At the moment they were out in the Lagoon among the Lost Lands, Scarsdale underwater and Foley up in a little steam caorlina fitted for diving. The millionaire, rigged out in rubber hoses and brass helmet, was down inspecting a mural, preserved for centuries beneath the waves by a varnishing technique now lost to history, attributed (dubiously) to Marco Zoppo, and known informally as The Sack of Rome. Seen through the brilliant noontide illumination, approached with the dreamy smoothness of a marine predator, the depiction seemed almost three-dimensional, as with Mantegna at his most persuasive. It was of course not just Rome, it was the World, and the World’s end. Haruspices dressed like Renaissance clergy cowered beneath and shook fists at a sky turbulent with storm, faces agonized through the steam rising from vivid red entrails. Merchants were strung by one foot upside down from the masts of their ships, horses of fleeing and terrified nobility turned their heads calmly on necks supple as serpents to bite their riders. Peasants could be seen urinating on their superiors. Enormous embattled hosts, armor highlighted a millionfold, were struck by a radiance from beyond the scene’s upper edge, from a breach in the night sky, venting light, light with weight, in percussive descent precisely upon each member of all these armies of the known world, the ranks flowing beyond exhaustion of sight, into shadow. The hills of the ancient metropolis steepened and ascended until they were desolate as Alps. Scarsdale was no æsthete, the Cassily Adam rendition of Little Big Horn was fine enough art for him, but he could see right away without the help of hired expertise that this was what you’d call a true masterpiece, and he’d be very surprised indeed if somebody hadn’t already sold reproductions of it to some Italian beer company to use in local saloons over here.
Up above in the boat, beneath a Stetson long in service, in the shade of whose brim his face could not be quickly read, Foley supervised the Italians working the air pump. Through the blue-green water he could see the gleam off the helmets and breastplates of the divers. Now and then, fitfully, his hands would begin to approach the nozzles of the plenum chamber from which the air-supply hoses led below. Before touching the apparatus, however, the hands were taken back, often directly into Foley’s pockets, where they remained for a time before beginning their next stealthy approach. Foley did not seem to notice that this was happening, and if questioned about it would probably have expressed genuine puzzlement.
He also did not notice that he was being observed from the shore by the Traverse brothers through Reef’s new pair of twenty-four-line marine glasses finished in claret-colored Morocco, a gift from ’Pert Chirpingdon-Groin. They had been putting in an hour or two a day tracking Scarsdale around town, just to see if there was going to be any such thing as a clear shot.
In a distressed light over the Grand Canal, autumnal and hazy, the last of the summer tourists were drifting away, rents had become cheaper, and Reef and Kit had found a room in Cannareggio, where everybody seemed to be poor. Bead-stringers sat in the little open spaces and uncheerful lucciole appeared at dusk. Squadri of young rio-rats burst out of alleyways screaming “Soldi, soldi!” The brothers walked around the canalsides all night, up and across and down the little bridges, among the fluent breezes of the nocturnal city, scents of late vegetation, broken bars of song, calls upward to shuttered windows, small unseen liquid gestures now and then out in the misty waterways, the creak of a gondola oar against a forcheta, the glare of the paraffin lamps at the late-night fruit markets reflecting off the shiny skins of melons, pomegranates, grapes and plums. . . .
“So how we going to do the Hottentot on this bird?”
“The what?”
“French—it means assassination.” Reef had guessed that tracking his target and outwitting tycoonical security would not be the only obstacles to getting the deed done. “Got to be sure, Professor—I can count on you in this, can’t I?”
“You keep asking.”
“Since that spiritual confab we had up north there with Pa, seems like that there’s something else on your mind now, and settling this score ain’t it exactly.”
“Reefer, anytime it’s a matter of your back, you know I’m there.”
“Never disputed that. But look here, it’s wartime, ain’t it. Not like Antietam maybe, big armies all out in the light of day that you can see, but the bullets are still flyin, brave men go down, treacherous ones do their work in the night, take their earthly rewards, and then the shitheads live forever.”
“And what is it they’re fighting about again?”
