I did take a special interest in the post-script on the letter, however.
“Are you certain you’d never seen the killer before?”
“Of course not. Unlike you, I don’t collect vampire friends.”
“I just thought I’d ask. It’s possible he saved your life.”
“By not killing me as well?”
“No, that isn’t what I mean. It seems the last part of this message instructs the recipient to kill the messenger if this letter is delivered unsealed.”
She went a little pale. “That’s a precaution. In the event I read it before delivery.”
“Obviously, if you could read the language you would have known to reseal it, so that doesn’t make sense. This was so the man who was to murder you would feel no guilt in doing so. The fact that according to the sender the letter was supposed to have been sealed, would have absolved the recipient of guilt and put the responsibility for your death on your own shoulders. It might have been your body in that garden instead of his. Well, pretending for the moment that his body was lying in the garden still.”
“It would have been his body, only by my hand,” she said.
“Yes, you’re probably right.”
Her eyes darted around the room. “We should find a private place, Christoph, so you can read the rest of that letter to me and I can find out what information I was meant to die for.”
“You’re right. I might be the only one in this Heuriger who can read Romansh, but ironically, I might be the only one who doesn’t understand what any of it means. What did you have in mind?”
“I have quarters nearby. They should be sufficiently private.”
* * *
Gaining access to a young unmarried woman’s private boudoir is always a challenge, whether the purpose behind that access is innocent, or very much not.
Anna was staying in a boarding house run by a battle-axe of a woman called The Frau. This Frau had a moral compass that placed her somewhere above the Pope, and a tendency to eject tenants who disagreed with her minimum standards of chastity.
Or so I was told. I didn’t get an opportunity to meet her, which was fortunate. Equally fortunate, for this particular devising, the women of the house had an entire system established to spirit visitors into the apartments undetected. It was a coordinated effort that required no fewer than four residents acting in concert to redirect The Frau’s attentions, hold open the rear entrance, and act as lookout. Considering how efficient the entire process was, I had to think the building’s tenants entertained a large retinue of men on a semi-regular basis. The Frau was probably losing a lot of money by not charging the male visitors.
The quarters were small, but very clean and plush, and much more girlish than its resident. I ended up in a chair in the sitting room on the other side of a portable screen behind which Anna was changing.
“I must apologize,” she said before disappearing, “ but I can only wear a corset for so long. I feel as if I’m being squeezed to death.”
“As a gentleman, I feel honor-bound to offer my assistance in freeing you from this horrible experience.”
“I’m sure you do,” she said, with a gentle laugh that led me to think it wasn’t completely out of the question. “I can hear you perfectly well from the other side of the screen, and I know how to undress myself. Read the whole letter. Let’s see if we can figure this out together.”
So I did. And when I was finished I read it through again. Then we started attacking it sentence-by-sentence to work out why it was important enough for someone to be killed over the contents.
The obscure dialect the drafter used was only one problem. There was also the matter of the abbreviations. As far as I could tell, the letter contained minutes from a meeting, which made it possibly the most boring piece of espionage imaginable. But this meeting involved people with names that—if written out—would have been easily recognizable to anyone looking at the page, regardless of their familiarity with the rest of the words. Their solution was to abbreviate the names. The only other way around it would have been to use a language that employed different alphabet, which is what I would have done.
“Who do you suppose RSVC is?” I asked.
Her initial response was a loud clatter. She must have had so many knives hidden in the dress she couldn’t easily locate each of them, because this was the third time I’d heard one fall to the floor.
“Probably the Viscount Castlereagh. Robert Stewart.”
“And he is?”
A sigh, the slap of a knife on a wood countertop, the slip of lace through an eyehole. Audio-only striptease.
“The foreign secretary of Britain,” she said. She stepped out from behind the screen, wearing only a turquoise bustier and a white lace slip. She either forgot that this didn’t constitute acceptable public clothing or didn’t much care if I saw her in her underthings. “Please tell me you do know what Britain is?”
I couldn’t really speak right away. Anna had untied her hair, which cascaded over her naked shoulders and framed her face in a way that was far more fetching than I would have expected. She had high cheekbones and striking eyes, and those two things in combination generally made for a very attractive woman when her hair was pulled back. This was true as well for Anna, but with the hair down her face was somehow more intoxicating.
And yes, I was mostly looking at her face, although there was a great deal of cleavage to gawk at as well. I could see one of her ankles, too. I have nothing bad to say about ankles.
“I do,” I said, eventually. “I’ve even been there.”
“Well thank God.”
She disappeared behind the screen again, and I exhaled.
“Was Robert Stewart at this meeting?” she asked.
“I don’t think he was, they only talked about him.”
“Who are they, though? Where was this meeting?”
I’d read it through twice already, and that information wasn’t in the letter. “If you have a pad and paper I can translate it out so I don’t have to keep referring to the text for you.”
“I think it would be a poor idea to keep any records we don’t have to, especially one in plain tongue.”
