Magistrates of Hell

TWELVE

‘Damn it, Asher, what the hell are you playing at?’ Hobart looked up from his papers the moment the Chinese manservant closed the study door behind Asher. ‘When I said get Rick off this damnable lie, I wasn’t giving you carte blanche to go poking your nose into backstairs gossip!’

P’ei? Or had one of Richard’s three jolly companions mentioned to Richard that he – Asher – had been asking about Hobart Senior’s diversions . . . and about his servants?

‘A British court isn’t going to let your son off a murder charge if his only defense is “it must have been the Chinese”.’

Hobart still had the same quarters he’d occupied before the Rebellion: eight rooms around what had been a minor courtyard in the rambling old palace that the Legation had originally taken for its own. The red pillars had been repainted and some of the soot stains removed from the ceiling, but the gold on the ancient rafters had never been touched up. The courtyard outside, spotlessly tidy, was bare of the flowers, trees, caged birds or kongs of goldfish that so many old China hands adopted to transform this strange architecture into a semblance of home.

The Senior Translator jerked to his feet and flung his pen down on the desk. ‘They would if you’d do your job instead of swanning around the hills chasing ghost stories!’

‘The job you gave me is to clear your son,’ Asher returned calmly. ‘Part of that process is to find out who would want to implicate Rick in so hideous a crime, and in order to learn who, one has to ask why.’

‘Why?’ It was a fair imitation of someone who didn’t understand what Asher was talking about, but Asher could see fear widen Hobart’s eyes. The harsh voice stammered a little: ‘What d’you mean, why?’ Then he waved his arms, raised his voice to a shout. ‘You can’t tell why a Chinese will do anything, you bloody imbecile! They don’t think like we do! This is a people who believe magic headbands will make them invulnerable to bullets, for God’s sake! Who believe their dead ancestors will arrange favors for them from the afterlife!’

‘I suggest you attend a spiritualist seance in any corner of London,’ said Asher, ‘if you want to see people having conversations with their dead ancestors. And talk to the French High Command if you want to hear about how military elan is going to trump German machine guns. Police work is police work whether you’re in Peking or London, and unless one or the other of us can come up with a specific reason why some particular Chinese would want to see your son hang for murder, what a London judge is going to see is your son’s tie around the throat of a girl who was forcing him into a marriage he didn’t want.’

Hobart opened his mouth to shout something further, but Asher held his eyes, familiar with his temper from those months of tutoring. Determined not to lose his fifty pounds – and with it, all chance of completing his studies – Asher had dodged thrown books, sidestepped physical violence, and plowed head-down through a near-constant deluge of profanity. The curious thing had been that in his calmer moments, Hobart didn’t seem to recall clearly what he had said or done. He’d excuse himself in the most general of terms – that’s just my way, you know . . .

Was strangling a fourteen-year-old girl in the bedclothes while you sodomized her ‘just my way’ as well?

‘You know Eddington isn’t going to be satisfied with “it must have been some Chinese”.’ But unspoken between them hung the words YOU tell ME why the Chinese want to see your son hang.

Or why they want YOU to see your son hang.

Hobart cleared his throat. Blotches of red stood out on his cheekbones, like badly applied rouge. ‘You’re right, of course.’ He sat again at his desk. ‘Problem is, you can’t tell – no white man can – which of those Chinks is working for which tong or gang or Triad or family or for the bloody Kuo Min-tang. Sure, they may give you some story about . . . oh, I don’t know, revenge or protecting someone or . . . or family honor . . . But how can you tell it’s true? The only thing I’m asking you to do is find some kind of hard evidence – something a judge will believe – that it wasn’t and couldn’t have been Rick. It doesn’t have to be the truth—’

He waved impatiently when Asher opened his mouth to speak.

‘Just do something, understand? And don’t waste your time with the Chinese.’

Asher had heard that tone any number of times from his superiors in the Department, upon those occasions that he’d asked for permission to look into what had later turned out to be some murky Departmental jiggery-pokery. He knew he wasn’t going to get any further.

‘And it isn’t my business,’ he said to Lydia later, holding Miranda in a corral formed by his legs while Lydia sorted through the pile of notes – execrably translated – that Count Mizukami had had sent over that afternoon from the Peking police department. Arranged in neat stacks on the parlor’s marble-topped table, they concerned all cases of disappearances or unexplained deaths in Peking from March – when the last of the ‘beheading squads’ had finished their post-riot rounds – up through May of that year, which was as far as his clerical staff had gotten to date. And, to date, they had proved nothing except that Peking had too many beggars, too many peasants flocking into the city from an impoverished countryside, and too many criminal gangs waging war upon one another for the police to keep adequate track of.

He went on, ‘I honestly don’t think Hobart’s going to go to the Germans and peach on me. He’s a beast – and I suspect, mad nor’nor’west where women are concerned – but my experience of him is that he’s never been anything but steadfastly loyal to the Empire.’

