Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  Then the grief was gone and even the memory of it evaporated, leaving – as the old wizard says in The Tempest, – not a wrack behind.

  But Asher didn’t fully regain consciousness until he was in the motorcar, wrapped in a decrepit German greatcoat and aching with cold, with the Graf beside him and Augustin at the wheel, roaring through utter darkness towards Paris.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Returning to their suite, Lydia paused in the doorway to assure her aunt that she had no desire to learn what Madame Izora’s ‘terrible revelation’ had been, and that she would far rather simply go to bed.

  ‘I should think that, placed as we are, in peril of German submarines, you should be desperate to know the truth, for your daughter’s sake.’

  Lydia blinked at her, wide-eyed through her thick glasses. ‘I thought there was no danger of submarines, Aunt!’

  ‘There isn’t,’ retorted the older lady, with the flat firmness of one who has only held up the danger as a bugbear to thrust her niece into joining the group – not that Lydia had needed any proof of this. ‘Yet as a mother, my dear, I find you sadly wanting in concern for how these terrible events may affect your child!’

  ‘Now, Lady Mountjoy, I will not have my poor Lydia chided.’ Princess Natalia rustled back from her own door to put an arm around Lydia’s waist. Her gentle purr banished any hint of admonition from her words. ‘Poor child, she does not look well at all. Do you not see how pale she is? Like my poor Evgenia, who after four days is still seasick. And she touched nothing of her dinner.’

  In fact, Lydia had made her usual sparing forays into the fantasias of veal croquettes, poached salmon, Cincinnati ham and banana fritters, but Aunt Louise – who had had no attention for anything but her own plate and Mrs Cochran’s philippics on the subject of the still-silent wireless – easily believed her to have consumed nothing, and declared heartily, ‘Nonsense! Mal de mer is no more than an illusion of the mind, and can easily be overcome with the proper mental attitude. Your maid is malingering …’

  With real heroism Natalia professed a willingness to hear more, engaging the dowager’s attention while Lydia slipped into the suite, and across the parlor to her own room. There she changed quickly into her simple skirt and shirtwaist, and opened her dressing-table drawer. Ellen had outdone herself. Caviar jars filched from the kitchen, a container which had once held face cream, another bearing the remains of the label ‘Restorative Pectoral Drops’, had all been thoroughly rinsed with boiling water. Strips of adhesive tape had even been helpfully stuck onto the lids, for labeling purposes.

  I shouldn’t be doing this. Lydia swiftly transferred these objects to the small leather satchel she’d carried at the Front. But there was no question, now, about whether she should turn all her efforts to breaking the millionaire’s hold on Simon – or at least transferring that power to herself.

  And then what?

  First things first, she told herself desperately. One thing at a time. You don’t know what’s going to happen, or what you’ll need.

  She heard Natalia and her aunt leave the suite, discoursing with great intensity on the location of the entrance to the realms and cities which exist within the hollow earth: ‘If there is in fact a cavern at the North Pole, how does one account for the teaching of Lady Paget’s spirit guide, that the people of Atlantis journeyed there?’

  Slinging the satchel round her shoulder, Lydia ghosted back across the parlor, and out onto the Promenade. She glanced at her aunt’s gilt camelback clock as she passed the piano. Ten thirty.

  ‘Time enow,’ Don Simon murmured, from the shadows at the corner of the Promenade. ‘Cochran and Barvell have passed here and gone on into the princess’s suite minutes ago. They have, as you see, locked the door behind them.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Lydia in a whisper, as they rounded the corner of the private Promenade and she saw the huge silver padlock glistening on Cochran’s door. ‘Where on earth did they find such a thing? Silver hasps, too …’

  ‘I suspect ’twas furbished up in my honor,’ returned the vampire. ‘’Tis not a new model of lock.’

  This was true. Lydia turned it over in her fingers, identifying it as an old-style railroad padlock which had been electro-plated. ‘I wonder what the deck stewards – not to speak of Mr Cochran’s nephew and servants – think of it?’

