Authors: Barbara Hambly
He strode to the reception line and was introduced to his hostesses, the Prince of Montenegro’s twin daughters, who had both married cousins of the Tsar; they were dark-eyed, elegant women of roughly his own age, dressed with a lavishness that Englishwomen reserved for Court presentations. Prince Razumovsky managed to appear, like a smiling green-uniformed genie, just as Asher reached the front of the line, and he added a few words praising Mr Plummer’s open-mindedness and large holdings in shipping and packing-house stocks. This guaranteed Asher a steady stream of company for the evening: aristocrats – male and female – bored with the ‘stifling conventions’ of the Orthodox Church and eager to ‘explore the realms that so-called modern science has claimed do not exist’; pasty, intense scions of the vast class of professional bureaucrats who for centuries had administered the Russian Empire, brimming over with love for ‘the
real
Russia, the
true
Russia of the villages, which understands its own heart’; charlatans – native, foreign, or of totally indeterminate nationality – who gripped Asher’s elbow or shoulder, as if to draw him by force through the Gate of Enlightenment, and gazed into his eyes, saying, ‘I can see you are a seeker after Truth . . .’
And I can see YOU are about to pick my pocket
.
He wondered if any of these individuals had battened upon Ysidro, and with what result.
In the cab on the way to the palace, after he had briefed his companion on the names of doctors he was to listen for, he had brought up the subject of Count Golenischev: ‘Is there a chance we’ll encounter him tonight?’
‘I doubt it.’ Elegant in evening dress, Ysidro had folded his gloved hands, like an ivory statue against the lights of the Embankment.
‘And his rival for mastery? Prince Dargomyzhsky?’
‘I think had it been Dargomyzhsky whom Lady Irene saw, Golenischev would have named him, if only to cause him grief. Therefore I assume that the Prince was also at this opera ball on the night of the Obolenskys’ affair. Golenischev is vain – foolish, too, particularly in his choice of fledglings – yet, to remain master at all, he must have learned that we are safe only so long as we are invisible. These people here tonight, above all, are the ones no vampire in his right mind would speak to: people who both believe that a vampire could exist and possess sufficient social standing to gain a hearing from the powerful. It is only our good fortune,’ Ysidro had added drily, ‘that no one believes
them
.’
Indeed, once within the hall, Asher was not surprised that Ysidro became, if not literally invisible, at least profoundly unseen. Was this, he wondered, because the vampire was not quite capable of making his scarred face look completely human? Or did he simply wish to avoid the conversation of four thousand people who talked of nothing but the mysterious rain of fish that had fallen on Olneyville, Rhode Island, in May of 1900, or of whether ‘star jelly’ (whatever that was) was extraterrestrial or supernatural in origin? Four women and one man told Asher about the ghosts in their houses. An earnest-looking woman in her sixties wearing diamonds that could easily have purchased New College and the souls of everyone employed there held Asher’s hands in hers and told him about the fairies she had seen at the bottom of her garden. Asher achieved his gravest expression and exclaimed, ‘You don’t say!’
And three people, herded in his direction at various times in the evening by Prince Razumovsky, told him all about Spontaneous Human Combustion. ‘That woman in France in the 1700s, now, she was only one out of many, stretching back to Biblical accounts!’ asserted an earnest dark-eyed woman whom Asher guessed – from the estimated cost of her dress and jewels – to be the wife or sister of an upper-level bureaucrat in one of the Ministries. ‘Science
conspires
– positively
conspires
! – to keep these things from us, Mr Plummer, for fear of creating a panic. But I myself have heard – from a dear friend whose word can be
entirely
trusted! – of an actual case that a friend of
his
was acquainted with, in Kiev . . .’
‘It’s true,’ boomed a stubby little gentleman with round heavy-lensed spectacles, like a slightly overfed gnome. He – in common with a number of the men present, though Asher had noticed that the genuinely Theosophically-minded guests tended to be women – had chosen to wear, not formal evening-dress of white tie and tailcoat, but ‘the raiment of the people’: i.e. a loose blouse such as the peasant men wore, baggy trousers, and boots, the difference being that ‘the people’, in their desolate villages, generally didn’t have their blouses and trousers tailored for them out of heavy Chinese silk.
