“ENJOYABLE VISIT?” the Cohen inquired a little too offhandedly, as if a practical joke were about to unfold.
“He offered me a job.”
“Capital!”
Lew summarized the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly case, which the Cohen, like everybody in the British Isles except Lew, was intimately familiar with already. “Does this make me a double agent? Should I start wearing a fake nose or something?”
“Renfrew can be under no illusions about your relations with the T.W.I.T. By now he must have worked up a complete dossier on you.”
“Then . . .”
“He thinks he’ll be able to use you.”
“The way you folks’ve been doing.”
“Oh, but we’re the pure of heart, you see.”
It might have been the residual effects of Cyclomite abuse, but Lew swore he could hear an invisible roomful of laughter, and some applause as well.
A cross the city noontide a field of bells emerged into flower, as the boys came swooping in over Murano, above wide-topped red-clay chimneys the size of smokestacks, known as fumaioli, according to the local pilot, Zanni. “Very dangerous, the sparks, they could blow up the balloon, certo,” drops of perspiration flying off his face at all angles, as if self-propelled. The comically anxious but good-hearted Italian had come aboard earlier in the day, after the boys had obtained the necessary clearances from the Piacenza branch of the Chums of Chance, known here in their native Italy as “Gli Amici dell’Azzardo.” The Inconvenience having gone into dockyard facilities, the boys had been given temporary use of an Italian airship of the same class, the semi-rigid Seccatura.
From their stations the fellows now beheld the island-city of Venice below them, looking like some map of itself printed in an ancient sepia, presenting at this daylit distance an impression of ruin and sorrow, though closer at hand this would resolve into a million roof-tiles of a somewhat more optimistic red.
“Like some great rusted amulet,” marveled Dr. Chick Counterfly, “fallen from the neck of a demigod, its spell enfolding the Adriatic—”
“Oh, then perhaps,” grumbled Lindsay Noseworth, “we ought to set you down there right away, so that you can go rub it, or whatever amulet fanciers do.”
“Here, Lindsay, rub this,” suggested Darby Suckling, from his seat at the control panel. Next to him Miles Blundell gazed carefully at various dial-faces while reciting in a sort of torpid rapture, “The Italian number that looks like a zero, is the same as our own American ‘zero.’ The one that looks like a one, is ‘one.’ The one that looks like a two—”
“Enough, cretin!” snarled Darby, “we ‘get the picture’!”
Miles turned to him beaming, his nostrils taking in the ambiguous smell of molten glass rising from the vomitoria beneath them, which only he among the crew found at all pleasant. “Listen.” From somewhere in the light mist below could be heard the voice of a gondolier, singing of his love, not for any ringleted ragazza but for the coal-black gondola he was at this moment oaring trancefully along. “Hear that?” tears sliding down the convexities of Miles’s face. “The way it goes along in a minor key, and then at each refrain switches off into the major? Those Picardy thirds!”
His shipmates glanced at Miles, then at one another, then, with a collective shrug, by now routine, returned to ship’s business.
“There,” said Randolph. “There’s the Lido. Now, let’s just have a glance at the chart. . . .”
Approaching the sand barrier which separated the Venetian lagoon from the open Adriatic, they descended to a few dozen feet of altitude (or quota, as the Italian instruments referred to it) and were soon scouting the so-called Terre Perse, or Lost Lands. Since ancient times numerous inhabited islands here had sunk beneath the waves, so as to form a considerable undersea community of churches, shops, taverns, and palazzi for the picked bones and incomprehensible pursuits of the generations of Venetian dead.
“Just to the east of Sant ‘Ariano and— Ecco! Can you see it? if I’m not mistaken, gentlemen, Isola degli Specchi, or, the Isle of Mirrors itself!”
“Excuse me, Professor,” Lindsay with a puzzled frown, “there’s nothing down there but open water.”
“Try looking below the surface,” advised the veteran aeronaut. “I’ll bet you Blundell can see it, can’t you Blundell, yes.”
“Something a little different today,” sneered Darby Suckling. “A mirror-works under the water. How are we s’posed to carry this mission out?”
“With our accustomed grace,” replied the skyship commander wearily. “Mr. Counterfly, stand by your lenses—we’ll want as many plates of this little stabilimento as you can get us.”