‘Will you go visit this An Lu T’ang who got Sir Grant his girls for him?’

Asher was silent for a time, while Miranda pulled herself up to an unsteady standing position, clinging to his knee. ‘I don’t know. Ten to one if I acquired proof of Hobart’s activities, it still wouldn’t clear Richard. I’d only be told to shut up and sit down by Sir John Jordan. Not because he thinks Hobart has the right to give rough handling to Chinese girls, but in the interests of diplomatic respectability. To say nothing of the fact that Hobart probably isn’t An Lu T’ang’s only customer in the Legation quarter.’

Lydia made a face. ‘But you can’t let the boy be punished. And you can’t leave Hobart at large.’

‘I won’t.’ He heard his own voice say the words, with a slight sensation of surprise at how completely he meant them.

‘Do you think Richard knows about his father?’

‘I’d bet almost anything I own that he doesn’t. Why would he? How would he?’ Asher disengaged Miranda’s small fingers from his watch chain and dug in his pocket for a copper Chinese coin. ‘Hobart came out to China in 1884 and went home just long enough to court, marry, and inseminate Julia Bunch. He left England three weeks after Richard was born and returned once every five years thereafter. Much of that time the boy would have been at school. I’d be surprised if Richard has spoken to his father above fifty times in his life.’

About as many times as I spoke to my own, he reflected, with a wry regret that wasn’t precisely sadness. It was the way most people he knew had been raised. Presumably, if his father had known he and his wife were both going to die while their only son was thirteen years old he’d have made a greater effort to spend more time with him, if only to more firmly inculcate into him the vital importance of not letting down the standards expected of the Better Classes, and the paramount necessity of knowing all the Right People in order to further one’s career.

That pedantic, fastidious scholar – whom Asher still thought of as ‘old’, though he’d been just forty at the time of the accident – could have secretly been Jack the Ripper or the King of the Cannibal Islands when he’d go ‘up to Oxford’ or ‘down to London’ from Wychford, and no whisper of it would have reached his children’s ears.

All those children he saw in the hutongs, who darted in and out of courtyards full of laundry and goldfish and uncles and grandmas . . . Asher shook his head, prey again to that curious sense of visiting another planet.

‘Do you think Hobart will make some other kind of trouble for you?’

‘I hope he’s not that much of a fool.’ He held the coin between his fingers, made it vanish, and sat gravely while Miranda investigated every finger separately and probed with her tiny hand down his cuff. ‘If he takes it into his head that I might peach on him, he may try to do something that will get me thrown out of China – hence the thirty pounds hidden in the generator room. I might have to go lie doggo at Wu’s.’

‘I knew I should have married Viscount Brightwell’s son.’

‘You’re the one who insisted on coming to China . . .’

At that point Karlebach knocked on the suite door, bundled in his long old-fashioned coat and bearing a satchel which contained a dark lantern, branches of wolfsbane and hawthorn, and a dozen of vials of his arcane potions. Over his shoulder he carried the discreet case of his new shotgun, and his pockets rattled with ammunition.

Asher glanced at the clock. A little past four. In an hour it would be dark.

Ito would be waking up.

‘If this samurai does not flee there tonight,’ Karlebach asked as they crossed the lobby to the hotel’s front doors, ‘might this Japanese – or your own ambassador – gain us entry to the old palace pleasure-grounds around the – what are they called?’

‘The Golden Sea,’ Asher replied. ‘President Yuan’s taken over that whole enclosure for his own palace, so I doubt his guards will look with favor on two ch’ang pi kwei wandering around peering into grottos with a shotgun. But by the same token, they’d probably kill – or try to kill – any yao-kuei they saw . . .’

‘If they don’t try to hire them,’ said Karlebach grimly.

‘In any case, didn’t you say that the Others – at least in Prague – avoid lights and people? Right now Lydia is concentrating her research around the “Stone Relics of the Sea” – the two lakes that lie to the north of the enclosure. They’re open to the public, but many of the temples and tea houses around them have been deserted since the Revolution.’

‘It would be worth my time to visit them, while you finish making your map of the Shi’h Liu mine.’ Karlebach reached back to touch the leather-wrapped shotgun with the affection of a lover. ‘How much longer until you have enough of a map for us to go down and find where these things sleep?’

‘If they sleep as vampires sleep,’ corrected Asher. ‘We don’t know that they won’t wake up the moment they hear us coming – or feel us coming, as the vampires feel the living, even in their sleep.’

And if the yao-kuei had taken up some kind of residence near Peking’s lakes, reflected Asher as the two rickshaws spun their way toward the rear gate of the Japanese Legation, what would the vampires of Peking make of that? Always supposing that the Magistrates of Hell weren’t behind these creatures to begin with.

