Blood Maidens (25 page)

She dunked her pen in the inkwell, found her place again, and continued with her notes.

‘I want to see the American consul.’

‘Not the British consul?’ The interrogator was an elderly man, almost a caricature of a Prussian Junker: tall, fair, and with the contempt of one who has grown up knowing himself to be the ruler of every human being around him, outside his own family.

‘I tell you I don’t know who the hell this Professor Leyden is that you keep saying I am. My name is Plummer, and I’m from Chicago—’

‘Then why did you assault the officers sent to apprehend you at the Bahnhof?’

Because I knew damn well my story wouldn’t hold up for ten minutes
. ‘I told you, I thought he was this rat-bastard German named Speigel who’s been followin’ me ever since I come to Köln, swearin’ I’m the man who meddled with his sister, the ugly cow—’

‘And how long has that been?’

‘Two days.’

‘And you did not report this to the police?’

‘Mister –’Asher poked his finger at the officer in his best imitation of an American engineer he’d known in Tsingtao – ‘you know goddamn little about Americans if you think we run snivelin’ to the cops every time a man leans on us for one thing or another. We take care of our own problems.’

Behind thick pince-nez, the interrogator’s blue eyes narrowed. ‘Evidently. Yet none of this explains why you then assaulted the police officers a second time on the platform, when it was amply clear to anyone but an imbecile that they were the police and not civilian attackers.’

‘Well, maybe by that time you put my dander up.’

And thank God everyone from Land’s End to Yokohama knows Americans think elevated dander a perfectly appropriate reason for taking on six policemen and two officers of the artillery
.

He was taken back to his cell. There were two other men in it with him, one a laborer from Saxony on the Neuehrenfeld gun emplacements, the other an elderly Frenchman who persisted in shoving, cursing at, and haranguing the Saxon about Alsace-Lorraine and the foul attempts by the Germans to spy out the secrets of the French Army and then corrupt the populace with lies about the efficacy of that Army to defend
La Patrie
. Asher, whose whole body ached from the fracas at the Bahnhof, wished he could unobtrusively kill them both.

Grated windows gave onto a minuscule areaway about two feet below the level with the Rathaus courtyard. When the endless day ended and darkness finally fell, Asher wondered if Ysidro had emerged from his coffin before the train stopped in Berlin, and if Mrs Flasket had gotten herself away safely. How soon would the vampire become aware that he, Asher, was not in the city with him? And what would he do then?

A jail officer brought food: bean porridge in cheap tin bowls, water, and bread. Men talked in other cells, desultory abuse in five separate varieties of Rhineland German. The gray-haired Frenchman – for the dozenth time – ranted at the Saxon about
l’Affair Dreyfus
, despite the fact that the Saxon knew not a single word of what was being said to him. As silence gradually settled on the cells, Asher unobtrusively flipped open his box of ‘snuff’ and rubbed some of it on his gums.

It might be morning before Ysidro realized that, in the parlance of the Department, plans had come unstuck. But growing in the back of his mind was the uneasy vision of Petronilla Ehrenberg’s handsome town house in Neuehrenfeld . . . and the recollection of the fact that, because of the shortness of time before the departure of the train, he had not searched it from top to bottom. If she slept there, she would have kept her coffin in a crypt or sub cellar, like the one beneath Ysidro’s rented nest in Prague or the one in Lady Eaton’s shallow cellar in Petersburg.

And he had no assurance that some other vampire had not been sleeping in that crypt, aware of him – as he knew vampires were sometimes aware – in its sleep.

Towards dawn he slept, and save for those intervals when his two cell-mates so infuriated one another as to attempt to settle European politics between them with fists, he dozed on and off through most of the day. When he asked the guard if the American consul had been contacted, the man said he didn’t know, and in truth Asher knew this was a hazardous ploy at best. America, greedily snapping up every territory it could lay hands on in the Pacific and the Orient, had little use for Europe. Its Presidents tended to appoint as consuls personal friends whom they considered deserving of four years’ paid holiday in Europe, or useful political supporters, ditto. Considering the strategic position of Köln on German’s defensive line, the Americans were more than likely to wash their hands of him with Pilate-like speed . . .

