02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD ja-2

by Barbara Hambly

  "The Sultan's guards?" Lydia raised her eyes to the man who towered over her, the impressionistic glitter of bullion, buttons, epaulets, fringe, and a beard of still- brighter gold resolving themselves into a good-humored, handsome face and bright blue eyes as the prince bent to kiss her hand. Slavic facial angle, Lydia thought automatically. Brachycephalic. Cranial index about 82. I %. I really must stop seeing people in terms of their internal structure...

  "There was little harm done," the prince said in beautiful Oxonian English and offered her his arm. Lydia followed him back out into the colonnade, where electric lights had been incongruously strung from pillar to pillar. A few men stood at one end of the arcade smoking-Lydia caught the acrid whiff of tobacco, but at that distance they were little more than a clump of black forms spatchcocked with the white of shirtfronts.

  The day had been a cold one, and few ladies, bare-shouldered as she was herself, ventured into the sea-chilled darkness.

  "Your husband had lodgings here in Stamboul," the prince went on when they were out of earshot of the smokers. "Most Europeans prefer to stay in Pera, of course, particularly since the coup. There haven't been riots among the Armenians in the past week or two, but fighting in the streets between the Greeks and the Turks can't be stopped. Your husband..."

  He gazed down at her for a moment from his great height, and Lydia could see him asking himself what he could, in discretion, ask her. The look in Lady Clapham's eyes when she'd said, An acquaintance of your husband, had told her exactly what this "junior attache" did in the Czar's service.

  "I know that my husband came to Constantinople to ask the advice of... certain friends." She laid the same emphasis on the last words and met his eyes. The corners of them crinkled in a little smile. Yes, I know my husband was a spy and you still are. Presumably, she thought, Lady Clapham wouldn't have introduced them that way if Russia was an ally of Austria. Whose side was the Ottoman Empire on?

  "Ah," he said. "As you say, Madame Asher." His smile widened. "Then you know that he probably had his reasons. You wouldn't happen to know what those were?" She shook her head. "I only knew that he might be in trouble. Sir Burnwell told me he arrived in Constantinople a week ago yesterday, and that nobody's seen him since Wednesday afternoon."

  "And what sort of help did you believe you could be?" He spoke kindly, but she could see something else in his gaze. Just because we're allies, Jamie often said, doesn't mean we're on the same side. She felt panicky again, as she had in Vienna, panicky and unable to make a correct choice.

  Forcibly, she put the panic aside. "I thought I could recognize the man who might betray him," Lydia lied, with what she hoped was calm. "I don't know his name," she added, and went on at once, "But what happened Wednesday afternoon?" Razumovsky looked as if he might say something else, but changed his mind. Probably, thought Lydia, because he thought it likelier he'd get more information later if he gave a little himself. He might even actually like Jamie- he looked like the sort of person Jamie, and in fact she, would and could like.

  "As I said, he had lodgings on the Stamboul side of the Horn." The prince lowered his voice and glanced along the colonnade to the group of smokers again. None looked in their direction, but the prince guided her down the short flight of marble steps that led to an arched tunnel beneath the pavilion, and so through to the dark gardens beyond. "He told no one where they were, and when I saw him, he had the look of one watching over his shoulder. On Wednesday men from the palace intercepted him by the Grand Bazaar, sent by the High Chamberlain, they said-though anyone could have bribed him to do so." He grinned reminiscently. "I've bribed him to do similar things myself."

  "And he sent to you for help?"

  "We've been friends a good many years," said the Russian. "Sir Burnwell would probably have complained to the army first, or the C.U.P., and been put off for God knows how long. Semibarbarity has its advantages. I came here-where the Chamberlain and in fact the Sultan still hold a good deal of power- and blustered and shook my fist. Shook my country's fist, which frightened them even more. Already the Sultan is playing off the people against the army, trying to rouse them in a countercoup, for he wields power as the head of the Mohammedan faith, you know. If it comes to it, the Chamberlain and his master are going to need support."