He folded his hands within their gloves, watched the shopkeepers lighting the first lanterns of the evening against the autumn’s early twilight. Their presence hangs in the air like smoke . . .

And fear of them had driven the old Jesuit vampire to hide underground for nearly three hundred years.

Asher and Karlebach left their rickshaws at the rear gate of the Japanese compound on Rue Lagrené, followed the narrow line of neat brick bungalows: a tribute to the determination of the Japanese to become a Western power rather than be subjugated and chewed up piecemeal as China had been. The dwellings of its diplomats and attachés had nothing in them of the horizontal architecture and encircling verandas of Japan. They could have been imported whole from London or Berlin or Paris, like the solid walnut chairs that decorated Count Mizukami’s parlor. Electric light streamed from sash windows; men in royal-blue uniforms, or the discreet gray or black mufti of European suits, climbed front steps, knocked at doors . . .

‘Something’s wrong,’ said Asher.

Karlebach looked around him, then counted the bungalows and realized that all those officers, all those officials, were going to, or coming from, the fifth dwelling along the little street.

Count Mizukami’s.

No sign of haste, or panic. Yet when Asher and Karlebach arrived, it was to find the wall of the foyer lined two-deep with shoes, and when a servant conducted them to that blandly Western parlor, Asher saw the little shrine to the left of the door was closed and covered over with white paper. ‘Someone has died,’ he said.

His glance sought Mizukami, standing in a small group near the inner door into the rest of the house. Like a sturdy elf in his black suit, the attaché exchanged bows with the men who crowded around him. All Japanese, Asher noted.

Not someone whose death would be noted in the other Legations.

Karlebach’s eyes widened with horror as he guessed whose death it must be. ‘Then they do pass through death,’ he whispered, ‘they are indeed more like the vampire than we had thought. Will this Count of yours understand, do you think, if we tell him that we must see this man’s body? We must cut the head off quickly and stake the heart—’

Asher gestured to him for quiet. Together, they made their way through the crowd to the Emperor’s military attaché, and when he turned to them and bowed, Asher asked, ‘Was it Ito-san, sir?’

‘It was.’ The Count’s coffee-black eyes met Asher’s, steady and deeply sad. ‘The physical effects of his illness were more than his body could bear. He died a little before sunset.’

‘I am deeply sorry to hear it. We owed him our lives, and it grieves me, beyond what I can say, to realize that our lives were bought at the cost of his own.’

‘He was samurai,’ replied Mizukami. ‘He understood that it was his duty.’

‘If you will excuse us, Count,’ put in Karlebach in an urgent whisper. ‘It is necessary – vitally so – that we be permitted to see the body. The head at least should be severed, lest—’

‘It is custom,’ returned the Count, folding his hands before him, ‘that when a man commits seppuku, the friend who assists him onward severs the head. You need have no concern for that. I have made arrangements for Ito-san’s body to be burned tomorrow, and his ashes will be sent back to his family in Ogachi.’

When Karlebach’s brow grew thunderous – Asher could almost hear him demanding: how they would locate yao-kuei in the city now? – the Count went on, ‘Some here in the Legation knew that he was ill, and I have put it about that it was of his illness that he died. He made a good end. A samurai’s end, with courage and honor.’

Asher murmured in Czech to the furious old man beside him, ‘What would you have done, sir?’

Ysidro had a point, he reflected, about the Van Helsings of the world.

They walked back to the Wagons-Lits Hotel through the early darkness. ‘Ito’s family had served the Mizukami for three centuries,’ said Asher, and he drew his brown ulster more closely about him. His breath smoked in the light that fell through the gateway – massive and slightly absurd – of the French Legation. ‘Of course the Count would assist him.’

He glanced across the street, with the casual air of one whose attention has been flagged by the cries of the old woman selling cricket cages on the other side of Legation Street, but didn’t break stride. Nor did he see whatever it was – half-familiar flash of color or style of movement, a face he’d glimpsed somewhere before? – that had touched that old part of his soul, the part which had kept him alive in Berlin and Belgrade and Istanbul . . .

But his whole being – every instinct he possessed – shouted at him: Run now and run fast. You’re being followed.

DAMN it.

And of course there was nothing behind them, or anyway nothing that looked dangerous. Too many shadows, the electric glow from the more modern buildings bright against the older softness of paper-lantern-light. A couple of rickshaws spun by; a little group of home-going Chinese – servants, presumably, but who could tell?; and three American soldiers striding along arm-in-arm singing ‘Marching Through Georgia’:

Hurrah, hurrah, we bring the jubilee,

Hurrah, hurrah, the flag that makes you free . . .

