"Very well," Faust said at last. "But only this once, and only because I need to know. I am not obligating myself to anything." He cocked his head, listening, and then swore. "Fuck!"
A gaunt man, whose loose-fitting greatcoat and raffish air identified him as a black marketeer, walked up, saying, "Are you waiting for the night train to Metz?" With which words he became a woman. A ribbon on her coat identified her as a war widow. Which explained all: occupation, lack of fear, man's coat. She grinned a five-toothed grin. "Is that what they told you?"
Faust paid her no heed. But his formidable intellect was focused on the wider vistas these days; his judgment was not necessarily reliable in purely practical matters. So Wagner said, "Why? Do you know something?" And, when the woman looked meaningfully away, slipped a bank note into her waiting hand. "Now what is this about the night train to Metz?"
She laughed. "There ain't none! Nor ever will be. They can't admit to it for political reasons. But about a month ago Reactionary guerillas seized the railhead, and because the Royalists are on the offensive down south, there ain't the forces to take it back. The stationmaster will be here in a minute. You wait. He'll tell you there's been a delay and then he'll suggest you put up at his brother-in-law's hotel. Tomorrow you'll come back bright and early with your bags. There'll be another delay. Sometime in the afternoon you'll be sent back to the hotel. Maybe you'll shout and complain. But they won't never admit to a thing. No, they won't. I've seen people stay at the hotel over a week before giving up."
"It can't be!" Wagner exclaimed. Her eye glittered madly. He very much doubted what she said could be trusted.
"Can't it? Then why is there nobody else waiting for the train, eh? Look—here he comes."
The stationmaster strode up the platform, blowing upon his enormous mustache. He was a walrus of a man, all paunch, bright brass buttons, and self-importance. He waved a flipper to get their attention.
Wagner turned to his master to suggest they take a room and make plans overnight.
But Faust was gone.
A bag in either hand, Wagner ran from the platform and down to the street. Faust was nowhere in sight. Still, he must be nearby. Wagner could find him—he knew he could.
Reims was the sort of town that looked best from a distance. The factory smokes would lend a faint glamorizing haze to its tired walls, and the slag-heaps would catch the sun in a way that suggested the exotic structures of India or Ethiopia. From a distance, one would not smell the sulfur and methane stenches nor descry the ubiquitous soot. Up close, it was all ditches, buckets, broken ladders, and dead cats.
Wagner trotted down the rue Chemin, anxiously peering into the alleys and accosting bystanders to ask in a French that had gone all to pieces in his agitation whether they had seen a distinguished man dressed thus and so in these last few minutes? Some frowned, some drew back, others waved him on—helpfully or not, he could not tell.
He seized upon a shopkeeper standing in his doorway, explaining, "He is not well. Mai, you understand, tres mal." The man looked at him blankly. Was he talking to an idiot? Wagner wondered. "Distingue, dressed in black—en noire/'
The shopkeeper looked down at Wagner's clenched hands. He released the man's shirt. Still, the man said nothing.
Despairing, Wagner ran on.
Even in his alarmed state he could not help but notice the posters. They were everywhere, on public and private walls alike, hundreds of them, and all of an unsettling uniformity:
RALLY
to protest your
EXPLOITATION
by Department Stores, Co-Ops
& FOREIGN IMPORTS!!!
SACRIFICE
for the survival of
FRANCE
Scrap Iron, Saltpeter, Grease
ALL ARE NEEDED!!!
EXHIBITION
of arts and crafts by
THE WORKERS OF REIMS
support your neighbors buy local!!!
TRAITORS BEWARE
even now the
CROSS-HAIRS
may be trained on the back of your neck!!!
The invention of the maze, according to certain Parisian intellectuals, coincided with the completion of Babylon, the first city. Wherein, as never before, it was possible to lose oneself among walls that completely hid the horizon. An out-lander would find himself hopelessly disoriented, and yet a citizen, who held the pattern of the whole in his mind would not. Urban life was thus founded upon the principle of deliberately confounding those who were not a part of it. Civilization was a strategy of exclusion.
