lean as certain cats get as they age; rather like a cat in a gray walking suit tabbied with black lace.
I'm sorry, Francoise.
As he watched her, he had been piercingly aware of the ornate bronze gratings in the walls at sidewalk level, brushed by the gunmetal taffeta of her skirt. There was movement in the darkness, he realized, movement beneath the pavement under her feet; whispering in the shadows, eyes in the dark. Waiting only for the coming of night.
They were in Vienna as well.
Francoise, get out of there! he tried to shout. Go to your home, light the lamps, don't let them in. Don't speak to them, when they meet you on the pavement...
But because of what he had done, thirteen years ago, she could not hear him or would not heed. She walked on, and it seemed to him that gray mist drifted up through those bronze gratings and breathed after her down the street.
He shook the recollection away. It was not likely that he would meet her-she might not even live in Vienna anymore- and in any case, the love between them was past and done. And there was nothing for which he would trade the prospect of living the rest of his life with Lydia, that copper-haired, bespectacled nymph.
But still there was that ache in his heart whenever he heard the "Waltz of the Flowers."
"Herr Professor Doktor Asher?"
He turned, startled, halfway to the cab stand, his first thought, Not now!
Karolyi and Ernchester would be along in minutes.. -
Two brown-uniformed Viennese policemen stood behind him. Both bowed.
"You are the Herr Professor Doktor Asher who has just come from the Paris-Vienna Express?"
"I am, Herr Oberhaupt." The old Viennese custom of bestowing titles on everyone dropped immediately back into place, along with the lilting, slightly Italianate Viennese accent. "Is there a problem? I presented my passport..."
"No, no problem with the passport," said the policeman. "We regret extremely that you are wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of a man in Paris, a Herr Edmund Cramer. Will you be so good as to accompany us to the Rathaus?"
Shocked, for a moment Asher could only stare. Then a string of Czech curses caught his ear, and he looked around in time to see a couple of porters loading an enormous, brass-cornered trunk onto a goods wagon, observed by Karolyi and the Earl of Ernchester. Karolyi happened to turn his head and for a moment met Asher's eyes.
He tipped his wide-brimmed hat and smiled. The last Asher saw of them as he was escorted out of the station, spy and vampire were making their leisurely way to the rank of cabs.
Chapter Five
"We knew each other in a former lifetime, you see." Miss Margaret Potton looked up from picking at a loose thread on the button of her left sleeve, and behind lenses as massive as Lydia 's own-had Lydia been wearing them in so public a forum as the Hotel St. Petersbourg's dining room-her blue eyes had a look of wary defiance. "Many lifetimes. It's as if I always knew, all my life. All my life I must have been having those dreams, only to forget them absolutely, completely, in the morning."
" 'Must have'?" quoted Lydia, trying to keep her fury at Ysidro out of her voice. "When? If you forgot them that completely, how do you know you had them 'all your life'? Do you honestly remember any prior to last night?"
The small mouth set stubbornly. "Yes. Yes, I do. Now."
Lydia said nothing. That cad! was all that came to her mind, and she thought, Surely there's a more descriptive word than that. James is a linguist. I must ask him about it.
Miss Potton looked up again and set her shallow chin. "That is, I knew I had dreamed something important. I always had the knowledge that I was dreaming about something-something beautiful, something critical, something that would change my life. Only I never remembered, until last night."
"I've never heard anything so idiotic in my life!" All the lurid dreams returned to her, love, rescue, waltzing on moonlit terraces, she witty and he laying his reluctant heart at her feet. "Last night he wanted you to think you remembered. Because it was convenient for him..."
"No." A beetroot stain blotched thin cheeks. "Yes. In a way. Because he needed me." She returned to picking at her sleeve button. "When he came to me last night- when I woke in the moonlight and saw him standing there at the foot