“The maquillage, you know. I’m finding it—”
“Oh I say, did I get my eyes wrong again? I’m always doing that. Which side is it tonight?”
“No, no, they’re fine, in fact it all looks . . . well, smashing actually.”
“Why, Derrick.”
“I mean, do you do it yourself? or does someone else?”
“You must have heard of Zsuzsa, no? well, I spent most of this afternoon in her salon, she’s really the only one to see when—you know how you get those little premonitions that you’re about to meet someone it won’t be lost on—”
“Good—that’s the smile I want, exactly, now hold it just like that and don’t be alarmed, but we are not, at the moment, unobserved.”
“Where?”
“Just passing by . . . there.”
“Ah.”
“They’ve been back and forth now more than once—unless I’m mistaken, they’re out of Misha and Grisha’s atelier. You have got in with a colorful crowd, Latewood. Now . . . in a moment they’ll turn and start back, by which point I’d better have my hand on your leg—will that be any sort of problem for you?”
“Well . . . which leg were you thinking of, Derrick?”
“Yes . . . here they are again.”
“Hmm . . .”
“Presently, and as naturally as possible, we shall get up and leave together, allowing them to follow us. Do you know the Hotel Neue Mutzenbacher, near the Imperial Stables?”
“Know of it. Rather a museum of bad taste, wouldn’t dream of going in there, personally.”
“Really. Always seemed a jolly enough place to me.”
“‘Always,’ Derrick? You are . . . an habitué of . . . of the Mutzi, then?”
“Its décor is more than made up for by its most useful A.M.E., or Alternate Means of Egress, that’s if you don’t mind some sewage.”
“One develops a tolerance . . . though look here, if your own lot use it, mightn’t it be known to old M. and G. as well?”
“Still, they’d have to wait outside for a bit, wouldn’t they, to make sure, before they went crashing in.”
“Make sure of—”
“My own authenticity in this.”
“And that would take how long?”
“Dunno. Long enough, one hopes. How long do your rendezvous last on average, Cyprian?”
“Hours and hours sometimes. Depending on how infatuated he is, of course.”
“Yes though as many must become quickly bored— ah jolly good and there’s the Stiftskaserne, not much farther now. . . .”
THE FIAKER TOOK THEM southward toward the reddened fraction of moon, lights of the city converging behind them, the driver humming to himself appropriate Fiakerlieder but refraining from bursting into full song.
“This isn’t the way to the station.”
“To the Süd-Bahnhof, it is.”
“But that’s for Trieste, not for home. Derrick? I don’t want to go to Trieste . . . I was supposed to be going quite the other direction, wasn’t I, toward Ostend, toward . . .” He could not quite repeat “home.”
“With luck they will also assume we want the Ostend Express—so perhaps they will have pulled their people over to the Staatsbahn. Classic misdirectional exercise, sit back, not to worry, eventually we’ll have you headed the right way. If that’s what you really want. Here are your tickets, transit documents, letter of credit, spot of the ready—”
“A thousand Kreuzer? That isn’t even ten quid.”
“Dear, dear. What was your customary fee again?”
Cyprian stared back boldly. “The least one can get by on in Vienna is thirty K. per day.”
“Out where you’ll be, I imagine you’ll find life less expensive. As to ‘home’”—passing electric lamplight flaring at intervals, like a prison searchlight, off his eyeglass-lenses—“you might take some time to consider how congruent with ‘England’ that word can be for you these days. Curiously, it may actually be safer for you in Trieste . . . or even further east.”
His eyes were difficult to make out, but from the set of his shoulders and the modulations of his lips, Cyprian could gather some of what he wasn’t saying. After a moment’s psychorectal entertainment, “Among the Turks, I suppose you mean.”
“Almost a charming reflex, Latewood, were it not so predictable among your lot. Yes—to retreat, not for the first time, from the dangerous polyphonies I must deal with daily to these single-note brothel tunes—it’s the Turks I mean, with all their fabled equipment and so forth. Exactly.”
“Hmm.” Cyprian gazed at the shadow-steeped operative. “You’re entangled, aren’t you, or for the moment anyhow. It’s all right, I’m not surprised, you are attractive in a battered sort of way.”
