Traveling With The Dead(32)

“I do not see that you have the authority to turn us away,” a slim man in an overemphatic waistcoat was saying as Lydia hesitantly crossed the road. “I do not see this at all.”

“Can’t do anything about that, sir.” The sturdy gentleman pushed back his flat cloth cap and remained blocking the entry. Even through the comforting blur of myopia, the glimpse of blackened rafters and fallen-in walls was horrible, and the smell of cold ash lay thin and gritty on the chill air.

“I shall write to the Neue Freie Presse about this.”

“You do that, sir.”

Lydia stepped forward hesitantly as the slim man stormed away to rejoin his party by the carriages; the sturdy gentleman fixed her with a jaundiced eye and said, in not-very-good German, “Nobody allowed in, ma’am.”

“Is… is a Mr. Halliwell here?” asked Lydia. If Dr. Fairport were officially an agent of Britain, it stood to reason the burning of his sanitarium would not go uninvestigated by the Department. It only surprised her they’d still be at it three days later. She saw the man’s stance shift at the sound of the name and said, Could you tell him a Mrs. Asher is here to see him? Mrs. James Asher.“

Without her spectacles, Mr. Halliwell proved to be a magpie behemoth, a series of circles of blacks, whites, pinks, and gleaming reflections that resolved itself at four feet into a heavy, pug-nacious face and brightly humorous green eyes behind small oval lenses. A big damp hand gripped Lydia’s while a second patted it moistly; the little clusters of would-be sightseers across the road glowered at this favoritism.

“My dear Mrs. Asher!”

“My friend, Miss Potton.”

Halliwell bowed again, an awesome sight.

“Strange business. Deuced strange business. Your husband didn’t send for you, did he?” He glanced down sidelong at her from his height, but she noticed his voice was barely above a whisper.

She shook her head. “But the telegram he sent me on his way here gave me reason to believe that he might be in trouble. He… he wasn’t here when this happened… was he?”

The green eyes narrowed. “Why would you think he was?”

“Because…” Lydia took a deep breath. In broad daylight and in front of half a dozen argumentative Viennese, she thought, they couldn’t very well drag her away in a closed carriage. She said, very softly, “Because he said he was coming to Dr. Fairport. And because I have reason to believe Dr. Fairport was in the pay of the Austrians.”

His glance flicked across the road, then to Miss Potton— discreetly out of earshot—and back. “You don’t happen,” he said equally quiet, “to have mentioned this to anyone else?”

“No. Not even to Miss Potton,” she remembered to add, mindful of her companion’s safety. “But I think it’s true. I take it,” she went on slowly, “that you haven’t spoken with Dr. Asher on the subject.”

Halliwell fingered his short-clipped beard, studying her as if matching the eggplant taffeta of her gown, the mint and ecru frills of her hat, against other things. Lydia wondered how James could possibly have played at spies for as long as he had: This business of not knowing what to say or whom to say it to was both wearing and unnerving. Presumably, Ysidro would come to her rescue if Halliwell were a double agent also, provided Margaret had the wits to run for it…

But if Margaret had been foolish enough to believe Ysidro’s farrago about previous lifetimes, goodness knew what she’d do in a crisis.

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” the fat man said abruptly. “And I was starting to think so before you turned up. Just the fact that the Kundschafts Stelle hasn’t let us into this place until this morning tells me there’s something fishy, though of course we can’t come out and say the man was working for us.”

He glanced again at the loitering tourists across the road. “Would you ladies be so good as to meet me for dinner at Donizetti’s on the Herrengasse this evening at eight? We’ll be able to talk there.” He nodded back toward the burnt-out shell of the house, where another man could be seen slowly picking his way through the mess of collapsed beams and bricks. “I can tell you now no one’s found any trace of your husband… and what we have found is not anything a lady should see.”

