‘Doesn’t trust you, does she?’
The smaller man shot him a glance of simmering resentment. ‘She should hold herself up on the issue of trust! I’d be a fool – we’d be fools—’ his eyes went to the colonel’s straight broad back retreating before them in the darkness, and something deeper than resentment flickered in the momentary set of his thin lips – ‘to actually put that power into her hands. But the rest of them are too afraid of that slut Elysée.’
Gray daylight shone ahead of them. Asher smelled the vague melancholy stink of graveyard earth. A flight of crude steps – nailed together by the Communards forty years ago? – led up to the cramped confines of a tomb, through whose wrought-iron grille Asher could recognize the crowded tombs, the iron crosses and thick foliage of Montmartre Cemetery. The place was a quarry up until Napoleon’s time; of course there’d be ways into the mines.
The colonel halted just within the tomb’s door, turned back to Asher with his pistol leveled. ‘Fräulein Hyacinthe is going to ask you,’ he said in his calm, oddly boyish voice, ‘which of the four relics in the chapel is the Facinum, the source of power for the Master vampire of Paris. You’re not going to tell her the truth.’ He must have seen Asher’s glance go back to where Lydia still stood, her arms gripped by the soldiers Kraus and Mundt, for he went on, ‘Your wife will remain in the motor car with us. We will inform the lady that she was shot, killed. It is up to you to convince her of this. I hope you are capable of shedding tears at will, Herr Professor?’
Asher felt his ears get hot and his hair prickle with anger. He said quietly, ‘Like a crocodile, Herr Colonel.’
‘You will tell Fräulein Hyacinthe that the Facinum is one of the other relics – I understand that there are four of them? A pity they cannot all be carried away this afternoon and melted down for gold, but they are bulky and the way out of the chapel, so Herr Professor Schaumm informs me, is difficult to negotiate. The Fräulein Hyacinthe demands to know which relic it is, for that reason: she can get only one of them out of the hôtel and to her own hiding-place. You will see to it that she takes the wrong one.’
Asher glanced sidelong at Schaumm, and saw again in his face the anger of one who feels himself cheated of deserved credit.
As if he saw the glance, the colonel went on, ‘Herr Professor Schaumm informs me that the vampire is a subtle creature, capable of reading small signs in the human face and the human voice. If you believe you’ll fare better by taking her side in this business rather than ours, I assure you that you will find this is not the case.’
Asher whispered, ‘I do not so believe.’
Another man – like Kraus and Mundt, clearly a soldier in plain clothes – waited outside the cemetery gate in a Renault camionette. With most of the city’s banks closed, Asher guessed that anyone who had the Nachrichtendienst’s money on hand could get pretty much anything he needed. Certainly Ysidro had had no trouble.
Asher tried to brace himself against the door as the colonel went around to get into the driver’s seat. ‘Let Mrs Asher go,’ he said. The sensation of speaking through miles of dark tunnel to someone infinitely distant hovered around the edges of his mind, the pain in his chest less disconcerting than the feeling of literally being unable to bear the weight of his flesh on his bones. ‘I’ll tell Madame Hyacinthe whatever you want, but leave Mrs Asher out of this. She’s had nothing to do with any of this.’
The colonel made a sign – almost bored, like a man telling his footman to drown a crying kitten – and one of the soldiers shoved Asher into the front seat beside the officer. Schaumm, Lydia, and the three soldiers got into the back.
‘When I get – we get – the Facinum—’ Schaumm leaned forward across the seat backs to speak – ‘and Hyacinthe Delamare takes her own prize and leaves, then you and Mrs Asher will be free to go.’
The colonel glanced back at Schaumm in a kind of slight surprise. Surprised, maybe, reflected Asher grimly, that Schaumm would think for a moment that Asher believed this …
Schaumm added silkily, ‘We have no quarrel with the innocent.’
From his fellow student’s slight stammer as he delivered this line Asher could tell that Schaumm had no intention of letting him and Lydia go free. He’ll probably tell Kraus and Mundt to do it, somewhere he can’t see. He wanted to ask how no quarrel with the innocent applied to recent events in a number of Belgian villages, but knew he’d be better off pretending that he did, in fact, believe what he’d been told. Still he couldn’t help saying, ‘You know we’re going to be extremely lucky if she doesn’t kill us both.’