“Indeed. It’s why all the sodomitic case-files end up on my desk. Oh, but”— shaking his head vigorously, as if out of a trance—“was I complaining again? Frightfully sorry, sometimes it just comes as you’d say spurting out like that—”
THE RUSSIANS PRESENTED little problem. “You’ve your choice of simple or qualified Kuppelei, Misha—”
“I’m Grisha.”
“Whatever, it’s the only choice you’ll be offered. Six months or five years. If you insist on being difficult, we will produce documents showing that poor little Cyprian was your legal ward at the time you led him, under false pretenses, into an immoral life—and that can fetch you up to five years in a Habsburg prison, most likely confined in a cell Belgian style, a pound and a half of bread a day, meat and soup on occasion I’m told, better than being an average free man in your native Russia, yet presenting perhaps a bleak lookout for an epicure of the rank you have come to occupy. . . .”
At some point it was decided that Cyprian could safely be told that his whereabouts and medium-term plans, almost before they’d been worked out in any detail, had all but routinely been passed on to the Colonel, who, Cyprian had learned, by now specialized in south Slavic politics as well as sex-practices, which were widely believed to include irregularities of gender.
“Croatia-Slavonia! But it’s his—”
“Yes?”
“His garden of delights. Sooner or later he’s apt to visit, and then he’ll kill me, or one of those Russians will, oh thanks Theign, just ever so much.”
“I shouldn’t worry about them. You’re not on their list anymore.”
“Since when? And why not?”
“Disappointed? Since your Colonel was arrested”—elaborately lifting out and consulting a Swiss calendar watch in gunmetal and black porcelain— “actually, on Thursday last. I say, did we forget to tell you? ever so sorry. No, he’s no longer in play. That chapter is over. We have moved on. Though in the business, it is never too fanciful to envision a reunion someday, especially as it seems he may, one must admit inexplicably, have taken a fancy to you.”
“Not even if England expects it, Theign.”
“Oh,” shrugging, “yes I am given to understand that a spot of chastisement might come into it, fairly pro forma, but little beyond that—”
“Not these people, for God’s sake, even the silliest cretin on their list knows that if you turn, you die. Chastisement. What bloody remote planet is it you’re from again?”
“We know ‘these people,’ Latewood.”
Cyprian grew thoughtful. “All important news, undoubtedly, but why tell me? Why not keep me ignorant and afraid, as usual?”
“Say that we were beginning to trust you.”
“He chortles. Bitterly.”
“Say it was even something you needed to know—”
“—for what you’re about to ask me to do.”
IN TRIESTE he could at least imagine himself growing to some sort of manhood, perhaps even into an Old Upper Adriatic Hand—a dangerous reverie, for he had soon grown fairly sensible of how little he had to say in the matter of where he was to be posted from then on. Yet what end to the drama could he’ve expected? Foreign Section were using him as unquestionably as any of his former clients
had. The same now say this, now wear this, do this. If it was his destiny, all along, to be an object of someone’s administration, why not just join the Navy, some navy, and be done with it?
Derrick Theign, whose code name out here was “Good Shepherd,” managed to come out every few months or so, always an evening arrival and the same suite at the Métropole, held for him since the days when it was also itself known as the Buon Pastore—never for more than a night, and then he’d be off again, to Semlin, over to Zagreb usually, and points east whose names were never spoken aloud, less out of caution than fear. The meetings with Cyprian were never about anything of moment, unless one included certain charged silences which often would stretch uncomfortably as they sat drinking together among the red plush and ormolu. Cyprian began to wonder if Theign weren’t actually finding excuses to repeat this cycle of arriving, falling silent, getting what he must imagine as some grip on himself, packing up abruptly the next day, and leaving. It was an index of how far Cyprian’s insouciance had lapsed that he never thought of simply asking his field supervisor what was afoot. When the matter of Venice arose, he was taken by surprise.
“Venice.”
