Traveling With The Dead(14)

Could see the dark glitter of Cramer’s blood where the rats had gnawed his face.

He feared his dreams, but they drank him in, like water flowing down into darkness.

He thought, I’ve been in this room before. When have I been in this room? Beyond shrouded windows rain streamed down, sodden and heavy; if there had been furniture in the room once, all had been cleared, but for a table at one end. Shawled with drippings, the guttered stumps of candles burned in tall holders, two at the head, two at the feet, and their light made daffodil thumbprints on the velvet pall that draped one end of the table like a thrown-back counterpane and winked in the jeweled leaves of a coronet set in the black cloth’s midst. The dream had the taste of very distant memory, and he somehow knew that it was deep, deep in the night.

A woman lay on the yellow marble floor before the table, like a second pall dropped by a careless servitor, awkward in corsets and bum rolls and strange pennoncels of ribbon. Her hair was black, except where the candle flame breathed on it a cinnamon light. Its puffs and volutes, like those of her clothing, were in tangled disarray.

“Anthea.” Another woman came down the room’s length, passed within touching distance of Asher, or where Asher would have been had any of this ever really occurred. “Anthea, you must come to bed.” Even drugged with sleep, Asher identified the longer vowels in come and bed, the elongated ou, and thought automatically, Late seventeenth century. This new woman also wore black. Against ebon lace cascading from high combs, her face seemed lifeless, her eyes swollen and red. “ ‘Tis long gone midnight, and the mourners away to their homes.” She knelt in a sighing waterfall of back-draped skirts and touched the prone woman’s arm.

“How can he be dead?” It was a deep voice for a woman’s, low but very clear. There were no tears in it, only a tired wonderment, as if she really wanted to know. The odd thing was that Asher recognized it but remembered a modern pronunciation, unlike the one she used now.

“I don’t… I don’t feel as if he were. Did I walk up the stairs, would he not be waiting at the top?” A ribboned fontange snagged in her hair, tilted drunkenly as she raised her head, then slithered to the floor unheeded. Though he was at least twenty feet from her, Asher knew her eyes were the color of last autumn’s oak leaves, matted at the bottom of a pool.

“I felt so, when my Andrew died.” The other woman put a hand to Anthea’s side to help her up. Anthea rose unsteadily, tall and wholly beautiful though her clothing was askew from lying on the floor. The flesh of her breasts rose in creamy mountains above the flattening of her bodice, and small shadows marked the paler line of her collarbone, the curves of her broad-set cheeks. “Believe me, my darling,” said her friend, “he is dead.”

Slowly, like a very old woman, Anthea stepped forward, reaching to touch the velvet pall where, Asher realized, a coffin had lain. Her voice was very small, like a child’s. “I don’t understand what they expect me to do without him.”

She turned and walked the length of the room, as if she did not see her friend who followed in her wake. Certainly she did not see Asher, though her black skirts brushed the tips of his boots and he smelled the musky blend of ambergris, funeral incense, and womanhood that sighed from her clothing. Her tall lace headdress lay on the floor where it had fallen, like a broken black rose.

Steffi, darling, you do realize how dreary you are when you’re jealous?“

Asher jolted awake, sunlight in his eyes, his neck stiff and the gentle, persistent rocking of the train still tapping in his bones. He slumped back into the corner of the seat again and listened as Steffi—whoever Steffi was—rumbled some reply in harsh Berlin hoche Deutsch as he and his baby-voiced Viennese girlfriend passed down the corridor outside, toward the restaurant car presumably. Asher reached up and switched off the still-burning electric lamp above his seat, then pressed the porcelain button to summon a porter. When he ordered shaving water—accompanied by a tip he couldn’t well afford—Asher asked the time.

“It is five minutes past ten in the morning in Vienna, sir,” said the man in Italian-accented French. “Ten minutes past nine in Paris. Myself, I should put local time at quarter of ten.”

Asher, who had reset his watch to Paris time but had been too exhausted to wind it last night, set it again. “Have they done with serving breakfast?”

