Against the Day (136 page)

   
“Manly
as they come, little or no patience with anything else.”

“Crikey,
my very type of chap. Are you still as fond of booking insane bets as you were
in your Newmarket period? At the right odds, I’ll wager I could seduce any of
that manly brigade you’d care to choose. Take no more than one evening.”

Within the week
Ratty had set him up an appointment with Derrick Theign, a tall and careworn
functionary, from his accent stationed out here, perhaps, actually, for a while
now. “I suppose I do enjoy it here, more than one ought, so I’ve been told.
Though with field reports up to one’s ears, where one possibly finds time, for
any of
. . .
well, the other, that’s
if one fancied that sort of thing, which of course one doesn’t, much.”

   
“ ‘
Much.’ Oh, dear.”

“But I must say I
am
ever so
frightfully keen on these chocolate and raspberry articles—would you mind
if we obtained
. . .
perhaps several
of them actually, not to take
along,
you see, but to
eat here,
even
if it’s rather
more quickly
than may be considered—”

“Derrick, if I may so address
you—I’m not giving you ‘nerves’? Little nondescript, unthreatening me?
Hadn’t we better—”

   
“No,
not at all, it’s just the
. . .
hmm.
Dash it all. Then again . . .”

   
“Yes
do go on, please—‘the’ what?”

   
“The
maquillage, you know. I’m finding it—”

“Oh I say, did I get my eyes wrong
again? I’m always doing that. Which side is it tonight?”

   
“No,
no, they’re fine, in fact it all looks
. . .
well, smashing actually.”

   
“Why,
Derrick.”

   
“I
mean, do you do it yourself? or does someone else?”

“You must have heard of Zsuzsa, no?
well, I spent most of this afternoon in her salon, she’s really the only one to
see when—you know how you get those little premonitions that you’re about
to meet someone it won’t be lost on—”

“Good—that’s the smile I want,
exactly, now hold it just like that and don’t be alarmed, but we are not, at
the moment, unobserved.”

   
“Where?”

   
“Just
passing by
. . .
there.”

   
“Ah.”

“They’ve been back and forth now more
than once—unless I’m mistaken, they’re out of Misha and Grisha’s atelier.
You have got in with a colorful crowd, Latewood. Now
. . .
in a moment they’ll turn and start back, by which point
I’d better have my hand on your leg—will that be any sort of problem for
you?”

   
“Well.
. . which leg were you thinking of, Derrick?”

   
“Yes
. . .
here they are again.”

   
“Hmm
. . .”

“Presently, and as naturally as
possible, we shall get up and leave together, allowing them to follow us. Do
you know the Hotel Neue Mutzenbacher, near the Imperial Stables?”

“Know
of
it.
Rather a museum of bad
taste, wouldn’t dream of going
in
there, personally.”

   
“Really.
Always seemed a jolly enough place to me.”

   
“ ‘
Always,’ Derrick? You are
. . .
an habitué of. . . of the Mutzi,
then?”

“Its décor is more than made up for
by its most useful A.M.E., or Alternate Means of Egress, that’s if you don’t
mind some sewage.”

“One develops a tolerance
. . .
though look here, if your own lot
use it, mightn’t it be known to old M. and G. as well?”

“Still, they’d have to wait outside
for a bit, wouldn’t they, to make sure, before they went crashing in.”

   
“Make
sure of—”

   
“My
own authenticity in this.”

   
“And
that would take how long?”

“Dunno.
Long enough, one hopes. How long do your rendezvous last on average, Cyprian?”

“Hours and hours sometimes. Depending
on how infatuated he is, of course.”

“Yes though as many must become
quickly bored— ah jolly good and there’s the Stiftskaserne, not much
farther now
. . . .
”

The
Fiaker
took them
southward toward the reddened fraction of moon, lights of
the city converging behind them, the driver humming to himself appropriate
Fiakerlieder
but refraining from bursting into full song.

   
“This
isn’t the way to the station.”

   
“To
the SüdBahnhof, it is.”

“But
that’s for Trieste, not for home. Derrick? I don’t want to go to Trieste
. . .
I was supposed to be going quite the
other direction, wasn’t I, toward Ostend, toward . . .” He could not quite
repeat “home.”

“With
luck they will also assume we want the Ostend Express—so perhaps they
will have pulled their people over to the Staatsbahn. Classic misdirectional
exercise, sit back, not to worry, eventually we’ll have you headed the right
way. If that’s what you really want. Here are your tickets, transit documents,
letter of credit, spot of the ready—”

   
“A
thousand Kreuzer? That isn’t even ten quid.”

   
“Dear,
dear. What was your customary fee again?”

Cyprian
stared back boldly. “The least one can get by on in Vienna is thirty K. per
day.”

“Out
where you’ll be, I imagine you’ll find life less expensive. As to ‘home
’ ”
—passing electric lamplight flaring
at intervals, like a prison searchlight, off his eyeglasslenses—“you
might take some time to consider how congruent with ‘England’ that word can be
for you these days. Curiously, it may actually be safer for you in Trieste
. . .
or even
further east.
”

His
eyes were difficult to make out, but from the set of his shoulders and the
modulations of his lips, Cyprian could gather some of what he wasn’t saying.
After a moment’s psychorectal entertainment, “Among the Turks, I suppose you
mean.”

