James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (19 page)

Asher went on quickly, “It was another vampire, a woman, who attacked me just outside the walls. Do you know where they keep the key?”

Ernchester shook his head. “Fairport keeps it,” he said after a moment. As Asher had heard on the train, his accent was far less modern than his wife’s, the flat vowels making it sound very American. “Where is Anthea? They said they had her…”

“I don’t know.”

“Find her. I beg you, take her out of this place…”

Asher stepped to the bar, examined the keyhole of the small doorway set in the lattice. It was a Yale cylinder type, and unlocking it was far beyond the capacity of a piece of wire. At the back of the barred area he could see a trunk, like a block of shadow. In front of it the earl seemed very small in his shabby, swallowtailed coat, his gay red-and-yellow waistcoat and strapped pantaloons, a ghost wrought of dust, a mummy that sunlight would shatter.

“I’ll be back.”

As he turned to go, he saw, lying on the bench beside the outer door, the lace mitts Anthea had worn at LaStanza’s and a red ribbon from which depended a black pearl the size of a pea. It had been around her neck when she’d lain down in the trunk that served her as a traveling coffin. They must have brought them in, to show him that they had her indeed.

What had the original deal been, he wondered as he mounted the hidden stair to the scullery above and pushed the shelves to behind him. A lure, to bring him into their power for something he’d never have consented to do? What? Ernchester had certainly gotten on the train at Charing Cross of his own volition, had been a free man when he’d murdered Cramer. Asher’s jaw tightened bitterly, remembering that large young man’s ingenuous grin. He should shoot the boy’s murderer, not risk his own life setting him loose.

He remembered again as he climbed the stairs to Fairport’s office with quick silence—staying by the wall so the treads would not creak—why he had come to hate the Great Game.

A lamp burned in the office—inconveniently, because one of the curtains was half open, and it meant careful maneuvering not to be seen from outside as he approached the desk on his hands and knees. He’d heard no one in this wing of the house. He had only minutes before they returned and started searching in earnest, and Ernchester was right in that he must, above all, release Anthea. While Karolyi had her, he had the vampire earl, whether or not the man was actually in his possession. The fact that Ernchester had jumped to the conclusion that the dreadful scream he heard had been hers told its own story.

They are killers, he thought, in a kind of baffled rage at himself. Over the years Anthea has done to thousands of men what that woman nearly did to me. Why should I care?

But all he remembered was the face of a woman in a portrait, plump, weary, gray-haired, in mourning for a husband who had died thirty years before. How can he be dead?

Among the litter on the surface of the desk—Fairport, though not as bad as Lydia, was an untidy housekeeper—Asher recognized the folded copy of last Fridays Times. Beside it lay a yellow envelope containing two train tickets.

Paris
to Constantinople, by way of Vienna.

Constantinople
?

A thought came to him. Isn’t it enough that you’ve betrayed me, lied to me?

Crouching on the floor beside the desk, he removed the handset from the telephone and cranked the Vienna exchange.

“Here Vienna Central Telephone Exchange,” came the operator’s cheerful voice. “A very good evening to you, honored sir.”

“And a very good evening to you, honored madame,” replied Asher, who knew that it never did anyone any good to try to hurry a Viennese telephone operator. “Would you be so kind as to connect me with Donizetti’s cafe in the Herrengasse, and ask them to let me speak with the Herr Ober, please?”

The floor vibrated with a door closing somewhere. Feet passed quickly along a downstairs hall. Seconds fell on him like shovelfuls of earth filling a grave.

“Certainly, honored sir, it would give me great pleasure.”

He heard her voice, distantly engaged in formal greetings and elaborate social chat with someone at Donizetti’s, asking at length for the honored Herr Ober, there is a most honored Herr who wishes to speak with him if his duties will allow him time, and, more closely, voices calling from the courtyard outside the windows. “… found nothing… someone there…” Minutes, he thought, and they would begin to search the house.

“Ladislas Levkowitz at your service, honored sir.”

