Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Frau Doktor.’ He stood. But still he was braced to dodge, presumably in case she turned out to be armed after all.

  It was the scar-faced German Heller. The ‘Communist thug’.

  ‘What are you doing down here?’ she asked.

  He removed his knitted cap, and bowed ironically. ‘The same as yourself, I expect, Madame.’ He slipped his German Army revolver into the pocket of his decrepit jacket. An old-style French infantryman’s jacket, Lydia identified it, with the insignia torn off. ‘I think that you believe as I do, that this talk of vampires was all my hat, meant to frighten farmers and miners who know no better. I heard you asked to see that poor girl’s body.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Was she indeed drained of blood, as they said?’

  Lydia nodded.

  ‘Completely?’

  ‘Almost, yes. There was no livor mortis that I could see.’

  ‘Was there any blood in her hair?’ He pulled his cap back on. ‘Or behind her ears –’ he touched the place on himself – ‘as would be the case were her throat cut and she was hung like an animal, to drain out?’

  Lydia thought about it. ‘Not behind her ears, no. I was looking for livor mortis; that’s one of the places where it sometimes shows up.’ She frowned. ‘She wore a headscarf – one of those enormous white embroidered ones that some of the Slovenian ladies wear. Her hair was braided under it, I didn’t take it off of her.’ And I should have, she thought. ‘There was some blood on the collar of her dress. Her throat had two small incisions, four or five centimeters below the ear-lobe, in the carotid artery.’

  The kind a vampire would make with his claws, before drinking from the wound …

  ‘And did they look rather like punctures?’

  ‘Yes. Particularly, I suppose, to someone who isn’t used to coming suddenly on a dead body.’ She turned the details over in her mind again. ‘At the Front we were always dealing with puncture wounds from shrapnel, you know, or from splinters if a section of shoring was blown out. A man could bleed to death in minutes from even a small tear in the throat like that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the German quietly. ‘Yes, I know. So where did the blood go?’

  Lydia could only shake her head. ‘Dr Liggatt asked that, too.’

  ‘It takes only a little more time than that,’ he went on, ‘for a body to bleed out completely, if it is hung up by its feet, for instance. This has to have been done … somewhere.’ He gestured: big hands, like a mechanic’s or a miner’s, callused like pickled leather in the kind of fingerless knit gloves that she’d seen men wear for warmth at the Front. The scars on his face were mostly the kind that a man would get from shrapnel or flying debris, but one on his temple, older than the others, looked like a knife scar. ‘And drained into what? A bucket? One of the wash tubs from the kitchen?’ He spoke to her without euphemism, as if he did not expect her to be shocked.

  Very much, in fact, as Jamie had always spoken to her, even when she was a girl of fourteen. She tried to imagine Mrs Cochran’s reaction to such matter-of-fact discussion, or the response of the young ladies she’d come ‘out’ with during her Season.

  ‘Have you ever tried to carry a gallon or more of liquid in a bucket without splashing so much as a drop? That’s what you’re looking for here, isn’t it?’

  Lydia hesitated, then nodded. Let’s not get into the issue of why I’m carrying hawthorn stakes and silver nitrate in my satchel.

  ‘You could take it and empty it into one of the cleaning drains,’ she said. ‘They’re on every deck. You’d still have to bind up her neck to carry her to where she was left. And leave her someplace while you went and disposed of the blood. Even a drained body will leave a trail of drips.’

  His mouth – thin-lipped and curiously sensitive – quirked in wry amusement at this matter-of-fact view of the logistics of the exercise, and he said, ‘So I have – I’m sorry to say – seen.’ And there was, for a moment, a world of blood-soaked muddy wasteland in his blue eyes.

  And for that moment silence lay between them. An understanding. I say, didn’t I meet you in Hell last year …?

  Lydia took a deep breath. ‘But why?’ she asked, and propped her spectacles more firmly onto her nose. ‘That’s what I don’t understand about all this. Why would anyone do a thing like that? I mean, yes, obviously, they want to frighten people … Someone clearly wants people to believe there’s a vampire aboard the ship …’

  Anything, she thought, rather than go down the path of truth, or possible truth: that there is a vampire aboard the City of Gold.

  Why not just tell them what you know? Let Simon be dragged from his hiding place and killed?

