Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “We’re really O.K.,” Reef muttered.

  “I might be able to help some.”

  “Not for this,” Kit said.

  “See, it’s really dangerous,” Reef explained, as if that would be enough to send her away.

  “In which case you probably shouldn’t be calling attention to yourself every time you move, or open your mouth—me, on the other hand, I know how to go around unseen, unheard, more important I know people here, who if they ain’t the exact ones you need, they’ll know people that might be. But please, keep on like this on your own if it’s what you want.”

  Reef started in on his hatbrim, never a good omen. “Tellin you straight out, we don’t have much money to throw around.”

  “I ain’t looking for your money, Mr. Traverse—though I can’t speak for others in this town, ’cause it’s the usual story, once upon a time people used to do favors for free, but not lately.”

  “Not even when it’s in the public interest?” said Kit, getting him another of those cautionary looks from his brother.

  “Illegal, yet in the public interest. My. Now what could that be? Let me think a minute.”

  “Where’d you run into this one,” Reef squinting at them both. “One of your old college ‘flames’?”

  “Ha!” exclaimed Kit and Dally, more or less together.

  “She’s on the square, Reefer.”

  “You already told me.”

  Oh? Not having blushed for a while, Dally figured this was not the moment either. Reef was looking at her carefully. “Miss Rideout, it’s not my practice to force situations onto people.”

  “Especially li’l bitty American girls look like they ain’t got a brain in their head, right?”

  “Oh, now.” Reef put his hat back on and stood. “Got to go run some ’Pert-connected chores, maybe we’ll talk later. Areeferdirtcheap, kiddies.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Rounder Italian, I think.”

  Kit and Dally began to walk, Dally putting her head into a tobacconist’s from time to time to light another cigarette at the shop’s lamp. It was not, presently, their pace that accelerated so much as a certain concentration between them, brought on in no small measure by the city itself. She found them a secluded table in a garden in back of a tiny osteria between the Rialto and Cannareggio. They ate a polenta with squid in squid ink, and a zuppa di peoci that couldn’t be beat. Once she would have thought, Our first “date”—now she was wondering only, what in hell kind of trouble’s this boy got himself into now?

  “Here it is then.” Kit throwing down a glassful of grappa.

  She waited, her eyes wide open.

  “This is what we come here to do. You breathe a word and we’re all dead, right?”

  “Deaf and dumb,” she assured him.

  “I’m gonna tell you what it is. You ready?”

  “Kit—”

  “O.K., you know who Scarsdale Vibe is.”

  “Sure. Carnegie, Morgan, all them princes of capital.”

  “Vibe is the one who . . .” he paused, nodded to himself, “who hired those boys to kill my Pa.”

  She put her hand on his hand and left it there. “Kit, I guessed it all the way back on the boat, but thanks for trustin me with it. Now you and your brother’re fixin to go get Vibe for it, is what this is about, I guess.”

  “So when you offered to help us, you already had some idea.”

  She kept her eyes lowered.

  “Well you can get out of that if you want,” he said in a kind of low voice. “Real easy.” They sat there for a while. She didn’t dare move her hand. It was modern times, and ungloved hands did not touch deliberately unless it meant something.

  As to what that might be, of course . . .

  For his part, Kit had got as far as noticing her eyes, which even allowing for this Venetian light seemed strangely silver-green. Green eyes in a redhead, nothing too unusual in that—but irises set in a ground somehow lambent as unpolished silver, to which all other shades of color were referred, how could that be? Photographs of themselves. And why should he be paying so much attention to her eyes?

  “It gets worse, I’m afraid. Something must have happened back in the States, because now Vibe’s people are after me. Is why I’m not in Germany anymore.”

  “Sure that you’re not just . . .”

  “Crazy? That I wouldn’t mind.”

  “And you two are really . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to say it, because she couldn’t tell how serious any of this was.

  “‘Planning to do the deed,’” Kit suggested.

  “And get out of town ahead of the carabinieri. Where are you headed, if it’s not too forward of a gal to ask?”

  “Reef, ask him. Me, Inner Asia is the plan right now.”

  “Oh sure, just down the road there from Outer Asia. No chance you’d ever be stickin around here for a while, always did have that whole other life, now you’ll be a fugitive from justice and who knows what all besides.”

