James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (28 page)

She smiled happily and followed Lydia down the stairs.

The reception was held in a medium-sized pavilion in the inner garden court of the old palace of the sultans, flanked by plane trees and surrounded by a colonnade of shallow, green-tiled domes. The Sultan himself had not occupied the Topkapi Palace for a good fifty years, but the new government—the Committee of Union and Progress—used it for state functions, and this three-room suite, though a little small for a reception and rather stuffy with its low, coffered ceilings and Western-style crystal chandeliers, was at least unhallowed by any sort of Imperial tradition.

“Ambassador Lowther hardly knows whom to speak to these days,” Sir Burnwell confided to Lydia as gorgeously caparisoned palace servants divested them of coats and cloaks in the doorway of the kiosk’s small service room. “It’s like the old story about the seer who was right half the time, but one never knew which half. The C.U.P. holds power in patches, but nobody knows which patches they are.”

“At least under the old Sultan one knew whom to bribe.” Lady Clapham brushed straight the folds of her periwinkle and gold chiffon dress, and nodded approvingly at both the younger members of the party. “Don’t worry, my dear,” she added more quietly to Lydia. “If there’s anything to be found about your husband, we’ll find it here. I know at least someone who saw him Wednesday afternoon. I hope he’s here… Russians have such an Oriental idea of time.”

She led the way into the main hall, where the reception line moved slowly past the bearlike Talaat Bey, the new lord of this place where the sultans had reigned for five centuries, and the Romeo of the new army, the beautiful Enver Bey. The room was crowded with men and women dressed in the height of European fashion—most of them fair-skinned and all of them speaking French—and servants in old-fashioned turbans, slippers, and pantaloons bearing silver trays of refreshments. Lydia noticed Miss Potton craning her neck, looking around her, presumably in the hopes that Ysidro would have followed them here after all.

“Andrei!” Lady Clapham called out and moved into the crowd, returning a moment later with a hunter-green colossus on her arm. “Prmce Andrei Illlyich Razumovsky, of the Russian Embassy; Mrs. James Asher. His Highness is an acquaintance of your husband, my dear. He was the last one to see him after that affair with the Sultan’s guards Wednesday, weren’t you, Andrei?”

“The Sultan’s guards?” Lydia raised her eyes to the man who towered over her, the impressionistic glitter of bullion, buttons, epaulets, fringe, and a beard of still-brighter gold resolving themselves into a good-humored, handsome face and bright blue eyes as the prince bent to kiss her hand. Slavic facial angle, Lydia thought automatically. Brachycephalic. Cranial index about 82. I %. I really must stop seeing people in terms of their internal structure…

“There was little harm done,” the prince said in beautiful Oxonian English and offered her his arm. Lydia followed him back out into the colonnade, where electric lights had been incongruously strung from pillar to pillar. A few men stood at one end of the arcade smoking—Lydia caught the acrid whiff of tobacco, but at that distance they were little more than a clump of black forms spatchcocked with the white of shirtfronts.

The day had been a cold one, and few ladies, bare-shouldered as she was herself, ventured into the sea-chilled darkness.

“Your husband had lodgings here in Stamboul,” the prince went on when they were out of earshot of the smokers. “Most Europeans prefer to stay in Pera, of course, particularly since the coup. There haven’t been riots among the Armenians in the past week or two, but fighting in the streets between the Greeks and the Turks can’t be stopped. Your husband…”

He gazed down at her for a moment from his great height, and Lydia could see him asking himself what he could, in discretion, ask her. The look in Lady Clapham’s eyes when she’d said, An acquaintance of your husband, had told her exactly what this “junior attache” did in the Czar’s service.

“I know that my husband came to Constantinople to ask the advice of… certain friends.” She laid the same emphasis on the last words and met his eyes. The corners of them crinkled in a little smile. Yes, I know my husband was a spy and you still are. Presumably, she thought, Lady Clapham wouldn’t have introduced them that way if Russia was an ally of Austria. Whose side was the Ottoman Empire on?

“Ah,” he said. “As you say, Madame Asher.” His smile widened. “Then you know that he probably had his reasons. You wouldn’t happen to know what those were?”

She shook her head. “I only knew that he might be in trouble. Sir Burnwell told me he arrived in Constantinople a week ago yesterday, and that nobody’s seen him since Wednesday afternoon.”

