Against the Day (104 page)

Root
signaled the waiter, making broad gestures toward Pléiade. “She gets the
check—
haar rekening, ja ?
”

Pléiade’s
rendezvous
was with one
Piet Woevre, formerly of the Force Publique, whose taste for brutality, refined
in the Congo, had been found by security bureaux here at home useful beyond
price. His targets in Belgium were not, as newspaper politics might suggest,
German so much as “socialist,” meaning Slavic and Jewish. The mere street
profile of a frock coat worn longer and looser than any Gentile would present
made him reach for his revolver. He himself appeared to be blond, although the
rest of his coloring was not consistent with that shade. There were suggestions
of a timeconsuming daily toilette, including liprouge and a not unambiguous
cologne. But Woevre was indifferent to most of the presumptions and passwords
of everyday sexuality. He had left that sort of thing far behind. Back in the
mapless forests. Let anyone think what they like—should it come to a need
for corporal expression, he could maim or kill, had lost count of how often he
had done this, without hesitation or fear of consequence.

He
belonged to the unbroken realm and its simplicities—riverflow, light and
no light, transactions in blood. In Europe there was too much to remember, an inexhaustible
network of caution and contrivance. Down there he didn’t even need a name.

At
first glance, there might seem little to choose between the French Foreign
Legion and the Belgian Force Publique. In both cases one ran away from one’s
troubles to soldier in Africa. But where the one outfit envisaged desert
penance in a surfeit of light, in radiant absolution, the other sought, in the
gloom of the fetid forest, to embrace the opposite of atonement—to
proclaim that the sum of one’s European sins, however disruptive, had been but
facile apprenticeship to a brotherhood of the willfully lost. Whose faces,
afterward, would prove as unrecallable as those of the natives.

 
One look at the Q’s, ambling through
town with tobacco crumbs on their shirts and small banknotes sticking out of
their pockets, was enough for Woevre to become at once what passes, among
deputies of evil, for smitten. That is, willing to drop the surveillance and
shelve the files of all his other current assignments, to concentrate on this
band of
rastaquouères
who had blown so problematically into town. Not to
mention the presence of “Young Congo” at the same hotel.

“They
could turn out to be only innocent mathematicians, I suppose,” muttered
Woevre’s section officer, de Decker.

“ ‘
Only.
’ ”
Woevre was amused. “Someday you’ll explain to me how that’s
possible. Seeing that, on the face of it, all mathematics leads, doesn’t it,
sooner or later, to some kind of human suffering.”

   
“Why,
your very own specialty, Woevre. Comrades in arms, one would think.”

“Not when the suffering might easily
be mine, let alone theirs. Because they do not distinguish.”

De Decker, not himself a philosopher,
feeling vague alarm whenever he encountered this tendency in field personnel,
had appeared to shift his interest to some papers in front of him.

The man was a
bobbejaan.
Woevre
felt a familiar itch in his knuckles, but the discussion was not quite over.
“This wire traffic with Antwerp and Brussels.” De Decker did not look up. “One
particular group, ‘MKIV/ODC,’ which no one can quite identify, unless your
people
. . .
?”

“Yes it looks to our cryptos like
some sort of weaponry—torpedorelated? who, at the moment, can say? ‘Mark
Four something or other.’ Perhaps
you
might care to inquire into it. I
know it’s not part of your remit,” as it appeared Woevre was about to protest,
“yet another set of ‘antennas’ would be welcome.”

“Graciously put. Consider me another
loyal
gatkruiper.
”
Accelerated
by an awareness of diminishing returns, Woevre was out the door.

   
“As
if you hadn’t enough to put up with,” Pléiade Lafrisée remarked later.

   
“That’s
all the sympathy I get?”

“Oh
. . .
was there some stipulated amount? Did you sneak that into our
agreement, too?”

“With invisible ink. What we’d like
tonight, though, is a look through his room. Can you keep him occupied for an
hour or so?”

Her
hands had been busy with his person. She hesitated, thinking it over, until she
sensed some brutal imminence, then continued. Later in her bath, she inspected
a number of bruises, and decided they were all charming except for one on her
wrist, which to a connoisseur might have suggested absence of imagination.

Woevre
watched her leave the room. Women looked better from behind, but one saw them
that way only when taking their leave after one was done with them, and what
good was that? Why did this society insist on a woman entering a room facefirst
instead of assfirst? Another of the civilized complexities that made him miss
intensely the forest life. Since returning to Belgium he had found only an
increasing number of these, deployed around him like traps or mines. The need
not to offend the King, to remain aware of rival bureaux and their own hidden
schemes, to calibrate everything against the mortal mass of Germany, forever
towering over the day.

Could it matter who spied for whom?
The ruling families of Europe, related by blood and marriage, inhabited their
single great incestuous pretense of power, bickering without end—the
state bureaucracies, the armies, the Churches, the bourgeoisie, the workers,
all were incarcerated within the game
. . . .
But if, like Woevre, one had seen into the fictitiousness of European
power, there was no reason, in the terrible transhorizontic light of what
approached, not to work for as many masters, along as many axes, as one’s
memory could accommodate without confusion.

And what, furthermore, to make of
this late rumor, drifting just below Woevre’s ability to acquire the signal at
all clearly—an unidentifiable noise in the night that sends a sleeper
awake with heart pounding and entrails hollow—intelligence of a
Quaternionic Weapon, a means to unloose upon the world energies hitherto
unimagined—hidden, de Decker would surely say “innocently,” inside the
w
term. A mathematical paper by the Englishman Edmund Whittaker which few
here could make sense of was said to be pivotal. Woevre had noticed how the
conventiongoers kept giving one another these
looks.
As if parties to a
secret whose terrible force was somehow, conveniently, set to one side—as
if to be encountered only in a companion world they did not quite know how to
enter or, once there, to exit. Here in this subsealevel patch of strategic
ground, hostage to European ambitions on all sides, waiting, held sleepless
without remission, for the blows to descend. What better place for the keepers
of the seals and codes to convene?