  The thought turned her stomach. Despite herself, a childish illogic in her cried out against the thought of Don Simon, who had saved her life, who had saved Jamie’s life, and Miranda’s, being butchered by strangers.

  You would rather kill him yourself?

  She didn’t know how to answer that.

  ‘It’s why I want to find out where it was done,’ said Heller. ‘How it was done. It will tell us something – if only that we are up against someone who is smarter than we are.’ He rubbed the side of his broken nose with a callused forefinger. ‘I’ve talked to the young man’s mother and grandfather and though they swear he would never have harmed a hair of his fiancée’s head, many people saw her flirting with some Bohemian fellow – Horacek is his name – and saw Marek’s rage at her. So Marek could have set up this ‘vampire’ story to keep people from pointing at him. I don’t know the man, so I don’t know if it’s the sort of thing he would do. But somehow, I don’t think that’s the case.’

  ‘It’s certainly one of the stupider alibis I’ve ever heard.’

  Heller smiled again, grimly. ‘Exactly. Again our thoughts are alike, Frau Doktor. So what is going on?’

  Lydia shivered. What indeed?

  But having Heller’s assistance made a search of the hold much quicker and – Lydia had to admit – much less frightening, given the possibility that Don Simon might be down there and insane (and will the poison cause him to be awake in daylight hours?), or that Cochran’s thugs might be searching for him. They found no blood on the floor. Any of the tall luggage racks could have served as an improvised bleeding hook, but neither of them could discover any sign that one had been so used. Nor was anything untoward found among the trunks: no hair ribbon, no kicked-off shoe, no slip of paper with Meet me in the baggage-hold at midnight scribbled on it in Polish. At the end of forty minutes Heller said, ‘I think it is best that we cease our investigation for now, Frau Doktor. It will be the dinner hour soon –’ he meant Third Class dinner hour, not First – ‘and I think that whoever did this thing – whyever they did it – they will be watching behind them. They must be.’

  ‘I can’t imagine anyone so stupid as to believe that people are simply going to accept that a vampire did it …’

  ‘Can’t you?’ Heller’s mouth quirked. Lydia guessed his age at forty, but there was a bitter weariness in his eyes that aged him far beyond that. ‘Well, you are English,’ he added quietly. ‘One would have to go deep into the English countryside to find the sort of ignorance one encounters in the forests of East Prussia, or the mining villages far from any town. And I think the English less inclined to simply hate out of ignorance – hate the Catholics or the Orthodox, the gypsies or the Jews.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure of that,’ murmured Lydia, and Heller’s mouth hardened for a moment into something that wasn’t quite a smile.

  ‘Maybe. Certainly there are wealthy Americans and wealthy Germans, who believe that country folk are easily frightened by ghost stories. Just as they will believe anything,’ he finished bitterly, ‘that will justify stealing from the poor.’

  ‘You are right about that.’ Lydia shook her head, remembering Cochran’s words over dinner last night.

  She didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry that they had found nothing. Glad or sorry that whatever action mus
t be taken against Don Simon still rested entirely in her own hands.

  She looked perplexedly around her at the looming dark. ‘But until we know why this thing was done, we don’t know how much danger we’ll be in, if it’s seen that we don’t believe either the vampire story or the crime-of-passion story. Someone is clearly willing to kill …’

  ‘Exactly. And willing to kill, apparently at random, a girl who could do no one any harm.’

  ‘Might we …?’ Lydia hesitated. ‘Might we meet tomorrow, to continue the search? Quietly, at a time when neither of us would be missed?’

  The wry smile lightened the German’s eyes, and he removed his cap again. ‘Who misses a Socialist troublemaker at any time, gnädige Frau? The men in my cabin are a posse of idiots, but they know to ask no questions. But a lady such as yourself will be at all times surrounded – and there is your little girl to be thought of as well. You name the time of your convenience.’

  ‘Just after lunch? I’ll come down to the ship’s forward deck well.’

  He inclined his head, and grasped her hand as he’d have done, Lydia guessed, the hand of a fellow worker in some Brandenburg factory. ‘I am glad for the help, Comrade.’

  He listened at the hold door for a moment, very much as Ellen had, then opened it quickly and signed her to leave first.

