Against the Day (118 page)

who only go on reducing one’s budgets year after year, while
like missionaries sent onto hostile shores, we are left to God’s whim, and back
beyond the sea, amid the pleasures of Home, those who signed our edicts of
exile roar and frolic.”

   
“Sure
sounds like somethin’s cooking around here,” said Lew.

   
“Ever
so frightfully sorry,” eyes downcast. “You reproach me.”

   
“Naw,
Cohen, I’d never—”

“Oh
yes, yes, nor would you be the first
. . . .
You
see what a state I’m in
. . . .
Brother
Basnight, we would not have wished to drag you into this Shambhala business,
but with hostilities imminent, perhaps by now under way, we shall need everyone
on station. Inspector Aychrome has briefed you on Lamont Replevin, but there
are aspects of this the Met cannot appreciate, and so it falls to me to add
that Replevin has come into possession of a map of Shambhala.”

Lew whistled. “Which everybody’s
after.”

“But
makes no sense unless observed through a device called a Paramorphoscope.”

   
“Want
me to do a hoist?”

“If
Replevin knows what he has, then he’s already moved it to safety. But he may be
operating from an entirely different set of premises.”

“Guess
that means I’ll have to go have a gander. Can you give me an idea what I’m
looking for?”

“We
do have a similar map of Bukhara, thought to be from the same period.” He
produced a sheet on which had been reproduced a design that Lew could make no
sense of at all.

After
a quick consultation in
Kelly’s Suburban Dictionary,
Lew found his hat
and was out the door. By the time he got to the railway station, evening was
already gathering, along with a proper winter fog, which went on thickening,
drops of water condensing on everyone’s hat, producing a shine that to certain
nervous constitutions approached the sinister. The first pale husbands of the
evening stood waiting for suburban trains never meant to arrive at any
destination on the rail map—as if, to be brought to any shelter this
night, one would first have to step across into some region of grace hitherto
undefined. Lew entered a compartment, slouched in a seat, pulled his hatbrim
over his eyes, the wheels were ponderously cranked and he was off for the
remote and horrible town of Stuffed Edge.

The suburbs out
this way tended to be corrupted
versions of the Mother City, Wenlets combining the worst of village
eccentricity and bigcity

melancholia. Descending to the platform at Stuffed Edge, Lew
found a

prospect bleak and hushed, all but unmodified by vegetation
. . .
a scent of daylight oil hung over
the scene, as if phantom motor vehicles operated on some other plane of
existence, close but just invisible. Streetlamps had been lit up, he guessed,
for hours. Far away, down by the police station, a dog was howling at a moon no
one could see, perhaps imagining that, summoned repeatedly enough, it would
appear with food of some kind.

Elflock
Villa turned out to be a semidetached residence of singular monstrosity,
painted a vivid yellowish green which had refused to dim at the same rate as
the day. Even before he got inside, Lew could smell the coalgas—“the
smell,” as he had put it in more than one field report, “of Trouble.” If any of
the neighbors had noticed, none were in evidence—indeed, strangely for
this suburban hour, very few windows hereabouts seemed to be lighted at all.

Having
inserted a Vontz’s Universal Pick, before which the door bolt, as if having
read his mind, smoothly withdrew, Lew stepped into the overwhelming smell of
alchemized coke and a suite of equivocal shadows, whose walls were covered with
LincrustaWalton embossed in Asian motifs, not all of them considered
respectable. Stationed everywhere, not only in the niches intended for them but
also, like obtrusive guests, in the diningroom, the kitchen, even (perhaps
especially) the lavatories, lifesize sculpture groups exhibited the more
disreputable of classical and biblical themes, among which bondage and torture
seemed particularly to recur, the bodies of the subjects athletically perfect,
materials not limited to white marble, drapery
 
arranged to reveal and arouse. No degree of the allegorical
avoided an excuse to present an impudently hipshot youth, or a captive maiden
in some appealing form of restraint, naked and charmingly disheveled, in her
face an awareness dawning of the delights awaiting her in the asyetunilluminated
deeps of her torment and so forth.

