and trembly with his ill health and his cotton gloves and that fanatic glint in his pale blue eyes. Asher smiled, recalling the three days he'd spent with that comic-opera hypochondriac, journeying to some remote Czech village so Fairport could interview a peasant brother and sister who were contemporaries of his own great-grandparents, and so Asher could trace local variations of the verb byti or biti-and have a look at a forest road leading into Saxony that, for no good reason, had been widened and repaired with funds from Berlin. The old man hadn't taken off his gloves for the entire trip, had warmed the snow water of the streams because it was better for the liver, and had brought his own food, his own sheets, his own soap. The local peasants had shaken their heads and given him names of their own-"the laundry maid" and "Grandmother English"-and the innkeeper at one village had taken Asher aside and gravely asked if it were true that in the City-meaning Vienna-they had doctors who could cure people of such ailments. Asher had been hard put to explain that Grandmother English was such a doctor.

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

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

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

Why Ernchester?

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

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

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

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

Or had they? He paused in the act of dismembering the key-wound bear, a half- farcical vision rising in his mind of the sealed baggage car stacked high with coffins and trunks in which slumbered the vampires of Paris; of himself, strolling innocently into the restaurant car to face table after table of chalk- white, bone-thin faces and a sea of eyes that burned like actinic flame. When it came down to it, what the hell was he going to do once he reached Vienna? Try to hand the problem over to another incompetent and reluctant Department head? Get some other young novice killed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in his own compartment again, he rang for the porter, ordered dinner brought to him, adding with a wink and a couple of francs that he was indisposed. "You wouldn't have the English Times on board, would you?" "Certamente, sir," Giuseppe said, drawing himself up indignantly. "All the newspapers we have for our first-class passengers, of the latest editions." "How about last Saturday's? Last Friday's, too, if possible?"

"Hmm. That I don't know, m'sieu. I shall ask, shall look about the porters' rooms..."

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

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

Olumsiz Bey-Front

steps of British Museum, 7.-Umitsiz

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who was it who called himself the Deathless Lord?

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

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

The air was redolent with coffee.

Vienna.

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

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

I'm sorry, Francoise.

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

They were in Vienna as well.

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

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

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

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

"Herr Professor Doktor Asher?"

He turned, startled, halfway to the cab stand, his first thought, Not now!

Karolyi and Ernchester would be along in minutes.. -

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

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

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

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

Shocked, for a moment Asher could only stare. Then a string of Czech curses caught his ear, and he looked around in time to see a couple of porters loading an enormous, brass-cornered trunk onto a goods wagon, observed by Karolyi and the Earl of Ernchester. Karolyi happened to turn his head and for a moment met Asher's eyes.

He tipped his wide-brimmed hat and smiled. The last Asher saw of them as he was escorted out of the station, spy and vampire were making their leisurely way to the rank of cabs.