All the world in love with love, except it seemed for Kit, whose desires were consulted by no one, least of all himself. When he and Yashmeen met in the Kursaal later in the day, both were disoriented from lack of sleep, and his announcement of a detour to Venice for purposes of vendetta might have exhibited a certain bluntness.
“Can I square this with Brother Swome? He says I need to pick up the train to Constantza, and according to the schedule he gave me, there’s some extra time to get there. How much of a hurry do you reckon he’s in?”
“I think getting me out of Göttingen was the main point for them. You were a convenient element, you did your job. You needn’t feel obligated to them any further.”
“But this . . . other thing, we need to see about it while the chance is open. And as long as Reef thinks he needs me to watch his back, I can’t walk away from it. And whatever happens, it’ll move fast.”
She watched him, her brow troubled. “Good job your ticket’s to Kashgar, then, isn’t it.”
“Maybe nothing’ll happen.”
“Or maybe they’ll kill you.”
“Yashmeen, the son of a bitch has destroyed my family. What am I—”
“Only envy. You are lucky to have any recourse. A name, someone who can be held to account. Too many of us have to sit foolishly by while something comes out of the dark, strikes, returns to wherever it came from, as if we are too fragile for a world of happy families, whose untroubled destinies require that the rest of us be sacrificed.”
“But if it was you, and you had the chance—”
“Of course I would. Kit.” A hand on his arm for only as long as it had to be. “My plans are no longer mine to make, these T.W.I.T. people believe that I owe them my continuing survival, and someone has decided now is the moment to collect the debt.”
“So they’re taking you back to London?”
“First we go to Vienna, and then Buda-Pesth. Some mysterious burst of Psychical Research activity. I gather I am to be an experimental subject, but when I ask for details, they say it would compromise the integrity of the study for me to know too much.”
“Is it worth writing you care of the T.W.I.T., or will they open and read your mail?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Who can we trust, then?”
She nodded. “Noellyn Fanshawe. We were at Girton together. Here is her address, but don’t expect quick replies.”
“And your father—”
She handed over a sealed Sanatorium envelope, embossed with the usual grandiose coat of arms.
“What’s this? Thought you two only used telepathy.” He slipped it into an inside coat-pocket.
Her smile was thin, formal. “Telepathy, marvelous as it is, would not be—you say, ‘a patch’?—a patch on the moment you actually put this into his hands.”
She’d said more flattering things, he supposed, but none so trusting. He had a quick third-party glimpse of them, renegades keeping up a level of professionalism even if the profession had more or less done with them.
He saw her off from a little quay where a lake steamer waited. T.W.I.T. personages milled around, repeatedly throwing her looks of impatience and, it almost seemed, of reproof. The sky was dark with rushing rain clouds. She wore a simple waist and skirt, and a waterproof with a hood, and no hat. He would not know how to manage cow-eyed pleading even if they gave lessons. He took her hand and shook it formally but didn’t let it go right away. “Do you think—”
“We would ever have run away together in real life? no. I find it hard imagining anyone stupid enough to believe we would.”
The boat backed into the lake, turned, and she was swept away, not bothering to look back. Kit found Reef nearby, smoking cigarettes, pretending not to notice.
Kit allowed himself for a minute to wonder how many more of these tearless adieux he was supposed to go through before the one he really didn’t need, the one that’d finally be one too many.
And here came Neville and Nigel again, drinking opiated highballs of British cough syrup and aerated water from a portable seltzogene they had also been discharging at passersby, causing a spot of grumbling among the T.W.I.T. membership. At the moment the two were on their way to see the comic operetta Waltzing in Whitechapel, or, A Ripping Romance, based loosely, and according to some reviews tastelessly, on the Whitechapel murders of the late ’80s.
“Aahh!” Neville was peering at his reflection in the mirror. “Bags! Piggott’s should have such ‘bags’!”
