James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (32 page)

“Fled from you?” Lydia steeled herself, produced her eyeglasses from her handbag and put them on to peer at him. “Last night? Were you at the palace reception last night?”

Under the fine traces of mustache his mouth quirked, disarmed for a moment. With two quick gestures of his forefinger he smoothed the mustache, and Lydia noted the fine cut of the pale tan gloves, French kid at six shillings the pair.

“Baron!” Razumovsky’s gray and golden bulk appeared from around the corner of a stall and pushed through the crowd, Margaret scuttling in his wake. Lydia’s glasses immediately disappeared from her face and into the folds of her skirt. “Back from your flying visit to London, I see.”

“Prince.” Karolyi bowed to the exact depth required of a Russian prince rather than an English one. “A flying visit indeed, but one must dress, you know.” He laughed rather vacantly and flicked the lapels of his Saville Row suit. “Are you here with Mrs. Asher?”

He believes I’ve been taken by surprise, thought Lydia swiftly. If I put this off, he’ll guess I had time to prepare.

“Will you excuse us for a few moments, Your Highness?” As the Russian moved off she turned her back slightly and put her hand behind it, signaling—and hoping he saw—with her outspread fingers: five minutes.

“From what Mr. Halliwell said I gather you and my husband weren’t exactly friends,” she said quickly, keeping her voice fast and breathless to keep from stammering with uncertainty and dread. “But it is all really a… a sort of confraternity, is it not? You are all in the same business, no matter what side you’re on.” She produced her glasses again and put them on, well aware of the air of scholarly ineffectualness they lent to her face. “Thank you so much for letting me know! I knew—I knew—that Cousin Elizabeth couldn’t have been wrong!”

“Cousin Elizabeth?”

“Cousin Elizabeth in Vienna,” said Lydia, as if slightly surprised that Karolyi were not acquainted with her family. “She lent my husband twenty pounds a week ago Thursday night, to take the Orient Express to Constantinople. She’s his cousin—his second cousin, actually—and she lives in one of the suburbs, I forget the name… In any case I telephoned her when Mr. Halliwell gave me the note from my husband…”

“Note?” The graceful eyebrows deepened in a frown.

“Telling me to return to London. Saying he was going on, he couldn’t tell me where. Mr. Halliwell did his best to convince me to go back, and I let him think I was going back, but I knew my husband was in danger of some kind! I knew it.” She clasped her hands again, praying that it wasn’t obvious that she was shaking all over.

“Why were you in Vienna?” He was running this over in his mind, trying to fit pieces together. Guessing at Ysidro’s inscrutability had given her a greater ability to deal with ordinary human expression.

She widened her eyes. “He sent for me.” What other reason would there have been? her tone seemed to ask. And, when Karolyi looked gratifyingly skeptical, she explained, “He telegraphed and said there were some medical notes that would need to be analyzed. I am a medical doctor, you know,” she added, propping her spectacles and looking as unworldly and harmless as she possibly could. “I do research at the Radcliffe Infirmary.”

“And your specialty is?”

“Rare pathologies of the blood.” It was nothing of the kind, but unless Karolyi read medical journals, he wouldn’t know that. It was the kind of thing they would have sent for her to examine, if they were dealing with vampires.

He evidently didn’t, for a look of enlightenment dawned in his eyes. “I see.”

“But when I reached Vienna, Mr. Halliwell told me something dreadful had happened and Dr. Asher had had to leave the city suddenly, and gave me his note, telling me to return to London. And I knew he had to be in some kind of danger, especially after Cousin Elizabeth told me he’d borrowed money from her to come to Constantinople all of a hurry. And now they tell me he’s disappeared, and I don’t know what to do! Oh, Baron Karolyi, if you know anything, can help me in any way… !”

He looked annoyed, as well he might, she thought, but he concealed it well as he patted her hands. “Calm yourself, Mrs. Asher, calm yourself. What have you been able to find out of his whereabouts?”

That, she thought, was what he wanted to know. That, and how much she herself knew.

“Nothing!” she wailed. “I came here to the marketplace because I understand he was arrested near here. I thought that some of the shopkeepers might have seen something, or know something…” She removed her spectacles and blinked dewily up at him. “Prince Razumovsky was kind enough to offer to escort me here, as he knows the language.”

