“Perhaps you will find you can tolerate those two,” said the Grand Cohen. “I can’t, for very long. No one in the T.W.I.T. working that desk for more than a few days has been able to abide them. And, of course, of all the Icosadyad, they are the ones most capable of damage, who must be watched constantly.”
“Thanks, Cohen.”
They arrived at length at a dark, ancient block of flats south of the river, rising in a ragged arrangement of voids and unlighted windows to what in the daytime, Lew hoped, would not be as sinister as now.
Madame Natalia Eskimoff’s rooms ran to mamluk lamps and draped fabrics in Indian prints, smoke rising from elaborate brass incense burners, furniture of carved figwood, and odd corners that seemed designed to warn off all but the most unfrivolous of seekers, and Lew was enchanted right away, for the lady herself was just a peach. Eyes huge and expressive as those you’d expect to see more in magazine illustrations than out in this troublesome world. Volumes of silver-streaked tresses that invited some reckless hand to unpin it all to see just how far down her form it would reach. Tonight she wore a black taffeta turnout that looked simple but not severe, and probably had set her back a bundle, as well as amber beads and a Lalique brooch. Other nights, depending on how swanky the function and fashionable the gown, there might also be observed, tattooed in exquisite symmetry below Madame Eskimoff’s bared nape, the Kabbalist Tree of Life, with the names of the Sephiroth spelled out in Hebrew, which had brought her more than enough of that uniquely snot-nosed British anti-Semitism—“Eskimoff . . . I say what sort of name is that?”—though in fact she’d grown up in the Eastern Church and, to the disappointment of racial watchdogs throughout the island, what in fact she turned out to be, confoundingly, was a classical English Rose.
Looked into closely in her time both by Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Crookes, she had taken transatlantic liners to Boston to visit Mrs. Piper, traveled to Naples to sit with Eusapia Palladino (whom she was later to defend against charges of fraud at the infamous Cambridge experiments), could indeed be said to’ve attended some of the most celebrated séances of the day, the list of which was about to include one arranged by the ubiquitous and outspoken Mr. W. T. Stead, at which the medium Mrs. Burchell would witness in great detail the assassination of Alexander and Draga Obrenovich, the King and Queen of Serbia, three months before it even happened. She was known to the T.W.I.T. as an “ecstatica,” a classification enjoying apparently somewhat more respect than a common medium.
“We don’t go off into ordinary trances,” Madame E. explained.
“More the ecstatic type,” Lew supposed.
He was rewarded with a steady and speculative gaze. “I should be happy to demonstrate, perhaps on some night less exhausting than this.”
It was something that had come out during the séance tonight, none of which Madame Eskimoff had any direct memory of, although like all T.W.I.T.-sanctioned sittings, it had been recorded by means of a Parsons-Short Auxetophone.
“We take electros of the original wax impressions immediately after every sitting. Part of the routine. I have listened to these tonight already several times, and even if details are here and there obscure, I felt it a grave enough development to summon you here.”
It seemed that one Clive Crouchmas, a semi-governmental functionary who happened also to be a member of the T.W.I.T., though at a quite low beginner’s level, had been trying to get in touch with one of his field-agents who had died in Constantinople unexpectedly, in the midst of particularly demanding negotiations over the so-called “Bagdad” railway concession. As the replies were expected to be in Turkish, Crouchmas had brought along an interpreter as well.
“He specializes in the Ottoman territories, which is where Renfrew and Werfner have often found their best opportunities for mischief, working as a consultant, in fact, with both of them, letting each imagine he’s the only one who knows about the other and so forth. French farce. Being probably the only person in England who can stand the company of either one for more than a few minutes, old C.C.’s become quite useful to us as a channel between, though I must say I’m rather annoyed with him at the moment,” grumbled the Grand Cohen. “He should know better than to be wasting your time, Madame, with this endless Turkish Pound-mongering.”
