“Used to be, opened my own practice, more like a consultant on retainer now if that Icosadyad decides to really start acting up. Always something new, though over the years,” he calculated, “I’ve been out in search of them all—simplest turned out to be the hardest, Moon, Sun, and so forth, tried to avoid them whenever I could.”
Today in fact he’d been lying beneath the Sun, hat down over his eyes, half snoozing or as some would have it meditating, from sunrise till hard overhead noon. The Sun was trying to tell him something—“Beyond the usual, ‘Say, it’s me. It’s me,’ o’ course, which is more or less standard by now.”
Later on, tonight at the Overlunch manor, it was the Moon which had found him, among these tailcoated and Vionnet-gowned guests drifting the pavilioned gardens, reflected in the obsidian smoothness of the ornamental lake, calling down from the sky, again, “It’s me. . . . It’s me . . .” as the giant crayfish clattered slowly out of the bathing-pool, and the dog began to bay from some distant part of the grounds, and here came the strong and beaming Moon herself, just above a bared and passing shoulder, beaming down on these privileged at play, with their circus-striped tents, their lamps radiantly lensed from within fantastic grottoes of ice, their Oriental knife corps with clever white accents at toques and teeth.
Then at last, pure and unmistakable, The Star. “It’s me. . . .”
In ordinary divination practice, The Star, number XVII, which at first glance signified hope, was just as apt to portend loss. It showed a presentable young woman, unclad, down on one knee, pouring out water from two vases, her nakedness meant to suggest that even when deprived of everything, one may still hope. A. E. Waite, following Éliphaz Lévi, believed that in its more occult meaning the card had to do with the immortality of the soul. Lew in his earlier days, perhaps understandably, was more interested in that naked woman part, though various T.W.I.T. advisers tried to talk him past it. He seemed convinced, so compelling was the vision of deck-designer “Pixie” Colman Smith, that one evening he would turn a bend in the landscape and there would be the same exact conjunction of earth and water, the tree on the knoll, the bird on the tree, and there for the moment oblivious to his presence, with the sweep of foothills and mountains behind her, this glorious naked blonde. Old Tarot hands had seen this condition of point-missing before, and even had a word for it—“Pixielated.” “The present occupant of that Arcanum might not even be female,” he was warned repeatedly, to little effect.
Dally had been staring, her expression more and more radiant. He narrowed one eye quizzically. “What?”
“That was the last card she turned up for me,” Dally said. “At Earl’s Court. The Star.”
“Well,” Lew angled his thumb aloft and eastward, where sure enough a very bright, luminous object had been slowly on the rise all evening, “it’s a good one to get, all right.” It was the Dog Star Sirius, which ruled this part of the summer, and whose blessings, tradition held, were far from unmixed.
“Tell me, then,” she asked, as if it was an affliction they shared, “who was it? When you finally tracked them down. Who turned out to be The Star?”
His usual practice at this point was to say, “Well, now, I might’ve been exaggerating about that one, I never did find out, exactly.” But, much as Lew would rather go off to the terrace down beside the dark little lake and smoke a cigar by himself, he had some business with this young lady.
“Can you spare a minute, Miss Rideout?”
She had been having a fairly pleasant time up till now, but these parties did tend to have their payback arrangements, and she guessed this was tonight’s. She put down her Champagne glass, took a deep breath, and said, “Sure.” A pulse of silence swept the terrace, leaving a stray half bar of dance-orchestra music, unexpectedly dissonant, to stain the evening, before it resumed, playing now in 3/4, too fast to be called a waltz or for any but the determinedly athletic or the insane to keep up with, and as a result couples were dancing at a number of different speeds, trying to arrive someplace recognizable at the end of each four bars, everybody crashing into furniture, walls, each other, staggering away from these collisions at unpredictable angles, giggling incessantly.
“The fellow you came here with.”
“Mr. Crouchmas.”
“Known him long?”
“Who wants to know?”
“I’m only the go-between,” Lew said.
“For who? The T.W.I.T?”
“It’s not them, but I can’t say any more.”
