“And then follow him, eh. Game is afoot, ha, ha.”
“Oh, he’ll go to Scheissvogel’s. We’ve advised him to keep the rendezvous, and whether he’s straight or not he’ll meet the old man. At least if he’s playing his game the way we think he is.”
“And the Gaucho?”
“Give him another hour. Then if he wants to escape, let him.”
“Chancy, Mr. Stencil.”
“Enough, Moffit. Back in the chorus line.”
“Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” said Moffit, soft-shoeing out the door. Stencil heaved a sigh, leaned forward in the chair and recommenced his dart game. Soon a second hit, two inches from the first, had transfigured the Minister into a lopsided goat. Stencil gritted his teeth. “Pluck, lad,” he muttered. “Before the girl arrives the old bastard should look like a blooming hedgehog.”
Two cells away there was a loud morra game in progress. Outside the window, somewhere, a girl sang about her love, killed defending his homeland in a faraway war.
“She’s singing for the tourists,” the Gaucho complained bitterly, “she must be. No one ever sings in Florence. No one ever used to. Except now and again the Venezuelan friends I told you about. But they sing marching songs, which are useful for morale.”
Evan stood by the cell door, leaning his forehead against the bars. “You may no longer have any Venezuelan friends,” he said. “They’ve probably all been rounded up and pushed into the sea.”
The Gaucho came over and gripped Evan’s shoulder sympathetically. “You are still young,” he said; “I know how it must have been. That’s the way they work. They attack a man’s spirit. You will see your father again. I will see my friends. Tonight. We’re going to stage the most wonderful festa this city has seen since Savonarola was burned.”
Evan looked around hopelessly at the small cell, the heavy bars. “They told me I might be released soon. But you stand a fat chance of doing anything tonight. Except lose sleep.”
The Gaucho laughed. “I think they will release me too. I told them nothing. I’m used to their ways. They are stupid, and easily gotten round.”
Evan clenched the bars furiously. “Stupid! Not only stupid. Deranged. Illiterate. Some bungling clerk misspelled my name Gadrulfi, and they refused to call me anything else. It was an alias, they said. Did it not say Gadrulfi in my dossier? Was it not down in black and white?”
“Ideas are so novel to them. Once they get hold of one, having the vague idea it is somehow precious, they wish to keep possession of it.”
“If that were all. But someone in the higher echelons had got the idea Vheissu was a code name for Venezuela. Either that or it was the same bloody clerk, or his brother, who never learned to spell.”
“They asked me about Vheissu,” the Gaucho mused. “What could I say? This time I really knew nothing. The English consider it important.”
“But they don’t tell you why. All they give you are mysterious hints. The Germans are apparently in on it. The Antarctic is concerned in some way. Perhaps in a matter of weeks, they say, the whole world will be plunged into apocalypse. And they think I am in on it. And you. Why else, if they are going to release us anyway, did they throw us into the same cell? We’ll be followed wherever we go. Here we are, in the thick of a grand cabal, and we haven’t the slightest notion of what’s going on.”
“I hope you didn’t believe them. Diplomatic people always talk that way. They are living always on the verge of some precipice or other. Without a crisis they wouldn’t be able to sleep nights.”
Evan turned slowly to face his companion. “But I do believe them,” he said calmly. “Let me tell you. About my father. He would sit in my room, before I went to sleep, and spin yarns about this Vheissu. About the spider-monkeys, and the time he saw a human sacrifice, and the rivers whose fish are sometimes opalescent and sometimes the color of fire. They circle round you when you go in to bathe and dance a kind of elaborate ritual all about, to protect you from evil. And there are volcanoes with cities inside them which once every hundred years erupt into flaming hell but people go to live in them anyway. And men in the hills with blue faces and women in the valleys who give birth to nothing but sets of triplets, and beggars who belong to guilds and hold jolly festivals and entertainments all summer long.
“You know how a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he’d had for some time that his father is not a god, not even an oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such faith. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairy tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father.
