“As many guns as you need,” Zlatko promised.
“You chase him into our sights, we’ll do the rest,” said his brother Vastroslav.
ON LOOKING INTO Theign’s Austrian connections, Cyprian was fascinated to discover how intimate he had grown with the military Chancellery of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, who from the Belvedere in Vienna directed a web of intrigue aimed at refashioning the map of Europe, by way of pro-tégés such as the current foreign minister Aerenthal, architect of the annexation of Bosnia.
“Which does suggest,” murmured Cyprian to himself, “that Theign must have known about the annexation long, long before the step itself was taken, yet he pretended to be as surprised as any of us. Effectively, it was the first phase of their damned general European war, and he sent me into the thickest of it, where I could take no action that would not lead to my destruction. I say, I must kill this evil bastard immediately, really I must.”
As long as it remained in the interests of both England and Austria-Hungary that Russia be kept from acquiring too much power in the Balkans, Theign had been able apparently to justify any degree of coöperation with the Ballhausplatz by pleading the Macedonian Question, remaining thereby safe from any suspicions of treason.
In addition, through 1906 and ’07, not yet accounted-for amounts of time and money had been spent, not to mention discomfort inflicted, up to and including anonymous death in unfrequented corners of the cities of Europe, to see that no Anglo-Russian understanding ever came about. It having been of the essence to Germany that England and Russia be enemies forever, the operatives most active in this must have been German or their creatures the Austrians, without doubt including Theign’s handpicked prætorians. But with the Entente in force, Theign must have been waiting, with his usual predator’s gift of patience, for reassignment. It would probably be best to move quickly.
As Cyprian’s field skills, held to the whetstone of European crisis, had sharpened, so Theign’s, from overindulgence in various luxuries, including Viennese cuisine, had deteriorated. Cyprian would never become a Venetian, but he had learned a useful thing or two, among these that whatever rumors were worth in other towns, here in Venice they could be trusted as scientific fact. He went out to Castello, and sat at caffès and bàcari and waited, and presently there was Theign, accompanied by his brace of plug-uglies. Cyprian recited the appropriate formulæ and became invisible. Before long, in the intricate though mismatched dance which then began, he had learned every minute of Theign’s daily timetable, and managed to hover unobserved within mischief-making distance, hiring pickpockets to make off with note-cases, arranging at the fish-market for Theign to be assaulted with a dubious haddock, taking to the rooftops of Venice himself to launch the odd furtive tile at Theign’s head.
One night he happened to shadow Theign to a palazzo in San Marco, near the Rio di San Zulian. It was the Austro-Hungarian consulate, for pity’s sake. How much more blatant did the man imagine he could be? Cyprian decided to materialize.
He had the Webley ready, calibrating exquisitely his placement half in, half out of the fog. Theign, secure in some cloak of exemption, did not appear to be surprised. “Well, it’s Latewood. We thought you were dead.”
“So I am, Theign, I’m haunting you.”
“Reports to the Belvedere on your mission have been simply glowing, the Crown Prince himself—”
“Spare us both, Theign, and make your arrangements.”
Theign lurched defensively, but Cyprian had vanished. “You do move quickly for a lazy sod!” Theign cried into the empty courtyard. Once Cyprian might have felt some remorseful twinge at this appeal to their past.
AS THE CRISIS APPROACHED, he found himself less able to tolerate the everyday. He wasn’t sleeping. When he drank to get to sleep, he found himself awake again after less than a fitful hour of dreams in which Yashmeen betrayed him, again and again, to some apparatus known, for the purposes of dream, as “Austria.” But even in the dream he knew it could not be that. He woke imagining that the true name had been revealed, but that the shock of waking had dislodged it from his mind.
“IT WILL BE TONIGHT, then, if all goes well,” the Prince said, with a smile whose bleakness had more to do with inconvenience than regret. He and Cyprian had arranged to meet, furtive as an assignation, in the late afternoon at Giacomuzzi. “You have every right to be present.”
“I know. But with the Ottician brothers in town, it is best now to step out of the way and allow them their repayment.”
The Prince peered back doubtfully. “There was more you wished?”
“Only to thank you for your efforts in this matter, Altezza.”
The Prince had always possessed the princely gift of knowing when and how to conceal his contempt. This was necessary in the world not only because truly murderous people could be overly sensitive to insult, but also, incredible as he would once have imagined it, he himself was wrong now and then. A man who does not know how much to ask for is of course contemptible—but sometimes, not often, he will simply want nothing for himself, and that must be respected, if only for its rarity.
“You will come out to the island next week for our annual ball?”
“I’ve nothing to wear.”
He smiled, allowing Cyprian to think it was nostalgia. “The Principessa will find something for you.”
“She has exquisite judgment.”
The Prince squinted at the sky through his glass of Montepulciano. “In some things, most likely.”
THE MOMENT HE EMERGED from the station and set foot on the Ponte degli Scalzi, Theign understood that he ought to have remained in Vienna. Protected, if not safe. At the moment his prætorians were all elsewhere, on assignment at various borders of his domain, but if necessary Vienna itself would have enfolded and defended him. He tried to imagine that he had not come to Venice, perhaps for the last time, in any way because of Cyprian Latewood. Those fires certainly had been banked for ages. He was unwilling, however, to let the pale little sod have the last move in this. Latewood had been merely, inexcusably lucky, but had not been at the game long enough to deserve his luck.
