Traveling With The Dead(64)

Demerci strolled back, looking worried. “Just a word of warning,” he said quietly. “There’s more unrest in the Armenian quarter tonight. When you go home tonight, you may want to go through the Mahmoudie and the Bab Ali Djaddessi, rather than through the Bajazid.”

Hindi gestured impatiently. “They’re not going to call in the army again, are they?”

“I’m not sure. They have not so far. But there have been some rather… odd… murders, and it wouldn’t take much to set off rioting again.” He bowed again to Lydia. “It sounds ridiculously feeble of me, madame, to ask you not to hold the actions of the army and the government against my people. We are not barbarians, in spite of what you must think. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of us who are horrified at what the army does to the Armenians, and the Greeks, in this city. It is a terrible mistake to put the rifles of tomorrow into the hands of the ignorance of yesterday.”

Most of the people at the reception seemed very little worried by the prospect of further noting, as if such matters couldn’t possibly concern them: Herr Hindi essayed a few jokes about what one had to deal with in foreign parts. Lydia wondered if this was because they’d already been through so many riots since July or because they mostly lived in Pera, or because they were as absorbed in selling railway stock or army boots or plumbing fixtures as she was, under normal circumstances, in isolating the effects of pancreatic secretions. One or two of the embassy wives called for their carriages early, but Lady Clapham merely said, “Nonsense. Late’s better than early. By the time supper’s over they’ll all have gone to bed and we’ll be able to drive straight onto the bridge and never mind going the long way round.”

She was probably right, Lydia thought. In any case, Prince Razumovsky—who had a very Russian concept of time—had not yet arrived, and tired though she was, she needed to speak to him tonight. Lydia had the distinct impression that if she went to Sir Burnwell and asked for help in forcing her way into an old palace in Stamboul to find word of Jamie, the result would be a round of polite letters to the Dardanelles Land Corporation rather than the prompt offer of a couple of Cossacks with clubs.

So she waited, too keyed up to do more than peck at the lobster aspic and ptarmigan in green peppercorn sauce, and on either side of her Herren Hindi and Zeittelstein traded head shakings over Mahler’s latest symphony and the newest juicy tidbits of the scandal concerning the Kaiser’s brother and a Vienna masseur. After supper there was dancing, and Lydia allowed herself to be swept into a waltz by Herr Zeittelstein and a lively schottische by the parson of the American Lutheran Mission on Galata, all the while listening, watching, for sight of His Highness’ rich green uniform or the pantherlike grace that even without spectacles she knew as Karolyi.

She had worried a little about leaving Margaret at the Rue Abydos house with only Madame Potoneros and her daughter, though she suspected that unless she herself was there, neither Karolyi nor his vampire companion—companions?—would even try to enter the house. In any case, the bolt on the front door had been repaired, the one on the kitchen wing reinforced with another, stronger lock, and every window festooned with garlic and hawthorn.

“I can summon any into whose eyes I have looked,” Ysidro had said to her once during a long game of picquet on the train from Adrianople—they had been discussing Dracula. “To call one to me who is a stranger—to have them put aside silver, if they are wearing it, or garlic or any of the other flowers and woods which sear and blister our flesh—is a more difficult thing.”

Lydia shivered, wondering if the Turkish vampire, the interloper of last night, would have been capable of making her take off her silver necklace had he spoken to her on the street some earlier night or whispered to her in dreams. She had warned Margaret about Karolyi and given orders to the two housekeepers to remain until dawn. It was all that she could do, she felt, in the face of Margaret’s blotch-faced, white-lipped refusal to accompany her tonight.

Lydia was standing beside the heavily curtained window that looked out over the Roman walls to the sea, scanning the newest comers to the room for the tall form of Razumovsky—and even at this late hour embassy parties and members of the new government were still arriving—when a cold hand touched her elbow and a voice like wind breath said, “Mistress?” in her ear.

Earlier that day, remembering the sonnet, she hadn’t known how she was going to speak to him, hadn’t even known how she wanted to speak to him. But in the fierce electrical radiance of the chandeliers, he wore his alien, vampire face. It was the face that must show in the mirror—a skull’s face of hollow eyes and staring bones within the long web of hair—and that was easier to deal with than the haunting illusion that somewhere in those sulfur eyes lurked the remnants of a living man.

