James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (12 page)

Or a prisoner already.

Or…

She put the thought from her.

The compartment was a comfortable one, embellished with rosewood paneling, velvet upholstery, and electrical light fixtures shaped like frosted lilies. Alone, Lydia unpinned the jade-and-eggplant fantasia of her hat and settled into her seat, gazing out the window at the impressionistic flower bed of color, shadow, and light that was the station platform, seeking, she realized, for the sturdy brown blob, the clumsy stride that would be Margaret Potton. After a moment she opened her handbag and fished forth her spectacles, a little startled, as always, at the sudden sharpness of people’s faces, the lettering on the signs. According to the booklet on the little table before her, dinner would be served in the salon car at eight-thirty, but between anxiety about James and the obscure fear that even yet she would encounter Ysidro, she doubted she would feel much hunger. Her head ached, and she realized she hadn’t eaten anything since the three-quarters of a croissant she’d consumed before Margaret Potton had entered the dining room at the hotel.

She watched through the window until the train began to move. Then she settled back and closed her eyes, and breathed a sigh.

Jamie…

“If I may say so, mistress,” murmured a voice like the sudden slide of silk over unexpecting bare skin, “you make yourself difficult to look after. Were I your husband, I would school you.”

Lydia whipped around in her seat, stomach lurching—anger, fear, and, against her will, a deep flash of relief that she’d have some kind of help and advice. Her relief angered her still more, and she replied tartly, “Were you my husband, I would demand a separate establishment.” She pulled off her eyeglasses and slipped them behind her hat.

He stood in the doorway, ivory and shadow. As in his tomb, only the slender hands, the gold ring, caught the light. Behind him, spectacle lenses flashed in the corridor.

“You behold it.” He stepped inside and his small gesture took in the rosewood, the velvet, the frosted lily lamps.

He had fed. She could see the faint color that stained his white face and close mouth, so that he appeared more nearly human in the staring light.

Sickness filled her that she had ever felt relief. That she had ever asked help or advice of such a thing.

“Miss Potton has taken a compartment at the other end of the carriage,” Ysidro went on. “It would be our pleasure, would you join us there for cards.”

Lydia
stood up, slender and straight in her traveling dress of carnation faille, jet and amber glittering. “Send her home.”

“I’ve already told you I don’t have—” began Miss Potton, and Ysidro raised a finger.

“This is not possible.”

“Will it not be possible after we return from Vienna?” Lydia’s face was almost as chalky as the vampire’s. “Are you going to kill her when you’re safe in London again? And me, and James, to secure the secrets you hope to stop Ernchester from telling the Austrians?”

His expression did not change, but she was aware of thoughts passing through the sulfur-crystal mazes of his eyes. Thinking about options? she wondered. Or only about what kind of story she was likely to believe?

“You have admirably guarded the secrets you learned a year ago,” he said after a time. “They are no more believable now than they were then. And I believe Miss Potton as capable of keeping them as yourself.”

The tram lurched a little, going over the points; lights cascaded past the window. In the corridor a small dog barked furiously and a woman crooned, “La, tais-toi, p’tit malin!”

“I understand that dinner will be served at half past eight.” Ysidro’s fingers moved toward the folder on the table but did not touch it. Like everything about him, the gesture was minimal, as though long years had wearied him of all but the smallest symbols of what had been human mannerism, human expression, human speech. Lydia was suddenly reminded of the worn stones of a field circle in a pasture near Willoughby Close, her childhood home, like the white stumps of teeth protruding from olive turf.

“I suggest you ladies partake, if so be your wish, and return after to Miss Potton’s compartment. Do you play picquet, mistress? The most excellent of games, and the representation in little of all human affairs. I assure you,” he added, saffron gaze meeting the brown, “that neither you nor she has aught to fear of me.”

“I never did,” Margaret said from the doorway. Ysidro did not so much as shift his eyes.

Lydia
said, “I don’t believe you.”

The vampire bowed. “This news breaks my heart.”

And he was gone. Margaret, who no more than Lydia had seen him go, looked startled, then hastened away down the corridor without so much as an excuse, leaving Lydia standing alone.

