Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  The princess’s breath left her in a little gasp. ‘Infamous—’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ added Lydia darkly, seeing she had her full attention and belief, ‘if it was Mr Cochran who is putting it about that Mr Goldhirsch is the vampire, as a way of deflecting the search from wherever the real vampire is hiding.’

  That made sense even to her, and the Princess Natalia, much struck, whispered, ‘You’re right!’ She did not, Lydia noticed, even question whether the American millionaire would do such a thing.

  ‘Don’t tell Tania.’ Lydia glanced around her again, trying to sound like someone in a blood-and-thunder novel. ‘Whatever you do. Don’t tell anyone. You know how these things get about. But I need to get in and search Mr Cochran’s suite.’

  ‘Ah! So!’ Illumination brightened the princess’s face. ‘And if our good Madame Izora has a … a revelation, a vision, a dream—’

  ‘Exactly!’ Lydia marveled again at her friend’s combination of cleverness and absolute credulity. ‘And if Madame says she sees or smells a … an unknown substance, a jar or bottle clutched in the vampire’s hand, Cochran will bring Barvell with him, to ask questions about it. Barvell is a chemist, you know. It will have to be tonight,’ she added quietly. ‘We cannot risk even the slightest chance, that this … this monster … will reach America. Certainly not if it’s allied itself with Cochran. If one of his detectives is in the suite I’ll have to come up with some way to—’

  ‘They won’t be.’ The princess shooed the problem aside like a mosquito. ‘Samson – my footman, you know – says that none of them have been about the suite all day. Only Barvell. See—’ she pointed back along the Promenade toward Cochran’s suite – ‘they’ve put extra locks on the outer doors. A padlock – Heaven knows what they paid Captain Winstanley to let them do it!’ She put a hand on Lydia’s elbow, when Lydia would have taken her at her word and gone to look. ‘And it makes sense, you know. Samson told me yesterday that M’sieu Cochran’s valet, even, shares a second-class stateroom – the smallest of that class, down on F Deck! – with Oliver – the nephew, you know, the secretary. Oakley – the valet – is obliged to go up five flights at a set time each morning, to shave M’sieu Cochran and help him dress, and does everything by time schedule, and now I see why! The American does not want him – or anyone! – in the suite, except that poisonous creature Barvell. You don’t think he is hiding this vampire, this creature, in the suite, do you? Like mine, it must have an inner room which can be kept lightless …’

  Lydia shook her head quickly. ‘If he were, he wouldn’t be searching for him, which he obviously is.’ And, because the princess was coming uncomfortably close to the truth, she added, ‘Monsieur seems to have made a friend,’ nodding along the Promenade toward the little group of Ossolinska, Miranda, and the two dogs. They had been joined by the Allens, Mr Allen holding a well wrapped-up infant in his arms while his slender, stylish wife stooped to caress the little dog’s head.

  ‘Dreadful people.’ The princess raised her lorgnette momentarily, as if peering through opera glasses at a distant stage. ‘If Allen is their real name. Tania tells me that it was originally Altmann; Jew bankers from Holland.’ Disdain curled the edges of her voice. ‘M’sieu is constantly up and down to the wireless room, trying to get news of the New York stock market. He must be, as Madame Cochran says, like a rooster in an empty henhouse, with the wireless out this afternoon. It’s all Jews think about, you know.’

  She paused to bestow a warm smile in passing upon a Mr Tyler, wealthy – according to Ellen – from the proceeds of a string of factories in Pittsburgh in which immigrant girls worked sixteen hours a day. The industrialist beamed and tipped his hat.

  ‘Is the wireless out?’ Lydia glanced up automatically in the direction of the Marconi room, though it was hidden by the roof of the promenade.

  ‘So they say. Though myself, I say, one of the great joys of travel is to be adrift from the cares of the world one has left behind. To be one with the sea and the sky. To come to know one’s fellow passengers –’ she smiled, and tightened her elbow over Lydia’s hand – ‘without all that pestering about how many men were killed last week in Flanders, and what those imbeciles in Petersburg are doing now. I can read about it all when we reach New York.’