  ‘Like all of my own servants over the years – and every tradesman and tailor and bootmaker with whom I have met in the hours of night to get properly fitting coats – what they think is that money is a very good thing to have in this unsympathetic world. And like my tailor and bootmaker,’ added the vampire thoughtfully, ‘I daresay the deck stewards and the servants – and perhaps Mr Cochran’s nephew as well – have seen stranger things.’

  He stepped back, as Lydia’s picklocks made short work of the simple innards of the elderly Yale – which had probably been selected for the job, Lydia reflected, because its size made it simpler to plate.

  ‘I must say,’ Don Simon went on as she worked, ‘that I feel myself insulted, if they counted beforehand upon breaking my will ere the voyage was over.’

  ‘If they counted on it,’ said Lydia thoughtfully, ‘they clearly didn’t trust you. You didn’t happen to overhear how they plan to damage the engines, did you?’

  ‘I did, but I am no mechanic, Lady. ’Twas a long explanation involving bribery and reciprocating turbine housings, and I made no more of it than the dogsbodies did. Cochran cursed them roundly for imbeciles, until at length they said they understood, in tones which sounded to me as if they did no such thing. Myself, I doubt of their being even able to get near the machines, yet I daresay ’twould do no harm to inform Captain Winstanley that German spies may be trying to sabotage the engines.’

  ‘He’ll believe that sooner than he’d believe such a thing of Mr Cochran.’ Lydia pushed the door open cautiously, and ducked inside, Don Simon retreating to the end of the Promenade to keep watch.

  In Barvell’s silver-locked case, the ampoules of antivenin serum had, as Lydia had suspected, been neatly re-filled. Only one flask in the lower section of the case showed a significant reduction of its contents – constant theft at the casualty clearing station’s pharmacy had given her a very exact eye as to the levels of any substance in containers. She took as much from each ampoule as she dared, but altogether this didn’t even fill one of the little phials that she’d begged from Dr Liggatt – how much is the least amount needed to keep the poison at bay? How long can he survive on a half-dose, or a quarter-dose? And in how much pain?

  She likewise took a small quantity from the flask (which might be anything, even the poison itself), and tiny amounts of the contents of all other jars, carefully copying the meaningless symbols on their labels. If Jamie can decode these later …

  But that brought up again the subject of allowing Don Simon to go ashore in New York, and again she turned her mind from it.

  The symbols looked arbitrary to her – an insect, a cow, a frog, the moon – but once in New York, she reflected, she’d at least be able to figure out what they were. The moon was, by the smell of it, and the way it stained her fingertip, almost certainly silver nitrate.

  After that, with heart pounding and ear cocked for the scratch of Don Simon’s claws on the outer door, she combed first Barvell’s room, then Cochran’s, the parlor, and the dressing room, searching for anything that resembled notes or information on how much of what to mix, and whether to heat it or dilute it or distill it or what. Anything that she might have missed or overlooked before. And what am I going to do with all this? she asked herself, as she moved methodically through the drawers and closets. Mix up more to give to Simon so he can go on killing people in New York?

  She blinked back tears of frustration and anger. What was it her Nanna – and Jamie – always said? Better to have it and not need it – or never dare use it – than to really, really need it and not have it …

  And they would need it, if the second vampire
got ashore.

  In any case, the wretched Mr Barvell seemed to be like Jamie, carrying everything in his head. Or, like Jamie, he’d done something clever, like mailing all his notes to himself at General Delivery in New York, Left Til Called For.

  ‘Something’s amiss.’ Don Simon was listening, head cocked, when Lydia came quickly up the Promenade. ‘’Tis difficult to discern at this distance, and with water all about us, but there is uneasiness in the deeps of the ship. Too many people hurrying about for this hour of the night.’

  ‘Someone’s disappeared.’ Her stomach seemed to turn over with dread. ‘Another child …’

  ‘’Tis not yet midnight.’ A pin scratch frown appeared between the vampire’s brows. ‘How could a vampire lure any child now? Three people have died, and every child on the ship must be seeing El Cuco in every shadow. Only at midnight could a vampire work upon a child’s mind.’