Miss Potton returned half an hour later, tapping gently on the curtained glass. Lydia, who in the intervening time had neither resumed her spectacles nor taken from her portmanteau the issue of Journal des Etudes Physiochemiques she had brought for entertainment, turned from a somewhat blank contemplation of the lights fleeing by in the darkness and said, “Come.”

The governess stepped inside, holding to the doorway as if afraid of rebuke. She’d dispensed with her deplorable hat. Her hair, tightly prisoned in pins on the top of her head, was the one thing about her that was truly as it had been in the dreams, thick, heavy, silky, and black as night.

I did call her a fool
, thought Lydia, seeing the hesitation in the other woman’s eyes.

But she is a fool!

But telling her so again would not break Ysidro’s hold on her.

Lydia
took a deep breath, rose to her feet and held out her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t trust him, but that’s no reason to… to be angry with you.”

Miss Potton smiled tremulously in return. She had envisaged, Lydia realized, a journey in company with a frozenly hostile traveling companion, reason enough to look wretched. “You can trust him, you know,” she said, her blue eyes widening with earnestness. “He is a true gentleman.”

And a multiple murderer who hasn’t been human for at least four hundred years
. “I never doubted that,” Lydia said. “Is he there?” She nodded down the corridor. When Margaret bobbed her head, she went on, “Would you wait here for me? There’s something I need to say to him in private.”

He was playing solitaire. An abacus, a small calculating machine, and a notebook lay on the table beside the spread of the cards. Four decks. The corridor lights made wan mirrors of his eyes. No light burned above the little table where he sat.

“You summoned her for me, because no lady travels alone, is this correct?”

The pale head inclined. In the near dark she had the impression of a skull surrounded by the spider strands of his long hair.

“Then the corollary would be that no lady travels with a known killer?”

“You’ve lain with one every night for seven years, mistress,” replied the nearly soundless voice. “In my time ladies traveled with them regularly, quite sensibly, I might add, for protection.” A white hand, almost disembodied in shadow, laid card upon card and shifted a column; flicked a bead in the abacus; made a note.

“In your time,” Lydia persisted, “was it not customary for gentlemen to respect the wishes of the ladies with whom they traveled?”

“If they were not foolish.” He turned a card, made another note.

“I won’t have you killing while we’re traveling together.”

Another card, colors indistinguishable in the cinder-colored gloom. He did not look at her. “Unless it be for your convenience?”

Lydia
stood for a time, her breath coming fast. Then she turned and strode down the corridor to the restaurant car, leaving him alone turning cards in the dark.

“My dear Asher, a terrible mistake… a terrible mistake.” Dr. Bedford Fairport fidgeted with the cuffs of his gray cotton gloves and flinched away from a stout blond policeman who came through the station-house duty room with a musically inclined drunk in tow. Much was made of Vienna’s reputation as “The City of Music.” Asher wondered whether this was what its enthusiasts had in mind. The drunks with whom he had shared his cell the previous night had both sung, though not always the same songs. One was a Wagnerian, the other a disciple of Richard Strauss. It had been a long night.

“Mistake, hell.” Asher closed his valise, having satisfied himself that its contents—including the key waxes and counterfeit baggage-room seals in the secret pocket—were untouched. A uniformed clerk offered him a release to sign, then a paper for Fairport. “Karolyi must have seen me when I got off to telegraph Streatham in Munich. I suppose I should be glad it isn’t worse.”

“The honorable Herr will be staying with Herr Professor Doktor Fairport?”

Asher hesitated; Fairport said, “Yes, yes, of course. Not an imposition at all, my dear Asher,” he added, as the two crossed the worn black marble floor and emerged into the chill, misty sunlight of the Ring. “In fact, since I’ve agreed to be responsible for your conduct, I’m sure the police wouldn’t have it any other way. It will be quite like old times.”

Asher grinned a little wryly, recalling the clean, small bedroom above what had been the old stables at Fruhlingzeit, the sanitarium tucked away in the quiet slopes of the Vienna Woods.

“You must have spent an appalling night!” Fairport twittered.