Karolyi sniffed, just slightly, and Lydia reflected that Lady Clapham’s estimate of the prince’s amorous nature was probably correct, if Karolyi would believe that the prince would come here to escort a woman.

“Listen, Mrs. Asher,” he said, lowering his voice somberly and leaning down a little to gaze into her eyes. “His Highness may officially be on the side of the English, but believe me, he is not a man to be trusted. Whatever you chance to learn—even small details, even if they sound foolish to you—let me know at once. You and I can pool our resources; together we can find your husband.”

You mean you can find the Master of Constantinople’s hideouts
, she thought, a moment later watching his splendid brown shoulders disappear into the crowd at Razumovsky’s approach. Still, she thought, turning with shaky gratitude to her rescuer, she hadn’t done so badly. On her first visit to the Grand Bazaar, she had been able, at quite short notice, to sell an almost total stranger a complete load of goods.

As they began to move away, the shopkeeper, who until this time had remained sewing slippers in a corner, got to his feet and padded over to her, and without a word affixed to her collar a cheap brass safety pin on which was strung a blue glass bead, painted with an eye. Then he smiled and bowed, and explained something to Razumovsky at great length.

“For the Evil Eye,” the prince said as he led Lydia away.

The street of the brass vendors contained, in addition to innumerable tiny shops where old men tapped and fashioned everything from plates and boxes to enormous long-spouted teapots and life-sized deer, four sellers of fig paste, a man dispensing lemonade from a huge earthenware jug on a handcart, a vendor of sesame candy, and a regiment of beggars.

There was no storyteller.

“Helm Musefir?” the keeper of the largest shop on the row said in response to Razumovsky’s question. He was a little man with a beard the color of iron down to his middle, who had not abandoned the old-fashioned clothing with the coming of the reforms. His pantaloons were resplendent in volume and hue, his sashes fringed in tarnishing silver, his slippers purple morocco and curled extravagantly at the toe. His turban was green, pinned with an enormous clasp of shining brass like an advertisement above his brown, good-natured face, and as he spoke he fingered a loop of prayer beads in his hand. “Since Monday he is gone. My wife’s cousin has a friend who lives in the room above him; he says he has not been to his rooms, neither he nor Izahk, the Armenian boy who takes care of him and runs his errands.”

“Was there a reason for this?” the prince asked. When the brass seller hesitated, Razumovsky gestured to Lydia and explained in the French in which most of the vendors seemed fluent, “This good madame is seeking news that the hakawati shair might have had for her and would deeply value any word as to Musefir’s whereabouts.”

“Ah.” The shopkeeper bowed slightly at the emphasis Razumovsky placed on the word value. “In truth, I do not know. Will the good lady be so kind as to accept…” He held out to her a brass dish of Turkish Delight, pale green in a snowy dust of sugar. “My wife’s cousin’s friend is also a friend of the landlord’s sister, and she says that the hakawati shair was not in debt, nor in arrears of rent. Likewise the boy Izahk’s uncle, who frequents the same coffeehouse as my brother-in-law, would have mentioned had the old man been ill. So I do not know.”

Of course, thought Lydia, wiping powdered sugar from her fingers as His Highness walked her back through the teeming aisles of the bazaar, no one had seen or noticed James himself. James was like that. But it did not escape her that if James had arrived in Constantinople Saturday evening, he could easily have sought out the hakawati shair Helm Musefir on Sunday—the last day upon which the old storyteller himself was seen.

After the bewildering stinks and colors of the Grand Bazaar, tea at the Hotel Bristol was like stepping through a door and finding oneself suddenly in the south of France. For Lydia this effect was heightened by the fact that, in spite of the Bristol’s excellent view of the Golden Horn, she could not see the old city. For her, the world ended a yard past Herr Hindi’s broad shoulders in a light-filled sea of obscurity through which white-coated waiters swam, their silver dishes flashing like strange treasure in the late afternoon sun.

Women wearing stylish pale-hued frocks chatted with well-tailored gentlemen in French and German over Ceylon tea and creme brulee. A small orchestra played Mendelssohn. Three children in knee pants and starchy white dresses consumed water ices under the benevolent glare of a tightly laced woman in black bombazine.

It was restful beyond words.

