James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (5 page)

“Thought I’d find you in one of the cafes in the Palais,” explained the young man. “Streats said you banked at Barclay’s, and it’s right round the corner. I’m on my way to the Hotel Terminus; thought I’d get a little more information on this Ernchester bird and his Hungarian friend.” He flipped from his breast pocket the notepaper onto which Asher had copied the address of the Hotel Terminus, by the Gare St. Lazare. “The chief seems to think Karolyi’s hot stuff.”

Hot stuff
. Asher looked into those luminous eyes and his heart sank. The boy was barely older than the students he was supposed to be lecturing today back at New
College—and he breathed a peripheral prayer that Pargeter was taking his lecture as agreed if he were delayed in Wells. He couldn’t let this beardless novice go up against a man like Karolyi, let alone Ernchester.

“He is deadly,” Asher said. “Don’t let him see you, don’t let him get within arm’s reach of you if you can help it. Don’t let him know you’re on his trail. I know he looks like he’s never done anything but try on uniforms and trim his mustache, but that’s not the case.”

Cramer nodded, sobered by Asher’s words. Asher wondered what Streatham had said about him.

“And Ernchester?”

“You won’t see Ernchester.”

The young man looked puzzled.

“That’s his skill.” Asher got to his feet, left a five-franc silver piece on the table for the waiter, and led the way to the door. “So we’ll have to concentrate on keeping track of Karolyi. What money have you?”

Cramer’s eyes twinkled. “Enough to get a train ticket at the last minute and not have to starve through the night.”

“Something like that.” It began to rain again as they emerged from the long doors of Vefory’s into the arcade around the Palais Royale. The arcade was becoming crowded, the rain notwithstanding; gentlemen in top hats and expensive greatcoats from the Bourse and the nearby banks, and ladies in tulip skirts like brilliant flowers against the dripping gray monochrome of the hedges, trees, and winter earth of the central gardens. Halfway around the arcade Asher found the place he sought: DuBraque et Fils, Jeweler. Cramer watched in a certain amount of puzzlement as Asher purchased three chains, each about eighteen inches long, of what the jeweler assured him was sterling silver.

“Put this around your neck.” He handed one to Cramer as they emerged into the arcade again. In many of the shops the gas had already been lit, and the light from the wide glass window winked on the bright links as Cramer tried to open the catch without taking off his gloves. “Ernchester really believes himself to be a vampire,” Asher went on, winding another of the chains double around Cramer’s wrist. “Wearing silver may just save your life.”

“That far ‘round the twist, eh?”

Asher looked up from affixing the second chain, met the young man’s eyes for a moment, then returned his attention to the clasp.

“Don’t underestimate him.” The fit was close; Cramer was a well-fleshed young man. “Don’t relax your guard for a minute once it gets dark. He’s a lunatic, but that doesn’t mean he can’t kill you in seconds.”

“Shouldn’t we stop by Notre Dame for a crucifix, then?” A smile struggled on his face.

Asher remembered a lieutenant he’d known on the Veldt— Pynchon? Prudhomme? He’d had an East Anglian glottal stop, anyway—standing, hands on hips, staring out at the hot, dense silence of lion-colored land. Well, they’re just a lot of farmers, when all’s said, aren’t they? “It’s the silver that keeps them away,” Asher said.

Cramer did not seem to know what to reply.

Even at the Palais Royale it was difficult to find an empty cab in the rain. They ended by taking the Underground to the Gare St. Lazare and crossing the square to the Hotel Terminus. “Should we ask at the cab rank?” Cramer indicated the line of light, two-wheeled fiacres along the railings of the place, the horses head down, rugged against the ram, the men grouped beneath the trees, wrapped in whatever they could find to keep warm.

Asher shook his head. “He’ll have used a cartage company. It’s a big trunk. A London four-wheeler could barely take it; a Paris fiacre’s too lightly sprung. We’ll just check here…” He ascended the gray granite steps of the Terminus, crossed the dark Turkey carpets to the lobby desk, Cramer at his heels like a well-bred but very large dog.