  Lydia shivered, remembering a scene glimpsed from the window of the embassy carriage as they'd clattered along one of the few streets in the old city wide enough to admit such a vehicle: three men, dark-haired and hook-nosed, in the khaki uniforms of the new army, beating up an old man outside a half-closed shop. A muttering crowd had gathered, but no one had dared interfere; the old man had only put his hands over his head for protection, as if he knew perfectly well that begging for mercy or asking for help were equally out of court. "They brought him out in a short time," Razumovsky went on, stroking back the surge of his golden mustaches. "As I'd suspected, they were holding him in the guardhouse here, which means it was the Chamberlain who'd been bribed. He had been knocked about a little, nothing serious."

  "I hope he put proper antiseptic on it," Lydia said, and was startled when the prince burst into laughter. "I mean," she added hastily, realizing how that had sounded, "I'm quite shocked, of course, that he was hurt, but if he will get into danger... What had he been doing?"

  "Apparently-he did not tell me this, but I found it out through palace contacts of my own-questioning storytellers in the markets. That was how they knew where he would be."

  "Storytellers." Old man who lived to be a thousand... The wandering script of Fairport's notebook sprang immediately to her mind. Woman who lived to be five hundred (wove moonlight).

  "You tell me why," said the prince.

  Lydia only shook her head, though a numbness started behind her breastbone and seemed to spread to fingers, lips, toes. Stress on top of hypothermia, she thought. And then, a small inner voice like a child's, Jamie, no...

  "You're cold, madame." The prince put a warm hand to the small of her back and led her up the steps again, toward the brighter lights at the other end of the arcade. "We were walking back to his rooms in the Bajazid when an Armenian boy came up to him. I didn't hear all the boy said, but I know he said, 'My master told me to show you the place.' Jamie took his leave of me..." He shook his head. Did he look well? she wanted to ask. Did they take his knife when he was arrested, and did he get it back? Did you see if he still had the silver around his neck, on his wrists?

  It was conceivable, she thought, that the Sultan's guards had stolen it. The ones she'd seen at the palace's outer gates looked capable of relieving a dying man of his shoes.

  Under her corsets her heart seemed to be pounding uncomfortably fast.

  "Your palace contact didn't happen to say which storytellers, did he?" Razumovsky stopped, gazing down at her again. Men had appeared in the colonnade, Europeans in bright colors that had to be uniforms. By the way they were looking around, Lydia guessed they were the prince's own attaches.

  "Mrs. Asher," he said quietly, "Constantinople is not a good city. It is not a safe city, especially now, with the army in power and turning things upside down, and it has never been a good city in which to be a woman. I have been making inquiries of my own about James. When I hear anything, even of the smallest, I will send to you at once."

  "Thank you." Lydia clasped the broad, kid-gloved hand. "I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. I can't... there are reasons I can't tell you how I know... what I know. But any help you can give me..."

  "On this condition." Razumovsky brushed at his mustaches again. His glove buttons had diamonds in them that twinkled like tiny stars. "Something tells me I do not need to tell this to you, but I will anyway. Do not investigate anything alone. Not anything. Call on me for help at whatever hour. Is there a telephone where you're staying?" She shook her head. "Then send a page. Do you understand? If I can't come, I'll send a servant. You don't need to tell me or him or anyone where you're going, but don't go alone.

  "Sir Burnwell and
the embassy staff are good men, but they haven't been here as long as I. Moreover, they are perceived as being on the side of the C.U.P., and against the old powers. In any case the German businessmen who've advanced money to both sides hold more power here than either my embassy or yours. When you go about the city, take someone with you- someone besides that silly girl of yours, I mean- and don't assume that you can get away with anything safely. This isn't England. There," he said, and led her back toward the lights, the smokers, the door with its tall guards in their billowy pantaloons and turbans of orange and red. Not until they were inside and he had fetched her champagne and a cracker of sour cream and Russian caviar did he excuse himself, and two minutes later she saw him-or at any rate someone his height with a gold beard and a uniform of hunter- green-deep in conversation with Enver Bey himself.

