"The Earl of Ernchester is a vampire."
Streatham-a fussy, chinless man whom Asher had never liked-regarded him for a moment with narrow surprise in his light blue eyes, as if asking himself why Asher would perpetrate such a tale and if it constituted a threat to his position as head of the Paris branch of the Department. Asher had spent a good part of the previous night, sleepless aboard the Dover ferry and the train from Boulogne, trying to phrase an argument that would convince those in charge to either have Karolyi arrested in Pans-scarcely likely, since Karolyi never went anywhere without diplomatic credentials-or to assign a man to follow him, to at least see what his next step would be.
Lack of sleep, hunger, and sheer exasperation when the green-painted door of the town house on the Rue de la Ville de l'Eveque hadn't opened to his knock at five minutes after nine had had their effect. Sitting on a bench under the bare trees before the Madeleine, watching the town house for signs of life, with the chilling threat of rain blowing over him for twenty freezing minutes, he had finally thought, To hell with it. I'll tell them the truth.
Streatham ventured a small chuckle, like an agent offering a read newspaper on the Underground to the minor clerk of some foreign legation: a feeler to see how the land lies. "You aren't serious."
"Ernchester-or Farren, as he sometimes calls himself- Wanthope is another one of his names-is perfectly serious about it," Asher said grimly, remembering the dead laborer on the train. Whether or not he's correct in his claims that drinking human blood has enabled him to live two hundred years, I know from my own experience that the man has abilities for which a foreign power would pay well. He can get past guards unseen. I don't know how he does this, but he can. He has an almost fakirlike ability to get in and out of places. And he can influence people's minds to an almost unbelievable extent. I've seen him do it." In fact, Asher reflected, watching the thoughts pass almost visibly across the back of the Paris chief's shallow blue eyes, he hadn't seen Ernchester do any of the things he described. Of all the vampires who had ringed him like ghosts in last fall's misty London darkness, Charles Farren, quondam Earl of Ernchester, was one of the few who had not, to one degree or another, used the eerie abilities of the vampire mind to trap or hunt or influence him.
And as he'd watched the yellow pinpricks of the Dover lights vanish into the blackness of fog beyond the Lord Warden's stern rail, Asher had reflected that that was one of the strangest aspects of the entire matter: that Ernchester had been the Hungarian's choice.
There were far more dangerous vampires in London. Why not one of them? Streatham's mouth grimaced into what was probably supposed to be a smile. "Really, Dr. Asher. The Department genuinely appreciates your concern, particularly in view of the circumstances of your leave-taking..."
It was a gratuitous jab, and Asher felt a sting of annoyance.
"What I said and felt about the Department when I left still holds." He set down his teacup. At least they'd offered him tea, he thought, something he was unlikely to get elsewhere in Paris. "If the Department were about to be dynamited, I don't think I'd cross the street to pinch out the fuse.
"But this isn't the Department I'm talking about." His voice was level, but cold with an old rage burned now to clinkers and ash. "This is the country. You cannot let the Hofburg hire the Earl of Ernchester."
"Don't you think you're exaggerating a little? Just because the Austrians are courting some hypnotist-"
"It's more than hypnosis," said Asher, knowing that if he lost his patience with this man, he'd lose all hope of getting his help. "I don't know what it is. I only know that it works." He drew a deep breath, realizing how little of the actual vampire power could be described. Even to someone who was willing to believe, he wasn't sure he could describe that curious blanking of the mind that vampires imposed on their victims, allowing them to move utterly unseen; the ability to stand outside a building or on the next street, or half a mile away, silently reading the dreams of whosoever they chose. They were born spies.
Of course Karolyi, raised in the hotbed of Carpathian legends, would believe, or be ready to believe.
I am ready to do whatever my Emperor requires... He'd imitated the glowing-eyed gallantry of all those other young fools in the officers' corps, but even then Asher had known that Karolyi had been speaking the absolute truth. It was just that some people had a different view of that word, whatever.