“Pardon,” Asher said to the clerk, in the Strasbourg French of a German. He stood as the Germans stood, the set of his shoulders like that he had seen in South German officers, but without the Prussian stiffness which might have gotten him little help in this city of long memories. “I am trying my sister Agnes to locate; she was on the Dieppe train this morning to have come, and nothing of her I have heard. The matter is I do not know whether she travels under her own name, or that of her first husband, who was killed in Kenya, or of her second…”

As he and Cramer crossed the square again, Asher said, “Karolyi’s checked in, all right.” He ducked between a bright red electric tram and the shined and chauffeured automobile of one of the old gratin, turned up the Rue de Rome and again on the Rue d’Isly. “Name’s on the register, or at least the name of one of his lesser titles. Now we get to do the boring and soul-destroying part…”

“I refuse,” Cramer said cheerily, turning up his collar against the cold, “to believe there’s anything more boring and soul-destroying than combing through a hundred fifty French newspapers per day—and that’s just the political ones, mind, and just the Parisian ones—in search of ‘items of interest’ to the War Department. Do your worst.”

Asher grinned and led the way up the steps of the modest Hotel d’Isly, no more than a door between a state-run tobacconist’s and a workingmen’s estaminet. “There speaks a brave soul and true agent.” He had almost forgotten, he thought, the light camaraderie of the King’s secret servants. The boy had promise. Pity he had no better teacher for the time being than Streatham.

Resuming the stance and speech of the Strasbourg German, he presented the clerk on duty in the narrow upstairs lobby with a tale, not of a vanished sister, but of a vanished trunk: a meter and a half long, leather-covered oak with iron strapping. A confusion in the Gare, misplaced labels… No? No. Perhaps the gnadige Herr could give some advice on the local cartage companies, such as a man might have summoned to the Gare? The city directory, to be sure, could be purchased, but it gave little idea…

“The Bottin, pff!” The clerk gestured. “Here is the list we use, m’sieu, when we have a client with such a trunk. Not all are on the telephone, you understand, but for such as are, there is the cabinet…”

“Wunderschoen! The Herr is entirely too kind. Certainly all the calls will be compensated for. Please accept this token…”

“It’s up to you now,” Asher said softly as the clerk returned to his counter and Asher and Cramer were alone by the wooden confessional of the telephone cabinet. “You’ll have to go along on foot and check the companies that aren’t on the phone, but those are near enough to send a page with a note. I’ll go back to the Terminus and keep an eye out for Karolyi. There’s a cafe on the Rue d’Amsterdam corner of the Place du Havre, and another on the other side of the Rue du Rome; both of them command a view of the cab stand. I’ll be in one or the other, or under the arcade of the Gare itself. If I’m not there—if Karolyi comes back and leaves again and I follow him myself—you wait for me there. The last train for London tonight leaves St. Lazare at nine. I’ll look for you before half past eight. All right?”

Cramer nodded. “All right. Jolly good of you to point me out the way…”

Asher shook his head dismissively, rising to his feet and digging his gloves from his pocket. “Don’t let either of them know you’re on their trail. But don’t lose them. It’s more important than you know.”

His smile was boyish. “I can only do my best.”

Asher picked up the battered brown leather valise that had accompanied him throughout the day and nodded. “It’s all any of us can do.”

At the head of the stairs he paused, turned back to see the tall, stout form perched in the telephone cabinet, the desk clerk’s list spread out on his knee. No money to get anything more than that, he thought, with a kind of despair. Paris wasn’t a trouble spot. What experienced men the Department had were in Ireland or on the Indian frontier.

He almost went back.

And then what? he asked himself. Volunteer to pursue Karolyi myself? Let the Department have me again, to do their bidding as I did before?

But this was different.

It was always different, he thought bitterly, turning away. The only thing ever the same was that they wanted you to do it—and what it did to you inside.

Something hurt within him, like old wounds at the onset of storm.

At the cafe on the corner of the Rue d’Amsterdam, Asher ordered a cafe noir and settled himself to wait. Being unable to read the newspaper, he asked the waiter for pen and paper, and amused himself, between watching the cab rank, by observing the passengers going to and from the Gare, making a game of deducing financial circumstances, occupation, and family ties from details of clothing and manner and speech, less systematically than Conan Doyle’s Mr. Holmes but with an agent’s habit-sharpened skill. This was a good place for it; he heard three kinds of German, five Italian dialects, Hungarian, Dutch, and a half-dozen varieties of French. Once a couple walked by speaking Greek—brother and sister, he guessed from the familiar form of speech as much as the resemblance between them. Later a small family of Japanese passed, and he thought, One day I’ll have to study that tongue.

If he survived.

The clock on the Trinite struck four, and he knew he had missed the afternoon boat-train.