“Do come along Lewis,” said Nigel, “we’ve an extra ticket.”
“Yes, and by the way,” said Neville, “here’s something else,” but Lew easily dodged the stream of seltzer, which hit Nigel instead.
That evening the Strand, as if by some consensus, was exhibiting that sinister British craving for the dark and shiny so well known to experts in erotic neuropathy, not to mention students of the chimpanzee—crowds in mackintoshes, patent boots, and top hats, the soiled allure of marcasite brooches and earrings, pomaded temples struck to chill glitter in the public lighting . . . even the pavement, slick with rain and oily exudations, contributing its own queasy albedo. The streetlighting carried, for those, such as Neville and Nigel, who could hear it, the luminous equivalent of a steady, afflicted shriek.
Up and down the street, buskers pranced and spun before the theatre queues—conjurors produced small animals from nowhere, tumbling routines featured skull-and-pavement clearances running typically in the millimeter range, while just in front of the Duke of Cumberland’s Theatre a ukulele quartet were playing and singing a medley of tunes from Waltzing in Whitechapel, including one intended to be sung Gilbert and Sullivan style by a chorus of constables to a matching number of streetwalkers—
You know, it’s . . .
Only copper propa-
gaaaan-da, that
Policemen never woo, woo, woo!
—You
Know I’d be just as cud-dly as a
Paaaan-da,
If only-I-knew,
You wan-ted-to-cud-dle-me too! E-
-ven in Ken-ya, Tangan-yi-ka and U-
gaaaan-da,
It’s not that unheard of . . .
Coz it’s a
Proper crop o’ propa-
gaaaanda, that
A flat-tie can’t fall in love!
In the theatre, Lew dropped a shilling into the box on the back of the seat in front of him, took out a pair of opera-glasses, and began scanning the crowd. The moving field came to rest at length on whom but the co-tenant of Tarot card XV, Professor P. Jotham Renfrew, apparently down from Cambridge taking in a show, his face flattened into a lurid two-dimensional chromo of itself, sitting in a box with somebody in a foreign uniform, whom it took Lew only a moment more to recognize as his former fellow Archduke-minder, the Trabant Captain, now regular K. & K. Landwehr Colonel, Max Khäutsch, hardly changed from the Chicago days, unless perhaps grown slightly more mineral, toward the condition of a statue in a park frequented by the irregular of spirit.
Lew had little time to dwell on the past, however, for with a great crash of cymbals the orchestra began to play the overture.
Waltzing in Whitechapel turned out to be one of those modern works in which a group of players are struggling to put on a musical comedy about Jack the Ripper, “Rather than letting old Jack just go carving about under his own steam,” as Nigel began to complain during the applause for the first number.
“But honestly Nigel, it would be an actor up there in any case, wouldn’t it,” objected Neville.
“Well that may be so Neville,” furtively removing from his coat a silver flask of Morphotuss cough preparation and taking a belt or two, “but as it’s an actor playing an actor playing Jack, why that’s so artificial don’t you agree?”
“Yes but it’s all artificial Nigel, including the blood everyone’s come for, and one must simply get over that mustn’t one.”
“If you’d prefer real blood,” advised a quiet voice from
a seat behind them, “I’m sure something could be arranged.”
“I say,” Neville shifting in his seat as if to look back.
“For pity’s sake, Neville,” hissed Nigel, crazed eyeballs flickering to and fro, “don’t turn round, it could be Him.”
At intermission, Lew headed for the bar and found Colonel Khäutsch already working on a brandy and soda. If he was surprised to see Lew, he had grown professionally weary enough over the years not to show it.
“Business, eternal business. One would prefer two weeks’ furlough in Berlin, but K. und K. matters often oblige one to postpone one’s entertainments. . . .” Khäutsch shrugged with his eyebrows at different heights. “There I am, complaining again. Sowieso. . . . How is your life progressing, Lewis? You are not still working as a ‘spotter’?”
