“Fascinating. But . . . human beings aren’t vectors. Are they?”
“Arguable, young lady. As a matter of fact, in India, the Quaternions are now the basis of a modern school of Yoga, a discipline which has always relied on such operations as stretching and turning. Here in the traditional ‘Triangle Asana,’ for example”—he stood and demonstrated—“the geometry is fairly straightforward. But soon one moves on to more advanced forms, into the complex spaces of the Quaternions. . . .” He shifted a few dishes, climbed on the table, announced, “The ‘Quadrantal Versor Asana,’” and commenced a routine which quickly became more contortionistic and now and then you’d say contrary-to-fact, drawing the attention of other diners and eventually the maître d’, who came running over waving a vehement finger and was two steps away from the table when Dr. Rao abruptly vanished.
“Uwe moer!” The functionary stood fingering his boutonnière.
“Go it, Doc!” chuckled Root. Pléiade lit a cigar, Barry Nebulay was looking under the table for hidden compartments. Except for a couple of Dr. Rao’s table partners who were now busily picking items of food off his plate, astonishment was general. Presently they heard the Doctor calling from the kitchen, “Out here, everyone—come, see!” and sure enough he had reappeared with his foot in a tub of mayonnaise, though, curiously, not quite the same person he had been before performing the Asana. Taller, for one thing.
“And blond now, as well,” puzzled Pléiade. “Can you do it backwards and return to who you were?”
“I have still not learned how. Some master Yogis are said to know the technique, but for me it remains noncommutative—mostly, I just like to hop about. Each time I become somebody else. It is like reincarnation on a budget, without the element of karma to worry about.”
Pléiade, whom Kit had decided he was better off not trusting, lingered through another bottle of wine before producing from her reticule a Vacheron & Constantin watch, flipping open the hunting-case, and executing a dazzling smile of social apology. “I must fly, do forgive me, gentlemen.”
Some of that consulting, Kit supposed.
Root signaled the waiter, making broad gestures toward Pléiade. “She gets the check—haar rekening, ja?”
PLÉIADE’S RENDEZVOUS was with one Piet Woevre, formerly of the Force Publique, whose taste for brutality, refined in the Congo, had been found by security bureaux here at home useful beyond price. His targets in Belgium were not, as newspaper politics might suggest, German so much as “socialist,” meaning Slavic and Jewish. The mere street profile of a frock coat worn longer and looser than any Gentile would present made him reach for his revolver. He himself appeared to be blond, although the rest of his coloring was not consistent with that shade. There were suggestions of a time-consuming daily toilette, including lip-rouge and a not unambiguous cologne. But Woevre was indifferent to most of the presumptions and passwords of everyday sexuality. He had left that sort of thing far behind. Back in the mapless forests. Let anyone think what they like—should it come to a need for corporal expression, he could maim or kill, had lost count of how often he had done this, without hesitation or fear of consequence.
He belonged to the unbroken realm and its simplicities—river-flow, light and no light, transactions in blood. In Europe there was too much to remember, an inexhaustible network of caution and contrivance. Down there he didn’t even need a name.
At first glance, there might seem little to choose between the French Foreign Legion and the Belgian Force Publique. In both cases one ran away from one’s troubles to soldier in Africa. But where the one outfit envisaged desert penance in a surfeit of light, in radiant absolution, the other sought, in the gloom of the fetid forest, to embrace the opposite of atonement—to proclaim that the sum of one’s European sins, however disruptive, had been but facile apprenticeship to a brotherhood of the willfully lost. Whose faces, afterward, would prove as unrecallable as those of the natives.
One look at the Q’s, ambling through town with tobacco crumbs on their shirts and small banknotes sticking out of their pockets, was enough for Woevre to become at once what passes, among deputies of evil, for smitten. That is, willing to drop the surveillance and shelve the files of all his other current assignments, to concentrate on this band of rastaquouères who had blown so problematically into town. Not to mention the presence of “Young Congo” at the same hotel.
“They could turn out to be only innocent mathematicians, I suppose,” muttered Woevre’s section officer, de Decker.
