"There is no mark of a crow on the doorjambs," he said, and Asher recognized the Elizabethan word for spanner.
"No," Asher said. "Nor is there anything that could have been used for a fulcrum to get a lever under the door handle. It was jerked out with a straight pull. Again, it's just within the realm of possibility that a human could have done it, but it isn't very probable."
There was long silence, in which, faintly, Asher could hear the patter of renewed rain from above. Then Ysidro said, "But it cannot have been a vampire. Even had he worn a glove to protect his hand from the stake, the daylight would have destroyed him."
"Would it?" Asher led the way up the cellar steps to the gaslighted kitchen above. The coffin gaped on the floor before them, like some monstrous fish platter displaying a ho rr idchef d'oeuvre on the worn and ugly linoleum. In a kindling drawer near the stove, Asher found a piece of candle, angled it down the lamp chimney to get a flame, and bore it through the door that gave into the front part of the house.
"Did Calvaire ever speak of Paris? Of what caused him to leave?"
"No." Ysidro drifted beside him, a soundless ghost in his gray suit. With the gas turned up full, it was obvious no one had crossed the dust-choked parlor or the hall from the front door, "He was not a man who dwelt upon the past, even so recent a past as that. Perhaps he had a reason, but many of us are that way. It is better so."
"You said when he came here that he 'promenaded himself-waited to make his kill until Grippen had contacted him, and swore fealty to Grippen, in exchange for Grippen's permission to hunt. But it's obvious that even an inexperienced fledgling, if he's careful, can conceal himself from the two oldest known vampires in Europe, at least for a time."
Again Ysidro was silent, turning the implications of that over in his mind.
"Was there ever any talk of vampires older than yourself? Much older, say, a hundred years older? Two hundred years?"
An odd expression flickered in the back of Don Simon's pale eyes. He paused on the stairs to the first floor, his pale hair haloed in the parlor gaslight behind him. "Of what are you thinking, James?"
"Of vampirism," Asher said quietly. "Of the slow change of the body, cell by cell, into something other than mortal flesh and mortal bone-of the growth of the vampire's powers. My wife's a pathologist. I know that diseases change, like syphilis, the Plague, or chicken pox, even sometimes producing new symptoms, if they continue long enough without killing the patient."
"And you think the vampire state a disease?"
"It's a blood-borne contagion, isn't it?"
"That is not all that it is."
"Alcoholism alters the brain, driving its victims to madness," Asher said. "High fevers can destroy the mind or parts of the mind; the mind itself can bring on physical ailments-nervousness, declines, what women call 'vapors,' brain fever. Any family practitioner could have told you that, even before Freud started doing his work on nervous hysteria. Emotional shock can cause anything from a stroke to a miscarriage. If you've traveled in India, seen the things the fakirs do, you'll know the mind can perform stranger feats upon the body than that.
"What I'm getting at is this: Does vampirism have symptoms, devel-opments, which only manifest themselves after a certain span of years? A long span, longer than most vampires live or can remember? Would one eventually, in the span of years, toughen even against daylight? And you didn't answer my original question."
Instead of replying at once, Ysidro resumed his climb to the floor above, Asher following at his heels, the burning candle still in his hand. He lit the gas in the upper hall and opened the two doors there. One room was a parlor, the other a bedroom, both obviously long out of use.
"It is an odd thing," Ysidro said slowly, "but there are not many vampires in Europe-or in America, which has had its own troubles- much over two hundred and fifty years old. These days vampirism is a phenomenon of the cities, where the poor are uncounted and deaths are relatively invisible. But cities tend to trap vampires in their own cata-clysms."
He opened the door at the end of the hall, leading to the attic stair. Asher paused briefly to study the two heavy hasps screwed into the wood of its inner side. Neither had been torn out; the padlocks, neatly open, were hooked through the steel staples on the doorframe.
He tried Bully's remaining keys out of sheer routine-two of them fitted. Unlike the cellar, the attic door had a single hasp on the outside, but it was clear from the locks that no one had forced his way in or out.
They traded a glance, and Asher shrugged. "We might as well see what's up there anyway-there may be papers."
