Against the Day (208 page)

Kit squinted. “You’re talking about—”

   
“
Una
picchiata!
”

   
“What’s
that?”

   
“A
very steep dive, not like when you go down in a spin, here you’d be
controlling
it all the way
—release the bomb as close to target as you can get,
then pull up sharply again to get out of the way of the explosion. Think you
could figure how to modify
mia bella
Caproni for that?”

“A ‘nosedive’? that’s insane Renzo,
too much stress in all the wrong places, the bracing would snap, control
surfaces couldn’t take it, the wings would fall off, the engine would either
stall or explode—”

   
“
Si,
certo,
but aside
from that. . . ?”

Kit was already sketching and
scribbling. Renzo trusted him by now. He had already helped replace Renzo’s
Isotta Franchini engines with four hundredhorsepower Packards and figured how
to mount two more Revelli machine guns in the tail and on the underbelly of the
aircraft, which was a very large triplane bomber with a fiveman crew, affectionately
named
Lucrezia,
after the homicidal Borgia heiress.

   
“
Andiamo,
“Renzo said,
standing abruptly. “I’ll show you.”

   
“Not
in that Caproni,” Kit demurred.

   
“We’ll
take the SVA.”

   
“That’d
be a Warren truss
. . .
I don’t know
if it’ll—”

   
“
Macchè
. . .”

He was right, of course. Once they
were in the air, guiding on the single spooky light on top of the Molo
Antonelliana, Kit began to see what he was up to here. “Don’t suppose we could
aim at the Cambio, could we?” Not that they’d still be there, but it seemed a
reasonable target.

“Nothing
simpler.” Renzo banked them over toward the Piazza Carignano. “Hold on,
Cowboy!” leaning gleefully on the stick as they went into a steep,
stomachlifting dive.

They
were soon going so fast that something happened to time, and maybe they’d
slipped for a short interval into the Future, the Future known to Italian
Futurists, with events superimposed on one another, and geometry straining
irrationally away in all directions including a couple of extra dimensions as
they continued hellward, a Hell that could never contain Kit’s abducted young
wife, to which he could never go to rescue her, which was actually
Hellofthefuture, taken on into its functional equations, stripped and
fireblasted of everything emotional or accidental
. . . .

And
then Renzo had pulled them up in a shuddering proptotail assault on airframe
integrity, and they were sailing above the river as if it was all just a Sunday
spin.

Kit
could see the appeal. Of course he could. Pure velocity. The incorporation of
death into what otherwise would only be a carnival ride.

Divebombin into the

City!

Golly, what fun it

Can be!

Watchin em scatter,

Watchin em run,

Hearin em scream when

We fire that gun, my buddy,

We can pull out when

We want to—

We can go zoomin away,

With the ground just so close,

Rushin right up your nose,

We go divebombin into the day!

   
“Did
you hear that airplane last night?” she said at breakfast.

   
“Loud,
huh? How’d your boyfriend react? Or do I mean not react.”

   
She
stared back. “Golly but you’re a bastard.”

Kit
worked off and on at the interesting problem of how to pull a gigantic triplane
out of a nosedive, and went up with Renzo for a couplethree more of those
picchiate,
most notably in August of 1917 during a Bolshevikinspired strike of workers
at the weapons factories in Torino.

“Let
us hear one of those cowboy screams,” suggested Renzo, and Kit complied as they
roared steeply down toward a large demonstration. The strikers went scattering
like ants in an anthill, caught in the focus of some ray more deadly than
sunlight. Kit risked a look over at Renzo, demented even when at rest, and saw
that here, approaching the speed of sound, he was being metamorphosed into
something else
. . .
a case of
possession. Kit had a velocitygiven illumination then. It was all political.

The
strike in Torino was crushed without mercy, strikers were killed, wounded, sent
into the army, their deferments canceled. Renzo’s
picchiata
had been
perhaps the first and purest expression in northern Italy of a Certain Word
that would not quite exist for another year or two. But somehow like a
precognitive murmur, a dreamed voice, it had already provisionally entered
Time. “You saw how they broke apart,” Renzo said later. “But we did not. We
remained single, aimed, unbreakable. ~
Um vettore, si?
”

   
“Not
if you hadn’t pulled us out. If we’d hit—”

   
“Oh.”
Renzo refilled his glass. “All that is for the other world.”

   
In
October came the disaster at Caporetto, which Renzo blamed on the

strikers. “Putting them among the brigades was the worst
mistake the Army could have made. Spreading their poisoned lies about peace.”
He had stopped wearing civilian clothes. He was now in uniform all the time.
Eagles seemed to be a prominent motif.

One day there
were children
calling up
from the street. Dally went to the window. A beautiful woman in a prewar hat
stood down there holding the hand of a little girl about five, and with them
seemed to be Kit’s damn old rogue of a brother Reef, whom she’d last seen
stomping his way out of Venice. Shading his eyes from the sun. “That Dahlia?”

They
were here as refugees. Most of the fighting was in the northeast, so they had
come west to Torino, where Reef had heard Kit was working, from a flier he’d
run into in a bar.

“Domenico?
What in heck’s he been up to, thought he’d be permanently nosedown by now.”

“Said
you helped him out one time, somethin about he tried to piss out a window on a
superior officer—”

“Wasn’t
the first time, kind of a hobby, don’t know how he keeps ’em all straight.”

