that he might be in trouble. He... he wasn't here when this happened... was he?"
The green eyes narrowed. "Why would you think he was?"
"Because..." Lydia took a deep breath. In broad daylight and in front of half a dozen argumentative Viennese, she thought, they couldn't very well drag her away in a closed carriage. She said, very softly, "Because he said he was coming to Dr. Fairport. And because I have reason to believe Dr. Fairport was in the pay of the Austrians."
His glance flicked across the road, then to Miss Potton- discreetly out of earshot- and back. "You don't happen," he said equally quiet, "to have mentioned this to anyone else?"
"No. Not even to Miss Potton," she remembered to add, mindful of her companion's safety. "But I think it's true. I take it," she went on slowly, "that you haven't spoken with Dr. Asher on the subject."
Halliwell fingered his short-clipped beard, studying her as if matching the eggplant taffeta of her gown, the mint and ecru frills of her hat, against other things. Lydia wondered how James could possibly have played at spies for as long as he had: This business of not knowing what to say or whom to say it to was both wearing and unnerving. Presumably, Ysidro would come to her rescue if Halliwell were a double agent also, provided Margaret had the wits to run for it...
But if Margaret had been foolish enough to believe Ysidro's farrago about previous lifetimes, goodness knew what she'd do in a crisis.
"I'm inclined to agree with you," the fat man said abruptly. "And I was starting to think so before you turned up. Just the fact that the Kundschafts Stelle hasn't let us into this place until this morning tells me there's something fishy, though of course we can't come out and say the man was working for us." He glanced again at the loitering tourists across the road. "Would you ladies be so good as to meet me for dinner at Donizetti's on the Herrengasse this evening at eight? We'll be able to talk there." He nodded back toward the burnt-out shell of the house, where another man could be seen slowly picking his way through the mess of collapsed beams and bricks. "I can tell you now no one's found any trace of your husband... and what we have found is not anything a lady should see."
"God knows what the Kundschafts Stelle found before they let us in." Halliwell's small, rather womanish mouth pursed as he removed his gloves. In the saffron- drenched Renoir of color that was Donizetti's without spectacles, he seemed to fit in, becoming curiously invisible in a way that he hadn't in the unfamiliar environment of open air and bare woods. He reminded Lydia rather of some of her uncles, who grew like fleshy pale pot plants in their London clubs and never emerged into the light of day.
"I'll tell you the truth, Mrs. Asher-if your husband were at Fruhhngzeit when it burned, nobody's said anything about it to us. They've had the place closed off for two days. It was twenty-four hours before they even let the police in.
Typical. When the Emperor's son blew his brains out twenty years ago, taking a seventeen-year-old girl with him for reasons best known to himself, the original story was that he'd died of 'heart failure.' Government agents and the girl's own uncle propped her corpse into a carriage with a broom handle up her back to keep reporters from learning two bodies instead of one were found at the scene.
"How did your husband know this Farren fellow, and how did you find out about Fairport?"
At this point the table captain appeared again, waiter and boy in tow, and a long and Byzantine discussion ensued concerning the concoction of Tafelspitz and how the canard Strasbourg was prepared this evening, and the relative tartness of the sour cherry soup. Rather to Lydia's surprise, Margaret, who had all day been her tongue-tied self, plunged into the conversation with the absorbed interest of a fellow gourmet, winning the approval of both Halliwell and the table captain-the Herr Ober, Halliwell called him-with her opinions on capers and beurre brule. It was, Lydia reflected, an entirely new side to her traveling companion than she had so far seen.
Only when the little train of servitors was gone did Halliwell turn back to her.
Lydia, after a moment's pause to collect her thoughts, sketched a bowdlerized version of the telegrams she had received, the