Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2)

Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2) Page 9

Asher remained on the Prater until nearly four, to give the hue and cry time to subside. He had a late lunch at one of the rustic cafes that lined the Volksprater's bridle paths, consuming Czech sausage and buchty with one eye on the broad, graveled way that led from the organ grinders and carousels around the great Ferris wheel off into the gray and rust fastnesses of the old Imperial hunting park. Once he caught a glimpse of the brilliant cobalt jackets of the Imperial- and-Royal contingent of his pursuers among the thin trees and heard their faint hallooing as they searched.

England, when war comes, I think you'll be safe on the Austrian front at any rate.

But his inner smile faded at the thought of Ernchester, no longer now entirely a volunteer. If there were any stipulations in the deal he'd made with Karolyi, any acts he wouldn't perform at the nobleman's behest, the rules had changed. Or would change, when they told him they held Anthea prisoner.

He shivered in his rag-fair coat.

How long had Fairport been a double? he wondered. According to Karolyi, as far back as the flap over the smuggled Russian guns. It wasn't as unusual as it might seem to outsiders that Fairport hadn't blown him to Karolyi then. The fact that Fairport was passing the odd fact along to the Kundschafts Stelle from time to time didn't mean he was entirely their man. Doubles- particularly men like Fairport- were frequently masters of self-deception, as Asher knew from having dealt with them. They always kept things back, from either side, sometimes for the most bizarre and absurd reasons: He remembered an American missionary in China who hadn't warned him of an impending rebel attack because he didn't want a Chinese patron of the mission to learn that his-the patron's-son had a mistress in the quarter of Tientsin through which the rebels were expected to come.

And perhaps Karolyi hadn't asked it of him, judging the matter too small to waste a trump on information he could learn some other way. Even in retrospect, however, the thought of how close he'd come to dying as his Czech mountain guide had died made Asher shudder.

Fairport's research was already an obsession back in the nineties. Top quality materials, facilities, research journeys were always expensive, and Fairport was not a wealthy man. The best agents, Asher reflected, were those without any weak points, any handles upon which an enemy could grip.

Like Karolyi. Smooth, hollow men for whom the Job was all.

He glanced back at the self-consciously rustic kiosk where the waitresses huddled out of the cold, and wondered if Halliwell could be trusted.

Fairport might not be the only one in Karolyi's pay. Better, certainly, to wait until six and leave a message at Donizetti's, arranging a meeting. If he could stay out of sight until then...

But after six it wouldn't matter.

Not to Karolyi.

Though Asher was already fairly certain what he'd find, he strolled to the kiosk and bought that day's Neue Freie Presse. On the back page he found a small lead line: lacemaker's body found in wienerwald Scanning the brief copy, his eye picked out the words "drained of blood." The name of the vineyard near which she'd been found was familiar, a quarter hour's drive from Fruhlingzeit. So. He stared blankly in the direction of the gay-colored midway, the shooting galleries and Punch and Judys, the panopticum where the murder of the Czar was on view in wax for the edification of schoolboys. A fleer of music blew from that direction, a distorted jingle of pipes and chimes, and then was gone. "The Waltz of the Flowers."

So.

A lacemaker. Like the prostitute in Paris, a woman no one would miss.

Of course Karolyi would pick a woman.

Ernchester would be there until sometime tonight.

Fairport was disposable. Even the knowledge of a scheme to use vampires was disposable. As Karolyi had said, most men in the Department weren't going to believe it anyway.

What could not be disposed of-what he himself could not relinquish-was Ernchester.

Today- now-Asher knew where the vampire earl was, where Anthea would be. Knowing Fairport- and Fruhlingzeit-were blown, they'd move tonight and, like true vampires, fade into the mists, leaving only a little blood and a muttering of rumor behind.

A fiacre drove by on the path, the coachman whistling briskly. The afternoon light had turned steely and cold. Asher shivered again and blew on his hands.

There was, of course, always the option of taking the first train back to Munich - cadging a ride in the baggage car, at this point, but Asher had done that in his time. If Burdon were still the head of the Munich branch-if there still was a Munich branch-he could at least get enough money to go back to England. Tell them Fairport was a traitor, Karolyi was in league with-well, a very dangerous man-and wash his hands of the business. Go home to Lydia, who might very well have sent him a wire at Fairport's... None of this was his affair anyway. He had done all he could be expected to do.