"Dr. Grippen and I were the only two who survived the Fire of London," Ysidro went on, as they ascended the stair. "I only lived by lucky chance. As far as I know, no Munich vampire survived the trou-bles of the forties, and no Russian vampire Napoleon's invasion, occu-pation, and incineration of Moscow. Rome has always been a perilous city for the Undead, certainly since the founding of the Inquisition."
At the top of the attic stairs, the door stood open. A square of grimy yellowish light indicated a window and a street light somewhere below.
"Que va?" Ysidro whispered behind Asher in the dark. "Did he sleep here, the windows would be muffled..."
It took Asher a moment, in the almost total darkness beyond the feeble circle of the candle's light, to see what lay on the floor halfway between the door and the left-hand wall.
"Calvaire?" he asked softly, as Ysidro brushed past him and strode to that grisly heap of bones, ash, and seared metal oddments. Buttons, brace buckles, the lacing tips of shoes, and the charred metal barrel of a stylographic pen all glinted briefly in the fluttering yellow glow as he came to stand behind the kneeling vampire. Then he looked on past them, to the farther wall. A hinged panel gaped open, showing a coffin within a small closet which would have been totally indistinguishable from the wall itself when shut. Thick draperies and shutters had been torn from the attic's single window. In the silence, the rain on the low roof was like the ominous tattoo of Prussian drums.
"At least a man," he added, lowering his candle again to shed its weak radiance on the remains, "since there are no corset stays." He was interested to note that, judging by the relative wholeness of the bones, Ysidro seemed to be correct about the French vampire's age.
The vampire lifted a gold ring clear of the mess and blew the thin coating of ash and dust from it. A chance draft made the candle flame waver; the diamond of its setting winked like a bright and baleful eye. "Calvaire," he affirmed softly. "So he must indeed have wakened, with the searing of the light, to stagger already dying from his coffin..,"
"Which is a curious thing," Asher remarked, "if our killer, being a vampire himself, knew from the first that the head had to be cut off to prevent such a thing from happening. Almost as curious as the fact that the door downstairs wasn't locked." He stooped beside Ysidro to pick a couple of keys from the ghastly debris. He matched the wards and found them duplicates of Bully Joe's keys. "There's no mark of charring on the floor between the coffin's place of concealment and the body, either. If, as you say, the flesh begins to burn at once..."
"He could not have admitted the killer himself," Ysidro said. "What-ever the capabilities of the killer, Calvaire at least could not have gone anywhere near the door at the bottom of the steps during the hours of daylight,"
"And yet the killer entered that way."
Ysidro lifted an inquiring brow.
"Had he not, he could simply have left the way he came, without unlocking the door at the bottom of the step at all. What it looks like is that Calvaire knew his killer, and admitted him himself, by night... Is it usual for a vampire to have two coffins in the same building?"
"It is not unusual," Ysidro said calmly. "Fledglings frequently take refuge with their masters. And then, there are few houses which are safe for vampires, and those which are, ofttimes become veritable rookeries of the Undead, as you yourself found in Savoy Walk. That was one of my reasons for keeping
from you as many details as possible. Not for their protection, you understand, but for yours."
"I'm touched by your concern," Asher said dryly. "Could the killer have killed or incapacitated Calvaire in some other way, leaving the body to be destroyed when daylight came?"
The vampire did not answer for a moment, sitting hunkered beside the burned skeleton, his arms extended out over his knees. "I do not know," he said at length. "But if he had broken Calvaire's neck or back -and the skull seems to be lying at a strange angle, though that, of course, might simply be the way it rolled when the muscles were con-sumed-it would have incapacitated him, so that he lay here on the floor, conscious but unable to move, while the light slowly brightened in the window. If our killer is himself immune to daylight," he added neutrally, "it is possible that he remained to watch,"
"Another argument," Asher said, "for the fact that Calvaire knew him, it being less entertaining to watch the sufferings of those to whom we are unknown and indifferent."
