“Stop up ’at little baby’s ears a minute would you darlin, got to have us some recreational skeet here,” Reef snapping a magazine into the Madsen gun and, after settling everybody in behind some rocks by the roadside, murmuring something like, “At long last,” started off in semiautomatic mode but soon, as the assailants began to curse and scatter, the appeal of the change lever in front of the trigger-guard grew irresistible, and Reef entered the domain of five hundred rounds per minute, and before he could holler anything too gleeful the magazine was used up and the barrel not even warm, and whoever they’d been, they didn’t seem to be there anymore.
“What he does best, of course,” Yashmeen murmured as if to Ljubica.
A little farther down the road they ran into a Greek army detachment coming to investigate the rapid fire they thought they’d heard. Since the war began there’d been Greek troops everywhere in the south of Albania, which they thought of as Epirus, belonging to some idea of Greece more abstract than anyplace their own homes and families might’ve happened to be. Reef, with the Madsen stashed well out of sight, shrugged and made vague gestures in the direction the bushwhackers had gone off in, and he had soon obtained a pack of cigarettes and a ride in a supply wagon as far as Korça, nowadays under Greek occupation.
After shivering under a shredded tent all night, they were up early and out again into the freezing predawn, and on the road. Past Erseka they began to climb up into the Gramoz Range, the beech trees leafless in the rising winds, winter peaks above shining desolate as Alps, on the other side of which, where they were known as the Pindus, lay Greece.
As the sun was going down they found a farm outbuilding that seemed deserted, until Reef came in from scavenging for firewood and found Ljubica sitting next to one of the savage and ill-disposed sheepdogs known in Macedonia as a šarplaninec.
Dogs out here were famous for biting before they barked—Cyprian had been pretty repetitious on that point—but here was Ljubica, all sociability, talking away in her personal language, and the critter, looking something like a shaggy brown-and-blond bear with a kindly enough face, was listening to her with great interest. When Reef approached, they both turned their heads to stare, politely but unmistakably in warning, the dog raising her eyebrows and clicking her tongue, which somebody back in the tunnel days had once told Reef was Albanian for “No.”
“O.K., O.K.” Reef slowly backed out through the doorway again.
It would be many years before he learned that this dog’s name was Ksenija, and that she was the intimate companion of Pugnax, whose human associates the Chums of Chance had been invisibly but attentively keeping an eye on the progress of Reef’s family exfiltration from the Balkan Peninsula. Her task at this juncture was to steer everyone to safety without appearing to.
Accordingly, the next day Reef was out doing some forward scouting, Yash and Ljubica dug in back up the valley, when from someplace he smelled woodsmoke and heard donkeys, and next thing he knew, there were these three Albanians who had the drop on him. “Well tungjatjeta, fellas,” Reef trying to recall some tunnel Albanian and flashing his all-purpose charming smile.
The Albanians were also smiling. “I fuck your mother,” the first one greeted him.
“I fuck you, then I fuck your mother,” said the second.
“First I kill you and your mother, then I fuck you both,” said the third.
“You folks are usually so . . . friendly,” Reef said. “What’s up?” He had an enormous 11 mm Montenegrin Gasser in his belt, but this, he sensed, was not the time to be reaching for it. The men were packing older-type Mannlicher rifles and one Gras, likely all taken from dead Greeks. Some small argument had developed, which Reef dimly understood was about who would get to shoot him, though nobody seemed that eager, ammo he guessed being in short supply, especially for the Gras, 11 mm like his pistol, which might be all they were after. So it would be between the Mannlichers. They were now looking around in the mud for suitable pieces of straw to draw. The nearest cover was a ditch with a berm ten yards to his right, but then Reef caught the gleam off a rifle barrel there, and then a couple more. “Oh, oh,” he said, “looks like I’m a dead duck here. How do you folks say it, një rosë vdekuri, right?”
Buying him a minute and a half of grace, which turned out to be just enough, because a voice somewhere began calling his name, and presently a wiry figure came ambling out from behind a stone wall.