“Maybe a language only you and I know. Are you familiar with Sanskrit?”
“What is that? East Indian? No. Keep it oral.”
“All right. Who do you suppose KWFM is?”
“Prince Metternich, I suspect. Was he there?”
I flipped through the document. “No.”
She sighed. “Who was there?”
“Um… PGL. I think he was definitely there.”
“PGL… who else?”
“PSH? Lots of P’s. One T.”
“T?”
“Yes, but there aren’t any other letters to go with that one. Just T.”
“That’s unhelpful.”
“I don’t believe the framers of the document were interested in making this easy on someone in our position.”
Anna emerged from the screen again. She had extricated herself entirely from women’s clothing and had switched to a large white men’s shirt and a pair of slacks that were likely meant for a boy. Her hair was in a ponytail.
Honestly, I could have spent the evening waiting for her to pop out from the screen every few minutes in different clothes.
“Who else?” she asked.
“Um… CPR. And CL.”
“This is not at all helpful.”
“I realize that, but I wasn’t the one who wrote it.”
She sat on the edge of her bed, which was a number of feet away from me. In slacks, she settled in as a man might, with her legs uncrossed and open. I wondered if she often had cause to impersonate a boy. With her hair up and tight and hidden in a hat and her bosoms tied, she could no doubt pass as one on a cloudy day. I elected not to say this, as this would not have been much of a compliment.
“What about the body of the document?” I asked. “Maybe it can give us an idea of who these others were.”
The meeting these various initials had convened was inordinately concerned with Saxony, which was a detail I found more interesting than I let on. I happened to have met a Saxon duke a few years earlier, and more to the point had saved him from being stolen and ransomed. He knew me by another name, but he knew me nonetheless. Assuming he hadn’t been kidnapped more successfully in the interim, he could maybe turn out to be helpful, if he was in Vienna at all.
“None of it sounds important,” she said. “It sounds like the sort of thing bound to be discussed in the congress proper. I can appreciate certain members of the talks meeting on the side, perhaps to digest the various positions without those positions being made a part of the official record, but I see no reason to kill a man for the results of that meeting.”
“Or to kill a woman,” I said. “The author of this letter—assuming it was he that gave it to you—decided you were to perish after completing the task. Maybe to figure this out we should begin with him.”
“Yes, only I don’t know who he is or how to relocate him. And I’m assuming he thinks me dead.”
“Maybe you should tell me how you got involved in this undertaking.”
She sighed. “Would you like a drink?”
“I would always like a drink.”
Anna slid open a drawer in her nightstand and extracted a bottle. After a little more digging she found a cup, which she handed over. It was a steel cup of the kind I would expect to discover aboard a ship.
“I have only one glass, I’m afraid I don’t often entertain.”
“That’s all right.”
She poured an amber liquid into the cup. “Brandy,” she said. She took a swig from the neck of the bottle before I had a chance for a taste. It was subtle, but this was her way of telling me the liquid wasn’t poisoned. It was a nice touch, and one I wouldn’t have expected from a woman. It was also mostly unneeded, as I can’t really be poisoned. I assume this is for the same reason I can’t get sick, whatever that is.
I tried her brandy while she sat back down, ignoring for the moment the idea that if she really, really wanted to poison me, the smart play would have been to put the poison in the cup. Likewise, brandy would have been the liquor to use in such an endeavor, as most poisons are bitter and brandy’s sweetness can offset that nicely.
It was fair to say I didn’t think I could really trust her. I wanted to. We had managed to spend most of the day together by then, and I’m frankly bored of 90% of humanity after under an hour of active conversation. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that one of the reasons I found her so interesting was that she wasn’t telling me the whole truth, and I wanted to know what that whole truth was.
The letter was a good example. As much as we appeared to be struggling together with the contents, there was something about her responses that made me think none of it was really a surprise, not even the part where the author attempted to have her killed. I felt like I was missing an important angle.
Anyway, the brandy was unspectacular, but brandy doesn’t have to be excellent to be enjoyable. It was also not bitter and probably without poison.
“A man approached me through common associates,” she said. “Some months ago. I was … not in Vienna at the time. Elsewhere.”
“Britain?” I guessed.
“Elsewhere,” she repeated. “He asked me to come to Vienna. He provided me with this apartment and a per diem, and established a method for contacting me when my services were required, and that was all. It was the last I saw of him. Weekly, a purse arrives, delivered to The Frau and forwarded to my door. It’s a generous enough sum that I’m able to keep up the appearances of a highborn lady.”
“A mercenary spy.”
“I like to think of it as an effective way to earn coin without having to open my legs for someone unsavory. So far I’ve enjoyed a much better life than someone with my background should expect to have.”
“The counterfeiting of blades strikes me as a lucrative endeavor.”
“Oh, it can be. But I need men with titles to establish provenance, which means getting close to men with titles. So you see, my benefactor’s needs coincide nicely with my own. There are more titled men and women in Vienna than ever.”