But that left Anthea in the hands of Karolyi.

And he knew where Ernchester was today. That was the crux of the matter.

There was a telephone in the kiosk. Undoubtedly the police could trace him through the exchange if he phoned Halliwell- he'd dealt with the endless polite chatter of Viennese telephone operators too often to think the transaction could be accomplished quickly. And the delay of a night in jail meant that Ernchester-and Anthea-would vanish untraceably.

When he'd taken a seat at this table, half screened from the path by a hedge, there had been two or three other brave souls sipping coffee and gazing contemplatively over the slaty waters of the canal. Now he was alone. Across the river the clock on St. Stephen's struck three.

Unwillingly Asher got to his feet, thrust his bare hands into his pockets, and after a cautious glance up and down the path for signs of pursuit, headed back along the Haupt Allee for the Praterstern, where with his last few pfennigs he could catch a tram at least partway to the Vienna Woods.

It was not long after the coming of full dark that Asher realized he was being followed.

He took the tram as far as Dobling, then climbed the winding road through thin rust- and-pewter woods past Grinzing. Moving kept him a little warm, though his side hurt at every step and he had to stop repeatedly to rest on the low rock walls that divided woods or vineyards from the road. He was sitting thus, trying to get his breath after a particularly steep patch of road, when he heard the church clock in that storybook village chime five.

Now and then a farm wagon passed, and once a motorcar full of homebound seekers after pastoral calm, but as the twilight clotted under the trees, such things became few. A small wind cleared the clouds; a shaved silver coin of moon floated in a halo of ice. By six it was utterly dark.

That mattered less than it might have, for Asher knew the road. Toiling upward with the ache of fatigue dragging at his bones, there were times when he felt he'd never been away. He didn't even have to look for the Fruhlmgzeit Sanitarium's gateposts of ivy-covered stone. The slope of the road told him exactly how far yet he had to go.

He listened for the sound of human pursuit. But that was not what he heard. He would have been hard put to say exactly what it was he did hear, or what he felt, that told him they were in the woods be-hind him. Perhaps, had he not come so close to death at their hands-or the hand of those like them in Paris -a year ago, he would not even have known he was being stalked.

But he knew. A touch of sleepiness at his mind, in spite of the wind eating through his holed coat and the ache of his wound. A sense that it wasn't really necessary to look behind him, or around him, at the woods. And then, when a single breath of moving air sighed from the cinder-colored darkness among the trees, the sweetish stink of blood.

He didn't slow his step, or quicken it, not daring to let them see he knew, but he did wonder what he was going to do. He was nearly at the drive that turned into Fruhlingzeit, and the drive, at least, would be watched by Karolyi's men. He'd have to leave the road then. The silver on his throat and wrists would buy him a few seconds, but they wouldn't save him from a broken neck. The road before him lay deserted.

On the whole they moved without sound, but it was late in the autumn, and beneath the pale stems of the beeches the brown leaves mounded thick, and dead fern and ivy rustled and whispered with the passage of unseen feet.

He stopped on the edge of the road-he'd been keeping to the shadows along the ditch in case Karolyi had patrols on the road- and took his watch from his pocket, angling it to the moonlight, then closed it with a click and, under cover of slipping it into his pocket again, unhooked the fob from his belt. A quick motion wrapped the chain twice around his middle finger, so that when he drew his hand out again-and tucked it under his armpit, as if for warmth-he carried the rounded disk of silver cradled out of sight in his palm.

It wasn't much, but it would have to do.

He sprang across the ditch, scrambled a little up the bank, wondering if they could hear the sudden heavy slamming of his heart. The Vienna Woods were thin. Beneath a summer canopy of leaves he doubted he could have navigated by night, but with the trees bare, the familiar shapes of beech and sycamore were just visible by the latticed pallor of the moon. There was no way of telling how great a force of men Karolyi had at the sanitarium. It would take only one to spread an alarm.

Provided he lived to get anywhere near the walls.