Lew had a sketchy idea of the situation. The European powers had already invested years in the seduction and counterseduction necessary to obtain from the Ottomans the much-coveted railway concession, and if it finally were awarded to Germany, this would be a bitter development indeed for Great Britain, Berlin’s chief rival in the region. Not least of the diplomatic anxieties set loose would be Turkey’s clear sanction of a German line, to run across Anatolia, over the Taurus Mountains, along the Euphrates and the Tigris, through Baghdad all the way down to Basra and the Persian Gulf, which Britain up until now had believed lay firmly within her own sphere of influence, and thus open for Germany a so-called “shortcut to India” even more congenial to trade than the Suez Canal. The entire geopolitical matrix would acquire a new, and dangerously unverifiable, set of coefficients.
Madame Eskimoff placed the wax cylinder in the machine, started the air-pump, adjusted a series of rheostats, and they listened. The several voices were at first difficult to distinguish, and unaccountable whispers and whistling came and went in the background. One voice, seemingly Madame Eskimoff’s, was much clearer, as if through some unexplained syntonic effect between wherever this spirit was speaking from and the recording machine. Later she explained that this was not entirely herself speaking but a “control,” a spirit on the other side acting, for the departed soul one wished to contact, much in the same capacity as a medium on this side acts on behalf of the living. Madame Eskimoff’s control, speaking through her, was a rifleman named Mahmoud who had died in Thrace back in the days of the Russo-Turkish War. He was responding as best he could to Clive Crouchmas’s detailed inquiries as to per-kilometer guarantees for various branches and extensions of the Smyrna-Casaba line, and being translated into English by the third voice Crouchmas had hired for the séance, when without warning—
“Here,” said Madame Eskimoff—“listen.”
It was not exactly an explosion, though the mahogany sound-horn of the Auxetophone certainly became overloaded as if it were, shuddering, rattling in its mountings, quite unable to handle the mysterious event. Perhaps it was the form a violent release of energy in this world would appear to take to a disembodied reporter such as Mahmoud—the voice of an explosion, or at least the same abolition of coherence, the same rapid flying-apart. . . . And directly, before the last of it had quite racketed away, like a train over the next ridge, someone, a woman, could clearly be heard, singing in Turkish to one of the Eastern modes. Amán, amán . . . Have pity.
“Well. What do you make of it?” Madame Eskimoff inquired after a pause.
“From what one gathers,” mused the Cohen, “though Crouchmas is not the voice of Allah in these matters, far from it, the Ottoman government’s kilometric guarantees have lately become so attractive that, as if by miracle, phantom railways are beginning to blossom out in Asia Minor, among those treeless plateaus where not even panthers will venture, linking stations for towns which do not, strictly, exist—sometimes not even in name. Which is apparently where the person speaking by way of Mahmoud was located.”
“But it doesn’t happen that way usually,” puzzled the comely ecstatica. “They like to haunt stationary places, houses, churchyards—but moving trains? notional rail lines? hardly ever. If at all.”
“Something’s afoot,” groaned the Cohen, with an inflection almost of gastric distress.
“And did somebody just blow up a train line?” Lew feeling somewhat out of his depth here, “or . . .”
“Tried to,” she said, “thought about it, dreamed it, or saw something—analogous to an explosion. Death is a region of metaphor, it often seems.”
“Not always decipherable,” added the Cohen, “but in this case Eastern-Questio
nable, beyond a doubt. More Renfrew and Werfner melodrama. Queer Street for the Tiresome Twins, I’d say. Not immediately clear which will murder the other, but the crime itself is as certain as the full moon.”
“Whom do we have at Cambridge, keeping an eye on Renfrew?” inquired Madame E.
“Neville and Nigel, I believe. They’re up at King’s.”
“Heaven preserve King’s.”
“Michaelmas term is upon us,” said the Cohen, “and Miss Halfcourt begins her residence at Girton. That might provide us just the occasion to have a look in on the Professor. . . .”
Madame Eskimoff’s tweeny had brought out tea and a gâteau, as well as a twelve-year-old Speyside malt and glasses. They sat in a sort of comfortable electrical dusk, and the Cohen, unable quite to let go of the topic, discoursed on Renfrew and Werfner.