“Hideously irresponsible—I shall write to the Newe Freie Presse about the ghastly misconduct of the police in putting simple witnesses wanted for questioning in the general cells! You could have caught anything in that cell, anything from tuberculosis to smallpox to cholera!” The old man coughed, and Asher remembered that Fairport had had tuberculosis—and smallpox—as a child. His milk-white skin was still marked with it, like ancient chewings of mice.

He did not look well now. But then, Fairport never looked quite well. Thirteen years ago, when he first met Fairport, Asher had been surprised when Maxwell—then head of the Vienna section—had told him the doctor was only fifty-four. Prematurely stooped, prematurely wrinkled, prematurely white-haired, he had the air of an almost-invalid that Asher did not consider much of an advertisement for his sanitarium.

The Viennese apparently thought otherwise. They flocked to the isolated villa and paid huge sums for “rest cures” and “rejuvenation” by means of chemicals, electricity, and esoteric baths. Looking down now at the bent little man beside him—even straight he wouldn’t have topped Asher’s shoulder by more than an inch—Asher wondered if Fairport’s preoccupation with reversing the effects of age was part of his fury at the encroaching dissolution of his own body.

Fairport must be nearing seventy now, calculated Asher, and forced himself not to offer his help as the old man hobbled along the pavement. His face had the shrunken exhaustion of years, his hands—encased as always in the gray cotton gloves he bought by the dozen, washed after wearing once, and discarded weekly— trembled uncontrollably. Lydia, he found himself thinking, would have diagnosed something or other on the spot.

Even under clouds, Vienna had the air of brightness he recalled; the clifflike labyrinths of buildings cream or gold or brown with their pseudomarble garlands, their putti and grimacing tragedy/comedy masks; gilded ironwork, tiny balconies, great somber doors guarding flagstoned courtyards inside.

A short distance along the Ring a smart brougham drew up beside them, the black body of the closed coach varnished and gleaming, its brass hardware polished like gold. A big man wrapped in a coachman’s long coat and muffler sat on the box, frowning under a simian brow ridge while a footman, equally tall, sprang from the rear platform to open the door. Asher reflected that the sanitarium must be doing well if the old man could afford this kind of turnout.

“You’ll want a hot bath and a good rest, I daresay.” Fairport gestured away his footman’s proffered arm with a wave of his cane. “Thank you, Lukas… I’ve telephoned Halliwell—he’s the head of the Vienna section these days, do you remember him?—to let him know you’re in town, but this evening, if you’re feeling up to it, will be early enough.”

Asher considered. It was mid-morning, the mists from the canal barely diffuse in the bright air. Though they stood on the threshold of winter, the cold seemed not so raw as that of London or Paris, the damp not so bitter. The air had a soft quality, like rose petals. In the Volksgarten a few hardy citizens sat behind the line of chain and potted trees that demarcated the terrace of a small kaffee haus, and Asher had a flashing recollection of true Viennese coffee and the concentrated sinfulness of a Creme Schnitten. Fruhlingzeit Sanitarium, isolated among woods and vineyards, was restful and silent but about an hour’s drive from the outskirts of the town.

“If you don’t mind,” Asher said slowly, “there are things I need to do here. Someone I need to trace, without delay.”

“Karolyi?” Fairport’s almost hairless white brows formed little arches in the fish-belly forehead. “His addresses are quite well known. A town house in Dobling and a flat on the Kartnerstrasse… I assume you’re not interested in that ancestral castle at Feketelo in the Carpathians…”

“No.” Asher shook his head. “No, someone else, someone whose name I don’t know. And it may take me a little time in the Rathaus to find the records.”

He knew it would have to be done, and his mind leaped ahead, calculating how long it might take and when the sun would set. He thought he would have time to do the thing in safety, but with an almost subconscious gesture he rubbed his wrist to feel, through glove and shirt cuff, the protective silver links.

“If I may abuse your hospitality so far, I think what I need to do is, first, find myself a public bath and get cleaned up, then start my search in the records office. How late might I come out to Fruhlingzeit without disturbing anyone to let me in?”

Fairport smiled, a dry little V-shaped quirk. “My dear Asher, this is Vienna! My staff remains active until nearly eleven, and I’m frequently at work in the laboratory until midnight. Right now there’s no one staying at the sanitarium—we had some electrical troubles early in the week—so there’s no trouble about that.”