“Ramiz?”
“Vëlla! Brother!” He ran to Reef and embraced him. “This is the American who saved my life back in the Swiss tunnel!”
The three riflemen seemed disappointed. “Does that mean we don’t get to shoot him?”
“Thought you’d be in America by now,” Reef said.
“My family. How could I leave?” As it turned out, this village was inhabited by refugees from all over the country, north and south, targets of blood-feud revenge who had found it possible no longer to remain each a prisoner in his own home, and decided that setting up a village-size compound all together would be the best way to have a little more room to move around in while still honoring the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjin. A community founded on vengeance suspended.
“You were lucky,” Ramiz said, “strangers don’t get this close, usually.”
“Just looking for a safe couple of nights,” Reef said, and gave him a rundown on Yash and Ljubica.
“You are crazy to be out here, too many Greeks loose in these hills.” He poured rakia. “Gëzuar! Bring them both here! Plenty of room!”
Reef got back to the village with Yash and Ljubica just as it began to snow, and for the next few days they were snowed in. By the time they were able to journey on, he’d picked up a little more Tosk dialect and learned to play “Jim Along Jo” on a clarinet, which everybody here seemed to own at least one of, some of the men getting together nights after supper with their instruments and playing in three- or four-part harmony and drinking rakia.
Reef and Yashmeen were to find themselves standing against the snow descending, in a comradely persistence too unquestioned for either to have thought of as honorable, their backs often as not to the wind, tall, silent, bowed over their own hearts, over the small life it had become their duty, unimposed, emerged simply from the turns of their fate, to protect—not only it seemed from the storm, because later, sheltered for a moment, in Përmeti or Gjirokastra, both remembered feeling the presence of a conscious and searching force which was not the storm, nor the winter nor the promise of more of the same for who knew how long . . . but something else, something malevolent and much older than the terrain or any race that might have passed in unthinking pilgrimage across it, something which swallowed whole and shit into oblivion whatever came in range of its hunger.
REEF HAD ONCE BEEN NOTORIOUS all over Colorado as the most luckless fisherman west of the Great Divide, but this trip he’d brought along a fishhook all the way from Yz-les-Bains, which he began now to drop and somehow, contrary to all expectation, manage every other day or so to pull out some kind of trout from one of the rivers. The snow came and went, but when it went, it became mostly rain, cold and miserable. On a rare day of sunshine, up near a town in the Vjosa Valley, he and Yash allowed themselves a moment of slack just to stand and gaze.
“I’d stay here forever.”
“Don’t sound too nomadic to me.”
“But look at it.” Pretty scenic, Reef guessed, a dozen minarets brightly ascending among the trees, a little river you could see the bottom of rushing through the town, the yellow light of a café in the dusk that could become their local, the smells and the murmuring and the ancient certainty that life, however reduced now and then to the arts of being intelligent prey, was preferable to the plague of eagles beginning to take over the land.
“That’s the worst of it,” Yashmeen said. “It’s so beautiful.”
“Wait till you see Colorado.”
She looked over at him and after a heartbeat or two he looked back. Ljubica happened to be in Reef�
�s arms, and she pressed her cheek against his chest and watched her mother the way she did when she knew Yash was just about to start crying.
ONCE THROUGH GJIROKASTRA, they began the long switchback out of the mountains and down to the Adriatic Sea—mingling part of the way with Turks still headed south. There was a cease-fire in effect now among all parties except for Greece, still trying to take Yanina, the last Turkish stronghold in the south. Half the Turkish army by now were dead, wounded, or taken prisoner, and the rest were heading in desperation for Yanina. Reef gave them the rest of his cigarettes. It was all he had. Kept one or two, maybe.
At last they came over the Muzina Pass, and there presently was the sea, and the whitewashed houses ascending from the deep curve of the little harbor of Agli Saranta.
