Traveling With The Dead(20)

By previous arrangement, Artemus Halliwell was waiting for him at Donizetti’s cafe. The head of the Vienna section was in his mid-thirties, untidy, bearded, bespectacled, and enormously obese; Asher remembered him from the London statistics department. Behind small oval slabs of glass, Halliwell’s pale green eyes were like cabachon peridots as he listened to Asher’s account of his journey.

“So this Farren thinks he’s a vampire, eh?” Halliwell carved a neat fragment of backhendl and popped it into his incongruous rosebud of a mouth. “I suppose that’s how he came into your purlieu in the first place, is it?”

Asher nodded. In a sense it was actually true.

“You get some of that in Vienna, though not as bad as Buda-Pesth. When I went west into the mountains only last year, there was a tizz-woz in one of the villages about a man who was supposed to turn himself into a wolf. I’m told in parts of the Black Forest no one will talk to you, sell you anything, give you directions to anywhere, if you kill a hare.”

He dabbed his lips with his napkin and the ubiquitous Ober appeared, asking with folded hands if everything was all right.

“I think you should know,” said the fat man, when the Ober had effaced himself again, “that there’s been a bit of a stink.”

Asher felt his nape prickle. He’d been around the Department long enough to recognize that carefully neutral tone. “Oh?”

“Streatham’s doing.” He made a dismissive gesture with his fork. “Naturally. Always was a bloody fool. He’s made to-do about that boy Cramer’s death with the French authorities, ranting about British citizens and treaty rights—-just as if our offices weren’t in flat violation of any treaty’s assertions of good faith. The thing is, the French have washed their hands of the whole matter, contacted the Vienna police, and are demanding your return under escort on the first available train. I held them off for a day, saying I hadn’t any idea where you were,” he went on, raising a staying hand against Asher’s protest. “But whatever you’ve learned today at the Rathaus, you’d probably better pass along to me.”

“Idiot,” Asher said dispassionately, while his mind raced ahead.

It was close to eight; the streets would remain crowded enough to protect him until ten at least, possibly later, and in any case he doubted that vampires could detect an intrusive interest in their lairs from a single walk by a casual observer.

But even in a single walk-past he could tell a great deal, particularly which of the several houses on his list of possibilities was the likeliest haunt. Enough information, at least, that whoever took over wouldn’t be going into the job defenseless, as Cramer had done.

“And what was it,” asked Halliwell, “that you went to the Rathaus today to find?”

Asher considered for a moment, then said quietly, “Vampires.”

Halliwell’s tufted brows went up.

“Are there people here who believe in them?”

The Vienna chief gestured with his fork again. “There’s always muttering among the Gypsies. The waiter at my cafe swears he saw a vampire on an old gate tower connected to a house in the Bieberstrasse—used to be part of the ramparts.” He shook his head. “My cafe. I sound like a Viennese. Caught myself calling this place my restaurant the other day, same as I’d talk about my club at home.”

“I don’t know.” Asher looked around him lazily, soothed by the atmosphere of the place, the slight shabbiness of the oak panels, the soft flicker of the gaslight and the all-pervasive smell of goulash, and scratched a corner of his mustache. “Isn’t one’s cafe here a little like one’s club in London?”

“The hell it is.” Halliwell surgically excised another morsel of chicken. “At a club you have a vote on who gets let in the door. Here anyone can come in—and does.” He glared across at a party of uproarious young subalterns in the sky-blue coats of the Imperial-and-Royal Uhlans. “The wine’s atrocious, and I think if I hear one more waltz, one more operetta, one more Mozart concerto, I’m going to open negotiations with the Turks to reinvade, and this time I’ll make damn sure they win. Has Farren been to Vienna before?”

“I haven’t been able to find that out,” said Asher. “Not under his own name, anyway.” Which might or might not be true, but was probably true enough for this century. “I have an idea he’d hide out in a house reputed to be haunted or connected somehow with… odd rumors.”