“Snapshots of the empty sea—whoo-whee!” the embittered mascotte twirling a finger beside his temple—“but ain’t the old man just gone bugs at last!”
“I would for once feel compelled to agree with Suckling,” gloomily added Lindsay Noseworth, as if to himself, “though perhaps in terms more narrowly clinical.”
“Rays, boys, rays,” chuckled Scientific Officer Counterfly, busy with his photographic calibrations, “the wonders of our age, and rest assured none of ‘em strangers to the spectrum of this fabled Italian sunlight. Just wait till we’re back in the developing room, and you shall see a thing or two then, by Garibaldi, that you shall.”
“Ehi, sugo!” cried Zanni now from the helm, directing Randolph’s attention to a trembling apparition in the distance, off to starboard.
Randolph seized binoculars from the chart table. “Confound it, boys, either that’s the world’s largest flying onion or it’s the old Bol’shaia Igra once again, coming to town, planning to take in some Italian culture, no doubt.”
Lindsay had a look. “Ah! that miserable Tsarist scow. What can they possibly want here?”
“Us,” suggested Darby.
“But our orders were sealed.”
“So? Somebody unsealed ‘em. Don’t tell me those Romanoffs can’t afford a fellow, or even two, on the inside.”
There was a moment of grim silence on deck, acknowledging that, quite beyond coincidence, everywhere they had gone lately, no matter what conditions of secrecy they might have taken to the sky under, the inexorable Padzhitnoff, sooner or later, had appeared on their horizon. Whatever mutual suspicions might have flowered among the lads themselves—by the simplest computation, twentyfold at least—their true apprehensions converged on those invisible levels “above,” where orders, never signed or attributed, were written and cut.
Throughout the day the fellows found themselves unable to refrain from discussing the Russians’ presence here, and how it might have come about. Though there was to be no encounter with the Bol’shaia Igra that day, the shadow of the bulbiform envelope, and the menacing twinkle of gunmetal beneath it, nonetheless would persist well into the later moments of ground-recreation.
“You cannot be implying that whoever issues Padzhitnoff’s orders is intimate with whoever issues ours,” Lindsay Noseworth was protesting.
“Long as we just keep on doing everything we’re told,” Darby scowled, “we’ll never know. Wages of unquestioning obedience, ain’t it?”
It was early evening. Having returned their borrowed airship to the A. dell’A. compound on the mainland, the team were gathered for dinner in the garden of an agreeable osteria in San Polo, beside a little-frequented canal, or, as the narrow waterway is known to the Venetians, rio. Wives leaned out onto small balconies to collect the clothes that had been drying all day. Somewhere an accordion was wrenching hearts. Shutters were beginning to close against the night. Shadows flickered in the narrow calli. Gondolas and less elegant delivery boats glided over water smooth as a dancing floor. Echoing in the chill dusk, through the wind-flues of sotopòrteghi and around so many occult corners that the sounds might have come from dreamers forever distant, one could hear the queerly desolate advisements of gondolieri—“Sa stai, O! Lungo, ehi!”—mingled with cries of children, greengrocers, sailors ashore, street-vendors
no longer expecting reply yet urgent as if trying to call back the last of the daylight.
“What choice have we?” said Randolph. “No one would tell us who informed Padzhitnoff. Whom could we even ask, when they’re all so invisible?”
“Unless we decided to disobey for once—then they’d show themselves quick enough,” Darby declared.
“Sure,” said Chick Counterfly, “just long enough to blast us out of the sky.”
“So . . . then,” Randolph holding his stomach as if it were a crystal ball and addressing it musingly, “it’s only fear? Is that what we’ve become, a bunch of twitching rabbits in uniforms intended for men?”
“Cement of civilization, ‘nauts,” chirped Darby. “Ever thus.”
The girls who worked here, recently down from the mountains or up from the South, glided about among the tables and in and out of the kitchen in a kind of compressed rapture, as if they couldn’t believe their luck, out here, drifted like this into the pallid sea. Chick Counterfly, as the most worldly of the company, and thus spokesman by default in fair-sex encounters that might turn in any way ambiguous, beckoned to one of the comely cameriere. “Just between us, Giuseppina—a lovers’ secret—what have you heard this week of other pallonisti around the Lagoons?”