“It is an unavoidable outcome of the Victorian Age itself. Of the character of its august eponym, in fact. Had the demented potboy Edward Oxford’s pistol-shots found their mark sixty years ago at Constitution Hill, had the young Queen died then without issue, the insupportably loathsome Ernst August, Duke of Cumberland, would have become King of England, and Salic law being thus once more observed, the thrones of Hannover and Britain would have been reunited. . . .
“Let us imagine a lateral world, set only infinitesimally to the side of the one we think we know, in which just this has come to pass. The British people suffer beneath a Tory despotism of previously unimagined rigor and cruelty. Under military rule, Ireland has become a literal shambles—Catholics of any worth or ability are routinely identified when young, and imprisoned or assassinated forthwith. Orange Lodges are ubiquitous, and every neighborhood is administered from one. A sort of grim counter-Christmas runs from the first to the twelfth of July, anniversaries of the Boyne and Aughrim. France, southern Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia have combined in a protective League of Europe, intended to keep Britain an outcast from the community of nations. Her only ally is the U.S., which has become a sort of faithful sidekick, run basically by the Bank of England and the gold standard. India and the colonies are if possible worse off than they were.
“Now, we have also Victoria’s unbending refusals to consider the passage of Time, for example her insistence for more than sixty years that the only postal image of her be that of the young girl on the first adhesive stamps of 1840, the year of dim young Oxford’s assassination attempt. Her image, whether on medallions, statuary, or commemorative porcelain, is meant to be imperial as can possibly be, except that the young lady depicted is far too young for those trappings of empire. Add to this her inability to accept Albert’s death, continuing to have his room kept as it was, fresh flowers every day, uniforms out to the cleaner’s, and so forth. It is almost as if that fateful day on Constitution Hill, Oxford’s shots had found their mark after all, and the Victoria we think we know and revere is really a sort of ghostly stand-in, for another who is impervious to the passage of Time in all its forms, especially the well-known Aging and Death. Though she may, technically speaking, have grown older like everybody else, grown into the powerful mother, internationally admired statesperson, and much-beloved though humorless dumpling of legend, suppose the ‘real’ Vic is elsewhere. Suppose the flowering young woman herself is being kept captive, immune to Time, by some ruler of some underworld, with periodic connubial visits from Albert allowed, neither of them aging, in love as passionately as in the last terrible moment ascending to the palace, the Princess Royal forever three and a half months in her womb, the lovely springtide of early pregnancy rushing through mother and child in a flow that Time will never touch. Suppose the whole run-together known now as ‘the Victorian Age’ has been nothing but a benevolent mask for the grim realities of the Ernest-Augustan Age we really live in. And that the administrators of this all-enveloping pantomime are precisely the twin professors Renfrew and Werfner, acting somehow as poles of temporal flow between England and Hannover.”
Lew was dismayed. “Cohen, man, that’s horrible.”
The Grand Cohen shrugged. “Only a bit of fun. You Yanks are so serious.”
“Those professors are no laughing matter,” offered Madame Eskimoff, “and you are well advised, Mr. Basnight, to take the Icosadyad every bit as seriously as you do. I was among them, once, as the Fool—or ‘Unwise One,’ as Éliphaz Lévi preferred—perhaps the most demanding of all the Trumps Major. Now I have a flock of suburban punters believing, poor souls, that I possess intelligence they will find helpful. Being unwise as ever, I cannot bring myself to disabuse them.”
“You switched sides?” said Lew.
She smiled, it seemed to him a little condescendingly. “‘Sides.’ Well. No, not exactly. It had become an impediment to my calling, so I resigned and joined the T.W.I.T. instead, not without later occasion for regret. Hard enough being a woman, you see, but a Pythagorean into the bargain—well.” It seemed that each British mystical order claiming Pythagorean descent had its own ideas about those taboos and bits of free advice known as akousmata, and Madame Eskimoff’s favorite happened to be number twenty-four as listed by Iamblichus—never look into a mirror when there’s a lamp next to you. “Meaning one must rearrange one’s entire day, making sure one is finished dressing well before nightfall—not to mention hair and maquillage—all of which is sure to look different under gas or electric light anyway.”
“Can’t believe it’d run you much more than a minute or two,” Lew said.
And there was that gaze again. “Hours can be consumed,” she pretended to lament, “by hatpin issues alone.”