“‘Only.’” Woevre was amused. “Someday you’ll explain to me how that’s possible. Seeing that, on the face of it, all mathematics leads, doesn’t it, sooner or later, to some kind of human suffering.”
“Why, your very own specialty, Woevre. Comrades in arms, one would think.”
“Not when the suffering might easily be mine, let alone theirs. Because they do not distinguish.”
De Decker, not himself a philosopher, feeling vague alarm whenever he encountered this tendency in field personnel, had appeared to shift his interest to some papers in front of him.
The man was a bobbejaan. Woevre felt a familiar itch in his knuckles, but the discussion was not quite over. “This wire traffic with Antwerp and Brussels.” De Decker did not look up. “One particular group, ‘MKIV/ODC,’ which no one can quite identify, unless your people . . .?”
“Yes it looks to our cryptos like some sort of weaponry—torpedo-related? who, at the moment, can say? ‘Mark Four something or other.’ Perhaps you might care to inquire into it. I know it’s not part of your remit,” as it appeared Woevre was about to protest, “yet another set of ‘antennas’ would be welcome.”
“Graciously put. Consider me another loyal gatkruiper.” Accelerated by an awareness of diminishing returns, Woevre was out the door.
“As if you hadn’t enough to put up with,” Pléiade Lafrisée remarked later. “That’s all the sympathy I get?”
“Oh . . . was there some stipulated amount? Did you sneak that into our agreement, too?”
“With invisible ink. What we’d like tonight, though, is a look through his room. Can you keep him occupied for an hour or so?”
Her hands had been busy with his person. She hesitated, thinking it over, until she sensed some brutal imminence, then continued. Later in her bath, she inspected a number of bruises, and decided they were all charming except for one on her wrist, which to a connoisseur might have suggested absence of imagination.
Woevre watched her leave the room. Women looked better from behind, but one saw them that way only when taking their leave after one was done with them, and what good was that? Why did this society insist on a woman entering a room face-first instead of ass-first? Another of the civilized complexities that made him miss intensely the forest life. Since returning to Belgium he had found only an increasing number of these, deployed around him like traps or mines. The need not to offend the King, to remain aware of rival bureaux and their own hidden schemes, to calibrate everything against the mortal mass of Germany, forever towering over the day.
Could it matter who spied for whom? The ruling families of Europe, related by blood and marriage, inhabited their single great incestuous pretense of power, bickering without end—the state bureaucracies, the armies, the Churches, the bourgeoisie, the workers, all were incarcerated within the game. . . . But if, like Woevre, one had seen into the fictitiousness of European power, there was no reason, in the terrible trans-horizontic light of what approached, not to work for as many masters, along as many axes, as one’s memory could accommodate without confusion.
And what, furthermore, to make of this late rumor, drifting just below Woevre’s ability to acquire the signal at all clearly—an unidentifiable noise in the night that sends a sleeper awake with heart pounding and entrails hollow—intelligence of a Quaternionic Weapon, a means to unloose upon the world energies hitherto unimagined—hidden, de Decker would surely say “innocently,” inside the w term. A mathematical paper by
the Englishman Edmund Whittaker which few here could make sense of was said to be pivotal. Woevre had noticed how the convention-goers kept giving one another these looks. As if parties to a secret whose terrible force was somehow, conveniently, set to one side—as if to be encountered only in a companion world they did not quite know how to enter or, once there, to exit. Here in this subsea-level patch of strategic ground, hostage to European ambitions on all sides, waiting, held sleepless without remission, for the blows to descend. What better place for the keepers of the seals and codes to convene?
NEXT EVENING KIT, having against his better judgment accompanied Pléiade to her suite, found himself in some perplexity, for at some point in the deep malediction of the hour she had mysteriously vanished. Only a moment before, it seemed to him, she’d been there at the seaward window, poised against the uncertain marine light, carefully mixing absinthe and Champagne to produce a strange foaming louche. Now, with no sensible passage of time, the rooms were resonant with absence. Next to the cheval-glass, Kit noticed a pale dressing-gown, of all-but-insubstantial chiffon, not draped over a chair but standing erect, now and then rippling from otherwise unsensed passages of air, as if someone were inside of it, perhaps stirred by invisible forces less nameable, its movements, disquietingly, not always matched by those of its tall image in the mirror.
