He watched the figure’s hands and feet, waiting for the appearance, in the ever-thickening gloom, of a sphere of a certain size. He unbuttoned his suit jacket, and the weight of the little Browning swung itself easily within his reach. The figure might have noted this, for he began to move away. “Say, haven’t we met?” called Lew in the most American tones he could locate given the cloudiness and uncertainty of the hour. The reply was a laugh, unexpectedly blithe, and an acceleration off into the evening and the approaching rain. By the time a light drizzle had begun, the stranger had vanished, making no appearance next day, at the match, which I Zingari, beginning on a rather damp pitch, eventually won by eight wickets.
BACK IN LONDON, Lew went out again to Cheapside to consult Dr. Coombs De Bottle, who seemed a bit more tattered and fretful than last time.
“You’re the tenth, or perhaps hundredth, person to ask me about carbonyl chloride this week. Somewhere in that order of magnitude. The last time the hierarchy all got this curious, it was just after the Jameson Raid. Now they’re driving us mental again. Whatever do you imagine could be afoot?”
“Hoping you could tell me. Just got a fast look at our old pal the Gentleman Bomber, up at Cambridge, but it was too dark to get in a shot at him. What you folks call bad light.”
“The Metropolitans have fallen curiously silent about him. I’d rather hoped he’d left the country, like Jack the Ripper or something.”
“This phosgene story I heard—it’s a different modus, more like a trip-lever concern that just sits there till a target comes along, and all on a much bigger scale than a single bomb-thrower.”
“Sounds like a combination of gas projector and land mine,” in a tone of mild astonishment, as if this were an altogether new one on him.
“About all I can tell you. Kind of sketchy, I guess.”
“Phosgene vaporizes at forty-six degrees Fahrenheit, so it would have to be stored in pressure tanks of some sort. The trip-lever would then, through suitable linkage, simply open a valve. The pressure in the tank could be higher or lower depending on how forcefully one wished to project the gas. The theory as I understand it is to direct the agent along a line, say against a line of troops advancing. One reckons in weight deployed per unit length of line, say pounds per yard, per hour.”
“Try tons per mile.”
“Good God. How extensive is this?”
“War Office boys must already know all about it, but the figure I have is two hundred miles. You could talk to them.”
THE COHEN WAS INCLINED to a philosophic view. “Suppose the Gentleman B. is not a simple terrorist but an angel, in the early sense of ‘messenger,’ and in the fateful cloud he brings, despite the insupportable smell, the corrosive suffocation, lies a message?” According to Coombs De Bottle, some did survive the attacks. Even in fatal cases there could be a delay of up to forty-eight hours. Successful treatment was known to require four or five hours of absolute rest. “So phosgene is not a guarantee of certain death,” said the Cohen. “And perhaps victims are not meant after all to die, perhaps the Messenger’s intention is actually benevolent, a way of enforcing stillness, survival depending as it does upon a state of quiescence in which his message could be contemplated, possibly, later, acted upon . . .?”
THEN ONE MORNING Lew stumbled down to the breakfast salon to find that everyone had left town. If this had been Colorado, it might have suggested an imminent visit by a sizable party, heeled no doubt and in the mood for triggerplay—in which case leaving town would’ve been no more than a prudent step. But no one in particular showed up at Chunxton Crescent. Lew waited, but somehow the place only went along, breathing silently, the corridors empty, the wall surfaces inside and out sending back echoes that arrived at each ear a tiny fraction of a second apart, producing an illusion of spirit-presences repeating the words of the living. Acolytes and servants crept about as always, without much to say. Cohen Nookshaft and Madame Eskimoff had vanished, Neville and Nigel as well, no one seemed to be in charge. Deliveries of coal, ice, milk, bread, butter, eggs, and cheese continued to arrive.