"Interesting." Ysidro turned the ring he held this way and that, the candlelight shattering through its delicate facets to salt that alabaster face with a thousand points of colored fire. "The odd thing is that among vampires, there is a legend of an ancient vampire, so old and powerful that no one ever sees him anymore-so old that even other vampires cannot sense his passage. Even a hundred and fifty years ago, other vampires were avoiding his haunts. To them he was semifabulous, like a ghost. Traditions among them said that he had been a vampire since before the days of the Black Death."
"And what were his haunts?" Asher asked, knowing already what the Spaniard would say.
The expressionless eyes raised from the glitter of the gem before them. "He slept-or was said to sleep-in the crypts below the charnels of the churchyard of the Holy Innocents, in Paris."
Eleven
"It is not the city that it was." If there were nuances to that soft, light voice of bitterness, anger, or regret, it would have taken a vampire's hyperacute perceptions to read them-Asher himself heard none. Around him the closed cab jos-tled and swayed. When his elbow, raised where his hand, linked through the hanging strap, came in contact with the window, he felt through his coat sleeve the chill of the glass. The noises of the street came to him dimly: the clatter of wheels, on pavement of wood and asphalt, rebounding from the high brown walls of theimmeubles , the occasional hoots of motorcars; the pungent cursing of the sidewalk ven-dors; and the gay, drifting frenzy of violin and accordion that spoke of some caf cone' in progress.
Blindfolded, he could see nothing, but the sounds of Paris were dis-tinctive and as bright a kaleidoscope as its sights. No one, he thought, who had ever been here ever questioned how it was in this place that Impressionism came to be,
Ysidro's voice went on, "I have no sense of being at home here-this sterile, inorganic town where everything is thrice washed before and after anyone touches it. It is the same everywhere, of course, but in Paris it seems particularly ironic. They seem to have taken this man Pasteur very seriously."
The noises changed; the crowd of vehicles around them seemed more dense, but the echoes of buildings were gone. Asher smelled the sewery stink of the river. A bridge, then-and judging by the length and the din of a small square and buildings halfway along, it could only be the Pont Neuf, a name which, like that of New College, Oxford, had not been accurate for a number of centuries. In a short time, they turned right, and continued in that direction. Asher calculated they were headed for the old Marais district, the one-time aristocratic neighborhoods that had not been badly damaged by either the Prussians, the Communards, or Baron Haussmann, but said nothing. If Ysidro chose to believe that blindfolding him would keep him in absolute ignorance of the whereabouts of the Paris vampires, he-and they-were welcome to do so.
He was uncomfortably aware that the Paris vampires had not even the threat of the day killer to reconcile them to the presence of a human in their midst.
"My most vivid memories of Paris are of its mud, of course," the vampire went on quietly. "Everyone's were, who knew it then. It was astounding stuff,/ a boue de Paris- black and vile, like a species of oil. You could never eradicate either its stain or its smell. It clung to every-thing, and you could nose Paris six miles away in open country. In the days when every gentleman wore white silk stockings, it was pure hell." The faintest hint of self-mockery crept into his voice, and Asher pic-tured that still and haughty face framed in the white of a court wig.
"The beggars all smelled of it, too," Ysidro added. "Hunting in the poor quarters was always a nightmare. Now..." He paused, and there was a curious flex in that supple voice,
"It would take me a long time to relearn Paris. Everything has changed. It is strange territory to me now. I do not know its boltholes or hiding places; I no longer even speak the language properly. Every time I say c z instead of ce, je ne Vaime point instead of/ e ne V'aimepas, every time I say je fhquel que chose instead ofjel'aifait, I mark myself as a stranger."
"You only mark yourself as a foreigner who has learned French from a very old book," Asher replied easily, "Have you ever talked to a Brahman in London for the first time? Or heard an American south-erner speak of 'redding up a room'?" The cab stopped; under the silk scarf bound over his eyes, Asher could detect very little light and knew that the street itself was quite dark, particularly for a city as brightly illuminated as Paris. The place was quiet, too, save for the far-off noises of traffic in some nearby square-the Place de la Bastille at a guess- but the smell was the smell of poverty, of too many families sharing too few privies, of cheap cooking, and of dirt. The Marais, Asher knew, had declined drastically from the days when Louis XV had courted Jeanne Poisson through its candlelit salons.
