Against the Day (130 page)

“No
money in Vectors,” he blurted, “that’s a whole range of luxury items right
there. Abstinence takes care of itself, pretty much.”

“But
there was no end to the distraction. Did you expect quite so much? I didn’t.
There always seemed to be something.” She glanced his way, experimentally.
“Someone.”

“Oh,”
his pulse growing percussive, “helps to be easy on the eyeballs, no doubt.”

She
was smiling, but with her eyes narrowed. Seemed to be waiting for him to pursue
the thought, though he had no idea where. “Well,” cursing himself in the
instant, “I wonder what that old Günni’s been up to. Must be in Mexico by now.”

Her
eyes drifted away, as if into some private realm of annoyance. “Would you
really have fought a duel over me, Kit?”

“You
mean Günni and me both, or just me?” What was wrong with his brain here?

   
“You,
Kit.”

It
called for at least a moment of speculative gazing, but Kit only bounced back,
“Why sure, who wouldn’t?” She waited an extra heartbeat, then put down her
glass and looked around for her reticule. “I say something?”

“You
didn’t
say something.” She was on her feet and extending a gloved hand.
“
Ite, Missa est.
”

   
Lionel
Swome had no objection to Kit dossing at the Sanatorium, and Reef

found him in his room opening the free bottle of Champagne
that had come with it.

   
“Just
got here in time.”

   
“I
was fixing to drink it all, but I could let you have a couple cc’s maybe.”

   
“Hey!
cheer up there, runt o’ the litter. Guess what?”

   
“Do I
have to?”

   
“Maybe
this time we’ve caught us a good hand for a change.”

Kit
blasted the cork across the room, knocking askew a sepia photographic portrait
of Böpfli and Spazzoletta, posed beside a hydropathic pump. He drank the
overflow and handed the bottle over. “Your idea of a good hand.”

   
“It’s
your ol’ benefactor Scarsdale Vibe.”

Kit
was instantly on rectal alert. His hands ached and he began to sweat. “Seems
he’s over here in Europe,” Reef went on, “lookin to buy some of that Fine Art,
all up and down the continent doin what the millionaires do. And at the moment,
in fact, he’s right in the neighborhood, headin for Venice Italy—”

   
“Foley
mentioned it already. Wasn’t good news then, ain’t now.”

“Depends,
don’t it. Fate is handin this one right to us, Kit, there might never be a
better time.”

   
“For
. . .”

Reef
peered at his kid brother, as if into a shadowy room. “Still too early to fold.
Hand ain’t been called yet.”

Kit
went over to the window and looked at weather racing up the lake to collide
with the mountains. His policy of juvenile optimism no matter what was beginning
to annoy even him, besides not working anymore anyway. “And who,” in sudden
great weariness, “ ’s running with Vibe these days? Besides Foley, that is.”

“Could
be one or two other Pinks in the brush, we’d sure have to keep an eye out.”

   
“So
we’re going to find him and kill him, is that the plan?”

Reef
pretended to squint upward at his brother through an imaginary telescope. “Well
you
sure are a bloodthirsty customer for being so short ’n’ all.”

“Then—we
don’t kill him? Reefer? What
do
we do?” Since the last time he’d been
facetoface with Scarsdale Vibe, at the Pearl Street offices, Kit had little
trouble imagining himself aiming and firing with a steady hand and a composed
spirit. It had come to this anyway. This far.

Reef
on the other hand looked to be all passion and no plan. “Rifle at long range,
sure, but facetoface’d be better, say we took more of a, don’t know, Italian
approach? How are you with a dirk? I can back you up—glue on some

false mustachios—pretend to be
a waiter or something, maybe, maybe bring

him a glass
οf
poison Champagne—
”

“Reef, we, um, better think this one
through?” Was Reef figuring somehow on Kit, the scientific one, to come up with
a plan?

   
“Too
bad we can’t talk to Pa.”

   
“According
to some of Yashmeen’s friends—”

“Oh not you too, I got to listen to
this stuff day and night from ’Pert and that bunch, little of it goes a long
way, brother.”

“They do séances?” Kit reached for
the packet of smokes on the table between them and lit one up. “And you never
tried to contact Pa? Just curious.”

“Nothin but some fad thing for them.
They do rope me in time to time, don’t mind, ’specially if it’s next to some
interestin young lady, never can tell what handholdin in the dark can lead
to—but I don’t talk about Pa, or us, or Colorado, none of that. They think
I’m from your part of the country, Harvard and so forth.”

   
“Yale.”

“You bet, but, now, you’re worryin me
here a little, Kit, supposed to be this hardcased man of science?”

Kit shrugged inside an envelope of
smoke. “Don’t know how scientific it is, but lately there’s this ‘Psychical
Research’—laboratories, experiments and so forth.”

   
“And
ain’t it just the bunk.”

“So were wireless waves, and not all
that long ago. Roentgen rays, whatever rays are coming next. Seems every day
somebody’s discovering another new piece of the spectrum, out there beyond
visible light, or a new extension of the mind beyond conscious thought, and
maybe someplace far away the two domains are even connected up.”

Reef
shook his head as if embarrassed. “They build a wireless telephone that we can
talk to Pa on it, you’ll let me know, won’t you.”

As
it turned out, that evening, as dusk crept over the rooms and suites, something
like this very piece of equipment was about to materialize on their earthly
plane, in the person of Madame Natalia Eskimoff. The kindly ecstatica, luminous
from hiking up in the mountains, grasped right away their melancholy, if not
their longerterm plans for revenge. She leaned against the walnut hotel bar
still in her excursion suit, sipping at some ancient Scotch from a heavy
tumbler of Bohemian crystal engraved with unreadable BöpfliSpazzoletta
heraldry, regarding the brothers amiably but with her own parameters for
patience. “I do hope you’re not after mumbo jumbo in the dark,” she said,
“glowing giant amœbas that leave sticky residues. White

faced children in nightclothes who glide room to room, whose
feet don’t touch the floor.”

