Authors: Barbara Hambly
Berlin
.
Ice water could not have doused him so chillingly.
I’ve seen that man in Berlin
. . .
Rissler, his name had been. A young man, tall, stooped and colorless, with prying discontent in his blue eyes . . . It was the way he stood and his bitter expression, as much as anything else, that had brought him back to Asher’s mind. He’d seen him come and go half a dozen times from the Auswärtiges Amt in the Wilhelmstrasse; a clerk, Asher recalled. He had only known his name because he made it his habit to know the names and faces of everyone connected with the Foreign Service. One simply never knew.
Asher excused himself to the Grand Duchess, followed the German clerk’s lean, drooping form as he made his way down the length of the hall with a small plate of caviar and toast points in one hand, a glass of champagne in the other.
First assignment abroad?
He hadn’t been one of the men assigned to running foreign agents, at least not in 1896 he hadn’t. Even now, he didn’t have an experienced agent’s walk or manner – he hadn’t even made an effort to alter his appearance, still wearing his flaccid mutton-chop whiskers and anemic mustache. Did those idiots in the Wilhelstrasse really think nobody noticed what the lesser clerks looked like?
So there must be something only he could do – perhaps he was the only one who spoke Russian or knew what star jelly was.
With all the gossips and assignees flirting and chatting along the sides of the hall among the ostentatious golden pillars, it was a simple matter to follow him down the hall, and remain out of sight . ‘Dear Monsieur Plummer—’ A slim hand in an eighteen-button kid glove fastened itself to his elbow. ‘You really
must
permit me to introduce you to one of our most
devoted
seekers after truth! Madame Anna Vyrubova, Monsieur Plummer of Chicago—’
Asher bowed to the other Grand Duchess – the Grand Duchess Militsa was the one with the emeralds and the Grand Duchess Anastasia wore the rubies – and to the round-faced, plump little blonde woman she had in tow, keeping his eye on the retreating mutton chops. Fortunately, Rissler – or whatever he was calling himself here – was tall . . .
‘
Chicago
!’ Madame Vyrubova squealed, clasped plump hands in an ecstasy of delight. ‘All the way here from the United States!’ She seized Asher’s fingers like an excited schoolgirl. ‘How do you like Petersburg,
cher
Monsieur?’
‘Excuse me, Highness,’ said Asher with a bow and a glance towards Rissler, who had reached his goal: a large and handsome gentleman, whose dark hair and close-trimmed beard were streaked with white. ‘But could you tell me who that gentleman might be over there? The one whose sinister minion is handing him the champagne?’
Both women looked. ‘Oh, my
dear
Mr Plummer.’ Madame Vyrubova dimpled mightily. ‘Dr Benedict Theiss! You must
indeed
possess Second Sight! “Sinister minion” is
precisely
how I would describe Monsieur Texel! Because one sees in his eyes, you know – dreadful,
shifty
eyes! – that whatever he
says
, he hasn’t the
slightest
belief in dear Dr Theiss’s theories about the deeper powers of the World Soul . . .’
‘He is a German,’ remarked the Duchess dismissively – sparing Asher the trouble of surreptitiously double-checking Lydia’s list for the name. In any case he remembered it clearly, and the address, on the Samsonievsky Prospect, the main avenue of the Vyborg-side.
‘Now, don’t speak of Germans in that horrid superior tone of yours, Militsa! Dr Theiss is a German, and he has a mind
most
open to the influences of the Unseen worlds. A veritable exile, Monsieur Plummer,’ the little woman sighed. ‘A tragic case, indeed. I quite
weep
when I think of it . . . Though I do weep very easily, Mr Plummer. All my friends say that I am too sensitive. He was a young man, you know, when that
horrible
Bismarck swallowed up his country into that
awful
German Empire of theirs . . . He left, rather than be ruled from Berlin, and never went back. And Bavaria still is a separate country, you know, Militsa! So Dr Theiss isn’t
really
a German! He does such unselfish good, you know,’ she added, turning back to Asher and clasping his hand, ‘working with the poor in the slums!’