“Herr Ober Levkowitz, I realize it’s a tremendous imposition on such a busy man as yourself, but would the British Herr Halliwell have arrived for dinner yet? Could you be so kind as to let him know that Herr Asher wishes to speak with him on a matter of some urgency? Many thanks…”

Asher cradled the handset against his face, rose to his knees and with a swift glance at the window made a quick review of the rest of the desk. Three or four green-covered notebooks contained interviews with octogenarians in the Vienna region, and others much farther afield. A thick bundle of invoices for glassware and chemicals connected with experiments on the blood of these ancients proved, at a glance, that Fairport’s expenses were far greater than the sanitarium’s profits could possibly cover. In the back of a drawer was a thick wad of torn-open envelopes of the stationery of the Austrian Embassy in Constantinople, each containing a dated slip with amounts written on them—large amounts—and signed “Karolyi.” The dates went back two years. There were half a dozen keys, none of which would fit a cylinder lock of the type on the silver lattice’s door. A crowbar, he thought. There’d be one in the generator crypt if he could get to it.

Dammit, he thought, stop chatting with the Herr Ober and come to the telephone…

“Set the receiver back in the cradle, Asher.”

He turned his head. Fairport stood in the office doorway, a pistol in his gray-gloved hand.

Asher didn’t move. “I’ll use it,” Fairport warned. He came slowly into the room, circling wide to stay out of Asher’s reach and keeping the pistol pointed, until he was close enough to the desk to stretch out his free hand and push down the cradle, breaking the connection.

Asher settled from kneeling to crouching again beside the desk, his legs gathered under him, the handset still dangling from his grip. “Even against one of your own countrymen?” It was the cant of the Great Game—honor on the playing fields of Eton and God Save the King. But the Game was one Fairport had been playing for years as well, and there was a chance he would still think in its terms. And Asher was curious about the terms in which he did think.

“This matter goes beyond country, Asher,” said Fairport softly. He backed a little, out of immediate arm’s reach. “It’s all you can think of, isn’t it? All that sleek brute Ignace can think of. Like savages, both of you, tearing up volumes of Plato to stuff into cracks in the roof to keep the rain out. What we have found is the greatest revelation, the greatest discovery, in the history of mankind, and all he can think of is how such a man can be used in Macedonia and against the Russians in Bulgaria—and all you can think of is how to kill such a man, that the balance won’t tip against you in the ‘Great Game.’ You don’t understand. You refuse to understand.”

“I understand how much damage a man like that can do, if he allies himself with any government. And I understand the kind of fee a government would pay such a man.”

Fairport looked completely blank. Then, when Asher raised his brows, the old man flushed an unhealthy, blotchy pink. “Oh. Oh, that. I’m sure it’s a condition that can be rectified with proper medical investigation… I’ve found astonishing virtue in yogurt as a food of longevity, and in Chinese ginseng. They won’t always be drinkers of human blood…”

“I’m sure that lacemaker Ernchester killed last night would be glad to hear it,” Asher replied grimly, though some objective corner of his mind had to fight not to laugh at the image of Lionel Grippen, Master Vampire of London, supping on a dish of yogurt and ginseng tea. “And don’t you think there might be vampires who’re as fond of the taste of human death as they are of human blood?”

The old man’s mouth flinched. “That’s the most revolting thing I’ve ever heard! They can’t possibly be… No one in his senses could be. They’ll welcome that liberation as much as any drunkard would welcome the liberation from drink. And in the meantime there are the physically and socially unfit—”

“You mean traitors?” No other sounds in the house, though there was a dim clashing of shrubbery as someone passed by under the window. If he could disarm him without a shot being fired, there might still be time.

Fairport drew himself up. “I am not a traitor,” he said with dignity.

Asher sighed in genuine disgust. “I never met a double agent who was.”

“I have never passed information along to Baron Karolyi which would hurt any of our contacts or our agents…”

“How would you know?” Asher demanded tiredly. “You know nothing about politics, you barely read a newspaper, or at least you didn’t when I was here. You don’t think, if he can make a deal with vampires—if he can blackmail Ernchester into creating other vampires, fledglings loyal to the Austrian government— they won’t eventually be used against us here? Or back at home?”