What had Anthea said? The masters among the Undead are jealous of their territories. He remembered, too, that pitiful fledgling Bully Joe Davies back in London, glancing in terror over his shoulders: They'd kill me, they would- Grippen don't want none in London but his own get, his own slaves...

Had they, too-whoever they were-read that tiny mention in the Neue Freie Presse about the dead lacemaker and known that another was hunting on their territory, killing in such a way as to rouse the suspicions of the rulers of the day?

Or did they simply recognize his heartbeat, Asher wondered, the smell of his blood, as those of an intruder who had been snooping around the walls of their palaces last night?

Asher walked as quickly as he dared, moving purposefully. Once he heard the leaves rustle, and some sound that might have been a taffeta petticoat, but his senses screamed at him that there were more than one. Like sharks they followed him, slipping unseen through the abysses between the trees.

White glimmered ahead. Black veins of ivy traced it: the rear wall of Fruhlmgzeit. Above it bulked the house's steep roofs and stuccoed walls, the golden ochre hue so characteristic of Viennese houses grubby in the dark. Most of the windows facing the woods were shuttered, but lamplight from those facing the court outlined what had been the stable, since converted into a laboratory and therapy room. Asher had always suspected that the aged cats and dogs-and the occasional Viennese businessmen-upon whom Fairport experimented showed improvement because of the therapeutic massage, good food, and careful tending that went with "magnetic induction." There was a sort of crypt under the stable, Asher remembered, where Fairport's generator was housed among stores of carbolic, ether, kerosene, and coal.

Nearer the wall he smelled the smoke of a guard's cigarette.

The trees pressed close around the back of the property. From the concealment of an oak he could see the window where he'd sat all that long ago afternoon, planning how to get himself out of Vienna and betray Francoise in the most painful possible fashion in the process.

Then he turned his head and saw a woman standing beside him.

The hair lifted on his nape. He had not heard one single sound.

She was beautiful, like something wrought of moonlight, flaxen hair piled high, but snagged and tugged by the branches until its tendrils floated around her face in a glowing halo; light eyes, gray or blue, etiolated and transparent. Her dress was moonlight, too, some oyster shade, colorless as a web, and the luster of satin flickered along its sleeve as she lifted her hands. Her eyes filled with longing and sorrow and desire.

Asher felt his mind shutting down, warm yearning for her flooding heart and thoughts and groin, even though, in the shadows of those waxen lips, he saw the curve of fangs. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that he wanted her, as desperately as he had wanted Lydia before they were married, as desperately as he had wanted the pretty shop girls of Oxford when he was a student and frantic with a boy's nascent lusts. Against his will a sort of drunkenness filled his mind and he found himself reaching for her, filled with the irrational conviction that kissing her, touching her, would not matter, that it would be all right, the way one thinks in a dream.

As if from some tremendous distance he saw himself, his mind protesting but unable to connect its thoughts with his actions. Her hands touched his face, cold even in their gloves of shell-colored kid; they slipped over his ears and down to his neck, and his own hand felt rough and cold on the taut silvery cloth of her side.

Then her mouth twisted in a snarl, wide, like an infuriated cat's. The glamour snapped away as her hands jerked back from his collar, where even through fabric and leather she felt the sear of the silver underneath. Asher gasped, waking, it seemed, to find her mouth inches from his throat, her grip already like iron on his arms. Before she could move, he struck her cheek with the silver watch palmed in his hand, twisting away from her even as she screamed-shock, pain, fury, like a cheetah's scream, or a demon's in hell.

He flung her from him, bolted for the wall. She screamed again, and from the corner of his eye he saw her collapse to her knees, clutching the side of her face, screaming over and over as she clawed at the flesh. Something-some darkness- flashed among the trees, and he felt a smothering sleepiness crush his mind like gloved iron. He thrust it from him, scrambled up and over the wall as men's voices cried out somewhere close, dropped into the rosebushes below instants before the first of Fairport's servants pounded around the side of the house. He rolled into the shadow, hiding the pale blur of his face, and they ran through the garden to the gate. The moment the last was gone, he flung himself across the narrow space of gravel and bare thorn to the door under the stair. Then other men were in the garden, calling to one another. He heard Lukas the coachman's name, and someone called something about "Herr Kapitan..." presumably Karolyi's regimental rank.

