ONE DAY she remembered the schoolbook Vlado had given her, stuffed into her luggage and forgotten. She began to read in it, a little of it every day, like a devout person with a religious text. She read not in hope but in terror, not in certitude but a terrible broken anxiety over Vlado’s fate. She found she could make out some of the symbols, vector and Quaternion notation she remembered Kit showing her back in Göttingen. It appeared to be a mathematical argument of the classic sort, one even Riemann might have made, except that everywhere terms containing time stood like infiltrators at a masked ball, prepared at some unannounced pulse of the clock to throw back their capes and reveal their true identities and mission. There were moments in the text when she felt herself about to grasp an intelligence so grand and fatal that she deliberately retreated, willed herself to forget whatever gift for mathematical linkage or analogy might allow her to go on, into certain madness. What she could not make herself forget was Vlado, the living hand that had made these marks across this paper, the hand she still so hopelessly wished to feel buried in her hair, resting against her lips.
Cyprian came churning back at last in to a winter mirage of Venice, no sleep to speak of for weeks, bedraggled, squinting at the tarnished city through the rain on the Lagoon, shivering in the wind’s raking assault, eyes scratchy, hair all jagged and drastically in need of attention from Signor Fabrizio—he longed for some time in a steaming tub with a cold bottle of anything alcoholic with bubbles. Pity the galleggianti wouldn’t be open till May. At the moment he must settle for lighting up another Sobranie, coughing repellently, and ranging the wet deck trying to stay on his feet. Filthy weather. What had he ever seen in this place, that had brought him back? Who cared anymore where he was or if he’d ever return? Yashmeen, of course, was the answer he hoped for, but after his turn on the Peninsula, he found it would not serve to be thinking ahead in too chirpy a fashion.
She was no longer in Trieste. He had spent a week there looking for her, everywhere he could think of, and learned only, from Vlado Clissan’s associates, who had vowed to take revenge, of Vlado’s melancholy fate at the hands of Derrick Theign. “He has gone mad,” said Vlado’s cousin Zlatko Ottician. “He is dangerous now to everyone.”
“I’ll have a look round Venice.” Even if Vienna was now the more likely place to find Theign. Cyprian was moving in a stunned vacuum his skin could not successfully define. It did not improve his mood to reflect that he might be as much to blame as anyone—Vlado had been his one dependable operative, as much as possible in this game his friend, and it was difficult to see Theign’s behavior as anything but a sort of murderous housecleaning.
“Must . . . stay on feet. . . .” There! at that exact moment, he spotted the treacherous bastard himself in a traghetto, emerging from the mists, standing up in his usual pose, as ever too self-absorbed to pass for Venetian, gliding past oblivious to the little steamer and Cyprian at its rail taken by an unexpected rage. The apparition faded again into the rain. “No, no,” Cyprian muttered, “won’t do. . . .” Some reap the whirlwind, he was left to glean the undelineated fog—penance, he supposed, for never having learned to think analytically. Now when he most needed a clever plan, his mind was become all staring Arctic vacancy. The far more resourceful Bevis Moistleigh, whose interests just then were if anything more precarious than Cyprian’s, would be off with his charming Jacintha someplace annoying, larking among the early daffodils or whatever. Expecting gratitude was of course a mug’s game, one paid back obligations in timely fashion at the going price, and gratitude figured in hardly at all . . . but, well, really.
Cyprian’s only comfort at the moment was the loaded Webley-Fosbery service revolver in his kit. If worse came to worst, which it must, failed expectation being the rule of this business, why he could always produce the firearm, couldn’t he, and use it against some target to be designated when the moment arrived. Theign preferably, but not ruling out himself. Cazzo, cazzo . . .
He found the old pensione in Santa Croce occupied by a party of British tourists who took him for a local cicerone seeking employment. The bora howled among the chimneys, as if amused. Nobody there knew anything about previous tenants, but Signora Giambolognese downstairs recalled their many evenings of high drama, screaming and thumping about, and greeted Cyprian with one of those wary smiles, as if he were about to tell a joke. “He lives in the Arsenale, your friend.”
