Against the Day (128 page)

   
“Familiar
name.”

   
“I
should think so. One of your American demigods.”

   
“And
he’s over here now?”

“
Tesoro,
sooner or later
everyone is. This Vibe person has been buying up Renaissance art in what even
for an American is indecent haste. His next target according to the gossip is
Venice. Perhaps he’ll buy
it
as well. Is he a

friend of yours? I can’t quite imagine that, but we shall be
in Venice soon, and then perhaps you’ll introduce us.”

   
“Didn’t
know I was invited along.”

She gave him a look and, possibly by
way of formal invitation, reached for his penis.

Philippe was an
alumnus
of the infamous
children’s prison in Paris known as the Petite Roquette, and had gained an
early appreciation of institutional spaces. He had become especially partial to
cathedrals, and liked to think of this mountain as such a transcendent
structure, with the tunnel as its apse. “In a cathedral what looks solid never
is. Walls are hollow inside. Columns contain winding staircases. This apparently
solid mountain is really a collection of hot springs, caves, fissures,
passageways, one hidingplace within another—and the Tatzelwurms know it
all intimately. They are the priesthood of their own dark religion—” He
was interrupted by a scream.

   
“
Ndih
’më!
” It
was
coming from a little side gallery.
“
Nxito!
”

Reef ran into the smell of newmilled
pine shoring and saw the Tatzelwurm, much bigger than he’d been led to expect,
standing over Ramiz. The critter was depending on its looks to intimidate its
victims, hypnotize them into some kind of compliance with their fate, and it
seemed to be working on the Albanian. “Hey, Ace!” Reef yelled. The Tatzelwurm
whipped its head around and stared him full in the eyes.
Now I have seen
you,
was the message,
now you are next on my list.
Reef looked for
something to hit it with. Drill bit in his hand was worn too short, nearest
picks and shovels weren’t near enough, looked like his only bet was close
quarters with the jacking hammer. By the time he’d figured this out, something
had gone funny with the light, shadows had appeared where they shouldn’t have
been, and the Tatzelwurm had disappeared.

Ramiz had been working in his
underwear and had a long gash on his leg that was bleeding pretty good. “Better
get back to the
spital,
”
Reef
said, “get that seen to. Can you walk on it?”

   
“I
think so.”

Philippe and a couple of others had
shown up. “Be right with you all,” Reef said, “just want to make sure it’s
gone.”

“Here.” Philippe tossed him a
Mannlicher eightshot, which Reef could tell by the balance had a full magazine.
He carefully stepped into the shadows.

“Hello, Reef.” It seemed to leap out
of the rockface, condensed in a kinetic blur of lethal muscle and claw,
screaming as it came.

“Holy
shit.” With the Tatzelwurm about a foot away, Reef had just time to squeeze off
a shot, whereupon the critter exploded in a great green foulsmelling cloud of
blood and tissue. He fired again just on general principles.

   
“Green
blood?” said Reef later, after a long shower.

   
“Did
we forget to mention that?” said Philippe.

   
“It
spoke my name.”

   
“Ah,
bien
sûr.
”

   
“I
heard it, Philippe.”

“You have saved my life,” declared
Ramiz, “and though we would both much prefer to forget the whole matter, I am
now obliged, someday, somehow, to repay you. An Albanian never forgets.”

   
“Thought
that was an elephant.”

He worked through to the end of the
shift, showered again, unlocked his private pulleyrope, lowered his clothes
from the overhead, hung his wet working gear on the hook, raised it again and
padlocked the rope, got dressed, just like any other day. But this time he went
in the office and collected his pay, and trudged down into Domodossola and
didn’t look back. They had been good friends, that crew. It was a busy period
of history. He might get to see some of them again.

It was said
that great tunnels like the Simplon
or St.Gotthard were haunted, that when the train entered and the light of the
world, day or night, had to be abandoned for the time of passage however brief,
and the mineral roar made conversation impossible, then certain spirits who
once had chosen to surrender into the fierce intestinal darkness of the
mountain would reappear among the paying passengers, take empty seats, drink
negligibly from the engraved glassware in the dining cars, assume themselves
into the rising shapes of tobacco smoke, whisper a propaganda of memory and
redemption to salesmen, tourists, the resolutely idle, the uncleansably rich,
and other practitioners of forgetfulness, who could not sense the visitors with
anything like the clarity of fugitives, exiles, mourners, and spies—all
those, that is, who had reached agreement, even occasions of intimacy, with
Time.

Some
of them, rarely but never quite by accident, were known to engage a passenger
in conversation. Reef was alone in the smoking car, some nameless black hour,
when a not entirely opaque presence appeared in the plush seat opposite.

“What
could you have been thinking?” he inquired. It was a voice Reef had not heard
before but recognized nonetheless.

“About
what?”

“You
have a wife and child to look after and a father to avenge, and here you are in
some damn lounge suit you didn’t pay for, smoking Havanas you wouldn’t
ordinarily even know how to find, much less afford, in the company of a woman
who has never had a thought that didn’t originate down there between her legs.”

“Pretty direct.”

“What happened to you? You were a
promising young dynamiter, your father’s son, sworn to alter the social
terrain, and now you’re hardly much better than the people you used to want to
blow up. Look at them. Too much money and idle time, too little fucking
compassion, Reef.”

“I earned this. I put in my time.”

