Traveling With The Dead(63)

“Are you quite sure you’re all right, my dear?” Lady Clapham touched Lydia’s wrist as they paused in the doorway of Monsieur Demerci’s town palace above the darkening Marmara Sea.

Lydia nodded though she felt exhausted. She would have been glad to remain home, as Margaret had done, pleading a headache after the events of last night. Under the opera-length kid gloves and deep festoons of lace on her spinach-green gown, her bandaged arms smarted. The one thing she prayed, blinking at the dazzling electric brightness of the reception room, was that she wouldn’t meet Ignace Karolyi amid the moving rainbow of men and women.

“I could do with a little champagne,” she confided, as two slim dark servants, incongruous in Western-style livery and powdered wigs, ushered them through the tiled doorway toward the receiving line.

“What you need is brandy,” retorted Lady Clapham. “I’ll see what I can find.”

Their host was a Sorbonne-educated Turk in impeccable evening clothes, though the ferocity of his black mustache sounded an uneasy echo in Lydia’s mind of the dark face with glittering fangs that had come so close to hers last night. His wife, a younger daughter of impoverished Silesian nobility, reminded Lydia of a highly bred rabbit in a yellow satin dress. She was probably the one responsible for the ridiculous eighteenth-century livery of the servants, and maybe for the electrical chandeliers, the candy-pink glass of the Venetian mirror frames, the tassled raspberry curtains and white and gold Louis XVI chairs, as well. Herr Hindi greeted her and expressed immediate concern: the beautiful Frau Asher did not look well, he hoped there was no indisposition. It comes of all this dull talk of business and jaunting about the old city; of course, a woman’s more delicate constitution would be susceptible…

Only concern for her husband, who was to have met her in Constantinople and had not been heard from. Lydia unfurled her spangled Chantilly fan and tried to look interestingly wan without appearing haggard. She had hoped that Herr Zeittelstein might be here tonight. From things her husband had said, she thought that perhaps he and the honored Herr shared a mutual : client, and she might glean some news…

Certainly! Of course! Absolutely! Jacob had only just returned from Berlin that afternoon, he had been rather out of touch but he would be delighted to help in any fashion he could…

And so, indeed, he proved. Jacob Zeittelstein was a youngish, strongly built man who in spite of evening dress looked more like a pipe fitter than his company’s representative to the Ottoman Empire. He listened to Herr Hindi’s introduction and Lydia’s explanation with the air of one who never forgets names, faces, or circumstances and has all information at the tips of his beefy fingers.

“My husband mentioned that he was in touch with the Dardanelles Land Corporation, you see,” Lydia explained, naming the bank account that had paid out a certified check for eighty pounds to a Freiherr Feketelo on 26 October. According to Razumovsky, Ignace Karolyi had left Constantinople abruptly, mysteriously, and under another name on the twenty-seventh. She had finally tracked it down, just this afternoon. “He said he was meeting someone in the company here in Constantinople, and I was wondering… It’s absurd,” she added, with a slight duck of her head. “And yet I can’t help wondering if they might have heard anything…” She raised her eyes helplessly to Zeittelstein’s. “But I haven’t any idea who they are, and I can’t seem to find out.”

“Dardanelles Land?” Zeittelstein’s eyebrows shot up. “The mysterious Herr Fiddat?”

“I believe that was the name.” Lydia sipped a tiny quantity of Monsieur Demerci’s excellent champagne. “They are clients of yours, aren’t they?”

“Ha ha!” Hindi trumpeted. “She’s up on everything, this clever little lady.”

“He,” Zeittelstein said, with a puzzled expression. “Not they. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, the Dardanelles Land Corporation exists only on paper. Quite typical, actually. All those corporations do is pay money to their founders. Fiddat…” He shook his head.

Lydia felt exactly as if she had—not by chance, but by sheer steadiness of eye and hand—shot an arrow clean into the gold.

She widened her eyes. “What’s mysterious about him?”

“Everything. Extraordinary.” He shook his head. “It was on his business that I was in Berlin. Having decided, evidently all of a clap, to install refrigeration in the Roman crypt under his palace in the market district, he must needs have it now, at once. When the valve on the ammonia pump proved to have been cracked in shipping, he would not wait, like a normal person, for an express to Berlin for a new one. No. Five thousand francs he paid—almost two hundred pounds!—for me to return to Berlin, myself, in person, the very day the valve was found to be defective, by the quickest possible route. He even paid for the lost business here in this city that it cost me.”

