Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Sure. Where’d your partner get to?”

  “Vlado must have seen them before I did.”

  Rocco came over. “Austriaci. They must be looking for Pino and me.”

  “It’s me and Vlado,” she said.

  “We can offer you a lift,” Pino purred, as usual failing to disguise his lecherous intentions. “Il Squalaccio will sleep four comfortably.”

  Reef picked up his elephant gun and headed outside. “I’ll cover you folks. Make a run for it when you can.” On the beach he found an abandoned bathing-machine and set up a position, took a wood match, held it in the rain long enough to soften the head of it, then smeared the wet phosphorus over the sights front and rear till they were glowing enough to see.

  Presently Yashmeen was crouching next to him, hatless, breathing deliberately, and rounds had begun to hum about the vicinity. Reef pulled her close, steadied the rifle on her shoulder, and fired off a couple of his own. Back at the giant hotel, they could see the darkly-clad Austrians hit the wet sand.

  The wind took the sounds of the gunfight over the dark beaches as far as Malamocco. Survivors of a winter in the open, despised, evicted, willingly lost, shivered in pockets of rude shelter gathered around driftwood fires and wondered aloud what it might be.

  The knot of gunmen moved past, making for the jetty, where a low, dark mass waited, visible mostly from the wreathing of motor exhaust which surrounded it. “Oh,” she groaned, and Reef could feel her muscles growing tight. She had seen Vlado among them, bleeding, taken, and knew she must not call out to him.

  “Where’s your boat?” She was silent and did not move. “Miss Halfcourt.” She nodded, arose as the snarl and sputter and the shriek of bad bearings rose to a maximum and then slowly withdrew.

  She and Vlado had run aground on the Lagoon side. The little vessel was not quite dismasted, but Reef saw no way for them to get across to Venice in it, short of rowing.

  “Would you like a tow?” Rocco and Pino and Il Squalaccio.

  Out on the water, squinting through the rain for the lights of San Marco, Reef said, “Here I thought I was livin the high life. Your friends back there—did I hear ‘Austrians’?”

  “Likely an Englishman too, named Theign.”

  “I don’t keep good track of the politics, but last I heard, now, England and Austria, ain’t that different sides?”

  “It’s not what you’d call really official.”

  “And they’re after you? are you not official either?”

  She laughed, or maybe that’s not what it was. “I think they were after Vlado.” Her hair was all snarled, her frock was torn. She bore distant resemblance to a lady in need of protection, but Reef was cautious.

  “Where you been stayin?”

  “Trieste. Not sure I should go there anymore.”

  By the time they reached Venice the storm had blown on over the terraferma and the moon was out in high spooky shine. They moved cautiously into the skein of little canals, the engine throttled back to a muffled grumble, everything in the night queerly lit, just about to ascend into some glow less bearable. At last they stepped onto a narrow fondamenta. “We’ll hide this for you in a little squero we use,” Rocco said. “It will be safe.”

  “Buy you boys a gin fizz next time I see you,” Reef touching his hat.

  “If God wishes,” said Pino. The midget submarine moved off, the boat in tow at a lopsided angle.

  They climbed a couple flights of stairs, first marble, then wood. Reef let them in to a room full of moonlight.

  “Your place?”

  “Some boys from down the Amalfi coast, we’ve done business together, they keep it handy for whoever. Good for a couple-three days maybe.”

  He found a bottle of grappa, but she waved it away and collapsed on the divan, allowing herself only one utterance of Vlado’s name, her whisper as close to defeated as anyone, including herself, had heard it.

  “He could have got away in all that confusion—tell you what, I’ll go out, ask around a little. There’s a bathtub in there, soap and so forth, you take her easy, I’ll be back soon.”

  “This needn’t be—”

  “It ain’t. Figure like that I’m trying to accommodate a friend of my brother’s is all.”

  On the way back down the stairs he allowed himself the couple minutes of descent to calculate that Kit was likely out someplace on a camel right now fighting off half an army of screaming Chinese and probably had more on his mind than what this very strange young lady might be up to. Which didn’t excuse how Reef had turned his back and walked away. Just a shitheel way of proceeding, and he couldn’t even remember why anymore.