“I thought Captain Hugh was mad; I would have signed the commitment papers myself. But at Piazza della Signoria 5 I was nearly killed in something that could not have been an accident, a caprice of the inanimate world; and from then till now I have seen two governments hagridden to alienation over this fairy tale or obsession I thought was my father’s own. As if this condition of being just human, which had made Vheissu and my boy’s love for him a lie, were now vindicating them both for me, showing them to have been truth all along and after all. Because the Italians and the English in those consulates and even that illiterate clerk are all men. Their anxiety is the same as my father’s, what is coming to be my own, and perhaps in a few weeks what will be the anxiety of everyone living in a world none of us wants to see lit into holocaust. Call it a kind of communion, surviving somehow on a mucked-up planet which God knows none of us like very much. But it is our planet and we live on it anyway.”
The Gaucho did not answer. He walked to the window, stood gazing out. The girl was singing now about a sailor, halfway round the world from home and his betrothed. From down the corridor floated cries: “Cinque, tre, otto, brrrr!” Soon the Gaucho put his hands to his neck, removed his collar. He came back to Evan.
“If they let you out,” he said, “in time to see your father, there is also at Scheissvogel’s a friend of mine. His name is Cuernacabrón. Everyone knows him there. I would esteem it a favor if you would take him this, a message.” Evan took the collar and pocketed it absently. A thought occurred to him.
“But they will see your collar missing.”
The Gaucho grinned, stripped off his shirt and tossed it under a bunk. “It is warm, I will tell them. Thank you for reminding me. It’s not easy for me to think like a fox.”
“How do you propose to get out?”
“Simply. When the turnkey comes to let you out, we beat him unconscious, take his keys, fight our way to freedom.”
“If both of us get away, should I still take the message?”
“Sì. I must first go to Via Cavour. I will be at Scheissvogel’s later, to see some associates on another matter. Un gran colpo, if things work right.”
Soon footsteps, jangling keys approached down the corridor. “He reads our minds,” the Gaucho chuckled. Evan turned to him quickly, clasped his hand.
“Good luck.”
“Put down your bludgeon, Gaucho,” the turnkey called in a cheerful voice. “You are to be released, both of you.”
“Ah, che fortuna,” said the Gaucho mournfully. He went back to the window. It seemed that the girl’s voice could be heard all over April. The Gaucho stood on tiptoe. “Un’ gazz’!” he screamed.
VIII
Around Italian spy circles the latest joke was about an Englishman who cuckolded his Italian friend. The husband came home one night to find the faithless pair in flagrante delicto on the bed. Enraged, he pulled out a pistol and was about to take revenge when the Englishman held up a restraining hand. “I say old chap,” he said loftily, “we’re not going to have any dissension in the ranks, are we? Think what this might do to the Quadruple Alliance.”
The author of this parable was one Ferrante, a drinker of absinthe and destroyer of virginity. He was trying to grow a beard. He hat
ed politics. Like a few thousand other young men in Florence he fancied himself a neo-Machiavellian. He took the long view, having only two articles of faith: (a) the Foreign Service in Italy was irreparably corrupt and nitwit, and (b) someone should assassinate Umberto I. Ferrante had been assigned to the Venezuelan problem for half a year and was beginning to see no way out of it except suicide.