And, of course, for the same reason, the Department – if he were willing to condemn himself in advance by asking for the British Consul – would do likewise.

He dreamed that night of Lydia, as he’d dreamed of her in China and later in Africa, in the years between his despairing realization that he loved that budding girl as a man loves a woman, and his return from Africa to find her disinherited and able – for all her family cared – to marry a poor man after all.

Lydia in white gauze and a wide-brimmed hat, with her red hair down her back . . .

Lydia glancing sidelong at him beneath those long dark lashes and saying,
You really ARE a spy, aren’t you?

Lydia
 . . .

He jerked awake with a gasp, but the cell was empty save for his snoring comrades. Under the dim flicker of the gas beyond the bars, the corridor lay shadowed but still.

On the second day – Tuesday – the American Consul visited him, and it quickly became clear that this square-jawed, disapproving banker with an insanely spreading beard wanted nothing to do with wild Midwesterners who got into brawls with the German police on railway platforms. ‘You understand my position, I hope, Mr Palmer,’ said Mr McGuffey, in his dry New England accent, and folded plump clerkly hands. ‘I will, of course, cable Chicago at once to confirm your bona fides, but if you are as you say you are, I’m sure all these matters can be straightened out.’

The following morning Asher was taken from his cell to the office, where the same interrogator as before informed him – with a telling glance at the brown stubble that was ghosting visibly back into existence on the shaved top of his head – that a telegram had been sent to the Auswärtiges Amt in Berlin, and that he – Professor Ignatius Leyden aka Jules Plummer of Chicago – was facing a military court and a charge of espionage.

EIGHTEEN

And there it was.

Lydia thumbed the tightly-folded packet of counterfoils for the third time, seeking a note of explanation, but found none. Jamie must have parceled this up in a terrible hurry, not even to have enclosed word of where he’d found all these things. Knowing Jamie, she guessed he’d burgled Petronilla Ehrenberg’s house . . .

She wondered if he’d burned it down afterwards, to cover his tracks. It would be like him.

It appeared that Petronilla Ehrenberg owned property on the north bank of the Neva across from Elaghinskoy Island: the former monastery of St Job. Lydia’s sense of St Petersburg geography was good enough by this time to place it, on the outer edge of the grimy ring of factories that surrounded the city, within walking distance of the Vyborg-side slums. There was also a town house on the Sadovaia Oulitza in the Smolny district, as well as the ‘small factory building’ at the familiar address on Samsonievsky Prospect.

And she’s clearly found a woman willing to serve her, to BE Petronilla Ehrenberg by daylight. That must have been what Rasputin saw
.

She shuffled the stiff law-hand documents into chronological order, noting names, dates, bank-account numbers.

Juggling identities was nothing new for a vampire. Petra Ehrenberg – the real Petra Ehrenberg, who had become Undead in 1848 – had taken over the name and identity of her ‘niece’ Paulina, and then made a new identity as Petronilla years later. Did the woman she had spoken to at the clinic – this green-eyed woman in the Doucet suit and sables who flirted by daylight with Benedict Theiss in Petronilla Ehrenberg’s name . . . Did she realize that it was the custom of vampires to murder their servants when they were done with them?
Or does she think she’ll be the exception to that rule?

For a moment, the recollection of Margaret Potton lying dead on their bed in Constantinople overwhelmed her: the waxen face, the blue eyes staring, the mouth agape, as if she’d died gasping for the oxygen her lungs were no longer getting . . .

If I pound on her door and tell her
, thought Lydia,
she’ll only turn that information over to the REAL Petronilla, hiding in her dark crypt somewhere
 . . .