Down in town, a winter rainstorm outside, which back up in the mountains they knew would be snow, Ljubica sleeping bundled in a wolfskin, they felt as if they were still moving, borne on some invisible conveyance, following some crooked, complicated path, now and then interrupted by sojourns in semipublic gathering places like this one, filled with layers of stale tobacco smoke, political arguments over obscure issues—a fluorescent blue sense of enclosure, the only view outside through a window at the harbor, and beyond it the furious sea.
They found a fishing captain who agreed to take them over to Corfu his next time out, and drop them at the town. With a winter norther coming down off the mountains, roughening the strait with whitecaps besides an already perilous swell, they headed south down the channel, the wind on their port quarter. Reef, no sailor, spent the time vomiting, often into the wind, either because he didn’t care or couldn’t wait. Once they were in the lee of Pantokratoras, the wind dropped, and within the hour they had come to safety at last in the town of Corfu, where the first thing they did was go to the Church of St. Spiridion, patron saint of the island, and light candles and offer thanks.
They would stay the rest of the winter and into the spring and the radiant sunshine, and out on the main esplanade a cricket game with a visiting XI from Lefkas, everyone in white, and nothing imaginable of darkness or blood, for the duration of the game in its blessedness . . . Ljubica exclaiming in road-baby demotic every time the bat and ball made contact. At the end of the game, little of which, including who’d won, Reef was able to figure out, the Lefkas side presented their opposite numbers each with one of the hot-pepper salamis for which the island was famous.
Persisting behind the world’s every material utterance, the Compassionate now took steps to re-establish contact with Yashmeen. As if the Balkan assignment had never been about secret Austrian minefields at all, but about Cyprian becoming a bride of Night, and Ljubica being born during the rose harvest, and Reef and Yashmeen getting her safely to Corfu—thereby successfully carrying out the “real” mission, for which the other, mines and all, was what the Compassionate liked to call a metaphor—one day as she and Ljubica were sitting at a café out on the Esplanade, there was Auberon Halfcourt, holding a bottle of ginger beer, trotting up in a fiacre as if he were keeping an appointment. . . . It would be his granddaughter who spotted him first, having recognized the horse, who like the other horses here wore a straw hat with holes for his ears to poke through.
After formal kisses all round, Halfcourt took a seat.
“But what are you doing in Corfu?” Yashmeen in beaming bewilderment.
“Waiting for you.” He pushed across to her a battered piece of greenish pasteboard.
“My postal. You actually got it?”
“One of the Russians who’d routinely been reading all my mail since the day I arrived at Kashgar deemed this more important than anything H.M. Government might have had to say. Cabled me instantaneously.” She had written, “We hope to reach the Adriatic.”
“Meaning it would be either here or Durazzo, but Durazzo lately having become rather a casus belli, one went into a trance and summoned the old intuitive powers don’t you know, and Corfu it was.”
“Oh and this”—gesturing around at the Parisian arcades, the leafy, well-watered paradise—“had nothing to do with it.”
They sat and drank ouzo in the twilight. Up at the old Venetian fort the evening gun went off. Breezes stirred the cypresses and olive trees. Corfiots strolled to and fro.
“Seeing you again,” he said, “once I thought it would be one of those moments of surrender to fate, with an unpleasant outcome guaranteed. It did not prevent me from wanting to, however.” They had not seen each other since before 1900. Whatever his feelings might prove to be, her own were not so much in conflict now as expanded. Her love for Ljubica being impenetrable and indivisible as a prime number, other loves must be accordingly re-evaluated. As for Halfcourt, “I am not who I was,” he said. “Out there I was the servant of greed and force. A butler. A pastry-cook. All the while believing myself a military professional. The only love they permitted me was indistinguishable from commerce. They were destroying me and I didn’t know it.”
“Have you resigned your commission?”
“Better than that. I have deserted.”
“Father!”
“Better than that,” he went on in a sort of cheerfully serene momentum, “they think I’m dead. Through my Russian colleague Volodya, I am also comfortably set, thanks to a transaction in jade—your namesake mineral, my dear—destined one day to be considered legendary. You may think of me as the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. And—”
“Oh, I knew there would be more.” She was visited by the certainty that he was deep in some intrigue with a woman.
