Against the Day (142 page)

“Some hothead with a stiletto,” Dally
trying to keep from sounding too hopeful.

“Oh, perhaps not. But the risks she
takes, not necessarily the romantic sort—well . . .”

   
“It’s
all right, Hunter, I’d rather not know.”

   
“You’re
in no danger over there as long as you keep a sharp lookout.”

And something there did always seem
to be lurking, though Dally wasn’t sure what it was. Sometimes the Princess was
seen conferring spiritedly with Spongiatosta security details posted about the
streets nearby, whose livery bore the ancient family arms, a sponge couchant on
a field chequy with flames at the foot. She lingered in secluded alcoves with
tidied young women whose skills lay officially in the secretarial line, who
never visited the palazzo more than twice, not that Dally was counting,
exactly. Who on departing cast back quizzical but not quite sorrowful gazes at
the Principessa’s bedroom windows. Hunter remained constant among her other
visitors, and if it was in any way to keep an eye on Dally, he was a gentleman
and stayed inconspicuous about it.

·
    
·
    
·

Someplace out on
the Atlantic between New York and Göttingen, Kit had half come to hope that
someday, in some dreamed future, when his silence had grown plausible to Pearl
Street, then would have been his moment to return, agent at last for Webb’s
vengeful ghost, return to daylit America, its practical affairs, its steadfast
denial of night. Where acts such as the one he contemplated were given no name
but “Terror,” because the language of that place—he might no longer say
“home”—possessed no others. But here was the hour, imminent, in a town he
was having trouble even making sense of. Sitting out in the Piazza with a
couple hundred others, drinking tiny cups of the bitter burned sludge these
folks called coffee, while pigeons sought jointly or severally the pearl gray
of the maritime sky, Kit wondered how more or less real Inner Asia was likely
to turn out than what he was looking at now. The town was supposed to’ve been
built on trade, but the Basilica San Marco was too insanely everything that
trade, in its strenuous irrelevance to dream, could never admit. The numbers of
commerce were “rational”—ratios of profit to loss, rates of
exchange—but among the set of real numbers, those that remained in the
spaces between—the “irrationals”—outnumbered those simple quotients
overwhelmingly. Something like that was going on here—it even showed up
in this strange, patternless subset of Venetian address numbers, which had
already got him lost more than once. He felt like a person familiar with only
real numbers watching a complex variable converge
. . . .

“What, you again? Alone with your
thoughts, don’t let me interrupt, just out gatherin my lunch.” Her hair like a
gong, redirecting his attention.

“Sorry about this morning, Dahlia.
Didn’t mean for you to go stomping off that way.”

   
“Me?
I never stomp. Grew out of my cowgirl boots a long time ago.”

“Listen, sit down, I’ll buy you somethin.
Actually, here’s Reef, let him buy you somethin.”

She looked around the field of little
tables quickly, as if she didn’t want to be recognized. “Does it have to be
Quadri?”

   
“Just
headed for the first empty seat.”

“This place has been tainted for fifty
years, ever since the Austrians all started comin here, back when they were
occupying the city. Nothin in this town’s ever done with. Try Lavena there
sometime, coffee’s better.”

“Say, Dahlia, thanks for the D. and
D. today there with ’Pert.” Reef, puffing on a Cavour, on the way someplace
else, joined them for a minute. “She tends to get a little insecure when they
look like you do, and it can go on for weeks.”

“Happy
to help. I think.” A silence fell. “Well,” Dally piped after a while, “you boys
are up to
something illegal,
I’ll bet! why, anybody can tell, just
looking at you.”

   
“Oh,”
Reef a little nervous it seemed, “we usually are.”

“You’re already sittin at the wrong
caffè, which leads an observer, and there’s enough of those, to calculate
you’re both strangers in town, maybe even short on resources.”

   
“We’re
really O.K.,” Reef muttered.

   
“I
might be able to help some.”

   
“Not
for this,” Kit said.

“See, it’s really dangerous,” Reef
explained, as if that would be enough to send her away.

“In which case you probably shouldn’t
be calling attention to yourself every time you move, or open your
mouth—me, on the other hand, I know how to go around unseen, unheard,
more important I know people here, who if they ain’t the exact ones you need,
they’ll know people that might be. But please, keep on like this on your own if
it’s what you want.”

Reef started in on his hatbrim, never
a good omen. “Tellin you straight out, we don’t have much money to throw
around.”

“I ain’t looking for your money, Mr.
Traverse—though I can’t speak for others in this town, ’cause it’s the
usual story, once upon a time people used to do favors for free, but not
lately.”

“Not even when it’s in the public
interest?” said Kit, getting him another of those cautionary looks from his
brother.

“Illegal, yet in the public interest.
My. Now what could that be? Let me think a minute.”

“Where’d you run into this one,” Reef
squinting at them both. “One of your old college ‘flames’?”

   
“Ha!”
exclaimed Kit and Dally, more or less together.

   
“She’s
on the square, Reefer.”

   
“You
already told me.”

Oh? Not having blushed for a while,
Dally figured this was not the moment either. Reef was looking at her
carefully. “Miss Rideout, it’s not my practice to force situations onto
people.”

“Especially li’l bitty American girls
look like they ain’t got a brain in their head, right?”

“Oh, now.” Reef put his hat back on
and stood. “Got to go run some ’Pertconnected chores, maybe we’ll talk later.
Areeferdirtcheap, kiddies.”

   
“What’d
he say?”

   
“Rounder
Italian, I think.”