  Fourteen

  The room was more crowded than before. During her conversation with the prince, Lydia had been dimly aware of lights passing among the trees and hedges as servants conducted newcomers along the paths from the enormous outer court. Scanning backs, Lydia identified the asymmetrical mauve volutes of her patroness' gown in the midst of a dark cluster of male suiting. As she approached, she heard the guttural babble of German and made out references to track miles, rolling stock, gauge widths, and Krupps that told her that Lady Clapham had fallen among the businessmen, but in any case Lady Clapham held out her hand to her with the air of a somewhat long-toothed Andromeda greeting a schoolgirl Perseus in ecru lace and pink ribbons.

  "My dear Mrs. Asher," she cried. "May I present to you Herr Franz Hindi? Herr Hindi, Mrs. Asher. Now if you'll please excuse us, Herr Hindi, I promised to introduce Mrs. Asher to Herr Dettmars... You're a godsend, my dear!" she added in a low voice as the stout, fair-haired gentleman who had shaken Lydia's hand was left behind with considerable celerity. "Such a bore." She steered her into one of the smaller rear chambers of the pavilion, just as crowded and if possible more airless than the long front room. "Do I have the appearance of a woman who will perish if she does not receive accurate information concerning the differences between soft-coal hummer furnaces and hard-coal base burners?" Lydia paused to study her with mock gravity. "Turn 'round," she instructed, and with a straight face the attache's wife did so.

  "Only a little in the back," Lydia replied after due consideration.

  "I'll wear a shawl over it, then," promised Lady Clapham. "I am suffocating. Was Prince Razumovsky able to give you any information about your husband, dear?" Lydia nodded slowly. "He told me my husband was doing some kind of research, talking to storytellers in the markets. Did he-Dr. Asher, I mean-mention this to you?"

  "That isn't what brought him to Constantinople, surely?"

  "No," Lydia said. "But he does research in such things wherever he is. He's a folklorist as well as a linguist."

  Lady Clapham sighed resignedly and poked at her untidy, graying coiffure. "Well, better than one of those lunatics like my brother, who goes about taking rubbings off tombs. Not even in heathen parts but in places like Wensley Parva and Bath Cathedral. And in hunting season!" She shook her head wonderingly and picked a cracker of caviar from a servant's tray as if the man had been a table.

  "Yes, he did ask about storytellers. Burnie told him about the old fellow who sits in the street of the brass sellers in the Great Bazaar. Did His Highness offer you his help? I thought so. Just make sure you have Miss Potton with you at all times and you should be quite all right. Where has Miss Potton got to?"

  Lydia gazed around the small chamber. Though without her eyeglasses most men in crowds looked alike-except James, of course, whom she would know anywhere under any circumstances, and human Christmas trees like Prince Razumovsky- she could generally spot women by the colors and shapes of their dresses. But there was no sign of the fawn-and-white silk among the crowd, no ink blot of black curls glistening in the sharp yellowish light. She remembered Ysidro remarking last night, I may be somewhere thereabouts, and Margaret's desire to see him at the reception... And the more so now, to show him her newfound beauty.

  "She may have gone into the gardens." The image of Margaret, in improbable Georgian panniers and wig, waltzing with Ysidro on the terrace of some dream mansion, floating through her mind.

  "She'll freeze," Lady Clapham predicted. "Oh, my dear, there's someone I do want to introduce you to... absolutely charming, and such a cut-up..." She was already starting to lead her toward a man who had just entered the smaller room. Another uniform, this one scarlet, heavily braided with silver and ornamented with, of all things, a leopard skin over the shoulder, set off dark hair and a stance that told her at once, without being near enough to see his face, that he was as handsome as Apollo and knew it. All Adonises, she reflected-or was that Adoni?seemed to stand in the same way. She wondered if anyone had done a study on the subject. Not that anyone but a woman would notice, of course... "... member of the diplomatic community here and an absolute charmer, even if he's never going to rock the world with his intellect. Baron Ignace Karolyi..."

  "Excuse me," Lydia said hastily. "I think I see Miss Potton and I really do need to... I'll be back in one moment..."

  "Really? Where...?"

