Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

It meant that she suspected him of leading a double life.

It meant that he was a footfall away from being blown. With Karolyi returning to Vienna in a matter of days, he knew what that would mean.

She'd been perceptive enough to see through Karolyi's imitation of an innocuous young idiot. Why hadn't he thought she would see through his own impersonation of scholarly harmlessness?

He'd sat by the window until the long summer afternoon faded and the white roses on the garden wall dwindled to milky blurs, until he had been unable to read the printing on the dry yellow telegraph forms, though he had by then memorized what each had said. He knew what they meant. He knew what they meant he had to do.

He pushed the memory aside now. When he recalled Viennese coffee and Creme Schnitten, he had automatically thought of the Cafe New York. Though he guessed Francoise had not entered its doors since the summer of 1895, either, he knew he'd look elsewhere for those small pleasures.

Francoise had been right about cafes in Vienna. It applied equally to public baths. Though not as ubiquitous as cafes, they were plentiful and good for the same reason. Most apartments in the overcrowded city lacked hot water; thousands of families still relied on communal pumps in the halls, communal toilets in the courtyards. But the Viennese were a clean people, cleaner in Asher's experience than the Parisians, for all the French fanaticism about keeping their windows spotless. Certainly the jail cell he'd occupied last night had been far from the pesthole of Fairport's imaginings.

The Heiligesteffanbaden was a veritable emporium of cleanliness, and heavily populated even for a Tuesday morning. Workingmen, students, bearded bourgeoise, and stolid hofrats scrubbed conscientiously in pink marble tubs, under the solicitous eye of the usual host of marble and mosaic angels and the usual Viennese hierarchy of Herr Oberbadmeister, Oberbadmeister, Unterbadmeister, and the garzone who collected the towels. Asher visited the barber next door to be shaved, changed into the shirt and underclothing he'd bought on the way from the Prefecture of Police, paid a quick visit to a man he'd known back in '95 who cut keys, and felt much better, though the clerks at the Rathaus looked askance at his rumpled jacket when he asked to examine wills and title documentation of the older dwellings in the Altstadt. He guessed he would have enough time to do what he needed to do, if not before dark, at least before the crowds thinned from the streets.

As both scholar and spy, Asher had long ago learned that human beings reveal the true workings of their souls when their attention is on something that consumes them to the exclusion of their usual desire to make an impression on others-and that something is usually property. He had, he reflected dryly, witnessed a particularly unappetizing modern example of that very phenomenon in the wake of his cousin's funeral three days ago. In their preoccupation with who's going to get what, people forget to cover their tracks: banking records, wills, probates, leaseholds, account books can yield a startling amount of information to someone with time at his disposal and a high tolerance for dust. Asher started with the oldest palaces of the Altstadt, those exuberantly decorated masterpieces of white stucco whose baroque facades could barely be seen because of the narrowness of the ancient city's alleys, matching ownership records with wills, wills with death notices and, more importantly, birth notices; doing sums on every page of his notebook and all around the margins of the Times Personals, the only other paper he had in his valise. He found himself heartily missing Lydia, not out of romantic considerations, but simply because she was a good researcher and would thoroughly enjoy this chase. He left around two for a sandwich, but it was only when one of the several bespectacled young clerks came to his table in the reading room and said apologetically, "If it please you, Herr Professor Doktor, this building is now closing," that he realized the windows were pitch-black and that the electric lights had been on for nearly an hour and a half.

By previous arrangement, Artemus Halliwell was waiting for him at Donizetti's cafe. The head of the Vienna section was in his mid-thirties, untidy, bearded, bespectacled, and enormously obese; Asher remembered him from the London statistics department. Behind small oval slabs of glass, Halliwell's pale green eyes were like cabachon peridots as he listened to Asher's account of his journey.

"So this Farren thinks he's a vampire, eh?" Halliwell carved a neat fragment of backhendl and popped it into his incongruous rosebud of a mouth. "I suppose that's how he came into your purlieu in the first place, is it?"

Asher nodded. In a sense it was actually true.

"You get some of that in Vienna, though not as bad as Buda-Pesth. When I went west into the mountains only last year, there was a tizz-woz in one of the villages about a man who was supposed to turn himself into a wolf. I'm told in parts of the Black Forest no one will talk to you, sell you anything, give you directions to anywhere, if you kill a hare."

He dabbed his lips with his napkin and the ubiquitous Ober appeared, asking with folded hands if everything was all right.

"I think you should know," said the fat man, when the Ober had effaced himself again, "that there's been a bit of a stink."

Asher felt his nape prickle. He'd been around the Department long enough to recognize that carefully neutral tone. "Oh?"

"Streatham's doing." He made a dismissive gesture with his fork. "Naturally. Always was a bloody fool. He's made to-do about that boy Cramer's death with the French authorities, ranting about British citizens and treaty rights-just as if our offices weren't in flat violation of any treaty's assertions of good faith. The thing is, the French have washed their hands of the whole matter, contacted the Vienna police, and are demanding your return under escort on the first available train. I held them off for a day, saying I hadn't any idea where you were," he went on, raising a staying hand against Asher's protest. "But whatever you've learned today at the Rathaus, you'd probably better pass along to me."

"Idiot," Asher said dispassionately, while his mind raced ahead. It was close to eight; the streets would remain crowded enough to protect him until ten at least, possibly later, and in any case he doubted that vampires could detect an intrusive interest in their lairs from a single walk by a casual observer.

But even in a single walk-past he could tell a great deal, particularly which of the several houses on his list of possibilities was the likeliest haunt. Enough information, at least, that whoever took over wouldn't be going into the job defenseless, as Cramer had done.

"And what was it," asked Halliwell, "that you went to the Rathaus today to find?"

Asher considered for a moment, then said quietly, "Vampires."

Halliwell's tufted brows went up.

"Are there people here who believe in them?"

The Vienna chief gestured with his fork again. "There's always muttering among the Gypsies. The waiter at my cafe swears he saw a vampire on an old gate tower connected to a house in the Bieberstrasse-used to be part of the ramparts." He shook his head. "My cafe. I sound like a Viennese. Caught myself calling this place my restaurant the other day, same as I'd talk about my club at home."

"I don't know." Asher looked around him lazily, soothed by the atmosphere of the place, the slight shabbiness of the oak panels, the soft flicker of the gaslight and the all-pervasive smell of goulash, and scratched a corner of his mustache. "Isn't one's cafe here a little like one's club in London?"

"The hell it is." Halliwell surgically excised another morsel of chicken. "At a club you have a vote on who gets let in the door. Here anyone can come in-and does." He glared across at a party of uproarious young subalterns in the sky- blue coats of the Imperial-and-Royal Uhlans. "The wine's atrocious, and I think if I hear one more waltz, one more operetta, one more Mozart concerto, I'm going to open negotiations with the Turks to reinvade, and this time I'll make damn sure they win. Has Farren been to Vienna before?"