The White City (5 page)

“He…he
wishes
? He wishes so. But with you as my hero, I do not worry, no?” She touched his wrist, fingers hooking to beckon him along without ever actually quite taking hold of him.

—Come.

Bemused, he came. She led him around another baffled half-wall—he left his empty glass on a waiter’s tray—through a back door, and into a secluded corner in the cold, darkening areaway behind the gallery. There—while he was still wondering what to do and what to say—she kissed him on the mouth most thoroughly.

She was just as soft and scratchy and wonderful as Jack had anticipated. Her lips were dry and she stung with vodka, and after a moment her tongue started to pry at his teeth so he opened them to let her in. When she pulled back, he put one hand on her nape so she didn’t go too far. In a poem, her lips would have been Chinese red as well, vermilion as the sunset sprawled across her canvases, but they were pale sienna like eggshells. He felt a tingle on his neck, as if someone were observing them, but just this once he did not turn to check. It was more important to watch her smile when she said, “It was boring party anyway. Come with me?”

Wordless, he nodded. And did.

Moscow

Police Palace, Kremlin

May 1903

As Asimov led Sebastien into a paint-peeling beige interview room, undecorated except for the high enameled tin ceiling and the patterns of rust surrounding the cold radiator, there was no indication that the officer considered him anything other than an honored guest. Sebastien breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that the interview room had no external windows. It was a trick meant to keep detainees ignorant of the passing of time, but in Sebastien’s case it would serve as a protection. He had no need to immediately inform his arresting officers that he was a dead man if there were no threat of exposure to the sun.

Although the Tsar’s government would never admit it, Moscow’s Imperial Police were modeled on London’s force, and Sebastien found the procedures of his detention tolerably familiar. He thought we would be allowed to cool his heels for an hour or two, and then, when the investigator had obtained as much information about Sebastien and the crime as he could dig up quickly and the interview subject had had time to work himself into a lather, Dyachenko would be in to commence the questioning. Additionally, Sebastien had as much as insured that he would first question Abby Irene. Which was a little like sending a kitten to interview a tiger, but Sebastien could not bring himself to feel too troubled by it.

Sebastien had resources that most mortal detainees would not. Where a typical human would wear himself out fussing at the metaphorical bars of his cage, Sebastien merely selected his chair—the wooden one by the table that was patently intended to be his—and settled himself, hands folded, for the wait. The sounds of conversation drifted to him from the offices outside, men and a few women going about their business in the usual way of police stations.

As he let himself drift, Sebastien could hear their footsteps, their heartbeats, the pattern by which the doors throughout the offices opened and closed. He could hear the small noises the building made, as well—its foundations settling, its stone walls shedding the heat of the sun, its old dry wood contracting in the chill. Most of the conversation he could discern was about the factory strike, though a little pertained to the murder. Before too long he heard a pair of familiar voices and allowed himself a smile.

There was more than enough here to hold his attention for weeks, if he let it. He was only just getting to know the place when newly familiar footsteps approached, a key turned in the lock, and the door of the interview room swung wide enough to admit the slender frame of Imperial Inspector Dyachenko. He closed it behind him, and Sebastien could hear that someone locked them in. Dangerous for Dyachenko, if Sebastien had been of a mind to be difficult—but it was a show of trust, all in the spirit of building rapport, and the wampyr chose to accept it as such.

Dyachenko dragged a chair over, its rough pine legs skipping across worn taupe tiles, and plunked down into it. He produced Sebastien’s passport from inside his coat, as if it had never left the pocket, and set it on the table between them. The letter of invitation was nowhere in sight, but Sebastien had not expected to see it again unless he were being confronted with it. It was, after all, evidence in a murder investigation.

Dyachenko rested his fingertips on the passport but did not push it across the table. He tapped them once, twice, and cleared his throat. His spectacles flashed back the gaslight when he tipped his head back.

—So who was the dead woman?

—A most direct opening gambit, Imperial Inspector.— Sebastien shrugged and continued, —I do not know. She was already dead when I made her acquaintance.