There was still no sign of Cramer or Karolyi.

Periodically the waiters brought him coffee, but seemed content to let him remain. Asher knew there were men who sat in cafes throughout afternoon and evening, writing letters, reading, drinking coffee and liqueurs, playing quiet games of cribbage, dominoes, chess. Passengers came in for a coffee, or to wait for friends. The sky darkened to the color of soot, and bright white electric lights blossomed all around him in the square. The cab men changed their day horses for the beat-up screws they drove after sundown—why subject your good beast to the rigors of night work?—and lit the yellow lamps that marked their origin in the Montmartre quarter.

It was almost six when he saw Karolyi. The man had a lithe deadliness to him, like a cheetah masked as a house cat; his wide-skirted Hungarian greatcoat billowed around his boot calves in his haste, and he looked here and there quickly as he sprang up the steps of the Hotel Terminus, smooth strong chin and beautiful lips touched by the arc lights that left his eyes in his hat brim’s shadow. It was the way he moved when he thought himself unobserved that had first made Asher wonder about him, back in Vienna. That, and the fact that he was clearly too intelligent to be content to do what he was doing.

Asher paid his bill and cursed the Department, gathered his valise and strolled casually across the square so as to be loitering in the dense shadows of the trees near the cab stand when the Hungarian reernerged from the Terminus’ doors. He heard him speak to a driver, giving an address on the Rue du Bac. Because there was the possibility that Karolyi might change cabs, Asher simply told his own jehu, “Follow that cab—don’t let him see us,” and the man, a waspish little sparrow of a Parisian in a faded army coat and muffler, gave him a knowing wink and whipped up his disreputable old nag in pursuit.

They crossed at the Pont Royal, the lights of the Louvre shining on black water. Near the Quai d’Orsay, Karolyi dismissed his cab, and Asher followed him afoot along the crowded streets of the Left Bank. Beneath the trees of the Boulevard St. Germain, Karolyi picked up one of those bright-dressed, frowsy-haired women whom Asher had seen emerge, a little like vampires themselves, from the darkness as soon as the lamps were lit. He felt a pang of disgust, both with his quarry and with himself, but he continued to loiter just far enough behind to keep the man and his new companion in sight. They turned from the lighted boulevard into the dark blocks of old houses that had made up the quarter long before the Citizen King’s improvements, stopped at a workman’s cafe for a drink. Standing in the raw gloom of an alleyway, Asher heard the half hour strike from St. Clothilde; the whine of fiddles and concertinas reached him, and in the glare of the colored lights he saw gaudy petticoats swirl and striped stockings, and mouths opened in laughter behind the blue haze of cigarette smoke.

The night train was at nine. He wondered if he had time to leave word for Cramer and still catch it, or if he’d have to spend a night in Paris after all. The thought wasn’t pleasant. At a sound behind him, he whirled, his heart in his mouth, seeing in his mind’s eye the cold white faces, the strangely glittering eyes of the Master of Paris and her fledglings…

But it was only a cat.

If it had been Elysee de Montadour, he realized, he would have heard nothing.

When Karolyi and the woman emerged from the cafe, she was clinging to his arm, her great brassy fleece of hair hanging loose from its pins and her head lolling. Karolyi, Asher remembered, had always been very circumspect with the girls of his own class or the daughters of the wealthy Vienna
nouveaux riches, instead preying incognito on suburban shop girls or driving out to the country inns to seduce the young girls who worked in the vineyards.

Their footfalls dripped on the moist pavement. As they approached Asher’s unseen post in the alley, a man in a striped jersey and sailor’s jacket stepped out of a doorway. “Got a couple sous for an honest man out of luck?”

When Karolyi said, in his icily perfect accent, “Go and have yourself stuffed,” the man grew belligerent, blocking his way; though not as tall as the Hungarian, he was beefier, standing too close, threatening with the aggressive curve of his shoulder, the readiness of his hands.

“That ain’t no way to—”

In one move Karolyi shucked the woman from his arm, leaving her to fall back against the soot-black wall, and lightly reversed the walking stick in his hand. Before the beggar could utter a sound, Karolyi brought the stick around sideways, hitting the skull with a crack Asher could hear where he stood. When the man slumped, Karolyi struck him again, heavy, deliberately, full-force blows, as if beating a carpet. Unhurried. It was not a neighborhood much frequented by the guardiens de la paix.