Blood Maidens (34 page)

I had to do what I did, what I am doing, for the common good
.

Other times he would dream of Lydia and would wake in a sweat, wondering if she were all right. If she were guarding herself, keeping her distance from Theiss and Ehrenberg . . .

If Ysidro had gone to her, or if he were waiting in Berlin.

But remaining in Berlin until nightfall to look for him was out of the question. Tired as he was, it was going to be difficult enough, to do what he had to do.

The train left Eichenberg for Berlin at ten, with full dark barely settled on the land. Jacoba, in the faded dark dress of a workingman’s wife, sat beside him in the third-class compartment without speaking, through hours of darkness with Prussia’s endless pine-forests flashing past under the light of the waxing moon. The compartment – indeed, most of the third-class car – was empty; only at the far end had a child cried, on and off, for the first part of the night, barely audible over the thrumming of the wheels and the small clatter of the window glass. In the swaying orange stain of the oil lamps, he’d seen Jacoba’s lips curl a little, smiling with no kindness at the thought of that infant in its mother’s arms.

She stayed where she was, however, and made conversation about the inconveniences of rail travel in her medieval-tinted German, until the moon set and the linked pentagons of the Maiden hung low over the dark wall of trees. Then she rose from the hard bench and opened the compartment door. Night wind whipped away the scarf she wore over her dark hair; she seemed to hang in the doorway for a moment, weightless as a demon, colorless lips smiling in the dirty light. ‘Do not betray me, Asher,’ she said, and then let go. The night whirled her away.

She would find, Asher guessed, a root cellar or a trunk in someone’s attic in which to pass the daylight hours, and would come on to Berlin once darkness fell. He had seen vampires run and knew their speed: tireless, inexorable, like monstrous half-glimpsed moths.

She would reach Berlin well before dawn. And he, James Asher, had better not be anywhere in that town.

It had been well over a decade since he himself had had occasion to drop out of a moving train-car, and he wasn’t looking forward to the experience. But he had a good idea of how Jacoba intended to keep him where she could find him in Berlin, and knew – as he watched the dawnlight slowly strengthening beyond the windows of the car – that it was jump or die. Wantzig flashed by, Beelitz, Potsdam – little platforms never touched at this hour of the morning, though the first workmen were already to be seen moving about in the early light.

And if I break my leg
, Asher reflected, gauging the thickening agglomerate of sheds, warehouses, disused rolling-stock and piles of spare ties and extra cinders that trail like dirty spoor along rail lines everywhere as they near their termini,
it really WILL be all up for us. And for England – and the world – as well
. He did not want to think what the world would be, if governments got into the habit keeping and paying coteries of vampires in the only currency they would value.

He had trained himself, years ago, not to think of Lydia while Abroad, rationing the vision of her to those times when it was safe to relax, the way he would have rationed liquor. But he thought of her now, as the tracks and sidings doubled and quadrupled in the clear new sunlight and the train neared the Potsdamer Bahnhof, and he prayed that Ysidro had had the good sense to go on to St Petersburg from Berlin, without even stopping to kill Colonel von Brühlsbuttel in passing . . .

Whatever was going on, Asher wanted a word with the man before he killed him.

And he knew in his heart that if von Brühlsbuttel was Madame Ehrenberg’s connection to the Kaiser, killing him wouldn’t matter. She’d only find someone else whose whereabouts they
didn’t
know.

The train was slowing. Beyond a doubt, a welcoming committee of police waited for him on the platform, alerted by a telegram from the Lady Jacoba that the man whom the Köln police had arrested as Professor Ignatius Leyden, otherwise known as Mr Jules Plummer of Chicago – dressed in such-and-such a fashion and minus the mustache and extravagant American whiskers – would be on the 7:49 from Eichenberg.

Damn her
.

She probably assumed she could retrieve him from the jail that night – not knowing that he’d be immediately transferred to a military prison, prior to being hanged as a spy.

Ysidro
, he thought,
if I ever see you again I will drive a stake through your heart for getting me into this
 . . .

He opened the door, estimated his speed, tossed out the small bundle of his possessions, and dived.

He made a rolling landing down the cinder hill of the tracks, taking the impact diagonally across his left shoulder and back; he scrambled to his feet (
good, I didn’t break my leg
 . . . ), and jogged towards the nearest shelter, a tool shed by a siding. When he’d got his breath back, he jogged down the track to pick up his bindle, as American hoboes called it – a change of linen almost as dirty as what he had on, and the shaving kit Todesfall had procured for him back in Köln – then headed, at once and by the most circuitous route possible, for a bookstore in the Dorotheestrasse. It was in the opposite direction to Charlottenstrasse, but he knew that if he wasn’t to be found on the train, the police would immediately figure out what he’d done and begin the search for him, and he’d better not look like his description.
Auf Golden Tintenfa
β was –
thank God!
– still in its old location – as far as Asher knew the place had been a bookstore since the time of Fredrick the Great – and still under the proprietorship of old Bickern, a little grayer and more stooped than he’d been when Asher had last seen him, but reassuring as the gates of Heaven.

The little bookseller looked up as Asher limped in – probably the least prepossessing-looking traveler since Odysseus had woken up on the beach at Scherie – but said, politely, in his heavily Saxon German, ‘Might I help you, sir?’

Working for the Department, one never knew which storm-battered tramp might turn out to be the King of Ithaca, down on his luck.

In English, Asher said, ‘I’m looking for a copy of the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
. I’m afraid it’s rather urgent.’

Bickern’s green eyes widened, but as there was no one else in the shop he said, in the same language, ‘I may have one here in the back.’

Asher said, ‘Thank you,’ and meant it as he seldom had in his life.