There was a slight jogging as the vampire got out of the cab and the muted exchange of voices and, presumably, francs. Then a light, firm hand touched his arm, guiding him, and he heard the cab rattle away down the cobbles. "Do you speak Spanish any more at all?"
There was level pavement, then a step down, and a sense of close walls and cold shade-the doorway vestibule whose gates would open into the central court of one of the big oldhotels particuliers. Beside him, very quiet, came Ysidro's voice: "I doubt I could even make my-self understood in Madrid."
"Have you never gone back there, then?"
In the ensuing moment of silence, Asher could almost see Ysidro's eyes resting on him with their calm, noncommittal gaze while the vam-pire sifted through all possible responses for the one which would give the least. "What would be the point?" he asked at last. "My people are, and have been since the Reconquista, suspicious and intolerant." Asher realized with a small start that by my people he meant Spaniards, not vampires. "With the Inquisition probing every cellar for heretics and Jews, what chance would a vampire stand? It is possible in most cir-cumstances to avoid the touch of silver, but such avoidance is, in civi-lized countries, not marked. Were it noticed in Spain in those days, it would have been fatal."
Asher heard then a faint scratching, like the furtive scuffle of a mouse behind a wainscot, as the vampire scraped at the panels of the door with his nail, a sound which only other vampires would hear.
But other vampires, of course, would have detected their voices in the street.
He heard nothing within, but sensed feet floating weightlessly down the stair; his heart, it seemed, was thumping uncomfortably fast. "Do they know about me?" he asked.
They had taken the night mail by way of Calais. The porters had grumbled at the size and awkwardness of the huge leather-and-iron trunk that was ticketed as part of Asher's luggage, but had been sur-prised at its comparative lightness. "Wot you got in there, mate, bleedin' feathers?"
"I trust that all travel arrangements will go as we have made them," Ysidro had commented, leaning on the Lord Warden's aft rail and watching the few twinkling lights on the Admiralty Pier fade into the thin soup of iron-colored mist. "But it never pays to take chances."
He glanced beside him at Asher, whose mind h
ad already recorded the slight flush of color in the white cheeks, the warmth in those cool fingers. Standing beside him, gloved hands on the rail and collar turned up against the raw cold of the night, Asher had been conscious of a vague disgust and alarm, not at the vampire, but at himself, for noting these signs as a mere deductive detail and not the certain evidence of some poor wretch's murder in a London slum. He had felt angry at himself and frustrated, as he had often been in his latter dealings with the Foreign Office, burdened with a sense of performing what was only marginally the lesser of two colossal wrongs.
The vampire's gaze had turned, as if he could still descry the dark shape of Dover's cliffs, invisible now in the west. "At the risk of sound-ing crude," he had gone on carefully, "I would like to point out to you that at present I am the only one protecting you from Grippen and his cadre. Were you to destroy me, you might perhaps ensure your lady's safety for a season, for I am the only one who knows the terms of our agreement..."
Asher had started, relief loosening a knot of apprehension in his chest that had been with him, it seemed, so long that he had almost forgotten its origin.
With the possibility of a daylight-hunting vampire looming uneasily in his mind, he had not dared another meeting with Lydia, but it had been one of the hardest things he had ever done simply to take his leave of her by anonymous telegram. Ysidro, he presumed, would be able to protect him in Paris-if protecting him was in fact his intention-but he turned cold with dread at the thought of Lydia staying in London alone. Only the knowledge that she was enormously sensible and would wait, as ordered, to hear from him before undertaking anything re-motely dangerous-the knowledge that she understood the situation- made it bearable and, then, bearable only in relative terms.
He felt a surge of gratitude toward the vampire of which he was almost ashamed-gratitude and surprise
that Ysidro would have told him this.
"But you would never be able to go near her again," the vampire went on. "The others would track you and destroy you, as one who knows too much. In so doing, they would undoubtedly find her as well."
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