James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (13 page)

He fished in the pocket of his old-fashioned frock coat and produced a latchkey. “If you don’t see a light in my study or the laboratory, simply let yourself in. I’ll have the old room ready made up for you, the one looking out onto the garden at the back, you remember?”

Asher smiled. “I remember.”

His smile faded as Fairport climbed into the brougham—the footman Lukas had to help him—and drove away into the shifting traffic of the Ring, brasses winking like heliographs.

He remembered.

He remembered sitting for hours in the window of that whitewashed room, looking down into the overgrown courtyard whose high wall formed only a nominal barrier against the whispering high-summer woods, reading over and over the three telegrams he’d found upon his return from the mountains. Remembered not wanting to know what they told him.

All three had been from Francoise, sent on successive days. All three had asked for an immediate reply. But he’d seen her at the Cafe New York—his shoulder tightly strapped and a hefty dose of Fairport’s stimulants in his veins—earlier that day. She had mentioned the telegrams in passing, but said they were nothing much.

It meant that she’d been checking on his movements in the period of time in which he was supposed to be ill rather than away.

It meant that she suspected him of leading a double life.

It meant that he was a footfall away from being blown. With Karolyi returning to Vienna in a matter of days, he knew what that would mean.

She’d been perceptive enough to see through Karolyi’s imitation of an innocuous young idiot. Why hadn’t he thought she would see through his own impersonation of scholarly harmlessness?

He’d sat by the window until the long summer afternoon faded and the white roses on the garden wall dwindled to milky blurs, until he had been unable to read the printing on the dry yellow telegraph forms, though he had by then memorized what each had said. He knew what they meant. He knew what they meant he had to do.

He pushed the memory aside now. When he recalled Viennese coffee and Creme Schnitten, he had automatically thought of the Cafe New York. Though he guessed Francoise had not entered its doors since the summer of 1895, either, he knew he’d look elsewhere for those small pleasures.

Francoise had been right about cafes in Vienna. It applied equally to public baths. Though not as ubiquitous as cafes, they were plentiful and good for the same reason. Most apartments in the overcrowded city lacked hot water; thousands of families still relied on communal pumps in the halls, communal toilets in the courtyards. But the Viennese were a clean people, cleaner in Asher’s experience than the Parisians, for all the French fanaticism about keeping their windows spotless. Certainly the jail cell he’d occupied last night had been far from the pesthole of Fairport’s imaginings.

The Heiligesteffanbaden was a veritable emporium of cleanliness, and heavily populated even for a Tuesday morning. Workingmen, students, bearded bourgeoise, and stolid hofrats scrubbed conscientiously in pink marble tubs, under the solicitous eye of the usual host of marble and mosaic angels and the usual Viennese hierarchy of Herr Oberbadmeister, Oberbadmeister, Unterbadmeister, and the garzone who collected the towels. Asher visited the barber next door to be shaved, changed into the shirt and underclothing he’d bought on the way from the Prefecture of Police, paid a quick visit to a man he’d known back in ‘95 who cut keys, and felt much better, though the clerks at the Rathaus looked askance at his rumpled jacket when he asked to examine wills and title documentation of the older dwellings in the Altstadt. He guessed he would have enough time to do what he needed to do, if not before dark, at least before the crowds thinned from the streets.

As both scholar and spy, Asher had long ago learned that human beings reveal the true workings of their souls when their attention is on something that consumes them to the exclusion of their usual desire to make an impression on others—and that something is usually property. He had, he reflected dryly, witnessed a particularly unappetizing modern example of that very phenomenon in the wake of his cousin’s funeral three days ago. In their preoccupation with who’s going to get what, people forget to cover their tracks: banking records, wills, probates, leaseholds, account books can yield a startling amount of information to someone with time at his disposal and a high tolerance for dust.

Asher started with the oldest palaces of the Altstadt, those exuberantly decorated masterpieces of white stucco whose baroque facades could barely be seen because of the narrowness of the ancient city’s alleys, matching ownership records with wills, wills with death notices and, more importantly, birth notices; doing sums on every page of his notebook and all around the margins of the Times Personals, the only other paper he had in his valise. He found himself heartily missing Lydia, not out of romantic considerations, but simply because she was a good researcher and would thoroughly enjoy this chase.

