Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  Dr Liggatt squeezed and thrust his angular way through the door, with the vessel’s bantam-weight First Officer, Mr Theale, a couple of burly deck stewards and a translator. The translator was repeating, in Russian, Italian, and laborious German, ‘Please to clear cabin. Everyone, please to clear corridor. Admit these people out. Everything be take care of – please to clear cabin.’

  Pani Marek, holding the hand of the weeping young sister and speaking to her quietly, whirled upon the officers with a perfect storm of Slovene. Tania and three other women in the room added their voices to the din, while the girl Ariane held the grieving mother tight.

  ‘For love of God, sir,’ said Father Kirn to Liggatt in German, ‘this woman is the child’s mother!’

  The men hesitated, then Mr Theale said, ‘Stand over there for a moment, if you would, Father, with her. Does she have a husband? A relative? They may remain, but we must have room. Yes,’ he added, as Lydia rose and approached Dr Liggatt, ‘Mrs Asher may remain as well. The rest of you, please clear out and give us room.’

  Ariane, edging out into the corridor, gently took charge of the two young girls who’d been crowded into the cabin’s farthest corner: dark and tangle-haired and dressed in gaudy cast-offs, aged – Lydia guessed – twelve and ten. They looked enough like the mother to be the dead child’s sisters. They clung to the older girl, their faces soaked with tears: guilt as well as grief. They were the ones who’d been playing with her, dodging about the decks in the chilly evening before another night – Lydia looked around her in pity and distaste – of the suffocating closeness of a cabin overheated by at least ten other sleeping bodies.

  Stepping back beside Father Kirn, Lydia whispered, ‘Where was she found? And when?’

  ‘Just after midnight,’ said the old priest. ‘When Luzia was found not to be in her bed, we began to search. Even those who believed that poor Pavlina Jancu had been killed by Valentyn Marek, thought themselves again of the upír. I was one of those who found her –’ he averted his face quickly, wrinkled eyelids shutting as if to close out the sight of the crumpled little body in her mended hand-me-downs – ‘at the foot of the stairway, in the – what is it called? The gangway well.’ He pronounced these last words carefully, in English. ‘Not a hundred feet from this place. This thing, this devil, it is merciless—’

  ‘Had you been up and down that stairway before? During the search? Had anyone?’

  The old man shook his head, tears tracking down through the wrinkles of his face. ‘How could they have, and not have seen her? The crew uses that stair, but mostly here, we go up and down the larger stair near the dining room. Does that matter? The child is dead, she is dead, even the least of these, the children of Ishmael, is a soul in the eyes of Christ.’

  Lydia bit back the comment that she had seen Father Kirn stop two of the little Greek children from playing with the three gypsy sisters only that afternoon.

  ‘And the thing that killed her – the thing that drank her blood – it is still somewhere on this ship. In the darkness, in the thousand corners where no one goes. But we will find it.’

  He turned to look at Dr Liggatt, kneeling with thermometer and probes beside the cot, and his dark eyes gleamed with sudden, somber fury. ‘There is great evil in this world, Madame. And not all of it concerns guns, and aeroplanes, and the shouting of the War. Some of it is deeper, and older, and more terrible. But it is given to each man, that he has the power at least to stop that evil. And that we will do, Madame. That we will do.’

  Gathering up his small supply of the wafer in its box, he crossed himself again, and edged his way to the little gypsy’s mother and sisters, to offer them what comfort he could.

  All Friday morning, Asher spent at the embassy, alternately drinking tea with Cyril Britten and thumbing through reports on various persons with whom Spenser Cochran was connected. He was easily able to work in quiet, for the old head clerk was in and out of the room: word had just reached the ambassador that the Tsar of Russia had abdicated, not only for himself but also on behalf of his fragile son. As the next-in-line – the Tsar’s scapegrace younger brother – was refusing the title (and the responsibility for a rapidly-destabilizing government in the midst of a horrifying war – Asher was fairly certain that in his place, he’d turn it down as well) until elections could be held, the embassy was in an uproar. Whenever the head clerk was called away, Asher took advantage of his absence by asking the assistant that Britten had assigned him – another man in his eighties who, like Britten, knew every file and dossier in the place, but had to be reminded of who the ambassador was and who the Allies were fighting – for documents pertaining to many subjects that had nothing to do with Spenser Cochran, but which he suspected might come in useful later.

