Against the Day (43 page)

Lew had been in England less than a
week when one night a neophyte in the T.W.I.T. had come running in, face white
as plaster, in his agitation forgetting to remove his hat, a mauve fedora.
“Grand Cohen, Grand Cohen! forgive my interruption! they wanted me to make sure
you got this personally.” Handing over a scrap of pale blue notepaper.

“Quite so,” nodded the G.G., “Madam
Eskimoff’s sitting tonight, wasn’t it. . . let us have a look, then
. . . .
Oh
dear.” The paper
fluttered in what suddenly resembled a nerveless hand. Lew, who’d been hoping
for a quiet evening, looked over in an inquiring way. The Cohen was already
shrugging off his ceremonial robes and looking for his shoes. Lew pulled his
socks from a jacket pocket, grabbed his own shoes, and together they proceeded
to the street and into a growler, and were off.

En route the Grand Cohen outlined the
situation. “It likely has to do,” he sighed, producing from an inner pocket a
Tarot pack and flipping through it, “with
.
. .
here, this one, number XV, The Devil”—in particular, the Cohen
went on, with the two chained figures found at the bottom of the card, imagined
by their artist Miss Colman Smith, perhaps after Dante, as simple naked man and
woman, though in the earlier tradition these had been shown as a pair of
demons, genders unspecified, whose fates were bound and who could not separate
even if they wanted to. At present this unhappy position among the Major Arcana
was occupied by a pair of rival University professors, Renfrew at Cambridge and
Werfner at Göttingen, not only eminent in their academic settings but also
wouldbe powers in the greater world. Years before, in the wake of the Berlin
Conference of 1878, their shared interest in the Eastern Question had evolved
from simple bickeringatadistance by way of the professional journals to true
mutual loathing, implacable and obsessive, with a swiftness that surprised them
both. Soon enough each had come to find himself regarded as a leading
specialist, consulted by the Foreign Office and Intelligence Services of his
respective country, not to mention others who preferred to remain unnamed. With
the years their rivalry had continued to grow well beyond the Balkans, beyond
the evershifting borders of the Ottoman Empire, to the single vast Eurasian landmass
and that ongoing global engagement, with all its English, Russian, Turkish,
German, Austrian, Chinese, Japanese—not to mention
indigenous—components, styled by Mr.

Kipling, in a simpler day, “The Great
Game.” The professors’ manœuvrings had at least the grace to avoid the
mirrorlike—if symmetries arose now and then, it was written off to
accident, “some predisposition to the echoic,” as Werfner put it, “perhaps
built into the nature of Time,” added Renfrew. Howsoever, over their
cloistering walls and into the map of the megacosm, the two professors
continued to launch their cadres of spellbound familiars and enslaved
disciples. Some of these found employment with the Foreign Services, others in
international trade or as irregular adventurers assigned temporarily to their
nations’ armies and navies—all sworn to loyalties in whose service they
were to pass through the greater world like spirit presences, unsensed by all
but the adept.

“Perhaps you will find you can
tolerate those two,” said the Grand Cohen. “I can’t, for very long. No one in
the T.W.I.T. working that desk for more than a few days has been able to abide
them. And, of course, of all the Icosadyad, they are the ones most capable of
damage, who must be watched constantly.”

“Thanks, Cohen.”

They arrived at length at a dark,
ancient block of flats south of the river, rising in a ragged arrangement of
voids and unlighted windows to what in the daytime, Lew hoped, would not be as
sinister as now.

Madame Natalia Eskimoff’s rooms ran
to mamluk lamps and draped fabrics in Indian prints, smoke rising from
elaborate brass incense burners, furniture of carved figwood, and odd corners
that seemed designed to warn off all but the most unfrivolous of seekers, and
Lew was enchanted right away, for the lady herself was just a peach. Eyes huge
and expressive as those you’d expect to see more in magazine illustrations than
out in this troublesome world. Volumes of silverstreaked tresses that invited
some reckless hand to unpin it all to see just how far down her form it would
reach. Tonight she wore a black taffeta turnout that looked simple but not
severe, and probably had set her back a bundle, as well as amber beads and a
Lalique brooch. Other nights, depending on how swanky the function and
fashionable the gown, there might also be observed, tattooed in exquisite
symmetry below Madame Eskimoff’s bared nape, the Kabbalist Tree of Life, with
the names of the Sephiroth spelled out in Hebrew, which had brought her more
than enough of that uniquely snotnosed British antiSemitism—“Eskimoff. .
. I say what sort of name is that?”—though in fact she’d grown up in the
Eastern Church and, to the disappointment of racial watchdogs throughout the
island, what in fact she turned out to be, confoundingly, was a classical English
Rose.