That evening he was wandering around secret police headquarters with a small squid in one hand, looking for someplace to cook it. He’d just bought it at the market, it was for supper. The hub of spy activities in Florence was the second floor of a factory which made musical instruments for devotees of the Renaissance and Middle Ages. It was run nominally by an Austrian named Vogt, who worked painstakingly during the daylight hours putting together rebecs, shawms and theorbos, and spied at night. In the legal or everyday segment of his life he employed as helpers a Negro named Gascoigne who would bring in his friends from time to time to test out the instruments, and Vogt’s mother, an incredibly aged butterball of a woman who was under the curious illusion that she’d had an affair with Palestrina in her girlhood. She would be constantly haranguing visitors with fond reminiscences about “Giovannino,” these being mostly colorful allegations of sexual eccentricity in the composer. If these two were in on Vogt’s espionage activities, no one was aware of it, not even Ferrante, who made it his business to spy on his colleagues as well as any more appropriate quarry. Vogt, however, being Austrian, could probably be given credit for discretion. Ferrante had no faith in covenants, he regarded them as temporary and more often than not farcical. But he reasoned that as long as you’d made an alliance in the first place you might as well comply with its rules as long as was expedient. Since 1882, then, Germans and Austrians had been temporarily acceptable. But English most assuredly not. Which had given rise to his joke about the cuckolded husband. He saw no reason for cooperating with London on this matter. It was a plot, he suspected, on Britain’s part, to force a wedge into the Triple Alliance, to divide the enemies of England so that England could deal with them separately and at her leisure.
He descended into the kitchen. Horrible screeching noises were coming from inside. Naturally leery of anything deviating from his private norm, Ferrante dropped quietly to hands and knees, crawled cautiously up behind the stove and peered around it. It was the old woman, playing some sort of air on a viola da gamba. She did not play very well. When she saw Ferrante she put the bow down and glared at him.
“A thousand pardons, signora,” Ferrante said, getting to his feet. “I did not mean to interrupt the music. I was wondering if I might borrow a skillet and some oil. My supper. Which will take no more than a few minutes.” He waved the squid at her placatingly.
“Ferrante,” she croaked abruptly, “this is no time for subtlety. Much is at stake.”
Ferrante was taken aback. Had she been snooping? Or merely in her son’s confidence? “I do not understand,” he replied cautiously.
“That is nonsense,” she retorted. “The English know something you did not. It all began with this silly Venezuelan business, but by accident, unaware, your colleagues have stumbled on something so vast and terrifying that they are afraid even to speak its name aloud.”
“Perhaps.”
“Is it not true, then, that the young Gadrulfi has testified to Herr Stencil that his father believes there to be agents of Vheissu present in this city?”
“Gadrulfi is a florist,” said Ferrante impassively, “whom we have under surveillance. He is associated with partners of the Gaucho, an agitator against the legally constituted government of Venezuela. We have followed them to this florist’s establishment. You have got your facts confused.”
“More likely you and your fellow spies have got your names confused. I suppose you are maintaining as well this ridiculous fiction that Vheissu is a code name for Venezuela.”
“That is the way it appears in our files.”
“You are clever, Ferrante. You trust no one.”
He shrugged. “Can I afford to?”
“I suppose not. Not when a barbaric and unknown race, employed by God knows whom, are even now blasting the Antarctic ice with dynamite, preparing to enter a subterranean network of natural tunnels, a network whose existence is known only to the inhabitants of Vheissu, the Royal Geographic Society in London, Herr Godolphin, and the spies of Florence.”
Ferrante stood suddenly breathless. She was paraphrasing the secret memorandum Stencil had sent back to London not an hour ago.
“Having explored the volcanoes of their own region,” she went on, “certain natives of the Vheissu district were the first to become aware of these tunnels, which lace the earth’s interior at depths varying—”
“Aspetti!” Ferrante cried. “You are raving.”
“Tell the truth,” she said sharply. “Tell me what Vheissu is really the code name for. Tell me, you idiot, what I already know: that it stands for Vesuvius.” She cackled horribly.
He was breathing with difficulty. She had guessed or spied it out or been told. She was probably safe. But how could he say: I detest politics, no matter if they are international or only within a single department. And the politics which have led to this worked the same way and are equally as detestable. Everyone had assumed that the code word referred to Venezuela, a routine matter, until the English informed them that Vheissu actually existed. There was testimony from young Gadrulfi, corroborating data already obtained from the Geographic Society and the Board of Inquiry fifteen years ago, about the volcanoes. And from then on fact had been added to meager fact and the censorship of that single telegram had avalanched into a harrowing afternoon-long session of give-and-take, of logrolling, bullying, factions and secret votes until Ferrante and his chief had to face the sickening truth of the matter: that they must league with the English in view of a highly probable common peril. That they could hardly afford not to.