“Not lately, more like a hired goon. You’re not still riding herd on that Franz Ferdinand, are you?”
A sour smile and shake of the head. “The feckless idiot who once drove us mad is exactly the same as he was—how much can these people change, after all? But the Imperium have since found, mercifully, other ways for me to serve them— Ah, but here is someone you may wish to meet.” Making his way toward them through the crowd came Professor Renfrew.
Well, not exactly. Lew didn’t technically jump, but a number of muscle groups did seem poised to. He resisted the urge to seize himself by the head and perform some violent though as yet dimly imagined readjustment.
“Allow me to present my German colleague, the Professor-Doktor Joachim Werfner.”
The German professor sure did look a hell of a lot like Renfrew, though maybe a little more informally turned out, frayed cuffs, uncombed hair, eyeglasses tinted a strange bruised green.
Careful not to seem too impressed by the resemblance, Lew reached to shake hands. “You’re visiting London, Professor? How’re you enjoying it?”
“Mostly business, though Max has been so kind as to acquaint me with Piccadilly Circus, where one can actually find a species of Munich beer.”
“I can sure sympathize, we probably share the same opinion of English beer, it’s like drinking your evening dinner.”
For a while they discussed what the penny press had been calling the “Ripperetta.”
“It is curious,” said Khäutsch, “that these Whitechapel murders occurred not that long before the tragedy at Mayerling, which to some of us in Austria has always suggested a common origin.”
“Not this again,” Werfner pretended to groan.
“One of those strong impressions from youth,” explained Khäutsch. “I was in those days a lieutenant who fancied himself a detective, and believed I could solve it.”
“Austrian Crown Prince and his girlfriend had a suicide pact or something,” Lew tried to recall. “So we ended up with old F.F. instead.”
“The world was given a Liebestod for romantic fools. The harsher truth is that Rudolf was put out of the way.”
Lew looked around. “Should we be . . .?”
Khäutsch shrugged. “Only a little harmless Fachsimpelei. Violent death in high places is of professional interest to us all, not so? The case was closed long ago, and anyway the ‘truth’ was never as important as what lessons Rudolf’s successor, Franz Ferdinand, might draw from it.”
“You’re saying that somebody at the top—”
Khäutsch nodded solemnly. “Elements who could never have tolerated Rudolf on the throne. He found so little in Austria to admire, and his beliefs were simply too dangerous—he ranted incessantly about our corruption, our worship of the military, especially the German military—he feared the Triple Alliance, saw evidence of the anti-Semitic everywhere, in general he hated the whole Habsburg idea, and was unwise enough actually to publish these opinions, naturally in the Jewish newspapers.”
“And the girlfriend—”
“Ach, die Vetsera. Dumpy little thing, no one’s idea of a grand passion, but just the sort of story to divert an otherwise-fatal public curiosity, cherchons la femme, always useful in politics.”
“Then who do you think did it?”
“For a while my favorite suspect was the Emperor’s chamberlain, Count Montenuovo—but then one day I had my illumination from above, and knew that it must really have been Jack the Ripper”—general muttering—“himself, working under contract. Considering that he disappeared from London around November of ’88, and Mayerling was at the end of January ’89—time enough for Jack to get to Austria and become familiar with his target, yes?”
“They were shot, Max,” protested Werfner with exaggerated gentleness, “not butchered. Jack was not a firearms person, the only similarity is that the list of suspects in the ‘Ripper’ case is also long enough to populate a small city, each more plausible than the one before, the stories, one by one, convince us utterly, that here, at last, must surely be the true Ripper, inconceivable that anyone else could have done it—until the next fanatic steps forward to make his or her case. Hundreds, by now thousands, of narratives, all equally valid—what can this mean?”
“Multiple worlds,” blurted Nigel, who had floated in from elsewhere.