“Macchè, nell ’Arsenale—”
She turned up both palms, shrugged. “Inglesi.”
Outside again, on a sudden whim he turned into the calle of the traghetto to the Santa Lucia Station and saw, just coming out of the British consulate, who but Ratty McHugh, assuming Cyprian to be a street-beggar and twitching his gaze away. But then back again—“Oh I say. Latewood?”
“Hmmn.”
“We’ve got to talk.” They went back inside to a remote courtyard-within-a-courtyard where Ratty had an office. “First of all, we’re deeply sorry about what happened at the Arsenale. Clissan was a good man, among the best, which you must have known better than anyone.”
It turned out that Theign was not really domiciled inside the Arsenale but maintaining offices there to be used for a pied-à-terre when he was in town. “Not to mention damned convenient for gathering any naval intelligence one might wish to pass on to one’s Austrian masters.”
“And the Italian Navy don’t especially mind?”
“Oh, it’s the usual. They think he’ll lead them to some greater apparatus, he’s content to let them go on dreaming. Bit like marriage, I suppose.”
Cyprian then noticed a pale gold wedding ring. “Gorblimey. I say congratulations old man, major step in life, can’t imagine how I missed it in the Bosnian papers, who is she and so forth Ratty?”
“Oh it’s old Jenny Invert, you remember her, we all used to go to Newmarket together.”
Cyprian squinted. “That girl from Nether Wallop, Hants, three feet taller than you ’s I recall, wizard trapshooter, president of the Inanimate Bird Association chapter down there—”
“The very lass. She believes I’m some sort of junior diplomat, so if you two ever do meet again, though I shall try my best to see it never happens, you won’t suddenly start, well, reminiscing about any of . . . this—”
“Silent as the grave old man. Though she could be ever so useful at the moment with our problematical acquaintance couldn’t she, dead shot and all.”
“Yes the last time you joked about that Cyprian, in Graz wasn’t it, I may’ve acted a bit shirty, though I’ve since been thinking it over and, well . . .”
“No need to apologize Ratty, as long as you’ve come to your senses on the subject’s the main thing isn’t it.”
“He’s being very careful. Never out of doors without at least two great simians looking after his flanks. Itineraries subject to change without notice, always in code in any case, which no one really can break, as the key also changes day to day.”
“If I could locate Bevis Moistleigh, I’d put him to work on it. But, like you, the only chords on his ukulele these days are for ‘I Love You Truly.’”
“Ah yes wait that’s F major, C seventh, G-minor seventh—”
“Oca ti jebem,” a Montenegrin pleasantry Cyprian had found himself using with some frequency lately.
Ratty threw an inquiring stare. “And your own, ehrm . . .”
“Don’t.”
“We know she’s not in Trieste anymore. Stopped here for a bit, left in the company of some American, parts unknown, I’m afraid. I did promise to keep an eye on her, but—”
“Shame, Ratty, special circle of Hell for that sort of thing.”
“Knew you’d understand. See here, I’m back to London tomorrow, but in case a clear angle of fire should open up—” He took a mallet and began to strike vigorously at a nearby Chinese gong. A person in a checked suit put his head in the door and raised his eyebrows. “This is my colleague Giles Piprake, no known problem he can’t sort out.”
“Your bride’s never complained,” muttered Piprake.
“Cyprian here needs to go speak with the Principe Spongiatosta,” said Ratty.
“I do?” puzzled Cyprian.
“Exactly how Ratty expressed it to the vicar, and look what happened,” said Piprake. “I gather this is about Derrick ‘Rogue Elephant’ Theign.”
“Prince who again?” inquired Cyprian in some dismay. “Surely not, umpire?”
“Among the very best of our reliables,” Ratty informed him.
“He and Theign were regular associates. If not partners in the deepest sorts of evil enterprise. In fact—” looking nervously over at Piprake.
“Theign once arranged an assignation for you with the Prince, yes, we know. How did it go, I always meant to ask.”
“Aaaahh!” screamed Cyprian, attempting to hide beneath an open dossier on Ratty’s desk.
“Sensitive,” Ratty said, “hasn’t been in the business long—Latewood, do pull yourself together, there’s a good chap.”