‘Oh, I think I’ll be able to get out of there well before the sun goes down. Certainly the colonel has taken the precaution of loading his pistol with silver bullets. Fräulein Delamare will be effectively trapped in the chapel until dark.’ Schaumm giggled again. ‘And I assure you, I’ll be very careful not to let her get between me and the door.’
THIRTY
Asher really did lose track of the proceedings after that, aware only of the movement of the car through the silent streets and not even always of that. The car came to a halt and gates were opened. Around him lay the forecourt that he’d only gotten a glimpse of through the judas of the gate, back in another world, another city, another life where people rode in lacquered carriages and bought earrings for ladies of a certain reputation in shops on the Rue de Rivoli …
The Hôtel Batoux.
It was exactly as Camille Batoux had described it – he recalled the lavender scent of her perfume and the curious silvery gravelliness of her voice – when she’d told him of her very peculiar childhood: We’d make up stories of who lived on the other side of those bolted doors – all shades of Poe and Mrs Radcliffe and Miss Havisham! – and sometimes we’d slip out of bed in the middle of the night and listen at the keyholes. Sometimes we heard voices, or thought we did. My uncle would beat us if he caught us …
Asher had sipped the coffee she’d set before him and had thought, If you were my child in such circumstances, I’d have beaten you too.
But then I’d never, EVER have raised a child in such a house.
Even as he’d thought this, looking across the worn and exquisite coffee-set into those enormous hazel eyes, he had reflected, Easy for me to say, whose father had a good living in the Church. Whose family saw to it that I got an education, though they tried their damnedest to make me go into helping Uncle Theobald run his shoe factory.
Gabrielle Batoux had picked for the house’s guardians the most indigent members of the family, those who would have been sunk in Dickensian poverty were it not for the money that mysteriously turned up in Uncle Evrard’s bank account every month.
Now, looking back on the conversation, he thought, And what else am I doing to Miranda, every day that I don’t hunt down Ysidro and kill him while he sleeps?
He had no answer to that.
‘Get out of the car.’
Lydia cried, ‘Jamie!’ when he stumbled, unable to stand, and tried to get out too. The guard beside her yanked her back.
Asher panted again, ‘Let her go,’ as he was dragged to his feet. ‘We don’t know—’
‘All in good time,’ said Schaumm. ‘I understand from Miss Hyacinthe that the Montadour woman has taken her human minions with her.’
‘They are human,’ said Asher wearily. ‘The vampires. Human beings, like you and me. Not demons. Not spirits. Until you realize that, you cannot deal with them.’
As he was shoved into the house he glanced back over his shoulder, saw the line of sunlight was more than three-quarters of the way up the courtyard’s eastern wall. Close by, the chimes of the church of Sainte-Clare struck six.
The house was precisely as he recalled it, though the trunks and cupboards gaped open, looted by the guards before they’d left. The spiral stair descended the tower through a drench of buttery sunlight that fell from a dozen incongruous windows. ‘Mundt,’ the colonel commanded, and the henchman who wasn’t half-carrying Asher knelt to pick the
lock on the grille. The chapel door, at the foot of the stair, was still locked, and bore no sign of any attempt to force it.
The chapel. What am I forgetting that I saw in the chapel? Or felt there, that made me go upstairs to wait for her to waken?
Or was that only a dream?
The colonel struck a match, rekindled his lantern. Turned the many corners, put aside the heavy velvet curtains. Opened the door.
Hyacinthe turned from staring at the altar and smiled in the candlelight. ‘You again, honey-man.’ She was beside them in an eyeblink and ran caressing claws from the side of Asher’s face down across his throat. ‘Not so brave with no silver on your person, are you?’
He shook his head, mindful that he was supposed to be a man who had just brutally lost his wife. Numb, eviscerated … She took his face between her hands, kissed his mouth, her body clinging to his like wet silk. He felt her stiffen with anger as he turned his face aside, but she was already looking past his shoulder at the door.
‘Where’s the woman?’ All the syrup vanished from her tone.
