Against the Day (190 page)

Reef had once
been notorious
all over
Colorado as the most luckless fisherman west of the Great Divide, but this trip
he’d brought along a fishhook all the way from YzlesBains, which he began now
to drop and somehow, contrary to all expectation, manage every other day or so
to pull out some kind of trout from one of the rivers. The snow came and went,
but when it went, it became mostly rain, cold and miserable. On a rare day of
sunshine, up near a town in the Vjosa Valley, he and Yash allowed themselves a
moment of slack just to stand and gaze.

   
“I’d
stay here forever.”

   
“Don’t
sound too nomadic to me.”

“But look at it.” Pretty scenic, Reef
guessed, a dozen minarets brightly ascending among the trees, a little river
you could see the bottom of rushing through the town, the yellow light of a
café in the dusk that could become their local, the smells and the murmuring
and the ancient certainty that life, however reduced now and then to the arts
of being intelligent prey, was preferable to the plague of eagles beginning to
take over the land.

   
“That’s
the worst of it,” Yashmeen said. “It’s so beautiful.”

   
“Wait
till you see Colorado.”

She looked over at him and after a
heartbeat or two he looked back. Ljubica happened to be in Reef’s arms, and she
pressed her cheek against his chest and watched her mother the way she did when
she knew Yash was just about to start crying.

Once through
Gjirokastra
, they began
the long switchback out of the mountains and down to the Adriatic
Sea—mingling part of the way with Turks still headed south. There was a
ceasefire in effect now among all parties except for Greece, still trying to
take Yanina, the last Turkish stronghold in the south. Half the Turkish army by
now were dead, wounded, or taken prisoner, and the rest were heading in
desperation for Yanina. Reef gave them the rest of his cigarettes. It was all
he had. Kept one or two, maybe.

At last they came over the Muzina
Pass, and there presently was the sea, and the whitewashed houses ascending
from the deep curve of the little harbor of Agli Saranta.

Down in town, a winter rainstorm
outside, which back up in the mountains they knew would be snow, Ljubica sleeping
bundled in a wolfskin, they felt as if they were still moving, borne on some
invisible conveyance, following some crooked, complicated path, now and then
interrupted by sojourns in semipublic gathering places like this one, filled
with layers of stale tobacco smoke, political arguments over obscure
issues—a fluorescent blue sense of enclosure, the only view outside
through a window at the harbor, and beyond it the furious sea.

They found a fishing captain who
agreed to take them over to Corfu his next time out, and drop them at the town.
With a winter norther coming down off the mountains, roughening the strait with
whitecaps besides an already perilous swell, they headed south down the
channel, the wind on their port quarter. Reef, no sailor, spent the time
vomiting, often into the wind, either because he didn’t care or couldn’t wait.
Once they were in the lee of Pantokratoras, the wind dropped, and within the
hour they had come to safety at last in the town of Corfu, where the first
thing they did was go to the Church of St. Spiridion, patron saint of the
island, and light candles and offer thanks.

They would stay the rest of the
winter and into the spring and the radiant sunshine, and out on the main
esplanade a cricket game with a visiting XI from Lefkas, everyone in white, and
nothing imaginable of darkness or blood, for the duration of the game in its
blessedness
. . .
Ljubica exclaiming
in roadbaby demotic every time the bat and ball made contact. At the end of

the game, little of which, including
who’d won, Reef was able to figure out, the Lefkas side presented their
opposite numbers each with one of the hotpepper salamis for which the island
was famous.

Persisting behind the world’s every
material utterance, the Compassionate now took steps to reestablish contact
with Yashmeen. As if the Balkan assignment had never been about secret Austrian
minefields at all, but about Cyprian becoming a bride of Night, and Ljubica
being born during the rose harvest, and Reef and Yashmeen getting her safely to
Corfu—thereby successfully carrying out the “real” mission, for which the
other, mines and all, was what the Compassionate liked to call a
metaphor—one day as she and Ljubica were sitting at a café out on the
Esplanade, there was Auberon Halfcourt, holding a bottle of ginger beer,
trotting up in a fiacre as if he were keeping an appointment
. . . .
It would be his granddaughter who
spotted him first, having recognized the horse, who like the other horses here
wore a straw hat with holes for his ears to poke through.

   
After
formal kisses all round, Halfcourt took a seat.

   
“But
what are you doing in Corfu?” Yashmeen in beaming bewilderment.

“Waiting for you.” He pushed across
to her a battered piece of greenish pasteboard.

   
“My
postal. You actually got it?”

“One
of the Russians who’d routinely been reading all my mail since the day I
arrived at Kashgar deemed this more important than anything H.M. Government
might have had to say. Cabled me instantaneously.” She had written, “We hope to
reach the Adriatic.”

“Meaning
it would be either here or Durazzo, but Durazzo lately having become rather a
casus belli, one went into a trance and summoned the old intuitive powers don’t
you know, and Corfu it was.”

“Oh
and this”—gesturing around at the Parisian arcades, the leafy,
wellwatered paradise—“had nothing to do with it.”

They
sat and drank ouzo in the twilight. Up at the old Venetian fort the evening gun
went off. Breezes stirred the cypresses and olive trees. Corfiots strolled to
and fro.

