Traveling With The Dead(33)

“Well,” Lydia pointed out, “my husband always said that one should burn the place down after killing someone…”

She regarded Halliwell with startlement when the fat man burst into delighted laughter. “It’s true,” she protested. “It isn’t as if there were other houses around to be damaged.”

“My dear Mrs. Asher,” he chuckled, “I can see why old James married you.”

“Well,” she said, “it wasn’t for my domestic talents. But I don’t think, if James had started the fire, anyone would have found enough of two bodies to identify them. He’s usually much more efficient than that.”

“No.” Halliwell’s round face grew suddenly grim. “And I can’t picture your husband killing them the way these men were killed.”

He glanced apologetically across at Margaret—digging her way happily through a towering castle of chocolate and whipped cream—and lowered his voice. “According to our sources in the Kundschafts Stelle, they were… horribly wounded. Bled almost completely dry of blood. They must have been cut in the house itself and later dragged into the open. I can’t imagine your husband, or any sane man, doing that.”

Lydia was conscious of Margaret putting down her fork, her hand suddenly shaking.

Halliwell went on, “And there were more than three bodies found. There were at least five, two of them so badly burned they couldn’t be identified; and they haven’t even finished digging out the building where the kerosene blew up. Bedbugs had a room underneath it, which we used for a hiding place for whoever was inconveniently connected with the local socialists or anarchists or Serbian nationals. If Asher was a prisoner, he’d have been held down there.”

Lydia looked again at her untouched dessert. She felt cold inside. She’d been a fool, she thought, not to guess that the newspaper would lie. She’d been a fool to think she could overtake him in time to prevent disaster. She said again, “I see.”

“We found plenty of evidence of the kind of man Farren is, if he could take out five men like that, as well as evidence of what he thought he was. Fairport had fitted up a safe room with silver bars—vampires are supposed to hate silver, aren’t they? But we haven’t found any trace of your husband.”

She took a deep breath. “And Farren?”

Halliwell shook his head. “No sign of him, either. Our connections in the Kundschafts Stelle tell us they were watching the Bahnhof for your husband all evening—the police really were looking for him that day—so it’s doubtful that he left town that way.”

He reached out and clumsily patted her arm. “That doesn’t mean he’s come to harm,” he said. Lydia looked quickly up at him

“For all I know, they’re still looking for him. God knows what Karolyi told them about him. I’ve asked, and they’re being damned cagey. And he could have left town on the Danube ferries or taken a tram and walked to another station. Anything. It may be he’s simply hiding out.”

“Maybe.” Lydia remembered one of James’ digressions on how easy it was to get out of a town that had become temporarily too hot.

Then she thought about the burned skeleton of the sanitarium and the stink of charred wood still hanging in the chilly air, and her heart sank, as if with sickness or shock.

“In the meantime, you can do me a favor, if you would, Mrs. Asher. Your husband said you were a medical doctor?”

She nodded. “I have a medical degree, yes, but I mostly do research on endocrine secretions at the Radcliffe Infirmary. The few women with practices all seem to go into what they call ‘women’s medicine’—and still have trouble making a living at it, I might add. And I’ve never been terribly interested in what my aunts referred to as ‘the plumbing.’ Did you need something looked at?”

He mopped up the last of his Sacher torte and gazed regretfully at the polished white porcelain plate. Then he propped his glasses, frowning. “None of the laboratories survived—they were all directly over the kerosene stores—but we do have Fairport’s notebooks from his study. The place was pretty badly charred, but those we managed to recover. He was a British citizen and be damned to who paid the rent on the sanitarium. I suspect the Kundschafts Stelle’s going to want to see them eventually, but if you’d be good enough to have a look through them and tell us anything that it might be worthwhile for us to know, I’d appreciate it. I have them here.”

He held up a battered leather satchel, overloaded and strapped together with rope where its buckles would not hold. “We’d like to know what he was working on. If you still have your list of his articles…”

Lydia nodded. “Aging,” she said. “Blood. Immortality.” Halliwell grunted. “No wonder he fell for Farren.”