“‘They,’ I wish it was ‘they,’ but it’s not, it’s us. Damn, Kit, you’re in this. Ain’t you?”
“Well Reefer, that sounds like Anarchist talk.”
Reef shifted into what Kit had to assume was a calculated silence. “Worked with a number of that persuasion over the last few years,” he said, finding in a shirt pocket the hard black stub of a local cigar and lighting up. Then, twinkling malevolently, “Guess there can’t be too many of ’em in the mathematics line.”
If Kit had been feeling touchy he might have shot back with something about Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, but decided only to nod at Reef’s turnout. “Nice suit.”
“All right.” Chuckling into a cloud of evil smoke.
They stumbled, exhausted, on into the imminent daybreak in search of strong drink. On the San Polo side of the Rialto bridge they found a bar open and went in.
EARLY ONE MORNING the previous April, Dally Rideout had woken up knowing without being told that the new peas, the word in her thoughts being bisi, were in at the Rialto market. It had seemed like an occasion. She had already forgotten—having nightwalked into the dialect the way we can pass gently from dream out into the less fluid terms of waking—exactly when conversations in the street had turned less opaque, but one day the bobwire was down, and she had been reckoning for a while in etti and soldi and no longer steering campo to campo looking up to uncommiserating walls for names of alleyways and bridges, serenely alert to saline winds and currents and the messages of bells. . . . She looked in mirrors to see what might have happened, but found only the same American mask with the same American eyes looking through—the change must lie elsewhere.
And months later here she was at the same market, early as usual, a nice sharp wind raising a steel-gray nap on the water in the Grand Canal, looking for something to bring back to the kitchen of Ca’ Spongiatosta, where they were finally allowing her to do some cooking, after she had showed Assunta and Patrizia one of Merle’s old soup recipes. Today there were topinambur from Friuli, the Treviso radicchio was in, the verza looked good, and just to make the morning complete, well what do you know, who should come sauntering out of this little dive by the fish market but Mr. Go-away-you’re-too-young-for-shipboard-romance himself, yehp that Kit Traverse all right, same hat, same worried look, same potentially fateful baby blues.
“Well, Eli Yale. Ain’t this peculiar.” Over his shoulder appeared a face you couldn’t miss the family resemblance in, which she figured must belong to the third Traverse brother, the faro dealer.
“Well bless me, Dahlia. Thought you’d be back in the States by now.”
“Oh, I’m never goin back. What happened to you, you get to Germany O.K.?”
“For a while. Right now me and Reef here,” Reef smiling and tipping his hat, “have got some business in town, and then we’re off again.”
Well auguri, ragazzi, and damn if this was about to ruin her day. More of these birds that come flying in, was all—look around, gather in flocks like the pigeons in the Piazza, fly off again. No, as Merle used to say, apiarian by-product of hers. Despite which, “You fellows staying around here?”
After a warning look sideways at Kit, “Just some little pennsilvoney,” Reef insincerely twinkled, “forget just what part of town.”
“Forthcomin as ever I see, family trait, well it’s all been mighty nice and I have to get to work now.” She moved off.
“But say,” Kit began, but she kept moving.
Later the same morning,
walking with Hunter past the Britannia, once known as the Palazzo Zucchelli, damned if there wasn’t Reef Traverse again, accompanied this time by a slender blonde woman in one of those slanted feathery hats, and a beefy individual whose eyes were made more complex than they perhaps were by gray sun-goggles, bustling out of the hotel and heading apparently for a day on the Lagoon.
“Good God—Penhallow, I say, it isn’t you? Well I mean of course it’s you, but dash it all, how can that be, don’t you see! Though I suppose you could be some sort of twin or something—”
“Do stop driveling, Algernon,” advised his companion, “it’s far too early in the day,” though in fact the sfumato had burned off an hour ago.
Reef widened his eyes slightly in Dally’s general direction, which she read as, Don’t let’s get into it just now.
“Hullo, ’Pert,” Hunter taking her hand it seemed emotionally, “lovely to see you, and where else could it’ve been but here?”
