Evidently the fact that had he not done so, she would have killed him within seconds was of no importance to those old voices of his childhood: his country- doctor father, his grim-faced uncle, his tutors at Winchester and Oxford. He still felt an utter swine.
Did he think she was any different from Anthea?
The pawls of the lock snicked back. As he opened the door, dim gaslight from the scullery above showed him a strange gleam on the lock plate. Asher braced his foot in the door to keep it from closing-it was, as he recalled, heavily springed- and lit a match for a better look.
On the inner side, the lock was silver.
The smell of fresh-sawn wood filled his nose, and beneath it, the smell of blood.
His nape prickled again, and he stood still, listening, barely breathing. Then, slowly, he turned the catch to keep it from locking again, raised his lucifer higher and held it up into the room within.
Silver flashed in the seed of phosphor light. Where he had known only a small underground chamber equipped with bed, chair, and chamber pot, he now saw a glittering grillwork of silver bars that stretched from side to side not three feet from the door. Where the base bar of electroplated steel held them across the floor there were curls of sawdust, yellow and new.
Behind the bars, eyes caught the reflection like the eyes of a cat.
Asher blew out the match as the flame scorched his fingers. Frail, twice- reflected light from the stairway showed him a pale face, pale hands as they approached the bars, the white of a shirt-front and an old-fashioned stock.
A voice spoke out of the darkness. "Have you come for my capitulation? I told you I'd do anything you asked. Isn't it enough that you've betrayed me, lied to me? Was it necessary to... to do what you did?"
There was a pause, while Asher stared blankly into the darkness, and the strange eyes gleamed back at him from behind the silver bars.
Then the voice said, "Dr. Asher. The doctor of languages from London. Don Simon said you had been a spy."
Asher's mind made a tardy jump. "That wasn't your wife's voice you heard," he said.
One of the white hands moved; Ernchester pressed it for a moment to his mouth, closed his eyes, like a man trying to still something within himself.
Asher went on quickly, "It was another vampire, a woman, who attacked me just outside the walls. Do you know where they keep the key?"
Ernchester shook his head. "Fairport keeps it," he said after a moment. As Asher had heard on the train, his accent was far less modern than his wife's, the flat vowels making it sound very American. "Where is Anthea? They said they had her..."
"I don't know."
"Find her. I beg you, take her out of this place..."
Asher stepped to the bar, examined the keyhole of the small doorway set in the lattice. It was a Yale cylinder type, and unlocking it was far beyond the capacity of a piece of wire. At the back of the barred area he could see a trunk, like a block of shadow. In front of it the earl seemed very small in his shabby, swallowtailed coat, his gay red-and-yellow waistcoat and strapped pantaloons, a ghost wrought of dust, a mummy that sunlight would shatter.
"I'll be back."
As he turned to go, he saw, lying on the bench beside the outer door, the lace mitts Anthea had worn at LaStanza's and a red ribbon from which depended a black pearl the size of a pea. It had been around her neck when she'd lain down in the trunk that served her as a traveling coffin. They must have brought them in, to show him that they had her indeed.
What had the original deal been, he wondered as he mounted the hidden stair to the scullery above and pushed the shelves to behind him. A lure, to bring him into their power for something he'd never have consented to do? What? Ernchester had certainly gotten on the train at Charing Cross of his own volition, had been a free man when he'd murdered Cramer. Asher's jaw tightened bitterly, remembering that large young man's ingenuous grin. He should shoot the boy's murderer, not risk his own life setting him loose.
He remembered again as he climbed the stairs to Fairport's office with quick silence- staying by the wall so the treads would not creak-why he had come to hate the Great Game.
A lamp burned in the office-inconveniently, because one of the curtains was half open, and it meant careful maneuvering not to be seen from outside as he approached the desk on his hands and knees. He'd heard no one in this wing of the house. He had only minutes before they returned and started searching in earnest, and Ernchester was right in that he must, above all, release Anthea. While Karolyi had her, he had the vampire earl, whether or not the man was actually in his possession. The fact that Ernchester had jumped to the conclusion that the dreadful scream he heard had been hers told its own story. They are killers, he thought, in a kind of baffled rage at himself. Over the years Anthea has done to thousands of men what that woman nearly did to me. Why should I care?
But all he remembered was the face of a woman in a portrait, plump, weary, gray- haired, in mourning for a husband who had died thirty years before. How can he be dead?
Among the litter on the surface of the desk-Fairport, though not as bad as Lydia, was an untidy housekeeper-Asher recognized the folded copy of last Fridays Times. Beside it lay a yellow envelope containing two train tickets.
Paris to Constantinople, by way of Vienna.
Constantinople?
A thought came to him. Isn't it enough that you've betrayed me, lied to me?
Crouching on the floor beside the desk, he removed the handset from the telephone and cranked the Vienna exchange.
"Here Vienna Central Telephone Exchange," came the operator's cheerful voice. "A very good evening to you, honored sir."
"And a very good evening to you, honored madame," replied Asher, who knew that it never did anyone any good to try to hurry a Viennese telephone operator.
"Would you be so kind as to connect me with Donizetti's cafe in the Herrengasse, and ask them to let me speak with the Herr Ober, please?"
The floor vibrated with a door closing somewhere. Feet passed quickly along a downstairs hall. Seconds fell on him like shovelfuls of earth filling a grave.
"Certainly, honored sir, it would give me great pleasure."
He heard her voice, distantly engaged in formal greetings and elaborate social chat with someone at Donizetti's, asking at length for the honored Herr Ober, there is a most honored Herr who wishes to speak with him if his duties will allow him time, and, more closely, voices calling from the courtyard outside the windows. "... found nothing... someone there..." Minutes, he thought, and they would begin to search the house.
"Ladislas Levkowitz at your service, honored sir."
"Herr Ober Levkowitz, I realize it's a tremendous imposition on such a busy man as yourself, but would the British Herr Halliwell have arrived for dinner yet? Could you be so kind as to let him know that Herr Asher wishes to speak with him on a matter of some urgency? Many thanks..."
Asher cradled the handset against his face, rose to his knees and with a swift glance at the window made a quick review of the rest of the desk. Three or four green- covered notebooks contained interviews with octogenarians in the Vienna region, and others much farther afield. A thick bundle of invoices for glassware and chemicals connected with experiments on the blood of these ancients proved, at a glance, that Fairport's expenses were far greater than the sanitarium's profits could possibly cover. In the back of a drawer was a thick wad of torn- open envelopes of the stationery of the Austrian Embassy in Constantinople, each containing a dated slip with amounts written on them-large amounts-and signed "Karolyi." The dates went back two years. There were half a dozen keys, none of which would fit a cylinder lock of the type on the silver lattice's door. A crowbar, he thought. There'd be one in the generator crypt if he could get to it.