Next evening Kit
, having against his better judgment
accompanied Pléiade to her suite, found himself in some perplexity, for at some
point in the deep malediction of the hour she had mysteriously vanished. Only a
moment before, it seemed to him, she’d been there at the seaward window, poised
against the uncertain marine light, carefully mixing absinthe and Champagne to
produce a strange foaming louche. Now, with no sensible passage of time, the
rooms were resonant with absence. Next to the chevalglass, Kit noticed a pale
dressinggown, of allbutinsubstantial chiffon, not draped over a chair but
standing
erect,
now and then rippling from otherwise unsensed passages of air, as if
someone were inside of it, perhaps stirred by invisible forces less nameable,
its movements, disquietingly, not always matched by those of its tall image in
the mirror.

Nothing now, not even the ocean,
could be heard in the room, though the windows overlooked the long moonstung
waves. In the moonlight, against gravity, the thing poised there, faceless,
armless, attending him, as if, in a moment, it would speak. In the curiously
sealed quality of the silence in

the room, they waited thus, the disquieted Vectorist and this
wraith of Pléiade Lafrisée. Was it something he drank? Should he start
conversing with a negligee?

To the distant pulse of the sea,
among the tallhatted monitory shadows, he made his way back to the hotel to
find his bedroll gone through, though that couldn’t have taken more than a
minute, and his first thought was of Scarsdale Vibe, or a Vibe agent.

“We saw them,” said Eugénie. “It was
the political police. They think you are one of us. Thanks to us, you are now a
nihilist outlaw.”

“It’s O.K.,” said Kit, “it’s
something I was always planning to get around to anyway. Did any of them bother
you folks?”

“We know each other,” said Policarpe.
“It’s a peculiar game we all play. Against what looms in the twilight of the
European future, it doesn’t make much sense, this pretending to carry on with
the day, you know, just waiting. Everyone waiting.”

“In France,” said Denis, “they speak
of He Who Must Come. He is not the Messiah. He is not Christ or Napoleon
returned. He was not General Boulanger. He is unnameable. Nevertheless one
would have to be uncommonly isolated, either mentally or physically, not to
feel His approach. And to know what He is bringing. What death and what
transfiguration.”

“We wait here, however, not, like the
French, for some Napoleon, nothing that human, but kept hostage to the arrival
of a certain military Hour, whenever the general staffs decide it has struck.”

   
“Isn’t
Belgium supposed to be neutral?”

“
Zeker
”
—a shrug—“there’s even a
Treaty, which makes it a
dead cert
we’ll be invaded by at least one of the signatories, isn’t that what
Treaties of Neutrality are for? Each of the Powers has its plan for us. Von
Schlieffen, for instance, wants to send in thirtytwo German divisions against
our own, let us say, six. Wilhelm has offered Leopold part of France, the
ancient Duchy of Burgundy, if, when the mythical moment arrives, we will
surrender all our famous shellproof forts and leave the railways
intact—little Belgium once again busy at what she does best, tamely
offering her battlefieldready lowlands to boots, hooves, iron wheels, waiting
to be first to go under before a future no one in Europe has the clairvoyance
to imagine as anything more than an exercise for clerks.

“Think of Belgium as a pawn. It is no
accident that so many international chess tournaments are held here in Ostende.
If chess is war in miniature
. . .
perhaps
Belgium is understood to be the first sacrifice in a general conflict
. . .
though perhaps not, as in a gambit,
to provide a counterattack, for a gambit may be declined, and who would decline
to take Belgium?”

“So
. . .
this is like Colorado, with changes of sign—it’s negative
altitude, this living below sealevel, something like that?”

Fatou stood close to him, looking up
through her lashes. “It is the sorrow of anticipation, Kit.”

The next time
he saw Pléiade Lafrisée was at a
caférestaurant off the Place d’Armes. It would not occur to him until much
later to wonder if she had arranged the encounter. She was in pale violet peau
de soie, and a hat so beguiling that Kit was only momentarily surprised to find
himself with an erection. It was still early in the study of these matters,
only a few brave pioneers like the Baron von KrafftEbing had dared peep into
the strange and weirdly twilit country of hatfetishism—not that Kit noticed
stuff like that ordinarily, but it happened actually to be a gray toque of
draped velvet, trimmed with antique guipure, and a tall ostrich plume dyed the
same shade of violet as her dress
. . . .

   
“This?
One finds them in every other midinette’s haunt, literally for sous.”

   
“Oh.
I must’ve been staring. What happened to you the other night?”

   
“Come.
You can buy me a Lambic.”

The place was like a museum of
mayonnaise. This being just at the height of the
culte de la mayonnaise
then
sweeping Belgium, oversize exhibits of the ovoöleaginous emulsion were to be
encountered at every hand. Heaps of Mayonnaise Grenache, surrounded by plates
of smoked turkey and tongue, glowed redly as if from within, while with less,
if any, reference to actual food it might have been there to modify, mountains
of Chantilly mayonnaise, swept upward in gravityimpervious peaks insubstantial
as cloud, along with towering masses of green mayonnaise, basins of boiled
mayonnaise, mayonnaise baked into soufflés, not to mention a number of not
entirely successful mayonnaises, under some obscure attainder, or on occasion
passing as something else, dominated every corner.

   
“How
much do you know of La Mayonnaise?” she inquired.

   
He
shrugged. “Maybe up to the part that goes
‘
Aux armes, citoyens
’
—”