“What stood for a thousand years,” Randolph pronounced, “what neither tempest not earthquake, nor even the catastrophic Napoleon Bonaparte could touch, we have bumblingly brought down in an instant. What shall be the next target of our ineptitude? Notre Dame? the Pyramids?”
“It was an accident of war,” Lindsay insisted. “And I am not so sure we did it anyway.”
“Then you did actually see something, Noseworth?” inquired Chick Counterfly.
“I regret,” sniffed Lindsay, “that seldom in the heat of engagement have I found sufficient leisure for scientific observation, though the well-known propensity of the other commander for attacking his targets with deciduous masonry would strongly if not inescapably suggest—”
“Yet being aloft, we were not at all in the path of the tower’s collapse,” pointed out Chick, patiently. “We had the weather-gauge. We were bearing down upon them.”
“—coupled with their swift departure,” Lindsay, oblivious, had continued, “as if in shame at what they had done—”
“Hey, Lindsay, you can still catch ‘em if you hurry,” taunted Darby.
“Or we might send in pursuit your maternal relation, Suckling, one glimpse of whom should prove more than sufficient fatally to compromise their morale, if not indeed transform them all into masonry—”
“Well, your mother,” riposted the readily nettled youth, “is so ugly—”
“Gentlemen,” implored Randolph, in whose voice it required little clairvoyance to detect a neuræsthenic prostration only with difficulty resisted, “we may have committed today a great wrong against History, beside which this petty squabbling shrinks to submicroscopic insignificance. Please be so kind as to save it for some more recreational moment.”
They arranged to meet with Captain Padzhitnoff and his officers on an all-but-deserted stretch of Adriatic beach over on the Lido, toward Malamocco. The commanders embraced in a curious mixture of formality and sorrow.
“This is so terrible,” said Randolph.
“Was not Bol’shaia Igra.”
“No. We didn’t think so. It wasn’t the Inconvenience either. Who then?”
The Russian aeronaut appeared to be struggling with an ethical question. “St. Cosmo. You are aware that something else is out there.”
“Such as . . .”
“You have seen nothing? Detected nothing unusual?”
“Over the Piazza, you mean.”
“Anywhere. Geography is irrelevant.”
“I’m not sure—”
“They appear out of . . . some other condition, and they vanish back into it.”
“And you believe it was they who knocked down the Campanile?” said Chick. “But how?”
“Vibrational rays, nearly as we can make out,” said Chick’s opposite number, Dr. Gerasimoff. “Adjustable to target’s exact sympathetic frequency, thereupon inducing divergent oscillation.”
“How convenient,” muttered Lindsay darkly, “that one cannot analyze the rubble for evidence of the quadruple brickbats it is your delight to drop on anyone you take a dislike to.”
The Russian, remembering his vision of the collapse, smiled wanly. “Tetraliths are only deployed in anger,” he said. “A detail acquired from Japanese, who will never, unless they wish to offend, present you with four of anything—Japanese character for ‘four’ being same as that for ‘death.’”
“You have been in Japan, Captain?” Randolph glaring meanwhile at Lindsay.
“These days, who in my line of work has not?”
“You wouldn’t happen to know a Mr. Ryohei Uchida. . . .”
Nodding, eyes glittering with enthusiastic hatred, “Bastard we have been trying to assassinate for two years now. Nearly got him in Yokohama with nice, right-angled fragment, so close he was actually standing inside angle, but missed him by millimeters—polny pizdets! such luck, that man!”
“He seemed like quite a well-spoken gentleman when he interviewed us for the mission—”
Padzhitnoff squinted warily. “Mission?”
“Last year his people—an outfit called the Black Dragon Society?—wanted to hire us for some routine aerial surveillance.”
“St. Cosmo, are you insane? Why are you telling me this? Don’t you know who they are?”
Randolph shrugged. “A patriotic organization of some kind. I mean they may be Japanese, but they do take as much pride in their country as anyone.”
