nearly eleven, and I'm frequently at work in the laboratory until midnight. Right now there's no one staying at the sanitarium-we had some electrical troubles early in the week-so there's no trouble about that."
He fished in the pocket of his old-fashioned frock coat and produced a latchkey.
"If you don't see a light in my study or the laboratory, simply let yourself in. I'll have the old room ready made up for you, the one looking out onto the garden at the back, you remember?"
Asher smiled. "I remember."
His smile faded as Fairport climbed into the brougham-the footman Lukas had to help him- and drove away into the shifting traffic of the Ring, brasses winking like heliographs.
He remembered.
He remembered sitting for hours in the window of that whitewashed room, looking down into the overgrown courtyard whose high wall formed only a nominal barrier against the whispering high-summer woods, reading over and over the three telegrams he'd found upon his return from the mountains. Remembered not wanting to know what they told him.
All three had been from Francoise, sent on successive days. All three had asked for an immediate reply. But he'd seen her at the Cafe New York-his shoulder tightly strapped and a hefty dose of Fairport's stimulants in his veins-earlier that day. She had mentioned the telegrams in passing, but said they were nothing much.
It meant that she'd been checking on his movements in the period of time in which he was supposed to be ill rather than away.
It meant that she suspected him of leading a double life.
It meant that he was a footfall away from being blown. With Karolyi returning to Vienna in a matter of days, he knew what that would mean.
She'd been perceptive enough to see through Karolyi's imitation of an innocuous young idiot. Why hadn't he thought she would see through his own impersonation of scholarly harmlessness?
He'd sat by the window until the long summer afternoon faded and the white roses on the garden wall dwindled to milky blurs, until he had been unable to read the printing on the dry yellow telegraph forms, though he had by then memorized what each had said. He knew what they meant. He knew what they meant he had to do.
He pushed the memory aside now. When he recalled Viennese coffee and Creme Schnitten, he had automatically thought of the Cafe New York. Though he guessed Francoise had not entered its doors since the summer of 1895, either, he knew he'd look elsewhere for those small pleasures.
Francoise had been right about cafes in Vienna. It applied equally to public baths. Though not as ubiquitous as cafes, they were plentiful and good for the same reason. Most apartments in the overcrowded city lacked hot water; thousands of families still relied on communal pumps in the halls, communal toilets in the courtyards. But the Viennese were a clean people, cleaner in Asher's experience than the Parisians, for all the French fanaticism about keeping their windows spotless. Certainly the jail cell he'd occupied last night had been far from the pesthole of Fairport's imaginings.
The Heiligesteffanbaden was a veritable emporium of cleanliness, and heavily populated even for a Tuesday morning. Workingmen, students, bearded bourgeoise, and stolid hofrats scrubbed conscientiously in pink marble tubs, under the solicitous eye of the usual host of marble and mosaic angels and the usual Viennese hierarchy of Herr Oberbadmeister, Oberbadmeister, Unterbadmeister, and the garzone who collected the towels. Asher visited the barber next door to be shaved, changed into the shirt and underclothing he'd bought on the way from the Prefecture of Police, paid a quick visit to a man he'd known back in '95 who cut keys, and felt much better, though the clerks at the Rathaus looked askance at his rumpled jacket when he asked to examine wills and title documentation of the older dwellings in the Altstadt. He guessed he would have enough time to do what he needed to do, if not before dark, at least before the crowds thinned from the streets.
As both scholar and spy, Asher had long ago learned that human beings reveal the true workings of their souls when their attention is on something that consumes them to the exclusion of their usual desire to make an impression on others-and that something is usually property. He had, he reflected dryly, witnessed a particularly unappetizing modern example of that very phenomenon in the wake of his cousin's funeral three days ago. In their preoccupation with who's going to get what, people