‘In the mines?’ A thin stripe of moonlight gleamed on her spectacles as she raised those huge brown eyes, mildly inquiring, to his. ‘In the café down the street? Most of the police have joined the army, so I don’t think anyone would stop the local apaches from beating me to death as a German spy. In a cupboard in the attic? I suspect the first thing they’re going to do is burn the house. And if I do manage to get away and run all the way to Dieppe – always supposing I can get to Dieppe – there’s still no way for me to cross the Channel. Besides,’ she added, ‘I’m not going to promise anything of the kind.’
‘I don’t want Miranda growing up an orphan.’
‘I don’t want Miranda growing up an orphan,’ retorted Lydia. ‘Nor do I want to have to deal with my aunts without a husband to protect me, so you just do as you’re told and let me protect you.’
She turned her head sharply, as if at some sound. Listening, Asher heard it too.
‘Is that thunder?’ She moved to the window as he had done, eye to the crack, still unwilling to show more of herself to the watchers than she had to. Even at this hour Asher could just make out the shadows of two men standing on the pavement opposite.
Hyacinthe’s servants? Elysée’s?
Had the Germans not been so near, the military authorities would have been on the doorstep days ago.
Another rumble in the distance, a deep, sustained growling that did not fade.
‘It’s the German guns.’
Announcements appeared all over Paris the following day. Greuze brought one in that he’d torn off the shutters of the boarded-up Café Arabie, along with his usual ration of bread, fish, and pâté.
PEOPLE OF FRANCE!
For several weeks relentless battles have engaged our heroic troops and the army of the enemy. The valor of our soldiers has won for them, at several points, marked advantages; but in the north the pressure of the German forces has compelled us to fall back.
This situation has compelled the President of the Republic and the Government to take a painful decision.
In order to watch over the national welfare, it is the duty of the public powers to remove themselves, temporarily, from the city of Paris.
Under the command of an eminent Chief, a French Army, full of courage and zeal, will defend the capital and its patriotic population against the invader …
Endure and fight!
‘They left last night.’ Greuze leaned one shoulder in the doorway of the kitchen where Asher was slumped in a wooden chair, trying to rally enough strength to drag himself back up the stairs to bed. ‘I’ve been up the Eiffel Tower, as far up as I could get. The military’s still up at the top, and the radio offices. You can see the smoke from the fighting. The Boche are on this side of the Marne, and the soldiers at the Tower say they’re still falling back.
‘How you feeling?’ He looked across at Asher, grim meaning in his eyes.
‘Like running a long distance,’ said Asher, though his stomach sank at the thought. ‘At speed.’
‘We better do it tonight, then. Without even the chance of the police stopping them, they have no reason to wait. Our friends here last night?’
He jerked his head back toward the Rue Lepic.
‘Till about one.’ When he’d gone to the window again at three he had seen no one, though he’d guessed that if either he or Lydia ventured outside they’d meet one of Hyacinthe’s fledglings, if they weren’t simply hanged by the local inhabitants from the nearest lamp post.
His dreams after that had been troubled, recollections of his flight – sixteen years previously – from the German enclave in Shantung in a railway boxcar full of raw cow-hides. Only in the dream the cow-hides had been crammed into monstrous trunks, like Ysidro’s traveling coffin, and he’d known that Lydia was locked in one of the trunks and he’d forgotten which one.… But as he’d patiently picked the locks on trunk after trunk, hearing Lydia’s muffled pleas and sobs from somewhere in the boxcar, he’d opened one trunk and found it full of rat bones, still wet with acid whose fumes made his eyes sting.
‘Raimund Cauchemar, Rue de la Fontaine, Paris’, the label had said, and he’d thought, Oh, yes, Cauchemar was in Emeric’s workroom looting things when Ysidro got there. He must have got the acid and the rat bones too.
‘I’ll come at two,’ said Greuze. ‘They’ve shifted most of the patrols over into the northern suburbs. Those papers your friend Kryzwiki wrote up should get us out of town without the truck being confiscated.’
The thought of dragging himself down the stairs again made Asher’s teeth ache. ‘I’ll be ready.’