  She had an idea how miserable she looked, and pulled her hand away. Kit reached for it again. “Listen, don’t think it’s—”

  She smacked his hand and smiled grimly. “Don’t bother with that. You and whoever, your business.”

  “Me and— What’s that mean?”

  A level gaze he couldn’t read. Sunlight came into the little place and abruptly her hair went incandescent. They lingered then in one of those paralyses where anything anybody said would be wrong.

  “Look,” Kit exasperated, “you want my word on it? give you my word. Solemn word. Right back here—same spot exactly, that jake with you? Let me write down the name and address, o’ course a firm date could be a different matter—”

  “Save it.” She wasn’t glaring exactly, but it was no sunny smile either. “Someday maybe you will promise me somethin. And then, look out, mister.”

  Wasn’t as if they’d ever had the time to get creatively lost in this maze of calli, was it, or go out sailing on the Lagoon in some little topo with one-them orange sails, or wander church to church rhapsodizing over the great paintings, let alone pause up on the Iron Bridge at sunset to kiss while lanterned boat traffic passed beneath them and accordions choired their newfound love. None of that Venetian stuff was about to happen, not this damn lifetime.

  What did she want? Wasn’t this just Merle all over again? That alchemy, the magic crystals, the obsessive assaults on the Mysteries of Time, she’d really believed once that she had to get away from that before it drove her as crazy as her Pa, and now, would you just look, here she was getting it back, here was another lunatic, somebody this time leaving her, to go search for an invisible city over the edge of the world. Cazzo, cazzo . . .

  “Forget about him,” advised the Principessa. “Tomorrow night at Palazzo Angulozor there will be a wonderful ball. Come, please. I’ve a hundred gowns just hanging here with nothing to do, and you and I, we are the same size.”

  “I’m too sad,” Dally demurred.

  “Because he is leaving,” sniffed the Principessa, who had heard the story in general but none of the details, though heaven knew that had never kept her from dispensing advice. “Might be gone for a year, maybe more, maybe forever, vero? Like a young soldier, going off to serve. And you think you’ll wait for him.”

  “Do I. Who the hell are you,” Dally flared, “to be making fun of my feelings? You’re the one’s always pissing and moaning about ‘one cannot live without love.’”

  Whatever basis they were on by now allowed for this sort of impertinence. The Principessa shrugged, amused. “That’s what this is?”

  “Maybe not up to your standards, Princess.”

  “And the young man? What are his feelings?”

  “Don’t know and I ain’t about to ask.”

  “Eh! Appunto! It is all a romance tale you have made up.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “And when? While you are waiting, I know a dozen young men, very rich, who would love to mak
e your acquaintance.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come. Indulge me. Let us look at a few things. I am thinking of one old straccio in particular, green ‘meteore,’ perfect with your eyes, trimmed in Venetian guipure, which might just do the trick.”

  THEY WERE ALL out on the roof of the place in Cannareggio. Ruperta had left on the noon train, headed for Marienbad, inconsolably eyeing every fellow traveler in range. Her egotism being so monstrous that she could see no further than her next romantic adventure, she had been a perfect companion for Hunter, who had decided to go along as far as Salzburg. Love in the air? Say, did Dally give a rip?

  “So I’m in on this Hottentot o’ yours?”

  Reef shrugged. “Forty mule, I guess.”

  “What’s that.”

  “French, it means for lack of anything better. There’ll have to be somebody to keep us from making too many wrong turns.”

  “Thanks. That’s it? a cicerone, nothin a little more, I don’t know, physical? I pick pockets and snatch hangers off of tourist ladies. I throw knives with good accuracy up to twenty meters. I’ve fired guns with names and calibers you never heard of.”

  “We were fixin to handle that part of it ourselves, actually.”

  “You don’t see me in a markswoman role here, fine. More in the line of what then, nurse? cook? Wait! what have we here, why it’s one-them cordite elephant guns if I ain’t mistaken.”

  “You ain’t. Rigby Nitro Express, point 450 caliber, shoots a nickel-plated hollow-point.”

  “Which expands on impact,” the girl nodded, “and is sure not your average sporting bullet. Maybe that Vibe oughta change his name to Jumbo. Mind if I—”

  “Please.” Reef handed it over and she made a point of hefting it for balance, opening and closing the breech, taking a stance, sighting in on various bell towers around town. After a while she murmured, “Sweet weapon,” and handed it back.

  “’Pert’s idea of a good-bye gift,” Reef said.

