THREE
They reached St Petersburg in two days.
Asher had been clean-shaven during his earlier visits to Germany, and bearded in South Africa. The night before his departure for London he shaved the top of his head and dyed his remaining hair and mustache a streaky black, which sent Lydia into fits of giggles. Still, it made him feel a little safer when they changed trains – with a mountain of luggage including Ysidro’s double-lidded coffin-trunk – in Berlin.
Abroad, men in the Department called it.
In enemy territory, even if the King has a treaty with whoever’s in charge where you are. To the Department, Abroad was, by definition, always enemy territory.
And many, many people knew him in Berlin as the Herr Professor Ignatius Leyden . . .
Some of whom might have been wondering why the Herr Professor had so suddenly dropped out of sight after the South African war.
Ysidro left their first-class compartment some miles outside of Berlin – it was dark by that time, the train drumming full speed through the dreary wastes of Prussian pine-forests and gray little Prussian farm-villages – and it wasn’t until after the cab ride from the Potsdamer Bahnhof on Königsgrazerstrasse to the Settiner Bahnhof on the other side of the river, the inspection of travel papers, and the St Petersburg train’s departure shortly after midnight, that he came silently into the compartment again and settled down with a copy of Le Temps.
‘Was the Master of Berlin aware of you?’ Asher set aside his own paper, the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, remembering the masters of other cities he had met: the brittle and vicious woman who ruled the Paris nest; the dark and frightening shadow he had so narrowly escaped in Vienna.
The bleached horror in Constantinople that still sometimes burned in his dreams.
Compared with those, the chance of a brush with someone in the Auswärtiges Amt who might remember his face paled into a momentary contretemps.
‘I spoke with none.’ Ysidro turned a page. ‘And as I am not such a fool as to hunt upon ground not my own, I think that the Master of Berlin only watched my passage, if so much. He has the reputation of remaining like a spider in his cave, unless one draws his eye. All know this to be unwise.’ He folded the newspaper. ‘I was not aware of his attention.’
‘And your friend in Petersburg,’ asked Asher, after a long hesitation – did one speak words of reassurance to the Dead? – ‘will you be able to find her through her dreams, once we’ve reached that city? Learn what happened to her, and why she has not written?’
Ysidro was silent for so long that had he not known the vampire as he did, Asher would have taken the lack of reaction as a snub. The vampire absorbed the newspaper as he would have savored a zabaglione at the Savoy, with a delicious slow sensuality, as if he could taste the minds and hearts of those whose stories he pieced together. At length he said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘She was not vampire when you knew her in England, then?’
‘No.’
‘Then she is not your fledgling?’
Ysidro looked up for a brief instant, and it seemed to Asher as if – for the space of a single wingbeat of the Angel of Death – he might have replied. Then he only said again, ‘No,’ in a voice remote as the arctic ice.
So we may not have her help in learning WHICH German scientist is allying himself with the Undead, Asher thought. Nor in knowing how far things have progressed, and in what direction.
A few hours later, blackness still lying over the Baltic forests, Ysidro handed Asher a slip of paper bearing two addresses, and a draft on the Crédit Lyonnais for five thousand francs, then silently vanished into the corridor again.
At five minutes to eight in the morning, with dirty snow still blotching the streets and breaking ice bobbing in the steely canal below a rampart of dreary apartments, Asher stepped off the train at the somewhat confusingly-named Warsaw Station in the Russian capital. Cab drivers and porters swaddled in sheepskin clustered around bonfires built on the street corners; the air reeked of charcoal, burnt bread, and the frowst of unwashed wool. Little drifts of Russian, French, German, and Polish seemed to move like clouds above the muffled figures hurrying along the station platforms, and Asher felt the queer bristling surge of excitement that was only half fear.
Abroad.
Where everything was brilliantly focused, every color vivid and every scent the scent of peril. Where every sound was significant and the blood in the veins felt charged with electricity – only in fact, reflected Asher ruefully, what the blood was charged with was adrenalin, which Lydia had informed him was a common glandular reaction to stress.
He recalled what it had felt like to love being Abroad.
For two days he’d been reading War and Peace, so that enough of his rusty Russian had come back to him to engage porters and summon a cab. It was Lent – not, Asher knew, that that would slow St Petersburg society down much, with the exception of the Tsar and his pious Empress. As the porter’s wagon slithered and skidded its way towards the first of the addresses, a small town house near the Smolny monastery, the carriages and motor cars of the rich passed them in the foggy dawn-light, homeward bound from the usual very un-Penitential Petersburg parties. Against the silvery morning grayness, the painted plaster of the town’s buildings stood out like spring flowers – pale greens, lemon yellows, cerulean blues – all trimmed with white like the frosting on Rococo pastries. Bureaucrats, clerks, and middle-ranking Army officers already clogged the flagways, hurrying – Petersburgers were always hurrying – with the purposeful stride of men who fear to be seen by their superiors as less than passionately dedicated to the welfare of their pettifogging departments, bearing from one office to another an endless round of Russian paperwork. Overhead, the seagulls mewed eerily in the raw mists.
The city hadn’t changed.
Asher had the trunks disposed in the rather shallow – but pitch dark and windowless – cellar of the town house, locked the house thoroughly, summoned another cab, and betook himself to the second address, Les Meublées L’Imperatrice Catherine on the Moyka Embankment. There he took from his carpet bag garlands of dried garlic and wild roses – plants universally recognized as causing severe discomfort to the Undead – done up in netting, wreathed the windows in them, and slept until ten, when he had arranged for the concierge’s servant to bring up breakfast and draw a bath. He did not sleep particularly well.