When the taxi-driver left the room Asher murmured to Lydia in English, ‘What about Ysidro?’ He could almost hear Rebbe Karlebach shout, Leave the monster to die! But despite his conviction that Karlebach was right, his every instinct revolted at leaving behind one who’d helped them.
To say nothing of the fact that Ysidro could almost certainly get them past the patrols.
‘He usually comes here before two,’ she replied. ‘We’ll have to get his trunk somehow.’
The journey to Poitiers would be a nightmare, Asher already knew, and God only knew if they’d be able to get petrol to continue, always supposing the truck wasn’t confiscated en route.
He’d meant to write a note to the vampire – who might merely check the house before setting forth on his nightly rounds without making himself known to its inhabitants – but by the time Greuze and Lydia got him back up to his room and to bed, his hands were too shaky to hold a pencil. ‘What should I say?’ Lydia asked, and Asher dictated, ‘“We must leave at one a.m. – speak to us at once.” Leave it in the cellar, where he’ll see it.’
And how we’re going to explain the presence of a coffin in the truck to Greuze …
She sat at the small desk in the corner and spread out a sheet of notepaper, a shred of sunlight from the crack in the shutters turning the ends of her hair to molten copper. As if from a very great distance away Asher saw her pick up the pencil, but he was asleep before she finished the note.
TWENTY-NINE
I’m forgetting something.
Asher shoved five hundred krone into his jacket pocket and opened the drawer of the small desk in his room in the staff quarters of Frühlingszeit Sanitarium – the Department’s safe house in the Vienna Woods – though he knew he’d burned everything in the chamber that had his handwriting on it. He’d also burned the three telegrams which, taken together, had let him know that his German cover was about to be blown and that the Austrian Auswärtiges Amt might be looking for him tomorrow.
There was a train to Milan this afternoon at six forty. He had just time to catch it.
He’d bought a ticket weeks ago.
But I’m forgetting something …
He opened another drawer. There were rat bones in it, glistening wet and smelling of acid.
Urgency drummed him. You have to flee.
You have to meet the Baroness Himmelschein – that smouldery-eyed tart from the cabarets – at the Café Donatelle, so that the woman you love here in Vienna, who has begun to suspect that you are not as you seem, will think you fled the city as the result of a cheap intrigue, rather than that you really AREN’T what you seem.
They may already be after you …
The feeling plagued him, tormented him, in the fiacre into town, and as he made his way on to the platform at the Westbahnhof, his every nerve telling him to run and his training and intelligence telling him to amble, arm in arm with the chattering Baroness. All the while he was wondering if he’d remembered to put on his false spectacles and to shave off the imperial he’d grown for his journey to Vienna. He had, though, and was moreover vaguely aware that this was in fact a dream. Because it was a dream he was uneasy that the whiskers had either grown back overnight or had turned into something else that would attract attention.
Lydia, he thought suddenly. I’ve forgotten Lydia!
Seized with panic, he let go of the Baroness’s arm
– Wait, did I know Lydia then?
I have to wake up.
‘Lucien,’ purred the Baroness, hastening to the train-car – that was the name on his papers that year. ‘Lucien, darling, hurry, the train is leaving …’
I was supposed to get Lydia out of Vienna.
No, wait, this all happened before I met her …
Police were coming into the station (That’s wrong, that was Constantinople. I made a clean getaway from Vienna, albeit saddled with the Baroness). As he hastened down the platform a man behind him said, ‘James,’ and he turned to see Constantine Angelus, his dark churchman’s gown billowing in the engine’s steam. The conductors were calling out, ‘Alle an Bord!’
‘I can’t stay,’ said Asher, but Angelus stepped in front of him, a wet cardboard box in his hands. ‘I have to wake up.’
‘You have to take this.’ The vampire held it out to him. ‘Take it and destroy it.’
Asher didn’t touch it, for he saw that the sulfuric acid that soaked the box had eaten the vampire’s flesh away, the bones of his hand emerging from the blackening flesh of his wrists. The box had no lid: he saw that it contained a human skull.