Nothing now, not even the ocean, could be heard in the room, though the windows overlooked the long moon-stung waves. In the moonlight, against gravity, the thing poised there, faceless, armless, attending him, as if, in a moment, it would speak. In the curiously sealed quality of the silence in the room, they waited thus, the disquieted Vectorist and this wraith of Pléiade Lafrisée. Was it something he drank? Should he start conversing with a negligee?
To the distant pulse of the sea, among the tall-hatted monitory shadows, he made his way back to the hotel to find his bedroll gone through, though that couldn’t have taken more than a minute, and his first thought was of Scars-dale Vibe, or a Vibe agent.
“We saw them,” said Eugénie. “It was the political police. They think you are one of us. Thanks to us, you are now a nihilist outlaw.”
“It’s O.K.,” said Kit, “it’s something I was always planning to get around to anyway. Did any of them bother you folks?”
“We know each other,” said Policarpe. “It’s a peculiar game we all play. Against what looms in the twilight of the European future, it doesn’t make much sense, this pretending to carry on with the day, you know, just waiting. Everyone waiting.”
“In France,” said Denis, “they speak of He Who Must Come. He is not the Messiah. He is not Christ or Napoleon returned. He was not General Boulanger. He is unnameable. Nevertheless one would have to be uncommonly isolated, either mentally or physically, not to feel His approach. And to know what He is bringing. What death and what transfiguration.”
“We wait here, however, not, like the French, for some Napoleon, nothing that human, but kept hostage to the arrival of a certain military Hour, whenever the general staffs decide it has struck.”
“Isn’t Belgium supposed to be neutral?”
“Zeker”—a shrug—“there’s even a Treaty, which makes it a dead cert we’ll be invaded by at least one of the signatories, isn’t that what Treaties of Neutrality are for? Each of the Powers has its plan for us. Von Schlieffen, for instance, wants to send in thirty-two German divisions against our own, let us say, six. Wilhelm has offered Leopold part of France, the ancient Duchy of Burgundy, if, when the mythical moment arrives, we will surrender all our famous shellproof forts and leave the railways intact—little Belgium once again busy at what she does best, tamely offering her battlefield-ready lowlands to boots, hooves, iron wheels, waiting to be first to go under before a future no one in Europe has the clairvoyance to imagine as anything more than an exercise for clerks.
“Think of Belgium as a pawn. It is no accident that so many international chess tournaments are held here in Ostende. If chess is war in miniature . . . perhaps Belgium is understood to be the first sacrifice in a general conflict . . . though perhaps not, as in a gambit, to provide a counterattack, for a gambit may be declined, and who would decline to take Belgium?”
“So . . . this is like Colorado, with changes of sign—it’s negative altitude, this living below sea-level, something like that?”
Fatou stood close to him, looking up through her lashes. “It is the sorrow of anticipation, Kit.”
THE NEXT TIME he saw Pléiade Lafrisée was at a café-restaurant off the Place d’Armes. It would not occur to him until much later to wonder if she had arranged the encounter. She was in pale violet peau de soie, and a hat so beguiling that Kit was only momentarily surprised to find himself with an erection. It was still early in the study of these matters, only a few brave pioneers like the Baron von Krafft-Ebing had dared peep into the strange and weirdly twilit country of hat-fetishism—not that Kit noticed stuff like that ordinarily, but it happened actually to be a gray toque of draped velvet, trimmed with antique guipure, and a tall ostrich plume dyed the same shade of violet as her dress. . . .
“This? One finds them in every other midinette’s haunt, literally for sous.”
“Oh. I must’ve been staring. What happened to you the other night?”
“Come. You can buy me a Lambic.”
The place was like a museum of mayonnaise. This being just at the height of the culte de la mayonnaise then sweeping Belgium, oversize exhibits of the ovoöleaginous emulsion were to be encountered at every hand. Heaps of Mayonnaise Grenache, surrounded by plates of smoked turkey and tongue, glowed redly as if from within, while with less, if any, reference to actual food it might have been there to modify, mountains of Chantilly mayonnaise, swept upward in gravity-impervious peaks insubstantial as cloud, along with towering masses of green mayonnaise, basins of boiled mayonnaise, mayonnaise baked into soufflés, not to mention a number of not entirely successful mayonnaises, under some obscure attainder, or on occasion passing as something else, dominated every corner.