“They are very rich, these Turks,” Hindi interpolated sententiously. “Ill-got, I’ll wager, some of them. Refrigeration works, you must know, my dear Frau Asher, by compression of ammonia gas, much better than the old sulfur dioxide system. Sulfur dioxide—that’s a chemical compound—has the inconvenient habit of becoming corrosive and eating up the machinery which stores it. Ha ha!”

“Truly?” Lydia gave him her most radiant smile and timed precisely the turn of her head back to Zeittelstein, cutting off his further explanations with, “And was he pleased to get his valve?”

Zeittelstein shook his head. “I’m not sure, Frau Asher. This afternoon I find nothing but a heap of hysterical messages from his agent… Has your husband ever laid eyes on Herr Fiddat himself, Frau Asher?”

Lydia shook her head. “I thought there might have been some sort of proscription against Mohammedans dealing with Christians face-to-face—not ordinary Mohammedans, I mean, but that he might belong to some… some odd sect of dervishes.”

“Not any dervish I’ve ever heard of,” put in Hindi, in the act of neatly shagging hors d’oeuvres from a silver plate proffered by a servant. He grinned at Zeittelstein. “Not that you’d know anything about that, ha ha.”

Zeittelstein grinned back. “Well, as far as I know, in thirteen hundred years no Mohammedan has ever had a problem dealing with a Jew.” His grin faded and the dark, wise eyes grew thoughtful. “I will say this: his agent’s terrified of him. I can hear it in his voice. My own suspicion—and I can’t exactly say why I feel this—is that Fiddat is a leper.”

“How extraordinary!” Lydia said with a wealth of implied Please go on in gesture and voice and the tilt of her head.

“Nobody that I know has seen him,” Zeittelstein continued, and glanced over at Hindi for corroboration.

Hindi tapped the side of his nose. “Very mysterious chap.” He turned to catch the eye of their host. Monsieur Demerci strolled obediently over, pausing now and then to smile and speak to one or another of his guests.

“Ja’far, you’ve never laid eyes on Herr Fiddat, have you? Or visited his palace?”

“Oh, I’ve visited the House of Oleanders,” Zeittelstein said. “I spent the better part of ten days assembling that wretched compressor—brrr, that vault is cold! But always I am met at the door by servants and conducted down to the crypt by them… They stand and watch me while I work.”

“According to Hasan Buz—the ice merchant, you understand, madame,” Demerci said with a polite bow that made him look considerably less like a Turkish corsair and more like a former soldier made good, “it’s the same with his men when they make deliveries. The stuff gets stacked in the corridors—half a ton at a time—and the servants pay them and dismiss them. Hasan has to pay them double. They say the house is cursed.”

“Where is the house?” Lydia asked.

A servant, emerging between the heavily carved pillars that lined the reception room, gestured discreetly; Demerci excused himself with another bow and went to speak to the man while Zeittelstein said, “It’s in the very old part of the city between the Place d’Armes and the old Sublime Porte, near the Bazaar. If you were walking east along the Tchakmakajitar from the Valide Han, it’s the third turning up the hill. The house itself runs into at least three old hems and rambles everywhere, but the door I go through is there. You’d have to walk around the walls till you found the main door, if you wish to speak to Herr Fiddat, but personally,” he added, “I wouldn’t go there without an escort…and I don’t mean Lady Clapham.”

“Oh, no,” Lydia agreed, her heart pounding fast.

“Great heavens, no!” Hindi cried indignantly. “A European lady to that part of town?”

Tomorrow, she thought, looking around swiftly for the Russian prince. With Razumovsky and a couple of stout footmen from the Russian Embassy… God, don’t let Karolyi’s note have

been genuine ! It was lies, it had to be lies, and that business of One dose to you is an enemy was, James had told her, one of the oldest tricks in repertoire. She wondered if perhaps they should wait until dark to include Ysidro in the party, but common sense told her that even were Ysidro at the height of his strength—which he was not—it would be far safer to enter a vampire nest in daylight hours than by night, even if it did mean going in without an expert’s assistance. Besides, Ysidro might refuse to take part in an actual assault.