‘It is as much as my reputation at the University would be worth, were I to write up all I have found,’ went on the gnome, gripping Asher’s sleeve in a way that hinted at the flight of his former auditors and wagging a finger in his face. ‘Yet evidence points definitively to the truth of such accounts. Not in India or Mexico, mind you, but here in Petersburg! Only this past September, in Little Samsonievsky Court, the
dvornik
of one of those tenement buildings found a charred heap of ashes in one of his rooms, burned so hotly that the whole of a human body was consumed, save for the shoes . . .’
‘There was a rash of such happenings,’ broke in the bureaucrat’s wife, ‘four or five, in those horrible little streets around the Kresky Prison and the train station. And always the same! The oily yellow deposits on the walls, the blue smoke in the air . . .’
‘You don’t say!’ exclaimed Asher, switching to English from the sixth-form French in which he had been laboriously addressing his informants.
‘There were other such burnings – or findings of burned bodies, with no sign of combustible materials – between August and October, all about St Petersburg,’ added the gnome, poking Asher’s waistcoat with a stumpy forefinger. ‘Now, scientists would tell you that these were all in the Vyborg-side – the most appalling slums in Petersburg, Monsieur Plummer – and that the poor are all much addicted to the consumption of vodka. Ergo, these were all poor drunkards whose clothes had been soaked with the stuff and who had lit themselves on fire smoking American cigarettes. But, I ask you,
all
of them? I have heard at least seven different accounts . . . Is it reasonable that seven people – one of them a young girl, to judge by the size and style of her shoes . . . shoes, moreover, not such as a factory girl would wear –
seven
of them, would all soak themselves in enough vodka to consume not only the flesh but the bones as well?’
‘But what does it mean?’ asked Asher.
‘They are signs of the End.’ The bureaucrat’s wife spoke with a trace of indignation in her voice, as if Asher surely had no need to ask. ‘Signs of the coming of the Antichrist—’
‘Oh, nonsense!’ retorted the gnome, instantly defensive. ‘Great God, woman, have you learned nothing about the ageless cycles through which this universe passes?’ He turned back to Asher, face ablaze with eagerness. ‘It is mere proof that the universe is entering a Realm within the Abyss of Eons wherein the boundaries between the natural and supernatural world shift and grow indistinct. We of the Circle of Astral Light have found arcane hints at such things in ancient writings, which cannot mean anything else! Entities from other Realms—’
‘Can you persist in clinging to Science,’ demanded the woman, ‘with evidence of the Day of Judgment – of fire raining from Heaven with the sounding of the First Trumpet of the Seventh Seal – staring you in the face? Can you
be
so blind?’
Asher stepped back out of the conversation – both other participants had apparently forgotten his existence already – and a cool thin voice at his elbow said, ‘It was not Little Samsonievsky Court, but Samsonievsky Alley . . . and, so far as I can determine, all those seven accounts can be traced back to only one.’
Asher turned to meet pale eyes behind heavy spectacles, a gray little man who reminded him indefinably of Count Golenischev’s cold-faced fledgling. Prince Razumovsky, hovering behind him, lifted his eyebrows, but this signal wasn’t necessary. Okhrana – Secret Police – emanated from the little gray gentleman like the clanging of a warning bell. Asher immediately became as American as possible, bunched his eyebrows together and exclaimed with naive eagerness, ‘You sound like you know a lot about it, Mr—’
‘Zudanievsky,’ Razumovsky introduced. ‘Gospodin Alois Zudanievsky, Mr Jules Plummer, of Chicago—’
‘Mighty pleased to meet you, sir.’ Asher shook hands like a pump handle.