Nothing really changed, he thought. He didn't know how many times he'd sat in this discreet town house within walking distance of the embassy during the years in which he'd ranged all over Europe, going out ostensibly in quest of moribund verb forms and variant traditions about fairies and heroes and coming back with German battleship plans or lists of firms selling rifles to the Greeks. Those years seemed hideously distant to him, as if it had been someone else who risked his life and traded his soul for matters that had been obsolete in a year.
Streatham folded his hands, white as a woman's and as soft. With a kind of perverse relish, he said, "Of course, having been out of the Department, you wouldn't know about the reorganization since the end of the war and the old Queen's death. After South Africa, the budget was drastically cut, you know. We have to share this house with Passports and the attache for Financial Affairs now. We certainly can't ask the French authorities to order the arrest of an Austrian citizen just on your say-so- certainly not a member of one of that country's noble houses, not to speak of the diplomatic corps. And we can't spare a man to follow Karolyi around Paris, much less trail him to Vienna or Buda- Pesth or wherever else he'll be going on to."
"Karolyi's only a means to an end," Asher said quietly. "He's the only way you can track Ernchester..."
"And don't keep calling him 'Ernchester.' " Streatham peevishly aligned the edge of a report with the edge of his desk and centered the ink stand above it. "The Earl of Ernchester happens to be a good friend of mine-the real Earl of Ernchester. Lucius Wanthope. We were up at the House together," he added smugly. By "the House" Asher knew he meant Christ Church College, Oxford, and wondered if that was the same Lucius Wanthope who'd been one of Lydia 's suitors, eight or nine years ago. Streatham pronounced it Wanthope, swallowing the middle of the word after the fashion of Oxford. "If this impostor is going about calling himself by that title, the least you can do is not subscribe to the hoax."
"It doesn't matter," Asher said tiredly, "if he's calling himself Albert of Saxe- Coburg-Gotha. And I know all about the reorganization and the budget. Have him followed. This was the address on his luggage. It's just a transit point, but your man can trace him through the local carting company. He'll be hauling a large trunk somewhere today, possibly to the Gare de l'Est to go on to Vienna, more probably to some house here in the city where they can set up operations. Find out who his connections are..."
"And what?" Streatham chuckled juicily. "Drive a stake through his heart?"
"If necessary."
Streatham's eyes-too close together in flaccid pouches the color of fish belly- narrowed again, studying him. Asher had washed and shaved in one of the public washrooms at the Gare du Nord after dispatching a telegram to Lydia, but he was well aware that at the moment he looked less like an Oxford don than he did some down-on-his-luck clerk at the end of the night on the tiles.
The Paris chief opened his mouth to speak again, but Asher cut him off. "If necessary I'll telegraph Colonel Gleichen at Whitehall. This is a matter on which we can't afford to take chances. I spent my last few shillings to follow them here, to warn you of a threat greater, in my years of experience, than anything currently facing our department. Believe me, I wouldn't have done it if I'd thought that Ernchester was just a stage hypnotist with a good act, and I wouldn't have done it if I'd thought there was any alternative to the danger we'll face if he does start working for the Kundschafts Stelle. Anything Vienna learns is going to end up in Berlin. You know that. Gleichen knows it, too."
At the mention of the head of MO-2's D Section, Streatham's face had slowly begun to redden; now he fetched an exaggerated sigh. "It'll put the entire Records Section days behind, but I'll pull Cramer off Information and assign him. Will that satisfy you?"
Asher fished his memory and came up empty.
"After your time," said Streatham, with a kind of breezy viciousness. "A good man at his work."
"Which is?"
"Information."
"You mean cutting articles out of newspapers?" Asher stood and picked up his hat. Outside the tall windows it had begun to rain again. The thought of the three- quarter-mile walk to Barclay's Bank on the Boulevard Haussmann gave him a sensation akin to the grinding of unoiled gears deep in his chest.
"Everyone in the Department has had to cover several areas of work these days."
The enmity in Streatham's voice was plain now. I in very sorry about the inconvenience to you, and about the fact that the budget doesn't permit us to stand you your train fare home. Of course, you're welcome to a bed in one of the duty rooms..."