  He helped himself to some embassy stationery and a copy of the ambassador’s signature on his way out.

  In the afternoon, armed with credentials and letters of introduction as questionable as the major’s uniform that he wore when on his own side of the lines, he made his way to the Quai des Orfèvres and found out everything that the Paris Sûreté knew about Dr Louis Barvell. Which, it turned out, was quite a bit.

  ‘He’s a Belgian,’ said the one-armed clerk who showed Asher into the department library. ‘Studied in Louvain, though his name was Hendrick Doumont at the time. He seems to have specialized in occult lore and chemistry. Though he never obtained a medical license, he set himself up in Paris as a “nerve doctor” and did a fair business among wealthy women: I don’t believe there’s ever been a record of him paying his own rent.’ He limped to a cabinet and brought back a folder of newspaper cuttings, which included a photograph that seemed to have been taken on the front steps of the Hotel de Crillon. Barvell, a tall, broad-shouldered man of dark good looks and natty tailoring, had evidently realized he was being photographed and was half-turned away from the camera. The middle-aged woman clinging to his arm wore an expression of shocked dismay.

  ‘He’s a good-looking fellow,’ the clerk went on, an ironic sparkle in his dark Gascon eyes. ‘Seems also to have a talent for getting people to hand him money. He’s well-known these days in what they call “occult circles”, both here and in America.’ He fetched another photograph – equally blurred – with the clumsiness of one still learning to maneuver with a missing limb and what was clearly a shattered pelvis. ‘America’s where he went – in a hurry – in … Let’s see … 1909.’

  ‘Fraud?’ inquired Asher. ‘Or women?’

  ‘Accusations –’ the clerk put a world of implication in the cock of his brow – ‘which were later dropped. When he returned to Paris in 1913 – which is when he started calling himself Barvell – he touted himself as a mentalist healer, and it was thought prudent to keep an eye on him, though nothing was ever proven about the client of his who disappeared. But it was noted that from that point the rent on his apartment was paid by an American who had controlling interests in German manufacturing and mines.’ The man shrugged, and made that characteristically French back-and-forth waggle with his remaining hand. ‘En effet, many Americans had – and indeed, have – investments in Germany.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Asher, ‘that Dr Barvell – and his employer – took ship for New York only Wednesday. Would you happen to know if his apartment is for rent again?’

  ‘It is not. The rent has been paid up for six months.’ He handed Asher another file. ‘You have perhaps information which can be added to our store, on the subject either of Dr Barvell or M’sieu Cochran?’

  ‘At the moment, no,’ lied Asher blandly. ‘But I will certainly communicate with you with whatever I might learn.’

  The ambassador’s signature – and a few carefully chosen hints about Spenser Cochran’s German investments – served to get Asher into Louis Barvell’s apartment on the Rue Monceau, in company with a small white-haired gentleman named Lepic who had, like Asher and (Asher guessed) nearly everyone else he’d encountered at the Sûreté, retired from the service and been re-calle
d to duty when every available man under the age of forty-five was drawn to the Front. He didn’t expect to find much, and wasn’t disappointed. The apartment was one of the thousands constructed during the Second Empire, four spacious rooms on the ‘premier étage’ overlooking the building’s courtyard with wide windows, electricity laid on (wartime shortages permitting), and its own kitchen. One of the rooms, though stripped of all books, papers, and references, had clearly been used as a laboratory.

  A few chemicals remained, in bottles in the cabinet: silver nitrate, silver chloride, and distilled extracts of things like garlic and aconite. Though not a chemist himself, Asher had been tasked to pilfer many chemical formulae in his time and recognized the names of the powders and salts. He recognized also a number of botanicals, from his folkloric researches. Everything was neatly labeled, and he copied the information. The equipment on a lower shelf was mostly standard, familiar to him from Lydia’s laboratory at the end of their garden on Holywell Street. He listed those, too.

  In the unswept corners of the room he encountered shavings of silver mixed with the dust, and shavings of sawdust.