Looked into closely in her time both
by Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Crookes, she had taken transatlantic liners
to Boston to visit Mrs. Piper, traveled to Naples to sit with Eusapia Palladino
(whom she was later to defend against charges of fraud at the infamous
Cambridge experiments), could indeed be said to’ve attended some of the most
celebrated séances of the day, the list of which was about to include one
arranged by the ubiquitous and outspoken Mr. W. T. Stead, at which the medium
Mrs. Burchell would witness in great detail the assassination of Alexander and
Draga Obrenovich, the King and Queen of Serbia, three months before it even
happened. She was known to the T.W.I.T. as an “ecstatica,” a classification
enjoying apparently somewhat more respect than a common medium.

“We don’t go off into ordinary
trances,” Madame E. explained.

“More the ecstatic type,” Lew
supposed.

He was rewarded with a steady and
speculative gaze. “I should be happy to demonstrate, perhaps on some night less
exhausting than this.”

It was something that had come out
during the séance tonight, none of which Madame Eskimoff had any direct memory
of, although like all T.W.I.T.sanctioned sittings, it had been recorded by
means of a ParsonsShort Auxetophone.

“We take electros of the original wax
impressions immediately after every sitting. Part of the routine. I have
listened to these tonight already several times, and even if details are here
and there obscure, I felt it a grave enough development to summon you here.”

It seemed that one Clive Crouchmas, a
semigovernmental functionary who happened also to be a member of the T.W.I.T.,
though at a quite low beginner’s level, had been trying to get in touch with
one of his fieldagents who had died in Constantinople unexpectedly, in the
midst of particularly demanding negotiations over the socalled “Bagdad” railway
concession. As the replies were expected to be in Turkish, Crouchmas had
brought along an interpreter as well.

“He specializes in the Ottoman
territories, which is where Renfrew and Werfner have often found their best
opportunities for mischief, working as a consultant, in fact, with both of
them, letting each imagine he’s the only one who knows about the other and so
forth. French farce. Being probably the only person in England who can stand
the company of either one for more than a few minutes, old C.C.’s become quite
useful to us as a channel between, though I must say I’m rather annoyed with
him at the moment,” grumbled the Grand Cohen. “He should know better than to be
wasting your time, Madame, with this endless Turkish Poundmongering.”

Lew had a sketchy idea of the
situation. The European powers had already

invested years in the seduction and
counterseduction necessary to obtain from the Ottomans the muchcoveted railway
concession, and if it finally were awarded to Germany, this would be a bitter
development indeed for Great Britain, Berlin’s chief rival in the region. Not
least of the diplomatic anxieties set loose would be Turkey’s clear sanction of
a German line, to run across Anatolia, over the Taurus Mountains, along the
Euphrates and the Tigris, through Baghdad all the way down to Basra and the
Persian Gulf, which Britain up until now had believed lay firmly within her own
sphere of influence, and thus open for Germany a socalled “shortcut to India”
even more congenial to trade than the Suez Canal. The entire geopolitical
matrix would acquire a new, and dangerously unverifiable, set of coefficients.

Madame Eskimoff placed the wax
cylinder in the machine, started the airpump, adjusted a series of rheostats,
and they listened. The several voices were at first difficult to distinguish,
and unaccountable whispers and whistling came and went in the background. One
voice, seemingly Madame Eskimoff’s, was much clearer, as if through some
unexplained syntonic effect between wherever this spirit was speaking from and
the recording machine. Later she explained that this was not entirely herself
speaking but a “control,” a spirit on the other side acting, for the departed
soul one wished to contact, much in the same capacity as a medium on this side
acts on behalf of the living. Madame Eskimoff’s control, speaking through her,
was a rifleman named Mahmoud who had died in Thrace back in the days of the
RussoTurkish War. He was responding as best he could to Clive Crouchmas’s
detailed inquiries as to perkilometer guarantees for various branches and
extensions of the SmyrnaCasaba line, and being translated into English by the
third voice Crouchmas had hired for the séance, when without warning—

“Here,” said Madame
Eskimoff—“listen.”