“Lovers, eh. What kind of ‘lover,”’ wondered Giuseppina, pleasantly though audibly, “can think only of his rivals?”
“Rivals! You wish to say, that some other skyfarer—perhaps even more than one!—lays claim to your heart? Ehi, macchè, Pina!—what kind of ‘beloved’ is it who coldly tosses her admirers about, like leaves in a salad?”
“Maybe looking behind those leaves for a big giadrul,” suggested her Neapolitan colleague, Sandra.
“Captain Pa-zi-no!” Lucia singing from across the room. Giuseppina appeared to blush, though it might have been from residual sunset above the rooftops.
“Pazino . . .” Chick Counterfly suavely puzzled.
“It’s Pa-djeet-noff,” Giuseppina pronounced, while gazing at Chick with a formally wistful smile that might well, in this city of eternal negotiating, have meant, Now, what may I expect in return?
“Thundering toad-spit,” exclaimed Darby Suckling, “with all the spaghetti-joints in this town to choose from, are you saying those dadblame Russians have come in here? how many of ‘em were there?”
But she had tendered all she would, and deploying over one bared shoulder a gaze of mock reproach at the outspoken youth, was off to other tasks.
“Purple Thanksgiving,” beamed Miles Blundell, who tonight had decided, by way of getting up to speed, to begin with the tacchino in pomegranate sauce, evidence of which already decorated the jumper of his liberty uniform.
“Not too promising a piece of news, Cap’n,” Darby muttered, looking around the table for agreement—“maybe we should skip the eats and get the heck out of this place?”
“Not an option,” declared Lindsay Noseworth, vehemently. “Whatever their intentions here—”
“Do, Noseworth, put a sock in it,” sighed the Ship’s Commander—“for, all here know but too well that as we have run away before, so may we again, and denying it shan’t improve our odds against Sky-Brother Padzhitnoff. So while we may—dum vivimus, bibamus—that’s if you’d do the honors, Lindsay,” motioning with his wineglass toward the ice-filled bucket in the center of the table chilling the evening’s wine. Sullenly, the second-in-command selected and opened two bottles, a Prosecco from a vineyard only a little north of here and a comparably effervescent Valpolicella from farther inland, proceeding then around the table, to pour into each glass equal amounts of the white and red vini frizzanti.
Randolph stood, raising his glass. “Red blood, pure mind,” which the others repeated in more and less grudging unison.
The wineglasses were from a matched dozen, each having begun as a glowing parison at the end of some blowpipe over in Murano but days before. Tastefully ornamented in silver with the Chums of Chance heraldry and the motto SANGUIS RUBER, MENS PURA, the set had been that very day presented to the boys by current Shadow-Doge-in-Exile Domenico Sfinciuno, whose family in 1297, along with quite a few others among the Venetian rich and powerful of the day, had been disqualified from ever sitting on the Great Council—and hence made ineligible for the Dogedom of Venice—by then-sitting Doge Pietro Gradenigo, in his infamous decree known as the Serrata del Maggior Consiglio. But not even Napoleon’s abolition of the office of Doge five hundred years later had any effect on the claim to what, by now, generations of Sfinciuni, in a curious inertia of resentment, had come to regard as theirs by right. Meanwhile they devoted themselves to trade with the East. In the wake of the Polos’ return to Venice, the Sfinciuno joined with other upstart adventurers, likewise relegated by Gradenigo’s lockout, whose money was newer than that of the Case Vecchie but quite sufficient to finance a first expedition, and headed east to make their fortune.
So there arose in Inner Asia a string of Venetian colonies, each based around some out-of-the-way oasis, and together forming a route, alternative to the Silk Road, to the markets of the East. Maps were guarded jealously, with death the not-infrequent price of divulgement to the unauthorized.
The Sfinciuno grew ever richer, and waited—they had learned how to wait. Domenico was no exception. Like his ancestors before him, he wore not only the classic Doge’s hat with its upturned point on the back but also the traditional cuffietta or linen cap underneath, which usually only he knew he had on, unless of course he chose to show it publicly to favored guests, such as the Chums at the moment, in fact.