‘His Excellency tells me you seek information about the phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion.’ Curiosity flickered in Zudanievsky’s winter-colored eyes. Asher was familiar with the expression, from having worn it himself, and with just that caution about letting too much interest show.
And why would this person be seeking information about that?
Asher nodded. ‘There’s so much hearsay, and this-person-I-talked-to-said-this, and when you get to the bottom of it, it all happened where nobody could verify anything. And I’m looking for an actual case. An actual event.’
‘Are you a journalist, Mr Plummer?’
‘No.’ He rubbed the side of his nose. ‘Fact is, Mr Zudanievsky, the man I’m looking for – for personal reasons . . .’ He made a gesture, as if shooing those reasons aside. ‘One of the few times I had a conversation with him when he wasn’t lying – or I don’t
think
he was lying – was when he spoke of such an event having happened to his sister, this past fall. He seemed to think there was a plot of some kind, but I don’t know the nature of it.’
‘And what was your friend’s name?’
‘He said his name was Orloff,’ said Asher gruffly, mindful that the first thing Zudanievsky was going to do was check the police report he’d submitted. ‘I’ve found out since that was a lie. But I had reason to think he came here to Petersburg.’
‘I would be extremely grateful,’ put in Razumovsky, ‘for any help that you – or your Bureau – could extend to my friend Plummer in his inquiries.’
Zudanievsky inclined his head to the Prince in a bow that was almost burlesque. ‘Such assistance as I can give will be my pleasure, Excellency.’ Even in formal dress he looked gray, like a dust-colored spider; his face was the face of the man, Asher realized, that he himself had quit the Department rather than become. The man who will do whatever his government requires of him, without asking why, and not even take pleasure in it.
‘Do you know the Bureau Headquarters, on Kronverkskiy Prospect? Across from the Fortress . . . If you would give this to them –’ Zudanievsky produced his card – ‘and ask to see me at . . . one o’clock tomorrow? I will show you what we have.’
Asher presented the policeman with a card of his own, even as one of the twin Grand Duchesses clasped him by the arm and haled him away to introduce to a spiritualist who was collecting funds to establish an Institute for Research into the Supernatural in Chicago – an exercise in its way more trying than the conversation with Zudanievsky, since Zudanievsky hadn’t asked him anything about that city, which Asher had never visited in his life. Supper was served at midnight in a nearby hall – Lenten fare of caviar and Norway salmon, and a thousand sorts of mushrooms and pickles – and, in another hall, chairs had been set up before a grand piano played by a young man of extraordinary talent to whose efforts barely a third of those present actually listened. In addition to conversation, it seemed to Asher that there was a great deal of flirting going on, far more openly than would be the case in London. (‘
Dearest, in the middle of the day? With her
husband,
of all people?
’)
He drifted from group to group, vexed with the necessity of keeping his ears open for gossip rather than for the music.
For King and Country
, McAliester would have said, damn him . . . He asked names, dropped hints, mentioned a cousin who was a specialist in diseases of the blood – and mentally sifted endless rivers of persiflage infinitely less interesting to him than the entertainment that his conversational partners so totally ignored. He reminded himself that the Kaiser was seeking to enroll a vampire in some fashion in his arsenal of weapons . . . and that the American he was supposed to be wouldn’t have been able to tell a Debussy concerto from ‘Way Down Upon the Swanee River’.
But most of what he heard concerned the more prominent table-tappers and spirit-summoners then operating in St Petersburg, including one whom he recognized as having been exposed as a fraud in London. He listened with assumed fascination to accounts of people who had disappeared in plain sight of crowds – though not generally in cities where it was possible to investigate thoroughly – or of objects apported from distant locations by spirit mediums, including bona-fide sparrows’ nests that had miraculously, but not provably, originated in China . . . Not to speak of assignations, contretemps, affaires and alliances of an altogether less exalted nature . . .
And in the middle of an account from the Grand Duchess Anastasia herself, of a giant wheel of light seen by the crew of a Swedish fishing-vessel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean only the previous year, past Her Highness’s shoulder he saw a face that he knew.