“Smirno, balloon-boy! Here is political situation! Black Dragon’s purpose is to subvert and destroy Russian presence in Manchuria. Manchuria has been Russian since 1860, but after war with China, Japanese now believe it belongs to them. Ignoring treaties, Chinese Eastern Railway, wishes of European Powers, even their own promise to respect Chinese borders, Japanese are gathering worst criminal classes in Manchuria, arming and training them as guerrilla forces to fight against us there. I respect you, St. Cosmo, and I cannot believe you would ever consider working for such people.”
“Manchuria?” puzzled Randolph. “Why? It’s a miserable swamp. Frozen half the year. Why would anyone take that much trouble over it?”
“Gold and opium,” Padzhitnoff shrugged, as if everyone knew. Randolph didn’t, though he could appreciate in theory that elements of the surface-world might go to war over gold—it was happening in South Africa at that very moment—the “gold standard” was even said to be a factor in the social unrest currently afflicting the United States. He knew also that sixty years ago there had been “Opium Wars” between China and Great Britain. But between the history and the ground-level emotions driving it, the fear of being poor, let’s say, the blessedness of deliverance from pain, lay this strange interval forbidden to him to enter. He frowned. Both parties had lapsed into a perplexed silence.
Reviewing the conversation later, it seemed to Chick Counterfly that Padzhitnoff had taken a disingenuous line. “No reflections upon the Manchurian question can usefully neglect the Trans-Siberian Railroad,” he pointed out. “From a high enough altitude, as we have often observed, indeed that great project appears almost like a living organism, one dares to say a conscious one, with needs and plans of its own. For our immediate purposes, in opening up huge regions of Inner Asia, it can only make more inevitable Russian, and to a degree, European access to Shambhala, wherever that may prove to lie.”
“Then . . .”
“We have to assume they are here for the Sfinciuno Itinerary, the same as we.”
Meanwhile, like a form of architectural prayer, civic plans had been set in motion to rebuild the Campanile dov’era, com’era, as if the dilapidations of time and entropy could be reversed. The texture of the choir of city bells had changed—without the deepest, La Marangona, to anchor them, the skyfarers felt that much closer to the pull of the sky and imminent departure. As if a significant polarity had been reversed and they were no longer held but summoned. Or as Miles put it one evening just at sunset, “Bells are the most ancient objects. They call to us out of eternity.”
Deuce and Sloat were sharing quarters at Curly Dee’s spread down the valley, where Curly and his woman ran a sort of road ranch for fugitives, ten-dayers, threats to society, and assorted cases of moral idiocy—a squalid, undersize bangtogether sagging between its posts, whose roof might as well have been made of window-screen, for all the good it did in a storm.
“What say we go into town, find us some pussy, bring ‘em back here—”
“You don’t bring women to a place like this, Sloat. They get distracted, all’s they can see’s the tobacco-juice, the rats, the meals from long ago, it wrecks their mood.”
“You don’t like this room?”
“Room, it ain’t even a stall.”
“Wouldn’t want to think you ‘s going domestic or nothin.”
“We’d best go into town. Big Billy’s or Jew Fanny’s or someplace.”
They rode up into town. The electric lighting crept out to meet and saturate them, turn wrinkles in clothes and skin inside out. A seething of
human and animal voices. Some in pain, some having a time, some doing business. Telluride. Creede, but with only the one way in and out.
“How about we go look in to the Cosmopolitan for a minute.”
“Why? Th’only pussy in there chases mice.”
“Pussy on the brain, Big S.”
“Better’n opium smoke,” dodging out of the way as Deuce playfully drew and brandished his .44. A sly reference to Deuce’s on-and-off romance with Hsiang-Chiao, who worked in a laundry down the street. This was an old routine between the partners, and in fact each was to find his way that evening to his preferred recreation, reconnecting only hours later after a long spell of that glaring nightlessness Telluride was known for.