Had someone run across the street behind him, seeking cover in the doorway of the Chinese post-office, or behind the gateway of the German Legation? Had he half-recognized one of the peddlers? Or one of the German soldiers on the other side of the street? Someone who’d turned around after passing him and was now coming back the other direction? He didn’t know, and being seen examining his surroundings would only make the situation worse. They made one mistake. If they’re not put on their guard they’ll sooner or later make another.

Unless, of course, they plan to do something about me tonight.

He didn’t even know who ‘they’ were. Abroad one often hadn’t the slightest idea.

Mentally, he mapped escape routes. A vampire wouldn’t let himself be seen, unless it was a new-made fledgeling, or a vampire who had been starved for a sufficiently long time as to be losing his powers of concealment. If it was the Germans – or just possibly the Austrians, though he hadn’t seen anyone he recognized from the Auswärtiges Amt here – it might only be a preliminary observation. I’ve been around the Legation for over a week now. Anyone who wanted to find me, could . . .

I’ll have to tell Karlebach to make some kind of arrangement for Lydia . . .

IS old Wu still on Pig-Dragon Lane?

Windows, coal chutes, storerooms at the hotel . . . There was a kitchen service-door that opened into an areaway on Rue Meiji, about a hundred yards from the watergate that led out into the Chinese city.

Asher ascended the shallow steps of the hotel with a sense of relief. Karlebach had been haranguing him since they’d passed the French Legation on the subject of their next expedition to the Western Hills, and he’d barely heard a word. ‘Once we get the other entrances to the mine blocked, we should be able to go in by daylight. The main thing is to locate where they sleep and—’

Karlebach broke off to return the greeting of the English doorman, and Asher crossed the lobby to the desk for messages. A gentleman who’d been reading The Times in one of the lobby’s deep chairs got up, and Asher instinctively turned. Another, standing at the desk, advanced on him.

Here it comes . . .

The man who’d been reading The Times made his mistake. He addressed Asher before his confederate got within grabbing distance.

‘Professor Asher?’ Sussex. A European’s English would-be Oxonian . . . ‘The name is Timms. I’m from the Legation Police. There’s been a most serious allegation brought against you, for selling information to the German Legation.’

Asher said, with a slight note of surprise, ‘That’s ridiculous.’ He gestured – wait just a moment, I won’t make trouble – and moved as if to go say something to Karlebach . . .

Then cut swiftly to the right, dashed for the windows that overlooked Rue Meiji, toppled a chair in the startled Timms’s path, opened the window, and dropped through into the darkness.

He was pleased to see he’d calculated precisely; he was within a yard of the areaway to the kitchen. All the windows on that side were curtained against the icy night. He was stripping off his overcoat even as he sprang lightly over the railings, stepped back into the hotel and crossed the kitchen, overcoat slung over his arm – ‘I’m here about the generator,’ he explained to the one person who even gave him a glance in the bustle of preparing dinner – then walked straight to the doorway that led to the generator-room hall, stopped long enough to pick up his money, and climbed the service stair to the roof.

They’d assume he’d run straight for the watergate – it was a hundred yards from the window he’d escaped through – and would probably send a man up to watch Lydia’s room just in case.

Hobart. His feet sought the risers of the stair as he climbed, silent, up fifty-six steps in the dark. Possibly the Germans – old Eichorn might have recognized him after all – but the Germans were hardly likely to accuse him of selling information to themselves. Mizukami . . .? His instinct told him that the Japanese attaché was a man to be trusted, which of course might mean nothing. Vampires weren’t the only ones who buttered their bread by getting people to believe them.

But Hobart had every good reason to want him deported quickly and a closet that fairly rattled with skeletons.

At this time of the evening, every room on the floor relegated to the personal valets and maids of the guests was deserted. Above that was the attic, pitch-black and crammed with trunks: the smell of dust as he came up the narrow stair was suffocating. A bare slit of a hall, a dozen small rooms, each labeled with the number of the floor to which the luggage within belonged – he’d identified the location of the light switch on an earlier reconnaissance, but knew better than to give his position away by using it. From his overcoat pocket he took the candle he’d brought to go yao-kuei hunting with, lit it, and made his way to the ladder at the end of the hall which led to the roof.

By the light of the waning moon, Asher strode along the hotel’s low parapet till he found a fire-ladder. The roof of the Banque Franco-Chinoise lay two floors below. The Chinese houses that had been here in 1898 had mostly been destroyed in the Uprising, and had been replaced by modern buildings with modern iron fire-escapes. A narrow alley separated the Franco-Chinoise Bank from the old Hong Kong bank – one of the few older buildings on the street still standing – and the fire-ladder came down almost at the alley’s end. Still holding his ulster over one arm, its gray lining turned outward to foil the obvious question – did you see a man in a brown overcoat . . .? – he checked to make sure he had his pass for the city gates, walked up the alley, and found a rank of rickshaws, as usual, in front of Kierulf’s Store.

‘Silk Lane,’ he said.