Against the Day (166 page)

   
“So
you just gonna stay out on that old track, try to get you a capitalist with
that elephant gun,” Flaco said.

   
“Ought
to be you folks’s beef too, after that kid Tancredi they went and mowed down.”

   
Flaco
shrugged. “Maybe he should’ve known better.”

   
“Pretty
cold, Flaquito. Kid’s in his grave, how do you just let that go?”
   
“Maybe I’m losing faith in
assassinating the great and powerful anymore, maybe all it is, is just another
dream they like to tease us with. Maybe all I’m lookin for these days is a nice
normal shootin war with peons like me I can shoot back at. Your brother Frank
at least had the sense to go after the hired guns that did the real work.”

   
“But
that don’t mean Vibe and them don’t deserve it.”

   
“Course.
But that’s retribution. Personal. Not a tactic in the bigger fight.”
 
“Beyond me,” said Reef. “But I’ve still
got to go after that murdering bastard.”

   
“Well
good luck,
mi hijo.
I’ll say hello to Pancho when I see him.”

Should I know
better
? she wondered.

   
After
weeks of torches streaming by the window, thunderstorms in the

mountains, visits from the police, as if in an eternally
descending current, the roar louder than crying, or speech, blood finding its
voice, neither attempting to rescue the other but reaching back each one, again
and again, to pull the other deeper, away from safety. Before they went down to
Zengg to embark again for Venice, Vlado, as if having seen some lethal obstacle
ahead, entrusted to Yashmeen a green schoolboy’s copybook manufactured in some
Austrian part of the empire, with
Zeugnisbüchlein
printed on its front
cover, which he called
The Book of the Masked.
Whose pages were filled
with encrypted fieldnotes and occult scientific passages of a dangerousness one
could at least appreciate, though more perhaps for what it promised than for
what it presented in such impenetrable code, its sketch of a mindscape whose
layers emerged one on another as from a mist, a distant country of painful
complexity, an all but unmappable flow of letters and numbers that passed into
and out of the guise of the other, not to mention images, from faint and
spidery sketches to a full spectrum of inks and pastels, of what Vlado had been
visited by under the assaults of his home wind, of what could not be paraphrased
even into the strange holiness of Old Slavonic script, visions of the
unsuspected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to
be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of
day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters
with details of God’s unseen world. Its chapters headed “To Listen to the
Voices of the Dead.” “To Pass Through the Impenetrable Earth.” “To Find the
Invisible Gateways.” “To Recognize the Faces of Those with the Knowledge.”

Well, secret lore he’d been sworn
never to reveal, she’d have expected that. She knew by now that in those
mountains, with centuries of blood as security, such ferocious undertakings
were never questioned. “But this is written down,” she couldn’t quite keep
herself from objecting. “I thought it was supposed to be spoken, passed on
facetoface.”

“Maybe it’s a fake, then,” Vlado
laughed. “A forgery. For all you know we have workshops full of calligraphers
and illustrators, busy as dwarves in a cavern, for even back up there in the
mountains we know there are comfortable profits to be realized from the
gullibility of American millionaires and their agents, who are everywhere these
days with their famous satchels full of greenbacks, buying up everything they
see, oil paintings, antique crockery, fragments of castles, not to mention
marriage prospects and racehorses. Why not then this quaint native artifact,
with its colorful yet indecipherable visions?”

   
She
took it anyway. Telling herself she was attracted to its humility, its ease

of concealment.

·
    
·
    
·

In their visits
to Venice, they had gotten in the
habit of going to the movies. They went to the Teatri Minerva and Rossini, but
their favorite was the Malibran next to the Corte del Milion, traditionally
said to be the site of Marco Polo’s house. They sat in the dark and watched the
film shot here not long ago from a gondola by Albert Promio and his crew from
Lumière of Paris. At some point the image had entered the Arsenale, in dreaming
glide, down uncountable brown canalsides, among the labyrinths, the basins and
gondola workshops, ropewalks, the ancient stagnant pools. She felt a tremor
pass through Vlado’s body. He had leaned forward to stare, at a pitch of
apprehension she had never seen, not even at invisible horsemen and gunshots in
the night.

Reef was back
in Venice before he knew why. Here
was where everything had gone off the rails, though coming back to it was
likely to be no more useful than haunting is to a ghost. He was feeling a
little desperate. The bomb at the café in Nice had lit up a whole high range
like lightning at night, showing him the country ahead under a sombre and
unreadable aspect. He was not sure he could prepare for everything its shadows
might hold.

He had been over on the Lido doing
some practice shooting with his .450 cordite express rifle. He needed to get
his eye back, to concentrate on distant targets and failing light and
treacherous crosswinds. No one was there to raise the objection that he did not
at this point even know where his target might be. He had found no one in
Venice with any line on Scarsdale Vibe. He wandered around various
fondamente
at
different hours of day looking
for Dally Rideout, but she had disappeared. When he visited Ca’ Spongiatosta,
he was turned away rather rudely by the Principessa herself and given the bum’s
rush by two liveried
pistolieri.