Halliwell nodded, thinking, and the Ober returned with the Herr Ober in tow, to collect the polished ruins of Halliwell’s backhendl and Asher’s Tafelspitz, and to solicitously attempt to interest Halliwell in dessert with the air of a man who fears his client will collapse from starvation if not attended. Halliwell issued instructions as to the composition of an indianer with an attention to detail that seemed to delight the Herr Ober’s soul, then turned back to Asher as the two waiters bowed and took their leave.

“I’ve heard of the Japanese doing that in the Chinese war,” said Halliwell. “Headquartering in haunted houses in Peking.”

Asher nodded. “I was there,” he said. “And yes, they did; complete with mirror tricks straight off the Paris Opera stage. It may be harder to pull off here…”

“Not as hard as you think.” There was a small commotion in the doorway—two other young officers, brave in gold braid, with bright-clothed girls on their arms, and all the rowdy subalterns calling out greetings—and Asher saw Halliwell’s bulging eyes cut briefly, unobtrusively, in that direction, making sure the noise did not represent potential danger. Not a reaction one would expect from a fat gourmand ostensibly preoccupied with his pastry.

His eyes returned to Asher. “There’s a lot of country people in Vienna, in off the farms to the east: up-country Czechs and Hungarians and Romanians and what-have-you, come to work in the sweatshops after spending the first part of their lives, to all intents and purposes, in the sixteenth century. People who live in the Altstadt don’t interfere if there’s a big old palace that’s shut up day after day—it’s part of the neighborhood, and one would never risk incurring the displeasure of a baron. But newcomers from out of town—they get inquisitive.”

“And which big old palace,” Asher inquired, “are we talking about?”

Halliwell grinned and fastidiously removed a mote of powdered sugar from his whiskers. “There’s three or four. One on the Haarhof is supposed to be haunted, and there’s a seventeenth-century palais on Bakkersgasse where people claim to have seen lights. All the Hungarian waiters in town swear the baroque palais built over the ruins of the old St. Roche Church on Steindelgasse is inhabited by vampires—it’s actually owned by a collateral branch of the Batthyanys—and there’s a house in Vorlautstrasse near the old ramparts where four or five people are said to have disappeared over the course of the last ten years. All of them have perfectly legitimate antecedents, by the way, winter palaces of landed families who have larger places out in the country.”

“Any belonging to Karolyi?”

“I think the Bakkersgasse palais belongs to the Prague branch of the family. Not to our bird. It’s a huge clan.” Behind the spectacles the pale eyes danced, as if pleased he’d anticipated the thought. “Will you need help?”

Asher hesitated. The bloodied ruin of Cramer’s face came back to him, glistening gruesomely in the reflected light. Gummed with blood, the silver chain had crossed the huge wounds on the throat. The shopkeeper in the Palais Royal had sworn the chains were pure silver. More likely tourist trade trash, the thinnest wash over pewter or lead. The boy probably hadn’t even heard Ernchester approach.

“I haven’t much to send with you,” Halliwell went on. “Streatham’s an ass, but he was right about that. Everything’s been cut since the end of the war. Still, if you need a man…”

Beyond the gilt-framed windows of Donizetti’s, passersby hurried along the pavement, greatcoats bundled tight about them. Mist had risen again from the Danube Canal, blurring the outlines of apartment buildings whose grandiose central staircases led to dreary attic rooms shared by cobblers, embroiderers, Obers, and Herr Obers and their wives and children and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. Between the buildings the shadows lay deep in narrow passages leading to the heart of the ancient city, where sunlight fell only at noon.

One of the possibilities on Asher’s very incomplete list of suspect properties was on the Steindelgasse: said to stand over the crypt of old St. Roche.

“No,” Asher said softly. “No, I think I’ll be all right on my own.”

The palace in the Steindelgasse was typical of the great town houses of the nobility in the old city: five floors of massive gray walls, wedged between an ancient block of flats and the town palace of some count of the Montenuovo family that was illuminated like a Christmas tree for a ball. Looking up, Asher could see the tall windows of its first-floor salons ablaze with gaslight, which partly illuminated the narrow street; crystal chandeliers were visible, and a portion of a god-bedecked baroque ceiling.