Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5) (3 page)

“Of what kind?”

“I can’t share that with you.”

“The more we know about the dead man, the better we’ll understand why someone wanted to eat him.” 

She sat back and looked me over once again.  “You aren’t Viennese.  What’s your business here?”

“I have no business here.”

“A free merchant of some kind, I expect.  What do you peddle?”

“It looked like a nice city, that’s all.  I’m not here to pursue any particular interest.” 

Again, I don’t recall why I was in Vienna.  I do recall being well off financially while there, which is a state I find myself in periodically.  It’s cyclical. 

“I have
been
a merchant, certainly,” I said, “but just now I have only the funds I’m traveling with and the freedom to do as I wish.”

“You’re royal, then.  But not English.  French?”

“I’m what you would call a jumped-up peasant.  If I become bored I may at some point in the future consider a new business or title, but I’m not driven by either pursuit.”

“You can devise a better lie than this, sir.”

“I probably could, if I were lying.  Here, let me offer a solution to our current standoff.  You’ve already told me you are dressing above your station in life.  I expect you’re doing this because it opens doors for you that wouldn’t otherwise open.”

“You could say this about most women.”

“I could, but you’re not looking for a husband or a benefactor.  You want to be on the other side of those doors because that’s where important people are having important conversations.  You asked me what my trade is and I’m telling you the truth when I say I have none at present.  But you do.  I would wager your trade is in secrets.”

She smiled.  “As you can imagine, sir, if this were so, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“True, but let me build upon that assumption anyway.  As a person who traffics in secret information, I can’t imagine a better place for you than Vienna, where the value of secrets is at a premium.  Now, I have seen you neither read nor write, but assuming you can do both of those things—and I do—I believe somewhere on your person is a letter divulging secret knowledge.  This letter was supposed to be going to the man in the alley, up until he was killed by a creature you call a vampire.  How am I doing?”

“I’m beginning to wonder if
your
trade is divination.”

A letter found its way from her bosom and onto the table.  She kept her hand on it.

“How do you know these things?” she asked.

“I pay attention.  But here’s the solution I promised: I don’t care.  I don’t care what’s written in that letter or who it concerns, how you got it or who it was meant to go to beyond the fact that all of these things may have gotten your contact murdered.  I have no interest in politics.”

“Only a fool doesn’t concern himself with politics.”

“I concern myself only insofar as it’s a better way to solve problems than having a war.  But in the larger picture nearly all politics is petty and inconsequential, and I’ve lived long enough to learn not to care overly much about it.”

“You’re not so old as that, sir.”

“My age would surprise you.  Now can we move ahead?  If you had failed to meet up with this man, what were you supposed to do?”

“There was no alternative plan.”

“I know something of espionage, milady.  There’s always an alternative plan.”

“
I
had no other plan.  My cohort may have had one, but I must assume whatever he had worked out didn’t include his own murder.  I was told to complete my business with him and only him, and I’ve already violated that control by discussing this with you.”

“You haven’t told me anything,” I said.

“That hasn’t stopped you from getting very far purely on deduction.  Do you truly have no stake in the outcome of the proceedings?”

“The proceedings?”

“The congress.”

“Oh, that.  I’m not here for that.  I
think
I probably had some business in the city and decided to stay once it was concluded.”

“That was unconvincing to a staggering degree.”

“It’s a nice city.  And this was probably many months ago.  I recall seeing snow.”

“Oh my God, you’re an idiot.”

“No, just a drunk.  So?”

She sighed some more and rolled her eyes, and I don’t know what it is about exasperation in women, but I find it adorable.  Then she removed her hand from the envelope on the table.

It was unsealed.  I picked it up carefully, slid out the letter, and unfolded it.

“Interesting,” I said.

“Can you read it?”

It was in Romansh, a Swiss language that came with multiple dialects.  This was, I believe, the Sutsilvan dialect, but Vallader wasn’t out of the question.

Regardless of the dialect, they’re Romance languages, and I can read and speak pretty much all of them with only a little effort.  Not because I’m especially gifted, I just have a lot of time to practice everything.  Plus, languages have root tongues—Latin, in this case.  Once you know your way around the root you can navigate most of the descendants, especially if you update yourself from time to time.  I do, mostly because it’s easier to get food and shelter and women if I’m fluent in the local language.

“I can,” I said.  “But I wasn’t supposed to be able to, was I?”

“No.  And I don’t believe you.  Tell me what it says.”

I was about to do just that, but then a thought came to me.  “
You
don’t know what it says, do you?”

“It was handed over by a man I was told to never speak to again, to be delivered to a man I never met before.”

“And who are you, Anna, to be entrusted with such a vague and yet specific undertaking?”

“I am… nobody important.  I can get in and out of certain places because of my…”

“…your charms.”

“Yes.  That makes me valuable to certain people.  But I’ve never had to deal with a letter such as this, and I’ve never had to worry about a vampire.”

“It wasn’t a vampire.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Was this letter unsealed when it was handed to you?”

“It was.  I assume the language it was written in provided its own safeguards.”

“Or the one who gave it didn’t want to put his seal on it.”

“He was not the sort of man to have a crest of his own.”

“No… I imagine he wasn’t.”  I was skimming the letter while talking, when I should have been giving it my full attention.  The problem was, I didn’t follow much of the text because it involved people I didn’t know, doing things I didn’t understand.