Wagner had never felt so excluded, so isolated, so much an outsider as he did now. Every turn he took diminished the chances of finding his master. Yet it would be futile to stay with the streets which obviously did not contain Faust; he had no choice but to digress and diverge and digress again.
He began to run. Weeping tears of frustration, he gave up questioning people at all. He chose turns at random, running down lanes and up alleys with no plan of action at all other than a panicked determination to run until he could run no more.
Finally he came stumbling to a halt in front of a motorcar dealership. Exhausted, he put down the bags.
It didn't occur to Wagner that Faust might be within. They had been spending money at a furious rate; it had bled from their fingers, and hemorrhaged from their billfolds. What little remained would not have bought a mule-cart, let alone a motorcar. But when Wagner, expecting nothing, glanced through the showroom window, there Faust was.
He stood talking with what must surely be the dealership's owner. It was a study in contrasts. Faust was calm, pale, composed. The corpulent owner sawed his arms and raged himself red. Faust spoke a single word. All color drained from the
man's face. He turned away. Faust snapped his fingers impatiently. The owner handed him some small object.
Wagner had seen variants of this scene often enough. Yet it always amazed him. The master's genius for knowing was at work. He was somehow aware of that one fact the man would least want to have made public, and had negotiated a price for his silence.
Faust strode out into the street, jingling the keys to a new car. "The red one," he said, gesturing toward the lot, where a rainbow line of metal brutes stood in a splendid row. "Put the bags in the trunk."
Faust drove.
When Wagner had spun the crank to turn over the motor and leaped within, the master threw the automobile into gear and stepped on the gas pedal. The car bounced over a shallow ditch at the edge of the lot and with a horrid scraping noise, veered wildly onto the road.
Behind them, the owner stood watching them drive off. He looked stricken. Seeing him thus, Wagner felt a dreadful sympathy for the man. He hardened his heart against it.
He must be ruthless.
The car lunged like a wolf toward the center of Reims. "This is not the way to the Metz road!" Wagner shouted.
"No! We must obtain fresh clothing." The car brushed lightly against a brick building and bounced back into the center of the road. Wagner gasped with horror. "What we wear is filthy and stale with travel."
They rocketed deep into Reims, panicking horses and sending children scurrying for shelter, trending always away from the factories and into the prosperous neighborhoods bordering the old city.
The car slammed to a stop before a stone house decorated in the current fashion with terra-cotta trim. "The mayor lives here," Faust commented. But instead of going up the steps and knocking at the front door, he led Wagner through a narrow alley and around to the back. They entered unobserved through an unlocked door.
It was uncannily still within. Not even a servant was home. Through a doorway could be glimpsed a sitting room, with throw rugs scattered on the gleaming oak floors and an ormolu clock ticking loudly on the mantelpiece. Wagner almost jumped out of his skin when it chimed.
They went up the stairs and into a bedroom that smelled of hair oil and furniture polish. Faust threw open a dresser drawer and handed shirt, pants, underwear,
collar to Wagner. "These will fit you." He opened another drawer. "And these me."
It was dazzling how he knew—he knew!—the clothes would be there, and fit both of them, despite their variant sizes, and that they would be able to change into them undisturbed.
They stripped in the middle of the room, tossing what they wore upon the bed. "What point?" Faust said when Wagner started to fold his old trousers; he opened a third drawer and extracted money from a billfold therein. "Let them lie where they fall."
"But the owner—surely for the sake of his feelings, we should..."
"His feelings?" Faust smirked. "Fourteen innocent men languish in jail because of this ogre. Another three are dead by his direct orders, and twenty more by the action of policies he approved. Two years ago he had not a penny—what you see now is but a fraction of his wealth. You must have wondered why we found the garb of two men in a room that will hold but one. The last mayor was scourged and driven out of town naked. His clothes were cleaned and kept as a trophy." He handed Wagner a pair of shirt-studs. "I think we need not concern ourselves about this gentleman's feelings."