"Thank you," Asher said. "I'm just on my way to my bank." This Cramer is cutting
articles out of newspapers, he thought. "Don't let me keep you."
There had been a time, thought Asher as he descended the shallow sandstone steps, when he loved Paris.
And indeed, he loved it still. Against the cinder-colored street, the gravid sky, the white and yellow shapes of the bare sycamores, and the pale gold stone of the buildings seemed queerly bright. Windows were shuttered behind iron balconies; red and blue shop awnings seemed to blossom like flowers. Traffic was thick on the boulevard: cabs with their roofs shining with moisture; bright- colored electric tramways, hooting for right-of-way; stylish landaus, the horses puffing steam from their nostrils like dragons in the damp cold; men and women in daytime clothing the color of eggplant and wet stone.
A magic city, thought Asher. Even in his days with the Department, when he had made himself familiar with its thugs-for-hire, its safe breakers, forgers, and fences, he had still found it a magic place.
But he knew that he was hastening to accomplish his errands because he wanted very badly not to be in this city when the sun went down.
There was an ancient hotel particulier somewhere in the Marais district, owned by a woman named Elysee. Since the night he had been taken there, blindfolded, and seen the white-faced, strange-eyed, beautiful creatures who played cards in its brilliantly lit salon, he had not felt safe in this city. He was not sure he would ever willingly spend a night here again.
At Barclay's Bank he established his credentials and withdrew twenty pounds-five hundred francs, far more than he'd need for a prix-jixe lunch in the Palais Royale and his return journey, but the discomforts of last night had rendered him unwilling to trust Fate again. It was well after noon, but the Vefory was still serving luncheon. He settled in a corner with an omelette, fresh spinach, bread and butter that had nothing in common with the English travesty of the same name, coffee, and a copy of the Le Petit Journal. The next boat-train left at four. He had not quite time to visit the Louvre-only the booksellers on the quais, he thought, and a little while spent in the restful silence of Notre Dame.
It would be just getting dark as the train pulled out of the Gare du Nord, but that would be sufficient.
As he turned over the pages of the Journal, the top of his mind sifted and sorted the mishmash of Serbian demands for independence from Austria, Russian demands for justice in the Serbian cause, another massacre of Armenians by the new Turkish government, plots by the Sultan to regain his power, and the Kaiser's pursuit of ever faster battleships and ever more powerful artillery, while some other part of his thoughts seemed to see through those reports to the uses the Austrian Emperor-or the Czar or the Kaiser, for that matter-would have for a vampire.
In any direction he looked, the possibilities were terrifying.
Europe skated the rim of cataclysm, that much he knew. The German Kaiser was praying, literally and publicly, for an excuse to use his armies; the French were burning with pride, rage, and the old wounds of the Alsace. The Empire of Austria was trying to hold on to its Slavic minorities, while the Russians trumpeted their intention of backing up those minorities' "pan-Slav" rights. Asher had seen firsthand the weapons everyone was rushing to buy, the railway lines being constructed to carry men to battles, and in Africa he'd already seen what those weapons could do.
Would men who contemplated sending other men into machine-gun fire-or contemplated turning machine guns on soldiers with only rifles in their hands- shrink from handing over a political prisoner or two per week to someone who could slip into consulates, workshops, departments of navy and army utterly unseen?
He turned the page and, for a moment, saw their faces again in the dark of his mind. The coarse and powerful Grippen. Ysidro's enigmatic disdain. Bully Joe Davies. The beautiful Celeste.
The Earl of Ernchester.
Why Ernchester? he wondered again.
The weakest of them, strangely fragile, Grippen's fledgling and slave to the domination of the master vampire's mind. Did Grippen know the little nobleman had left London? Had made a pact with a foreign power? Had Grippen been approached first and refused?