“ . . . and so,” he told the assembly, “our dream is now closer than ever to being realized, as through the miracles of twentieth-century invention which these illustrious young American scientists have brought here to us, we may hope at last to recover the lost route to our Asian destiny usurped by the Polos and the accursed Gradenigo. Bless them! These ragazzi are not to be denied any form of respect, symbolic or practical, at the risk of our ducal displeasure, which is considerable.”
“Why, it’s like the Keys to the City!” exclaimed Lindsay.
“More like ‘Attenzione al culo,’” Chick muttered. “Try not to forget that this place is known for its mask industry.” A vigorous advocate of inconspicuousness, Chick found ceremonies like today’s both unnecessary and dangerous. Their mission in Venice, best performed without demands on time and visibility like the present one, was to locate the fabled Sfinciuno Itinerary, a map or chart of post-Polo routes into Asia, believed by many to lead to the hidden city of Shambhala itself.
“FIRST,” advised their cicerone in the matter, Professor Svegli of the University of Pisa, “try to forget the usual picture in two dimensions. That is not the kind of ‘map’ you are looking for. Try to put yourself back in the place of Domenico Sfinciuno or one of his caravan. What would you need, to determine where you are and where you must go? When the stars might not always be available, nor the peaks such as Khan-Tengri. . . . Not even Shiva’s own paradise Mount Kailash, at certain times of day an all-but-blinding beacon from which to take one’s range and bearing. . . . Because there are not only landmarks but also anti-landmarks—for every beacon, an episode of intentional blindness.”
“Wait,” Chick frowning as if puzzled. “Do I feel this conversation turning, how shall I say, abstract? Will this Sfinciuno Itinerary turn out to be not a geographical map at all but an account of some spiritual journey? Nothing but allegory and hidden symbolism—”
“And not one damn oasis you can get a real drink at,” Darby put in bitterly. “Thanks a lot, Professor. We’re in the religious-supply business now.”
“The terrain is quite real, quite of this world—that, you may appreciate, is exactly the problem. Now, as in Sfinciuno’s time, there are two distinct versions of ‘Asia’ out there, one an object of political struggle among the Powers of the Earth—the other a timeless faith by whose terms all such earthly struggle is illusion. Those whose enduring object is power in this worl
d are only too happy to use without remorse the others, whose aim is of course to transcend all question of power. Each regards the other as a pack of deluded fools.
“The problem lies with the projection. The author of the Itinerary imagined the Earth not only as a three-dimensional sphere but, beyond that, as an imaginary surface, the optical arrangements for whose eventual projection onto the two-dimensional page proved to be very queer indeed.
“So we have a sort of anamorphoscope, more properly no doubt a paramorphoscope because it reveals worlds which are set to the side of the one we have taken, until now, to be the only world given us.” The classical anamorphoscopes, he went on to explain, were mirrors, cylindrical or conical, usually, which when placed on or otherwise near a deliberately distorted picture, and viewed from the appropriate direction, would make the image appear “normal” again. Fads for these came and went, beginning as early as the seventeenth century, and the artisans of Isola degli Specchi were not slow in learning how to supply this specialized market. To be sure, a certain percentage of them went mad and ended up in the asylum on San Servolo. Most of these unfortunates could not bear to look at any sort of mirror again, and were kept scrupulously away from reflective surfaces of any kind. But a few, choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidal and even stranger, eventually including what we must term “imaginary” shapes, though some preferred Clifford’s term, “invisible.” These specialists remained at Isola degli Specchi under a sort of confinement within confinement so strict as to provide them, paradoxically, a freedom unknown in Europe and indeed anywhere, before or since.
“The Sfinciuno Itinerary,” explained the Professor, “conflated from its original fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sources, was encrypted as one of these paramorphic distortions, meant to be redeemed from the invisible with the aid of one particular configuration of lenses and mirrors, whose exact specifications were known only to the cartographer and the otherwise hopelessly insane artisans who produced it, plus the inevitable heirs and assigns, whose identities are even today matters of lively debate. In theory each point of the fiendishly coded map had to be accounted for, though in practice, as this implied a degree of the infinite not even Dr. Cantor in our own time is certain of, the draftsman and the instrument-maker settled for about the fineness of detail provided by what were then the very latest compound microscopes, imported from the Low Countries, anticipating—and, it has been said, superior even then to—the plano-convex designs of Griendl von Ach himself.”
Against the Day Page 32