Steam rolled across the platform, but the smell of it was the smoke of burning, and from the direction of the waiting-rooms came the crash of breaking glass.
The train was leaving. I’ll be trapped. Killed, as they killed poor Enver …
‘You have to take this.’ Angelus caught his arm with his skeletal hand. (Why am I not wearing silver?). ‘Please.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Asher, ‘I have to wake up—’
‘Jamie, you have to wake up!’
He opened his eyes. Smoke wreathed the afternoon light where it slitted in through the louvers, burned his eyes. Men were shouting in the street.
Bloody hell shit bugger goddam—
He hadn’t the slightest doubt about what was happening.
Someone fired a gun downstairs.
Lydia dragged him to his feet. He caught his trousers from the chair nearby. ‘You don’t have time to …’
‘They’ll be looking for a man in pyjamas.’
‘Oh. Is that something they teach you in spy school?’ she asked moments later, as she helped him down the back stairs toward the cellar. ‘How to get dressed in a hurry?’ She carried his jacket over her other arm, his tie crammed in her skirt pocket. Men were ramming the locked kitchen door with something, probably the bench from the garden. The salon and the dining-room were already in flames.
‘Most of my friends learned that at Oxford, yes.’ He caught a stout walking stick from a corner of the kitchen, clung to it for balance as they descended the stair, the wood cool against his bare feet. ‘So I suppose you could say so. Are there other exits marked?’ he asked, as she unbolted the old door beside the coal bin. ‘If any of the mob were Communards you know they’re going to know about the tunnel behind the Café Arabie.’
‘I know the way to the one in a cellar on Avenue Junot. Greuze’ – more shots upstairs – ‘says he’ll get away and meet us there with the truck.’
‘What about Ysidro?’ He ripped the note Lydia had written from its tin-tack on the coal bin, crammed the paper into his pocket.
‘He’s told me two or three times if worst came to worst to flee without him. He said he could hide in the mines for a time. His coffin is down there somewhere …’ She leaned Asher against the wall, scratched a match and lit the dark-lantern she’d taken from beside the door. Only then did she close the door, kneel to put his shoes on him, and then, rising, put her shoulder beneath his arm again. Even descending the stairs had left Asher dizzy. I’ll never make it all the way to the Rue Caulaincourt, let alone Poitiers.
‘Do you have our papers?’
‘Pocket,’ she said. ‘Greuze said he’d repainted the truck, but if we meet an army patrol on the way out of town they may give us trouble. They’re confiscating any vehicles they can get, and they’ll certainly take the petrol if they see it. If that happens, I’ll tell them you’re dying and have to be got out of the city,’ she added. ‘So try to look fragile.’
‘There won’t be any trouble,’ he panted, ‘about that.’
They ducked under a low-cut entry to another tunnel, turned a corner, and walked straight into Jürgen Schaumm and three men with pistols.
Asher yelled ‘RUN!’ and Lydia – to his thousand silent blessings – obediently shoved him straight into Schaumm’s pistol and bolted. The oldest of the henchmen – medium-sized, broad-shouldered, with ‘Prussian officer’ written all over him in letters a foot high – shouted in German, ‘Don’t shoot him, you fool!’ and the other two – who looked like German army seconded to the Nachrichtendienst – bounded after Lydia into the darkness. The officer pulled Asher away from Schaumm in an instant, flung him to the ground against the wall and held his pistol on him while he kicked him, savagely, twice. Through a haze of grayness Asher heard Lydia cry out, and distant curses in German.
They got her.
Damn it. Damn it …
The grayness that covered his mind cleared. He tried to rise and sank down again in a paroxysm of coughing as the officer lifted the lantern, called ‘Kraus! Mundt! Herüber!’
And to Schaumm, in a cold, crisp tenor, ‘This is the man?’
‘It is, Herr Colonel.’ Schaumm knelt at his side and added, over his shoulder, ‘I don’t think we’ll need to worry about him.’ And giggled, a mannerism that Asher had always loathed.
