James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (17 page)

Deportation telegram, thought Asher automatically, his mind still sluggish with sleep. And then, How did they trace me… ? He was mentally framing what he was going to tell Halliwell about the layout of the Batthyany
Palace when, with panther quickness, Ignace Karolyi stepped around the side of the door and put a knife to Asher’s throat.

Fairport bleated, “No!” as the blade gashed like splintered glass. “Not here!”

The ape-browed coachman and two burly thugs Asher had never seen before were already in the room and closing the door. One of them caught Asher’s elbows behind his back, thrust him against the wall; the other walked straight to the window to pull the curtains shut. Blood from the small cut on his neck burned hot on Asher’s skin, but Karolyi had already turned his attention elsewhere, though the blade remained cold against the flesh.

“Find it.”

Asher tried to turn but was pushed against the wall again. Over his shoulder he saw Fairport staring at him in a kind of aghast astonishment; one of the thugs took the medical bag out of Fairport’s hand, opened it and pulled out a paper of sticking plaster, which he slapped over Asher’s mouth. With his free hand Karolyi took something from his greatcoat pocket, a silk scarf, with which the thug tied Asher’s hands. Probably the same one, thought Asher, he’d used to strangle the woman in Paris.

Only then did Karolyi take his knife from Asher’s throat, sheathe it in an inner pocket of his jacket. The man who’d been holding Asher’s arms kicked him roughly behind the knees, thrusting him to the floor, a minor theater of operations while the others pushed through the doorway into the next room. Asher tried to cry out, a warning, protest, appeal against the hideous vision of them prizing open the double lids of the trunks…

Then he realized that Anthea was perfectly safe.

It was Karolyi who’d had her house searched—probably Karolyi who’d written Vienna Express on the timetable.

He’d had her followed here from the station.

“This has to be it,” he heard Fairport say in German.

“You’re not gonna check to see?” asked the coachman.

Fairport squeaked protestingly; Karolyi said, “Let it be, Lukas,” his voice casual, but the henchmen stepped quickly out of the room. “Did you think she would not follow?”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t know.”

Asher turned his face against the thick, dust-smelling carpet, saw them standing together in the doorway, the old man looking up into Karolyi’s face like a retriever who’s just lugged in a pheasant nearly its own size. He thought, Fairport’s a double. Something about the distance between them, the tilt of Fairport’s head, told the whole story. Has been a double for years.

On reflection he supposed he should feel anger, but he didn’t. It was something that happened in the Great Game, like stray whores being strangled or those who learned too much getting shot.

Karolyi looked down at Asher with an expression of rueful half amusement. “So tell me, Dr. Asher—was it just coincidence that you were the man assigned to follow me? Or was Ernchester wrong in believing that the British are not also using the Undead?”

Asher inclined his head. He reflected that it might even be the truth.

Karolyi laughed. “Not many, I daresay. They’re good, rational, God-fearing, Church of England, university men in your Department. Civilized, the way they tried to civilize me all my life.” He came over and squatted beside Asher’s shoulder, slim and soldierly even in the impeccably cut brown suit he wore. A hot blade of sunlight flashed across the gold and ruby of his cravat pin, red and gold repeated on his signet ring.

“But being raised in the mountains does something to you. I suspect I got from my Moravian nurse, at the age of five, what you got from years of comparing legends and collecting odd facts that don’t fit into the curricula of Oxford and Innsbruck. Was that why they picked you to follow me? Surely they don’t think I’d miss a familiar face?”

Unable to reply because of the sticking plaster, Asher only met his eyes. You know I’d never answer your questions anyway, his look said, and the full, red lips curved in a mocking smile.

“Well, I admit I didn’t realize it was you in ‘ninety-five until I saw you in the Munich train station. Our good Dr. Fairport kept that little secret from me back then.” Karolyi stood up. Behind him, the two thugs carried Anthea’s trunk to the door which the coachman Lukas held open; Fairport stood by, watery eyes flicking nervously from the trunk to Asher and Karolyi. “You know, I’d have thought you’d have been promoted past field agent by this time. You always struck me as being smarter than that. But maybe that was luck.”

He took his gloves from his pocket, started to put them on but glanced down again at Asher and returned them to the pocket again. A small gesture, but Asher knew at once what it meant.

