James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (4 page)

“Ernchester—or Farren, as he sometimes calls himself— Wanthope is another one of his names—is perfectly serious about it,” Asher said grimly, remembering the dead laborer on the train. Whether or not he’s correct in his claims that drinking human blood has enabled him to live two hundred years, I know from my own experience that the man has abilities for which a foreign power would pay well. He can get past guards unseen. I don’t know how he does this, but he can. He has an almost fakirlike ability to get in and out of places. And he can influence people’s minds to an almost unbelievable extent. I’ve seen him do it.“

In fact, Asher reflected, watching the thoughts pass almost visibly across the back of the Paris chief’s shallow blue eyes, he hadn’t seen Ernchester do any of the things he described. Of all the vampires who had ringed him like ghosts in last fall’s misty London darkness, Charles Farren, quondam Earl of Ernchester, was one of the few who had not, to one degree or another, used the eerie abilities of the vampire mind to trap or hunt or influence him.

And as he’d watched the yellow pinpricks of the Dover lights vanish into the blackness of fog beyond the Lord Warden’s stern rail, Asher had reflected that that was one of the strangest aspects of the entire matter: that Ernchester had been the Hungarian’s choice.

There were far more dangerous vampires in London. Why not one of them?

Streatham’s mouth grimaced into what was probably supposed to be a smile. “Really, Dr. Asher. The Department genuinely appreciates your concern, particularly in view of the circumstances of your leave-taking…”

It was a gratuitous jab, and Asher felt a sting of annoyance.

“What I said and felt about the Department when I left still holds.” He set down his teacup. At least they’d offered him tea, he thought, something he was unlikely to get elsewhere in Paris. “If the Department were about to be dynamited, I don’t think I’d cross the street to pinch out the fuse.

“But this isn’t the Department I’m talking about.” His voice was level, but cold with an old rage burned now to clinkers and ash. “This is the country. You cannot let the Hofburg hire the Earl of Ernchester.”

“Don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little? Just because the Austrians are courting some hypnotist—”

“It’s more than hypnosis,” said Asher, knowing that if he lost his patience with this man, he’d lose all hope of getting his help. “I don’t know what it is. I only know that it works.” He drew a deep breath, realizing how little of the actual vampire power could be described. Even to someone who was willing to believe, he wasn’t sure he could describe that curious blanking of the mind that vampires imposed on their victims, allowing them to move utterly unseen; the ability to stand outside a building or on the next street, or half a mile away, silently reading the dreams of whosoever they chose.

They were born spies.

Of course Karolyi, raised in the hotbed of Carpathian legends, would believe, or be ready to believe.

I am ready to do whatever my Emperor requires
… He’d imitated the glowing-eyed gallantry of all those other young fools in the officers’ corps, but even then Asher had known that Karolyi had been speaking the absolute truth. It was just that some people had a different view of that word, whatever.

Nothing really changed, he thought. He didn’t know how many times he’d sat in this discreet town house within walking distance of the embassy during the years in which he’d ranged all over Europe, going out ostensibly in quest of moribund verb forms and variant traditions about fairies and heroes and coming back with German battleship plans or lists of firms selling rifles to the Greeks.

Those years seemed hideously distant to him, as if it had been someone else who risked his life and traded his soul for matters that had been obsolete in a year.

Streatham folded his hands, white as a woman’s and as soft. With a kind of perverse relish, he said, “Of course, having been out of the Department, you wouldn’t know about the reorganization since the end of the war and the old Queen’s death. After South Africa, the budget was drastically cut, you know. We have to share this house with Passports and the attache for Financial Affairs now. We certainly can’t ask the French authorities to order the arrest of an Austrian citizen just on your say-so— certainly not a member of one of that country’s noble houses, not to speak of the diplomatic corps. And we can’t spare a man to follow Karolyi around Paris, much less trail him to Vienna or Buda-Pesth or wherever else he’ll be going on to.”

“Karolyi’s only a means to an end,” Asher said quietly. “He’s the only way you can track Ernchester…”

“And don’t keep calling him ‘Ernchester.’ ” Streatham peevishly aligned the edge of a report with the edge of his desk and centered the ink stand above it. “The Earl of Ernchester happens to be a good friend of mine—the real Earl of Ernchester. Lucius Wanthope. We were up at the House together,” he added smugly.