He left around two for a sandwich, but it was only when one of the several bespectacled young clerks came to his table in the reading room and said apologetically, “If it please you, Herr Professor Doktor, this building is now closing,” that he realized the windows were pitch-black and that the electric lights had been on for nearly an hour and a half.

By previous arrangement, Artemus Halliwell was waiting for him at Donizetti’s cafe. The head of the Vienna section was in his mid-thirties, untidy, bearded, bespectacled, and enormously obese; Asher remembered him from the London statistics department. Behind small oval slabs of glass, Halliwell’s pale green eyes were like cabachon peridots as he listened to Asher’s account of his journey.

“So this Farren thinks he’s a vampire, eh?” Halliwell carved a neat fragment of backhendl and popped it into his incongruous rosebud of a mouth. “I suppose that’s how he came into your purlieu in the first place, is it?”

Asher nodded. In a sense it was actually true.

“You get some of that in Vienna, though not as bad as Buda-Pesth. When I went west into the mountains only last year, there was a tizz-woz in one of the villages about a man who was supposed to turn himself into a wolf. I’m told in parts of the Black Forest no one will talk to you, sell you anything, give you directions to anywhere, if you kill a hare.”

He dabbed his lips with his napkin and the ubiquitous Ober appeared, asking with folded hands if everything was all right.

“I think you should know,” said the fat man, when the Ober had effaced himself again, “that there’s been a bit of a stink.”

Asher felt his nape prickle. He’d been around the Department long enough to recognize that carefully neutral tone. “Oh?”

“Streatham’s doing.” He made a dismissive gesture with his fork. “Naturally. Always was a bloody fool. He’s made to-do about that boy Cramer’s death with the French authorities, ranting about British citizens and treaty rights—-just as if our offices weren’t in flat violation of any treaty’s assertions of good faith. The thing is, the French have washed their hands of the whole matter, contacted the Vienna police, and are demanding your return under escort on the first available train. I held them off for a day, saying I hadn’t any idea where you were,” he went on, raising a staying hand against Asher’s protest. “But whatever you’ve learned today at the Rathaus, you’d probably better pass along to me.”

“Idiot,” Asher said dispassionately, while his mind raced ahead.

It was close to eight; the streets would remain crowded enough to protect him until ten at least, possibly later, and in any case he doubted that vampires could detect an intrusive interest in their lairs from a single walk by a casual observer.

But even in a single walk-past he could tell a great deal, particularly which of the several houses on his list of possibilities was the likeliest haunt. Enough information, at least, that whoever took over wouldn’t be going into the job defenseless, as Cramer had done.

“And what was it,” asked Halliwell, “that you went to the Rathaus today to find?”

Asher considered for a moment, then said quietly, “Vampires.”

Halliwell’s tufted brows went up.

“Are there people here who believe in them?”

The Vienna chief gestured with his fork again. “There’s always muttering among the Gypsies. The waiter at my cafe swears he saw a vampire on an old gate tower connected to a house in the Bieberstrasse—used to be part of the ramparts.” He shook his head. “My cafe. I sound like a Viennese. Caught myself calling this place my restaurant the other day, same as I’d talk about my club at home.”

“I don’t know.” Asher looked around him lazily, soothed by the atmosphere of the place, the slight shabbiness of the oak panels, the soft flicker of the gaslight and the all-pervasive smell of goulash, and scratched a corner of his mustache. “Isn’t one’s cafe here a little like one’s club in London?”

“The hell it is.” Halliwell surgically excised another morsel of chicken. “At a club you have a vote on who gets let in the door. Here anyone can come in—and does.” He glared across at a party of uproarious young subalterns in the sky-blue coats of the Imperial-and-Royal Uhlans. “The wine’s atrocious, and I think if I hear one more waltz, one more operetta, one more Mozart concerto, I’m going to open negotiations with the Turks to reinvade, and this time I’ll make damn sure they win. Has Farren been to Vienna before?”

“I haven’t been able to find that out,” said Asher. “Not under his own name, anyway.” Which might or might not be true, but was probably true enough for this century. “I have an idea he’d hide out in a house reputed to be haunted or connected somehow with… odd rumors.”