It rained. The rain ran down the statuary in the garden. Dripped off the noses of satyrs and nymphs. Lew contemplated a photograph of Yashmeen, in the gray light through the garden windows. He’d had a postal from her a week ago, bearing regular Swiss stamps as well as the bright red private hotel stamp of the Sanatorium Böpfli-Spazzoletta, saying she was off to Buda-Pesth, no reason given. An impersonation of carefree youth out touring the Continent, it seemed to Lew. Except that the same red stamps were showing everywhere among the daily post at Chunxton Crescent like drops of blood in the snow. Postal cards, envelopes of different sizes, not likely all sent by Yashmeen. Was that where everybody had gone, Switzerland? Without telling Lew, of course. Hired gunhand and so forth, no need, was there.
He surveyed his options. No one here that he could talk to, really, even Otto Ghloix had disappeared, no doubt back to his native Switzerland with everybody else. Lew should have felt more abandoned than he did, but strangely, what it really felt like was a release from a bad contract. Whatever was making them all so distraught, it hadn’t occurred to any of them that Lew might’ve turned out to be of some use. Fine, then. There’d be enough detective work elsewhere in this town to keep the bill-collectors happy, and it was long past time Lew set up on his own anyway. The T.W.I.T. could just go hire another gorilla.
“But it’s your destiny!” the Cohen would plead.
“Yes Lewis, here, take a puff of this and think it over.”
“Sorry boys, I don’t think I’m chasing Tarot cards anymore, no, from here on it’s anxious husbands and missing necklaces and exotic poisons for me, thanks.”
And if that wasn’t exactly who he was either—if, not having wanted much for a while, this wasn’t even exactly what he “wanted”—he was determined at least never to have to go back, never to end up again down some gopher-riddled trail through the scabland, howling at the unexplained and unresponsive moon.
Four
Against the Day
Cyprian’s first post was at Trieste, monitoring the docks and the emigrant traffic to America, with side trips over to Fiume and newcomer’s rounds at the Whitehead torpedo factory and the petroleum harbor, as well as down the coast to Zengg, headquarters of the increasingly energetic New Uskok movement, named after the sixteenth-century exile community who at one time had controlled this end of the Adriatic, then as much a threat to Venice at sea as to the Turks back in the mountains, and even today a dedicated cadre for whom the threat of Turkish inundation, immediate and without mercy, remained living and verifiable. Who continued to wait, all along the Military Frontier, night and day, for the fateful breach—manning the ancient watchtowers and recording on military maps of the region every least spark appearing in the terrestrial night, its compass-bearing and magnitude, keeping ready the dry tinder and paraffin for the alarm beacons, never allowing themselves more than half a minute before deliverance into light. Obvious implications for the Macedonian Question. Heaven knew what esoteric bureaux Cyprian’s Neo-Uskok reports found their way in among.
Trieste and Fiume, on either side of the Istrian Peninsula, had both become points of convergence for those in Austria-Hungary seeking to embark for passage west. Most, in the daily streaming of souls, were legitimate, though enough were traveling in disguise that Cyprian must loiter all day at dockside, and keep detailed logs of who was going to America, who was coming back, who was here for the first time. Out and In—like debits and credits, entered on facing pages in his operative’s notebook. After a few years of false uttering in a number of hands, allowing a lurid carnival of identities to enter his writing—he had returned to his schoolboy’s script, to distant Evensongs, to the wolving of the ancient chapel organ as the last light is extinguished and the door latched for the long night.
At sunset he could be found still lingering down by the docks, looking out to sea. Work did not hold him—sunsets had precedence. The promise of t
he evening—a density of possibility here that was decidedly absent in places like Zengg. Sailors, it went without saying, sea-creatures everywhere. A sky of milk-blue flesh descending to vermilion at the sea, the theatrically colored light thrown back to stain every west-facing surface . . .
CYPRIAN’S DESCENT into the secret world had begun only the year before in Vienna, in the course of another evening of mindless trolling about the Prater. Without thinking, he had drifted into conversation with a pair of Russians, whom he took, in his state of innocence at the time, to be tourists.
“But you live here in Vienna, we do not understand, what is it that you do?”
“As little as possible, one hopes.”
“He means, what is your work?” said the other one.
