Traveling With The Dead(19)

The Viennese apparently thought otherwise. They flocked to the isolated villa and paid huge sums for “rest cures” and “rejuvenation” by means of chemicals, electricity, and esoteric baths. Looking down now at the bent little man beside him—even straight he wouldn’t have topped Asher’s shoulder by more than an inch—Asher wondered if Fairport’s preoccupation with reversing the effects of age was part of his fury at the encroaching dissolution of his own body.

Fairport must be nearing seventy now, calculated Asher, and forced himself not to offer his help as the old man hobbled along the pavement. His face had the shrunken exhaustion of years, his hands—encased as always in the gray cotton gloves he bought by the dozen, washed after wearing once, and discarded weekly— trembled uncontrollably. Lydia, he found himself thinking, would have diagnosed something or other on the spot.

Even under clouds, Vienna had the air of brightness he recalled; the clifflike labyrinths of buildings cream or gold or brown with their pseudomarble garlands, their putti and grimacing tragedy/comedy masks; gilded ironwork, tiny balconies, great somber doors guarding flagstoned courtyards inside.

A short distance along the Ring a smart brougham drew up beside them, the black body of the closed coach varnished and gleaming, its brass hardware polished like gold. A big man wrapped in a coachman’s long coat and muffler sat on the box, frowning under a simian brow ridge while a footman, equally tall, sprang from the rear platform to open the door. Asher reflected that the sanitarium must be doing well if the old man could afford this kind of turnout.

“You’ll want a hot bath and a good rest, I daresay.” Fairport gestured away his footman’s proffered arm with a wave of his cane. “Thank you, Lukas… I’ve telephoned Halliwell—he’s the head of the Vienna section these days, do you remember him?—to let him know you’re in town, but this evening, if you’re feeling up to it, will be early enough.”

Asher considered. It was mid-morning, the mists from the canal barely diffuse in the bright air. Though they stood on the threshold of winter, the cold seemed not so raw as that of London or Paris, the damp not so bitter. The air had a soft quality, like rose petals. In the Volksgarten a few hardy citizens sat behind the line of chain and potted trees that demarcated the terrace of a small kaffee haus, and Asher had a flashing recollection of true Viennese coffee and the concentrated sinfulness of a Creme Schnitten. Fruhlingzeit Sanitarium, isolated among woods and vineyards, was restful and silent but about an hour’s drive from the outskirts of the town.

“If you don’t mind,” Asher said slowly, “there are things I need to do here. Someone I need to trace, without delay.”

“Karolyi?” Fairport’s almost hairless white brows formed little arches in the fish-belly forehead. “His addresses are quite well known. A town house in Dobling and a flat on the Kartnerstrasse… I assume you’re not interested in that ancestral castle at Feketelo in the Carpathians…”

“No.” Asher shook his head. “No, someone else, someone whose name I don’t know. And it may take me a little time in the Rathaus to find the records.”

He knew it would have to be done, and his mind leaped ahead, calculating how long it might take and when the sun would set. He thought he would have time to do the thing in safety, but with an almost subconscious gesture he rubbed his wrist to feel, through glove and shirt cuff, the protective silver links.

“If I may abuse your hospitality so far, I think what I need to do is, first, find myself a public bath and get cleaned up, then start my search in the records office. How late might I come out to Fruhlingzeit without disturbing anyone to let me in?”

Fairport smiled, a dry little V-shaped quirk. “My dear Asher, this is Vienna! My staff remains active until nearly eleven, and I’m frequently at work in the laboratory until midnight. Right now there’s no one staying at the sanitarium—we had some electrical troubles early in the week—so there’s no trouble about that.”

He fished in the pocket of his old-fashioned frock coat and produced a latchkey. “If you don’t see a light in my study or the laboratory, simply let yourself in. I’ll have the old room ready made up for you, the one looking out onto the garden at the back, you remember?”

Asher smiled. “I remember.”

His smile faded as Fairport climbed into the brougham—the footman Lukas had to help him—and drove away into the shifting traffic of the Ring, brasses winking like heliographs.

He remembered.