White kid was expensive, and blood would not come out of it.

“Remember my instructions, Lukas… all of my instructions…” he called out, and then turned with an admirable casualness to say, “Dr. Fairport, perhaps you’d best go with them.”

Fairport nodded, his gaze behind the massive spectacles glued to the trunk as the stevedores maneuvered it through the door.

“Of course,” he breathed, “they can’t appreciate… Klaus! Klaus, please, a little more gently!”

He’s forgotten I’m here
, thought Asher. More furious than frightened, he made a muffled noise that might have been Fairport’s Christian name.

By the way the old man flinched, Asher knew he’d guessed right. Absorbed, fascinated, obsessed by the prospect of taking a vampire alive, Fairport had forgotten. Had forgotten what Karolyi did with those inconvenient to him, if he’d ever known. The old man turned back, not quite in time to catch Karolyi smoothly withdrawing his hand from the front of his coat.

Asher met Fairport’s eyes, forbidding him not to guess what was going to happen the minute he left the room. The old man’s eyes, pale blue and tiny, distorted behind enormous rounds of glass, flinched away. Damn you, thought Asher, if you’re going to let him kill me, at least admit to yourself what you’re doing…

“You’d best supervise them,” Karolyi said gently, nodding after the departing men. You don’t really want to see this, do you?

Karolyi’s eyes met Fairport’s, held them, and Asher understood the unspoken barter: If you don’t want to have anything further to do with vampires, of course that can be arranged, too…

Fairport turned uncertainly, as if Karolyi had implied that only his intervention could prevent the three stevedores from heaving Anthea’s trunk out the window or riding it down the stairs like a bobsled.

Then he turned back. “Someone, er—might have seen us come in,” he said hesitantly. “They’ll certainly have seen the name on the van.” He looked apologetically down at Asher and twisted his hands in their gray cotton gloves, as if that were the best he could do. Asher wanted to kick him.

Karolyi fetched a long-suffering sigh. “Have you chloroform in your bag, then?”

Fairport went to his instrument case, but the tremor of his hands, increased by nervousness, spilled the chloroform as he tried to pour it onto the cotton pad. Karolyi strode over to steady him, and in that moment Asher twisted his wrists against the hastily knotted scarf. The silk wasn’t like rope, with rope’s matted fibers; one knot tightened hard while the other slithered and loosened. As Karolyi turned back with the drug-soaked cotton in hand, Asher chopped hard with his legs at the Hungarian’s ankles, pulled free one arm from the scarf, rolled to his feet and bolted for the door.

Karolyi, who had caught his balance on Fairport’s shoulder, threw the fragile old man aside and flung himself after, shouting at the same time, “Stop, thief!”

Coatless, unshaven, unknown to the hotel and still mute from the sticking plaster over his mouth, Asher could only redouble his speed down the front stair, swinging himself over the banister and down to the next flight as two stout porters in brass-buttoned green uniforms pelted up to meet him. He kicked his way through a rickety French door to a balcony that ran around two sides of the building’s central court, scrambled down a rain gutter to the court where a red and white van, Lukas at the reins, was just lurching into the carriageway to the street. He veered as the coachman drew rein and one of the thugs dropped off the back to meet him, ducked through a door into kitchen quarters, dodged past two startled cooks and a scullery girl and out again into a lane, pursued by cries of “Dieb! Mord!” and hammering feet.

The cramped, medieval streets of the old city seemed filled with pedestrians, either retreating from him in alarm or joining in the pursuit. He struck someone, blundered against a market woman and a postman with his parcels, ducked down an open gateway into another court and through another kitchen as half a dozen young officers in the blue and yellow uniforms of the Imperial-and-Royal Hussars sprang up from a table at a sidewalk cafe and streamed joyously after him, hands to their sword hilts and spurs rattling on the pavement.

He dodged into another gate and raced up the shadowy stairs, while police, guards, and passersby sped past him and into the courtyard, looking for a kitchen door or postern through a shop—finding it, they roared on through, while Asher pulled the sticking plaster from his mouth—with a certain amount of damage to his mustache—and, when they were gone, descended the steps and walked out to the pavement of the Dortheergasse again.