  Trestles in a corner stood precisely as they would stand, to support a coffin.

  He turned back to the door, where his white-haired Sûreté guide and the landlady stood with the keys. ‘Who lives in the apartment above this?’

  The landlady’s tone was flat. ‘The gentleman who rents this apartment also rents the one above. No one lives there.’ And, as Asher’s eyebrows went up, she continued, ‘It is not my affair, so long as they pay on time.’

  Asher responded, ‘No, indeed, Madame.’

  Smaller and lower-ceilinged, those rooms contained nothing, not even furniture. The uncurtained windows were shuttered, and cobwebs stitched those shutters together. Fragments of web likewise stirred in the corners, like the ghosts of fairies slain by the sound of siege guns and falling bombs.

  ‘Whatever it is he’s doing,’ said Asher, as he and his quiet guide descended to the street once more, ‘he – or Cochran – doesn’t want the neighbors to overhear. And given the crowding in Paris, and the demands for apartments, to keep such a place empty for four years argues a positive mania for privacy.’

  ‘En effet,’ replied Lepic. ‘So much so, that when Barvell’s flat was burglarized a few years ago – in May of 1913, it was – no report of it was made, though our sources tell us that Barvell was most exercised over the disappearance of several of his notebooks. Is this not true, Madame?’ He glanced back at the landlady, standing in the doorway behind them.

  ‘What my tenants choose to do and not to do is none of my concern, M’sieu.’ She closed the door.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ the policeman continued, ‘I trust you have no objection to my reporting our conversation to M’sieu Ladoux?’ He named the head of France’s counterintelligence division.

  ‘None in the least.’

  ‘And what is it, might I ask –’ Lepic offered him a cigarette, at which Asher shook his head – ‘which has prompted your interest in this American and his tame professor?’

  Asher shrugged. ‘They give me names, and ask for “anything you can find”. Sometimes I learn what it’s all about, sometimes I don’t.’ He glanced down at the shorter man, who was regarding him with evident disbelief in his light-green eyes. ‘But this should interest them.’

  TWELVE

  ‘There are storerooms –’ Lydia consulted her printed plan of the City of Gold – ‘at the farthest extent of the bow, on Decks D, E, F –’ she paused, propped her spectacles, and looked around at the place by the hard glare of the electrical fixtures which drowned whatever morning light might have come down from three decks above – ‘and down below here on G.’ The City’s crew had already been through that morning. Any traces of blood – or footprints – had been swabbed away. ‘That stairway goes right down through the ship.’

  Not, she reflected, that many clues would have survived the comprehensive trampling of every Third Class passenger who’d swarmed this portion of Deck F throughout last night, either searching for Luzia Pescariu or clamoring for news after her body had been found.

  Georg Heller touched her elbow, guided her down the low-ceilinged passageway away from the fore gangway well itself, to the door of the storeroom at the end, nearly hidden in shadow. ‘Can you pick the locks?’

  Lydia glanced over her shoulder, at the long artery that fed not only the Third Class cabins in this bow section of F Deck, but, farther on, the noisy cavern of the engine rooms and coal bunkers that made up the whole center section of the lower decks. Beneath the heavy vibration of the machinery surged the mutter of talk as the ‘black gang’ – as the stokers were called – came and went from their quarters on the deck above: as many white men as blacks, but everybody – by this hour of their shift – universally grimed in coal dust and grease.

  ‘I shouldn’t care to try it at this hour.’

  A cabin door on the other side of the open well of the gangway creaked; the one-eyed man Vodusek slipped out, crossed quickly to a locker in the shadows under the stairs, and brought something out of his trouser pocket – a picklock or a key, thought Lydia. A noise down the main corridor made him turn his head, however, and he startled at the sight of Lydia and Heller. Touching his cap, he said casually, ‘G’n morgen,’ and strolled away in the direction of the engines, slipping whatever it was – key or picklock – back into his pocket. Turning a corner, he disappeared into the tangle of side-halls and Third Class cabins.

  Heller raised his eyebrows and Lydia said, ‘It’s none of our business …’

  ‘One never knows,’ returned the German, ‘what may turn out to be one’s business.’