As
silently as possible, Lew crossed an expanse of black floortiles, each
surrounded by silvery grouting, some composite with that soft a shine to it.
The tiles, a combination of scalene polygons of different shapes and sizes, had
a radiant blackness which likewise failed to be onyx or jet. Visitors of a
mathematical bent had purported to see repeating patterns. Others, doubting its
solidity, were often afraid to walk upon the silvery web
. . .
as if
Something
had
built it. . .
Something that waited
. . .
that would know exactly when to
cause it to give way beneath the unwary visitor
. . . .

Lew
descended to the kitchen, the businesslike beam of his Apotheosis Sparkless
Torch sweeping the gloom until it revealed a human form, hanging from the
ceiling by one foot beside the ominously hissing stove, just like the figure in
the Tarot card, except that its head rested halfway in the open

oven door, where remnants of an exploded pork pie, almost
certainly owing to a failure to include steamvents in its crust, horribly
coated the oven’s interior. The hanging man’s face was partly covered by a
hinged mask of magnalium, connected to the oven by guttapercha hoses. In the
process of shutting off the gas and opening windows, Lew discovered that the
“corpse” was breathing after all. “I say, would you mind letting me down?” it
groaned, gesturing toward the ceiling, where Lew saw a blockandtackle
arrangement whose hoisting line ran over to a cleat on the wall. Lew undid the
line and carefully lowered Lamont Replevin (for it was he) to the smart
linoleum flooring. Removing the metal device from his face, Replevin crawled
over to a nearby tank of pressurized oxygen, also equipped with a breathing
mask, and administered himself a volume of the useful element.

Upon
tactful inquiry, Lew learned that, far from desiring any premature exit,
Replevin was enjoying a regular daily broadcast of the ongoing drama
The
Slow and the Stupefied,
currently a great rage among the gashead community.

   
“You
hear it? See it, smell it?”

 
“All of those and more. Via the medium
of Gas a carefully modulated set of waves travels from the emissions facility
to us, the audience, through the appropriate hoses to the receivingmask you
have seen, which one must of course wear over ears, nose, and mouth.”

“Have
you ever considered,” the question emerging not as gently as Lew had intended,
“eh, that is
. . .
gaspoisoning? some
kind of
. . .
hallucination . . .”

Seeming
only now to notice Lew, Replevin stared, a chill glint in his eye.
 
“Who are you, by the way? What are you
doing here?”

   
“Smelled
gas, thought there might be some danger.”

   
“Yes
yes but that wasn’t the question was it?”

“Oh.
Sorry.” Out with one of several phony business cards he always kept handy,
“Pike’s Peak Life and Casualty. I’m Gus Swallowfield, Senior Underwriter.”

   
“I’m
quite satisfied with my coverage at the moment.”

   
“For
fire, I’m sure, with all this gas around—but now how about burglary.”

   
“Burglary
insurance? how odd, I must say.”

“At
the moment most theft policies are written in the U.S., but there’s a great
future here in Great Britain. You saw how easily I strolled in here—and I
got a pretty good idea of your household effects on the way in. In less than
half an hour, that could all be inside a pantechnicon and rolling away to be
resold at any of a dozen markets, well before tomorrow’s dawn. You know the
business, sir—a legitimate bill of sale and no one can be charged with
receiving.”

“Hmm.
Well, come along
. . . .
” Replevin
conducted Lew upstairs, across the shimmering web of the foyer flooring, into a
private suite of offices, dominated by a lurid sculpture executed in a purplish
stone streaked with several colors of the red family.

   
“
Pavonazzetto,
”
Replevin said, “also
known as Phrygian marble, once believed to take its coloring from the blood of
the Phrygian youth Atys, the one you see right there, in fact—driven mad
through the jealousy of the demigod Agdistis, he is shown in the act of
castrating himself, thus to be presently conflated with Osiris, not to mention
Orpheus and Dionysus, and become a cult figure among the ancient Phrygians.”

