Ernchester is selling his services to a foreign government." Don Simon Ysidro's expression did not alter. Indeed, his face, still as the peeled ivory statue of some forgotten god, had shown neither anger nor scorn, as if over the years the flesh had settled to a final resting place on the delicate substructure of skull. Nor had his voice risen over the soft level that was almost, but not quite, a monotone, and all the more terrifying for that. Don Simon Xavier Christian Morado de la Cadena-Ysidro was the only vampire Lydia had met. She wondered if others were like him.
"Come upstairs."
He handed her back her weapon and led the way, lamp upraised to shed light on the damp stone stairs. His feet beneath the hem of his shroudlike woolen robe were bare. Though Lydia 's breath clouded gold in the lamplight, the owner of the nameless house seemed to feel nothing of the cold.
Four cats somehow materialized in the scullery, miawing to be fed, though Lydia observed that none came within arm's reach of the vampire. Ysidro set the lamp on the table and touched a spill to the flame. Though he was extremely difficult to see when he moved, Lydia had impressions, like frozen images from a dream, of white hands cupping light above the curved glass chimney and carrying it to the fishtail burners above the stove; of dense gold outlining the slight hook of the nose, the long chin and trace of shadow at the corner of his mouth. He opened the icebox, addressed the cats in Spanish and put meat and milk down for them. Then he stepped away from their dishes. Only then did they come close to eat. "Where did you hear this?" He held a chair while she sat, then perched a flank on the corner of the table. His English was flawless, save for the faintest touch of a Castilian lisp, and the occasional oddly bent inflection that Lydia knew would have conveyed volumes to James. In the set of Ysidro's shoulders, the way he held his head, she saw the echo of a long-vanished doublet and stiffened ruff.
She held out to him the telegram she had received Monday morning from the Gare du Nord. "Ignace Karolyi is-"
"I know who Ignace Karolyi is." His voice still held no very great interest, as if all emotion had long been worn away by the sheer abrasion of passing time. Indeed, in stillness, Lydia had the odd impression that he had been sitting so on the corner of the table for years, perhaps centuries.
The vampire turned the paper in ivory fingers, raised it to his nostrils, then touched it, very gently, first to his cheekbone, then to his lower lip. "A Hungarian boyar and, like your husband at one time, a man who cherishes the honor of service to his empire above personal honor, though perhaps Hungarians as a rule do not consider truth and loyalty as the English do. A diplomat, and a spy."
"I didn't know then about Karolyi," Lydia said. Some of her panic was passing-at least he appeared willing to listen to what she said. "I mean, only what James says in his wire. But I recognized his name. I found it in one of the lists I made a year ago, when I was trying to track down medical doctors I suspected of contacts with vampires. I was making notes of every name I found in any article. This one was in an article about Dr. Bedford Fairport."
He tilted his head a little, like an albinistic bird. "The man who seeks to have men live forever."
"You've heard of him, then." Reading over the long series of articles last night, she hadn't thought of Fairport's work on the changes wrought in brain and blood and glandular chemistry over time in exactly that light-she doubted that Fairport himself would see it that way. But suddenly she knew that Ysidro was right.
"This was one of his early articles," she went on slowly. "Back in 'eighty-six or 'eighty-seven, when he first went to Austria to study those Styrian peasants who live to be a hundred and ten. He mentions that the private sanitarium he was given charge of is owned by the Karolyi family, and that it was Ignace Karolyi who made the arrangements. He mentions Karolyi in the next article as a financial contributor who made research possible. And then Karolyi vanishes. In fact, all reference to Fairport's funding vanishes. It's never mentioned