  With the guilty sensation of a schoolgirl in mischief, Lydia crossed to the locker and made short work of its Chubb cylinder lock. The electric ceiling-fixture nearby showed them only shelves containing bottles of ammonia, Jeyes Fluid, a number of folded canvas tarpaulins, bleach and sponges. There was no sign of blood, but, tucked behind the sponges, was half a bottle of Glenlivet (of the sort Lydia had glimpsed behind the bar in the First Class lounge the previous evening) and two packets of Turkish cigarettes.

  She made a noise of distaste, and Heller calmly extracted a cigarette from each packet. ‘Even if he notices, he can’t very well report the loss. Like as not he’ll just think he miscounted. Would you like one?’ He held it out.

  Smiling a little, Lydia shook her head.

  Voices in the stairwell high above made him close the locker door quickly, and steer Lydia away in the direction Vodusek had gone, tucking one of the cigarettes into the pocket of his tattered jacket and putting the other in his mouth.

  ‘Are keys that easy to steal?’

  ‘I expect he borrowed one.’ The German shrugged. ‘He could get into the ship’s machine shop easily enough: he was a machinist at the Vulcan shipyard in Hamburg, before they started transferring men to the Front. No blood, at any rate,’ he added, grimly, and fished forth a steel lighter, such as the men had carried in their pockets at the Front. ‘Or candy.’

  Lydia said, very quietly, ‘No.’ She wondered if, when they found the hiding place of the vampire, there would be a box of chocolates tucked in whatever he – or she – was using for a protective coffin.

  As if he sensed her thoughts, Heller said, ‘What you have told me, of the smell of sweets on the little gypsy’s lips – and of wash-water on her fingers …’ He grimaced. ‘To a poor child, and that young, a friendly man’s whisper that he will give her chocolate, that is enough to make her hide from her sisters, sneak away to meet him. They starve for sweets, these little ones here.’

  Lydia remembered how the children had greeted Tania with joy, as the dispenser of treats. Evidently sweets weren’t difficult to acquire, if one scraped acquaintance with the kitchen staff, who seemed to have their own ideas about what First Class amenities could be quietly peddled to whom.

  A little hesitantly, she said, ‘She wasn’t … harmed … in any o
ther way.’ She wondered at her own delicacy. A man like Heller would certainly have heard the word rape before. And would know about men who preferred their victims young. ‘I asked Dr Liggatt – both about her, and about Pavlina Jancu. That is … curious. If we’re dealing with a madman.’

  ‘If we’re dealing with a very cunning madman …’ Heller frowned, and did not finish his thought. At the foot of a smaller stairway – the ship was pierced everywhere with them, tying the upper reaches to the lower – he paused, and took the cigarette from his mouth. ‘I have not thanked you, Frau Doktor, for speaking out for me to the captain yesterday evening. Myself, I do not believe that anyone made an attempt on Cochran’s life. And I do not think that this will be the last attempt the man makes on mine.’

  And, when Lydia opened her mouth protestingly, Heller went on, ‘I will not conceal from you that I am a Socialist, Madame. In my own country, before the war, I led workmen’s strikes, first in the mines of Saxony where I was born, then at factories in Hamburg and Berlin. We shut down Cochran’s steel mill at Rotenberg for nearly three months. I felt that the war was an abomination and a cheat – a betrayal of workingmen on both sides. Yet I volunteered and fought for my country, until I could endure no more. My country – and yours – is being betrayed by the pride and idiocy of those who govern it. I know that this makes me reprehensible in the eyes of everyone I meet – yourself, probably, included. I am sorry for this.’

  He looked seriously into her face, giving her the chance to speak. Behind them, the fragile-looking little Jewish boy that Lydia remembered from that first night outside the Third Class passenger shed darted past them and up the stairway, followed by a slightly older girl, dark braids bouncing, who called out, ‘Yakov! Yakov!’ amid gales of giggles. A moment after they disappeared the tall, elderly Jew she’d seen with the children came striding down the main corridor, scowling and grumbling horribly and carrying a belt looped up in his hand, as if ready with it to whack some juvenile bottoms.