Close to dawn Deuce came lurching into the Nonpareil Eating House, Sloat walking shotgun right over his shoulder. The place was full of hungry drunks. Drovers with imperfectly developed social skills chased among the tables after saloon girls who were not too tired to move as fast as they had to. Place was full of lard smoke. Mayva was in and out of the kitchen cooking and working whatever tables Lake wasn’t. Both women kept up a level of determined bustling, as if allowing the thousand details of the day to fill up what otherwise would’ve been some insupportable vacuum.
Deuce took this for “female restlessness,” which he thought he understood. When Lake came over to inquire with a silent lift of the eyebrows and chin if they were there to eat or sit, he did not remark at the time how desirable she looked. What surprised him was the way she’d kept some fire in her eye, rare in a biscuit-shooter, that no long shift was about to put out. Later he would also become aware of a darkness just as indelible, that could not be, but maybe was, the stain of some undivulged sin.
“Don’t be in a rush, boys, grocery wagon’s due in before noon, bound to be something on it you can eat.”
“Enjoying the scenery,” said suave Deuce.
“Nothin like this down Cañon City, I expect.”
“Oooh,” lowed Sloat appreciatively.
“Coffee,” Deuce shrugged.
“You’re sure. Think it through now.”
“Lake,” Mayva called from the kitchen, just about the same time Sloat muttered, “Deuce.” Steam and smoke curled out the kitchen window into cones of white electric light from bulbs installed high on stripped fir poles. Urgent Chinese conversation proceeded out in the street. Prolonged echoes of explosion rolled in from somewhere down the valley. Mine whistles went off up in the mountains. Morning came straining in through eyelashes and boot-soles, welcome as a marshal with a saddlebag full of warrants. Lake shrugged and got back to work.
Sloat sat nodding within some deep private smirk. “Civilians, now, my gosh. That gong’s about to start kickin you back, li’l amigo.”
“Don’t much care who does or don’t like it, Sloat.”
Meanwhile in the kitchen, “Better watch ‘at flirtin’ of yours, Lake, he’s dangerous goods, that little buckaroo.”
“Mamma, I hardly caught his name.”
“I saw what you were up to. Hundred men a day come through here, some of em regular celluloid-collar ads, too, and them, why you’re all business, but in strolls some shifty-eyed little hardcase with trouble wrote all over him, and you’re ready to—well I don’t know what.”
“I do.”
“Lake . . .”
“Teasing you, Ma?”
WHAT WAS IT, exactly, that had started in to ringing so inside Lake, tolling, bone deep, invisible in the night . . . was it the way his face that morning, even with the smoke in the room, had slowly emerged into clarity? Like an old memory, older than herself, something that’d happened before, that she knew now she’d have to go through again. . . . And the way he was looking at her—a knowing look, worse than the most cocksure good-for-nothing that ever came her way, the assumptions being made, not just by him either, but by something outside them. Had to be the altitude.
As for Deuce, of course he “knew” who she was—she had the man’s face, for Christ’s sake. Deuce was an abbreviated customer, hardly much taller than she—in a fair fight she might’ve even taken him, but the fight was not fair. Would never be. His edge, so he believed, came from the poisoned halo of murder for hire, the pure badness of everything he did when he wasn’t with her. Women could protest from now till piss flowed uphill, but the truth was, there wasn’t one didn’t secretly love a killer.
And it might turn out, to Lake’s own surprise as much as anybody’s, that she was one of these passionate young women who believed as the Mexican señoritas like to say that without love one cannot live. That any entrance of it into her life would be like unexpected laughter or finding religion, a gift from the beyond that she must not allow to just exit again and pretend it was gone forever. Unfortunately, “it” had now arrived in the form of Deuce Kindred, for whom her loathing would come to be inseparable from her passion.
Complicating matters but not keeping her awake nights was young Willis Turnstone, the doctor over at the Miner’s Hospital she’d met when she was working there before they put her on steady at the eating house. Willis was pretty direct, and it didn’t take more than one walk through the wildflowers before he’d declared his intentions.
“Can’t say I love you, Willis,” figuring she owed him just as direct of an answer. For she’d met Deuce by then, and it was just a simple case of the true article and its all-but-invisible shadow, and she didn’t have to wait too many heartbeats to tell the difference.