In P.R. circles Madame Eskimoff’s
séances were known, you’d say notorious, for their impertinence. “As if the
presences one encounters are so fragile they will get offended, or sulk, if the
question is too direct.
Bozhe moi!
these people are dead! How much more
rude does it get?”

They found a room, closed the drapes
against the insupportable night, the waxing gibbous moon and the mountain
heights almost as bright, inaccessible as the country of death, stars revealed
now and then through snow blown in long veils off the peaks, miles of
continental wreckage sweeping, frozen, neutral ground, uninhabited,
uninhabitable, forever. Madame Eskimoff turned down the lights. The sitters
included Kit, Reef, Yashmeen, and Ruperta, there to supervise the politics of
who sat next to whom.

“I’m going upcountry, going to be
harder to keep in touch, other things to do, further away though when you all
get here we’ll be together again, hope you’re takin care of all them chores I
used to seein’s it’s less important to me now, less and less, and there never
was much I could do to help anyway
. . . .
”

The voice emerging from the darkly
painted lips of Madame Eskimoff, slurred, effortful, as if brought upward
against the paralysis of dream, spoke Webb’s words but bore little resemblance
to what either brother could remember of Webb’s voice. They listened for the
stogiesmoker’s hoarseness, the ridgerunner’s twang, but what they heard was
European, more like the crossborder inflections that reps and drummers and
spies on that continent pick up after years there out in the field. The
concluding silence, when it came, was sharp as a cry. Color returned to Madame
Eskimoff’s face, tears collected in her eyes. But when she surfaced, she had no
memory of sorrow, or indeed any emotion.

“It wasn’t even Pa’s voice,” Reef in
an angry whisper. “I tell you, Kit, it’s just a con game.”

“That was the voice of her control,”
Yashmeen pointed out. “Also a gobetween, but working from the other side. We
use mediums, mediums use controls.”

“No disrespect,” Reef murmured, “but
speakin as a old bunco man myself, that’s just the kind of dodge I’d use if I
didn’t know what the deceased sounded like but wanted folks to think it was him
talkin
. . . .
” He was surprised to
see Madame Eskimoff nodding and smiling, as if in gratitude.

“Fraud is the element in which we all
fly, isn’t it,” she said, “it bears us aloft, there isn’t one of us hasn’t been
up on fraud, one time or another, before some damned beak of the
materialistic—‘Ha! I saw that, what’s that going on

with the toe of your shoe there?’ Insufferably smug guardians
of the daylit world, no idea of how easy it is to detect that sort of mischief,
usually from mediums who cannot manage a trance. Some never will. It requires
great capacity for surrender, and a willingness to forgo any memory of what
went on during it.”

   
“Well,
and that’s mighty convenient too, don’t you think?”

“I do indeed, and when I hear doubts
like yours, what I usually suggest is that the doubter try it for himself.”

   
“What
you just did? Thanks but I’m not a very supernatural type of fella—”

“You can never be sure, the gift
shows up in the strangest people.” She gently took Reef’s wrist and led him
back to the table.

“It ain’t so much going into it,” he
was trying to explain, “it’s ’at comin out again.”

   
“You’ll
do fine.”

   
“I
mean I’d hate to get, uh . . .”

   
“Stuck.”

“There you go.” Yashmeen and a
flâneur of Ruperta’s acquaintance named Algie arranged a quick foursome, as if
it was going to be a bridge game. No sooner had the sitters joined hands than
Reef was under, like that, off in some subecstasy. Next thing anybody knew, he
was singing, operatically, in the tenor register and the Italian language,
though Kit knew for a fact that Reef was tonedeaf, couldn’t get through “For
He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” without changing key. After a while whoever the
control was arrived at a high С and held it long enough to send
Sanatorium staff running off to find medical assistance.

“I seen others who died in bed,” Webb
began to speak, really Webb this time, “in easy reach of all they built and
loved, surrounded at the end by the children, the grandchildren, friends, folks
from town that nobody knew their names, but that wasn’t in the cards for me,
not in that flatbroke world it was given us to work and suffer in, those were
just not the choices.

“No point makin excuses. I could’ve
done ’er different. Not driven you all away. Figured how to honor those who
labor down under the earth, strangers to the sun, and still keep us all
together. Somebody must’ve been smart enough to manage that one. I could’ve
worked it out. Not as if I was alone, there was help, there even was money.

“But I sold my anger too cheap,
didn’t understand how precious it was, how I was wasting it, letting it leak
away, yelling at the wrong people, May, the kids, swore each time I wouldn’t,
never cared to pray but started praying for that, knew I had to keep it under
some lid, save it at least for the damned owners, but then Lake sneaks off into
town, lies about it, one of the boys

throws me a look, some days that’s all it needs is a look,
and I’m screamin again, and they’re that much further away, and I don’t know
how to call back any of it
. . . .
”

It could have been a hearttoheart in
some friendly saloon. But the one thing his sons wanted, they wouldn’t get
tonight. They wanted to hear Webb say, with the omnidirectional confidence of
the dead, that seeing Scarsdale Vibe had hired his killers, the least the
brothers could do at this point was to go find him and ventilate the son of a
bitch.

Afterward, as expected, Reef couldn’t
remember a thing. Madame Eskimoff and Yashmeen went off to the Turkish baths,
and Algie headed for the billiard room. Kit sat down at the table and looked
across it at his brother. “I didn’t do anything real embarrassin, did I?” Reef
wanted to know.

   
“It
was him, Reef. His voice, hell you even
looked
like him.”