On the way out, he made a brief detour into a garden-shed built up against the house like a lean-to. There was a can full of petroleum spirits there. He poured it on the floor. "That will suffice."
"What are you doing?"
"We have been reported to the NPs—les flics, as the frogs call them. They'll be coming after us soon if we don't give them something to better occupy their attention." He struck a match. "Stand back."
They drove out of town with Reims afire behind them. As they sped into the countryside, the smoke rose up and filled the sky.
They journeyed through the night, bumping and rattling over nightmarish dirt roads. Large rocks, dangerous holes, fallen tree limbs were forever gliding into their headlights. Where bridges had washed away through neglect or sabotage, they had to coax the automobile through crude fords. They did not make good time.
From radio broadcasts overheard in passing and newspapers bought on the fly, Wagner had learned that Faust's sudden departure had precipitated a financial crisis in the City of London. Had Wycliffe anticipated that—or the depression that many commentators said must inevitably ensue—the English spy-master would surely never have extended his grudging aid.
Well, it was too late now.
The markets were collapsing. The vast bubble of speculation upon which European prosperity was built had burst, and the very people who had been most anxious to be rid of Faust were now paying the price for his absence.
Midmorning the next day they stopped to patch a blown tire in a mud-daubed village where no work was being done. Every farmer and laborer was in the tavern, gathered heavily about the radio, shaking their heads in glum satisfaction at the news reports, spitting on the floor, and wondering aloud how long it would take for the all-devouring crisis to reach them.
They all came out to watch and offer suggestions as Wagner worked. By the time he had the tire back on, he was out of sorts, drenched with sweat, and completely exhausted. Faust disappeared into the tavern and came back with a bottle full of white pills. "Here," he said. "Take one."
"What are they?"
' 'Amphetamines.''
They rode with the canvas roof down, popping a steady stream of pills to keep themselves going. At first the drug imparted a crystalline clarity and edge to the ride. They motored through an eternal afternoon and into an interminably beautiful sunset in a silence that was as crisp and communicative as the best conversation. The air flowed over their faces like cool water, cleansing and enhancing their senses.
Sometime during the night, however, Wagner began to hallucinate. He drifted in and out of reality, never quite sure which side of it he was on. Once he awoke to discover that the car he was in was not the car he remembered from Reims.
He wanted to ask how that change had come about, but somehow he could not properly phrase the question. The world was fragmenting about him.
Faust was talking and had clearly been talking for some time. "Every vow I ever made, Wagner, every resolve and ideal I have ever had, is broken or violated. I swear it—no man has ever been so untrue to himself as I am now. Yet for Gretchen's sake I would do worse. That is the true measure of love, you see, the evil one will stoop to for its sake ..."
But he was distracted by Faust's demon, a tiny red imp with a barbed tail, trunks, and a pitchfork that capered upon the dashboard. It was trying to tell him something, but its voice was too high and small, like a mosquito's, for comprehension. He blinked and white doves swarmed down from the darkness to batter against his face and break up into nothing.
Snow, he thought. But that was wrong. It was too early for snow, surely. The wheel was in his hands, he was driving, and Faust sat in the seat beside him, head thrown back, mouth open. He was snoring.
Sometime later—earlier?—he shook his head and discovered he was sitting in a field of grass. The moon hung full and round in the sky and Faust sat in a chair nearby. He was smoking a cigar and grinning.
"Master," Wagner said groggily, "what is happening?"
"We ran out of gasoline. More is being fetched from a nearby village."
"Why—why are ... ?"
In the field about them were pale white shapes, men and women coupling in every conceivable position and combination. Shocked, Wagner looked to Faust and saw that though still elegantly dressed from the waist up, he was not wearing any trousers.
"It's the Festival of the Horned Man. I convinced these people that I should preside."