“That won’t happen!” Fairport cried. “I won’t let it happen! Asher, Karolyi is only a means to an end. These petty politics, a handful of military secrets that are going to be useless in three years, they’re a small price to pay for the knowledge, the learning, that will free man, finally, from the grip of age, and debility, and death!

“Asher, look at me!” He gestured like a frustrated child with his miniature fist. “Look at me! I’ve been an old man since I was thirty-five! Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste …” He shook his head. “And every day for the past twenty years I have dealt with men who, like me, have felt that cold, awful terror of knowing their bodies are failing them. Men stumbling as they try to outrace the Pale Horse. I’ve tried everything, traveled to the far corners of the world, seeking out those who have conquered age—trying to find what it is that makes the body fail, that cripples us, blinds us, deafens us, renders us white-haired and flatulent and impotent and brittle.”

Behind his thick lenses the blue eyes glittered suddenly, and genuine venom seeped into his voice. “What it is that wears out some while others continue to gorge and rut and dance into their eighties, their—”

Asher struck, thrusting off his long legs like lightning, smashing aside Fairport’s gun hand at the same moment he drove a fist into the little man’s chin. He struck with all he had, to carry him across the distance between them quicker than Fairport could react and shoot, and the impact hurled the professor back and to the floor, as if Asher had struck a child. There wasn’t time to think or regret—in another moment Karolyi or one of the footmen might enter, and at that point Asher knew he would die. Karolyi, unlike Fairport, was not a man to justify or explain.

He scooped up the gun, transferred Fairport’s key ring from the old man’s coat pocket to his own, pulled free the old man’s four-in-hand and used it to bind his wrists behind him, then stuffed Fairport’s handkerchief into his mouth for a gag. He took another moment to drag him behind the desk, keeping low still, out of the range of the windows… Really, he thought, half regretful, the man had always been out of his league…

And smelled smoke.

Gray smoke was rolling along the ceiling of the upstairs hall.

Asher cursed. He would almost certainly be caught if he tried to get Fairport out of there, but there was nothing for it, and the man’s halfhearted interference back at the pension in Vienna had almost certainly saved his life. He glanced out the long windows behind the desk, ascertained that there was no one visible in the gardens below, and kicked them open, dragging the little man out onto the balcony where the fresh air would revive him and he’d be able to hump himself down the outside stairs. Then he ducked back inside. Crimson reflections on the bare boughs showed him where two or three of the downstairs rooms were already in flames, and, even as he watched, he saw yellow light flare in the dark windows of the old stable building.

Arson, thought Asher in alarm. Two places at once. Who the hell…?

He flung himself down the stairs, Fairport’s gun in hand, the smoke already tearing his eyes and eating at his lungs. Under the stucco the old house was mostly wood and would go fast. Downstairs the smoke was worse, the heat pounding on Asher’s face and making him dizzy as he raced along the corridor to the scullery. As he ran he thought, If this is Karolyi’s work, why let Fairport stay free? Or has Anthea somehow started this?

The coachman’s body lay in the scullery door. His eyes and mouth were both wide in a look of utter shock. His collar had been torn open, his shirt pulled back to reveal the hairy masses of neck and chest. Wounds bulged like tattered white mouths from ear to collarbone, but there was almost no blood.

Asher felt as if his heart shrank and turned to ice in his chest.

He crossed the scullery, looked swiftly out the rear door to the yard and saw what looked like another body in the shadows under the outside stair. Smoke seared his nostrils, weighted his rib cage. He couldn’t tell if there was a smell of blood or not.

Not Anthea. And not Ernchester.

The others. The vampires of Vienna.

The ones who had followed him here.

Sweat was rolling down his face as he shoved back the shelving, ran down the stair into the cellars cool abyss. He struck a match as he thrust through the door at the bottom; Ernchester, pacing the silver cage like an animal, wheeled, his eyes flashing in the tiny speck of the flame. “They’re here,” he said hoarsely. “I feel them. The house—they’ve fired the house…”

He flicked through the barred silver door the moment Asher had it open, twisting his body so as not to touch.

“Anthea!”

He started for the door, then turned back, catching Asher by the elbow in a grip that came close to breaking the bone. “Did you find her? She isn’t in this house, I’d have known, I’d have felt her, read her dreams…”