I have basically stayed out of politics since the invention of politics.  Part of the problem is that political concerns are generally local and extremely time-specific, and I am very much about the long-term.  Learning all there is to know about a regional political reality is somewhat like learning a new language, except the knowledge isn’t useful for longer than a generation, which makes it just about useless to me.

I did take a special interest in the post-script on the letter, however.

“Are you certain you’d never seen the killer before?”

“Of course not.  Unlike you, I don’t collect vampire friends.”

“I just thought I’d ask.  It’s possible he saved your life.”

“By not killing me as well?”

“No, that isn’t what I mean.  It seems the last part of this message instructs the recipient to kill the messenger if this letter is delivered unsealed.”

She went a little pale.  “That’s a precaution.  In the event I read it before delivery.”

“Obviously, if you could read the language you would have known to reseal it, so that doesn’t make sense.  This was so the man who was to murder you would feel no guilt in doing so.  The fact that according to the sender the letter was supposed to have been sealed, would have absolved the recipient of guilt and put the responsibility for your death on your own shoulders.  It might have been your body in that garden instead of his.  Well, pretending for the moment that his body was lying in the garden still.”

“It would have been his body, only by my hand,” she said.

“Yes, you’re probably right.”

Her eyes darted around the room.  “We should find a private place, Christoph, so you can read the rest of that letter to me and I can find out what information I was meant to die for.”

“You’re right.  I might be the only one in this
Heuriger
who can read Romansh, but ironically, I might be the only one who doesn’t understand what any of it means.  What did you have in mind?”

“I have quarters nearby.  They should be sufficiently private.”

*   *   *

Gaining access to a young unmarried woman’s private boudoir is always a challenge, whether the purpose behind that access is innocent, or very much not. 

Anna was staying in a boarding house run by a battle-axe of a woman called The Frau.  This Frau had a moral compass that placed her somewhere above the Pope, and a tendency to eject tenants who disagreed with her minimum standards of chastity.

Or so I was told.  I didn’t get an opportunity to meet her, which was fortunate.  Equally fortunate, for this particular devising, the women of the house had an entire system established to spirit visitors into the apartments undetected.  It was a coordinated effort that required no fewer than four residents acting in concert to redirect The Frau’s attentions, hold open the rear entrance, and act as lookout.  Considering how efficient the entire process was, I had to think the building’s tenants entertained a large retinue of men on a semi-regular basis.  The Frau was probably losing a lot of money by not charging the male visitors.

The quarters were small, but very clean and plush, and much more girlish than its resident.  I ended up in a chair in the sitting room on the other side of a portable screen behind which Anna was changing.

“I must apologize,” she said before disappearing, “ but I can only wear a corset for so long.  I feel as if I’m being squeezed to death.”

“As a gentleman, I feel honor-bound to offer my assistance in freeing you from this horrible experience.”

“I’m sure you do,” she said, with a gentle laugh that led me to think it wasn’t completely out of the question.  “I can hear you perfectly well from the other side of the screen, and I know how to undress myself.  Read the whole letter.  Let’s see if we can figure this out together.”

So I did.  And when I was finished I read it through again.  Then we started attacking it sentence-by-sentence to work out why it was important enough for someone to be killed over the contents.

The obscure dialect the drafter used was only one problem.  There was also the matter of the abbreviations.  As far as I could tell, the letter contained minutes from a meeting, which made it possibly the most boring piece of espionage imaginable.  But this meeting involved people with names that—if written out—would have been easily recognizable to anyone looking at the page, regardless of their familiarity with the rest of the words.  Their solution was to abbreviate the names.  The only other way around it would have been to use a language that employed different alphabet, which is what I would have done. 

“Who do you suppose RSVC is?” I asked.

Her initial response was a loud clatter.  She must have had so many knives hidden in the dress she couldn’t easily locate each of them, because this was the third time I’d heard one fall to the floor.

“Probably the Viscount Castlereagh.  Robert Stewart.”

“And he is?”

A sigh, the slap of a knife on a wood countertop, the slip of lace through an eyehole.  Audio-only striptease. 

“The foreign secretary of Britain,” she said.  She stepped out from behind the screen, wearing only a turquoise bustier and a white lace slip.  She either forgot that this didn’t constitute acceptable public clothing or didn’t much care if I saw her in her underthings. “Please tell me you do know what Britain is?”

I couldn’t really speak right away.  Anna had untied her hair, which cascaded over her naked shoulders and framed her face in a way that was far more fetching than I would have expected.  She had high cheekbones and striking eyes, and those two things in combination generally made for a very attractive woman when her hair was pulled back.  This was true as well for Anna, but with the hair down her face was somehow more intoxicating. 

And yes, I was mostly looking at her face, although there was a great deal of cleavage to gawk at as well.  I could see one of her ankles, too.  I have nothing bad to say about ankles.

“I do,” I said, eventually.  “I’ve even been there.”

“Well thank God.”

She disappeared behind the screen again, and I exhaled.

“Was Robert Stewart
at
this meeting?” she asked.

“I don’t think he was, they only talked about him.”

“Who are
they
, though?  Where was this meeting?”

I’d read it through twice already, and that information wasn’t in the letter.  “If you have a pad and paper I can translate it out so I don’t have to keep referring to the text for you.”