there. Only a fat, middle-aged priest, vainly sweeping at last night’s dust on the floor, and the yellow dog scratching for fleas by the War-God’s altar. For the sum of ten cents, Lydia was conducted over the entire building, including the back garden – choked with pigeon coops – and the cellar and sub-cellar, which seemed to be filled with broken birdcages, sacks of potatoes, anonymous crates, torn oceans of tattered banners, and the remains of a set of faded puppets.
She thanked the priest, tipped him, and took her departure – the Baroness discoursing at the top of her lungs on the subject of rafters, doweling, and the history of tile roofs in China – with the deep sense that she’d missed something. That she’d looked right at it – whatever it was – and had failed to notice it. As she crossed the courtyard to the gate she glanced back, but saw only, in the shadows of the Temple, the line of grimacing devils that were the Magistrates of Hell. Ancient local gods, dead warriors of forgotten dynasties, personified variations of Buddhist saints, trampling on the bodies of the meticulously catalogued sinners.
Employees in the service of the King of the Damned.
At the hotel, a note awaited her at the front desk from Count Mizukami. Takahashi-san was resting more easily, the note said. He had had to have four fingers amputated, but retained the sight in one eye. He would be returning to Japan as soon as the course of rabies treatment was complete.
When Karlebach – clearly the worse for
Lydia wondered how much of this resolve was undertaken to keep an eye on Mizukami. The old scholar had – Ellen had reported – spent much of the day in his bed: she had gone to his room three or four times, to make sure he was well. Now, resplendent in a stunningly outdated blue tailcoat and a tie which could only have been described as antediluvian, he looked a little better than he had last night, but there was a gray haggardness to his skin that Lydia didn’t like.
She put her hand on his arm, said gently, ‘It isn’t him any more, you know. If he . . . If your friend . . . is still alive at all. That is . . .
‘I think so. Eventually.’ He rubbed his gloved hand over his face. ‘Else they would have spread beyond Prague ere this. And believe me, Madame, since first I learned of their existence, I have watched the newspapers and every account and traveler’s tale that circulates Europe. And I know,’ he went on, ‘that Matthias – if his body still lives – would not recognize me. And that all these things I have brought –’ he patted his pockets, where he usually kept his little phials of herbal decoctions – ‘would not bring him back.’
They descended to the lobby, Lydia veiled and clinging to the old man’s arm. As usual with the approach of the dinner hour, the handsome room, with its wood paneling, its Wilton carpets and the curlicued majesty of its Venetian chandeliers, buzzed softly with the conversations not only of the hotel’s guests, but also of the various ministers, attaches, senior clerks and translators of the Legations who sought the talents of its chef and the clubby, friendly atmosphere of its dining room.
As Karlebach crossed the lobby to collect his mail from the desk, Lydia scanned the crowd, listening for voices that she knew, identifying French Trade Minister Hautecoeur by his silver-streaked leonine mane and by the color and shape of his wife’s gown: Annette Hautecoeur, for all her crooning catlike tact, was a tall broad- shouldered woman whose silhouette was unmistakable . . . to say nothing of the fact that she was always surrounded by men, who were fascinated by her. And over there that splotch of green and blue had to be little Madame Bonnefoy from the Belgian Legation with her two daughters. With men it was more difficult. Lydia had to listen for their voices, watch the way they moved . . .
‘I mean-ter-say, honestly, Colonel Morris—’
Lydia’s blood ran cold at the plummy Etonian accents, followed – inevitably – by a maddening little giggle.
‘—what earthly difference does it make whether Yuan’s elected or t’other chap?’
Edmund Woodreave. She picked out his stoop-shouldered outline near the door, handing coat and overcoat to the Chinese porter – and Karlebach was deep in conversation with someone or other by the desk . . .
‘You know we’re going to have to blast the Germans out of Shantung sooner or later . . .’
He’d turn in a minute, and clothed in black as she was Lydia knew she’d be identifiable across the room even to someone as unobservant as Woodreave. She stepped back quickly into the open door of one of the lobby’s private parlors and closed it almost to behind her.
‘Oh! I’m so sorry—’ she said an instant later. ‘
‘Nothing.’ The Chinese gentleman bowed and waved a staying hand when Lydia would have slipped from the room again (and not, she prayed, straight into Edmund Woodreave’s arms . . .). ‘Mis-sus Ashu?’
For an instant Lydia was too startled to do anything but say, ‘Yes.’ She wondered in the next instant how he’d got in there. The management of the Wagons-Lits Hotel generally admitted only the best-dressed and most socially prominent Chinese to its lobby and parlor, and then – in the most tactful fashion possible – it did not let them linger.
And this old gentleman, though clearly not of the laboring classes, was shabbily, even raggedly, dressed . . . which was why he looked familiar, Lydia realized. His flowing robe wasn’t the nearly-universal Manchu
‘Dream.’ He touched his high, domed forehead. ‘Last night, other night. So sorry, speak not, write not. Dream. This hotel, red hair—’ He gestured at his own white hair where it flowed down over his shoulders, his nails long, like an old mandarin’s. ‘Black gown.
Feeling as if in a dream herself, Lydia took the paper.
The words had been written with a brush – drawn rather, as if carefully copied – but the up and down strokes, the strange loops and flourishes, were reproduced with eerie exactness.