“You are a mighty desirable length of calico, how come you’re not married already?” was how Deuce got around to popping the question.
“Thought I’d take my time, I guess.”
“Time is something you’re given,” he philosophized, “you don’t take it.”
It was not quite a reproof, and likewise short of a plea, but she must have caught something. “The way it is right now—nothin could make it better. But what about when we’re old?”
“Unless we could beat it. Never get old.”
She’d hadn’t seen his eyes like this. “Hope that ain’t Billy the Kid talk.”
“No. Crazier.” He was that close to just handing it all over to her. His soles ached, his fingers throbbed, his heartbeat was audible down the street and around a couple of corners, and she was gazing at him with no little alarm, trying to hang on to her own composure, expecting she didn’t know what. They were both so easily ridden in on by these unannounced passions. Their eyes grew feral, neck muscles went out of control, they became indifferent to where they were, even who was around.
Deuce, in his unguarded state, could feel his heart melting and his penis blood-crazy for her, both at the same time. . . . Handicapped by his ignorance of human emotion, he would come to desire Lake beyond any limits he could have imagined. He would beg, actually beg, self-styled professional badman and all, beg her to marry him. Even respecting her wish that they not fuck until after the wedding.
“It didn’t matter to me before. That’s just it. Now it does. Lake? I’ll change, I swear.”
“I’m not saying start goin to church. Just think about who you hire on with. Don’t have to be any ‘better’ than that.” Some would’ve said she knew even then what he’d done. Could not have helped knowing, God sakes.
One day Mayva had swapped her shift with Oleander Prudge, who, though far too young to be acting as the conscience of Telluride, lost no time in going after Lake.
“They’re saying Deuce Kindred’s the one shot your father.”
Not loud enough to stop conversation in the Nonpareil, but there it was at last. “Who’s sayin that?” Maybe a pulse in her neck leapt into visibility, but she was not about to swoon.
“No secrets in this town, Lake, there’s too much goin on, no time to cover up and not many who care, when you come right to it.”
“Has my Mamma heard any of this talk?”
“Well let’s hope not.”
“It ain’t true.”
“Hmp. Ask your beau.”
; “Maybe I’ll just do that.” Lake slammed a plate down so hard that the stack of hotcakes on it, each glistening with bacon grease, went toppling, rudely surprising a single-jacker, who snatched his hand away screaming.
“Wasn’t that hot, Arvin,” Lake scowled, “but here, let me kiss it, make it better.”
“You’re dishonoring your father’s memory,” Oleander’s snoot well in the air by now, “what you’re doing.”
Reassembling the stack on the plate, Lake gazed boldly back. “How I feel about Mister Kindred,” trying for some schoolteacher’s enunciation—“not that it’s your concern, and how I felt about Webb Traverse are two different things.”
“They can’t be.”
“You’ve had this happen to you? You even know what you’re talking about?”
Was there close attention from up and down the counter? Thinking back, it would seem to Lake that everybody had been in on this from the minute the news reached town, with her and Mayva, poor geese, the last to know.
LATER THEY GLARED at each other, up insomniac in the new-sawn wood and paint smells of the room they shared.
“I don’t want you seeing him no more. He comes in range of me, ever, I’ll shoot him my damn self.”
“Ma, it’s this town, people like Oleander Prudge, don’t care what they say, long as it hurts somebody.”
“I can’t show my face, Lake. You’re making sorry fools out of all of us. This has got to stop.”
“I can’t.”
“You better.”
“He asked me to marry him, Ma.”
Not news Mayva had been waiting to hear. “Well. Then you sure got your choice.”
“‘Cause I won’t believe any of this spiteful talk? Ma?”
“You know better. I been crazy the way you’re crazy now, hell, crazier, and it’s over faster’n you can blow your nose, and someday you’re gonna wake up, and then oh, you poor girl—”
“Oh. So that’s what happened to you and Pa.” She regretted it before it was even out of her mouth, but this was a wagon headed down a grade they could neither of them stop.
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