  Lydia could not stop herself from thinking, If we reach New York.

  The two women rejoined Miranda and the dogs and Ossolinska (Miranda was explaining to the fragile-looking Mrs Allen about mermaids and blue lotus), and the little girl’s words turned Lydia’s eyes towards the gray surge of the sea.

  She shouldn’t have to be making up stories about why we aren’t really in danger from submarines.

  At the far end of the promenade, Lydia could see the ship’s lookout mast, a thin spike of wood with the round white crow’s nest halfway up it, rather like a Sterno tin impaled on a kitchen spit. The pale gray daylight glinted on binoculars: two men searching the ocean’s surface.

  Searching for something they probably wouldn’t even see until it was too late.

  They’re out there, thought Lydia. Under the water. Sniffing, like wolves on a blood trail, for prey. She wondered if the crew of the E.C. Baldwin had yet paid for their Good Samaritan impulse. Aunt Louise had remarked, when Lydia had spoken of it on the way to lunch, that she was entirely sick of hearing about submarines and that she heartily agreed with the Royal Navy’s orders that no vessel was to go to the aid of a torpedoed ship for fear that the attacker might still be in the neighborhood.

  Is it worse, Lydia wondered, to be trapped on a ship with a vampire (well, two vampires), or surrounded by enemy submarines?

  Or to know that before the end of the voyage, you’re going to have to kill someone you love?

  ‘Personally,’ said the princess, moving on along the promenade and obliging the rest of her party – companion, dogs, Miranda, Lydia – to abandon the unworthy Allens, ‘I shall be glad when this voyage is done.’

  A gust of wind flung spray and rain on Lydia’s face.

  It was four o’clock.

  TWENTY

  ‘I’m to wait for him at half past eleven.’ Captain Palfrey, his face aglow with relief, checked his wristwatch, as if to make sure he’d reset it earlier that day when the City of Gold had crossed through into yet another time zone. Lydia tried to mentally calculate what time it actually was, in relation to where the sun would be (on the other side of the world) when it was midnight here, and failed (drat it, I forgot to pack a sextant. I wonder if Captain Winstanley would lend me one?).

  (Probably the reason Don Simon set their rendezvous for eleven thirty. He’ll be as late as he needs to be to bring the illusion into play.)

  A Willow Grove waiter – Roger – brought their pot of tea and plate of sweet biscuits. Across the café, she could see Miranda sitting, very lady-like in her pale-green, ruffled frock, with the princess and Madame Ossolinska, drinking ‘cambric’ tea heavily laced with milk from the demi-tasse cup that William presented to her with a smile. Aunt Louise could say what she liked about Aunt Lavinnia as a preceptress, but Lydia could see no fault in her daughter’s beautiful manners.

  Probably better than had I had charge of her, she thought sadly, for the past two and a half years …

  But her grief at having left her child, at the age of two and a half, to volunteer her skills at the Front was still a dagger in her heart.

  ‘Do you know,’ went on Palfrey eagerly, ‘I saw Colonel Simon yesterday, on the Second Class promenade? I passed on my way to the barber shop, and saw him standing by the forward deck well, chatting with Mrs Bowdoin. He caught my eye, raised a finger to his lips –’ the young man demonstrated – ‘when I looked again, he was gone. He’s a deep one,’ he added, pleased and proud.

  ‘He is indeed.’ As Lydia had spoken to Palfrey on Friday afternoon, she knew that, had he actually seen Don Simon a few hours before that – in the morning on his way to the barber’s to be shaved – there was no way he would have negle
cted to mention it to her. Simon must have put a dream into his mind last night, at midnight of local time – a dream that he’d seen him that morning.

  A dream so real that poor Captain Palfrey now thinks it actually happened.

  No wonder Mr Cochran wants someone who can do that, to be his slave.

  She sipped her tea. It was five. The rain had ceased, though the sky remained gray as iron.