“It could stand for Venus, for all I know,” he said. “Please, I cannot discuss the matter.” The old woman laughed again and began to saw away once more on her viola da gamba. She watched Ferrante contemptuously as he took down a skillet from a hook in the wall above the stove, poured olive oil into it and poked the embers into flame. When the oil began to sizzle, he placed his squid carefully in it, like an offering. He suddenly found himself sweating, though the stove gave off no great heat. Ancient music whined in the room, echoed off its walls. Ferrante let himself wonder, for no good reason, if it had been composed by Palestrina.
IX
Adjoining the prison which Evan had recently vacated, and not far from the British Consulate, are two narrow streets, Via del Purgatorio and Via dell’Inferno, which intersect in a T whose long side parallels the Arno. Victoria stood in this intersection, the night gloomy about her, a tiny erect figure in white dimity. She was trembling as if she waited for some lover. They had been considerate at the Consulate; more than that, she had seen the dull pounding of some knowledge heavy behind their eyes, and known all at once that old Godolphin had indeed been wrung by a “terrible need,” and that her intuition had once more been correct. Her pride in this faculty was an athlete’s pride in his strength or skill; it had once told her, for example, that Goodfellow was a spy and not a casual tourist; more, had revealed to her all at once a latent talent of her own for espionage. Her decision to help Godolphin came not out of any romantic illusion about spying—in that business she saw mostly ugliness, little glamour—but rather because she felt that skill or any virtù was a desirable and lovely thing purely for its own sake; and it became more effective the further divorced it was from moral intention. Though she would have denied it, she was one with Ferrante, with the Gaucho, with Signor Mantissa; like them she would act, when occasion arose, on the strength of a unique and private gloss on The Prince. She overrated virtù, individual agency, in much the same way Signor Mantissa overrated the fox. Perhaps one day one of them mi
ght ask: what was the tag-end of an age if not that sort of imbalance, that tilt toward the more devious, the less forceful?
She wondered, standing stone-still at the crossroads, whether the old man had trusted her, had waited after all. She prayed that he had, less perhaps from concern for him than from some obvoluted breed of self-aggrandizement which read the conforming of events to the channels she’d set out for them as glorious testimony to her own skill. One thing she had avoided—probably because of the supernatural tinge men acquired in her perception—was the schoolgirlish tendency to describe every male over the age of fifty as “sweet,” “dear,” or “nice.” Dormant in every aged man she saw rather his image regressed twenty or thirty years, like a wraith which nearly merged outlines with its counterpart: young, potent, possessing mighty sinews and sensitive hands. So that in Captain Hugh it had been the young version she wished to help and make a part of the vast system of channels, locks and basins she had dug for the rampant river Fortune.
If there were, as some doctors of the mind were beginning to suspect, an ancestral memory, an inherited reservoir of primordial knowledge which shapes certain of our actions and casual desires, then not only her presence here and now between purgatory and hell, but also her entire commitment to Roman Catholicism as needful and plausible stemmed from and depended on an article of the primitive faith which glimmered shiny and supreme in that reservoir like a crucial valve-handle: the notion of the wraith or spiritual double, happening on rare occasions by multiplication but more often by fission, and the natural corollary which says the son is doppelgänger to the father. Having once accepted duality Victoria had found it only a single step to Trinity. And having seen the halo of a second and more virile self flickering about old Godolphin, she waited now outside the prison while somewhere to her right a girl sang lonely, telling a tale of hesitation, between a rich man who was old and a young man who was fair.
At length she heard the prison door open, heard his footsteps begin to approach down a narrow alleyway, heard the door slam to again. She dug the point of her parasol into the ground beside one tiny foot and gazed down at it. He was upon her before she realized it, nearly colliding with her. “I say,” he exclaimed.
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