‘Dead.’ There was enough spiteful satisfaction in Schaumm’s voice to convince anyone. He enjoyed saying it. If he’d been working with Hyacinthe for over a month, Asher reflected, there was probably a great deal of pleasure in seeing her baffled rage. ‘So much for your scheme of having the local hooligans drive them into the tunnels by burning the house over their heads. She had a gun, and tried to defend him.’
Hyacinthe yanked Asher from the grip of his guard, pushed him against the stone chancel arch. Her narrowed eyes blazed as they looked into his, and Asher looked away again. Framing in his mind what it would be like. What he would feel, would think. You can’t just cook up a story, Belleytre used to say to him, in Paris or Prague or Damascus, when they were sorting out fake passports and dressing up as whoever they were supposed to be on that trip. You have to BE that person. To remember what that person remembers: losing a wife, losing a child, hating the British … WHY do you hate the British?
She is dead. I loved her and she is dead. His heart was a desolation, as it had been when he’d first realized he loved her, and that it was impossible for that love ever to come to anything.
It probably wouldn’t have fooled Ysidro, but he saw the flex of satisfaction on Hyacinthe’s bronze lips. She was glad he was in pain.
‘Then tell me this, honey-man.’ She let him sink to the floor at the base of the pilaster, sank down with him to her knees, her hands circling the gray stem of the stone behind his neck. Her voice lowered to a croon, but where her wrist touched his cheekbone he could feel her trembling, slight and constant, and he could see clearly the burn on her face and throat where he’d slapped her with his silver wrist-chain wound around his hand in the dark church of Sainte-Clare. Barely checked madness glittered in her eyes. ‘Tell me this and I swear to you, whatever happens to you, I’ll kill him – and I’ll make him beg me to do it. There is a magic hoodoo someplace, isn’t there? That Facinum they talk about? That Elysée used, to make her Master?’
He nodded, like a man to whom nothing has meaning any more. She had been awake, he calculated, since nine or ten o’clock the previous evening, when she’d learned that Elysée had fled. Had taken heaven only knew how much of what substance to ensure she stayed awake. She hadn’t the strength to turn his mind aside from the disfiguring wound, nor the acuity to detect his lie. The pain in her flesh must be driving her insane and for a vampire there was, he knew, only one cure for that pain.
‘Gabrielle Batoux had it,’ he whispered. ‘The Master of Paris who built this house. It belonged to Constantine Angelus. I don’t know where he got it.’
Her eyes shifted toward the altar with its four massive silver doorways, the candle flame glittering on the gold within. ‘Which one?’
He raised his voice just slightly and looked aside from her eyes. ‘The second from the left.’
Her nostrils flared, as if snuffling his blood. She caught his hair and forced him to look into her eyes, but he only held her gaze for a moment, then looked away again.
‘Well.’ She stood, and with her slow, drifting step crossed to the altar. The soldier Mundt tried to shrink away from her as he picked the silver-plated lock on the door left of center – Asher guessed the locks were simple Chubbs – and with a teasing smile on her dark lips she stood close beside him as he worked, fingering lightly his sweat-damp hair and touching his shoulders to see him squirm.
But once, suddenly, she turned, as if at a sound, and for a moment Asher could see fear in her eyes.
Rank on rank, the skulls of the wall looked back at her. From the elbow-high dado of pelvis-winged death’s-heads up to the curving vault of the ceiling, the skulls formed a silent chorus of mortality.
Watching with empty eyes.
I looked into those eyes.
Why did I do that?
She backed quickly away as Schaumm hurried forward and wrestled the relic from its niche. He could barely move the enormous heart, glittering with rubies and a-shimmer with enamel, purple and red and black; the colonel waved Mundt forward again with his pistol and, unwillingly, the soldier helped lift the thing and move it to the altar.
But Hyacinthe, picking it up, showed no such difficulty. Its size made it awkward in her arms but she cradled it like a baby, pressed her face to the blood-colored jewels. Her mouth quivered with the uncertain expression of one about to laugh or cry crazily, and her eyes burned in the lantern-light as she turned them upon Schaumm. ‘Thank you, little man.’ She nodded toward Asher. ‘Save that one for me. I’ll see you tonight.’
She stepped back, the shadows of the chapel seeming to engulf her.