The screaming had stopped. But they'd all be busy for some time.

Ten minutes, he thought-striding down the stone-flagged passageway to the kitchen- while everyone dashed madly around the perimeter of the wall. Longer, if they had as few men as he thought they did, or if they found anything. He tripped the lever behind the scullery cupboard, slipped down the narrow stairway it revealed. More than once he'd taken Slav nationalists or Russian messengers down this way, to keep them unseen by Fairport's patients.

God, how the blond woman had screamed!

At the flea market he'd purchased wire to make another picklock; his hands shook while he winkled the lock at the bottom of the stair. It was an old-fashioned tumbler type, and he could have picked it in his sleep-he'd warned Fairport about it a dozen times...

Seventeen years with the Department, he was interested to see, had not inured him to that old chivalric voice within him that protested that there were things that a gentleman did and would not do even in defense of his life: kick a man when he was down or render what was euphemistically called a "foul blow" in a fight; shoot a man in the back; lie on sworn oath; forge another's name. Shoot a sixteen-year-old boy who trusted you.

Steal money from a woman who loved you.

Strike a beautiful girl in the face with a handful of substance that you were reasonably certain would react upon her like vitriol.

Evidently the fact that had he not done so, she would have killed him within seconds was of no importance to those old voices of his childhood: his country- doctor father, his grim-faced uncle, his tutors at Winchester and Oxford. He still felt an utter swine.

Did he think she was any different from Anthea?

The pawls of the lock snicked back. As he opened the door, dim gaslight from the scullery above showed him a strange gleam on the lock plate. Asher braced his foot in the door to keep it from closing-it was, as he recalled, heavily springed- and lit a match for a better look.

On the inner side, the lock was silver.

The smell of fresh-sawn wood filled his nose, and beneath it, the smell of blood.

His nape prickled again, and he stood still, listening, barely breathing. Then, slowly, he turned the catch to keep it from locking again, raised his lucifer higher and held it up into the room within.

Silver flashed in the seed of phosphor light. Where he had known only a small underground chamber equipped with bed, chair, and chamber pot, he now saw a glittering grillwork of silver bars that stretched from side to side not three feet from the door. Where the base bar of electroplated steel held them across the floor there were curls of sawdust, yellow and new.

Behind the bars, eyes caught the reflection like the eyes of a cat.

Asher blew out the match as the flame scorched his fingers. Frail, twice- reflected light from the stairway showed him a pale face, pale hands as they approached the bars, the white of a shirt-front and an old-fashioned stock.

A voice spoke out of the darkness. "Have you come for my capitulation? I told you I'd do anything you asked. Isn't it enough that you've betrayed me, lied to me? Was it necessary to... to do what you did?"

There was a pause, while Asher stared blankly into the darkness, and the strange eyes gleamed back at him from behind the silver bars.

Then the voice said, "Dr. Asher. The doctor of languages from London. Don Simon said you had been a spy."

Asher's mind made a tardy jump. "That wasn't your wife's voice you heard," he said.

One of the white hands moved; Ernchester pressed it for a moment to his mouth, closed his eyes, like a man trying to still something within himself.

Asher went on quickly, "It was another vampire, a woman, who attacked me just outside the walls. Do you know where they keep the key?"

Ernchester shook his head. "Fairport keeps it," he said after a moment. As Asher had heard on the train, his accent was far less modern than his wife's, the flat vowels making it sound very American. "Where is Anthea? They said they had her..."

"I don't know."

"Find her. I beg you, take her out of this place..."

Asher stepped to the bar, examined the keyhole of the small doorway set in the lattice. It was a Yale cylinder type, and unlocking it was far beyond the capacity of a piece of wire. At the back of the barred area he could see a trunk, like a block of shadow. In front of it the earl seemed very small in his shabby, swallowtailed coat, his gay red-and-yellow waistcoat and strapped pantaloons, a ghost wrought of dust, a mummy that sunlight would shatter.

"I'll be back."