“Almost
a charming reflex, Latewood, were it not so predictable among your lot.
Yes—to retreat, not for the first time, from the dangerous polyphonies I
must deal with daily to these singlenote brothel tunes—it’s the Turks I
mean, with all their fabled equipment and so forth. Exactly.”

“Hmm.”
Cyprian gazed at the shadowsteeped operative. “You’re
entangled,
aren’t
you, or for the moment anyhow. It’s all right, I’m not surprised, you are
attractive in a battered sort of way.”

   
“Indeed.
It’s why all the sodomitic casefiles end up on my desk. Oh, but”—

shaking his head vigorously, as if
out of a trance—“was I complaining again? Frightfully sorry, sometimes it
just comes as you’d say
spurting out
like that—”

The Russians presented
little problem. “You’ve your choice of simple or qualified
Kuppelei,
Misha—”

   
“I’m
Grisha.”

“Whatever, it’s the only choice
you’ll be offered. Six months or five years. If you insist on being difficult,
we will produce documents showing that poor little Cyprian was your legal ward
at the time you led him, under false pretenses, into an immoral life—and
that can fetch you up to five years in a Habsburg prison, most likely confined
in a cell Belgian style, a pound and a half of bread a day, meat and soup on
occasion I’m told, better than being an average free man in your native Russia,
yet presenting perhaps a bleak lookout for an epicure of the rank you have come
to occupy
. . . .
”

At some point it was decided that
Cyprian could safely be told that his whereabouts and mediumterm plans, almost
before they’d been worked out in any detail, had all but routinely been passed
on to the Colonel, who, Cyprian had learned, by now specialized in south Slavic
politics as well as sexpractices, which were widely believed to include
irregularities of gender.

   
“CroatiaSlavonia!
But it’s his—”

   
“Yes?”

“His garden of delights. Sooner or
later he’s apt to visit, and then he’ll kill me, or one of those Russians will,
oh
thanks
Theign, just
ever
so
much.”

   
“I
shouldn’t worry about them. You’re not on their list anymore.”

   
“Since
when? And why not?”

“Disappointed? Since your Colonel was
arrested”—elaborately lifting out and consulting a Swiss calendar watch
in gunmetal and black porcelain— “actually, on Thursday last. I say, did
we forget to tell you? ever so sorry. No, he’s no longer in play. That chapter
is over. We have moved on. Though in the business, it is never too fanciful to
envision a reunion someday, especially as it seems he may, one must admit
inexplicably, have taken a fancy to you.”

   
“Not
even if England expects it, Theign.”

“Oh,” shrugging, “yes I am given to
understand that a spot of chastisement might come into it, fairly pro forma,
but little beyond that—”

“Not
these
people, for God’s
sake, even the silliest cretin on their list knows that if you turn, you die.
Chastisement. What bloody remote planet is it you’re from again?”

“We
know ‘these people,’ Latewood.”

   
Cyprian
grew thoughtful. “All important news, undoubtedly, but why tell me? Why not
keep me ignorant and afraid, as usual?”

   
“Say
that we were beginning to trust you.”

   
“He
chortles. Bitterly.”

   
“Say
it was even something you needed to know—”
  
“—for what you’re about to ask me to do.”

In Trieste
he
could at least imagine himself growing to some sort of manhood, perhaps even
into an Old Upper Adriatic Hand—a dangerous reverie, for he had soon
grown fairly sensible of how little he had to say in the matter of where he was
to be posted from then on. Yet what end to the drama could he’ve expected?
Foreign Section were using him as unquestionably as any of his former clients
had. The same
now say this, now wear this, do this.
If it was his
destiny, all along, to be an object of someone’s administration, why not just
join the Navy, some navy, and be done with it?

Derrick
Theign, whose code name out here was “Good Shepherd,” managed to come out every
few months or so, always an evening arrival and the same suite at the
Métropole, held for him since the days when it was also itself known as the
Buon Pastore—never for more than a night, and then he’d be off again, to
Semlin, over to Zagreb usually, and points east whose names were never spoken
aloud, less out of caution than fear. The meetings with Cyprian were never
about anything of moment, unless one included certain charged silences which
often would stretch uncomfortably as they sat drinking together among the red
plush and ormolu. Cyprian began to wonder if Theign weren’t actually finding
excuses to repeat this cycle of arriving, falling silent, getting what he must
imagine as some
grip on himself,
packing up abruptly the next day, and
leaving. It was an index of how far Cyprian’s insouciance had lapsed that he
never thought of simply asking his field supervisor what was afoot. When the
matter of Venice arose, he was taken by surprise.

   
“Venice.”

“Not
an unreasonable place for a listening post. It has occupied a fateful
geopolitical cusp ever since it lay at the ancient intersection of Western and
Eastern empires—as it still does in our day, though the empires have
mutated around it, the Prophet’s own still waiting their terrible moment, the
protection of Christ’s own falling now to Vienna and St. Petersburg, and the
newer empires far less pertinent to God, Prussia worshipping little beyond

military splendor, and Britain its
own mythic reflection, readjusted day to day in mirrors of faraway conquest.”

   
“Was
I asking?”

They were soon cozily, all but
domestically, established in a
pensione
in Santa Croce, within easy dash
of the train station and the Mestre bridge, gathered at the moment at a kitchen
table with a bottle of grappa and a tin of peculiar biscuits. Some sort of
strange sheep’smilk cheese from Crotona. Steamwhistles sounded outside.