No vampire, Elysee de Montadour had said, the gaslight gleaming queerly in her green eyes, will do that which endangers other vampires by giving away their haunts, their habits, or the very fact of their existence to humankind. A handsome woman, with nodding ostrich plumes in her hair, her green-black silk gown as stylish as if she had not been born in an era of panniers and three-foot coiffures. He remembered the cold strength of her hands, clawlike nails ripping open the veins in his arm to drink.
Why didn't Karolyi contact Elysee? he wondered. Or the Vienna vampires? Surely in that city, as in all cities where there were poor upon which to feed, one could find the hunters of the night.
He turned over the leaves of the newspaper, searching for mention of an insignificant laborer's body, found drained of blood on the boat-train. There was none.
"Dr. Asher?"
He'd been aware of the tall young man entering the restaurant, heading in the direction of his table; he'd identified his tailoring and his smooth, heavy- jawed face as English. The young man held out his hand, regarded Asher with frank brown eyes under an overhanging forelock of wheat-colored hair. "I'm Edmund Cramer."
"Ah." Asher took the boy's hand, gloved in sturdy York tan, in his own. "He whose absence from Records will imperil the defense of the realm against the French."
Cramer laughed and took the chair Asher pushed slightly toward him with his foot. The waiter appeared with another cup of cafe noir and a bottle of cognac; Asher waved the latter away. "Well, it's true the whole outfit is rather cumberish these days, but Streats could jolly well have upped for a train ticket, not to mention lunch. You did get to your bank all right and all that?" "You behold the spoils of my endeavor." Asher gestured grandly to the empty plates and handed the waiter two francs upon the man's reappearance with more cafe noir. "You have me followed?"
"Thought I'd find you in one of the cafes in the Palais," explained the young man. "Streats said you banked at Barclay's, and it's right round the corner. I'm on my way to the Hotel Terminus; thought I'd get a little more information on this Ernchester bird and his Hungarian friend." He flipped from his breast pocket the notepaper onto which Asher had copied the address of the Hotel Terminus, by the Gare St. Lazare. "The chief seems to think Karolyi's hot stuff."
Hot stuff. Asher looked into those luminous eyes and his heart sank. The boy was barely older than the students he was supposed to be lecturing today back at New College- and he breathed a peripheral prayer that Pargeter was taking his lecture as agreed if he were delayed in Wells. He couldn't let this beardless novice go up against a man like Karolyi, let alone Ernchester.
"He is deadly," Asher said. "Don't let him see you, don't let him get within arm's reach of you if you can help it. Don't let him know you're on his trail. I know he looks like he's never done anything but try on uniforms and trim his mustache, but that's not the case."
Cramer nodded, sobered by Asher's words. Asher wondered what Streatham had said about him.
"And Ernchester?"
"You won't see Ernchester."
The young man looked puzzled.
"That's his skill." Asher got to his feet, left a five-franc silver piece on the table for the waiter, and led the way to the door. "So we'll have to concentrate on keeping track of Karolyi. What money have you?"
Cramer's eyes twinkled. "Enough to get a train ticket at the last minute and not have to starve through the night."
"Something like that." It began to rain again as they emerged from the long doors of Vefory's into the arcade around the Palais Royale. The arcade was becoming crowded, the rain notwithstanding; gentlemen in top hats and expensive greatcoats from the Bourse and the nearby banks, and ladies in tulip skirts like brilliant flowers against the dripping gray monochrome of the hedges, trees, and winter earth of the central gardens. Halfway around the arcade Asher found the place he sought: DuBraque et Fils, Jeweler. Cramer watched in a certain amount of puzzlement as Asher purchased three chains, each about eighteen inches long, of what the jeweler assured him was sterling silver.
"Put this around your neck." He handed one to Cramer as they emerged into the arcade again. In many of the shops the gas had already been lit, and the light from the wide glass window winked on the bright links as Cramer tried to open the catch without taking off his gloves. "Ernchester really believes himself to be a vampire," Asher went on, winding another of the chains double around Cramer's wrist. "Wearing silver may just save your life."
"That far 'round the twist, eh?"
Asher looked up from affixing the second chain, met the young man's eyes for a moment, then returned his attention to the clasp.