"I don't understand."
Faust was wearing a sort of crown with two short horns. He reached up to adjust it. Complacently, he said, "Old religions die hard."
A woman, naked and startlingly buxom, approached to kneel before Faust's throne. He stood and presented his hindquarters to her. She reverently kissed both cheeks. Then, when he turned back, she stood, bent, and offered her own buttocks to him. He leaped forward and mounted her like a goat. The revelers had paused in their doings to watch. Now they cheered. The cigar was still clenched in his mouth.
Surely that had never happened. It must have been a hallucination.
Faust was driving again, and raving. "... beyond the certainty of France, into lands where no man speaks one language but all of necessity are multilingual. The traveler can never know here what nation he is in, things are so uncertain in these regions, where the boundaries flicker and no map is accurate for long. The border countries have been political coinage so long, and passed hands so many times, that their faces are worn smooth. Look into the eyes of the people here— sometimes French, sometimes German, often conquered, ceded, married into, given over, and yet somehow never possessed by themselves—and you will see nothing. They are a cautious folk, suspicious, silent, intimidated. You can never know which of them are dangerous and which are not, for they all share this same look." He turned to Wagner. "Take over the wheel. I am going to sleep in the backseat."
It was broad daylight when they arrived in Metz. They booked a room in a tavern and slept until it was light again. Then, dressed for travel, they took their bags downstairs and ordered a breakfast of sausages, turnips, and beer.
They were just finishing up when a man in the uniform of the French national police entered the tavern. Customers tensed as he approached, and quietly got up to leave as he passed them by. He came to their booth.
"You are English," he said.
"I am a citizen of a free imperial city," Faust replied icily, "and this is my servant. You have no jurisdiction over us. Nor is this France. Here, you have no authority to do anything."
"The Directorate does not acknowledge such legal niceties," the policeman said. He had glanced briefly at Wagner, judged him negligible, and then focused all his attention on Faust. "I am looking for two Englishmen. You must come with me for questioning."
"Do I look English? Do I sound English?"
"You are clearly out of your proper place. That is enough."
The man seized Faust's arm. Wagner, terrified, looked to his master for guidance, and saw those unblinking eyes looking directly back into his. His skull was buzzing. The night's sleep had not undone the effects of fatigue. The inside of his mouth tasted odd &nd coppery.
"Kill him," Faust said.
Wagner's gun came out of his coat pocket. He shot the man in the side, below the ribs. Flecks of blood spattered his hand, warm as piss and redder than apples. The policeman wrenched away, staring down at the wound. He crumpled without saying anything. His body lay stretched out upon the floor. To the far end of the room the taverner's mouth was a perfect O. It had all happened so suddenly.
Wagner stared down at the body. Then he raised his hand and flexed the fingers. The droplets of blood glistened like gems tones.
A wondering, exulting guilt expanded within him.
In Mannheim, they stayed in a hotel. Mercifully, Faust did not feel the need to have the other rooms on their floor emptied of inhabitants. When Wagner had suggested they might do so, he had simply rolled his eyes.
"You are right, you are right," Faust muttered. "I should have listened to you. And I will. But only long enough to bring my Gretchen away with me. I have no other use for you."
Lying on his side of the bed, Wagner uncapped his pen. His hands trembled and there were—when had that happened?—ink stains on his fingers.
From Metz we made our way to Saarbriicken. This strange journey has become for me a voyage of self-discovery. I have learned so much, so very much. THERE ARE NO LIMITATIONS. Underline that. I find that I am capable of anything. Anything at all. Just yesterday I seemed an ordinary sort of fellow. Now I know the transforming power of experience.
We hired a boat to transport our automobile down the Rhine to Mannheim. During the trip, I studied the Magister's face. The eyes, I noticed, are NOT EXACTLY
BALANCED. One is always a little nobler, the other a
trifle more knowing!!! THIS IS SIGNIFICANT! It tells so
Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick Page 25