As autumn deepened, Lew could be noticed hurrying from place to place, as if increasingly claimed by a higher argument—tensely vertical, favoring narrow black overcoats, slouch hats, and serviceable boots, a trimmed black mustache settled in along his upper lip. Despite the growing presence of electric street illumination, London in resolute municipal creep out of the Realm of Gas, he had begun to discover a structure to the darkness, dating from quite ancient times, perhaps well before there was any city here at all—in place all along, and little more than ratified by the extreme and unmerciful whiteness replacing the glare-free tones and composite shadows of the old illumination, with its multiplied chances for error. Even venturing out in the daylight, he found himself usually moving from one shadow to another, among quotidian frights which would only become unbearably visible with the passing of lamplighting-time into the lofty electric night.
This purposeful life did not keep him, for some while in fact, from trying to locate somewhere in Great Britain a source of Cyclomite, proceeding, desperately, from such opiated catarrh preparations as Collis Brown’s Mixture on to cocainized brain tonics, cigarettes soaked in absinthe, xylene in unventilated rooms, and so on, each proving inadequate, often pathetically so, as a substitute for the reality-modifying explosive he had enjoyed back in his former or Stateside existence.
He had no shame about enlisting the aid of Neville and Nigel, always these days, it seemed, down from University. Each of them was reputed to have at least a thousand pounds a year, which it seemed they spent mostly on drugs and hats. “Here,” Nigel greeted him, “do try a spot of ‘pinky,’ it’s ever so much fun, really.”
“Condy’s fluid,” explained Neville—“permanganate disinfectant, which one then mixes with methylated spirits—”
“Got the recipe from an Aussie we met whilst in the nick one Regatta weekend. Came to develop quite a taste for it after a while, though health aspects naturally did occur to us, so we’re careful only to allow ourselves one bottle per year.”
“Admire your restraint, boys.”
“Yes, and tonight’s the night, Lewis!” Abruptly producing a rather large bottle filled with liquid of a queer purple that Lew could swear was glowing.
“Oh, no, no, I—”
“What is it, the color you don’t like? here, I’ll adjust the gas,” Neville helpfully, “there. Is that better?”
One morning they got Lew up early and
bustled him into a cab before he was completely awake.
“Where we going?”
“It’s a surprise. You’ll see.”
They rolled eastward and presently pulled up in front of a nondescript draper’s shop in Cheapside that appeared not to have been open for some time.
“What’s this?”
“The War Office!” cried Neville and Nigel, grinning mischievously at each other.
“Quit fooling, I know they just moved it, but not here.”
“Some of their facilities would never dream of moving,” said Neville. “Come along.” Lew followed them through a narrow passageway next to the shop, leading back to a mews entirely invisible from the street, whose clamor back here had become abruptly inaudible, as if a heavy door had closed. They made their way along a sort of roofed alleyway to a short flight of steps, which took them on into regions somehow colder and remote from the morning light. Lew thought he heard water dripping, and utterances of wind, becoming gradually louder, until at last they stood before an entry scarred and dented all over as if by decades of assault.
Owing to a stubborn belief in Whitehall that the eccentric enjoy access to paranormal forces with nothing better to do than whisper suggestions for ever-more-improved weapons design, personnel offices throughout the Empire had been alert for at least a generation to the genteel stammer, the ungovernably darting eyeball, the haircut that no known pomade could subdue. Dr. Coombs De Bottle, actually, failed to meet these criteria. Suave, cosmopolitan, wearing a snow-white lab ensemble from Poole’s of Savile Row in hand-loomed Russian duck, smoking black Egyptian cigarettes in an amber holder, not a hair on his face allowed anywhere it should not be, he seemed suited more to a calling of public ingratiation, the international arms trade, perhaps, or the clergy. But something, some actor’s polish to his style of address, hinted at a nebulous past, and a grateful awareness of having, after all, found haven here. He greeted Neville and Nigel with a familiarity that Lew might have found suspect had there been less in the vast workshop they were now being ushered into to claim his attention and eventually, he supposed, trouble his dreams.
Against the Day Page 30