As he turned to go, he saw, lying on the bench beside the outer door, the lace mitts Anthea had worn at LaStanza's and a red ribbon from which depended a black pearl the size of a pea. It had been around her neck when she'd lain down in the trunk that served her as a traveling coffin. They must have brought them in, to show him that they had her indeed.

What had the original deal been, he wondered as he mounted the hidden stair to the scullery above and pushed the shelves to behind him. A lure, to bring him into their power for something he'd never have consented to do? What? Ernchester had certainly gotten on the train at Charing Cross of his own volition, had been a free man when he'd murdered Cramer. Asher's jaw tightened bitterly, remembering that large young man's ingenuous grin. He should shoot the boy's murderer, not risk his own life setting him loose.

He remembered again as he climbed the stairs to Fairport's office with quick silence- staying by the wall so the treads would not creak-why he had come to hate the Great Game.

A lamp burned in the office-inconveniently, because one of the curtains was half open, and it meant careful maneuvering not to be seen from outside as he approached the desk on his hands and knees. He'd heard no one in this wing of the house. He had only minutes before they returned and started searching in earnest, and Ernchester was right in that he must, above all, release Anthea. While Karolyi had her, he had the vampire earl, whether or not the man was actually in his possession. The fact that Ernchester had jumped to the conclusion that the dreadful scream he heard had been hers told its own story. They are killers, he thought, in a kind of baffled rage at himself. Over the years Anthea has done to thousands of men what that woman nearly did to me. Why should I care?

But all he remembered was the face of a woman in a portrait, plump, weary, gray- haired, in mourning for a husband who had died thirty years before. How can he be dead?

Among the litter on the surface of the desk-Fairport, though not as bad as Lydia, was an untidy housekeeper-Asher recognized the folded copy of last Fridays Times. Beside it lay a yellow envelope containing two train tickets.

Paris to Constantinople, by way of Vienna.

Constantinople?

A thought came to him. Isn't it enough that you've betrayed me, lied to me?

Crouching on the floor beside the desk, he removed the handset from the telephone and cranked the Vienna exchange.

"Here Vienna Central Telephone Exchange," came the operator's cheerful voice. "A very good evening to you, honored sir."

"And a very good evening to you, honored madame," replied Asher, who knew that it never did anyone any good to try to hurry a Viennese telephone operator.

"Would you be so kind as to connect me with Donizetti's cafe in the Herrengasse, and ask them to let me speak with the Herr Ober, please?"

The floor vibrated with a door closing somewhere. Feet passed quickly along a downstairs hall. Seconds fell on him like shovelfuls of earth filling a grave.

"Certainly, honored sir, it would give me great pleasure."

He heard her voice, distantly engaged in formal greetings and elaborate social chat with someone at Donizetti's, asking at length for the honored Herr Ober, there is a most honored Herr who wishes to speak with him if his duties will allow him time, and, more closely, voices calling from the courtyard outside the windows. "... found nothing... someone there..." Minutes, he thought, and they would begin to search the house.

"Ladislas Levkowitz at your service, honored sir."

"Herr Ober Levkowitz, I realize it's a tremendous imposition on such a busy man as yourself, but would the British Herr Halliwell have arrived for dinner yet? Could you be so kind as to let him know that Herr Asher wishes to speak with him on a matter of some urgency? Many thanks..."

Asher cradled the handset against his face, rose to his knees and with a swift glance at the window made a quick review of the rest of the desk. Three or four green- covered notebooks contained interviews with octogenarians in the Vienna region, and others much farther afield. A thick bundle of invoices for glassware and chemicals connected with experiments on the blood of these ancients proved, at a glance, that Fairport's expenses were far greater than the sanitarium's profits could possibly cover. In the back of a drawer was a thick wad of torn- open envelopes of the stationery of the Austrian Embassy in Constantinople, each containing a dated slip with amounts written on them-large amounts-and signed "Karolyi." The dates went back two years. There were half a dozen keys, none of which would fit a cylinder lock of the type on the silver lattice's door. A crowbar, he thought. There'd be one in the generator crypt if he could get to it.

Dammit, he thought, stop chatting with the Herr Ober and come to the telephone...

"Set the receiver back in the cradle, Asher."

He turned his head. Fairport stood in the office doorway, a pistol in his gray- gloved hand.