The colonel – and despite a fawn-colored tweed lounge suit that wouldn’t have been out of place on Piccadilly the man bore himself with the aggressive strut of a military aristocrat – stepped over, looked coldly down at Asher for an instant, and kicked him again as men emerged from the darkness with Lydia between them, her arm twisted behind her back. ‘Kill the woman if either of them gives trouble. We haven’t time to play little games.’
Schaumm dragged Asher into a sitting position, held him propped against the damp rock wall. ‘I hope for your wife’s sake you’ll be sensible.’ Behind thick polygonal slabs of glass his blue eyes burned with the restless urgency, the directionless anger that Asher well remembered from their summers together in Prague. ‘Where’s the Facinum?’
Asher was silent for a time, like a man struggling not to give up a final secret. ‘In the bone chapel,’ he said at length.
‘One of the relics?’
He let another half minute go by, hoping Lydia would forgive him and hoping he didn’t miscalculate either the colonel’s patience or his character. Schaumm made an imperious gesture to the henchmen and Lydia sobbed in pain.
‘Stop it! Let her go! It’s the gold box – the gold-and-silver box with the veiling inside.’
Lydia had the good sense to gasp, ‘Jamie, no! Don’t tell him—’
‘You’ve pounded Liège into gravel already,’ he snapped, turning savagely back to Schaumm. ‘You hardly need its vampires at your service any more. I take it Elysée de Montadour and her nest have fled Paris?’
‘In the small hours of this morning. Listen to me, Asher.’ Schaumm stepped back as the colonel (I wonder what regiment?) signaled for the beefier of the two henchmen to get Asher to his feet. ‘Hyacinthe Delamare is waiting for us at the Hôtel Batoux. She told me to bring you there – both of you. She’s the one responsible for the exacerbated tempers of the locals here, for the rumors of spies hiding in the house … I expect it’s in flames by now.’
He flashed the nervous toothy grin that Asher recalled, and when he touched Asher’s shoulder his fingers were trembling. He was wound up tight as a violin string with the nearness of his triumph. ‘You thought they all had to go to ground with sunrise, didn’t you? That they all fell asleep like the dead?’
Asher said nothing, but tried to look as if he was shaken by this information, and Schaumm emitted another pleased little giggle.
‘I’ve learned a great deal about those who hunt the night since last we parted, James. You never did believe in them, did
you? When did you learn differently?’
‘Seven years ago,’ said Asher. ‘What does she want?’
‘Exactly what I want,’ said Schaumm. ‘The Facinum.’
The colonel moved closer, gestured with his pistol toward Lydia. ‘And you had best be telling us the truth.’
Asher tried to look slightly panicky – which he was – and as if there might be any way for the Germans to tell whether he was lying or not, which he was fairly certain there wasn’t. To Schaumm he said, ‘How did you find out about it?’
He was curious as to whether Schaumm’s account of his acquaintance in Prague with the vampire Corsina Manotti would tally with what Rebbe Karlebach had written to him back in June, but the colonel snapped, ‘This is no concern of yours, Professor.’ Asher thought Schaumm looked a little disappointed at being cut off. He always did like to show off his knowledge.
‘How did you come to know of it?’ countered Schaumm.
‘One of the vampires in the Paris nest spoke of it, last time I was here.’
Arrows had been chalked on the tunnel wall; Asher struggled to stay on his feet as he and Lydia were thrust along after the bobbing light of the colonel’s lantern.
‘The Negro woman?’ Contempt flashed in Schaumm’s voice. ‘Treacherous and stupid, like all her race, and lazy as a slug. She told me they all whispered of it amongst themselves, the Paris vampires. But actually to go to the trouble of finding out what it was, or where it was …’ He shrugged in distaste. ‘I tried to reach the chapel this morning, when Mundt told me the guards there had abandoned their posts. We’ve kept an eye on the place, you know. But she was there before me. Hopped up like a dope-fiend on an elixir they take so as to remain awake into the hours of daylight …’
He shook his head like a street-corner preacher confronted with an actual dope-fiend. ‘She insisted we bring you to her, you and your charming bride. She wanted to hear about the Facinum from your own lips.’
Darkness on His Bones Page 27