“I must remember not to wear yellow,” Cyprian as if making a note to himself. Piprake, eyebrows oscillating, withdrew to telephone the Prince.
“You’ll keep us apprised,” said Ratty. Cyprian rose and put on his hat with one of those music-hall flourishes.
“Indeed. Well Ratty ta-ta, and best to your wife.”
“Don’t go near her I’m warning you, she’ll have you married to some horribly unsuitable friend of hers before you can remember the word ‘no.’”
The Princess was nowhere to be seen at Ca’ Spongiatosta, but the Prince was in the entry before the valletto could even take Cyprian’s hat, cheerful and splendid in some shade of heliotrope hitherto unobserved upon the planet.
“Facciam’ il porco,” the Prince greeted him, eagerly yet one hoped in jest.
Angling his head in regret, “Il mio ragazzo è molto geloso.”
The Prince beamed. “Exactly what you said last time, and in that same phrasebook accent. Qualsiasi, Ciprianino. Captain Piprake tells me that we may share an interest in neutralizing the plans of a former mutual acquaintance who has since chosen a most dangerous path of vice and betrayal.” They ascended to the piano nobile and passed through a gallery hung with the Prince’s collection of modern Symbolists, including some oils by Hunter Penhallow, notably his meditation on the fate of Europe, The Iron Gateway, in which shadowy multitudes trooped toward a vanishing line over which broke a hellish radiance.
The Prince gestured him into a room notable for its Carlo Zen furniture and vases by Galileo Chini. In the corner was a pale cream writing-desk accented with copper and parchment painted in spidery designs.
“Bugatti, isn’t it?” Cyprian said.
“My wife’s taste,” the Prince nodded. “I tend toward the more ancestral myself.”
Servants brought cold prosecco and glasses on a silver antique tray, and Alexandrian cigarettes in a Byzantine box at least seven hundred years old.
“That he should have pursued his schemes from Venice,” the Prince said, “this clouded realm of pedestrian mazes and municipal stillness, suggests an allegiance to forces already long in motion. But that is only the mask he has chosen. Other nations, Americans notoriously, style themselves ‘republican’ and think they understand republics, but what was fashioned here over corroded centuries of doges’ cruelty lies forever beyond their understanding. Each Doge in his turn became more and more a sacrificial animal, his own freedoms taken, his life brought under an impossibly stringent code of conduct, taking comfort, while he wore the corno, in a resentful brutality, waiting each day for the fateful escort of thugs, the sealed gondola, the final bridge. His best hope, pathetically slender, might be for some remote monastery and a decline into ever-deeper penitence.
“The doges are gone, the curse remains. Some today, often in positions to do great harm, will never come to understand how ‘power’—lo stato—could have been an expression of communal will, invisibly exercised in the dark that surrounds each soul, in which penance must be a necessary term. Unless one has performed in his life penance equal to what he has exacted from others, there is an imbalance in Nature.”
“Which must be—”
A princely hand ascended into the tobacco smoke. “I was speaking of Venetian history. Today that antique machinery of choice and limitation is available no longer. Today . . . suppose there were a foreign Crown Prince, for example, who passionately hated Italy, who upon succession to the throne of his empire would, certain as the sunrise, go to war with Italy to take back territory he believes to be his family’s . . . and further, suppose there were living and working in Italy agents of this emperor-to-be, particularly active in Venice, men whose lives had become dedicated only to promoting the interests of the enemy—if no other life, no number of lives mattered, no loyalties, no code of honor, no ancient tradition, only these agents’ pure wicked need that their Principal prevail at all cost. . . .”
“Whom could one trust then to defend the interests of the Nation? The Royal Army? the Navy?”
“In theory. But an enemy with Imperial resources can buy anyone.”
“If there is no one who cannot be bought . . .”
“We must fall back on probabilities and ask who is likely to remain unbought.”
They sat and smoked until the room had taken on a three-dimensional patina, as if from years of fine corrosion. “Not a straightforward problem, you see,” said the Prince at last.
“There are friendships,” it seemed to occur to Cyprian, with a narrowing of the eyes translatable as, Of course we have not been discussing anyone in particular.