The ache in his side was breathtaking, and under the bandages he could feel the warm seep of blood. Gray afternoon cold cut through his shirtsleeves. He fought a wave of dizziness as he hurried toward the crowds on the Graben, feeling in his trouser pocket and praying there was something there besides his handkerchief.

He was in luck. He’d paid for the coffee last night with one of Karolyi’s ten-florin notes and, owing to the pull of the wound in his side, had put the change in his trousers rather than the inner pocket of his jacket. It was enough, maybe, to get him a jacket at the flea market in the Stephansplatz if he wasn’t too fastidious, and a tram ticket out of the immediate area, to somewhere that he could hide.

Asher remained on the Prater until nearly four, to give the hue and cry time to subside. He had a late lunch at one of the rustic cafes that lined the Volksprater’s bridle paths, consuming Czech sausage and buchty with one eye on the broad, graveled way that led from the organ grinders and carousels around the great Ferris wheel off into the gray and rust fastnesses of the old Imperial hunting park. Once he caught a glimpse of the brilliant cobalt jackets of the Imperial-and-Royal contingent of his pursuers among the thin trees and heard their faint hallooing as they searched.

England
, when war comes, I think you’ll be safe on the Austrian front at any rate.

But his inner smile faded at the thought of Ernchester, no longer now entirely a volunteer. If there were any stipulations in the deal he’d made with Karolyi, any acts he wouldn’t perform at the nobleman’s behest, the rules had changed. Or would change, when they told him they held Anthea prisoner.

He shivered in his rag-fair coat.

How long had Fairport been a double? he wondered. According to Karolyi, as far back as the flap over the smuggled Russian guns. It wasn’t as unusual as it might seem to outsiders that Fairport hadn’t blown him to Karolyi then. The fact that Fairport was passing the odd fact along to the Kundschafts Stelle from time to time didn’t mean he was entirely their man. Doubles— particularly men like Fairport—were frequently masters of self-deception, as Asher knew from having dealt with them. They always kept things back, from either side, sometimes for the most bizarre and absurd reasons: He remembered an American missionary in China who hadn’t warned him of an impending rebel attack because he didn’t want a Chinese patron of the mission to learn that his—the patron’s—son had a mistress in the quarter of Tientsin through which the rebels were expected to come.

And perhaps Karolyi hadn’t asked it of him, judging the matter too small to waste a trump on information he could learn some other way.

Even in retrospect, however, the thought of how close he’d come to dying as his Czech mountain guide had died made Asher shudder.

Fairport’s research was already an obsession back in the nineties. Top quality materials, facilities, research journeys were always expensive, and Fairport was not a wealthy man. The best agents, Asher reflected, were those without any weak points, any handles upon which an enemy could grip.

Like Karolyi. Smooth, hollow men for whom the Job was all.

He glanced back at the self-consciously rustic kiosk where the waitresses huddled out of the cold, and wondered if Halliwell could be trusted.

Fairport might not be the only one in Karolyi’s pay. Better, certainly, to wait until six and leave a message at Donizetti’s, arranging a meeting. If he could stay out of sight until then…

But after six it wouldn’t matter.

Not to Karolyi.

Though Asher was already fairly certain what he’d find, he strolled to the kiosk and bought that day’s Neue Freie Presse. On the back page he found a small lead line: lacemaker’s body found in wienerwald Scanning the brief copy, his eye picked out the words “drained of blood.” The name of the vineyard near which she’d been found was familiar, a quarter hour’s drive from Fruhlingzeit.

So
. He stared blankly in the direction of the gay-colored midway, the shooting galleries and Punch and Judys, the panopticum where the murder of the Czar was on view in wax for the edification of schoolboys. A fleer of music blew from that direction, a distorted jingle of pipes and chimes, and then was gone. “The Waltz of the Flowers.”

So.

A lacemaker. Like the prostitute in Paris, a woman no one would miss.

Of course Karolyi would pick a woman.

Ernchester would be there until sometime tonight.

Fairport was disposable. Even the knowledge of a scheme to use vampires was disposable. As Karolyi had said, most men in the Department weren’t going to believe it anyway.

What could not be disposed of—what he himself could not relinquish—was Ernchester.