If she thought I’d told her the truth she’d have killed me.
She must realize that there’s a chance they haven’t got the real location from me yet …
The colonel seemed to startle a little, as if waking from a dream to find her gone, and Schaumm passed his hand over his eyes in momentary confusion.
He hasn’t learned to shut his mind to that illusion, thought Asher. To watch them when they move …
Schaumm turned (yes, he’s going to do it!) to the far right niche and poked the picks into the silver lock. The colonel was right beside him, almost visibly itching to grab at the relic, and Asher, still sitting on the floor beside the pilaster, calculated his distance from Kraus, the nearer of the two guards, and how much strength he’d be able to muster for a dash to the door …
‘Lying bastard ditch-pig!’
Asher had been watching the shadows where Hyacinthe had stepped back and disappeared – only he had still been able to see the gleam of her eyes – and even he didn’t see her until she was at the colonel’s side. The colonel and Schaumm were both engaged in lifting the heavy golden box-relic – the veiled Star of Bethlehem – from its niche and neither of them, clearly, had been aware that she was still in the chapel, hidden by the darkness and by her own powers of illusion. She took the colonel first and Schaumm dropped the golden box with a crash and a splintering of glass, and ran for the door like a rabbit. The German colonel screamed when Hyacinthe ripped his throat open with her claws and made a horrible, gurgling gasp as she fastened her lips to the spouting wound and drank.
The soldier Kraus yelled ‘Scheiße!’ and fired, shattering bone fragments from the wall. Asher flung himself at the man’s legs with all his strength, rolling – it was all he could do – and knocking him sprawling. He caught Kraus’s gun as it clattered to the floor, fired at Schaumm as Schaumm whipped a knife from his pocket and dove, not at Asher – who was farther away – but at Kraus, the nearest target and still down on the floor.
Schaumm stabbed him in the neck – clumsily, inexpertly, but enough to release a gush of blood – and then fled through the chapel door and into the dark of the passageway, leaving the guard behind him as bleeding bait.
Hyacinthe will go after him first.
Mundt fired twice at Hyacinthe and then lunged to drag her off the colonel.
Kraus staggered to his feet, ripped the gun from Asher’s hand, and kicked him back against the wall before stumbling toward the struggling forms beside the altar. Asher had managed to crawl four feet toward the door when Lydia and Greuze whipped through the black curtains and fired at Kraus as – still bleeding like a stuck pig – he spun and loosed off a shot at them.
Asher had enough strength to roll toward the nearest pillar and cover his head. He heard Greuze gasp ‘Dieu alors!’ and then a man’s harsh scream. Greuze and Lydia reached his side in a single swooping dash (Greuze must have followed Schaumm’s car – good work!), caught him as if to flee, and then ducked behind the pillar again, Greuze firing …
Hyacinthe looked up from Mundt’s spasming corpse, blood streaming down her chin and breast and eyes burning with ecstatic delight.
Kraus had fallen, one hand pressed to the wound in his neck. He rolled over and emptied his revolver at the vampire woman as she rose from Mundt’s corpse, and she smiled, orgasmic with the two lives she had drunk. Asher doubted if, between panic, shock, and the erratic beam of the colonel’s kicked-over lantern, any of the terrified man’s bullets even hit her, but knew that they’d cause very little damage if they did. She laughed, soft and throaty, and purred in the Creole French of her childhood, ‘Oh, you little bunny, Mama’s gonna eat you right up.’
Kraus flung the pistol at her and began to crawl toward the door.
‘When she fastens on him,’ breathed Asher, ‘run.’
‘I’m not—’
‘Damn it, RUN! Get to the light in the vestibule …’
Hyacinthe looked up, a few feet from the frantically crawling guard, and met Asher’s eyes. She almost chuckled as she whispered, ‘No, you don’t.’ She glanced down at Kraus. ‘This one isn’t going anywhere in a hurry.’
She walked toward them. Slowly. Smiling.
Greuze fired twice at her and this time Asher saw the shots hit her, slow dribbles of blood from a heart that had ceased beating decades ago. She looked tickled to death at the prospect of a quarry who’d entertain her and Asher knew he and Kraus were going to be the last ones to die.
Darkness on His Bones Page 28