It was not exactly an explosion,
though the mahogany soundhorn of the Auxetophone certainly became overloaded as
if it were, shuddering, rattling in its mountings, quite unable to handle the
mysterious event. Perhaps it was the form a violent release of energy in this
world would appear to take to a disembodied reporter such as Mahmoud—the
voice of an explosion, or at least the same abolition of coherence, the same
rapid flyingapart
. . . .
And directly,
before the last of it had quite racketed away, like a train over the next
ridge, someone, a woman, could clearly be heard, singing in Turkish to one of
the Eastern modes.
Amán, amán
. . .
Have
pity.

“Well. What do you make of it?”
Madame Eskimoff inquired after a pause.

“From what one gathers,” mused the
Cohen, “though Crouchmas is not the voice of Allah in these matters, far from
it, the Ottoman government’s kilometric guarantees have lately become so
attractive that, as if by miracle,

phantom railways are beginning to
blossom out in Asia Minor, among those treeless plateaus where not even
panthers will venture, linking Stations for towns which do not, strictly,
exist—sometimes not even in name. Which is apparently where the person
speaking by way of Mahmoud was located.”

“But it doesn’t happen that way
usually,” puzzled the comely ecstatica. “They like to haunt stationary places,
houses, churchyards—but moving trains? notional rail lines? hardly ever.
If at all.”

“Something’s afoot,” groaned the
Cohen, with an inflection almost of gastric distress.

“And did somebody just blow up a
train line?” Lew feeling somewhat out of his depth here, “or . . .”

“Tried to,” she said, “thought about
it, dreamed it, or saw something—analogous to an explosion. Death is a
region of metaphor, it often seems.”

“Not always decipherable,” added the
Cohen, “but in this case EasternQuestionable, beyond a doubt. More Renfrew and
Werfner melodrama. Queer Street for the Tiresome Twins, I’d say. Not
immediately clear which will murder the other, but the crime itself is as
certain as the full moon.”

“Whom do we have at Cambridge,
keeping an eye on Renfrew?” inquired Madame E.

“Neville and Nigel, I believe.
They’re up at King’s.”

“Heaven preserve King’s.”

“Michaelmas term is upon us,” said
the Cohen, “and Miss Halfcourt begins her residence at Girton. That might
provide us just the occasion to have a look in on the Professor
. . . .
”

Madame Eskimoff’s tweeny had brought
out tea and a gâteau, as well as a twelveyearold Speyside malt and glasses.
They sat in a sort of comfortable electrical dusk, and the Cohen, unable quite
to let go of the topic, discoursed on Renfrew and Werfner.

“It is an unavoidable outcome of the
Victorian Age itself. Of the character of its august eponym, in fact. Had the
demented potboy Edward Oxford’s pistolshots found their mark sixty years ago at
Constitution Hill, had the young Queen died then without issue, the
insupportably loathsome Ernst August, Duke of Cumberland, would have become
King of England, and Salic law being thus once more observed, the thrones of
Hannover and Britain would have been reunited
.
. . .

“Let us imagine a lateral world, set
only infinitesimally to the side of the one we think we know, in which just
this has come to pass. The British people suffer beneath a Tory despotism of
previously unimagined rigor and cruelty. Under military rule, Ireland has
become a literal shambles—Catholics of any worth or ability are routinely
identified when young, and imprisoned or as

sassinated forthwith. Orange Lodges
are ubiquitous, and every neighborhood is administered from one. A sort of grim
counterChristmas runs from the first to the twelfth of July, anniversaries of
the Boyne and Aughrim. France, southern Germany, AustriaHungary, and Russia
have combined in a protective League of Europe, intended to keep Britain an
outcast from the community of nations. Her only ally is the U.S., which has
become a sort of faithful sidekick, run basically by the Bank of England and
the gold standard. India and the colonies are if possible worse off than they
were.