  NINE

  Only a trifle late – and resplendent in diaphanous plum-colored silk with an aigrette of mint-green feathers – Lydia followed her Aunt Louise into the First Class dining room, identifying already the voices of her fellow passengers as much as the manner in which they stood and walked.

  ‘I looked for you at lunch,’ said Mr Tilcott, springing to his feet with an agility Lydia would scarcely have credited to a man of his girth, and guiding her to the vacant chair beside his. ‘I trust you were not indisposed? I positively could not eat a mouthful, worrying that you might be laid low by mal de mer.’

  Lydia would not have bet the hole out of a donut that anything could have reduced Mr Tilcott to self-starvation, but she smiled at him and said, ‘Thank you, Mr Tilcott. No, I spent most of the day exploring the ship.’ Which was true, in its way.

  Mr Cochran, Lydia noticed immediately as she sat, had managed to injure his left arm, and bore it now in a black silk sling, but Tilcott’s determination to monopolize her attention – and Cochran’s conversation with Dr Barvell on his other side – prevented her, for the moment, from asking what had happened. Though the sky remained gray and a sharp wind keened over the nearly empty decks, the sea hadn’t been sufficiently rough, in Lydia’s opinion, to make the stairways a hazard, and the millionaire, though in his sixties, impressed her as a fit and active man. Dr Yakunin was absent, and his place, beside the princess, was occupied by Madame Zafferine Izora: gazelle-boned, dark-eyed, and glittering like the night in a beaded gown of ebony fringe.

  Even without her glasses and across the distance of the table, Lydia suspected Ellen had been correct about the provenance of her hair.

  Izora’s voice, though deep, was pleasant, and she had an inexhaustible wellspring of conversation about everything, it seemed, except the War. ‘Quite the toast of Broadway, but since his wife divorced him he’s been involved with some outré suffragist poet or other … Oh, I understand Poiret’s on the verge of bankruptcy, and can you wonder? When you think of his designs beside those beautiful little gems Chanel is putting out; no one wears hobble skirts anymore! No, spaniels are completely out these days, M’am! The truly chic companion now is an Alsatian, or a chow-chow.’

  She added, lowering her mascaro’d lids as if gazing through the mists of time, ‘Cleopatra, you know, owned a black puppy named Amonophis.’ She passed the backs of her jeweled fingers across her forehead. ‘The dearest little thing. She’d trained him to take sugared wafers from her lips. It used to make Mark Antony almost weep with laughter.’ Then her eyes returned to the present and she smiled benignly, as – unsurprisingly – Mrs Cochran and Princess Gromyko begged her for further details about her visit (‘I was borne there in a state of trance …’) to the court of the Egyptian queen.

  Yet another belief, reflected Lydia, like religious prejudice, which didn’t seem to be restricted to Third Class.

  ‘Sounds like Madame Izora might be of use to you, Mr Cochran,’ declared Tilcott, signing the waiter to replenish his laitance de poisson on toast-points for the third time. ‘She’d surely be able to tell who it was who tried to sandbag you.’

  Lydia exclaimed, ‘Sandbag?’ startled, and the millionaire waved the remark away impatiently with his uninjured hand.

  ‘I don’t need spirits to tell me that,’ he said.

  ‘The most frightful thing.’ Aunt Louise laid down her silver fork – she was keeping up with Mr Tilcott on the fish course toast-point for toast-point. ‘One of those dreadful anarchists dropped a net full of sandbags from the boat deck down onto him as he descended from the promenade deck! His shoulder was nearly dislocated—’

  ‘He could easily have been killed!’ declared Mrs Tilcott, in tones which sounded less concerned for a man’s safety than indignant that such things could happen in First Class.

  Lydia’s eyes flared with shock and – her mind still on Don Simon (would he risk capture in order to take revenge?) – she asked, ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Just about two hours ago,’ responded the millionaire’s wife. She was wearing a tiara this evening, emeralds and diamonds so large that Lydia wouldn’t have believed they were real had the piece been on anyone else. ‘Of course we were all dressing for dinner, so nobody was around.’

  ‘Oh, it was cleverly done,’ growled her husband. ‘I’ll give the man that. I was lured there, M’am.’ He turned those sharp black eyes on Lydia. ‘“Meet me at six at the bottom of the promenade stair. Come alone.” And I fell for it, like a sap. If Kimball – one of my boys –’ Lydia had seen two of Cochran’s ‘boys’, loitering outside the dining-room door as she’d followed her aunt into the room – ‘hadn’t followed me and yelled, I might have been brained.’