  He found an all-night bar off the Campo Santa Margherita that had always been good for up-to-the-minute gossip till the Rialto cranked back up to speed in the morning, stood drinks, kept his ears open, once in a while asking a stupid-cowboy question or two. Everybody had heard about the shootout over on the Lido, and agreed that the only thing preventing war with Austria was that no Italians had been directly involved. The mavrovlaco was well known and a sort of outlaw hero in these parts, being, like his people for generations before him, an enemy of Austria and her ambitions in the Adriatic. Every time he left his mountain stronghold, they tried to follow and capture him, and this time the sea had betrayed him, for no one human ever would.

  Reef got back to find Yashmeen fallen asleep on the divan, having spread her wet hair out behind her on a towel to dry. The celebrated Venetian moonlight came in the window, everything looked sketched in chalk. He stood over by the window with his back to the considerably haunted city and smoked and watched her sleep.

  She was wearing a white batiste shift of some kind, transparent to moonlight, and in her sleep it had drifted above her hips. One hand rested between her legs, which were slightly apart. Reef somehow found himself with this erection.

  Fine thing. On the run, her beau in some very deep trouble indeed, and what dishonorable thoughts was he entertaining here? She chose that moment to shift in her sleep, turning so that he was now gazing at her, you’d say, admirable ass, and though what he ought to be doing now was taking a walk over to that Piazza or something, instead, true to his idiot nature, he’d un-buttoned his trousers and begun stroking his penis, unable not to gaze at the pale buttocks and dark cleft, the black spill of hair and naked neck, just a step or two away. As he was hitting the run-up to his grand finale, she rolled over and regarded him with shining, enormous eyes, which had been open for some time it seemed, her hands pretty much occupied the same way as his. He let go of his penis long enough to shrug, smile and turn his glistening palms up and outward, in an appeal, charming so he’d been told, for forbearance.

  “Are you committed to this disgusting activity,” she inquired, her attempt at a Girtonian drawl undone by a tremor she could not suppress, “or might the vagina hold some interest for you, beyond the merely notional?”

  Before he understood this was not a request for information, he had taken the two or three paces that mattered and was quickly on the divan and inside her, and not a moment too soon, as it turned out. She fastened her teeth, hard and unapologetically, between his neck and shoulder and let out thus muffled a long cry that was at least half a growl. He grabbed a handful of her hair, which he’d been wanting to do since he came in the room, brought her face around to his, and surprising himself, for he was not that much of a kisser, kissed Yashmeen until she started biting his lips and tongue and then maybe half a minute more, just to make sure of what was going on.

  She pulled away long enough to hiss, “You unprincipled swine,” and they were kissing again.

  He was expecting reproaches, but she was more interested in his Egyptian cigarettes. He located his match-safe and lit one for her. After a minute she said, “Did you find out anything?”

  “Not much.”

  “You’d better tell me. I am not some frail American wildflower.”

  “They took him inside the Arsenale.”

  S
he nodded gravely, and in the lamplight he could see the color leaving her face.

  “We could get in,” he said.

  “Oh? Then what? be shot at again.” When he didn’t answer, “And what else?”

  He flicked ash into his trouser cuff. “How serious are you about the way you look right now?”

  She peered into the cheval-glass. “You don’t approve? We have it off once, and you’re my fashion adviser?”

  He blew a smoke ring, on the chance it would get her attention. It rotated, expanded slowly into the moonlight, becoming a keen ghost-white. “Those were Mannlichers tonight over on that Lido, so I calculate them Austrian amigos of yours were not just out for a day of trapshootin. They were surely lookin for your friend Vlado, but if they also have a description on you now—”

  She took a lock of her hair and examined it in the mirror. “Then I shall need a disguise, and some of this will have to go.” She waited, as if for him to reply. “Well. When a girl needs a marcel wave in a hurry, there’s only one man in this town to see.” Reef had already fallen into snoring oblivion.

  By the time she got down to his insufferably fashionable corner of San Marco, just behind the Bauer-Grünwald, Signor Fabrizio was just opening for business.

