Barbara Hambly - Magistrates of Hell

‘That’s just exactly what I don’t know, sir.’ Dempsy picked a fragment of tobacco from his lower lip. ‘The thing is, Hans and Crommy and I were all – well, we didn’t see Rick leave Madame Yu’s. For streets around, you know, there’s nothing but dives, and we were wandering from one to the next. I came out of one place, and Hans said that Crom had said Rick had gone off in a rickshaw, and blamed if any of us could find him. He was pretty capsized when last I saw him,’ the young man concluded. ‘But, drunk or sober, he’d never have hurt a white woman. Not any woman, really.’

Asher raised his brows. Dempsy looked a little conscious and added, ‘I won’t say I’ve never slapped a Chinese woman, Professor. Hans’d have it that the Chink girls don’t respect you if you don’t, but I never found that. Besides, I really don’t care if they respect me or not.’ He shrugged, uncomfortable despite his words.

On the parade ground beyond the verandah, an officer’s whistle shrilled out a signal to a troop of khaki-clad Durham Light Infantry, whose every stride kicked up small clouds of yellow dust.

‘Do you think Hobart actually proposed to Miss Eddington?’

Dempsy gave the matter some thought. ‘He could have,’ he said at last. ‘Please don’t think Rick gets hammered like that every night of the week, sir. His pa keeps him pretty busy. And anyone in the Quarter’ll tell you, he won’t drink at those little parties they’re always throwing here, where everybody sips sherry and talks about Back Home. But about three times since he’s been here, we’ve gone down to the Eight Lanes and he’s wound up well and truly obfuscated, and he’s said things to me then that he had no recollection of afterwards. So he could have asked her, yes. But equally, Mrs Eddington was so—’

His mouth tightened under its thin black mustache, and for a moment his eyes shifted. Not a lie, thought Asher, so much as a second thought: is it wrong to tell him this?

‘He might have said something that Mrs Eddington pushed her daughter into believing was a proposal?’ he suggested gently.

Dempsy looked embarrassed. ‘The thing is, sir, Mrs Eddington was darn set on Miss Eddington marrying Rick. And I think Miss Eddington was . . . was darn set on marrying anyone . Well, she’s twenty-four . . . She was twenty-four,’ he corrected himself. ‘When a girl gets to be that age—’

The door behind them opened. Asher smelled fresh vomit even before he turned to see the soldier who’d taken Rick back to the cells emerge with young Hobart’s fouled gray jacket rolled up into a bundle with the shirt and green silk tie. In a carefully neutral voice, the soldier said, ‘You’d best let Sir Grant know that his son will be needing fresh clothing, sir.’

Dempsy waved as if to dispel the reek. ‘Jesus! And after all the fuss he made about getting his suits tailored, and his hankies to match.’

‘Did he?’ Asher signed the soldier to remain. Folded on top of the gray suit and green tie were the tweeds Rick had been wearing in the garden the previous night, including, grotesquely, the red-and-blue necktie with which Holly Eddington had been strangled.

‘Oh, hell, yes.’ The clerk made the whisper of a chuckle. ‘I guess I’m an American, sir, and the others are always ribbing me, how I look like I got dressed in a high wind . . .’

Which wasn’t true: Dempsy’s jacket was old and the cut of his trousers far from fashionable, but he had the well-scrubbed look common to many Americans. Despite his queasy pallor, he was freshly shaved, with a clean shirt and his tie done in a neat four-in-hand.

‘Is Rick fussy about his clothes?’

‘Not as bad as Hans Erlich.’ Dempsy grinned. ‘The two of them – Hans and Rick – will go on about what shade of tie goes with which socks like a couple of my mama’s friends back home. But please don’t think there’s anything sissy—’

Asher’s gesture disclaimed any such interpretation, and he took from the folded clothes the red-and-blue silk necktie – which the daylight showed to be entirely inappropriate for the muted mauves and greens of the tweed that Rick had worn the previous night. ‘Was this the tie Rick was wearing last night?’

Dempsy studied it for a moment. ‘No. The one he had on last night had spots, not stripes. The light wasn’t real good, but I think it was sort of greens and grays.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ Asher folded the tie up and tucked it into his pocket.

FOUR

‘Twenty-four hours?’ Professor Karlebach growled like a very old lion troubled by flies. ‘Ach, and for what? These creatures multiply, Jamie! Each night’s delay puts other victims in peril.’

Laughter from the party at the next table: the Austrian ambassador and two of his aides, chattering in Viennese French.

With a sidelong glance at them, Karlebach continued, ‘And it increases the chances that these things – these Others – will come to the attention of some one of the powers here.’ He gestured with the most recent issues of the Journal of Oriental Medicine and Etudes Physiologiques , pulled from the crammed pockets of his rusty, old-fashioned frock-coat. ‘Dr Bohren from Berlin, and that cretin Lemaitre from the Sorbonne, have written letters decrying this Bauer woman as a hoax, but you know it’s only a matter of time before someone in some War Department is going to start asking themselves how they might use these things. Surely we can reach this village this afternoon by motor car?’

‘We can. Provided nothing goes wrong.’ Asher sat back as the white-jacketed Chinese waiter brought green turtle soup and petite sole aux tomates to their table. The dining room of the Wagons-Lits Hotel was justly famous throughout the diplomatic community for the excellence of its lunches, and Asher had taken great care to obtain a table in the most inconspicuous corner of that elegant salon.

‘Have you ever ridden in a motor car, sir?’ Asher asked. ‘The tires are rubber: on a good macadam road you can go twenty or thirty miles between punctures. But here?’ He made an eloquent gesture with his eyebrows. ‘The road ends at Men T’ou Kuo. We’d have to procure horses there – or donkeys, more likely – to ride on to Mingliang. Given the presence of bandit groups in the hills – and Kuo Min-tang militia – personally, I would rather wait till we have an armed escort.’

‘I bow to your greater experience, Jamie.’ The old man rumbled his discontent. ‘It’s just, when I think of those who will be placed in danger—’

‘If someone will inevitably be placed in danger,’ said Lydia, ‘I would much rather that it not be you, sir, or Jamie.’ And she laid a hand over Asher’s wrist.

For this reason, with the conclusion of lunch, Asher passed the afternoon in giving his companions a Cook’s Tour of the Legation Quarter, with its odd mix of modern European structures and antique gateways left over from the days before the Uprising. Parade grounds, barracks, and soldiers in the uniforms of most of the armies of Europe served to remind them that they were intruders in that ancient land, and unwelcome ones at that.

‘Half this area was a regular Chinese neighborhood up till the Boxers shelled it into rubble,’ Asher explained as they paused to marvel over the Gothic absurdity of the French Post Office. ‘A maze of hutongs – those high-walled alleyways – and siheyuan , courtyard houses—’

‘Like the Legation this morning?’ asked Lydia.

‘They make up most of Peking. Sometimes one courtyard per house, sometimes two or three or five or ten, all leading out of one another. You never knew what was in some of those compounds. What the Boxers didn’t demolish was burned by Chinese mobs, or destroyed by the Expeditionary Force when they came through.’