Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

"Margaret," she asked, as they collected reticules, fans, shawls and keys, "what are you going to do when you return? To London, I mean? I could help you..." "Oh, I'll leave that to Don Simon," Margaret said. "My fate is in his hands." She smiled happily and followed Lydia down the stairs.

The reception was held in a medium-sized pavilion in the inner garden court of the old palace of the sultans, flanked by plane trees and surrounded by a colonnade of shallow, green-tiled domes. The Sultan himself had not occupied the Topkapi Palace for a good fifty years, but the new government-the Committee of Union and Progress-used it for state functions, and this three-room suite, though a little small for a reception and rather stuffy with its low, coffered ceilings and Western-style crystal chandeliers, was at least unhallowed by any sort of Imperial tradition.

"Ambassador Lowther hardly knows whom to speak to these days," Sir Burnwell confided to Lydia as gorgeously caparisoned palace servants divested them of coats and cloaks in the doorway of the kiosk's small service room. "It's like the old story about the seer who was right half the time, but one never knew which half. The C.U.P. holds power in patches, but nobody knows which patches they are."

"At least under the old Sultan one knew whom to bribe." Lady Clapham brushed straight the folds of her periwinkle and gold chiffon dress, and nodded approvingly at both the younger members of the party. "Don't worry, my dear," she added more quietly to Lydia. "If there's anything to be found about your husband, we'll find it here. I know at least someone who saw him Wednesday afternoon. I hope he's here... Russians have such an Oriental idea of time." She led the way into the main hall, where the reception line moved slowly past the bearlike Talaat Bey, the new lord of this place where the sultans had reigned for five centuries, and the Romeo of the new army, the beautiful Enver Bey. The room was crowded with men and women dressed in the height of European fashion-most of them fair-skinned and all of them speaking French-and servants in old-fashioned turbans, slippers, and pantaloons bearing silver trays of refreshments. Lydia noticed Miss Potton craning her neck, looking around her, presumably in the hopes that Ysidro would have followed them here after all. "Andrei!" Lady Clapham called out and moved into the crowd, returning a moment later with a hunter-green colossus on her arm. "Prmce Andrei Illlyich Razumovsky, of the Russian Embassy; Mrs. James Asher. His Highness is an acquaintance of your husband, my dear. He was the last one to see him after that affair with the Sultan's guards Wednesday, weren't you, Andrei?"

"The Sultan's guards?" Lydia raised her eyes to the man who towered over her, the impressionistic glitter of bullion, buttons, epaulets, fringe, and a beard of still- brighter gold resolving themselves into a good-humored, handsome face and bright blue eyes as the prince bent to kiss her hand. Slavic facial angle, Lydia thought automatically. Brachycephalic. Cranial index about 82. I %. I really must stop seeing people in terms of their internal structure...

"There was little harm done," the prince said in beautiful Oxonian English and offered her his arm. Lydia followed him back out into the colonnade, where electric lights had been incongruously strung from pillar to pillar. A few men stood at one end of the arcade smoking-Lydia caught the acrid whiff of tobacco, but at that distance they were little more than a clump of black forms spatchcocked with the white of shirtfronts.

The day had been a cold one, and few ladies, bare-shouldered as she was herself, ventured into the sea-chilled darkness.

"Your husband had lodgings here in Stamboul," the prince went on when they were out of earshot of the smokers. "Most Europeans prefer to stay in Pera, of course, particularly since the coup. There haven't been riots among the Armenians in the past week or two, but fighting in the streets between the Greeks and the Turks can't be stopped. Your husband..."

He gazed down at her for a moment from his great height, and Lydia could see him asking himself what he could, in discretion, ask her. The look in Lady Clapham's eyes when she'd said, An acquaintance of your husband, had told her exactly what this "junior attache" did in the Czar's service.

"I know that my husband came to Constantinople to ask the advice of... certain friends." She laid the same emphasis on the last words and met his eyes. The corners of them crinkled in a little smile. Yes, I know my husband was a spy and you still are. Presumably, she thought, Lady Clapham wouldn't have introduced them that way if Russia was an ally of Austria. Whose side was the Ottoman Empire on?

"Ah," he said. "As you say, Madame Asher." His smile widened. "Then you know that he probably had his reasons. You wouldn't happen to know what those were?" She shook her head. "I only knew that he might be in trouble. Sir Burnwell told me he arrived in Constantinople a week ago yesterday, and that nobody's seen him since Wednesday afternoon."

"And what sort of help did you believe you could be?" He spoke kindly, but she could see something else in his gaze. Just because we're allies, Jamie often said, doesn't mean we're on the same side. She felt panicky again, as she had in Vienna, panicky and unable to make a correct choice.

Forcibly, she put the panic aside. "I thought I could recognize the man who might betray him," Lydia lied, with what she hoped was calm. "I don't know his name," she added, and went on at once, "But what happened Wednesday afternoon?" Razumovsky looked as if he might say something else, but changed his mind. Probably, thought Lydia, because he thought it likelier he'd get more information later if he gave a little himself. He might even actually like Jamie- he looked like the sort of person Jamie, and in fact she, would and could like.

"As I said, he had lodgings on the Stamboul side of the Horn." The prince lowered his voice and glanced along the colonnade to the group of smokers again. None looked in their direction, but the prince guided her down the short flight of marble steps that led to an arched tunnel beneath the pavilion, and so through to the dark gardens beyond. "He told no one where they were, and when I saw him, he had the look of one watching over his shoulder. On Wednesday men from the palace intercepted him by the Grand Bazaar, sent by the High Chamberlain, they said-though anyone could have bribed him to do so." He grinned reminiscently. "I've bribed him to do similar things myself."

"And he sent to you for help?"

"We've been friends a good many years," said the Russian. "Sir Burnwell would probably have complained to the army first, or the C.U.P., and been put off for God knows how long. Semibarbarity has its advantages. I came here-where the Chamberlain and in fact the Sultan still hold a good deal of power- and blustered and shook my fist. Shook my country's fist, which frightened them even more. Already the Sultan is playing off the people against the army, trying to rouse them in a countercoup, for he wields power as the head of the Mohammedan faith, you know. If it comes to it, the Chamberlain and his master are going to need support."

Lydia shivered, remembering a scene glimpsed from the window of the embassy carriage as they'd clattered along one of the few streets in the old city wide enough to admit such a vehicle: three men, dark-haired and hook-nosed, in the khaki uniforms of the new army, beating up an old man outside a half-closed shop. A muttering crowd had gathered, but no one had dared interfere; the old man had only put his hands over his head for protection, as if he knew perfectly well that begging for mercy or asking for help were equally out of court. "They brought him out in a short time," Razumovsky went on, stroking back the surge of his golden mustaches. "As I'd suspected, they were holding him in the guardhouse here, which means it was the Chamberlain who'd been bribed. He had been knocked about a little, nothing serious."