“Seeing
you again,” he said, “once I thought it would be one of those moments of
surrender to fate, with an unpleasant outcome guaranteed. It did not prevent me
from wanting to, however.” They had not seen each other since before 1900.
Whatever his feelings might prove to be, her own were not so much in conflict
now as expanded. Her love for Ljubica being impenetrable and indivisible as a
prime number, other loves must be accordingly re

evaluated. As for Halfcourt, “I am not who I was,” he said.
“Out there I was

the servant of greed and force. A butler. A pastrycook. All
the while believing myself a military professional. The only love they
permitted me was indistinguishable from commerce. They were destroying me and I
didn’t know it.”

   
“Have
you resigned your commission?”

   
“Better
than that. I have deserted.”

   
“Father!”

“Better than
that,
”
he went on in a sort of
cheerfully serene momentum, “they think I’m dead. Through my Russian colleague
Volodya, I am also comfortably set, thanks to a transaction in jade—your
namesake mineral, my dear—destined one day to be considered legendary.
You may think of me as the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. And—”

“Oh, I knew there would be more.” She
was visited by the certainty that he was deep in some intrigue with a woman.

As if having read his daughter’s
mind, the old renegade exclaimed, “And by heaven here she comes, even as we
speak!”

Yashmeen turned to see approaching up
the esplanade, dwarfed by her shadow from the sunset, a tiny Asian woman all in
white, who was waving at them.

“That American chap who brought your
letter out to Kashgar is the one actually who introduced us. Ran into him last
year in Constantinople, tending bar. And there was Umeki. Ah yes, my little
Japanese eggplant.”

Indeed it was Umeki Tsurigane, who
had been posted to the Japanese embassy at Constantinople as a “mathematical
attaché,” on some mysterious mission on behalf of the technical establishment
of her country when she happened to stroll one early evening into the bar at
the Deux Continents, and there was Kit Traverse in front of a roomlong mirror
agitating the contents of a silver cocktail shaker.

   
“You
were supposed to die of shame.”

“Doing
my best,” Kit setting a shot glass and a beer glass in front of her.
  
“Your usual boilermaker,
mademoiselle?”

   
“No!
Champagne cocktail! Tonight that might be more appropriate!”

   
“I’ll
have one with you.”

He might have meant to ask about the
Qweapon and the Tunguska Event and so on, and for about one drink and a sip or
two from another it looked like the reawakening of old times, except that
Auberon Halfcourt showed up around then on his clandestine way out of Russia,
and “I don’t know what happened,” she told Yashmeen, “I was fascinated!” And
her life took one of those turns.

“An old rogue’s dream,” added
Halfcourt fondly. But Yashmeen was observing how the young woman gazed at her
father, and diagnosed it as a case

of true erotic mania. What Halfcourt felt, exactly, was, as
it had always been, something of a mystery to her.

They found Reef
in a taverna, down by the harbor in
Garitsa. Ljubica, now pushing the age of one and newly up on her feet, held on
to a barstool and with a lopsided smile that suggested this was nothing new,
regarded her father drinking ouzo and acquainting Corfiots with the intricacies
of Leadville FanTan.

Yash introduced Umeki with eyebrows
raised and a private handsignal curiously suggestive of a meatcleaver cutting
off a penis, Reef merely beaming back as he always did at any presentable young
woman in flirting range.

   
“Your
brother,” Umeki smiled, “he is—a bartender—and a matchmaker!”

“I knew all that math stuff’d be good
for somethin. Here, let me just dishonestly relieve these folks of a couple
more leptas and maybe there’ll be enough for supper.”

They all sat at a long table and ate
tsingarelli and polenta and yaprakia and a chicken stoufado with fennel and
quince and pancetta in it that Nikos the owner and cook said was an ancient
Venetian recipe from back in the centuries when the island had belonged to
Venice, and Reef snuck his baby daughter tiny sips of Mavrodaphne, which did
not put her to sleep but made her quite rowdy as a matter of fact, pulling the
tail of Hrisoula, the ordinarily imperturbable taverna cat, until she actually
meowed in protest. A small
rembetika
band arrived with a singer, and presently
Yash and Ljubica were up dancing a species of
karsilamás
together.

Later in the evening, Halfcourt took
Yashmeen aside. “Before you ask about Shambhala . . .”

“Perhaps I wasn’t going to.” Her eyes
were shining.

“For me, Shambhala, you see, turned
out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act
of leaving the futureless place where I was. And in the process I arrived at
Constantinople.”

   
“And
your worldline crossed that of Miss Tsurigane. And so.”

   
“And
so.”

y the time they agreed to part, Stray and Ewball had
forgotten why they ran off together in the first place. Stray recalled it had
something to do with her early notions of the Anarchist life and its promise of
a
greater invisibility,
extending for all she knew clear around the
world. By the time of the coalfield troubles in southern Colorado, she had
assembled her own network of sources for medical supplies, begun in the days of
the Madero revolution and expanded one local doctor, one union hospital, one
friendly pharmacist at a time. She had always had the gift for knowing whom to
trust and how far, finding herself now using her dealmaking skills to get food
and medicine where they were needed in these less clearly defined campaigns of
the revolution north of the border, and the possibility of a vast unseen
commonwealth of support certainly had its practical appeal.