This was true enough. Negotiation between sovereigns had been conducted, historically, through intermediaries—messengers, or someone with a modest title and the trust of a king. This process added a layer of complexity to any treaty, because inevitably the person negotiating was working from a slightly different agenda, and could control what information was shared with whomever he spoke for. (Telephones have largely eliminated this element.) From all I knew of the congress—which was not much at all—an effort had been made to remove the intermediaries from the talks as much as possible. That meant there were an unreasonable number of titled individual milling about Vienna.
“You’ve been busy while waiting for your orders, I take it.”
“Very much so. I’ve promised to deliver authentic Damascus to a duke and two princes, representing three countries. I suspect none of them would know what to do with a proper blade, but that’s not my concern. I was also asked to deflower a king’s nephew, a task I politely declined.”
I laughed. “Please accept my apology in advance, milady, but was it the money?”
“The money wasn’t an issue, and the nephew was hardly hideous, but he didn’t like girls. I could tell that instantly. I regret it will take his father much longer to figure this out. I wouldn’t have minded terribly otherwise, but I really do prefer a partner with at least some skill to match their ardor. This little man would have had neither.”
I was thinking I liked her better in men’s clothing. She seemed less guarded, and I felt more at ease. So much about the way women had to dress at the time was about illusion. Waists were cinched, breasts were squeezed and shoved upward, backs were held stiff, shoulders were augmented, hair sculpted and raised, and faces redrawn. It was almost theater. But without all of that clothing and make-up it was as if we had both agreed that the illusion was over and everybody could relax.
Of course, getting me at ease and speaking freely was an entirely calculated decision on her part, but I didn’t think this through until after it was too late for the realization to do me any good.
“So you received a signal?” I asked.
“One of the coins that came with the per diem was marked with an X. That was the signal. I had been given three different locations in the city, all of which I had reviewed in my travels through the city. The specific location depended on what kind of coin bore the mark.”
“Should I assume there’s no way to connect the coin to the location without being told ahead of time?”
“You should, yes. The associations are random, on the chance any of this was intercepted.”
Spy tradecraft always sounds like it’s going to be more interesting than it ever really is. It’s actually the worst combination of dull and paranoid the human mind can devise.
“The location was a dead drop that contained nothing but an address.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. You went to a building?”
“No. I went to a street corner. And at the appointed time a carriage stopped, and I got in. The man inside handed me this envelope and told me where to bring it, and when.”
“Where did he take you?”
“A hotel. My cover was as a hired lady, and so I accompanied him inside, but not into a room. I was escorted to the back of the building, where the carriage awaited to take me back to the same corner from which I’d been retrieved, and only after riding around the city for well over an hour.”
“And you don’t know who this man was?”
“I only saw him clearly once when we got out of the carriage and into the hotel lobby—a fleeting look—before he handed me off to an escort. I didn’t recognize him.”
“But clearly someone else would have.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He went throug
h the effort of making it appear as if he’d hired a prostitute. He needed a logical explanation for interacting with you, and thought it was necessary to play out the charade right up to the hotel. People expecting to be watched that closely are either important enough to be recognizable or are paranoid.”
“Or are spies. Always assume you’re being followed, and always have a cover story.”
I waved the letter. “He was important enough to get into this meeting.”
“No, no, you’re assuming he took the notes himself. We can’t assume anything like that.”
“There must be something useful we can get out of this man.”
“I saw his face. That’s useful. If I ever see him again.”
I sighed. “All right, so then what happened?”
“The following afternoon I went to the garden to deliver the letter, and you know the rest.”
“He didn’t tell you anything about the man you were meeting?”
“No. The garden was sufficiently private that there was no need. I had a code word to use, but it’s meaningless outside of that particular context.”
I thought of something. “I was in that garden with you. There was only one entrance.”
“So there was.”
“You walked in and found this vampire standing over your contact?”
“That’s correct, yes.”
“You were standing between it and the only way out of the walled garden.”
“He shoved me aside on his way by. I doubt he expected me to chase.”
“Why didn’t he just kill you? It doesn’t sound like he would have been interrupted.”
“I don’t know, Christoph. He didn’t give me an opportunity to ask.”
Something really wasn’t right about this story, but I couldn’t get my head around what it might be. That might have been because of the brandy, or possibly the fact that the white shirt she was wearing was a little see-through at certain angles.
As much as I hate to say it, I doubt I would have questioned the last part of this story if a man had told it to me. I could accept that a creature capable of biting open one man’s neck might be unwilling to combat another man, if the second man was sufficiently formidable. But as impressive as Anna was, formidable was not the first thing that sprang to mind. In truth, that was exactly what made her so dangerous, because she was not someone to be taken for granted. However, one generally needed to take someone like her for granted first in order to discover the mistake. It sounded like whatever this thing was, it fled on sight of her, and that didn’t really work for me.
Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5) Page 3