As if having read his daughter’s mind, the old renegade exclaimed, “And by heaven here she comes, even as we speak!”
Yashmeen turned to see approaching up the esplanade, dwarfed by her shadow from the sunset, a tiny Asian woman all in white, who was waving at them.
“That American chap who brought your letter out to Kashgar is the one actually who introduced us. Ran into him last year in Constantinople, tending bar. And there was Umeki. Ah yes, my little Japanese eggplant.”
Indeed it was Umeki Tsurigane, who had been posted to the Japanese embassy at Constantinople as a “mathematical attaché,” on some mysterious mission on behalf of the technical establishment of her country when she happened to stroll one early evening into the bar at the Deux Continents, and there was Kit Traverse in front of a room-long mirror agitating the contents of a silver cocktail shaker.
“You were supposed to die of shame.”
“Doing my best,” Kit setting a shot glass and a beer glass in front of her. “Your usual boilermaker, mademoiselle?”
“No! Champagne cocktail! Tonight that might be more appropriate!”
“I’ll have one with you.”
He might have meant to ask about the Q-weapon and the Tunguska Event and so on, and for about one drink and a sip or two from another it looked like the reawakening of old times, except that Auberon Halfcourt showed up around then on his clandestine way out of Russia, and “I don’t know what happened,” she told Yashmeen, “I was fascinated!” And her life took one of those turns.
“An old rogue’s dream,” added Halfcourt fondly. But Yashmeen was observing how the young woman gazed at her father, and diagnosed it as a case of true erotic mania. What Halfcourt felt, exactly, was, as it had always been, something of a mystery to her.
THEY FOUND REEF in a taverna, down by the harbor in Garitsa. Ljubica, now pushing the age of one and newly up on her feet, held on to a barstool and with a lopsided smile that suggested this was nothing new, regarded her father drinking ouzo and acquainting Corfiots with the intricacies of Leadville Fan-Tan.
Yash introduced Umeki with eyebrows raised and a private hand-signal curiously suggestive of a meat-cleaver cutting off a penis, Reef merely beaming back as he always did at any presentable young woman in flirting range.
“Your brother,” Umeki smiled, “he is—a bartender—and a matchmaker!”
“I knew all that math stuff’d be good for somethi
n. Here, let me just dishonestly relieve these folks of a couple more leptas and maybe there’ll be enough for supper.”
They all sat at a long table and ate tsingarelli and polenta and yaprakia and a chicken stoufado with fennel and quince and pancetta in it that Nikos the owner and cook said was an ancient Venetian recipe from back in the centuries when the island had belonged to Venice, and Reef snuck his baby daughter tiny sips of Mavrodaphne, which did not put her to sleep but made her quite rowdy as a matter of fact, pulling the tail of Hrisoula, the ordinarily imperturbable taverna cat, until she actually meowed in protest. A small rembetika band arrived with a singer, and presently Yash and Ljubica were up dancing a species of karsilamás together.
Later in the evening, Halfcourt took Yashmeen aside. “Before you ask about Shambhala . . .”
“Perhaps I wasn’t going to.” Her eyes were shining.
“For me, Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was. And in the process I arrived at Constantinople.”
“And your world-line crossed that of Miss Tsurigane. And so.”
“And so.”
By the time they agreed to part, Stray and Ewball had forgotten why they ran off together in the first place. Stray recalled it had something to do with her early notions of the Anarchist life and its promise of a greater invisibility, extending for all she knew clear around the world. By the time of the coalfield troubles in southern Colorado, she had assembled her own network of sources for medical supplies, begun in the days of the Madero revolution and expanded one local doctor, one union hospital, one friendly pharmacist at a time. She had always had the gift for knowing whom to trust and how far, finding herself now using her deal-making skills to get food and medicine where they were needed in these less clearly defined campaigns of the revolution north of the border, and the possibility of a vast unseen commonwealth of support certainly had its practical appeal.
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