Under his cloak he wore evening dress. She almost asked him if he’d left his scythe and hourglass at the door, until she saw the look in his eyes.

“They’re making for the house of Olumsiz Bey,” he said softly. “Rioters—Armenians, hundreds of them, crying for his blood…”

“Who… ? How do they… ?” Then she said, “The ice carriers,” realizing it for the truth at once. “Of course they’d know.”

“And the storytellers.” Ysidro caught her hand, drawing her unseen by others toward the door to the supper room, to the kitchens, to the back stairs. “And the beggars who watch the shadows pass at night. They all know. But they were afraid, until rage and hate at their priest’s murder finally drowned their fear. Put this on.”

She clutched the folds of the sable cloak, followed him past the unseeing servants cleaning up the plates, past the scullery boys bringing up more ice for champagne… past the footmen and drivers keeping warm by the fire in the stable court and looking up worriedly at the rising and falling of voices beyond the roofs, and the occasional snap of gunfire. “What happened?” She paused in the alley and fumbled her eyeglasses from their case in her reticule—all things leaped into clarity, more fearful almost than the comforting dreamlike blur.

“A priest was killed. And then an old man, an inoffensive seller of fig paste who gave to charity and had more grandchildren than King David. Vampire kills, careless, deliberate. Meant to be found, and meant to enrage.”

In the narrow lanes behind Demerci’s mansion, rocky and steep as stairs, the voices sounded frighteningly close. Flame reflected on the wood and stucco, the stained and weed-grown walls. Lydia thought, If they find me, they’ll attack me just for being European…

It was very hard to think past that fact, that fear.

“Karolyi,” she said. “Karolyi and the interloper. After I wouldn’t cooperate. All they have to do is follow the mob and let it do their work for them.”

Through a gap in the houses, she saw by torchlight a man riding the box of a broken-down carriage—black-robed, gray beard streaming, waving a crucifix aloft. Men all around him raised flaming brands, clubs, the edged and pointed tools of marketplace trades. Women’s voices keened like harpies.

“And part of that work,” said that cool, disinterested voice in her ear, “will be to kill James and anyone else they find at the Bey’s palace. If by chance Charles or Anthea are there, they will likely be imprisoned, and in no case to flee. Was your builder of refrigerators among those at the house just now?” He caught her elbow again as she stumbled, guiding her through a space between houses where a river of filth sucked at her shoes.

“Off the Tchakmakajitar Yokoussou near the Valide Han, he says. Third turning up the hill…”

“I’ve seen it,” Ysidro said. “It was one of many I suspected, but dared not go close enough to be certain.” Thin shards of moonlight blinked on shirtfront, cuffs, face, white on black, increasing her impression that she was being hastened along the insalubrious streets of Hell by a skeleton. “With any luck we shall reach the place before the mob, and—if James is in fact still alive—before the Bey decides to kill him to preserve his silence.”





Chapter Twenty-One


Asher knew he must escape or die. He’d been wakened hours earlier by gunshots in the streets, had lain listening as the sounds of horror-driven fury, the random ululation of violence, ebbed and then flared like the sullen quarreling of a drunkard who returns again and again to the wellsprings of his rage.

It was deep in the night, probably not many hours until dawn, when he heard them coming toward the house. Even in the Tientsin riots, the worst he’d known, this was the hour when such things quieted. Something, someone, was stirring them up, rousing them anew when they flagged.

And for the first time he could hear, among the confused buzzing shouts, words that he knew.

Vlokslak. Hortolak. Ordog.

They were coming to burn the House of Oleanders.

The vampires will flee, he thought.

Olumsiz Bey will kill me, rather than let me tell others what I’ve seen.

The spotted light of the stairway lamp still outlined the open door.

The thought of getting up appalled him. Just breathing was like being struck in the side with an ax. He rolled carefully off the divan and managed to get on his feet—achingly glad that a Turkish divan wasn’t even as high as the average milking stool the floor icy under bare soles, cold breathing around his ankles and stirring the long cotton shirt that someone had put on him when they brought him upstairs. He found his clothes farther along the divan, and put them on sitting. The boots were the worst. His bandaged arm ached and the stab of his broken ribs left him breathless as he pulled them on, but he knew the streets of Constantinople and knew he’d need them.