  I can’t let it happen. The thought turned again and again on itself in her mind, as she returned to her room to change into her Third Class togs, after arranging with Palfrey to stand watch on the promenade that night. Nor, she reflected, would Don Simon want it to happen. There were things about him that she knew she would never understand, but she knew his pride, the cold haughtiness of a sixteenth-century Spanish nobleman. To be ordered about like a hired assassin by a cold-blooded money-grubber like Cochran …

  To be brought to his knees, helpless in the kind of pain she had felt through dreams last week …

  To be passed along, to whoever Cochran needed political favors from …

  He would rather die.

  She thought about that, slipping quietly from her stateroom when Ellen gestured to her that the coast was clear.

  Would he rather die?

  She had seen him double over, for a moment speechless with agony, as the poison first bit. Had heard, on other occasions, the screams of vampires as their flesh ignited with the sun’s first touch.

  Had seen men die …

  The girls in the Swiss boarding school she’d gone to, the young ladies who had come ‘out’ with her, in the Season of 1899. They were always saying, I’d rather die …

  At the prospect of wearing last year’s hat to the Royal Horticultural Society Flower Show, or being seen taken into dinner with poor stammering Hugh Wigram. At the mere thought of staying – and being seen to be staying – at an inexpensive boarding house rather than one of the grand seaside villas in Deauville …

  I’d rather die.

  Lydia wondered if they said things like that still.

  In the fore deck well, older brothers and mothers grouped in the corners, watching the few children who still played games of bounce ball and hopscotch in the gray chill of the wet decks. Their movements were hesitant, as if they feared to get too far from their friends. They missed easy shots because they were looking over their shoulders. In the shelter of the crane mechanism, Ariane Zirdar was telling a little cluster of the smaller ones a story, with elaborate pantomime because several of them spoke no German. But when Lydia went through the door into E Deck, she saw many more of them, either playing in the cramped cabins, the doors propped open for air circulation, or sitting just outside cabin doors under the watchful eyes of their elders.

  More were in the dining room, fretful and crying, while the men smoked and muttered in corners.

  ‘I’m ready to settle that imbecile Vodusek with a wrench,’ growled Heller, fetching two cups of execrable tea from the samovar at the side of the dayroom. The coffee was exhausted already, and unwashed cups again piled the long sideboard. ‘After they nearly killed that poor Russian woman last night, he’s still insisting to everyone who’ll listen that it’s a vampire who’s doing these things. Shouting that we need to find the abomination, not that it’s a madman and that we need to get police to take fingerprints and measurements. Listen to me,’ he added, with a bitter chuckle. ‘My old comrades would laugh their heads off to hear me say we need the pigs. But I think this is a case where we do. We need their resources. This will end—’

  He shook his head. ‘Did you see the child’s body?’

  ‘Yes. I think he was lured with candy, like the other.’ She gave a detailed account of her examination of Kemal Adamic’s little corpse, ending with, ‘Are the men still searching?’

  ‘Some of them. Enough of the black gang, and the engine crew, have come to believe the talk, that they let searchers into the engine rooms and the coal bunkers. Though if the killings were done in a coal bunker there’d be signs of it on the victims’ clothing.’ He grimaced. By the soot smudges on his unshaven face, Lydia guessed he’d been one of those patient, tireless searchers. It crossed her mind to wonder if the sneak thieves of liquor and cigarettes had steered the searchers away from their personal hidey-holes.

  She certainly wouldn’t put it past Vodusek to do so.

  ‘And some of the black gang are as superstitious as the farmers and miners. I tried to talk some sense into that old God-peddler Kirn, but all he had to say to me was “Get thee behind me, Satan”, and quote me some Biblical swill about the Jews being an accursed race of Christ-killers.’

  ‘They’re saying,’ said Lydia, ‘that the vampire is old Goldhirsch.’

  ‘Quatsch!’ He made a face of disgust.

  ‘And a woman in First Class,’ went on Lydia carefully, ‘who claims to be psychic, says that the boy was killed in a place with chains. A dark place with chains, she said …’

  Heller had lifted his hand as if about to beg to be spared any more claptrap, but paused in the gesture. ‘Chain locker,’ he said. And seeing her blank look, explained, ‘The space in the nose of the ship, where they stow the anchor chain while we’re at sea. It’s right above the ballast tank. Now that you speak of it, were I to murder someone aboard-ship,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘that would be a good place to do it. Nobody goes there. It’s full of rats, and so close to the bilges, it’s foul as any slum outhouse.’