“They will have by the time m’sieu has finished shaving.” The porter touched his cap. Venetian, Asher guessed. Dark, but with the extraordinary sensual beauty that even the crones of that ancient republic possessed like a birthright. “I could bring m’sieu a little something.”

Asher handed him another silver two-franc piece, reflecting that porters on the Vienna Express would undoubtedly pocket anything from dollars to piastres. “You wouldn’t happen to know whether the Hungarian gentleman who’s traveling with the Englishman is still in the restaurant car, would you? Not,” he added, holding up his hand, “that this matter need be mentioned to either of them.”

The Italian’s dark eyes brightened with interest, and Asher added another franc. “A matter of family business.”

“Ah.” He nodded knowingly. “The Hungarian and the Englishman, their light burned on throughout the night, though of course because the curtain was closed I could see nothing of what passed within the compartment itself. But I know that they did not summon me to take down the bunks, and this morning when I go in to ranger the compartment, still they have not been slept in.” He glanced meaningfully up at Asher’s pristine bunk. Asher had locked the compartment door upon entering last night, and if this man had knocked, had slept through it.

When the porter—whose name, he said, was Giuseppe— returned with hot water, a breakfast tray, and coffee, he brought also the information that the Hungarian Herr Feketelo was no longer in the restaurant car. Following breakfast, Asher made his way unobtrusively down the corridor, banking on the fact that Karolyi, like his traveling companion, would sleep during the day. His own compartment was near the head of the coach, close to the accordion-fold bridge leading into the restaurant car. The compartment shared by Karolyi and Ernchester, according to Giuseppe, was close to the tail end. The next car in the train, Asher had already determined, was the baggage car.

It was sealed, but Asher had dealt often enough in duplicate seals and keys—and had seen enough of the sheer preternatural physical strength and agility of vampires—to know that this would present Ernchester no difficulties.

Asher expended several more francs from his dwindling resources on arrangements with Giuseppe to have his lunch also brought on a tray. It was certainly a more comfortable way to see Central Europe, he thought, than dodging around the Dinaric Alps with a price on his head, dogs—and Karolyi—on his trail, a pocketful of incriminating serial numbers from Swiss bank accounts, and a bullet in his shoulder. He listened to the voices passing in the corridor and kept his own curtain closed, watched the dark trees and fairy tale villages of the Black Forest rise and fold themselves over the lift of the Swabian Alps, with the higher gleam of white in the distance that marked the true Alps growing nearer as the train bent southward. At Munich the Express stopped for half an hour to add two second-class cars and another wagons-lits that had come down from Berlin, and Asher risked a dash to the station telegraph office to send two wires, one to Lydia telling her of his altered plans, and one to Streatham, informing him of the death of his agent.

He remained angry over that, not so much at Ernchester and Karolyi—it was, after all, a game they all played—but at Streatham, for assigning the least experienced of his men to a job that he should have known was dangerous. And, though he knew there was nothing else he could have done, at himself.

Crossing the great floor of the station under the weak gray daylight of the glass ceiling, Asher tried to remember who was in charge in Vienna these days. Perhaps no one he knew. Streatham had been right about the reorganization, of course. Fairport, at least, would still be in Vienna, unobtrusively operating his safe house out at his sanitarium in the Wienerwald, peddling rejuvenation to bankers and stockbrokers’ wives, fussy and trembly with his ill health and his cotton gloves and that fanatic glint in his pale blue eyes.

Asher smiled, recalling the three days he’d spent with that comic-opera hypochondriac, journeying to some remote Czech village so Fairport could interview a peasant brother and sister who were contemporaries of his own great-grandparents, and so Asher could trace local variations of the verb byti or biti—and have a look at a forest road leading into Saxony that, for no good reason, had been widened and repaired with funds from Berlin. The old man hadn’t taken off his gloves for the entire trip, had warmed the snow water of the streams because it was better for the liver, and had brought his own food, his own sheets, his own soap. The local peasants had shaken their heads and given him names of their own—“the laundry maid” and “Grandmother English”—and the innkeeper at one village had taken Asher aside and gravely asked if it were true that in the City—meaning Vienna—they had doctors who could cure people of such ailments. Asher had been hard put to explain that Grandmother English was such a doctor.