  “And our Ciprianuccio, he is safe and well?”

  “Traveling on business,” she said, not it seemed calmly enough to keep the parruchiere from crossing himself fretfully. His mood did not improve when he learned what she wanted. Of the many men and women who had worshipped her hair, Fabrizio was the extremist with the zealous roll to his eyeballs that one tried not to arouse unnecessarily.

  “I can’t cut it off. Macchè, Yashmeen. How could I cut it off?”

  “But it will belong to you, then. You can do whatever you want with it.”

  “If you put it that way . . .”

  She followed his gaze. They were now both looking at his penis. “No. You wouldn’t.”

  He shrugged.

  “It gets worse. I want to be blonde. Dark blonde at least. A Cadorina.”

  “Mother of God.”

  “And if anyone can do this thing . . .”

  The penis pleasantry was only Fabrizio’s little joke, of course. Yashmeen’s hair was to have a peculiar and not altogether dishonorable fate. It was to be bleached gently, re-curled, and fashioned into an elaborate wig in the eighteenth-century Venetian style, appropriate for a Carnevale costume, as part of which in fact it was to appear in the near future, at a fateful masked ball.

  WHEN THE CAMPANILE in the Piazza San Marco collapsed, certain politically sensitive Venetian souls felt a strange relocation of power. Somehow, they believed, the campanile of San Francesco della Vigna, a little north of the Arsenale, where the angel visited St. Mark on the turbulent night recorded by Tintoretto, a close double of the one that fell, had come to replace it as a focus of power, as if by a sort of coup in which the Arsenale, and the bleak certainties of military science, had replaced the Palazzo Ducale and its less confident human struggles toward republican virtue.

  Like the cemetery island of San Michele visible across the water, the Arsenale also presented to the civic view a Mystery surrounded by a wall, high pale brickwork, blank except here and there for a decorative iron tension-rod retainer or a tile rainspout, and topped by crenellations in a two-bladed halberd shape. All around the forbidden perimeter, the people of Castello went on with day-to-day lives, dogs shit on the paving-stones, church bells were heard, vaporetti put in and departed, pedestrians walked in the shadow of the Mystery as if it were not there, as if it were there but could not be seen. The ancient maps showed that what was visible from the entrances amounted only to a fraction of the entire works. To those forbidden to enter, the maps were like visions of prophets, in a sort of code, outward and visible notation for what lay within.

  Vlado Clissan, aware of a region of silence behind him, risked a glance back at the walls of the Arsenale, obstructing the salt wind, ascending, blank and functional, to take up half the sky. A veil of masonry. Mysteries there. He knew that before long a door, somewhere in the wall, usually kept invisible, would open. He would pass with his captors inside, and the next world would commence.

  In a long-abandoned corner of one of the ancient foundries he had had fitted out as an office, Derrick Theign was sitting on a folding chair, eyes quiescent and pale in a white face he was able somehow to relax into a mask never contemplated in Venice, which everyone, and particularly those in Vlado’s position, ought nonetheless to recognize. It had been known to frighten subjects into blurting information they didn’t actually have, confessing to acts they had never thought of committing.

  “Your people are trading in naval secrets. Uskok piracy brought up to date, I suppose—no point in seizing physical ships, when one can traffic in their souls.”

  Vlado laughed. “If I were a pirate, I would prefer a physical ship carrying a physical cargo worth physical money. And I would get to deal with a better class of middleman.”

  Theign might have been hoping for a more intellectual discussion, though it remained a given that, in the process now under way, a moment would arrive. Chats like this, delaying things, giving the subject any reason to hope, however transitory, would provide a much more effective blow to the spirit when the Webley finally did make its appearance—that drop into stillness useful to executioners, a paralysis of Will, or whatever it is analogous to Will that kept these people so perversely resisting to the end.

  “I saw you with someone, didn’t I, over on the Lido? Only a glimpse in all the confusion, but she seemed quite appealing. Actually.”

  “To you?” Careful not to seem too puzzled and provoke anything too soon.