“Clive and I are ever such good friends,” Dally said, as if Crouchmas were any of who knows how many West End juveniles.
“Some folks who take a lively interest in his business dealings,” said Lew, “would pay handsomely for certain information.”
“That’s if I knew what it looked like, which I wouldn’t, being’s I don’t exactly read the financial pages, can’t even understand the headlines, if you want the truth.”
“How about German?”
“Not a word.”
“Know it when you see it?”
“Guess so.”
Out in the dark grounds, a peacock suddenly made a loud gargled “Ooohkh(?)” then cried “HAI!” in almost a human voice.
“Brother Crouchmas has picked up a few German connections over the years,” said Lew. “Started back with Turkish railway guarantees—he’d rake in the money for a year or two, then he’d either resell the lines outright, or the operating licenses for them, mostly to respectable German firms through the Deutsche Bank, where in fact he’s kept a personal account, right up to the present day, by now in the fairly well-off range. When asked how patriotic or even loyal can that be, he’ll tell you the King is the Kaiser’s uncle, and if that isn’t a connection, he’d like to know what is.”
“Man has a point. But now, just for argument’s sake, how ‘handsomely’ are we talking here?”
“Oh, a nice retainer fee.” He wrote a number on a business card and handed it to her, aware that eyes were directed their way. “How come I don’t see waterworks, nose elevation, none of that usual how-dare-you routine? Most young ladies by now—”
“I’m only Clive’s little tart, ain’t I. What wouldn’t a girl like that do for a sum like this?”
SHE OUGHT TO HAVE felt worse about her espionage expeditions, at least that she was “betraying” him, but somehow she couldn’t get that deep about it. Time and again it was emphasized to her, by way of Lew Basnight, that this wasn’t personally directed against Crouchmas, it was more in the nature of gathering information, as much of it as possible, given the rapid changes in Turkish politics. Even if she’d read any of the documents, which she hadn’t, there would’ve been no way for her to tell how much, or even if, he could be hurt by them.
“Someone is clearly fascinated,” it seemed dismally to Hunter, “with Crouchmas’s simultaneous attachments to England and Germany. As if just having discovered a level of ‘reality’ at which nations, like money in the bank, are merged and indistinguishable—the obvious example here being the immense population of the dead, military and civilian, due to the Great War everyone expects imminently to sweep over us. One hears mathematicians of both countries speak of ‘changes of sign’ when wishing to distinguish England from Germany—but in the realm of pain and destruction, what can polarity matter?”
IT WAS A TALL BUILDING, taller than any in London, taller than St. Paul’s, and yet no one had ever been able to make it out with enough clarity for it to qualify as a “sight” tourists might be impressed by—more a prism of shadow of a certain solidity, looming forever beyond the farthest street one knew how to get to. The exact way to enter, let alone visit, remained a matter of obscurity, indeed was known only to adepts who could prove they had business within. The rest of the town looked up, and up, past a slate confusion of rooftops, and of course it was there, massively blocking the sky and whatever city features might lie behind it, a blackness nearly obsidian, hovering, all but breathing, descent built into its
structure, not only the shedding of rain and snow but more meaningfully within, the downward transfer of an undiscussed product from the upper levels to hidden cargo docks below, by chute, by lift, by valves and conduits—though the commodity was not exactly a fluid, the equations governing its movement were said to be hydrodynamic in nature.
