Against the Day (138 page)

restore the balancesheets on their
behalf—while queued up behind the Russians waited the Evidenzbüro, who
had not wished compromised their own surveillance of the Colonel, the British
Secret Service, obliged at least to keep an eye on those employees abroad who
consort with known intelligence operatives from elsewhere in Europe, plus Turkish,
Serbian, French, and Italian nonceoperatives, as the politics of the day might
demand, all regarding Cyprian as a likely candidate for deception, assault, and
elimination. In terrible fact, he was now running for his life.

yprian Latewood’s return to Vienna
was accompanied either in or outside of his head by the Adagio from the Mozart
Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488. It might have been prophetic, had he been
listening. This was a period in the history of human emotion when “romance” had
slipped into an inexpensive subfusc of selfawareness, unnaturally heightening
the effect of the outmoded pastels peeping from beneath, as if in some
stylistic acknowledgment of the great trembling that showed through, now and
then, to some more than others, of a hateful future nearly at hand and
inescapable. But many were as likely to misinterpret the deep signals as
physical symptoms, or another case of “nerves,” or, like the earlier, dimmer
Cyprian, some kind of “romance” in the offing, however little prepared he might
have been for that.

   
The
Vienna interviews went pleasantly enough. The Hotel Klomser, only a few blocks
from the War Ministry, served apparently as a traditional spot for discussions
like this. Colonel Khäutsch was mentioned only in euphemisms and
circumlocutions, some of them, given Cyprian’s imperfect grasp of the idiom,
nearly impenetrable. Local baked goods were kept within his easy reach in piles
far exceeding normal angles of repose. The coffee here, internationally
respected as an aid to loquacity, had been roasted with fanatical precision on
ultramodern machines whose heatingtimes, chamber temperatures, and humidities
could be read to hundredths of a unit, suggestive of either a local
Feinschmeckerei
evolved far beyond that of the rest of the world, or just the usual
compulsive application of any engineering improvement, however trivial. “That
is, if we may regard the history of civilization as distinguished by the

asymptotic approach of industrial
production tolerances, with time, to some mythical, neverattained Zero. What do
you think, Mr. Latewood?”

“Wehggnh ucchh uh gwehungghh nyuk
aikh annkh ngkh hnnh ikhgghhlnghawh,” replied Cyprian, his speech losing, into
a congested volume of Sachertorte mit Schlag, much of whatever acceleration it
was picking up from the coffee, though the interrogators were able to recognize
this as, “There was a question just like that on my littlego.”

Theign had warned him about the
interviewing techniques. “Don’t be too clever with them. ‘Mit Schlag’ could
easily take on another meaning.”

Cyprian was surprised to learn how
well known Theign was in this town, and how many people were eager to be
remembered to him. Over his years on the Vienna station Theign had apparently
put together his own prætorian apparatus, more or less by intuition, and in the
strangely crowded daytime corridors of the Hotel Klomser, Cyprian was
introduced to some of them.

He recalled having run into Miskolci
around the Prater, had in fact narrowly avoided once or twice doing business
with him. Miskolci was not exactly a vampire, but in obedience to phases of the
moon had been known to go about randomly waylaying and rudely biting the odd
civilian. Back in the late ’90s, when vampirism became fashionable owing to the
international popularity of the novel
Dracula,
granting biters of all
sorts license to obey their impulses in public, Miskolci discovered that, far
from being alone with a depraved taste, he was part of a quiteextensive
community. A subcircuit of the BudaPesth telephone exchange had apparently been
reserved for the use of hæmatophages, as they were then known, so one of
Miskolci’s most valuable assets, for Theign, had been this red haze of
connective threadwork, already in being, which surrounded him. His own specialized
gift had lain secret until one week at the height of the first Moroccan crisis,
when it became desperately essential to know the mobilization schedule of a
certain army corps. Theign’s shop had the right prima donna, but she had become
somehow reluctant to sing. “Perhaps I can help,” offered Miskolci. “Lock us in,
come back in an hour.” An eventful hour—Theign could hear the screaming
through the soundproofing and around a couple of turns in the corridor. When
next seen, the subject appeared superficially unharmed but upon scrutiny
carrying in his eyes an expression that gave some of Theign’s colleagues
unsettling dreams for years afterward—as if written there was an
introduction to ancient mysteries better left mysterious.

Theign had met Dvindler in the baths,
which at the time, he was finding convenient for factgathering—though he
had learned after no more than a

single visit to avoid the Zentralbad,
where one found nothing beyond a literalism of the hydropathic. For the more
poetic list of features he sought, Theign must spend time looking in the outer
districts. Eventually the AstarteBad, far out on one of the “K” or riverquay
lines, proved to be the ticket— Viennese Orientalism taken to newly
questionable frontiers of taste, lurid mosaics showing prebiblical orgies sort
of thing. A nonTeutonicsonly hiring policy. The sexes, perhaps by design,
imperfectly segregated, so that one might at any clouded turn of a corridor
stumble into the partner of one’s dreams, though in practice one seldom did.
The new construction always going on somewhere in acoustical contact suggested
relatively low property values out here, which, far from distracting, was by
many interpreted as erotic.