“Not an unreasonable place for a listening post. It has occupied a fateful geopolitical cusp ever since it lay at the ancient intersection of Western and Eastern empires—as it still does in our day, though the empires have mutated around it, the Prophet’s own still waiting their terrible moment, the protection of Christ’s own falling now to Vienna and St. Petersburg, and the newer empires far less pertinent to God, Prussia worshipping little beyond military splendor, and Britain its own mythic reflection, readjusted day to day in mirrors of faraway conquest.”
“Was I asking?”
They were soon cozily, all but domestically, established in a pensione in Santa Croce, within easy dash of the train station and the Mestre bridge, gathered at the moment at a kitchen table with a bottle of grappa and a tin of peculiar biscuits. Some sort of strange sheep’s-milk cheese from Crotona. Steam-whistles sounded outside.
Cyprian had learned that Theign held a commission in the Navy as a senior lieutenant, reporting to the Naval Intelligence Department at the Admiralty. His remit here in Venice, at least officially, was to look into a reported theft of secret engineering drawings from inside the menacing walls of the Arsenale itself—so catastrophically had the Italian maritime fate been compromised that he was finding it next to impossible even to learn what the drawings were of. “I can’t imagine what they’re all so mysterious about. Cruisers, frigates, all the usual, submarines and submarine destroyers, torpedoes, torpedo boats, torpedo-boat chasers, miniature submarines that can be carried inside battleships and launched from the bow as if they themselves were torpedoes.”
“I thought all that undersea business went on over in Spezia, at the San Bartolomeo works,” Cyprian said.
“Quite the swot,” Theign glared. It was a sore point. Time and again he had been referred to offices at La Spezia set up for the express purpose of misleading foreigners, especially ones like Theign, who might as well have worn sandwich-boards fore and aft reading SPY. “The boats everyone knows about,” he muttered, “Glauco class and its successors, of course. But these others are somewhat specialized. . . .”
We of the futurity know that the unit in question was the sinister Siluro Dirigibile a Lenta Corsa or Low-Speed Steerable Torpedo. “What makes it particularly malevolent,” Theign confided, perhaps indiscreet with pride when at last, after exceptional effort, he did manage to acquire the elusive gen, “is that it does not require of its crew any bravery at all, only that facility for creeping about which one associates with the Italian character.”
“Oh that’s just such a big myth,” Cyprian looking for an argument today, it seemed. “They are as direct as children.”
“Indeed. Most of the children of your acquaintance being, at best, corrupted, how ‘direct’ is that, exactly?”
“Get about more and you’ll see.”
“One thing that didn’t occur to the Royal Italian Navy,” Theign continued, “was observation from overhead. We know the Russians have had a program— Voznab, or vozdushnyi nablyudenie, aerial surveillance—for years, their aerostats and airships have been equipped with some advanced sort of masking device that mimics open sky, so that one often can’t see them even when one knows they’re up there. They keep forward bases in Serbia, which puts them less than an hour from here, perhaps two from Spezia. Some of the photographic plates actually show up on the Rialto from time to time.”
ONE DAY THEIGN CAME IN looking preoccupied. “Your friends Misha and Grisha have gone to ground. . . .”
“And might I have any idea where. Actually no, not a clue, so sorry. . . .”
“Let’s think for a moment shall we. Beginning with Vienna—would they have stayed on there?”
“Yes—and also, as you’d imagine, no. Misha loved the place, Grisha hated it. If they had a kick-up, one of them could easily have gotten on a train.”
“Grisha, you mean.”
“Misha was hardly a stranger to the joys of the unpremeditated gesture. . . . But I say Derrick, you people have been watching the trains, haven’t you?”
“Except for one small though bothersome gap in our . . . ehrm, earlier information.”
“Oh dear.”
“Cyprian, they may want you for a bit back at the Metternichgasse.”
Through his eyelashes Cyprian bestowed a sidewise gaze known to produce reflexes of desire up to and including, on at least one admittedly singular occasion in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leics, a proposal of marriage. “And where do you want me, Derrick?”