By “the House” Asher knew he meant Christ Church College, Oxford, and wondered if that was the same Lucius Wanthope who’d been one of Lydia’s suitors, eight or nine years ago. Streatham pronounced it Wanthope, swallowing the middle of the word after the fashion of Oxford. “If this impostor is going about calling himself by that title, the least you can do is not subscribe to the hoax.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Asher said tiredly, “if he’s calling himself Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. And I know all about the reorganization and the budget. Have him followed. This was the address on his luggage. It’s just a transit point, but your man can trace him through the local carting company. He’ll be hauling a large trunk somewhere today, possibly to the Gare de l’Est to go on to Vienna, more probably to some house here in the city where they can set up operations. Find out who his connections are…”

“And what?” Streatham chuckled juicily. “Drive a stake through his heart?”

“If necessary.”

Streatham’s eyes—too close together in flaccid pouches the color of fish belly—narrowed again, studying him. Asher had washed and shaved in one of the public washrooms at the Gare du Nord after dispatching a telegram to Lydia, but he was well aware that at the moment he looked less like an Oxford don than he did some down-on-his-luck clerk at the end of the night on the tiles.

The Paris chief opened his mouth to speak again, but Asher cut him off. “If necessary I’ll telegraph Colonel Gleichen at Whitehall. This is a matter on which we can’t afford to take chances. I spent my last few shillings to follow them here, to warn you of a threat greater, in my years of experience, than anything currently facing our department. Believe me, I wouldn’t have done it if I’d thought that Ernchester was just a stage hypnotist with a good act, and I wouldn’t have done it if I’d thought there was any alternative to the danger we’ll face if he does start working for the Kundschafts Stelle. Anything Vienna learns is going to end up in Berlin. You know that. Gleichen knows it, too.”

At the mention of the head of MO-2’s D Section, Streatham’s face had slowly begun to redden; now he fetched an exaggerated sigh. “It’ll put the entire Records Section days behind, but I’ll pull Cramer off Information and assign him. Will that satisfy you?”

Asher fished his memory and came up empty.

“After your time,” said Streatham, with a kind of breezy viciousness. “A good man at his work.”

“Which is?”

“Information.”

“You mean cutting articles out of newspapers?” Asher stood and picked up his hat. Outside the tall windows it had begun to rain again. The thought of the three-quarter-mile walk to Barclay’s Bank on the Boulevard Haussmann gave him a sensation akin to the grinding of unoiled gears deep in his chest.

“Everyone in the Department has had to cover several areas of work these days.” The enmity in Streatham’s voice was plain now. I in very sorry about the inconvenience to you, and about the fact that the budget doesn’t permit us to stand you your train fare home. Of course, you’re welcome to a bed in one of the duty rooms…“

“Thank you,” Asher said. “I’m just on my way to my bank.” This Cramer is cutting articles out of newspapers, he thought. “Don’t let me keep you.”

There had been a time, thought Asher as he descended the shallow sandstone steps, when he loved Paris.

And indeed, he loved it still. Against the cinder-colored street, the gravid sky, the white and yellow shapes of the bare sycamores, and the pale gold stone of the buildings seemed queerly bright. Windows were shuttered behind iron balconies; red and blue shop awnings seemed to blossom like flowers. Traffic was thick on the boulevard: cabs with their roofs shining with moisture; bright-colored electric tramways, hooting for right-of-way; stylish landaus, the horses puffing steam from their nostrils like dragons in the damp cold; men and women in daytime clothing the color of eggplant and wet stone.

A magic city, thought Asher. Even in his days with the Department, when he had made himself familiar with its thugs-for-hire, its safe breakers, forgers, and fences, he had still found it a magic place.

But he knew that he was hastening to accomplish his errands because he wanted very badly not to be in this city when the sun went down.

There was an ancient hotel particulier somewhere in the Marais district, owned by a woman named Elysee. Since the night he had been taken there, blindfolded, and seen the white-faced, strange-eyed, beautiful creatures who played cards in its brilliantly lit salon, he had not felt safe in this city. He was not sure he would ever willingly spend a night here again.