“And what sort of help did you believe you could be?” He spoke kindly, but she could see something else in his gaze. Just because we’re allies, Jamie often said, doesn’t mean we’re on the same side. She felt panicky again, as she had in Vienna, panicky and unable to make a correct choice.

Forcibly, she put the panic aside. “I thought I could recognize the man who might betray him,” Lydia lied, with what she hoped was calm. “I don’t know his name,” she added, and went on at once, “But what happened Wednesday afternoon?”

Razumovsky looked as if he might say something else, but changed his mind. Probably, thought Lydia, because he thought it likelier he’d get more information later if he gave a little himself. He might even actually like Jamie—he looked like the sort of person Jamie, and in fact she, would and could like.

“As I said, he had lodgings on the Stamboul side of the Horn.” The prince lowered his voice and glanced along the colonnade to the group of smokers again. None looked in their direction, but the prince guided her down the short flight of marble steps that led to an arched tunnel beneath the pavilion, and so through to the dark gardens beyond. “He told no one where they were, and when I saw him, he had the look of one watching over his shoulder. On Wednesday men from the palace intercepted him by the Grand Bazaar, sent by the High Chamberlain, they said—though anyone could have bribed him to do so.” He grinned reminiscently. “I’ve bribed him to do similar things myself.”

“And he sent to you for help?”

“We’ve been friends a good many years,” said the Russian. “Sir Burnwell would probably have complained to the army first, or the C.U.P., and been put off for God knows how long. Semibarbarity has its advantages. I came here—where the Chamberlain and in fact the Sultan still hold a good deal of power— and blustered and shook my fist. Shook my country’s fist, which frightened them even more. Already the Sultan is playing off the people against the army, trying to rouse them in a countercoup, for he wields power as the head of the Mohammedan faith, you know. If it comes to it, the Chamberlain and his master are going to need support.”

Lydia
shivered, remembering a scene glimpsed from the window of the embassy carriage as they’d clattered along one of the few streets in the old city wide enough to admit such a vehicle: three men, dark-haired and hook-nosed, in the khaki uniforms of the new army, beating up an old man outside a half-closed shop. A muttering crowd had gathered, but no one had dared interfere; the old man had only put his hands over his head for protection, as if he knew perfectly well that begging for mercy or asking for help were equally out of court.

“They brought him out in a short time,” Razumovsky went on, stroking back the surge of his golden mustaches. “As I’d suspected, they were holding him in the guardhouse here, which means it was the Chamberlain who’d been bribed. He had been knocked about a little, nothing serious.”

“I hope he put proper antiseptic on it,” Lydia said, and was startled when the prince burst into laughter. “I mean,” she added hastily, realizing how that had sounded, “I’m quite shocked, of course, that he was hurt, but if he will get into danger… What had he been doing?”

“Apparently—he did not tell me this, but I found it out through palace contacts of my own—questioning storytellers in the markets. That was how they knew where he would be.”

“Storytellers.” Old man who lived to be a thousand… The wandering script of Fairport’s notebook sprang immediately to her mind. Woman who lived to be five hundred (wove moonlight).

“You tell me why,” said the prince.

Lydia
only shook her head, though a numbness started behind her breastbone and seemed to spread to fingers, lips, toes. Stress on top of hypothermia, she thought. And then, a small inner voice like a child’s, Jamie, no…

“You’re cold, madame.” The prince put a warm hand to the small of her back and led her up the steps again, toward the brighter lights at the other end of the arcade. “We were walking back to his rooms in the Bajazid when an Armenian boy came up to him. I didn’t hear all the boy said, but I know he said, ‘My master told me to show you the place.’ Jamie took his leave of me…” He shook his head.

Did he look well? she wanted to ask. Did they take his knife when he was arrested, and did he get it back? Did you see if he still had the silver around his neck, on his wrists?

It was conceivable, she thought, that the Sultan’s guards had stolen it. The ones she’d seen at the palace’s outer gates looked capable of relieving a dying man of his shoes.

Under her corsets her heart seemed to be pounding uncomfortably fast.

“Your palace contact didn’t happen to say which storytellers, did he?”

Razumovsky stopped, gazing down at her again. Men had appeared in the colonnade, Europeans in bright colors that had to be uniforms. By the way they were looking around, Lydia guessed they were the prince’s own attaches.