He remembered sitting for hours in the window of that whitewashed room, looking down into the overgrown courtyard whose high wall formed only a nominal barrier against the whispering high-summer woods, reading over and over the three telegrams he’d found upon his return from the mountains. Remembered not wanting to know what they told him.

All three had been from Francoise, sent on successive days. All three had asked for an immediate reply. But he’d seen her at the Cafe New York—his shoulder tightly strapped and a hefty dose of Fairport’s stimulants in his veins—earlier that day. She had mentioned the telegrams in passing, but said they were nothing much.

It meant that she’d been checking on his movements in the period of time in which he was supposed to be ill rather than away.

It meant that she suspected him of leading a double life.

It meant that he was a footfall away from being blown. With Karolyi returning to Vienna in a matter of days, he knew what that would mean.

She’d been perceptive enough to see through Karolyi’s imitation of an innocuous young idiot. Why hadn’t he thought she would see through his own impersonation of scholarly harmlessness?

He’d sat by the window until the long summer afternoon faded and the white roses on the garden wall dwindled to milky blurs, until he had been unable to read the printing on the dry yellow telegraph forms, though he had by then memorized what each had said. He knew what they meant. He knew what they meant he had to do.

He pushed the memory aside now. When he recalled Viennese coffee and Creme Schnitten, he had automatically thought of the Cafe New York. Though he guessed Francoise had not entered its doors since the summer of 1895, either, he knew he’d look elsewhere for those small pleasures.

Francoise had been right about cafes in Vienna. It applied equally to public baths. Though not as ubiquitous as cafes, they were plentiful and good for the same reason. Most apartments in the overcrowded city lacked hot water; thousands of families still relied on communal pumps in the halls, communal toilets in the courtyards. But the Viennese were a clean people, cleaner in Asher’s experience than the Parisians, for all the French fanaticism about keeping their windows spotless. Certainly the jail cell he’d occupied last night had been far from the pesthole of Fairport’s imaginings.

The Heiligesteffanbaden was a veritable emporium of cleanliness, and heavily populated even for a Tuesday morning. Workingmen, students, bearded bourgeoise, and stolid hofrats scrubbed conscientiously in pink marble tubs, under the solicitous eye of the usual host of marble and mosaic angels and the usual Viennese hierarchy of Herr Oberbadmeister, Oberbadmeister, Unterbadmeister, and the garzone who collected the towels. Asher visited the barber next door to be shaved, changed into the shirt and underclothing he’d bought on the way from the Prefecture of Police, paid a quick visit to a man he’d known back in ‘95 who cut keys, and felt much better, though the clerks at the Rathaus looked askance at his rumpled jacket when he asked to examine wills and title documentation of the older dwellings in the Altstadt. He guessed he would have enough time to do what he needed to do, if not before dark, at least before the crowds thinned from the streets.

As both scholar and spy, Asher had long ago learned that human beings reveal the true workings of their souls when their attention is on something that consumes them to the exclusion of their usual desire to make an impression on others—and that something is usually property. He had, he reflected dryly, witnessed a particularly unappetizing modern example of that very phenomenon in the wake of his cousin’s funeral three days ago. In their preoccupation with who’s going to get what, people forget to cover their tracks: banking records, wills, probates, leaseholds, account books can yield a startling amount of information to someone with time at his disposal and a high tolerance for dust.

Asher started with the oldest palaces of the Altstadt, those exuberantly decorated masterpieces of white stucco whose baroque facades could barely be seen because of the narrowness of the ancient city’s alleys, matching ownership records with wills, wills with death notices and, more importantly, birth notices; doing sums on every page of his notebook and all around the margins of the Times Personals, the only other paper he had in his valise. He found himself heartily missing Lydia, not out of romantic considerations, but simply because she was a good researcher and would thoroughly enjoy this chase.

He left around two for a sandwich, but it was only when one of the several bespectacled young clerks came to his table in the reading room and said apologetically, “If it please you, Herr Professor Doktor, this building is now closing,” that he realized the windows were pitch-black and that the electric lights had been on for nearly an hour and a half.