“Yes and whatever have you been up to,” Algernon went on, “one moment you’re quite splendidly eighty-seven not out, they offer old Barkie the light, and next day not only you, but the entire side as well, are all”—he shrugged—“gone.” A species of giggle.
In the slightly baffled pause that followed, their owners taking notice of Dally for the first time, eyebrows came into play, fingertips investigated earorifices. Reef, though in full sunlight, had found some way to keep inside his own shadow. The blonde woman put forth her hand and introduced herself as Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin. “And these are—I don’t know, some collection of idiots I’ve fallen in with.”
Briefly taking the hand, “What pleasure, signorina. I am Beppo, Mr. Penhallow’s beesiness associat-eh.”
“You speak most frightfully good English,” the Chirpingdon-Groin woman examining the white kidskin of her glove, a bit puzzled. “And your hands are far too clean for an Italian’s. Who are you, exactly?”
Dally shrugged. “Eleanora Duse, I’m, eh, researching a role. Who are you?”
“Oh, dear,” Ruperta’s face growing even less distinct behind her blue sun-veil.
“Here,” Hunter producing his sketchbook and opening it to a charcoal rendering of Dally, as a girl, lounging pensively beneath a sotopòrtego, “here’s who she is. Exactly.”
They gathered round, as if this were one more Venetian sight they must take in, and all started twittering, except for Reef, who, patting his pockets as if having forgotten something, touched his hatbrim and disappeared back into the hotel. Ruperta seemed to take it personally. “Damned cowboy,” she muttered, “can’t wait till I’m gone.”
“How long are you in town?” Hunter more anxious than Dally had seen him lately.
Ruperta rearranged her scowl and began to recite a complicated itinerary.
“If you’re free tonight, then,” Hunter suggested, “we might meet at Florian’s.”
Dally congratulated herself for not smirking—she knew it was a place Hunter had ordinarily little patience with, though she had found its tables and chairs a productive field for scavenging cigarettes, coins, uneaten bread, not to mention on lucky days a forgotten billfold or camera, walking-stick, qualsiasi, that could be turned for a few francs. And that evening, sure enough, long after the King’s Band had left off playing, there they were, together out in front of Florian’s, Hunter’s eyes exclusively engaged with those of the Englishwoman. Romantic Venice. Dally snorted and lit up half an Egyptian cigarette. Next evening Hunter was out with his tack as usual, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, painting through the night, unapproached by any of yesterday’s party, seeming no more melancholy than usual. Whatever this cookie might be to him, Dally was sure not about to put her nose in.
AT FIRST she had wondered briefly at the readiness with which the Principessa Spongiatosta had taken her in, attributing it to some kind of a history between her and Hunter. After a while she wasn’t so sure. She had pretty much moved into Ca’ Spongiatosta by now, the life of the fondamente not so easygoing these days, better left to younger rio-rats. . . . “But just ’cause you’re off the pavement,” she was soon reminding herself, “don’t mean you’re any safer.”
The Principessa’s daily life was an incomprehensible plexus of secrets, lovers male and female, young and old, a relation not so much to the Prince as to his absence, though she had been known to scowl at and occasionally curse any who by so much as a gesture might have taken her for only another depraved young wife. The Prince’s absence was more than an unclaimed half of the Principessa’s bed—there was business afoot, sometimes as it seemed far from Venice, and she appeared quite often to be acting as some sort of necessary link, when not actually in his place—closeted for hours in remote shuttered rooms, never talking louder than a murmur with a dapper English individual named Derrick Theign who dropped by at least once a week with a gray morning hat in his hand, leaving his card when the Princess wasn’t in. The camerieri, ordinarily amused at the goings-on here, seem to shy away whenever he came in sight—covered their eyes, spat, crossed themselves. “What thing goes on?” Dally asked, but nobody would say. It did not appear to be romantic, whatever it was. Sometimes Theign showed up when the Prince was away, but more often it seemed to be the Prince—who, like the levante, could blow into town at any season—that Theign was eager to see.
