She was silent, expressionlessly drawing tiny patterns with her coffee spoon in the dust that filmed the white tablecloth.
‘I attended a lecture last year,’ she said at length, ‘by a Dr Beaconsfield, who claimed that such behavior is traceable to atavistic malformations in the nervous system. To my mind he didn’t make a very good case for it. I’d be curious about Sir Grant’s father.’
‘Hobart spoke to me of his father exactly once, in all the time we were at Oxford together. I know Lady Hobart was a horror. And the fact remains that it doesn’t matter whether the need for violence to achieve satisfaction with a woman is hereditary or not. Richard was set up. We did that kind of thing in the Department all the time, to get a grip on someone we needed, though I never heard of a case where we used murder. The victim of this scheme isn’t Richard, or even the poor Eddington girl. It’s Hobart.’
Lydia thought about that for a moment. ‘Then he’s right. It really
‘I think so. But for reasons that aren’t inscrutable in the least.’
She added a neat series of boxes around her drawing.
He wondered if she were thinking about Ysidro, who had killed far more women than one or two.
‘While we’re in Peking I’ll take you to the opera, Lydia,’ he said after a time. ‘There aren’t any wings or flies, and when the scenery needs to be changed – or the hero needs to grab a sword – stagehands run out and do whatever is necessary in full view of the audience. But since they’re dressed all in black, the audience simply pretends they’re not there: agrees not to see them.’
‘Like the servants in the Legation.’ Her voice was sad. She understood who had had access to Richard Hobart’s tie drawer. Who would know all about Holly Eddington’s determination to wed him, and the fact that if someone – someone she must already have known – said,
‘Except that we don’t know a thing about the servants in the Legations. Who they’re related to or where they go on their days off. Nothing. They come recommended – but when they step through the gates they disappear. But I do know that here, family is everything. Cousins owe favors to great-uncles; second-cousins carry messages for aunts they’ve never met. Whole clans of people who earn in a week what we pay for a rickshaw ride will club together every copper cash they make for years, so that grand-nephew Shen, who shows such promise, can get a tutor and go to school and take the government examinations – with the understanding that if Shen
‘Not so terribly different,’ she observed softly, ‘from home.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Except that Shen will almost kill himself to pass those exams, not for the sake of his own future, but because of what he owes his family. And we don’t see them at all.’
She wiped her spoon clean of dust, used it to stir her coffee, replaced the protective saucer. ‘So you think this girl that Sir Grant is rumored to have killed at this . . . this house he goes to on Big Tiger Lane is related to some of the Legation servants?’
‘That makes the most sense of anything I’ve heard. A Chinese can’t bring a case against an English diplomat, Lydia. This is the only way they could make him suffer: by having the son he loves disgraced and hanged.’
She said nothing. Thoughts turning, like her fingers on the table furnishings. Asher’s thoughts, too, ranged back to those three strange months of spending four hours a day with that loud-voiced, hard-cursing young man who got himself violently drunk every night after the lessons were done. The fifty pounds Hobart had paid him then had been what had taken him to Central Europe that second time, to study with Karlebach.
And his familiarity with the less-known reaches of the Austrian Empire that he had thus acquired had been what had brought him to the attention of the Department in the first place.
He’d been the only one of the Balliol men who had been invited, five years later, to Grant Hobart’s wedding to the daughter of an American millionaire.
Behind the closed bedroom door his quick ears picked up the creak of the bed springs and a rumbly murmur in Yiddish.
‘I’ll see how he is.’
Lydia wiped the dust off her spoon again and set it in her saucer. ‘You know Sir Grant isn’t going to want to hear that.’
‘No. So, just in case of trouble, I’ve cached thirty pounds where I can get at it in a hurry, under a floorboard in the generator room of this hotel. He has a temper, and he may turn spiteful – in which case I may have to run for it. I wonder if old Wu is still willing to hide
‘Old Wu?’
‘A minor crook in the Chinese City. I think he works for the Sheng family, or he did fourteen years ago. He could procure anything from telephone wire to French champagne, and he’ll certainly hide a
He wondered, as opened the bedroom door and saw his old teacher propped up among the pillows, if he had learned to move so casually past the unavengeable murder of an unknown girl – barely more than a child, from what he knew of Grant Hobart’s tastes – from his days with the Department.
Or was that something that had come on him since he’d known vampires?
‘We have to go back.’ Karlebach’s left thumb – the only digit still mobile on that hand – curled down hard over Asher’s fingers, as if he feared his former pupil would pull away at the murmured words. ‘We have to go down into the mine, find where they lie. I saw shotguns for sale at Kierulf’s store, next to the hotel, and there’s a gunsmith attached to the British barracks—’
‘I’ll go.’
‘No! I must—’
‘
Karlebach turned his face fretfully aside. ‘I know these things . . .’
‘What more about them do I need to know,’ asked Asher softly, ‘other than that they must be destroyed? There must be maps of some kind of the mine. I’ll find out from one of Sir John’s clerks what the mining company was and how to get my hands on its records. If I tell them I suspect the Kuo Min-tang is using the mine for a hideout I should get access. It isn’t as if it’s a secret. Those medicines you made—’
He nodded toward Lydia’s dressing table, where the phials stood in a glittering line. A minuscule drift of dust had settled along their bases.
‘You don’t know if they’d work against these things or not?’
‘I was a fool to bring them.’ Karlebach sighed. ‘Had there been more remains at the German woman’s mission I would have tried a drop here, a drop there, to see what effect they would have . . . Jamie, did you count them? Did you see how many there were? Dozens—’ His lined face twisted with distress.
‘There always seem to be more attackers in the dark,’ said Asher firmly, though he himself had been appalled at their numbers.
‘And we did not hear them, did not smell them, until they were almost on us. Matthias—’ Again he hesitated on his betrayer’s name. ‘Matthias said they had something of the vampire power to shield themselves from the eyes and minds of the living.’
‘Matthias made a study of them, then?’ He wondered if that young rebel had had the opportunity to do so because the medieval crypts and tunnels beneath the Old City had been in use by the revolutionary groups of Hungarians, Czechs, and Slavs who plotted to free their various homelands from the age-long grip of Austria.
Karlebach lay motionless for a time, then nodded. In the dense gloom of the bedroom, tears gathered in the old man’s eyes. ‘Like me, he feared what would happen if some of these politicians, these generals, learn of them, seek to use them to control their enemies. Already there are too many evil weapons in the world, Jamie. And too many men who believe that some good can come from fighting what they perceive as evil with weapons of an evil stronger still. This is why I say, I have to go back to the mine. I have to see them for myself, with my own eyes that cannot be deceived.’
Asher was silent for a time. Then he said, ‘Deceived?’
‘Jamie—’ Karlebach’s voice sank to a whisper. ‘These things are the kindred of the vampire. How can we tell