  His eyes narrowed as he turned the matter over in his mind. Near the depleted coffee urns, Vodusek and his sour-looking friend Slavik harangued a knot of uneasy women in Slovene, amid a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  ‘If I wanted to hang and bleed someone,’ the German went on, ‘I could do it from the upper portion of the chain itself, where it rises through the ceiling to the anchor. The bottom of the locker’s always a couple of feet deep in water, just from what drips in when the chain’s pulled up. You can’t even see it, because of the chain piled in it. With a funnel you could just drain the blood straight down into the bilge and nobody would notice anything until we docked. Probably not then. With the other stinks in there, I doubt you could smell even a couple of gallons of blood mixed with the water at the bottom.’

  ‘Could someone get to it? The chain locker? Dragging or carrying a body, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, yes. There are always emergency doors into it, in case the chain itself kinks or hangs itself up. On this ship, it’s probably from one of the dormitories where the stokers and greasers sleep. Maybe another from the bulk cargo hold one deck below. You could go in when the men in that room are all on-shift. Nobody would see you, if you’re careful.’

  And if you timed your kill, thought Lydia, for those ten or fifteen minutes on either side of midnight, when the vampire mind regained its full powers, to turn the perceptions of the living aside …

  ‘Can we …?’ she began, but voices interrupted her, shouting in the corridor outside. A child’s frantic wail of fear. Another child, shouting something … Lydia sprang to her feet and strode to the door, followed by every person in the room.

  But in a weird parody of last night’s riot, a crowd of the children that Lydia had seen so recently in the deck well were pushing, shoving, throwing bits of chalk and trash at the two children – Yakov and his sister – that she and Heller had seen yesterday while searching the rear portions of the ship. They’d cornered them in a turning of the corridor and Yakov was crying. He tugged at his sister’s skirt and sobbed, ‘Rivkah! Rivkah!’ and the girl Rivkah pushed him behind her, stamped her foot and shouted something at the juvenile mob. Lydia heard them yell back, ‘Zid! Iudey! Jüden!’ and knew what the trouble was.

  Before she could step forward, the girl Ariane, gold braids swinging, shoved her way through the pack and grabbed the dark girl’s hand. Her face convulsed with anger, Ariane turned and shouted at the mob, evidently words to the effect that they were cowards and (probably, Lydia guessed) no great advertisement for Christianity themselves. T
hey protested, but backed off a few paces – at fifteen Ariane was halfway to adult authority, and larger than most of them. Frau Zirdar strode from the group around Vodusek, shouldered past Lydia in the doorway and called out to her daughter, gesturing for her to come away and not interfere. Lydia caught the word for Jew.

  Ariane drew herself up and retorted.

  Frau Zirdar gestured more firmly, and her voice hardened.

  Threat of a thrashing, guessed Lydia, seeing the girl’s face. Tears flooded Ariane’s eyes but she didn’t give ground. Yakov and Rivkah, meanwhile, bolted away down the corridor to the WC at the end, evidently the only goal that could have gotten them out of their grandfather’s cabin. Frau Zirdar strode forward, grabbed her daughter by the wrist, and at the same time shouted something at the other children that made them scatter. Then she hauled her daughter away down the corridor for the promised punishment, whatever it was. Ariane followed meekly, her one attempt to explain being silenced with a harsh, ‘Utihnil!’

  ‘Little bastards,’ said Heller quietly. ‘There will be trouble indeed, if we don’t find this madman, and soon.’ He glanced sidelong at Lydia. ‘Some of the stokers were saying this morning that an American freighter was torpedoed, a few hours south of us. Have you heard further of this?’

  Lydia shook her head. ‘The ship’s wireless is out,’ she said. ‘They’ve got extra men up on the lookout, but I’m not sure how much good that will do, against a submarine. Particularly not once it gets dark. I did hear that at least some of the freighter’s crew – and passengers, if there were any – were picked up by another freighter.’