“Being agreeable. And yours?”
“At this moment? Only a small favor to a friend.”
“Of . . . excuse me, a friend of both of you? All quite friendly are we?”
“A pity that one must not quarrel with sodomites. The insolence in his voice, Misha, his face—something ought to be done about it.”
“By this friend, perhaps,” replied saucy Cyprian. “Who doesn’t much care for insolence either, I expect.”
“On the contrary, he welcomes it.”
“As something he must patiently put up with.” Holding his head a little averted, Cyprian kept sneaking glances at them, up and sidewise, through restless lashes.
The other man laughed. “As an opportunity to correct a perverse habit he does not approve of.”
“And is he also Russian, like yourselves? knout-fancier, that sort of thing perhaps?”
Not even a pause. “He much prefers his companions unmarked. Nonetheless, you might at least think before using your interesting mouth, while it remains yours to use.”
Cyprian nodded, as if chastened. The exquisite reflex of rectal fear passing through him then could have been simple cringing before a threat, or a betrayal of desire he was trying, but failing, to control.
“Another Capuziner?” offered the other man.
The price they settled on was not so high as to provoke more than ordinary curiosity, though of course the topic of discretion did arise. “There are wife, children, public connections—usual impedimenta we imagine you have learned by now to deal with. Our friend is very clear on this point—his reputation is of absolute importance to him. Any mention of him to anyone, no matter how trivial, will get back to him. He commands resources that allow him to learn everything people say. Everyone. Even you, cuddled down in your frail nest with some manly visitor you believe really wants to ‘keep’ you, or bragging to another forlorn butterfly, ‘Oh, he gave me this, he bought me that’—every living moment, you must attend to what you say, for sooner or later your exact words are recovered, and if they are wrong words, then, little miss, you will find you must go fluttering for your life.”
“And don’t imagine ‘home’ as a very safe place to be,” his companion added, “for we are not without resources in England. Our eye is ever upon you, wherever those little wings should take you.”
It had not occurred to Cyprian that this city might, by now, have anything more to reveal to him beyond the promise of unreflective obedience, day into night, to the leash-pulls of desire. Certainly, outside the Prater, and its role as a reservoir of Continental good looks, to find Vienna exhibiting behavior even a little more complex, especially with (it seemed here impossible not to gather) a political dimension as well, predictably sent his boredom coefficients swooning off the scale, and any number of alarm-devices into alluring cry. Perhaps the pair of go-betweens had already detected in him this shallowness of expectation. He was handed a card with an address printed on it—in Leopoldstadt, the Jewish quarter north of the Prater, across the railroad tracks.
“So. A Jewish friend, it seems. . . .”
“Perhaps one day a detailed chat on Hebraic issues could bring you some profit, financial as well as educational. Meanwhile let us proceed in orderly steps.”
For a moment a wing of desolate absence swept down across the garden tables here at Eisvogel’s, eclipsing any describable future. From somewhere in the direction of the Giant-Wheel came the infernal lilt of yet another twittering waltz.
The Russians, self-designated Misha and Grisha, having obtained one of his addresses, a coffeehouse in the IX Bezirk, were soon leaving messages for Cyprian there about once a week, scheduling appointments at unfrequented corners all about the city. As he grew more aware of their surveillance, as perhaps he was meant to, he spent less time in the Prater and more in cafés reading newspapers. He also began taking day-trips, prolonging them, sometimes through the night, to see what radius of freedom the watchers would allow him.
With no chance to prepare, he was summoned at last one night to the address in Leopoldstadt. The servant who opened the door was tall, cruel, and silent, and almost before Cyprian could step across the threshold, he was manacled and blindfolded, then roughly propelled down a corridor and up some stairs to a room with a peculiar absence of echo, where he was unbound only long enough to be stripped and then re-secured.