All day it had been raining. Up here the dark glass facings captured shapes of storm clouds rushing by, as if camouflaging, in its own illusion of movement, a warship of Industry sailing the storm-flows above the city. Inclined windows passed the smoky and violent light down into deserted passage-ways. Dally could search here, room after room, for days—open drawers and cabinets and find strange, official-looking documents concerning foreign arrangements never made public. . . . A royal charter, signed by King Ernest Augustus, granting some affiliate of Crouchmas’s shadowy firm the right to build a tunnel across the North Channel of the Irish Sea, between Galloway and Ulster, intended for the transport of military forces and a pipeline for illuminating gas. A railroad right-of-way, straight across the Balkan Peninsula, conceded in Cyrillic and Arabic script all woven in and out of the loveliest green guilloche by the no-longer quite-unabsorbed entity of East Roumelia. A deed for a huge tract of British soil, in Buckinghamshire a bit east of Wolverton and north of Bletchley, leased in apparent perpetuity to sovereign Obock, no typist’s copy but the original deed, an impressive document heavy as lead-foil and edged with an elaborate steel-engraved cartouche, glowing all but tropically in the misted greens, yellows, and oranges of some color process too proprietary even to have a name, depicting in fine detail palms, dhows, natives collecting salt or loading coconuts onto merchant vessels, historic moments such as the 1889 occupation of the fort at Sagallo by the Cossack adventurer Atchinoff and the archimandrite Païsi (faces too direct in their gazes to be merely fanciful), which ended in a shelling by French warships and seven innocent dead. Smooth-sliding wood drawer after drawer, stuffed with these territorial mysteries. No one seeming to care who opened them, who looked in—she had encountered no guards, no demands for identification, not even locks. Where there had once been locks were now open cylinders, corroded, occupied by nothing but shadowy exemption from the unrelenting rainlight she worked in now, breathing carefully, waiting to be walked in on in the act of reading forbidden data. But no one walked, up here.
Outside, the wind was pouring fiercely over figures she herself might have posed for not that long ago, reproduced now by hundreds in some modern variation on Portland stone which seemed to ring faintly in the long gusts, ring down the afternoon, with no one to listen. Frieze creatures, upper-floor caryatid faces, mineral loneliness. Where were any human eyes, let alone the blank lunes that served as eyes for others of their kind, to be met across these perilous chasms? They must be content to register the shadows that raced among the versatile diffractions of soot ascending to the summits of these towers daily scrubbed nacreous by the winds, so polished as to reflect the shapes of the clouds as they soared distant above the dark, the golden city-top, clouds edged like faces, cleanly contoured as handclaps, chasing beyond city limits across the vistas of bleared glacial grassland this day of storm, above this wet misfortune of country spaces. . . .
The lift bore her smoothly to the street floor. It felt like ascent. Invisible within her celebrated beauty, she glided through the lobby and back out into the clamorous city.
“Is that the young lady, sir?”
“Oh, God . . .” Clive Crouchmas in a stricken voice. “God help me. . . .”
“Sir, we’ll just need this signed then, as proof we’ve delivered the service we were engaged for.”
Dally hailed a cab and was driven away, the detectives touched their hats and slid around the corner, the rain started up again, Crouchmas continued to huddle in the grand false-Egyptian entryway. Those with business there came and went, casting glances. Night fell in a long hum, resonating across the bases of lowering clouds with a great frictional gathering of electromotive force, while beneath crept a solemnity of omnibuses, arriving or leaving every few minutes. Crouchmas had forgotten his umbrella. He made his way through the rain to a dingy establishment near the docks where soddenness was not remarked upon and drank for a while, ending up at the one place in London he was still able to think of as home, the establishment of Madame Entrevue, where, though requests for certain activities—mutilation of the poor, ritual sacrifice—more easily come by out in the economy at large, might be reason to turn a client away, for most needs they had to let one in the door. Cigar smoke scented the rooms. Telephones rang faintly down corridors not always visible.
As he had often noticed them doing lately, his thoughts now flew southward, as if by magic carpet, to Constantinople. “I’ll shop the bitch to a harem, is what I’ll do.” That this was no longer an option in the New Turkey did not at the moment occur to him.
Madame was her usual sympathetic self. “But did you think all this time it was about your looks? Your inexhaustible virility? Consult the mirror, Clive, and come to terms. You have a solid reputation for hardheadedness, why go sentimental now?”
“But she was not one of the usual, I was actually—”
“Don’t say it—we don’t use language like that in here.”
Later in the evening he happened to run into old “Doggo” Spokeshave.
“Well if you’ve Constantinople in your plans, Crouchmas, it happens that old Baz Zaharoff’s Wagon-Lits arrangement ought to be free for a bit.”
“You have the disposition of that, do you Spokeshave.”
“I shouldn’t think he’d mind, no, Crouchmas.”