  Six. Light still in the sky …

  ‘When I was a girl –’ the princess leaned forward like a crimson-enameled serpent – ‘my uncle Illya was killed by anarchists. Blown up by a bomb hurled in a train station at a train that was carrying Count Tolstoy – not the writer, I don’t mean, but the Minister of Finance …’

  Mrs Cochran exclaimed shrilly, and her husband jabbed with the fragment of artichoke he’d been eating. ‘That’s the kind of thing we’ll be having in America next, if these socialist labor bastards aren’t stopped.’

  His wife frowned at the word bastard – which Lydia, after thirty months at the Front, scarcely noticed – and in an effort to smooth things over, the princess continued, ‘They never caught the man who did it.’

  ‘Well, they caught this one,’ declared Captain Winstanley, a note of pride in his mellow voice. He stroked his silver mustaches. ‘A German Communist on the run from his own government; one of those labor agitators. He came aboard with Danish papers, under the name of Paulsen, but his real name’s Georg Heller. Mr Kimball got a look at him as he fled, and identified him—’

  ‘But I was with Mr – er – Paulsen,’ protested Lydia.

  That silenced the table. Aunt Louise regarded her as if she’d announced she’d been engaged in a spitting contest with the engineers.

  ‘Really, my dear—’

  ‘It’s true.’ Lydia glanced from Cochran to Captain Winstanley. ‘I saw … it sounds so silly,’ she added apologetically. ‘I saw what I thought was one of Her Highness’s little dogs, just vanishing down the stair to D Deck, and I ran down after it. I was afraid it would come to harm down there, or get itself lost. Mr Paulsen was kind enough to help me look for it, until we found it and saw it was really one of the kitchen cats. The big, fat, black one that hangs round the Third Class galley. We parted at six-fifteen. I know, because I didn’t want to be late to take a stroll with my daughter.’

  ‘There could be more th
an one Paulsen,’ declared Cochran truculently.

  ‘Oh, I’ll come down and identify him,’ returned Lydia with an earnest smile. ‘And even if he is a runaway German, I don’t really see there is anything wrong with a German, of military age, not wanting to go back to the Front and shoot at our men. If they’d all desert and go to America there wouldn’t be any more problem, would there?’ She widened her nearsighted eyes, as she had learned was most effective when dealing with her father’s curmudgeonly uncles when they’d come to call. ‘If there’s any question, I mean.’

  Captain Winstanley cleared his throat, and turned inquiringly to Cochran. ‘You did say Kimball was down at the far end of the boat deck …’

  ‘The man Heller’s a labor agitator,’ snapped the millionaire, as if that accusation were sufficient. ‘And I know for a fact this Paulsen is him! You can bet he’s bound for the States to cause trouble there. Stands to reason they’d try to put me out of the way. They all know me for a man who’ll give ’em trouble. A man who’s not afraid to take on them and the pasty cowards in the government too—’

  ‘Yes, but it’s scarcely a reason for locking him up for something he didn’t do. Is it?’ Lydia turned her gaze from the captain – who didn’t seem to be entirely certain whether to disagree openly with a First Class passenger – to Mrs Cochran, Her Highness, and finally Mrs Tilcott.

  ‘Well,’ said Tilcott, ‘not as such, no. Mrs Asher does have a point.’

  ‘The man should be locked up in any case,’ put in Mrs Cochran self-righteously.

  ‘That’s hardly the American Way,’ responded Lydia, ‘is it, Mrs Tilcott?’

  Cochran grumbled something and shot her an angry look, but Mrs Tilcott launched into a recital of why the heritage of Philadelphia was superior to such less-American venues as (for instance) Chicago or the South, and under cover of this, Princess Natalia leaned a little across the table to say to Lydia, ‘That was most kind of you, darling, to go seeking what you thought was poor Monsieur. He is, alas, addicted to low company, as all men are, though I assure you, my dearest Ossolinska would never be so careless as to let him slip away from her on shipboard! Dearest Zafferine –’ she turned to the psychic – ‘could you – might you – speak to my Uncle Illya tonight? Bring him, or my poor Aunt Katerina, to speak to me? Will you come?’