It hadn’t taken Dally long to learn what this Princess could be like, and sometimes she found herself just wanting to give the woman a kick. “Your friend sure knows how to bring on the blues,” she told Hunter.
“For a long time I imagined her quite deep indeed,” said Hunter. “Then I saw that I was mistaking confusion for depth. Like a canvas that gives the illusion of an extra dimension, yet each layer taken by itself is almost transparently shallow. You see what sorts of visitor come by. You see how long she can concentrate on anything. She’s living on borrowed time.”
“Some hothead with a stiletto,” Dally trying to keep from sounding too hopeful.
“Oh, perhaps not. But the risks she takes, not necessarily the romantic sort—well . . .”
“It’s all right, Hunter, I’d rather not know.”
“You’re in no danger over there as long as you keep a sharp lookout.”
And something there did always seem to be lurking, though Dally wasn’t sure what it was. Sometimes the Princess was seen conferring spiritedly with Spongiatosta security details posted about the streets nearby, whose livery bore the ancient family arms, a sponge couchant on a field chequy with flames at the foot. She lingered in secluded alcoves with tidied young women whose skills lay officially in the secretarial line, who never visited the palazzo more than twice, not that Dally was counting, exactly. Who on departing cast back quizzical but not quite sorrowful gazes at the Principessa’s bedroom windows. Hunter remained constant among her other visitors, and if it was in any way to keep an eye on Dally, he was a gentleman and stayed inconspicuous about it.
SOMEPLACE OUT ON the Atlantic between New York and Göttingen, Kit had half come to hope that someday, in some dreamed future, when his silence had grown plausible to Pearl Street, then would have been his moment to return, agent at last for Webb’s vengeful ghost, return to daylit America, its practical affairs, its steadfast denial of night. Where acts such as the one he contemplated were given no name but “Terror,” because the language of that place—he might no longer say “home”—possessed no others. But here was the hour, imminent, in a town he was having trouble even making sense of. Sitting out in the Piazza with a couple hundred others, drinking tiny cups of the bitter burned sludge these folks called coffee, while pigeons sought jointly or severally the pearl gray of the maritime sky, Kit wondered how more or less real Inner Asia was likely to turn out than what he was looking at now. The town was supposed to’ve been built on trade, but the Basilica San Marco was too insanely everything that trade, in its strenuous irrelevance to dream, could never admit. The numbers of commerce were “rational”—ratios of profit to loss, rates of exchange—but among the se
t of real numbers, those that remained in the spaces between—the “irrationals”—outnumbered those simple quotients overwhelmingly. Something like that was going on here—it even showed up in this strange, patternless subset of Venetian address numbers, which had already got him lost more than once. He felt like a person familiar with only real numbers watching a complex variable converge. . . .
“What, you again? Alone with your thoughts, don’t let me interrupt, just out gatherin my lunch.” Her hair like a gong, redirecting his attention.
“Sorry about this morning, Dahlia. Didn’t mean for you to go stomping off that way.”
“Me? I never stomp. Grew out of my cowgirl boots a long time ago.”
“Listen, sit down, I’ll buy you somethin. Actually, here’s Reef, let him buy you somethin.”
She looked around the field of little tables quickly, as if she didn’t want to be recognized. “Does it have to be Quadri?”
“Just headed for the first empty seat.”
“This place has been tainted for fifty years, ever since the Austrians all started comin here, back when they were occupying the city. Nothin in this town’s ever done with. Try Lavena there sometime, coffee’s better.”
“Say, Dahlia, thanks for the D. and D. today there with ’Pert.” Reef, puffing on a Cavour, on the way someplace else, joined them for a minute. “She tends to get a little insecure when they look like you do, and it can go on for weeks.”
“Happy to help. I think.” A silence fell. “Well,” Dally piped after a while, “you boys are up to something illegal, I’ll bet! why, anybody can tell, just looking at you.”
“Oh,” Reef a little nervous it seemed, “we usually are.”
“You’re already sittin at the wrong caffè, which leads an observer, and there’s enough of those, to calculate you’re both strangers in town, maybe even short on resources.”
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