“God knows what the Kundschafts Stelle found before they let us in.” Halliwell’s small, rather womanish mouth pursed as he removed his gloves. In the saffron-drenched Renoir of color that was Donizetti’s without spectacles, he seemed to fit in, becoming curiously invisible in a way that he hadn’t in the unfamiliar environment of open air and bare woods. He reminded Lydia rather of some of her uncles, who grew like fleshy pale pot plants in their London clubs and never emerged into the light of day.

“I’ll tell you the truth, Mrs. Asher—if your husband were at Fruhhngzeit when it burned, nobody’s said anything about it to us. They’ve had the place closed off for two days. It was twenty-four hours before they even let the police in. Typical. When the Emperor’s son blew his brains out twenty years ago, taking a seventeen-year-old girl with him for reasons best known to himself, the original story was that he’d died of ‘heart failure.’ Government agents and the girl’s own uncle propped her corpse into a carriage with a broom handle up her back to keep reporters from learning two bodies instead of one were found at the scene.

“How did your husband know this Farren fellow, and how did you find out about Fairport?”

At this point the table captain appeared again, waiter and boy in tow, and a long and Byzantine discussion ensued concerning the concoction of Tafelspitz and how the canard Strasbourg was prepared this evening, and the relative tartness of the sour cherry soup. Rather to Lydia’s surprise, Margaret, who had all day been her tongue-tied self, plunged into the conversation with the absorbed interest of a fellow gourmet, winning the approval of both Halliwell and the table captain—the Herr Ober, Halliwell called him—with her opinions on capers and beurre brule. It was, Lydia reflected, an entirely new side to her traveling companion than she had so far seen.

Only when the little train of servitors was gone did Halliwell turn back to her. Lydia, after a moment’s pause to collect her thoughts, sketched a bowdlerized version of the telegrams she had received, the articles they had prompted her to read, her realization that Fairport would certainly be interested in Ernchester’s pathology and almost as certainly would be working for, or with, Karolyi. “I don’t know what, or how much, of Farren’s abilities are connected with his belief that he is a vampire,” she concluded carefully. “But I know Dr. Asher considered him a very dangerous man, dangerous enough to warrant his dropping everything to pursue him to Paris to keep him from selling his services to the Emperor.”

“Hmm. For which he got small thanks from old Streatham, I daresay. How did you know to come to me? Asher didn’t know my name until he arrived.”

“A friend of my husband’s,” Lydia said, not sure whether she was telling the truth or not.

“Your husband had dinner with me in this cafe Tuesday night,” said Halliwell. “There’d been trouble in Paris, one of our operatives was killed. Your husband seemed to think this Farren had done it, but word got to the police that your husband had something to do with it, even before the French police sent for him. Karolyi’s work, of course. Asher spent the night in jail, which isn’t as uncomfortable as it would be in London, and was going to stay the night at the sanitarium after he’d had a look around the Altstadt Wednesday. That was usual—the place was a safe house. Your husband had stayed there before.”

“And did he?” She picked a little at the delicate crepe on the plate before her, her appetite gone.

“I gather he didn’t. Fairport showed up at the firm in the morning asking if Asher had been heard from.”

“That might have been a blind.”

“I don’t think so.” Halliwell dabbed his mouth with the delicacy of a maiden lady. “He sniffed around for information, which I don’t think he’d have done if he’d had him under hatches. He wasn’t that clever. Later in the afternoon he came back saying Asher was wanted by the police, which I knew already, and why didn’t I go talk to them? He hung about and wasted my time and asked a thousand questions and went with me to the station, which is just what he’d have done if he were a double and waiting for Asher to try telephoning, though that may be hindsight on my part. If I were Karolyi, I would have shot him for it. Personally, I never thought old Bedbugs had enough red blood in him to work a double game. At about seven that night Ladislas— the Herr Ober—came to my table and told me a Herr Asher was on the telephone for me, that it was urgent. By the time I got there, the line was dead. About two hours later we got the first reports of the fire.”

“Oh,” Lydia said slowly. “I see.”

“Do you?” The green eyes glinted sharply at her. “I don’t. None of us do. You’re thinking Asher might have started the fire…”