“But you’ll never earn these folks’s
respect or even any credibility. It’s never going to get much better than contempt.
Clear all the happy horseshit out of your mind, try to remember what Webb
looked like, at least. Then turn your thoughts to the man who had him murdered.
Scarsdale Vibe is in easy reach right now. Scarsdale
howaboutyouallgoliveinshitanddieyoungso’sIcanstayinbighotelsandspendmillionsonfineart
Vibe. Look him up when you’re down there in Venice, Italy. Better yet, sight
him in. You can still stop all this idle fuckfuck, turn around, and get back to
yourself again.”

   
“Assuming
for the sake of argument—”

   
“We’re
coming out of the tunnel. I have to be someplace else.”

it and Yashmeen walked up from the little hotel in Intra,
along the shore of the lake, to the churchyard at Biganzano, where Riemann’s
grave was. Saloon steamers, private launches, and sailboats could be seen
through the trees, out on the lake. Carriages and cargo wagons passed along the
road. The tramontana blew her hair back from her face. Kit couldn’t keep from
looking at her every step or two, though he’d rather’ve been staring into the
sun.

They had made the same journey as
Riemann, who had arrived here in June of 1866 on his third and last visit, for
which Göttingen professors Wilhelm Weber and Baron von Waltershausen had
obtained some money from the government. Riemann knew he was dying. If he
thought he was fleeing anything, it could not have been the hungry mouth of
death, for this was in the middle of what would be known as the Seven Weeks’
War, and death was all around. Cassel and Hannover had fallen to the Prussians,
the Hannoverian army under von Arentschildt, twenty thousand strong, had
concentrated at Göttingen and begun to march south trying to escape the
Prussian columns converging on them but were stopped by von Flies at
Langensalza, and surrendered on June 29.

Not that Riemann would find Italy any
more tranquil. A bit to the east of Lago Maggiore, the final battle for the
Veneto, between Austria and Italy, was shaping up. He had passed from the
rationalized hell of the struggle for Germany into Sunny Italy and the summer
of Custozza, and nine thousand dead, and five thousand missing, and soon down
into his own casualtylist of one.

Forty years later on, their own
plunge through Deep Germany, into the folkdream behind the Black Forest, where
there was said to be room for a

hundred thousand troops and ten times as many elves, Kit and
Yashmeen had found themselves trying to spend as much time in the train as
possible. At Göttingen there had been at least the sense that one was still
connected, however tenuously, to the rest of Europe. But as they moved
southward and consonants began to grow blurry, presently there was much less to
engage the rational mind—instead, everywhere, elfgrottoes, castles, set
dramatically on pinnacles, to which there was no visible access, country people
in dirndls and peculiar green hats, Gothic churches, Gothic breweries, shadows
with undulating tails and moving wings passing across the valley floors. “Maybe
I need a drink,” said Kit. “Schnapps, something. How about you, my turtledove?”

“Call me that one more time in
public,” she advised serenely, “and I shall strike you with a piece of
furniture.”

Other passengers were enchanted.
“Aren’t they sweet,” wives observed, and husbands blessed them with pipesmoke.

At the HauptBahnhof in Frankfurt, the
largest railway station in Germany, known locally as “the Wonderstructure at
the Gallowsfield,” the station restaurant seemed to breathe hesitantly, as if
still not quite recovered from the Wagnerian moment five or six years earlier
when the brakes failed on an Orient Express engine and it jumped the tracks and
came crashing into the restaurant among the marble pillars and chandeliers and
chattering diners, another incursion into the bourgeois calm to join the
collapses of the Campanile in Venice and of the roof at the Charing Cross
Station in London only a year before, nonlethal equivalents of an Anarchist
bomb, though some believed equally laden with intent.

To Kit and Yashmeen, it seemed more
like the revenge of Deep Germany on the modern age of steam. They bought
sandwiches in the buffets and kept close to the train, clinging with increasing
desperation to the machinery of transport against the onset of a lassitude
thick as grease, a creeping surrender to the shameless German primitivism all
around them. Switzerland arrived just in time, rising before them like a lime
sorbet after a steady diet of roasted ducks and assorted goose products.

At Riemann’s
grave
she swept off her
hat and stood with her head bowed, allowing the mountain wind to do as it
wished with her hair. “No,” as if answering a voice which had just suggested
it, “I think I should not cry.” Kit waited with his hands in his pockets and a
respect for whatever it was that had her so in its grasp.

“In Russia, when I was a small
child,” Yashmeen continued after a while, “I should not remember it now, but I
do, wanderers, wildlooking men, came to

our doors seeking shelter as if they
were entitled to it. They were the
stranniki
—once, they had led
everyday lives like other men, had their families and work, houses filled with
furniture, children’s toys, pots and pans, clothes, all the tack of domestic
life. Then one day they simply turned—walked out through the door and
away from that, from all of it—whatever had held them there, history,
love, betrayals forgiven or not, property, nothing mattered now, they were no
longer responsible to the world, let alone the Tsar— only God could claim
them, their only allegiance was to God. In my little town, and it was said all
over Russia, families had dug secret rooms beneath their houses, where these
men could rest on their journeys. The Government feared them more than it
feared Social Democrats, more than bombthrowers, ‘Very dangerous,’ Papa assured
us—we knew he didn’t mean dangerous to us—we also understood it was
our duty to help them in their passage. Their holy mission. Even with them down
under the house, we slept as peacefully as we ever did. Perhaps more so. We
told each other stories about them, ambassadors from some mysterious country
very far away, unable to return to that homeland because the way back was
hidden. They had to keep wandering the world whose deceptions and melodramas,
blood and desire, we had begun to sense, perhaps not seeking anything with a
name, perhaps only wandering. People called them
podpol’niki,
underground
men. Floors that had once been solid and simple became veils over another
world. It was not the day we knew that provided the
stranniki
their
light.”