Kit and Dally began to walk, Dally
putting her head into a tobacconist’s from time to time to light another
cigarette at the shop’s lamp. It was not, presently, their pace that
accelerated so much as a certain concentration between them, brought on in no
small measure by the city itself. She found them a secluded table in a garden
in back of a tiny
osteria
between the Rialto and Cannareggio. They ate a
polenta with squid in squid ink, and a zuppa di peoci that couldn’t be beat.
Once she would have thought, Our first “date”— now she was wondering
only, what in hell kind of trouble’s this boy got himself into now?

   
“Here
it is then.” Kit throwing down a glassful of grappa.

   
She
waited, her eyes wide open.

“This is what we come here to do. You
breathe a word and we’re all dead, right?”

   
“Deaf
and dumb,” she assured him.

   
“I’m
gonna tell you what it is. You ready?”

   
“Kit—”

   
“O.K.,
you know who Scarsdale Vibe is.”

   
“Sure.
Carnegie, Morgan, all them princes of capital.”

“Vibe is the one who . . .” he
paused, nodded to himself, “who hired those boys to kill my Pa.”

She
put her hand on his hand and left it there. “Kit, I guessed it all the way back
on the boat, but thanks for trustin me with it. Now you and your brother’re
fixin to go get Vibe for it, is what this is about, I guess.”

   
“So
when you offered to help us, you already had some idea.”

   
She
kept her eyes lowered.

“Well
you can get out of that if you want,” he said in a kind of low voice. “Real
easy.” They sat there for a while. She didn’t dare move her hand. It was modern
times, and ungloved hands did not touch deliberately unless it meant something.

   
As
to what that might be, of course . . .

For
his part, Kit had got as far as noticing her eyes, which even allowing for this
Venetian light seemed strangely silvergreen. Green eyes in a redhead, nothing
too unusual in that—but irises set in a ground somehow lambent as
unpolished silver, to which all other shades of color were referred, how could
that be? Photographs of themselves. And why should he be paying so much
attention to her eyes?

“It
gets worse, I’m afraid. Something must have happened back in the States,
because now Vibe’s people are after me. Is why I’m not in Germany anymore.”

   
“Sure
that you’re not just. . .”

   
“Crazy?
That I wouldn’t mind.”

“And you two are really . . .” She
couldn’t bring herself to say it, because she couldn’t tell how serious any of
this was.

   
“ ‘
Planning to do the deed,
’ ”
Kit suggested.

“And get out of town ahead of the
carabinieri. Where are you headed, if it’s not too forward of a gal to ask?”

   
“Reef,
ask him. Me, Inner Asia is the plan right now.”

“Oh sure, just down the road there
from Outer Asia. No chance you’d ever be stickin around here for a while,
always did have that whole other life, now you’ll be a fugitive from justice
and who knows what all besides.”

She had an idea how miserable she
looked, and pulled her hand away. Kit reached for it again. “Listen, don’t
think it’s—”

She smacked his hand and smiled
grimly. “Don’t bother with that. You and whoever, your business.”

   
“Me
and— What’s that mean?”

A level gaze he couldn’t read.
Sunlight came into the little place and abruptly her hair went incandescent.
They lingered then in one of those paralyses where anything anybody said would
be wrong.

“Look,” Kit exasperated, “you want my
word on it? give you my word. Solemn word. Right back here—same spot
exactly, that jake with you? Let me write down the name and address, o’ course
a firm date could be a different matter—”

“Save it.” She wasn’t glaring
exactly, but it was no sunny smile either. “Someday maybe you will promise me
somethin. And then, look out, mister.”

Wasn’t as if they’d ever had the time
to get creatively lost in this maze of
calli,
was it, or go out sailing
on the Lagoon in some little
topo
with onethem orange sails, or wander
church to church rhapsodizing over the great paintings, let alone pause up on
the Iron Bridge at sunset to kiss while lanterned boat traffic passed beneath
them and accordions choired their newfound love. None of that Venetian stuff was
about to happen, not this damn lifetime.

What did she want? Wasn’t this just
Merle all over again? That alchemy, the magic crystals, the obsessive assaults
on the Mysteries of Time, she’d really believed once that she had to get away
from that before it drove her as crazy as her Pa, and now, would you just look,
here she was getting it back, here was another lunatic, somebody this time
leaving her, to go search for an invisible city over the edge of the world.
Cazzo,
cazzo . . .

“Forget
about him,” advised the Principessa. “Tomorrow night at Palazzo Angulozor there
will be a wonderful ball. Come, please. I’ve a hundred gowns just hanging here
with nothing to do, and you and I, we are the same size.”

   
“I’m
too sad,” Dally demurred.

   
“Because
he is leaving,” sniffed the Principessa, who had heard the story in general but
none of the details, though heaven knew that had never kept her from dispensing
advice. “Might be gone for a year, maybe more, maybe forever,
vero
?
Like a young soldier, going
off to serve. And you think you’ll wait for him.”

“Do I. Who the hell are you,” Dally
flared, “to be making fun of my feelings? You’re the one’s always pissing and
moaning about ‘one cannot live without love.
’
”

Whatever basis they were on by now
allowed for this sort of impertinence. The Principessa shrugged, amused.
“That’s what this is?”

   
“Maybe
not up to your standards, Princess.”

   
“And
the young man? What are his feelings?”

   
“Don’t
know and I ain’t about to ask.”

   
“Eh!
Appunto!
It
is all a
romance tale
you
have made up.”