"Don't underestimate him." The fit was close; Cramer was a well-fleshed young man. "Don't relax your guard for a minute once it gets dark. He's a lunatic, but that doesn't mean he can't kill you in seconds."
"Shouldn't we stop by Notre Dame for a crucifix, then?" A smile struggled on his face.
Asher remembered a lieutenant he'd known on the Veldt- Pynchon? Prudhomme? He'd had an East Anglian glottal stop, anyway-standing, hands on hips, staring out at the hot, dense silence of lion-colored land. Well, they're just a lot of farmers, when all's said, aren't they? "It's the silver that keeps them away," Asher said.
Cramer did not seem to know what to reply.
Even at the Palais Royale it was difficult to find an empty cab in the rain.
They ended by taking the Underground to the Gare St. Lazare and crossing the square to the Hotel Terminus. "Should we ask at the cab rank?" Cramer indicated the line of light, two-wheeled fiacres along the railings of the place, the horses head down, rugged against the ram, the men grouped beneath the trees, wrapped in whatever they could find to keep warm.
Asher shook his head. "He'll have used a cartage company. It's a big trunk. A London four-wheeler could barely take it; a Paris fiacre's too lightly sprung. We'll just check here..." He ascended the gray granite steps of the Terminus, crossed the dark Turkey carpets to the lobby desk, Cramer at his heels like a well- bred but very large dog.
"Pardon," Asher said to the clerk, in the Strasbourg French of a German. He stood as the Germans stood, the set of his shoulders like that he had seen in South German officers, but without the Prussian stiffness which might have gotten him little help in this city of long memories. "I am trying my sister Agnes to locate; she was on the Dieppe train this morning to have come, and nothing of her I have heard. The matter is I do not know whether she travels under her own name, or that of her first husband, who was killed in Kenya, or of her second..."
As he and Cramer crossed the square again, Asher said, "Karolyi's checked in, all right." He ducked between a bright red electric tram and the shined and chauffeured automobile of one of the old gratin, turned up the Rue de Rome and again on the Rue d'Isly. "Name's on the register, or at least the name of one of his lesser titles. Now we get to do the boring and soul-destroying part..."
"I refuse," Cramer said cheerily, turning up his collar against the cold, "to believe there's anything more boring and soul-destroying than combing through a hundred fifty French newspapers per day-and that's just the political ones, mind, and just the Parisian ones-in search of 'items of interest' to the War Department. Do your worst."
Asher grinned and led the way up the steps of the modest Hotel d'Isly, no more than a door between a state-run tobacconist's and a workingmen's estaminet.
"There speaks a brave soul and true agent." He had almost forgotten, he thought, the light camaraderie of the King's secret servants. The boy had promise. Pity he had no better teacher for the time being than Streatham.
Resuming the stance and speech of the Strasbourg German, he presented the clerk on duty in the narrow upstairs lobby with a tale, not of a vanished sister, but of a vanished trunk: a meter and a half long, leather-covered oak with iron strapping. A confusion in the Gare, misplaced labels... No? No. Perhaps the gnadige Herr could give some advice on the local cartage companies, such as a man might have summoned to the Gare? The city directory, to be sure, could be purchased, but it gave little idea...
"The Bottin, pff!" The clerk gestured. "Here is the list we use, m'sieu, when we have a client with such a trunk. Not all are on the telephone, you understand, but for such as are, there is the cabinet..."
"Wunderschoen! The Herr is entirely too kind. Certainly all the calls will be compensated for. Please accept this token..."
"It's up to you now," Asher said softly as the clerk returned to his counter and Asher and Cramer were alone by the wooden confessional of the telephone cabinet.
"You'll have to go along on foot and check the companies that aren't on the phone, but those are near enough to send a page with a note. I'll go back to the Terminus and keep an eye out for Karolyi. There's a cafe on the Rue d'Amsterdam corner of the Place du Havre, and another on the other side of the Rue du Rome; both of them command a view of the cab stand. I'll be in one or the other, or under the arcade of the Gare itself. If I'm not there-if Karolyi comes back and leaves again and I follow him myself-you wait for me there. The last train for London tonight leaves St. Lazare at nine. I'll look for you before half past eight. All right?"