At first Theign was more annoyed than alarmed at the absence of Vincenzo and Pasquale. It had always been their custom to meet him at the platform, and this time he had given them ample notice. As he ascended the bridge, he likewise rose into the cold light of a suspicion that he might have sent them word too soon, allowing the message to be intercepted and unwelcome forces to mobilize.
“Signor Theign, I believe you have forgotten something back on the terraferma.”
Unknowns, standing at the peak of the bridge. Night was falling. He could not make out either of their faces clearly enough.
They brought him to an abandoned factory at the edge of Mestre. Associates surrounded the place, keeping to the shadows. “Ghosts,” Vastroslav said. “Industrial ghosts. Your world refuses them, so they haunt it, they walk, they chant, when needed they wake it from its slumbers.”
Rusted pulleys and driveshafts with broken leather belts drooping from them ran everywhere overhead. The floor was stained black from campfires built by transient visitors. On a metal shelf were various instruments, including a gimlet, a butcher’s saw, and Zlatko’s 11 mm Montenegrin Gasser, should a quick end become necessary.
“To save everyone trouble,” Vastroslav said, “there is nothing you can tell us. Nothing you can pay us. You have stepped into a long history of blood and penance, and the coin of these transactions is struck not from metal but from Time.”
“Do let’s get on with it then, shall we?” said Theign.
They took his right eye with a woodworker’s gouge. They showed him the eye before tossing it to the rats who waited in the shadows.
“One eye was missing from Vlado’s corpse,” Zlatko said. “We shall take both of yours.”
“Two eyes for an eye,” Zlatko smiling grimly, “this is Uskok practice—for we are savages, you see, or in a moment,” approaching with the gouge, �
��you don’t see.”
“Whenever you people torture, you try merely to cripple,” Vastroslav said. “To leave some mark of imbalance. We prefer a symmetry of insult—to confer a state of grace. To mark the soul.”
Soon the pain had driven Theign past words into articulated screaming, as if toward some rhapsodic formula that might deliver him. Zlatko stood by the shelf of tools, impatient with his brother’s philosophical approach. He would have used the pistol straight off, and spent the rest of the evening in a bar.
ONE DAY CYPRIAN HAD A MESSAGE from Yashmeen, which began “I must see you.” The rest of it he wouldn’t remember. She had been apparently to visit Ratty, who had passed on Cyprian’s whereabouts.
She and the American, who today was not in evidence, were staying at a pensione near San Stae. She greeted Cyprian in a pale shirtwaist and skirt that looked simple but must have cost at least two hundred lire. Her hair bobbed to about shoulder length. Her eyes fatal as ever.
“So old Ratty’s back in town. You certainly must have charmed him, either that or he’s growing careless.”
“I was happy to see him again.”
“Been a while, has it?”
“Since Vlado and I left Trieste, I suppose. I can’t remember.”
“No. Why should you?”
“Cyprian—”
“And Vlado looked after you all right, did he.”
Her eyes grew larger and somehow darker. “I owed him my life, more than once.”
“In that case I suppose I must rescue you sometime as well, and see what happens.”
“He wanted you to have this.” She was holding out to him some sort of school copybook, ragged, faded by the elements. The Book of the Masked.
After hesitating, Cyprian took it from her. “Did he actually say it was for me? Or do you only want it off your hands?”
“Cyprian, what am I to do with you? you’re acting like a perfect bitch.”
“Yes.” Suddenly reluctant to breathe. “It’s . . . everything just lately. Nothing. Haven’t slept.” Nodding at the bed. “Appears you haven’t either.”
“Ah.” Her expression changed. “Of course Reef and I have been fucking, we fuck whenever we can find a moment, we are lovers, Cyprian, in all the ways you were never permitted. What of it.”
He was rectally possessed by fear, desire, least resistibly hope. He had seldom seen her this cruel. “But I would have done—”
“I already know that.”
“—anything you commanded. . . .”
“‘Commanded.’ Oh and shall you, then?” She stepped closer, took his trembling chin between gloved finger and thumb. “Perhaps then if you behave, someday, some exquisite night, we shall allow you to admire us from afar. Restrained appropriately, I expect, poor Cyprian. Quite helpless.”
He was silent, met her eyes, looked away as if before a danger he could not bear to see.
She laughed as if she had just detected, by clairvoyant means, a question. “Yes. He knows all about you. But he’s not as easy as I am. Much as you might desire him.” He kept his gaze down and did not speak. “Tell me I am mistaken.” He risked another quick glance. Her eyes were implacable. She held his head still with one hand and with the other struck him in the face, surprising them both, then again, repeatedly, the scent of glove-leather flooding him, a smile slowly possessing her own face, until he whispered what she wanted to hear.
“Hmmn. You shall not so much as look at him without my permission.”