“Yet may not friends, too, defect, often for reasons less predictable than a cash arrangement? Unless . . .”
“I have recently returned,” said Cyprian carefully, “from a place where it is much more difficult, at least for the great Powers, to subvert personal honor. A place less developed no doubt than the sophisticated cultures of the West, still naïve, if not quite innocent.”
“Despised, disrespected, beneath suspicion,” suggested the Prince.
“They do not require vast sums, nor advanced weapons. They possess what all the treasuries of Europe cannot buy.”
“Passion,” nodded the Prince.
“May I make some inquiries?”
He saw a look of sympathy come over the Prince’s face. “I am sorry about your friend.”
“Yes. Well. He had many friends. Among whom—”
But the Prince was making another of those princely gestures, and before he knew it, Cyprian was back out on the salizzada.
ONE DAY, on the Riva, in front of the Metropole, Cyprian came unexpectedly face-to-face with Yashmeen Halfcourt, on the arm of a battered and rangy individual from whom, having been for some time in a state of unsatisfied desire, Cyprian found himself struggling to keep his eyes averted, not to mention a minute and a half’s worth of disorientation at seeing Yashmeen again. Her hair was shorter and lighter, and she was expensively turned out in aubergine taffeta trimmed with silver brocade, elbow-length sleeves with three or four lace ruffles, capeskin gloves in a dark claret, lovely kid boots in the same shade, a hat with plumes also dyed to match and its brim raked to one side, one or two curls swinging roguishly as if disarranged in passion. Cyprian, while making this inventory, realized with dismay how far from even presentable he must look.
“You’re alive,” she greeted him, difficult to say with how much enthusiasm. She had been smiling, but now her demeanor was oddly grave. She introduced Reef, who had been scrutinizing him in the direct way he’d come to associate with Americans.
“I heard about Vlado,” Cyprian said, hoping she would at least not play at salon sociability.
She nodded, folded her parasol and tightened her grip on Reef’s arm. “It was a near thing that night, they might have got me too, and if Reef hadn’t been there. . . .”
“Really.” Deciding to give her cowboy the once-over after all.
“Just happened to show up,�
� Reef nodded.
“But too late for Vlado.”
“Sorry there.”
“Oh,” detaching his gaze, “it’s being taken care of. The story isn’t over. Not by a long chalk.” Presently he sidled off down the Riva.
For the next week or so, Cyprian managed to go a little crazy, resuming, though not on a full-time basis, his old trade of compensated sodomy. In this city there was no shortage of pale men with tastes he understood, and he would need money, a pile of a certain height of it, to go after Theign properly. When his lapse into squalor had earned him enough, he went down to Fabrizio’s to have his curls abbreviated into a more combative look, and then caught the evening train to Trieste.
Heading once more over the Mestre bridge, into the smoky orange sunset, Cyprian felt the sadness peculiar to the contemplation of recent time unrecapturable. Anything earlier, childhood, adolescence, they were done with, he could get by without any of that—what he wanted back was last week, the week before. He refused, though not altogether successfully, to think about Yashmeen.
In Trieste the neo-Uskok membership, now being led by Vlado’s cousin Zlatko Ottician, greeted him warmly, having heard some exaggerated accounts, already half folkloric, of his adventures on the Peninsula.
They sat eating gibanica and sardines and drinking some herbal grappa called kadulja. Everybody was talking a dialect part coastal Čakavština, part seventeenth-century Uskok maritime slang. Opaque to Cyprian, but more important, to Vienna.
How to proceed? There was a good deal of discussion, in the caffés and taverns, out walking the Rive, of ways and means. No argument that Theign must be killed. Some favored a quick end, unnamed assassins in the dark, while others wanted him to suffer and understand. Poetic justice would be to shop him to some instrumentality famous for torture. Qualified as they were, none of the Great Powers would really serve this purpose, because Theign had done regular business with them all, likely thinking that would be enough to keep him protected. So his reckoning must come from a less exalted direction, the lower parts of the compass rose, the faceless, the despised, the Mavrovlachi of Croatia. Vlado’s own.
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