Cramer nodded. "All right. Jolly good of you to point me out the way..."
Asher shook his head dismissively, rising to his feet and digging his gloves from his pocket. "Don't let either of them know you're on their trail. But don't lose them. It's more important than you know."
His smile was boyish. "I can only do my best."
Asher picked up the battered brown leather valise that had accompanied him throughout the day and nodded. "It's all any of us can do."
At the head of the stairs he paused, turned back to see the tall, stout form perched in the telephone cabinet, the desk clerk's list spread out on his knee. No money to get anything more than that, he thought, with a kind of despair. Paris wasn't a trouble spot. What experienced men the Department had were in Ireland or on the Indian frontier.
He almost went back.
And then what? he asked himself. Volunteer to pursue Karolyi myself? Let the Department have me again, to do their bidding as I did before?
But this was different.
It was always different, he thought bitterly, turning away. The only thing ever the same was that they wanted you to do it-and what it did to you inside. Something hurt within him, like old wounds at the onset of storm.
At the cafe on the corner of the Rue d'Amsterdam, Asher ordered a cafe noir and settled himself to wait. Being unable to read the newspaper, he asked the waiter for pen and paper, and amused himself, between watching the cab rank, by observing the passengers going to and from the Gare, making a game of deducing financial circumstances, occupation, and family ties from details of clothing and manner and speech, less systematically than Conan Doyle's Mr. Holmes but with an agent's habit-sharpened skill. This was a good place for it; he heard three kinds of German, five Italian dialects, Hungarian, Dutch, and a half-dozen varieties of French. Once a couple walked by speaking Greek-brother and sister, he guessed from the familiar form of speech as much as the resemblance between them. Later a small family of Japanese passed, and he thought, One day I'll have to study that tongue.
If he survived.
The clock on the Trinite struck four, and he knew he had missed the afternoon boat- train.
There was still no sign of Cramer or Karolyi.
Periodically the waiters brought him coffee, but seemed content to let him remain. Asher knew there were men who sat in cafes throughout afternoon and evening, writing letters, reading, drinking coffee and liqueurs, playing quiet games of cribbage, dominoes, chess. Passengers came in for a coffee, or to wait for friends. The sky darkened to the color of soot, and bright white electric lights blossomed all around him in the square. The cab men changed their day horses for the beat-up screws they drove after sundown-why subject your good beast to the rigors of night work?-and lit the yellow lamps that marked their origin in the Montmartre quarter.
It was almost six when he saw Karolyi. The man had a lithe deadliness to him, like a cheetah masked as a house cat; his wide-skirted Hungarian greatcoat billowed around his boot calves in his haste, and he looked here and there quickly as he sprang up the steps of the Hotel Terminus, smooth strong chin and beautiful lips touched by the arc lights that left his eyes in his hat brim's shadow. It was the way he moved when he thought himself unobserved that had first made Asher wonder about him, back in Vienna. That, and the fact that he was clearly too intelligent to be content to do what he was doing. Asher paid his bill and cursed the Department, gathered his valise and strolled casually across the square so as to be loitering in the dense shadows of the trees near the cab stand when the Hungarian reernerged from the Terminus' doors. He heard him speak to a driver, giving an address on the Rue du Bac. Because there was the possibility that Karolyi might change cabs, Asher simply told his own jehu, "Follow that cab-don't let him see us," and the man, a waspish little sparrow of a Parisian in a faded army coat and muffler, gave him a knowing wink and whipped up his disreputable old nag in pursuit.