  Lydia couldn’t keep herself from thinking, As you’re going to work on poor Captain Palfrey’s in three-quarters of an hour …

  ‘Two of the children were lured with candy—’

  ‘They are niños,’ retorted the vampire, ‘they’re not stupid. With things as they are, would your daughter go with a stranger who offered her candy? I didn’t think so …’

  He turned his head again, and seemed to fade into the shadow as stealthy feet mounted the stair from the Second Class promenade below. ‘Is it you, Comrade Doctor?’ breathed Heller.

  ‘Madame, Madame,’ whispered a young girl’s voice in halting German, ‘please you must help—’

  Stepping forward to meet them, Lydia saw under the electric gleam of a lamp the dark-haired girl Rivkah Goldhirsch.

  ‘What is it?’ She looked quickly at Heller. ‘And how on earth did you get past the gates? If anyone catches you up here you’ll probably be locked up as a thief.’

  ‘I will beg you then to speak for me,’ said the German. ‘I only hope the gates will yet be open, when we return.’

  ‘Who’s missing?’

  ‘Ariane Zirdar. I’ve been to the chain locker, there’s no one there, no sign.’

  ‘Please,’ said the girl again. ‘My grandpa.’ She said something else in Slovenian.

  Heller translated, ‘She says, He is mean and he says bad things but we must help him. She means that there is enough anger now below decks, that she fears – as I fear – that if this girl turns up dead, as the others turned up, they may well mob old Goldhirsch before the quartermasters can muster enough stewards and porters to keep him from being lynched.’

  He turned back, listening, as Rivkah pleaded.

  ‘She says you have showed yourself kind, Comrade. She asks, would you hide him, for tonight, somewhere up here? Or speak to the captain …’ He paused again, the girl turning to Lydia, dark eyes wide with desperation. ‘He has money, she says, in his bag. He can pay. He gathered in all his debts before leaving their village. She says once before, they had to hide him, when the Christians back in their village said he kidnapped babies and the Jews drank their blood in the synagogue, only because they all owed him money. But it was his money that got the village seed wheat when—’

  Lydia held up her hand as her ear snagged a familiar word. ‘Did she say Malareka?’

  Heller nodded, with a slight frown. ‘Malareka, yes. It is the name of her village.’

  ‘That’s the village Vodusek comes from. And his friend Slavik. I’ve heard them a dozen times, saying Herr Goldhirsch is the vampire. Do they owe him money?’ She turned directly to the girl. ‘Vodusek, Slavik – do they owe your grandfather money?’

  She knew the answer before the girl nodded, before Rivkah poured out another stream of Slovenian and before Heller translated: ‘She says, yes. Her grandfather got all that he could from Vodusek before leaving their village. Gospod Vodusek claimed it was all that he had, but it wasn’t true if he could get his ticket. Herr Goldhirsch had to pay half of it to the Russian commandant of the village to collect it, and then, she says, Vodusek tried to rob them of it at an inn on the way.’

  Lydia felt, in that first instant, merely stunned, as if she’d walked into a shut door in the dark. Then heat swept her, blazing, burning fury.

  Heretic …

  Gypsy trash …

  Mohammedan brat …

  He was a shipyard mechanic …

  ‘He has her in the locker beside the stairs next to his cabin,’ she said quietly. ‘Where we found the liquor. It’s not … It’s not a real vampire at all. That’s where he keeps them …’

  The German stared at her for a moment, blankly, not understanding. Then his eyes widened as he understood. He whispered, ‘Motherless sons of a whore—’

  He caught her wrist, started toward the gangway back down to C Deck, and Lydia braced her feet. ‘Tell Rivkah to go along to that cabin, there –’ she drew them along the Promenade to the starboard corner, pointed to the door of the princess’s suite – ‘tell her to ask for Tania. Tell her to tell them all there that I sent her, that I’ll explain later—’

  And, as Heller explained, in his rough Slovenian, to the girl, Lydia whispered, ‘Simon, I have to go with him. The man has the girl in a locker, beside the stairway on F Deck, near the forward hatch. It has to be there, it’s near where the gypsy girl was found.’