“And where’s B.Z. off to then?”
“Japan, so the rumor goes. If not himself, then his people certainly. All very queer in his shop at the moment, Crouchmas, I must say.”
“But I say Spokeshave, shouldn’t the Nip have a rather complete weapons inventory by now?”
“Yes but it’s they who want to sell him something, you see. Everyone’s being ever so dark about it. The item doesn’t even have a name anyone agrees on, except for a Q in it somewhere I think. Something they came into possession of a few years ago and now have up for sale on most attractive terms, almost as if . . .”
“As if they don’t really need it, Spokeshave?”
“As if they’re afraid of it.”
“Oh dear. Who’s old Baz think he’ll sell it to then?”
“Oh, there are always climbers in the game, aren’t there, why Crouchmas just look at your own territory.”
“What? The rugriders.”
“Any number of Balkan interests as well, I shouldn’t wonder. Especially if Baz could price it cheaply enough, don’t you know.”
“Well I shall certainly have a look into it when I’m out there. Might take you up on Compartment Seven as well. Never hurts to be seen as an intimate of old Baz, does it?”
“I should know, shouldn’t I.”
“I MAY HAVE TO GO to Constantinople for a while,” he said smoothly. “It’s those old Ottoman railway guarantees again. Ghosts—they never go away. Even with the new régime figuring them in as budget expenses at so much per mile, there are still tidy sums to be obtained, if one can find one’s way through the Young Turkish labyrinth. But the thing must be done in person. I don’t suppose you’d be able to pop down for a few days, join me.”
“The new show won’t go into rehearsal for a while,” she said. “Let me see if it’s possible.”
Lew after making a brief telephone call gave her the go-ahead. “They say anything you can find out down there will be of ‘inestimable value.’”
“That’s it? No ‘Good luck Dally, of course we’ll pay per diem,’ nothing like that?”
“No, but on a personal note—”
“Why, Detective Basnight.”
“Watch your back. Please. I hear things about this Crouchmas fellow. Nobody trusts him.”
“There’s some would say he’s a sweet old duck, and I’m a mercenary minx.”
&
nbsp; “Oh hell, now you’re just flirting.”
To make sure he thought so, she lightly touched his sleeve. “I will be careful, Lew, don’t worry.”
He’d found himself wondering lately if it was Dally who might have turned out to be The Star. Some announcement of Lew’s final release from his obligations, if any still existed, to the T.W.I.T. Would the light of her innocence—minx or whatever—even be enough to show him decisively that the “Major Arcana” he had dogged for so long had never necessarily been criminals or even in a condition of sin? And that the T.W.I.T. had judged them so out of a profound and irreparable condition of error?
He felt it within his remit to accompany her to Charing Cross. The platforms smelled of sulfurous coal-smoke and steam. The engine trembled, muscular, Prussian blue under the electric lamps. One or two grinning devotees asked her to sign their shirt cuffs. “Don’t forget to bring me back some Turkish Delight.”
“About the only kind I’m likely to see—it’s just a working holiday for ol’ D.R.” When he handed her her valise, she leaned up and kissed his cheek. “Well,” adjusting her hat and turning to ascend the iron steps, “here I come, Constantinople.”
The idea in Clive Crouchmas’s mind of shopping Dally into a harem had been fine as far as it went, but revenge for some is not as sweet as profit, and it had soon occurred to him that she might more constructively serve as a bribe to somebody useful. Besides, the puritans now in power in what some were beginning to call Istanbul were resolved to do away with all vestiges of the sultanic, and actually Clive was obliged to put up with some rather disrespectful treatment in the very offices of the Ottoman Debt Agency in where he had once engineered some of his more, he supposed, Byzantine schemes. Even worse, others—German, to no one’s surprise—had been there before him, and pickings were slim. With the prospect of returning to England more or less empty-handed, Clive, blaming Dally for the whole contretemps, had an episode of insanity in which it seemed the only way to come out of this ahead would be to sell her into white slavery someplace else, by way of unreconstructed elements of the Old Turkey, and their Habsburg co-adjutors in what finally turned out to be Hungary.
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