Halliwell nodded, thinking, and the Ober returned with the Herr Ober in tow, to collect the polished ruins of Halliwell’s backhendl and Asher’s Tafelspitz, and to solicitously attempt to interest Halliwell in dessert with the air of a man who fears his client will collapse from starvation if not attended. Halliwell issued instructions as to the composition of an indianer with an attention to detail that seemed to delight the Herr Ober’s soul, then turned back to Asher as the two waiters bowed and took their leave.

“I’ve heard of the Japanese doing that in the Chinese war,” said Halliwell. “Headquartering in haunted houses in Peking.”

Asher nodded. “I was there,” he said. “And yes, they did; complete with mirror tricks straight off the Paris Opera stage. It may be harder to pull off here…”

“Not as hard as you think.” There was a small commotion in the doorway—two other young officers, brave in gold braid, with bright-clothed girls on their arms, and all the rowdy subalterns calling out greetings—and Asher saw Halliwell’s bulging eyes cut briefly, unobtrusively, in that direction, making sure the noise did not represent potential danger. Not a reaction one would expect from a fat gourmand ostensibly preoccupied with his pastry.

His eyes returned to Asher. “There’s a lot of country people in Vienna, in off the farms to the east: up-country Czechs and Hungarians and Romanians and what-have-you, come to work in the sweatshops after spending the first part of their lives, to all intents and purposes, in the sixteenth century. People who live in the Altstadt don’t interfere if there’s a big old palace that’s shut up day after day—it’s part of the neighborhood, and one would never risk incurring the displeasure of a baron. But newcomers from out of town—they get inquisitive.”

“And which big old palace,” Asher inquired, “are we talking about?”

Halliwell grinned and fastidiously removed a mote of powdered sugar from his whiskers. “There’s three or four. One on the Haarhof is supposed to be haunted, and there’s a seventeenth-century palais on Bakkersgasse where people claim to have seen lights. All the Hungarian waiters in town swear the baroque palais built over the ruins of the old St. Roche Church on Steindelgasse is inhabited by vampires—it’s actually owned by a collateral branch of the Batthyanys—and there’s a house in Vorlautstrasse near the old ramparts where four or five people are said to have disappeared over the course of the last ten years. All of them have perfectly legitimate antecedents, by the way, winter palaces of landed families who have larger places out in the country.”

“Any belonging to Karolyi?”

“I think the Bakkersgasse palais belongs to the Prague branch of the family. Not to our bird. It’s a huge clan.” Behind the spectacles the pale eyes danced, as if pleased he’d anticipated the thought. “Will you need help?”

Asher hesitated. The bloodied ruin of Cramer’s face came back to him, glistening gruesomely in the reflected light. Gummed with blood, the silver chain had crossed the huge wounds on the throat. The shopkeeper in the Palais Royal had sworn the chains were pure silver. More likely tourist trade trash, the thinnest wash over pewter or lead. The boy probably hadn’t even heard Ernchester approach.

“I haven’t much to send with you,” Halliwell went on. “Streatham’s an ass, but he was right about that. Everything’s been cut since the end of the war. Still, if you need a man…”

Beyond the gilt-framed windows of Donizetti’s, passersby hurried along the pavement, greatcoats bundled tight about them. Mist had risen again from the Danube
Canal, blurring the outlines of apartment buildings whose grandiose central staircases led to dreary attic rooms shared by cobblers, embroiderers, Obers, and Herr Obers and their wives and children and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. Between the buildings the shadows lay deep in narrow passages leading to the heart of the ancient city, where sunlight fell only at noon.

One of the possibilities on Asher’s very incomplete list of suspect properties was on the Steindelgasse: said to stand over the crypt of old St. Roche.

“No,” Asher said softly. “No, I think I’ll be all right on my own.”

The palace in the Steindelgasse was typical of the great town houses of the nobility in the old city: five floors of massive gray walls, wedged between an ancient block of flats and the town palace of some count of the Montenuovo family that was illuminated like a Christmas tree for a ball. Looking up, Asher could see the tall windows of its first-floor salons ablaze with gaslight, which partly illuminated the narrow street; crystal chandeliers were visible, and a portion of a god-bedecked baroque ceiling.