TWENTY-SIX
Asher reached St Petersburg at 7:55 in the morning of Wednesday, May tenth – the twenty-sixth of April by Russian reckoning – and took a cab straight from the station to Krestovsky Island.
He’d cabled Lydia from the train station in Vilna, hoping against hope that, after a week of hearing nothing from him, she had not undertaken some investigation of her own.
Ysidro might have stopped her – or helped her . . . If Ysidro had gone on to Petersburg.
He didn’t know that, either.
Prince Razumovsky’s izba was shut. Not even servants moved around its closed-up doors, its tightly shuttered windows.
Damn it. Damn it . . .
‘Jamie!’ The Prince sprang up from his desk when Asher appeared in the study’s French doors. ‘Good God, man, where have you been? Madame Lydia—’
‘Where is she?’
‘They have been searching Petersburg for her for four days!’
The izba had been cleared up, the broken glass of the windows removed and the windows themselves replaced. ‘Zudanievsky said they found a little blood on the wall of the pantry cupboard in the basement,’ reported the Prince, as Asher turned over the two makeshift pikes that the police had left lying on the long parlor table: a broom handle and a kitchen poker to which silver knives and forks had been roughly lashed with string. ‘There was a man’s jacket there also: light gray wool, rather small, from a tailor in Jermyn Street—’
Ysidro’s.
Asher’s heart seemed to pound more heavily as he looked around the dim room. The police had piled the twisted garlands of garlic and wild rose stems on the table as well. He wondered what Zudanievsky had made of them. The bespectacled officer had impressed him as a quintessential city bureaucrat, but one never knew, with Russians. In any case, there wasn’t a Russian in Petersburg who didn’t have relatives still on the land. Despite the ramshackle tenements, the gritty factory-smoke of the industrial slums, over two-thirds of its people were villagers, straight from the wheat fields and birch woods. They would know what all this meant.
Four days ago. He must have made his way straight here from Berlin.
Strain and exhaustion had left him numb, perfectly calm, and cold inside.
The Petersburg vampires attacked . . . Probably as soon as Count Golenischev left town.
Why? How would they have known who Lydia was, or where she was?
Or was it Ysidro they were after?
He said, ‘No bodies.’ He felt he was viewing all of this as if from a very great distance. As if it were someone else he was looking for, and he himself was someone else as well. ‘No sign of burning?’
‘Burning?’ The Prince’s heavy eyebrows knotted, but he’d been in the business of secrets for a long time and did not ask further. ‘No. Rina – Madame Lydia’s cook here – said that a young girl came to see her that night, a dark-haired girl dressed like a lacemaker or a milliner. Madame Asher sent the servants away at once, back up to the house. Jov says they all of them woke up the next day where they’d dropped off to sleep, all at once, still in their clothing, like the castle of Sleeping Beauty. The men in the stables as well. I think someone must have introduced something into the tea in the servants’ hall.’
Asher went to the corner of the table, touched the three little heaps of silver there: the chains Lydia had worn around her wrists, and on the other side of the table – as if it had been taken off later, or by someone else – the longer chain that had guarded her throat. Beside them lay her spectacles, like a killed daddy-long-legs of silver and glass.
Lydia.
Someone – not a vampire – must have taken the protective chains off her. That would mean Texel or Theiss.
He was aware of the Prince’s cornflower gaze on him, not only troubled but probing, questioning . . . Reading – as Zudanievsky had read – in Asher’s silence a knowledge of precisely what was going on. What is it that you can tell from these weapons, these chains, these herbs, my friend, that we do not know?
‘I’ll send for Zudanievsky. He should be at his office—’
‘Not yet,’ said Asher. He took a deep breath; it cleared his mind. ‘There’s something else I need to see first.’
‘What?’ The Prince grabbed him by the shoulder, almost shouted the word at him. ‘Good God, man, if you know anything, I can have half the Okhrana out—’
‘And it only takes one second for someone to panic and cut his losses.’ Asher stepped from his grip, gathered up the chains and the spectacles and slipped them into his pocket. The butler on the shallow front steps of von Brühlsbuttel’s house in Potsdam had said, A telegram that seemed to upset him very much. He left this morning . . . St Petersburg . . .
The German would have only a few hours’ start on him.
‘I should be back this afternoon,’ he said at last, as they stepped out onto the veranda, locked the door again behind them. ‘Yes, please, get in touch with Zudanievsky, tell him to have some men ready. But he is to do nothing without my express orders.’ Asher blinked, seeing Razumovsky’s bitter grin, and corrected himself: ‘Without your express orders.’
‘As it little behooves an officer of the Okhrana to be taking orders from Mr Jules Plummer of Chicago . . . Is there anything that you need? You look like you’ve spent a night in the train station—’
‘On the train.’ They walked up the path to the main house again, and he rubbed his face, unshaven and still itching from the spirit gum of the now-discarded Berliner beard. ‘And I’d probably better not be Mr Plummer anymore. He’s wanted in Germany for murder and espionage. You’d better explain that to Zudanievsky. I’m Jean-Pierre Filaret from Strasbourg—’
‘I doubt he’ll care. When did you last eat?’
‘Nineteen oh-seven, it feels like. I’ll need a pistol – an automatic, if you’ve got one – and something to eat, whatever you’ve got in the kitchen.’
He stepped through the French window again and stopped beside the study desk, looking down at the newspaper lying on the corner of that handsome plain of inlay and ebony.
There was a badly-printed photograph of Dr Benedict Theiss, above the headline: SLUM CLINIC DOCTOR BRUTALLY MURDERED.
‘Just give me the pistol,’ he said. ‘I’ll return as soon as I can.’
The town house of Petronilla Ehrenberg, on the Sadovaia Oulitza, reminded him a good deal of Lady Irene Eaton’s, which lay only a few streets away, and even more of La Ehrenberg’s house in Neuehrenfeld. Expensive, stylish, it was situated on the end of a short row of identical expensive and stylish town houses; there was no mews behind. Not for people who kept their own carriages, or who were in Petersburg for long enough at a time to want to be troubled with the upkeep of animals or permanent servants on-site. A pied-à-terre, for Moscow industrialists with business connections in the capital, or the mistresses of men in the Court or the Army.
Small gates opened into an alley behind. The lock on Number 12’s was surprisingly expensive, for where it was, but Asher had little trouble climbing over. A narrow yard, like Lady Eaton’s: kept up just enough not to look unkempt. Upstairs and down the rooms were showier, with the expensive and rather heavy-handed taste – and many of the same prints on the walls – he had seen in the Köln town-house. But it was a house designed simply to establish the fact that the occupant lived in a house like other people, and slept in a bed.
A crypt had been walled off the shallow basement, its door concealed behind boxes that cost Asher a struggle to shift. Like many basements in St Petersburg, its walls were clammy and everything smelled dimly of sewage. The coffin – mounted on trestles – was empty.
When Asher sprang lightly down from the top of the rear gate of Number 12 again and started back up the alley, a man stepped out from around the corner and held out his hand to him. ‘Please, mein Herr, ten thousand pardons—’
This didn’t sound like either the Okhrana or the St Petersburg police, so Asher stopped and waited while he approached. He walked like a cavalryman, though he was a man in his fifties. His cavalry whiskers were grizzled silver, and his tall, thin form was rather stooping in a baggy but expensive suit as travel-creased and soot-smutted as Asher’s own.