  “She knows about this that you’re fixin to do?”

  “She’s a city girl, she thinks I’ll be usin it for pheasants or somethin.”

  “Trying to kill somebody like Vibe,” it seemed to Dally, “best take your lesson from the famous attempt fifteen years ago on Henry Clay Frick, the Butcher of Homestead, which is never go for a head shot. Aiming for Frick’s head was Brother Berkmann’s big mistake, classic Anarchist mistake of assumin that all heads contain brains you see, when in fact there wa’n’t nothin inside damned Frick’s bean worth wastin a bullet on. People like ’at, you always want to go for the gut. Because of all the fat that’s built up there over the years at the expense of poorer folk. Death may not be too immediate—but in the course of probin around in that mountain of lard lookin for the bullet, a doctor, especially one that treats the upper classes, bein more used to liver ailments and ladies’ discontents, is sure to produce, through pure incompetence, a painful and lingering death.”

  “She’s right,” Reef agreed after a short period of wordless stupor, gazing as at some Indian guru of the violent, “and drygulchin’d be out of the question too, way too many people around, can’t be hittin any of ’em by mistake. A fella’d have to walk right up to old Scarsdale, face-to-face. Is where I guess you’d come in, Kit.”

  “Maybe not,” Kit said.

  “Oh, he stopped your money, hell that’s society-page gossip, not hot lead from ambush.”

  “Breeze in, howdy, Mr. Vibe how you been keepin and what a surprise seeing you here in Venice Italy—sure, Reef, you know what’ll happen.”

  “What’ll happen?”

  “Man wants me out of the way, I’m tellin you.”

  Dally growled in some impatience with all this dawdling. “Listen now, you two do understand don’t you, there’s others lined up waiting for a shot at this buzzard, and you ain’t exactly next.”

  Reef, as if this was news to him, “You don’t say. Why, you mean there’s actually other people hate him as much as we do?”

  “You’re in Anarchist country, buckaroo. Sooner or later over here, they’re bound to run out of royalty to shoot at and start lookin around for more of the riffraff—politicians, captains of industry, so forth. And that’s a list Scarsdale Vibe has been on for some time.”

  “You know any Anarchists?”

  “In town here, plenty.”

  “Reef thinks he’s one,” noted Kit.

  “You really think they might have somethin in the works already?” Reef said.

  “Most of it’s talk. You want to go have a look?”

  They got off at the San Marcuola stop and walked over a couple of bridges and under a sotopòrtego and into alleyways so narrow they had to walk single file till Dally said, “Here.” It was a caffè called Laguna Morte. Inside were Andrea Tancredi and some artist friends, and as it happened the topic under discussion was Scarsdale Vibe, as the latest in a series of American millionaires who had come here with designs against Venetian art.

  “The newspapers like to call it ‘spoils of war,’” declared Tancredi, “as if it is only some metaphorical struggle, with large dollar sums replacing casualty figures . . . but out of everyone’s sight and hearing, the same people carry on a campaign of extermination against art itself.” Even with Kit’s Italian on the sketchy side, he recognized this as passion, and not the usual coffeehouse eyewash.

  “What’s wrong with Americans spending money on art?” objected a piratically bearded youth named Mascaregna, “macché, Tancredi. This town was built on buying and selling. Every one of those Great Italian Paintings sooner or later has had a price tag. The grand Mr. Vibe isn’t stealing anything, he’s paying a price both sides have agreed on.”

  “It’s not the price tag,” Tancredi cried, “it’s what comes after—investment, reselling, killing something born in the living delirium of paint meeting canvas, turning it into a dead object, to be traded, on and on, for whatever the market will bear. A market whose forces are always exerted against creation, in the direction of death.”

  “Cazzo, let them have whatever they can take away,” shrugged his friend Pugliese. “Clear some room on these crumbling old walls for us.”

  “The American’s sins are far greater than art theft, in any case,” Mascaregna said. “We must not forget the vast unmapped city of unprotected souls he has brought to the edge of the abyss. Too many even for God to forgive.”

  “What Mr. Vibe needs,” said Tancredi, “is trouble he cannot pray himself out of.”

  “La macchina infernale,” Dally ventured.

  “Appunto!” Tancredi, known as reluctant to touch anyone, gave her an appreciative squeeze. Kit, noticing this, swung her a look. She let her eyes go as wide as possible and twirled an invisible parasol.