  Heller caught her wrist and they ran for the gangway. She glanced behind her at the Promenade, but saw no one in the shadows. She knew he’d heard her; he’ll have to get through his interview with Palfrey without me to keep watch.

  But for the most part her mind was a clinical swordblade of icy rage.

  On F Deck, people were just starting to panic. They were still looking for Ariane, still asking one another, Who saw her last? Where was that? Maybe she went …?

  Lydia could almost read their words in their gestures, in their faces as they spoke. It was quarter to midnight. Early, still … The others were found between two and three, she thought. Little Luzia within a few yards of the locker. When the search had widened, away from the sleeping quarters? When the rhythms of the vessel’s work shifts left gaps of time in which it was safe to smuggle the victim down to the chain locker, and then, later, up to some public place where late-roaming searchers would find the body?

  Gypsy brat … Who do you call heretic …?

  Bastard, she thought. Bastard.

  In her mind she heard Don Simon’s soft voice: For years I only killed Protestants, because they were already damned.

  In the corridor she saw the man Slavik at the head of a sizeable gang of men and boys, leading them in the direction of one of the gangways to the coal bunkers. Heard him shout something back to them and recognized again the word for Jew.

  ‘Slavik’s told people that bag Goldhirsch brought on board was full of gold,’ said Heller, striding along ahead of her. ‘Somebody – I forget who – said that’s why he stays in his cabin all the time. And I’ve heard that he transferred all of it to a money belt around his body.’

  ‘If he stays locked in his cabin all the time,’ returned Lydia grimly, ‘I expect it’s because – whatever his other sins – he’s afraid for his life. He’d know it the minute he saw Vodusek and Slavik in the passenger list. But of course it also means nobody will be able to say they’d seen him, when somebody is killed. And when that poor girl’s body is finally found I can just bet you there’ll be something of Goldhirsch’s nearby, or clutched in her hand, or something … Vodusek will yell something about this being proof, they’ll break down the cabin door, and one of his friends will “find” something of the girl’s in the cabin itself.’

  ‘And it’ll be all over,’ concluded Heller, ‘before the master-at-arms can get down here with a couple of stewards – if he can find any stewards, at this point, who’ll want to risk going up against a mob. Wait—’

  He opened the door of his own cabin, ducked inside, and came out again with a pry bar in one hand, and his German Army pistol in the other. It flashed through Lydia’s mind, as they clattered along the corri
dor that ran past the engines amidships, that somebody had probably better tell Mr Cochran that there wasn’t a second vampire aboard the City of Gold, so he’d call off his men from their silly attempt to sabotage the ship’s engines.

  And this, she realized – this attempt to commit murder by pogrom – was being done tonight for the precise reason that Cochran had given instruction to his myrmidons about the engines: because they were approaching New York. In two days, the enclosed circle of the ship’s world would split wide open. The vampire, if there had been one, would have gone ashore and vanished into the nameless masses of the city’s poor. The moneylender, another drinker of blood, presenting his proofs of solvency, would slip beyond Vodusek’s reach upon landing, with all the huge country to hide in.

  There was no one in the well of the crew gangway on F Deck. Voices echoed down the corridors in the direction of the boiler rooms. The bulb of the electric light immediately beside the stair was out. Searchers, Lydia guessed, could easily miss the locker entirely. Keeping his body carefully to one side of the door itself, Heller shoved the pry bar into the crack and heaved on it—

  —and nearly fell over as the door was flung open from within and Vodusek sprang through it like a tiger.

  Heller swung at him with the pry bar, but he was off balance and far too late. Vodusek had a knife in his hand and only the German’s reflexes saved him from being disemboweled. Lydia slithered past them and ducked into the locker, trying to identify which of the shapeless tangles of rope, tarpaulin, canisters and canvas would be the bound and muffled form of a girl.

  Before she could reach for the closest (and most promising) bundle, she heard a body fall behind her. A hard arm grabbed her around the waist while a hand clapped over her mouth, dirty and reeking of tobacco. He has a knife …

  She stomped hard on where his foot probably was – she was right – and dropped her weight down, the way Jamie had showed her. Felt the blade slash her shoulder as she twisted loose, turned as the man cursed …