   
“Sure
took things seriously back then, didn’t they?”

“This
one? all too contemporary I fear,
The Mutilation of Atys
,
by Arturo Naunt, Chelsea’s
own, shocking the bourgeoisie since 1889. If you’d like to see some genuine
Phrygian pieces, there are plenty of those about.”

Among
bridle hardware, fragments of silk from Chinese Turkestan, seals both ceramic
and carved in jade—“Here for example—a Scythian koumiss vessel,
third century
b.c
. You can clearly
see the Greek influence, especially in the friezework. And almost certainly an
image of Dionysus.”

   
“Worth
a few what you call quid.”

   
“You’re
not a collector, I take it.”

   
“I
can appreciate it’s old. How do you find stuff like this?”

“Thieves,
graverobbers, museum officials both here and abroad. Do I sense moral
disapproval?”

   
“Way
out of my line, but I could frown a little, if you’d like.”

“It’s
a gold rush out there now,” Replevin said. “The Germans in particular are
everywhere. Shipping things out by the caravanload. Naturally now and then
something will fall off a camel.”

“What’s
this?” Lew nodded at a scroll on the desk opened to a specific couple of feet,
as if someone had been consulting it. Replevin immediately grew shifty, which
Lew pretended not to notice. “Late Uyghur. Found its way to Bukhara, like so
many of these pieces. I fancied the design, interesting complexity, a series of
wrathful deities from Tantric Buddhism would be my guess, though depending on
the angle you hold it at, sometimes it doesn’t look like anything at all.”

He
might as well have been screaming “Be suspicious!” To Lew it looked like
symbols, words, numbers, maybe a map, maybe even the map of Shambhala they
wanted so much to see back at Chunxton Crescent. He beamed vaguely and
pretended to shift his attention to a statuette of a bronze horse and rider.
“Would you look at that! Mighty handsome critter, ain’t it?”

“They were horsemen above all,” said
Replevin. “Your American cowboys would have felt entirely at home.”

“You wouldn’t mind if. . .” Lew
producing a tiny German hand camera and removing the lens cover.

“Please do,” after hesitating just
long enough for Lew to understand that he had been appraised for harmless
idiocy and pronounced genuine.

   
“O.K.
if we turn up the gaslight?”

   
Replevin
shrugged. “It’s only raw light, isn’t it.”

Lew brought over a few electric lamps
as well, and began taking snapshots, making sure that any he took of the scroll
included other pieces, just for cover. He moved out of the offices to shoot
some more, keeping up a professional patter, for misdirection’s sake.

“Hope
you don’t take this the wrong way, but hanging upside down with your head in
the oven and the gas on? taken strictly from a risk point of view, I wouldn’t
be doing my job if I didn’t inquire how you were fixed for life insurance.”

Replevin
was not reluctant to bend Lew’s ear on the topic of Gasophilia, which could be
said to date from Schwärmer’s epochal discovery that gaspressure, analogous to
voltage in an electromagnetic system, might be modulated to convey information.

“Waves
in a timeless stream of Gas unceasing, illuminatinggas in particular, though
including as well waves of sound, which might, as in that mainstay of Victorian
science, the Sensitive Flame, modulate waves of light. To the cognizant nose in
particular, the olfactory sector—or smell, as it is known, can be a
medium for the most exquisite poetry.”

   
“Sounds
almost religious, sir.”

“Well,
out in south India, if you go into a particular sort of temple, for instance
the one at Chidambaram, into the Hall of a Thousand Pillars, asking to see
their god Shiva, what they’ll show you is an
empty space,
except that
it’s not really what
we
mean when we say ‘empty,’ of course it
is
empty,
but in another way, one that’s not at all the same as nothing
being
there,
if you follow me—”