  But she dodged away into the crowd.

  Fortunately, a doorway connected that room and the other rear chamber of the suite. Lydia ducked through, wove her way to the door leading back into the main salon, and worked back with what speed she could-given a visual range of less than a yard, though the brilliance of the man's uniform helped in avoiding him- to the double door leading into the colonnade. The cold was sharp. Wishing she'd had time to fetch her cloak, Lydia hurried along the black and white cobbled pavement to the stairway passage in which she'd taken refuge with the prince, and gathered her point-lace train in hand to descend the sloping tunnel to the terrace beyond.

  Once certain she was out of sight, she pulled her spectacles from her handbag and settled them on her nose.

  What had been an impression of leafy blackness and swimming spots of color resolved itself suddenly into a sable wonderland of cypress and willow that sloped down to the indigo shimmer of the sea. Bare boughs or somber leaves were illuminated from below by a rainbow lace of colored lamps, which outlined paths and terraces like dim-burning jewels dropped on velvet.

  To her left the lights traced terraces, stairways, the eaves of pale shut- windowed pavilions in a flickering web of ruby, azure, honey stars... and at the top of a flight of marble steps she saw one star was missing. A lamp had been taken.

  Margaret. She didn't know why she was so sure. Gathering her train more firmly, she hastened along the terrace and up those pale steps to the gap in the line of lights.

  A gem- latticed darkness of marble pavements and low box hedges spread out before her at the top, rimming deep stands of lawn and trees. The pavement led her around to the locked doors of the two pavilions overlooking the lower gardens.

  Past the second pavilion's door a low arch of very old bricks pierced the wall, marble steps leading down again, through a vaulted tunnel, to the terraces below.

  Had Margaret seen Ysidro in the gardens? Or only a shape she thought might be his?

  She turned back to scan the colonnades, the elaborate pavilions above and behind her, but saw no movement there; neither was there any sight of the pale mousseline de soie dress in the semiwilderness of trees and long grass that lay between her and the sea. She pulled a handkerchief from her bag to shield her fingers from the heat, then picked up another lamp, the brass base beneath the bowl of ruby glass hot through both cloth and glove. One of the innumerable wild cats that lived in the half-deserted shrubberies stared at her for a moment, then poured itself away into the darkness.

  What am I doing? wondered Lydia, half in disgust, as she descended the marble steps. Two minutes after the handsome Russian prince warns me "Don't investigate alone," I'm off like the heroine of a cheap thriller...

  But something about the shadowy darkness of the palace, deserted once the activi
ty around the kiosks had been left behind, filled her with fear for the sake of the younger woman. The sight of Karolyi had shaken her, and she did not think she dared either wait or go back.

  The red light of the lamp caught in the curves of an iron lion posted in what had been flower beds. On a tangle of overgrown rosebush, Lydia glimpsed white threads where a petticoat hem had caught and been pulled free.

  There was a door, hidden in the shadows of the three high vaults of ancient brick. It stood open. For a long time Lydia hesitated in the narrow aperture, one hand pressed to the stone jamb, the red-glowing lamp raised to look within.

  The stagnant pool a few yards behind her seemed to breathe cold over her bare shoulders, an echo of the damp chill that lay before her in the dark.

  Little did she know, quoted Lydia from the aforesaid cheap thriller, in an effort to push back the dread whispering at her heart, what horrors lay crouched in wait for her.

  But it was only a stone stairway-used, she thought, but not recently, save for the wet tracks vaguely outlined on the upper step or two.

  A woman's slippers.

  Idiot, idiot, idiot. She wasn't sure if it was Miss Potton or herself to whom she referred.

  At the bottom of the stairs, another open door, and a cavern vast and lost in shadows, where the ruby stain of her lamp smudged pillars, incredibly old, rising out of obsidian water to the brick vaulting of the ceiling low overhead. Of course, Lydia thought. All those pools in the gardens had to be watered from somewhere.

  A walkway stretched along one side of the cistern, vanishing very quickly into darkness. Heart beating hard, hoping she'd find Margaret soon, she started along it.