“How much do you know of La Mayonnaise?” she inquired.
He shrugged. “Maybe up to the part that goes ‘Aux armes, citoyens’—”
But she was frowning, earnest as he had seldom seen her. “La Mayonnaise,” Pléiade explained, “has its origins in the moral squalor of the court of Louis XV—here in Belgium the affinity should not be too surprising. The courts of Leopold and Louis are not that different except in time, and what is time? Both monumentally deluded men, maintaining their power through oppression of the innocent. One might usefully compare Cléo de Mérode and the marquise de Pompadour. Neuropathists would recognize in both kings a desire to construct a self-consistent world to live inside, which allows them to continue the great damage they are inflicting on the world the rest of us must live in.
“The sauce was invented as a new sensation for jaded palates at court by the duc de Richelieu, at first known as mahonnaise after Mahon, the chief port of Minorca, the scene of the duc’s dubious ‘victory’ in 1756 over the illfated Admiral Byng. Basically Louis’s drug dealer and pimp, Richelieu, known for opium recipes to fit all occasions, is also credited with the introduction into France of the cantharides, or Spanish fly.” She gazed pointedly at Kit’s trousers. “What might this aphrodisiac have in common with the mayonnaise? That the beetles must be gathered and killed by exposing them to vinegar fumes suggests an emphasis on living or recently living creatures—the egg yolk perhaps regarded as a conscious entity—cooks will speak of whipping, beating, binding, penetration, submission, surrender. There is an undoubtedly Sadean aspect to the mayonnaise. No getting past that.”
Kit was a little confused by now. “It always struck me as kind of, I don’t know . . . bland?”
“Until you look within. Mustard, for example, mustard and cantharides, n’est-ce pas? Both arousing the blood. Blistering the skin. Mustard is the widely-known key to resurrecting a failed mayonnaise, as is the cantharides to reviving broken desire.”
“Meet me tonight,” a sudden fierce whisper, “out at the Mayonnaise Works, and you shall perhaps understand things it is given only to a few to know. There will be a carriage waiting.” She pressed his hand and was gone in a mist of vetiver, abruptly as the other evening.
“Sounds too good to pass up,” it seemed to Root Tubsmith. “She sure is a pip, that one. You need company?”
“I need protection. I don’t trust her. But you know—”
“Oh ain’t that the truth. She’s trying to talk me into teaching her my Q.P. system. Well, maybe not ‘talk,’ exactly. I keep telling her she has to learn Quaternions first, and darn if she doesn’t actually keep showing up for more lessons.”
“She learning anything?”
“I know I am.”
“I’ll pray for your safety. Meantime if you never see me again—”
“Oh, be optimistic. She’s a goodhearted working girl, is all.”
THE USINE RÉGIONALE à la Mayonnaise or Regional Mayonnaise Works, where all the mayonnaise in West Flanders was manufactured and then sent out in a variety of forms to different restaurants, each of which presented it as a unique Speciality of the House, though quite extensive in area, was seldom, if ever, mentioned in guidebooks, receiving, in consequence, few visitors other than those employed there. Among the dunes west of town, next to a canal, visible by day for miles across the sands, rose dozens of modern steel tanks of olive, sesame, and cottonseed oils, which were delivered through a further maze of pipes and valves to the great Facilité de l’Assemblage, electrically grounded and insulated to allow production to continue uninterrupted by the disjunctive effects of thunderstorms.
After sunset, however, this cheerfully rational example of twentieth-century engineering dissolved into more precarious shadows. “Anybody here?” Kit called, wandering the corridors and catwalks in a borrowed lounge suit and some nifty razor-toed congress shoes. Somewhere invisible in the dark, steam dynamos hissed, and enormous batteries of Italian hens squawked, clucked, and laid eggs which rolled ceaselessly, day and night apparently, in a subdued rumbling, by way of an intricate arrangement of chutes cushioned in gutta-percha, to the Egg Collection Area.
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