“Yes,” Lydia said quietly. “No wonder.”

In light of the articles she had read, Fairport’s experiments—with blood, with saliva, with mucus, with the chemistry of the brain and the glands—came into crystalline focus.

The man who seeks to live forever, Ysidro had said.

He was right, she thought, turning over the cryptic notes while Margaret dozed in a welter of crocheted snowflakes. He was right.

Bedford Fairport was quite clearly a man possessed with the fanatic determination to discover whence came the deterioration of age, and an even greater determination to learn how to reverse its effects.

In the article in which he had mentioned Ignace Karolyi’s donation of the sanitarium and funds, Fairport had spoken of his own “premature aging.” Lydia had encountered reports of such progeria dating from the sixteenth century, and was of the opinion that some unknown vitamin deficiency or breakdown was responsible. She pushed up her spectacles on her forehead, rubbed her eyes. Of course he would grasp at rumors of immortality.

A glance at the reagents and vitamin solutions told Lydia that his experiments had been appallingly costly. He’d used orangutans as subjects two dozen times in the past few years, and Lydia knew from her own experiments how expensive the animals were. Unnecessary, too, she thought. In most experiments with deficiency syndromes, pigs seemed to work just as well. A double check showed her that he used orangutans to repeat experiments done on pigs, refusing to take what were, to her eye, quite clear failures as anything more than individual variations in data. Toward the end he’d taken to rerunning additional tests on everything, insistently investigating smaller and smaller points, like a man clutching at straws. Even if Fairport had private funds, he’d have to be staggeringly wealthy to continue such work as long as he had.

And she knew that if he had family money—if he’d been connected to one of the wealthier families in England—her aunt Lavinia would have steered her toward him at some point in her own Oxford days as a potential reference, partner, or colleague.

He’d betrayed James. Taken him prisoner. They haven’t even finished digging out the building where the kerosene blew up… If Asher were a prisoner, it would have been down there…

James might have gotten out of town, she told herself defiantly. The police were looking for him. He could have taken a tram, as he always said was best, or a ferry.

Bled almost completely dry of blood…

Tears fought their way to her throat, and grimly she forced them back. We don’t know anything yet. We don’t know.

“An entire notebook of the historical and folkloric.”

The soft voice nearly startled her out of her chair. Looking up, she saw Ysidro sitting opposite, a green cloth-bound ledger open before him. Past the vampire’s shoulder the mantel clock was visible, and Lydia was mildly surprised to see that it was now close to three in the morning.

“I hadn’t got that far.” She reached back to twist her heavy braid into a less schoolgirlish knot. The cook—an excellent woman of broad smiles and a completely incomprehensible language—had left Sacher torte, bread and butter, and a succulent bunch of Italian grapes, should either dziewczyna suddenly find herself in peril of starvation before morning light, and the smell of the coffee warming on the little primus stove was heavy in the room. “And folklore would only be speculative. Even so-called ‘historical’ personalities—rumors about Ninon de l’Enclos and Cagliostro and Count What’s-his-name in Paris…”

“Scarcely speculative at the end.” Ysidro turned the ledger, slid it across the table to her, hands like old ivory in the lamplight.

Old man who lived to be a thousand, related the wandering script. Brzchek Village. Woman who lived to be five hundred (wove moonlight). Okurka Village. Woman who used moonlight to make herself beautiful forever. Salek Village. Man who made a pact with devil, lived forever. Bily Hora Village. Woman who bathed in blood, lived five hundred years. Brusa, Bily Hora, Salek.

She looked up, puzzled. “It sounds like the sort of thing James does—talking to storytellers and grannies and old duffers at country inns.”

“I expect Fairport observed the way James went about his questioning and turned it to his own usages.” He tilted his head, moved the pile of invoices so he could read the top sheet. His pale eyebrows flexed. “One can, in any case, see the trend of his mind. But orangutans? I have spoken to those who saw James leave this city.”