—The coroner estimates two to three hours,— Dyachenko said.

—So do I. Should you be providing so much information to a suspect?

The detective tilted his head to one side and smiled.

—Don Sebastien, your whereabouts in the hour before sunset?

—My room in the Hotel Bucharest, preparing for the ballet. My companions, Dr. Garrett and Mrs. Smith, can confirm my whereabouts at that time. As can a valet provided by the hotel, who assisted with my dressing. Mikhail Gregorovich, I believe the young man’s name to be.

Sebastien kept himself still, waiting the next question. It came, slightly surprisingly, in perfectly excellent English. “And then there is the small matter, Don Sebastien, of your allergy to sunlight, is there not?”

“It would have kept me indoors at that time,” Sebastien allowed, with an incline of his head not unlike the one with which Dyachenko had earlier graced him.

“Setting aside for the moment motive and opportunity, there is also the issue of means,” Dyachenko continued. He raked nibbled fingers through his mouse-colored hair. “It would be most unusual for a wampyr to slaughter an unarmed woman with a canvas knife, and even more unusual for that wampyr to show signs of hunger and deprivation when arrested mere hours later, when there is no indication that he had been injured in the struggle. Not to mention the waste of all that blood.”

“And all that life,” Sebastien answered.

He thought he sounded only slightly reproachful, but Dyachenko’s eyebrows rose. “Do you know the whereabouts of Irina Stephanova Belotserkovskaya?”

—I do not,— Sebastien said. Although he appreciated the gesture, Russian was really no more trouble to him than English; all tongues were equally foreign in this age.

—Your women have come to collect you.— Dyachenko rose from his chair. He left the passport stranded on the table, a paper shoal on a scarred wooden sea. —You should hurry: the sunrise is quite soon. I hope you and the formidable Doctor Garrett will be willing to make yourselves available to assist in the investigation.

—I cannot imagine anything we would like better. Irina Stephanova is a friend.

That smile of Dyachenko’s was really something else, if you looked closely. It went all the way back in his eyes.

He gave Sebastien another one before he turned away and rapped for an open door. A man with enough gall, or enough trust—or little enough sense of self-preservation—to turn his back on a wampyr. Interesting.

As Dyachenko left the room, Sebastien lifted the passport from the table and feathered the pages with his thumb. Tucked inside the folder was a calling card in the name of Yuri Danylevich Dyachenko, bearing the address of this police station and two telephone numbers, Moscow exchange.

How modern.

Beside it, tightly pleated, lay a hundred-ruble note.

Moscow

Kitai Gorod

January 1897

Moscow’s streets were long; despite what passed for the warmth of the afternoon, the walk was brutal. Jack asked twice where Irina was taking him; each time she answered with a headshake and what he could interpret as a smile, though her scarf hid the lower half of her face completely.

The streets were frozen into a surface less forgiving than iron. Jack could still see the evidence in their splintery surfaces of how the topmost layer had frozen first and been shattered by hooves. The hard frost had then locked down hard in an irregular, cratered surface that made Jack grateful for the packed snow evening out its surfaces.

“This is a hard place,” he said to Irina.

“We are hard people.” She said it with pride, so he wondered if by
hard
she meant
strong
or
determined.
Some idiomatic concepts translated directly. Some did not.

The wind bit through his clothing as they walked, stinging his eyes and nose until they dripped fluids that froze against his scarf and his face. Jack found himself huffing in relief as they entered a subway entrance and descended below the reach of the savage cold. He pulled his scarf down. The subway stair was still below freezing, but by comparison it seemed quite comfortable. And when Irina reached out to squeeze his hand as they reached the crowded platform, it might even have been warm.

The crowds encouraged them to ride in silence, and so they did. Jack surrendered his seat to a
babushka
laden with net shopping bags; Irina stood for a woman juggling a baby swaddled until Jack could not even see its nosetip.

The subway car reeked of wet wool and cabbage and indifferently clean Muscovites, overlaid with the pall of coal smoke. Jack had heard that Paris was adopting electric trains; he looked forward to living long enough to see all Europe made cleaner and brighter, not just the Ville Lumiére.