“What of his own—”
“His own what? He’s an American. A cowboy. His idea of romance begins and ends with me on my back. You are a curiosity to him. It may be years before he gets around to you. It may be never. And meanwhile you shall have to suffer, I suppose.”
“What about ‘Welcome back, Cyprian, so lovely to see you alive,’ and so forth?”
“That too I imagine.”
“I mean I no more than step across the street for a packet of cigarettes and you’re—” He gestured with his head at the eloquent bedsheets, his eyes desolate. Desolate enough, he hoped.
“You went out there,” she said, “when you didn’t have to. How was I supposed to feel?”
“But we had agreed, I thought—”
“Had we.”
And then one of those silences fell, and a curious thing had happened to time, for although they were the same people they had been when he had stepped on board the S.S. John of Asia last year, at the same time they were two entirely different people who had no business being in the same city together let alone the same room, and yet whatever it was between them was deeper now, the stakes were higher, the danger of how much there was to lose terribly, incontrovertibly clear.
IN THE SCALES of the average working day, Cyprian’s self-regard, almost uniquely among gentleman ops of the day, had seldom accounted for much more than a newborn gnat’s eyelash. Colleagues had been routinely astonished to discover that he avoided the higher social circles, indeed owned no formal attire. Though more than happy to remark upon the appearance of others in regard to dress and grooming, Cyprian himself often went days without shaving or changing his collar or dittoes, on the assumption that he was all but invisible before the public gaze. At first Derrick Theign, among other handlers, had assumed it was a pose—“‘Who, little C.L.?’ Come off it Latewood, even tattered as you are, you’re not exactly a drug on the market of desire quite yet, princes of world industry might be sniveling at your shoe-tops if you’d only do something about your hair for example.”
“Wrong sod, I’m afraid,” Cyprian would only mumble, with what might, in a person more vain, pass for self-deprecation. Most who met him found it difficult to reconcile his appetite for sexual abasement—its specific carnality—with what had to be termed a religious surrender of the self. Then Yashmeen entered the picture, had a look, and understood in a pulsebeat, in the simple elegant turn of a wrist, what she was looking at.
The hope it ignited was unexpected—almost, in her life at the moment, unaffordable. But hadn’t she just been out in the Riviera casinos willing to risk far more against longer odds? Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs—what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it? And Cyprian, of all people. Dear Cyprian.
Then something also began to happen that was very odd indeed. For years Yashmeen had been the one obliged to put up with passions directed at her by others, settling for moments of amusement, preferring like a spectator at a conjuring performance not to know too much about how it worked. Heaven knew she had tried to be a good sport. But sooner or later she would run out of patience. A certain exasperated sigh and another broken-hearted amateur was left to flounder in the erotic swamp. But now, for the first time, with Cyprian’s return, something was different, as if with his miraculous resurrection something had also been restored to her, though she resisted naming it.
Men had never provided much challenge—all her memorable successes were with women. Having learned how, with little difficulty, to command the desires of London shopgirl and haughty Girtonian alike, Yashmeen was agreeably surprised now to find the same approach working with Cyprian, only more so. The gentle make-believe of princesses and maidservants and so forth was deepened, extended into realms of real power, real pain. He seemed not held back by the caveats she had come to sense ever in effect, retarding the souls of British womanhood—willing to transgress perhaps any limit she might devise. It was more than the usual history of flogging one expected from British schoolboys of all ages. It was almost an indifference to self, in which desire was directed at passing beyond the conditions of the self—at first she thought, as other women on the face of it might, well then it’s only self-hatred isn’t it, perhaps a class thing—but no, that wasn’t it. Cyprian took altogether too much pleasure in what she obliged him to do. “‘Hate’? no—I do
n’t know what this is,” he protested, peering in dismay at his naked form in her mirror, “except that it’s yours. . . .” With such smoothly presentable curves, this could have been narcissism—but that wasn’t quite it either. His gaze was not for the mirror, but for her. At first she thought to cover the mirror when they were together, and learned that it made no difference. His eyes remained adoringly lifted to Yashmeen alone, except for the times when she commanded him to direct them elsewhere.
“No,” he whispered.
“Are you saying no to me? I shall give you such a thrashing—”
“I shan’t let you do that,” in the same whisper.
She adjusted the line of her shoulders, a gesture she had learned particularly aroused him. “Right. I believe I shall have that defiant bottom. Now, Cyprian.”
“No,” even as his small sleekly-gloved hands moved languorously to the fastenings of his trousers, and he turned and slowly undid them, and lowered them for her, looking back over his shoulder.
He thought he knew being aflame. But this was sustained explosion, reaching now and then a quite unendurable brisance. Yet he endured it, not so much because it was her will as, unbelievably, what had become her need. How could he disappoint her need? It seemed too ridiculous, though the evidence lay everywhere. She was behaving like a love-smitten girl. She brought Cyprian armloads of flowers and extravagant underlinen. She praised him outside his hearing, at what some might have found excessive length. He had only to be minutes late for a rendezvous to find her anxiously trembling, moments away from tears. No formal cruelties she might then devise for his penance would quite cancel his memory of her undissembled need, as if he really had surprised her in a vulnerable moment.
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