They crossed at the Pont Royal, the lights of the Louvre shining on black water. Near the Quai d'Orsay, Karolyi dismissed his cab, and Asher followed him afoot along the crowded streets of the Left Bank. Beneath the trees of the Boulevard St. Germain, Karolyi picked up one of those bright-dressed, frowsy-haired women whom Asher had seen emerge, a little like vampires themselves, from the darkness as soon as the lamps were lit. He felt a pang of disgust, both with his quarry and with himself, but he continued to loiter just far enough behind to keep the man and his new companion in sight. They turned from the lighted boulevard into the dark blocks of old houses that had made up the quarter long before the Citizen King's improvements, stopped at a workman's cafe for a drink. Standing in the raw gloom of an alleyway, Asher heard the half hour strike from St. Clothilde; the whine of fiddles and concertinas reached him, and in the glare of the colored lights he saw gaudy petticoats swirl and striped stockings, and mouths opened in laughter behind the blue haze of cigarette smoke. The night train was at nine. He wondered if he had time to leave word for Cramer and still catch it, or if he'd have to spend a night in Paris after all. The thought wasn't pleasant. At a sound behind him, he whirled, his heart in his mouth, seeing in his mind's eye the cold white faces, the strangely glittering eyes of the Master of Paris and her fledglings... But it was only a cat.
If it had been Elysee de Montadour, he realized, he would have heard nothing. When Karolyi and the woman emerged from the cafe, she was clinging to his arm, her great brassy fleece of hair hanging loose from its pins and her head lolling. Karolyi, Asher remembered, had always been very circumspect with the girls of his own class or the daughters of the wealthy Vienna nouveaux riches, instead preying incognito on suburban shop girls or driving out to the country inns to seduce the young girls who worked in the vineyards.
Their footfalls dripped on the moist pavement. As they approached Asher's unseen post in the alley, a man in a striped jersey and sailor's jacket stepped out of a doorway. "Got a couple sous for an honest man out of luck?"
When Karolyi said, in his icily perfect accent, "Go and have yourself stuffed," the man grew belligerent, blocking his way; though not as tall as the Hungarian, he was beefier, standing too close, threatening with the aggressive curve of his shoulder, the readiness of his hands.
"That ain't no way to-"
In one move Karolyi shucked the woman from his arm, leaving her to fall back against the soot-black wall, and lightly reversed the walking stick in his hand. Before the beggar could utter a sound, Karolyi brought the stick around sideways, hitting the skull with a crack Asher could hear where he stood. When the man slumped, Karolyi struck him again, heavy, deliberately, full-force blows, as if beating a carpet. Unhurried. It was not a neighborhood much frequented by the guardiens de la paix.
The woman stood, swaying, her fist in her mouth, blinking at the scene in stupefied horror. She made no move to flee, and Asher wondered if she were capable of it. When Karolyi had finished, he turned, taking her by the front of her jacket and pulling her to him again, and she sagged on his shoulder like one drunk or drugged. A little light from the cafe showed Asher the beggar's blood, inky on the uneven pavement; the man's breath was a wheezing, stertorous gasp. Asher thought, He needs help. And then, If I go to the cafe for it, I'll lose Karolyi.
Silent as a lean brown cat in the shadows as he moved after the retreating pair, Asher remembered why he'd left the Department. Once you accepted the necessity of what you did-whatever my country requires-you might hate yourself, but you followed.
The house was one of those anonymous stucco-fronted Parisian dwellings in a narrow lane whose character hadn't changed since the days of the Sun King. Doors and windows were shuttered fast. As Karolyi unlocked the door of a downstairs shop, Asher ghosted through an alley a few houses farther up, counted chimneys, watched roof lines, and slipped into a clotted, weed-grown yard. Light shone behind shutters on the second floor, casting enough of a glow to let him see the broken- down shed that had once housed a kitchen amid a foul litter of rain barrels, old planks, broken boxes. All around him other shuttered windows made glowing chinks and slits of brass. The muck underfoot dragged his boots, the air nearly as thick, smothering with the stench of privies and of something newly dead.
He left his valise beside a rain barrel, scrambled with infinite care to the shed's roof. Through a broken louver he watched Karolyi tie the woman to a rickety chair. She was laughing, her head lolling back. "You like it like this, eh, copain? You want me to fight you a little?"