  Theign shrugged. “More to the point, how appealing to you? And how deeply of your persuasion? Or would she’ve been there more in a decorative role?”

  “Are you asking, what would I consider trading her for?”

  “Of course that does happen now and then. But I did not wish to insult either of you.”

  “I don’t know where she is. Even if I did, she’d be of little use. . . .”

  Theign watched Vlado’s face until the unpleasant thought had fully surfaced there, then nodded, one grown man to another. “Right. Unless our plans for both of you were the same. In which case, if you told me, it wouldn’t matter so much.”

  “Where she is.”

  “That’s if you knew, of course.”

  This was not the same as being in a tavern where an enemy puts a pistol in your face and says, “Make your arrangements with God, for you are about to be a dead man.” In a tavern, always, somewhere, close enough to hand, there would be a second pistol, a third, a chance. In this sober and unsociable vacancy, no such hope was evident. Any bet made in here would be for the highest possible stakes.

  LATER, at Cimiez, with the northeast wind driving the seasonal visitors indoors, when Yashmeen began to hear reports of a shootout near the Arsenale, between what might’ve been Austrian mercenaries and what might’ve been Dalmatian revolutionists, she put her faith, like a good Emotional Anarchist, in the Law of Deterministic Insufficiency.

  “What’s that?” said Reef.

  “Like a card comes up that you could never have predicted.”

  “Oh but hell darlin, if you’ve been counting ’em careful enough—”

  “That may be true for only fifty-two cards. But when the deck is orders of magnitude larger, perhaps approaching infinity, other possibilities begin to emerge. . . .” Her own way of saying, Vlado is immortal. Able to take care of himself, impossible to worry about. . . .

  Reef studied her, backing into a baffled smile he’d found more and more occupying his face. At first when she talked like this, he had put it down to some kind of belief without proof—religious, or superstitious anyway. But then wheels all up and down the Riviera, at Nice, Cimiez, Monte Carlo, Mentone, through the winter season and into the spring, like village gossips, had begun to chatter a different story. Pockets began to go ou
t at the seams from all the winnings being stuffed into them.

  The system had its origins in a ride she’d taken with Lorelei, Noellyn, and Faun on the Earl’s Court Wheel, centuries ago in her girlhood. “Thirty-seven numbers on the wheel,” she instructed him. “The zero belongs to the house. Of the other thirty-six, twelve—if you include one and two—are primes. Going clockwise, taking three numbers at a time, in each set of three you will find exactly one prime.”

  “So they’re spread out pretty even.”

  “But the wheel makes more than one revolution. The numbers repeat again and again, like a very fast clock with thirty-seven hours. We say thirty-seven is the ‘modulus’ of the wheel, as twelve is the modulus of an ordinary clock. So the number that a roulette ball comes to rest at is actually that number ‘modulo thirty-seven’—the remainder, after dividing by thirty-seven, of the total of moving compartments the ball has had a chance to fall into.

  “Now, by Wilson’s theorem, the product (p — 1) factorial, when taken modulo any prime p, is always equal to minus one. On the roulette wheel, p — 1 is thirty-six, and thirty-six factorial also happens to be the number of all possible permutations of thirty-six numbers. It is thus obvious from the foregoing that—”

  She was interrupted by the thud of Reef’s head on the table, where it remained.

  “I don’t think he’s been following this,” she muttered. But continued to whisper the lesson to him, as if choosing to believe he had only fallen into a light hypnosis. Apparently it worked, because in the coming days he began to win at roulette far outside the expectations of chance. If she continued to whisper further educational advice at appropriate moments, neither would discuss the matter.

  Why Reef should be finding her this irresistible, when the rule as he had come to learn it was that desire always fades, was not a question he lost much recreational time over. Her irresistibility filled the day, leaving little time for thought. No sooner would one of them be over the doorsill than she was lifting her skirts, or reaching for his penis, or simply lying back, eyes steely and wet, holding his gaze in a grip he knew no way out of, while she caressed herself, until, without needing to decide, he came to her. Always him to her, he noted to himself, that was the pattern, best to keep that in mind.