His reverie occupied him until Irina stood, tugging his hand, and he rose to follow as the train lurched into a station. The signs flashed past too quickly for him to sound out the Cyrillic letters, even if he hadn’t been muttering apologies and slipping between passengers. The train stopped with a jerk. Jack staggered, but Irina had been ready for it and steadied him. With his other hand he caught the rail and managed to spill out onto the platform with something like dignity.

He and Irina were the only ones getting off here. As he glanced around, she tugged his hand again and then dropped it, striding purposefully towards the stairs.

Jack ran a few steps to keep up with her. Her bootheels clicked more than his did, making him wonder if hers were hobnailed for better traction on the inevitable ice.

Incredibly, when they reached the surface, the cold was worse. The patches of clear sky beyond the buildings opposite told Jack that had emerged near the waterfront, and the wind off the river howled as it cut between buildings—and through his whole body. He fancied he could feel it ripping life and warmth from his very heart, blowing them off like shreds of tattered crepe.

The street was gray and deserted, and the buildings here seemed to be predominantly warehouses and factories.

With a little more available time, Jack managed to work out the words over the door of the factory they approached. It was, he thought, a slaughterhouse or a meat packing plant, and even in the cold air the smell of the stockyards that must lie behind it carried. Jack tried not to think too much of all that animal waste washing down the embankment into a river most of the city still used for drinking water. He hoped they had well-trained sorcerers for treating it.

As she led him up the icy steps to a side door, Jack touched Irina’s arm. Slowly, with careful pronunciation, he said, “You’re bringing me here to kill me, aren’t you?”

She must have followed the sense of it, because she laughed. “Me? No.” she said. “But I cannot speak for my friends.”

She didn’t have a key: the door stood unlocked. As they stepped inside, Jack found himself face-to-cravat with an impressively thewed gentleman who nodded at Irina and frowned at him. —He’s with me,— she said, and that seemed to settle it.

Jack’s initial impression of the room he stood aside to let them enter was that it was very red. Russians were fond of the color, especially in concert with gold; while the outsides of their cities were sometimes bleak and gray, and their coats and trousers and dresses black or charcoal to absorb the grime of the streets—but Jack sometimes thought they would enamel
anything
, and their houses and flats were full of enamel and filigree and elaborately etched and faceted ruby glass.

Anything to fight the dark and dreary cold.

Irina did not stay in the red room long. She shed her cold-weather armor, trading coat and baggage to a girl who hung them up behind a counter, and indicated that Jack should do the same. Ten pounds lighter, he followed her down a hallway—clean tile, not the distressing grayness he had envisioned from outside, into a meeting room too large to seem cramped, even though it was desperately crowded.

He recognized some of the people here from various revolutionary cafés in the White City, including Kobalt. As they entered, Irina slid a red-and-black armband from her pocket and twisted it around her upper arm.

Jack, who did not have one, leaned close to her. —I thought you said we weren’t going to the labor meeting.—

—This is a different meeting,— she said, as if that explained everything. And maybe it did, although as he watched her pour and sugar tea for both of them, it was hard to contain both his amusement and his disappointment. Was this really a better party than the one at the gallery?

Sipping his tea, his back to the wall, Jack thought
It might as well be the
same
party.
On the other side of a long, cold walk and a subway ride, and with much less interesting things on the walls. As the space filled up and Irina swung in ever-increasing orbits around him, spinning off to greet friends or enemies and eventually returning, he thought he recognized at least a third of the arrivals. There were the Kostov brothers, police informants or not. Nadia, the ginger-haired, layers of shawls over her layers of skirts giving her the appearance of a particularly Bohemian wing chair belonging to a colorblind poet with a mortal terror of drafts. There was Dmitri the counterman, whose art Irina so roundly dismissed. Jack might have been put off by the arrogance of her judgment, were not her own work so manifestly brilliant. That was the other thing about Russian girls, he was finding. They were not shy with their opinions, even the potentially offensive ones.