  The boy shook hands shyly with Kit and Reef. He did not, this particular afternoon, seem like one driven to any desperate pass. “This Vibe, eh?”

  It would have been as good an opening as any. The brothers exchanged a look, but somehow let it pass.

  Later they would remember his eyes.

  “HOW SERIOUS you think this kid is?” Reef wanted to know.

  “Lately,” Dally said, “he’s been talking a lot about Bresci, Luccheni, and some other famous Anarchist gunhands, enough to make folks nervous anyway.”

  “This was supposed to be easy,” Reef said. “Just plug the son of a bitch and be done with it. Now all ’f a sudden we’re lookin to hand the job over to somebody else?”

  “Who’s to say,” Kit carefully, “we couldn’t get it done quicker by just standing back, letting the forces of History roll on over him?”

  “That Harvard talk?”

  “Yale,” Kit and Dally said together.

  Reef blinked at them for a minute. “‘Who’s to say’? Well, to begin with . . .”

  THE PRINCIPESSA HAD finally talked Dally into going to the ball that night, and had also let drop the interesting piece of news that one of the guests would be Scarsdale Vibe. Sheltering indoor
s from an unusually insanity-inducing bora, Kit, Reef, and Dally sat playing poker and discussed this development, drinking grappa, Reef filling the air with malodorous smoke from his cheap Italian cigars. Everybody waiting for something, a good hand, a cheerful thought, the carabinieri at the door, beneath a strange heavy feeling of bad news rolling up the rails.

  “Ever seen one of these?”

  “Whoa, where’d that come from?”

  “Torino, Italy.”

  “No I meant—”

  “Simple sleight o’ hand, Venice is a colorful town but there’s too many blind corners. They call this the Lampo, cute, ain’t it? Repeater, fires a Gaulois 8 mm, this li’l finger ring here’s your trigger, middle finger fits right in there”—she demonstrated—“muzzle just peeks out of your fist, push out and the bolt goes back, squeezin your hand again chambers a round—bam.”

  “Well hell, you could go right up to him with this.”

  “Could, I guess.”

  “But you wouldn’t.”

  “Boys . . .”

  “He’s teasin you,” said Kit.

  “Guess I was,” Reef sighed dramatically.

  “Liven up the evening anyway,” Dally supposed.

  “Hey! Maybe you’ll meet some Italian prince, fall in love, at least git outside of some good eats.” Reef, laughing at his brother’s annoyance, started coughing out clouds of cigar smoke.

  “Strangle on ’at thing while you’re at it, why don’t you?”

  “Too bad I never went in for jewel-thief activities, Dahlia, you’d be the perfect accomplice.”

  “Jeez, Kit, your brother is so charming.”

  “He smells good too,” muttered Kit.

  “You go on ahead, Dahlia,” Reef said, “a party’s a party, never turn one down, raise all the hell you want, anything useful comes your way just let us know, we’ll be outside doing some reconnaissance. Somehow there’ll be a way to get him.”

  Outside, citizens were being blown horizontal, hanging on to whatever they could, shoes flown off their feet sailing away out over the stormy Lagoon. Roof tiles were picked away one by one, gondolas bounced booming end over end down the Riva, leaving spalled-off chips of lacquer to eddy behind in tiny black tornadoes, as overhead, shed feathers counter-whirling in a pale silvery turbulence, tutelary Venetian angels sought shelter among untended bells, wind-beaten, signaling now hours canonical only to storm, calling celebrants to invisible masses for the souls of the wrecked and sea-taken, as below the grounded pigeons and waterbirds were fleeing the Lagoon shivering into sotopòrteghi, into courtyards within courtyards, denying sky, pretending citizenship in the labyrinths of earth, gone glitter-eyed and shifty as rats in corners. Venetians pulled on rubber boots and waded through the high water. Visitors, taken by surprise, went teetering along elevated duck-boards, negotiating rights-of-way as they might. Hastily fashioned signs with painted arrows appeared at corners to indicate drier routes to take. Water heaved crazily out in the canals, gunmetal gray, smelling like the sea, some sea somewhere. Piazza San Marco was a great ornamental basin, belonging to the sea, dark as the sky it was reflecting, a ground for oblongs of orange light from the windows of the caffès and shops under the Procuratie, images scattered and re-scattered by the wind.