“For constipation,” Dvindler
announced by way of selfintroduction, “rely upon it, F.I.P., or Faradically
Induced Peristalsis, is quite the best thing.”

“Excuse me,” Theign said, “do I take
that to mean you actually intend to run an electrical current, how shall I put
this delicately—”

   
“There
is no way to put it delicately,” Dvindler said.
“
Komm,
I’ll show you.”

Theign looked around. “Shouldn’t
there be a physician or something in attendance?”

“It takes five minutes to learn how.
It is not brain surgery!” Dvindler chortled. “Now,
where is
that rectal
electrode? Someone always— Ah!” producing a long cylinder with a knob of
a certain size on one end and a wire coming out the other, which led to an
interruptor device, whose primary coil was connected to what seemed to Theign
an alarming number of Leclanché cells, hooked up in series. “Hand me that jar
of Cosmoline, if you would be so kind.”

Theign, expecting to be repelled,
found himself looking on in fascination. Apparently the trick was to coordinate
two electrodes, one inserted in the rectum and the other to be rolled about on
the abdominal surface, enabling the current flowing between to simulate a
peristaltic wave. If the application was successful, one excused oneself and
headed rapidly for some nearby toilet. If not, well, besides being part of a
general program of intestinal health, the procedure was valued by some, such as
Dvindler, on its own merits.

“Electricity! the force of the
future—for everything, you know, including the élan vital itself, will
soon be proven electrical in nature.”

The interruptor on the secondary coil
made a not disagreeable buzzing sound, which after a while seemed to blend in
with the liquid echoes of the larger establishment. Dvindler was singing quite
cheerfully to himself, a tune of the city which Theign slowly recognized as
Beda Chanson’s “Ausgerechnet Bananen.” On the way out, he borrowed five K. from
Theign for the battery fee.

And as for Yzhitza, well, Theign must
have been having an especially bad couple of weeks, because she mistook him for
a German businessman des

perately in need of recreation, addressing
him in what she imagined to be his native tongue, so that for a few minutes he
was less than clear about what was going on. But somehow, despite his low
energy state and an attitude toward women that never got more comfortable than
ambivalent, he was surprised to find his sexual interest kindled, indeed
commanded, by this actually quite ordinarylooking professional. At times, he
had to admit, enjoying himself inordinately.
“
Liebling,
you were never even a challenge,” she
confessed later, after rolling up for him a record of success at what the
Kundschaftsstelle liked to call
“
Honigfalle
work” that only one or two rogue historians might disagree had
changed the course of European history. By then Theign had moved on into much
colder operational country, and could nod impassively, taking it at face value.

On weekday
evenings Cyprian
,
appearing each time measurably fatter, even to the casual surveillant, came
lurching out of the same back exit of the Klomser and made his way—his
thoughts interrupted only by an occasional high С from Leo Slezak over at
the Opera House—sometimes by
Fiaker,
sometimes on the
Verbindungsbahn if he saw a train coming, to his old sanctuary of desire the
Prater, though nothing much was then ever observed to take place. The declining
sun was a chilled and violent orange, throwing opaque indigo shadows full of
foreboding—owls patrolled the vast park, marionettes occupied tiny
volumes of light in a general dusk, the music was as horrible as ever.

It
was nostalgia for its own sake, really. The more he found himself
addressed—even
called out to
—as
“
Dickwanst
” and
“
Fettarsch,
”
the more his Praterlongings began to ebb, and he turned to quarters
of the city he would not, as recently as months ago, even fleetingly have
considered, such as Favoriten, where he went to move among the crowds of
Bohemian workmen when the factory shifts changed, not so much seeking exotic
flirtation as to be absorbed somehow into a mobility, a bath of language he did
not speak, as he had once sought in carnal submission an escape route from what
it seemed of the world he was being asked to bear
. . . .

He
kept blundering into huge Socialist demonstrations. Traffic came to an
astonished halt as tens of thousands of workingclass men and women moved in
silence down the Ringstraße. “Well!” Cyprian heard an onlooker remark, “talk
about the slow return of the repressed!” The police were out in large numbers,
with headassault high on their list of activities. Cyprian caught a couple of
good whacks and found upon hitting the pavement that his recent weight gain was
an unforeseen asset.

Out
on his perambulations one day, he heard from an open upstairs window a piano
student, forever to remain invisible, playing exercises from Carl Czerny’s
School
of Velocity,
op. 299. Cyprian had paused to listen to those moments of
passionate emergence among the mechanical fingerwork, and at that moment
Yashmeen Halfcourt came around the corner. If he had not stopped for the music,
he would have been around another corner by the time she reached the spot where
he was standing.

For
a moment they stared, both seeming to recognize an act of mutual salvation. “In
four dimensions,” she said later, as they sat in a coffeehouse in Mariahilf at
the sharp intersection of two busy streets, at the vertex of two long narrow
rooms, able to see down the length of both, “it wouldn’t have mattered.”

She
had a job at a dressmaker/milliner’s nearby, owing, she thought, to the hidden
intercession of the T.W.I.T., because one day on the racks there had appeared a
version of the Snazzbury’s Silent Frock she once had been measured for in
London.

   
“What
I really need is a cloak of invisibility to go with it,” she supposed.

   
“Surveillance.”