Now, all at once, rearing out of the
water in a great smoking splash of Italian profanity, came a species of
Adriatic seamonster from which two creatures in rubber suits dismounted and
came trudging up the sand. Having passed by semimiraculous routes known to
inland sailors since Argonauts threaded their way through the European
continent, not always aboveground, Pino and Rocco were back in town with their
manned torpedo, by now grown somewhat in size—returned at last to Venice,
their journey eased by never in their hearts having left to begin with. On
recent nights they had been observed in bars of San Marco hotels, drinking local
gin fizzes known as Casanovas and arguing about association football, and after
the bars closed,

deep in the predawn hours, their
deadly vehicle had been heard howling like a highspeed ghost up and down the
canals and
rii
. . . .
This
evening they had decided to make a run over to the Lido, where next thing they
knew they were hearing these enormous blasts from shore, which with the
elaborate caution of the pursued they had assumed to be directed at themselves.

Reef carefully slung the rifle on his
shoulder and nodded. “Boys. Nicelookin rig you got there.”

   
“That
is an elephant gun,” said Pino.

   
“I
heard this was elephant country. You mean it ain’t?”

“We were going up to the hotel,”
Rocco pointing at the lampless mass of the Excelsior, “and get a drink.”

   
“I didn’t
think they’d open till it got warmer,” said Reef.

Rocco
and Pino looked at each other. “They have stayed open all winter,” Rocco said,
“they only pretended to close.”

“There
is,” Pino indicating the sand wastes around them, under the chill and failing
sunset, “a certain clientele.”

Sure
enough, inside the new luxury hotel the lights were blazing, corridors echoing
with the undeparted, desire coalescing briefly into glimpsed figures then
dissipating again, carried as if helpless before some indoor wind, across
dancing floors and terraces, along shadowy colonnades, where from someplace
music echoed, though the orchestra stand was unoccupied. Whitecoated barmen
were busy mixing drinks, though nobody was at the bar.

“There’s
a storm on the way,” Rafaello greeted them. He had a purple orchid in his
lapel, and knew Rocco and Pino. “You made it in here just in time.”

Slowly
the room was filling up with ragged refugees, shivering and staring. By later
in the evening, it became clear that business depended now as much on the
storms of winter and spring as it would in summer on warmth and clear sky.

“And
after a while,” Pino was saying, “we got attached. Gave it a name.
Il
Squalaccio.
”
Once it
had a name, it seemed impossible they could ever blow it up. They took it back
into the shop, rethought the design, built extensions fore and aft, new
compartments, installed a bigger engine, pretty soon they had a dwarf variety
of submarine.

“Mr.
Traverse?” Reef looked in the mirror and recognized Kit’s friend Yashmeen, whom
he’d last seen up at Lago Maggiore in the old ChirpingdonGroin era.

“Hello
once again.” She was there with a tall, goodlooking galoot from someplace
across the Adriatic. They’d been on their way back to Trieste when the storm
hit and cast them upon the lee shore of Lido, though their main worry now
seemed to be a motor launch they’d spotted behind them.

“They followed us all the way from
the Bacino, kept their running lights off, and if the storm hadn’t blown up,
they’d have probably sunk us by now.”

   
“
Attenzione,
”
murmured Pino.

A party of men had come in all
together, some remaining by the door, others beginning to work slowly through
the room, peering at faces. She turned toward Reef. “Pretend to be fascinated.”

   
“Sure.
Where’d your partner get to?”

   
“Vlado
must have seen them before I did.”

   
Rocco
came over.
“
Austriaci.
They
must be looking for Pino and me.”

   
“It’s
me and Vlado,” she said.

“We can offer you a lift,” Pino
purred, as usual failing to disguise his lecherous intentions. “
Il Squalaccio
will sleep four comfortably.”

Reef
picked up his elephant gun and headed outside. “I’ll cover you folks. Make a
run for it when you can.” On the beach he found an abandoned bathingmachine and
set up a position, took a wood match, held it in the rain long enough to soften
the head of it, then smeared the wet phosphorus over the sights front and rear
till they were glowing enough to see.

Presently
Yashmeen was crouching next to him, hatless, breathing deliberately, and rounds
had begun to hum about the vicinity. Reef pulled her close, steadied the rifle
on her shoulder, and fired off a couple of his own. Back at the giant hotel,
they could see the darklyclad Austrians hit the wet sand.

The
wind took the sounds of the gunfight over the dark beaches as far as Malamocco.
Survivors of a winter in the open, despised, evicted, willingly lost, shivered
in pockets of rude shelter gathered around driftwood fires and wondered aloud
what it might be.

The
knot of gunmen moved past, making for the jetty, where a low, dark mass waited,
visible mostly from the wreathing of motor exhaust which surrounded it. “Oh,”
she groaned, and Reef could feel her muscles growing tight. She had seen Vlado
among them, bleeding, taken, and knew she must not call out to him.

“Where’s
your boat?” She was silent and did not move. “Miss Halfcourt.” She nodded,
arose as the snarl and sputter and the shriek of bad bearings rose to a maximum
and then slowly withdrew.

She
and Vlado had run aground on the Lagoon side. The little vessel was not quite
dismasted, but Reef saw no way for them to get across to Venice in it, short of
rowing.

   
“Would
you like a tow?”
Rocco and Pino and
Il Squalaccio.

Out on the water, squinting through the rain for the lights
of San Marco, Reef said, “Here I thought
I
was livin the high life. Your friends back there— did I hear
‘Austrians’?”

   
“Likely
an Englishman too, named Theign.”

“I don’t keep good track of the
politics, but last I heard, now, England and Austria, ain’t that different
sides?”

   
“It’s
not what you’d call really official.”

   
“And
they’re after you? are you not official either?”

She laughed, or maybe that’s not what
it was. “I think they were after Vlado.” Her hair was all snarled, her frock
was torn. She bore distant resemblance to a lady in need of protection, but
Reef was cautious.