‘That is true,’ the Grand Duchess allowed, her distaste at the man’s birthplace melting into a forgiving smile. ‘Shall I introduce you, Monsieur Plummer? I fear you’ll find our Annushka exaggerates his belief. Benedict is a scholar of folklore, but, I fear, a sad skeptic. These scientists! They cannot truly
give
themselves, as one must, in childlike faith . . . Or perhaps the overdevelopment of the cranial nerves blinds the Inner Eye to True Sight . . . Indeed, it might be simply that his clinic devours all of his energy and time. It is, as Annushka says, tragic.’
‘I’d be honored,’ said Asher. ‘Always ready to hear what a skeptic has to say – I have to wonder about any argument that can’t stand light shed on it from both sides.’
‘
Exactly
what I always say!’ cried Anna triumphantly, bouncing on tiptoes like a child. ‘One must keep an
open mind
. . . Oh, excuse us just one moment, Monsieur, there’s General Saltykov-Scherensky wanting to . . . We shall be back . . .’
Asher, who had been to enough diplomatic receptions to know that any hostess was completely incapable of making it ten feet without being interrupted or sidetracked, melted into the crowd.
‘Dr Benedict Theiss.’ Ysidro materialized at Asher’s elbow, as Asher himself stepped into the niche formed by the gilt-sheathed pillars along the wall. ‘And none other from Mistress Asher’s list, so far as I can tell, here tonight.’
‘It may be that none of the others operates a charity clinic in need of donations.’ Asher angled his head slightly to look around the pillar at the expatriate Bavarian. ‘The man with him was a clerk at the German Foreign Office in Berlin.’
‘Was he, indeed?’ The vampire regarded doctor and minion like a snake contemplating crickets. ‘It may be that a visit to this clinic is indicated, to see what is there to be seen. Will you speak with him?’
‘I think not tonight,’ said Asher. ‘I want to hear what Razumovsky has to say about him, and possibly one of my friends in the Department here, before I let him see me to recognize me again.’
‘Then I shall await you outside. Whether or not he is the man Irene saw, the odds that you shall find
two
German scientists accompanied by agents of the Auswärtiges Amt here tonight are in the order of nine hundred and fifty thousand to one.’
‘I’ll bid goodnight to Prince Razumovsky.’
‘He seems to be much taken with an extremely handsome Baroness, but have it as you will. I doubt he will notice if you disappear.’
Ysidro moved off. Asher looked around for the Prince – who did indeed seem to be making what might in another man be interpreted as a proposal of marriage to a slender dark woman in a dramatic pink gown on the other side of the hall – and was starting in their direction when a hand was laid on his arm.
Asher had smelled the man coming before he was stopped by him; he turned, startled and repelled. Even among the occasional non-bathers that one found in any large gathering – and Asher had learned that aristocratic rank was no guarantee against personal eccentricity in that area – this man stood out. His ‘raiment of the people’ was costly silk, but the hand on Asher’s arm was dirty, the nails long and broken; the face he found himself looking into, a peasant’s bearded face.
Except for the eyes.
‘Who is that?’ The man’s coarse peasant Russian was as startling in this upper-class milieu as his goatish smell. ‘That one that you spoke to?’
Asher shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Keep from him.’ The peasant turned his head, pale eyes – gray and mad – following through the crowd although Asher himself could see no sign of Ysidro. ‘Flee him. Do you not see what he is? Darkness burns around him, as light burns around the faces of saints.’
‘And have you seen,’ asked Asher, ‘the faces of saints?’
The peasant looked back at him, startled, and his eyes were human again. Maybe they always had been. Then, framed by the long greasy mane of his hair, he broke into a grin. ‘We have all seen the faces of saints, my friend.’
Close by, Annushka Vyrubova paused in conversation with two uniformed Guards officers, caught sight of them, and smiled in adoration. ‘Father Gregory—’ Arms outstretched, she hurried towards them in a frou-frou of dowdy lilac silk.
‘Watch yourself, my friend.’ Father Gregory made the sign of the Cross before Asher’s face. ‘Go with God’s blessing. For I promise you, if you see that one again you will need it. That is one who cannot endure the light of day.’