“Precisely!” cried the Professor. “The Ripper’s ‘Whitechapel’ was a sort of momentary antechamber in space-time . . . one might imagine a giant railway-depot, with thousands of gates disposed radially in all dimensions, leading to tracks of departure to all manner of alternate Histories. . . .”
Chinese gongs, vigorously bashed, announced that the second act was about to begin. They all arranged to meet afterward at a reception in one of the gigantic hotels off Trafalgar Square and, when they arrived, found it seething with a cosmopolitan throng whose elements could not always be easily identified, among bushels of cut flowers, thoughtfully turned-out young women, valets on tiptoes and Champagne on ice, deep carpeting, and electric chandeliers. A small dance orchestra played, while couples experimented with the “Boston.” People in turbans and fezzes were observed. Neville and Nigel after a quick survey chose the most lethal drink at the bar, currently the rage in London, a horrible combination of porter and Champagne known as a “Velvet.”
Being good sports, they did put in with chitchat from time to time until, all but invisible to the others, a certain Oriental Presence was detected going out the door. “I say,” said one to the other, exchanging a meaningful look as, humming together, in “Chinese” harmony, the widely-known pentatonic theme
Tngtngtngtng tong-tong
Tng-tng tong . . .,
the two hopheads drifted off, mindless as sailors. Soon after that a seraphic youth in a lounge suit came gliding by, his nearer eyeball seeming to roll a fraction of a degree in Colonel Khäutsch’s direction, and Khäutsch, likewise excusing himself, disappeared into his own labyrinth of desire.
The Professor-Doktor put in his monocle and had a squint at Lew, which rapidly became a sort of confidential twinkle. “You and Max actually looked after the Crown Prince at one time?”
“Oh, Chicago—back when the Prince was a pup. I was in it only a week and a half, Colonel Khäutsch did all the work.”
“You would be surprised, perhaps appalled, at what has become of Franz Ferdinand. In somewhat indecent eagerness to ascend the throne when Franz Josef dies, he has set up his own shadow-state at the Belvedere, the great palace once built for Prince Eugene of Savoy. His circle are difficult people to admire, their motives do not always coincide perfectly with those of the Ballhausplatz, the Crown Prince himself entertaining most unwholesome fantasies, for example about Bosnia, which Max fears will land us all in great trouble one day—and Max is never mistaken, his grasp of the Balkan situation is unequaled in Europe.”
“He says the same about you.”
Werfner shrugged. “My market value tends to fluctuate. At the moment it is up, because of the Anglo-Russian Entente. Germany spent years trying to keep the two countries apart, and must now sit and watch all that careful work come unraveled. So to anyone with a thought on the subject, the Wilhelmstraße, pe
rhaps ten minutes longer than customary, might be paying attention.”
Lew listened guardedly to this impersonation of a gemütlicher alter Junge. According to most of the Werfner stories he’d heard, lives by the trainload were said to hang on his every pause for breath. The mystery of why Werfner should be in town at all, so far out of his ground, so close to his British adversary, would not go away. There persisted the classic nightmare scene of the man who is standing where he should not be. Despite both professors’ frequent and strenuous denials of twinship, some symmetry was being broken. Violated. It was enough to drive Lew back to his pernicious habit of Cyclomite-nibbling. He went looking for a W.C. in which to do this, though he supposed he could surreptitiously spread the stuff on a biscuit and administer it that way.
“WERFNER’S IN LONDON,” Lew told the Cohen next day.
“So the two N’s have reported.” It seemed to Lew that the Cohen was looking at him strangely. More than strangely, and how strange was that? “Things are becoming odd. We’ve other ops on station, of course, but I think that from here on you’ll be authorized—trusted—to take any initiative you see fit. Should an opportunity arise.”
Lew heard a somber note. “Cohen, could you get specific?”
“Metaphorical will have to do. Think of those two professors as ‘sidewinders’ out on the trail. Sometimes a man has the luck to avoid them. Sometimes he must take other steps.”
Against the Day Page 89