“Mrs. Asher,” he said quietly, “Constantinople is not a good city. It is not a safe city, especially now, with the army in power and turning things upside down, and it has never been a good city in which to be a woman. I have been making inquiries of my own about James. When I hear anything, even of the smallest, I will send to you at once.”

“Thank you.” Lydia clasped the broad, kid-gloved hand. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. I can’t… there are reasons I can’t tell you how I know… what I know. But any help you can give me…”

“On this condition.” Razumovsky brushed at his mustaches again. His glove buttons had diamonds in them that twinkled like tiny stars. “Something tells me I do not need to tell this to you, but I will anyway. Do not investigate anything alone. Not anything. Call on me for help at whatever hour. Is there a telephone where you’re staying?” She shook her head. “Then send a page. Do you understand? If I can’t come, I’ll send a servant. You don’t need to tell me or him or anyone where you’re going, but don’t go alone.

“Sir Burnwell and the embassy staff are good men, but they haven’t been here as long as I. Moreover, they are perceived as being on the side of the C.U.P., and against the old powers. In any case the German businessmen who’ve advanced money to both sides hold more power here than either my embassy or yours. When you go about the city, take someone with you— someone besides that silly girl of yours, I mean—and don’t assume that you can get away with anything safely. This isn’t England. There,” he said, and led her back toward the lights, the smokers, the door with its tall guards in their billowy pantaloons and turbans of orange and red. Not until they were inside and he had fetched her champagne and a cracker of sour cream and Russian caviar did he excuse himself, and two minutes later she saw him—or at any rate someone his height with a gold beard and a uniform of hunter-green—deep in conversation with Enver Bey himself.

The room was more crowded than before. During her conversation with the prince, Lydia had been dimly aware of lights passing among the trees and hedges as servants conducted newcomers along the paths from the enormous outer court. Scanning backs, Lydia identified the asymmetrical mauve volutes of her patroness’ gown in the midst of a dark cluster of male suiting. As she approached, she heard the guttural babble of German and made out references to track miles, rolling stock, gauge widths, and Krupps that told her that Lady Clapham had fallen among the businessmen, but in any case Lady Clapham held out her hand to her with the air of a somewhat long-toothed Andromeda greeting a schoolgirl Perseus in ecru lace and pink ribbons.

“My dear Mrs. Asher,” she cried. “May I present to you Herr Franz Hindi? Herr Hindi, Mrs. Asher. Now if you’ll please excuse us, Herr Hindi, I promised to introduce Mrs. Asher to Herr Dettmars… You’re a godsend, my dear!” she added in a low voice as the stout, fair-haired gentleman who had shaken Lydia’s hand was left behind with considerable celerity. “Such a bore.” She steered her into one of the smaller rear chambers of the pavilion, just as crowded and if possible more airless than the long front room. “Do I have the appearance of a woman who will perish if she does not receive accurate information concerning the differences between soft-coal hummer furnaces and hard-coal base burners?”

Lydia
paused to study her with mock gravity. “Turn ‘round,” she instructed, and with a straight face the attache’s wife did so.

“Only a little in the back,” Lydia replied after due consideration.

“I’ll wear a shawl over it, then,” promised Lady Clapham. “I am suffocating. Was Prince Razumovsky able to give you any information about your husband, dear?”

Lydia
nodded slowly. “He told me my husband was doing some kind of research, talking to storytellers in the markets. Did he—Dr. Asher, I mean—mention this to you?”

“That isn’t what brought him to Constantinople, surely?”

“No,” Lydia said. “But he does research in such things wherever he is. He’s a folklorist as well as a linguist.”

Lady Clapham sighed resignedly and poked at her untidy, graying coiffure. “Well, better than one of those lunatics like my brother, who goes about taking rubbings off tombs. Not even in heathen parts but in places like Wensley Parva and Bath Cathedral. And in hunting season!” She shook her head wonderingly and picked a cracker of caviar from a servant’s tray as if the man had been a table. “Yes, he did ask about storytellers. Burnie told him about the old fellow who sits in the street of the brass sellers in the Great Bazaar. Did His Highness offer you his help? I thought so. Just make sure you have Miss Potton with you at all times and you should be quite all right. Where has Miss Potton got to?”