At Barclay’s Bank he established his credentials and withdrew twenty pounds—five hundred francs, far more than he’d need for a prix-jixe lunch in the Palais Royale and his return journey, but the discomforts of last night had rendered him unwilling to trust Fate again. It was well after noon, but the Vefory was still serving luncheon. He settled in a corner with an omelette, fresh spinach, bread and butter that had nothing in common with the English travesty of the same name, coffee, and a copy of the Le Petit Journal. The next boat-train left at four. He had not quite time to visit the Louvre—only the booksellers on the quais, he thought, and a little while spent in the restful silence of Notre Dame.

It would be just getting dark as the train pulled out of the Gare du Nord, but that would be sufficient.

As he turned over the pages of the Journal, the top of his mind sifted and sorted the mishmash of Serbian demands for independence from Austria, Russian demands for justice in the Serbian cause, another massacre of Armenians by the new Turkish government, plots by the Sultan to regain his power, and the Kaiser’s pursuit of ever faster battleships and ever more powerful artillery, while some other part of his thoughts seemed to see through those reports to the uses the Austrian Emperor—or the Czar or the Kaiser, for that matter—would have for a vampire.

In any direction he looked, the possibilities were terrifying.

Europe
skated the rim of cataclysm, that much he knew. The German Kaiser was praying, literally and publicly, for an excuse to use his armies; the French were burning with pride, rage, and the old wounds of the Alsace. The Empire of Austria was trying to hold on to its Slavic minorities, while the Russians trumpeted their intention of backing up those minorities’ “pan-Slav” rights. Asher had seen firsthand the weapons everyone was rushing to buy, the railway lines being constructed to carry men to battles, and in Africa he’d already seen what those weapons could do.

Would men who contemplated sending other men into machine-gun fire—or contemplated turning machine guns on soldiers with only rifles in their hands—shrink from handing over a political prisoner or two per week to someone who could slip into consulates, workshops, departments of navy and army utterly unseen?

He turned the page and, for a moment, saw their faces again in the dark of his mind. The coarse and powerful Grippen. Ysidro’s enigmatic disdain. Bully Joe Davies. The beautiful Celeste.

The Earl of Ernchester.

Why Ernchester? he wondered again.

The weakest of them, strangely fragile, Grippen’s fledgling and slave to the domination of the master vampire’s mind. Did Grippen know the little nobleman had left London? Had made a pact with a foreign power? Had Grippen been approached first and refused?

No vampire, Elysee de Montadour had said, the gaslight gleaming queerly in her green eyes, will do that which endangers other vampires by giving away their haunts, their habits, or the very fact of their existence to humankind. A handsome woman, with nodding ostrich plumes in her hair, her green-black silk gown as stylish as if she had not been born in an era of panniers and three-foot coiffures. He remembered the cold strength of her hands, clawlike nails ripping open the veins in his arm to drink.

Why didn’t Karolyi contact Elysee? he wondered. Or the Vienna vampires? Surely in that city, as in all cities where there were poor upon which to feed, one could find the hunters of the night.

He turned over the leaves of the newspaper, searching for mention of an insignificant laborer’s body, found drained of blood on the boat-train. There was none.

“Dr. Asher?”

He’d been aware of the tall young man entering the restaurant, heading in the direction of his table; he’d identified his tailoring and his smooth, heavy-jawed face as English. The young man held out his hand, regarded Asher with frank brown eyes under an overhanging forelock of wheat-colored hair.

“I’m Edmund Cramer.”

“Ah.” Asher took the boy’s hand, gloved in sturdy York tan, in his own. “He whose absence from Records will imperil the defense of the realm against the French.”

Cramer laughed and took the chair Asher pushed slightly toward him with his foot. The waiter appeared with another cup of cafe noir and a bottle of cognac; Asher waved the latter away. “Well, it’s true the whole outfit is rather cumberish these days, but Streats could jolly well have upped for a train ticket, not to mention lunch. You did get to your bank all right and all that?”

“You behold the spoils of my endeavor.” Asher gestured grandly to the empty plates and handed the waiter two francs upon the man’s reappearance with more cafe noir. “You have me followed?”