‘Mother Mary, that’s never you, Asher?’ The bookseller pulled a wooden chair up to the table of the little rear parlor that lay behind the shop’s second – inner – room. ‘McAliester said as how you were back in the game—’

‘I’m not.’ Asher winked.

‘Oh, yeah.’ Bickern nodded. ‘Now you speak of it, Mac told me that.’

‘Good. And I’m not being followed, by the way – or, if I am, the Berlin police department has improved mightily since the last time I was in town . . . And I’m not going to sit in your chair until I’ve had a bath, if you can provide me with the facilities for such a thing?’

‘Christ, yes, help yourself.’ He waved to the old-fashioned stove, beyond which – through the spotless windows – could be seen a pump in the narrow yard. ‘Bath’s under the stairs—’

‘I remember.’ Asher had availed himself of the facilities at the Golden Inkstand before.

‘Where’ve you been sleeping, man?’ Bickern flipped open the door of the stove, thrust half a shovel-full of coal into the grate as Asher collected the pail from behind the door. ‘You look like a fugitive from the soup line.’

‘I would commit murder,’ replied Asher, ‘for the privilege of a soup line at the moment . . . Do you have the doings to get me up in a full beard and some decent clothes? They’re looking for me as I am – I’ll need money, too. I have to be out of Berlin by nightfall . . . And I need to see a man about a dog.’

TWENTY-FOUR

As a general rule, the Department didn’t go in for disguises. Most of its employees were long-timers like McAliester and Bickern, permanently part of the local landscape. Their disguise was simply that they
were
the Germans they would have been, had they been born and brought up in Germany rather than Britain. If an alteration in appearance was rendered necessary by circumstances, it was usually effected by simple change – standing differently, a different mode of speech and behavior:
I know I look a little like the person you’re looking for, but as you can see I’m really not anything like him
 . . .

Nevertheless, a great deal could be accomplished in an emergency with a change of raiment and accent, and one of Bickern’s jobs was to provide the wherewithal, if needed, for quick exits. This could extend to hair dye, eyeglasses, spirit gum, and what Shakespeare referred to as ‘
an usurpéd beard
.’

Resplendent in the most nondescript of German suits – and no German’s suit ever fit him the way a Frenchman’s or Englishman’s did – and a close-cropped beard reminiscent of the Tsar’s, Asher took a public tram out to Potsdam and walked to the Charlottenstrasse at about the time when the maidservants in those handsome houses – behind the sandstone porters’-lodges, the sweeping brick driveways – were ‘doing’ the bedrooms and their smooth-haired mistresses were embarking on the third cup of after-breakfast coffee. An occasional Palladian facade or Mansard roof spoke of landed wealth, of Junkers who controlled the peasants on their land exactly as if those peasants were still the medieval serfs they had been up until the days of Napoleon. But, for the most part, these were the houses of the wealthy industrialists whose factories worked day and night to provide weapons and munitions for Germany’s armies, and the marketable goods for the colonial empire that Germany intended to enlarge with victory.

Carriage horses, matched down to the height of their white stockings, drew shiny victorias under the new-leafed trees: young ladies in stylish furs, rigidly guarded by chaperones, on their way for an ‘airing’. No vulgar motor cars here. Nannies in black marched well-mannered toddlers firmly along the paths. Asher heard one admonish her charges not to dawdle, though what was the point of taking children for a walk if not to let them linger over tadpoles in the ditches or unfamiliar flowers by the wayside? Nevertheless, he recalled his own nanny had had precisely the same attitude about walks.
We must step out quickly if we are to reach the park in time to turn around and come home for lunch
.

Kleinerschloss was an ostentatious brick villa set back from the road among elm trees. Through ornamental metal railings, Asher glimpsed stables in the back. There was no porter in the lodge, however, and Asher, finding the gate closed but not locked, pushed it open and ascended the graveled drive to the door. As he neared it, the porter, uniformed in dark blue livery, emerged from around the corner of the house and begged his pardon with polite suspicion: could he be of assistance to the
gnädiger
Herr?

‘My name is Filaret,’ said Asher – that was the name on his new set of identity papers, at any rate – ‘and I have a message for Colonel von Brühlsbuttel.’ The man wasn’t in mourning, he observed, so at least Ysidro hadn’t murdered the head of the house.

‘You may give the message to me, Honored Sir.’ The porter bowed with military precision.
Ex-cavalry
, Asher guessed.
And not long out of the service, either
. ‘I will see that he gets it.’

‘A thousand pardons.’ Asher, who had taken the precaution of actually writing out and sealing a completely meaningless message in the back room of the Golden Inkstand, returned the bow. ‘I have been commissioned to place it into the hand of Colonel von Brühlsbuttel only.’

The front door opened; the butler came out, who was likewise ex-cavalry, and the porter’s height to an inch. Someone must have matched them like the carriage horses, except that the butler was adorned with a moderate-sized paunch and an enormous fair mustache. ‘I am afraid this is not possible, Herr Filaret. The Herr Colonel has gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘This morning.’ A look of concern clouded the man’s blue eyes. ‘He had a telegram, which he showed to no one, but which upset him very much. He packed a few things and left by the early train.’

‘Left for where?’ asked Asher, and he managed to radiate the air of a man vexed by additional difficulties in delivering his letter, instead of confronted by potential disaster.

The butler shook his head, baffled, and replied, ‘St Petersburg.’

‘Are you feeling better, Madame?’ Dr Theiss took her wrist gently in one hand, angled his little mirror to the window light to peer into her eye. ‘Very good – how many fingers do you see?’

Though she was, in fact, feeling considerably better, Lydia made a show of flinching from the light, whispered, ‘I don’t know – three? Four? My head . . .’

‘It’s all right. Can you not eat?’ He looked at the untouched porridge, then poured her out a glass of the weak lemonade that had been left with it.