"Igen." Karolyi had pulled off his gloves for the task, tossed his hat on the stained and sagging mattress of the bed. His face was as calmly pleasant as the face of a statue, his shoulders relaxed, as if he shed everything from him with the knowledge that whatever he did in the name of his country was acceptable and forgiven. There was genuine banter in his voice. "You fight, my little bird. See if it helps."
Beyond them Asher could see an enormous trunk that occupied all of one side of the room: leather, strapped and cornered with brass. It stood open, and the dim light of the oil lamp glinted on the metalwork, filled it with shadow, but Asher could see that there was a second, only slightly smaller trunk inside. The inner trunk could still easily have held a man.
A noise in the yard nearly stopped his heart; a hissing and a scuffle; rats fighting, he realized, leaning against the freezing brick wall. He remembered the smell of some dead thing near the shed.
When he looked back, Ernchester was in the room.
"You're late." By his voice Karolyi could have been speaking of a rendezvous for tea. "The train leaves the Gare de l'Est at seven-thirty. We've barely time to dispose of this little eclair before the carters arrive."
He stepped to the giggling woman, took the soiled lace of her collar and ripped her dress open to the waist. She wore a corset underneath but no chemise; breasts like loaves of fallen dough balanced precariously on top of the ridge of whalebone and canvas, nipples like big copper pennies. A cheap gilt chain glinted around her neck. She winked up at Ernchester, and with a flip of one knee tossed her skirts up over her lap. She wasn't wearing drawers, either. "You got time before your train, cheri!' She leaned her head back and made kisses at him with her painted mouth, then dissolved into giggles.
Ernchester looked down at her with no expression whatever. He seemed smaller than Asher remembered him, thin and nondescript in his old-fashioned clothing. Though no vampire Asher had ever met appeared physically older than the mid- thirties, Ernchester seemed somehow to have aged, even in the past year. It was nothing in his stance or his face; there was no gray in the close-cropped fair hair. But looking at him, Asher felt that he was seeing an empty glass, dry and coated with bitter dust.
"I've dined." He turned away.
"Oh, come on, p'tit," laughed the woman. "Ain't you got no taste for dessert?" Karolyi muttered disgustedly, "Sacree couilles"-not at the woman, but at the delay and the needless risks-and pulled a thin silk scarf from his coat pocket.
With deadly delicacy he crossed it into a loop and dropped it around the woman's neck. She gasped, squeaked as her breath was cut off. Her body heaved and flopped, stockinged legs threshing; she kicked off one of her shoes in the death struggle, and it struck the wall with a smack.
Asher turned his face away, pressed his cheek to the cold brick, sickened and knowing that he was a dead man if he tried to do a single thing to stop what was going on. He was aware that from the moment Karolyi had picked her up, he- Asher-had known that she was going to die.
He was aware, too, that the noises in the room-the scraping and bumping of the chair, the obscene sounds the woman made as life blubbed and spurted and popped from her body-would cover the sounds of his departure, so that he could reach the Gare de l'Est before they did and see what train was leaving at seven- thirty.
He had been in the Department too long, he thought, slipping silently down the rain gutter. He knew there was nothing he could do to save that woman. The attempt would cost him his life, and cost England, perhaps, untold lives if the Kaiser got the war he wanted...
Coward, he cursed himself. Coward, coward... They had always said that the most important thing was to get home with the information, whatever the cost to yourself or others. Honor was another luxury the Department couldn't afford. The clock struck seven, a reminder that time was short. Asher struck a pile of planking by the kitchen wall. Rats streamed in all directions in a hideous scurry of flying shadow, and there was the renewed stink of death.
He picked up his valise, but something made him turn and go back. Where the planks had fallen aside he could see a man's hand, palm upturned in a thin slat of light from the window far above.
I've dined, Ernchester had said.
Asher bent and moved the plank aside.
The face of the man pushed under the boards had already been gnawed; in any case, in the dense shadows it would have been impossible to tell who he was. But there was a silver chain around the plump wrist.