The Colonel himself removed the blindfold. He wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses, the bone-structure beneath a rigorously shaven scalp betraying to the keen student of ethnophysiognomy, even in the room’s exhausted light, his non-Prussian, indeed crypto-Oriental, blood. He selected a rattan cane and without speaking proceeded to use it on Cyprian’s unprotected naked body. Being chained tightly, Cyprian was unable to put up much resistance, and his unfaltering erection would in any case have made any protests unpersuasive.
So these assignations began, once a week, always conducted in silence. Cyprian experimented with costume, maquillage, and hairstyles in an attempt to provoke some comment, but the Colonel was far more interested in whipping him—wordlessly and often, employing a strange delicacy of touch, to climax.
One evening, near the Volksgarten, Cyprian was out in the street just drifting, when from somewhere not immediately clear he heard a chorus of male voices hoarse from hours of repetition singing “Ritter Georg Hoch!” the old Pan-German anthem, and here in Vienna, these days, anti-Semitic as well. Understanding immediately that it would be better not to have to encounter this lot, he slipped into the first wine cellar he saw, where whom should he run into but old Ratty McHugh, from school. At the sight of a face from a past all at once too measurably more innocent, he began to sniffle, not enough to embarrass anyone but so surprising them both that old Ratty was moved to inquire.
Though Cyprian had developed by now a clearer idea of the consequences if he spoke of his arrangements with the Colonel—death certainly not being out of the question, torture certainly, not the pleasurable sort he expected of his mysterious client but the real article, nonetheless he was tempted, almost sexually so, to tell all to Ratty in a great heedless rush, and see how much would in fact get back to the Colonel, and what would happen then. He had intuitively kept shy of any guessing as to whom his old school chum might be working for these days, and in particular from which Desk. With the sense of taking a step into some narcotically-perfumed and lightless room, calibrating the seductiveness of his tone, he whispered, “Do you think you could get me out of Vienna?”
“What kind of trouble are you in?” Ratty of course wanted to know. “Exactly.”
“‘Exactly’ . . .”
“I am in regular contact with people who might help. Though I mayn’t speak for them, my impression is that the more detailed your account, the further they’d be prepared to extend themselves.” The old Ratty had never spoken with quite so much care.
“Look here,” Cyprian imagined he could explain, “it isn’t ’s if one starts off intending to live this way . . . ‘Oh yes planning, you know, to seek a career in sodomy.’ But—perhaps less at Trinity than at King’s—if one wanted anything like a social life, it was simply the mask one put on. Inescapable, really. Every expectation, most of us, of leaving it all behind after the final May Week ball,
and no harm done. Who could have foreseen, any more than the actress who falls in love with her leading man, that the fiction might prove after all more desirable—strangely, more durable—than anything the civilian world had to offer. . . .”
Ratty, bless him, didn’t blink any more than he usually did. “My alternatives were a bit less colorful. Whitehall, Blackpool. But it’s only fair to warn you, you might have to absorb a bit of character assessment.”
“From your lot. Rather harsh, are they.”
“Manly as they come, little or no patience with anything else.”
“Crikey, my very type of chap. Are you still as fond of booking insane bets as you were in your Newmarket period? At the right odds, I’ll wager I could seduce any of that manly brigade you’d care to choose. Take no more than one evening.”
WITHIN THE WEEK Ratty had set him up an appointment with Derrick Theign, a tall and careworn functionary, from his accent stationed out here, perhaps, actually, for a while now. “I suppose I do enjoy it here, more than one ought, so I’ve been told. Though with field reports up to one’s ears, where one possibly finds time, for any of . . . well, the other, that’s if one fancied that sort of thing, which of course one doesn’t, much.”
“‘Much.’ Oh, dear.”
“But I must say I am ever so frightfully keen on these chocolate and raspberry articles—would you mind if we obtained . . . perhaps several of them actually, not to take along, you see, but to eat here, even if it’s rather more quickly than may be considered—”
“Derrick, if I may so address you—I’m not giving you ‘nerves’? Little nondescript, unthreatening me? Hadn’t we better—”
“No, not at all, it’s just the . . . hmm. Dash it all. Then again . . .”
“Yes do go on, please—‘the’ what?”
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