It proved at last to be the one silly question that Derrick Theign would find insupportable. What he intended then as a humorous tap on the cheek became first, unmistakably, a caress, and then, provoked by Cyprian’s venturesome laughter, a rather sharp slap. The next either of them knew, Theign had taken him painfully by his hair and they were kissing, not at all the way Englishmen would be expected to—if they must—but like foreigners, heedlessly. Enough saliva to soak into Cyprian’s shirt collar. Erect penises all round. The spell of Venice in those days, it was said.
“I wouldn’t have preferred this scenario,” Theign muttered not long after, while tending to various abrasions.
“Too late for that now, isn’t it?”
“It does put you in rather a different cubbyhole.”
Cyprian already skeptical, “Oh of course I wouldn’t be the only one.”
“One does try to avoid it, you see, whenever possible.”
“‘It.’ Oh, Derrick . . .” All but tearful.
“Don’t go sodomitical on me now, when you’ll be needing your wits about you, if that’s not asking too much.”
AS THE PETALS of unreflective desire, those narcotic days on the Lagoon, began to curl up, lose aroma, and drop one by one to the unadorned tabletop of daily business, Theign half-invented a local operative, “Zanni,” to resolve whose fictional crises he then found brief but always welcome opportunities to get out of the house, even if it must be into the swarming calli of Venice. Somehow immersion in the Italian mobility comforted him, clarified his mind like a well-timed Partagas. His Naval Intelligence job, in this city of masks, actually concealed a deeper project. “Zanni” was one of many code names for his contact with a small bicycle factory over on the Terraferma that had just gone into designing and building motorcycles. When forces did begin at last in Europe to move in appreciable numbers, there would have to be a way to maintain the flow of information. Telegraph and cable lines could be cut. Wireless was too vulnerable to Ætheric influences. The only secure method, it seemed to Theign, was a small international crew of motorcyclists, fast and nimble enough to stay ahead of the game. “They’ll be designated R.U.S.H., that’s Rapid Unit for Shadowing and Harassment.”
“‘Shadowing.’” Cyprian, somewhat embarrassed, had not heard the term before.
“Following a subject, keeping as close as his
own shadow,” Theign explained.
“Obliged almost to be someone’s . . . projection.”
“If you like.”
“So close in fact as to begin to lose oneself. . . .”
“Just what you people fancy isn’t it, surrender of the ego sort of thing.”
“Derrick, I can’t even ride a horse.”
“Don’t you understand that we’re trying to save your life? This way, whatever happens, wherever you’re assigned, you’ll be only hours from neutral ground.”
“Given fuel enough, who isn’t?”
“Depots are in place. You’ll have maps. What do you imagine it is I do out here?”
“Wouldn’t think of prying—though one has of course noticed, when you’re about, the naphthal fragrance—have you considered wearing something a bit less odor-retentive than Scottish tweed? for instance this new Italian ‘sharkskin,’ from which everything slips away smoothly as a satin gown.”
“I keep forgetting the reason I don’t have you transferred—it’s the fashion advice! Of course! Well. You’ll be interested in this—here’s one of the night-uniforms, prototype model, more leather here than your sort may be used to, but it does keep the wind out.”
“Hmm . . . I do rather fancy these metal studs—each with a purpose of its own I’m sure—though don’t they seem rather . . . conspicuous?”
“You’ll be moving too fast for it to matter.”
“All right if I just . . . slip into . . .”
“Not at all and mind you, these are only the fatigues, wait till you see the dress uniform.”
“Derrick, you do like me a little, I think. . . .”
Later that evening Theign summoned Cyprian into his office. “See here, Latewood, in all the time we’ve known each other, we’ve never yet had a serious talk about death.”
“Probably a good reason for that,” Cyprian looking around the room nervously.
“I assume it’s the usual sodomite sensibility?”
“How’s that?”
“All you people with your repertoire of avoidance techniques—denying the passage of time, seeking out ever-younger company, constructing your little airtight environments stuffed with art undying . . . there isn’t one of you with anything real to say on the subject. Yet in our business it’s everywhere. We must tithe a certain number of lives yearly to the goddess Kali in return for a European history more or less free of violence and safe for investment, and very few are the wiser. Certainly not the homo brigade.”
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