EIGHT
On the way along the Nevsky Prospect in a cab, Asher recounted where and how he had seen Herr Rissler – now, apparently, Monsieur Texel – before. ‘That’s another piece of information that I shall keep to myself for the time being,’ he added, drawing the cab’s lap robe more closely around himself against the night’s brutal cold. The local population didn’t appear to mind. Carriages passed them as if it were four in the evening instead of four in the morning, and in the windows of elegant apartments above the marble-fronted shops, lamps still glowed through the raw Neva fog. ‘It was a joke in the Department, how obvious it was when the Okhrana started following one of us: one chap used to send his mistress’s footman out with hot coffee for them on cold nights. By Lydia’s list, there are nearly a dozen German specialists in blood disorders operating in Petersburg alone. It won’t take our vampire long to find another, once he learns one is blown.’
‘In truth,’ Ysidro murmured. ‘Even allowing for the fact that some of those dozen may be in Petersburg because they cannot stomach the Kaiser and his aims, as Theiss apparently claims to be. At least we know in which direction we should be looking at the moment . . . if this Theiss is indeed the man Irene saw.’ He folded his gloved hands, relapsed into silent consideration of those muffled figures on coachman’s boxes and footman’s perches, those jewel-box windows.
‘I’ll vet the others.’ Asher drew from his pocket the solid little pack of visiting cards that had been pressed into his hands in the course of the evening, at least half of them bearing scribbled invitations to tea, seances, soirées. ‘It shouldn’t be difficult, the way these people talk about each other. I’m booked for luncheon with the Circle of Astral Light on Friday . . .’
Yet in his heart he knew this was only caution. A clinic on the Samsonievsky Prospect . . . An ideal cover.
Is Rissler – Texel – his only henchman?
Any of the men in that enormous gold-and-crimson hall might have been German agents also.
It was purely chance that I recognized Texel . . .
Would the AA send more than one agent?
They would if they believed Theiss. If they believed they could have at their call a shadow agent whom no sentry could stop, no picket see
.
A German doctor here whose studies strike me as remarkably similar,
the Lady Irene had written.
As if Asher had spoken her name, instead of merely thought it, he became suddenly conscious of Ysidro’s silence. Without turning from his contemplation of the street, the vampire said, ‘It is absurd to suppose that, were she still able to do so, the Lady would not feel my presence in Petersburg and contrive to get in touch with me. This policeman you spoke to – I commend your accent, by the way – said there had been ashes found, and a woman’s shoe.’
‘In the autumn,’ said Asher quickly. ‘Your friend’s letter was written in February.’
Ysidro turned his head, the tiniest human flex to his brows: evidently surprised, and – surprisingly – touched, at the offer of comfort. ‘Such being the case,’ he said after a time, ‘whose, then? Golenischev spoke of no such loss among his nest.’
‘And, in any event, it wasn’t our pro-German Undead, either. Would Golenischev have lied? Or would the girl have been a fledgling of this Prince Dargomyzhsky they spoke of?’
‘Had she been, I cannot imagine Golenischev would not have thrown the fact at his little rebels last night, in the midst of all that drama and blood. And while we who hunt the night distrust our own kind, ’tis almost unheard of for a vampire to kill another vampire or engineer his death.’
‘Would Lady Eaton have written to you, had one of the Petersburg vampires come to grief? Or of the rebellion in the Petersburg nest?’
The slight tilt of the Spaniard’s head would, in another man, have been sharply raised eyebrows, an elaborate scoff, and – in the case of the fragile old Warden of New College – an upflung hand and a disbelieving cry of,
My DEAR Asher—!
‘She had little use for the other vampires of Petersburg,’ said Ysidro, as the breaking ice on the Moyka flashed below them, jeweled by the reflected lights on the bridge. ‘Never in her letters to me did she so much as mention the names of Golenischev’s fledglings. And the letter she sent me at the time of the assassination of the present Tsar’s grandfather made no mention of the event, and she only touched upon the rioting here six years ago insofar as it inconvenienced her hunting.’