She knew from her dealings with Margaret and Ysidro how intransigent the victim of that seduction could be, when asked to consider any explanation other than the one that the vampire had planted in the victim’s dreams.

Besides, I promised Jamie that I wouldn’t
.

Lydia took some deep breaths. It was a few minutes before Margaret’s image retreated.

But what I CAN do is have a look at the place
.

Unlike many so-called ‘country dachas’ on the properties of the rich, the cottage behind Razumovsky’s palace really was a cottage. True, its four rooms were furnished more like a rustic stage-set for a pantomime fairy-tale than the dwelling of actual peasants, but at least it didn’t have its own ballroom and marble-tubbed baths, like the ‘cottage’ owned by the Baroness Sashenka’s husband. Lydia sought out Rina – the sturdy little cook – in the cellar, a gloomy rabbit-hole beneath the kitchen, which was, like every cellar in St Petersburg, as damp as a well; she’d never gotten used to the high-handed way the Petersburg ladies had of leaving the servants to guess whether they’d be in for dinner or not. Rina’s French was limited to ‘
coq au vin
’ and ‘
Joyeaux Noël
’, but Lydia had made notes for herself of important phrases in Russian, such as, ‘I will not be here for dinner,’ and, ‘Please ask Sergei to draw me a bath.’ (A European bath was also different from a Russian bath, which was what was known in England as a Turkish bath, more or less. Even in Turkey, Lydia had not had a Turkish bath, and she was not sure – despite the languorous urging of Razumovsky’s sister Natalia – that she felt up to utilizing the log-built banya at the end of the graveled path near the river.)

Dinner having been arranged for, Lydia changed her lacy ‘at-home’ gown for a very dashing carriage-dress, a Paquin medley of dark and pale greens that Natalia had supervised the purchase of (‘
Those English things make you look like someone’s virgin sister, darling . . .
’), made sure she had her little packet of picklocks buttoned to the lower edge of her corset, then walked the fifty yards or so through the woods to the stables, which rose, like a minor Versailles of gold-and-cream-colored stucco, before one reached the Razumovsky palace itself. Ivan – the only member of the stable staff who spoke French – chided her like a good-natured father for not having sent one of the maids with an order to get the carriage ready and bring it to the
izba’s
door, but let her sit on the bench in the yard to watch the harnessing-up. ‘I should send you back to the
izba
, to wait like a respectable lady, Gospozha,’ said the coachman with a grin, as he re-emerged from his private door a few moments later, very trim and un-Ivan-like in his conservative ‘day’ livery of maroon piped with pale blue. ‘What would His Excellency say, eh? Now, where is it that you have the wish to go?’

It was clear to Lydia that the Monastery of St Job had originally been built in the countryside, a mile or two back from the Neva, at some point early in the preceding century, when St Petersburg had been much smaller and the world much cleaner; Lydia was not in the slightest surprised that the monks had moved out. A factory producing rolling stock for Russia’s railways stood a hundred yards away, drearily excreting smoke that yellowed the air and made Lydia’s eyes burn as Ivan steered the team among the oozing ruts of the unpaved street. From the gates of the factory, from the doorways of grubby taverns or the steps of those endless, rickety wooden tenements, bearded, filthy men in faded clothing watched the gleaming vehicle pass with eyes that smoldered with resentment. As the brougham approached the dreary wasteland of railroad spur-lines and factory sheds that covered what had once been the monastery’s orchards, a child ran from an alley and flung a handful of horse dung at its shining side.

‘Are you sure of your directions, Gospozha?’ asked Ivan doubtfully, leaning back to the communicating window.

Though considerably intimidated at the thought of getting out of the carriage, Lydia replied firmly, ‘I’m sure that it’s the Monastery of St Job that I was asked to inquire at.’
I have walked into vampire nests and survived rioting Turks in the back alleys of Constantinople
, she told herself.
Each of those men has a liver, a spleen, two kidneys, two lungs . . . I’ve taken apart the corpses of men like them and they all look the same inside
 . . .