   
“Listen,
before we—”

“Don’t,”
Kit grabbing his brother in a delayed
abrazo.
“Don’t. Stay here as long
as you need to.”

Reef
had been working for the Italian army up in a totally unreal Alpscape rigging
aerial cableways known in the army as
teleferiche.
“It’s the Western
Front again, but turned on end—in France they kept trying to outflank
each other till there was noplace to go but into the sea. Here us and the
Austrians did the same thing only vertical, each army kept trying to get higher
ground than the other, till next thing anybody knew, they’re all sitting on top
of these
very sharp white mountaintops
with their ass freezing in the
wind, and noplace to go.”

   
“But
into the sky,” said Yashmeen.

The wives were getting along just
jake, eyeing each other not with any desire or suspicion in particular but
compulsively nonetheless, as if there were something which must at any moment
be revealed.

   
“You
two studied in Germany together.”

“He
was in vectors, I was in number theory, we hardly saw each other.” The two
women, who happened to be in eyecontact, began to smile, in what Reef saw as
the beginning of a complicity that might bear some watching.

“But
you’re the one he fought a duel over.”

   
“
Almost
fought a duel. What
did he tell you anyway?”

   
“I
may have exaggerated,” Kit said.

   
“And
you’re the one he rescued from that army of homicidal Hungarians.”

   
“Not
exactly. Kit, I’m beginning to have some doubts, here.”

   
“Yeahp,
better watch ’at shit,” Reef nodded cackling around a Di Nobili.

To
celebrate they all went out to dinner at the Ristorante del Cambio, known
locally as “the old lady.” Since Kit and Renzo had pretended to divebomb the
place, Kit had made a point of eating here at least once a week. There had been
no veal for years, but despite the shortages Alberto was able to bring them
agnolotti, and risotto, and mushroom stew, and tagliarini, and it was truffle
season, so some of those showed up as well, almost apologetically. Everybody
drank a lot of Nebbiolo. The city was full of acidyellow light and black and
precise shadows back inside the arcades. Searchlights stroked the sky.

One day climbing
down out of Renzo’s Caproni who
should reappear from the olden days but Kit’s old Yale classmate Colfax Vibe,
who though now in his midthirties and officially too old, had hustled his way
into the birdmen, as if to make up for his father’s purchased deferral fifty
years earlier. The U.S. Army Air Service was planning to send about five
hundred young pilot candidates over to Italy to train on Capronis, and Colfax
was here doing some advance inspection. Except for a little gray at the edges,
he showed no other evidence of the years.

’Fax soon had a baseball league
active in Torino. He and Kit got in the habit of dropping in to Carpano’s for a
punt e mes
once or twice a week. ’Fax had in some very odd and personal
way come to terms with Scarsdale’s death at the hands of his family’s trusted
factotum Foley Walker but wouldn’t talk about it, any more than he’d act
apologetic around Kit.

Faced with
Austria’s intention
to
take Venice and the Veneto, Italians resisted so fiercely that at last Kit was
shamed into abandoning his engineer’s neutrality, and began flying missions,
sometimes crewing for Renzo, sometimes alone. For a while he allowed himself to
be seduced into the Futurist nosedive, with its æsthetics of blood and
explosion.

“You might’s well have stayed in
Colorado,” Dally said. “Either way you’re carryin on that family tradition.”

“Beg
pardon?” Curious about how far she’d take it.

“Bombs,”
she said. “Bombs in the family. At least Reef and your Pa put ’em where they’d
do some good. “

   
“Austrians,”
Kit thought he would explain.

“Your brothersinarms. They’re not the
ones need bombing, hell even I know that.”

   
“Then
save me.”

   
“What?”

“If
I’m such miserable case, help me get back to the right piece of trail at least.
You tell me.”

She
tried. Later she thought she had. But soon enough he had dragged her history
with Clive Crouchmas into it again, and she’d fired back with something lowcost
about Yashmeen, and it only got louder from there, and salvation was the last
thing on anybody’s mind.

Next
mission he flew, when he got back to the flat afterward, she was gone.
I’m
going to Paris. Write to you soon.
Not even her name.

He
worried then for weeks, recalling how shaken Dally had been when news came in
that the S.S.
Persia
had been torpedoed by a Uboat captain named Max
Valentiner, a northern wolf descended into Mediterranean fields, and that among
those lost had been Dally’s colleague Eleanor Thornton, who had modeled for the
RollsRoyce hood ornament known as the Spirit of Ecstasy. Finally he got a
postcard from Paris, with Dally’s temporary address, and went back to sleeping
at night.

Crossing a sea
newly perilous and
contingent—no longer at the mercy of unknown longitude or unforeseen
tempests but of Uboats, the terror of a crossing having now passed from God to
the German navy, Reef, ~Stray, and Ljubica returned to the U.S. pretending to
be Italian immigrants. At Ellis Island, Reef, thinking both his English and
Italian could get him in trouble whichever he spoke, remained indecisively mute
long enough to have a large letter
I,
for Idiot, chalked on his back.
Then a few minutes later, somebody in a customs service uniform—Reef
never got a good look at his face—came running in out of the great seethe
and echo of voices with a wet sponge and erased it again, saving Reef, as he
soon discovered, from being sent back to Europe, being that an Idiot at the
time was considered likely to become a Public Charge and cost U.S. taxpayers money.