At the foot of the hill on which Pera stood, Lydia knew, Armenians cleared up charred beams and broken glass from the harsh retribution against their protests. Men like Razumovsky and Karolyi shifted and jockeyed for position in the background, selling guns to the Turks or the Greeks or the Arabs in preparation for a war that everyone knew was coming, and telling themselves it was all to maintain the peace. In every house in the old city, women lived in ugly little rooms like the harem, behind lattices that forbade not only the eyes of men but the sun itself, and no one raised a voice for them.

And beneath the surface moved darker shadows yet.

“Maybe it’s just my being a newcomer here that makes me feel as though I’ve dropped into another time as well as another world.” Lydia blinked brown eyes against the golden light and took a sip of her tea, dainty fingers half covered with mitts of ecru lace. “Sometimes it seems to me it’s the small things, not the big ones, that make a country change from ancient to modern, the way the Ottoman Empire is doing. Like buying stoves and furnaces instead of heating their houses with braziers…” After three days in the house on Rue Abydos, Lydia knew all about braziers. “I expect you still have people paying you with handfuls of gold.”

Hindi chuckled richly. “Ha ha, precisely so, Frau Asher. One finds the strangest things here in the mysterious Orient! You know, the other day I was called in to consult with a wealthy man who wanted to donate plumbing fixtures to the hospital attached to the mosque of the Sultan Mehmed…”

The ensuing story occupied fifteen minutes and had nothing whatsoever to do with furnaces, odd financial avenues, or possible wars among the city’s Undead, but nevertheless Lydia found it intriguing for its contrast between the new and the old. Once she discounted her host’s rather heavy-handed attempts at humor and his propensity for telling her what, as a European lady, she should and shouldn’t do, she did not find it difficult to listen to Herr Hindi on his favorite subject, perhaps because her own interests had always tended to the technical. He was, at least, a businessman with contacts in one of the strangest and most varied cities in the world, and not a twenty-two-year-old aristocrat whose world began with cub hunting in November and ended at the conclusion of the grouse shoots.

With a minimum of prompting, Hindi quite happily told her about his clients, the sometimes peculiar methods of payment found in an empire whose ruler had vetoed the building of an electrical dynamo because the word sounded too much like “dynamite” and might give encouragement to anarchists… and, of course, a great deal about the differences in burning time between soft and hard coal and the sorts of steam furnaces available from American manufacturers as opposed to those in Berlin.

“Ah, it’s a strange city, Frau Asher, a strange city!” He shook a plump, reproving finger at her. “And not one for a lady to be traveling about in alone! I hope you’re not one of those lady suffragettes we hear so much of, wanting to wear pants and smoke cigarettes and make us poor men stay home and mind the babies, ha ha!”

Lydia, who would far sooner have trusted any child with James than her friend Josetta or, God forbid, herself, simply out of regard for the poor infant’s comfort, refrained from saying so. Instead she angled the conversation neatly back to Herr Hindi’s adventures—in which he was far more interested anyway. In time, and with genuine interest, she asked, “So there are some clients who won’t appear at all? Who refuse to deal with the infidel even for the sake of their own comfort?”

“My dearest Frau Asher,” Hindi chuckled, “legions of them!” He poured her another cup of tea. The waiter had twice refilled the hot water, and once brought the furnace salesman another plate of Italian ice. Hindi was a thickset, fair Berliner of about thirty-five whose wife and two sons had remained in Germany. He had been one of the dozen or so gentlemen who had extended invitations, not, she knew, with the smallest intent of impropriety on either side, but simply because she was a new face in a rather small Western community and—if she didn’t wear her spectacles—reasonably pretty. She’d been glad when Lady Clapham, after a moment’s thought, had pronounced it “perfectly all right” not to bring Miss Potton along; even gladder when the attache’s wife had offered to invite the girl for tea and cards at the embassy instead.

Margaret had—characteristically—turned her down.

“Frau Asher, if you want to hear of impossible clients, you should talk to Jacob Zeittelstem. Now, there’s an eccentric client for you! Huge old labyrinth of a palace lost in some maze in the heart of the city, bills of credit from who knows what companies and corporations, can only work under certain conditions, won’t meet with him in the daytime at all, won’t meet with him under any circumstances half the time but sends these—these thugs who don’t know to do anything but open doors, it seems; won’t meet with him on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays, changes his mind, tear it out, do it over, but hurry, hurry, hurry…” He laughed again, and sipped his tea.