Against the Day (144 page)

   
“Don’t
think she’ll miss me all that much.”

Reef
smiled back with the patented tightlip look which had served him faithfully
across so many gaming tables. The burden of which was “Oh, go on ahead ’th
whatever you had in mind, just don’t blame me later on,” being useful for
throwing other players into paralyses of doubt, as well as making him look like
a compassionate opponent who worried that he might win too much of the others’
rent or babyfood money.

Grasping invisible reins and making
getonwithit motions, Kit finally said,
  
“What?”

   
“I’ll
tell you a story someday. Maybe.”

In the unrelenting drizzle
, some five or six carabinieri were arranged strategically
along the
fondamenta,
preventing people from crossing the bridge to the
Palazzo. Greatcoat collars turned up against the chill. No telling how long
they would have to be posted here. Under the aspect of a painting not hanging
on any recognized wall, titled
Failure.
Kit and Reef slunk by, trying to
be part of the
imprimatura.
Along the pavement opposite, figures in
black, bent as if against some wind of fatality, moved in a viscid streaming,
beneath black umbrellas in fitful undulation, each step a struggle, all traffic
fragmented into private missions of desire
.
. . .
Isolated from consequences as the middle of the night.

Electric lights in the windows,
torches carried to and fro by servants, the flames continually beaten at by the
wind. A heavy interior susurrance, inflected by ancient stone, issuing out onto
the
rio
along with a small string orchestra playing arrangements of
Strauss Jr., Luigi Denza, and hometown luminary Ermanno WolfFerrari.

Kit
caught sight of Dally in the Principessa’s borrowed gown and a dark silk
paletot, her incendiary hair done up in an ostrichplume aigrette dyed indigo,
sweeping in the gate and up the marble steps to the
piano nobile,
and
for a heartbeat and a half just forgot where he was and what he was supposed to
be doing here.

Scarsdale Vibe arrived in a private
gondola and mirrored by Foley Walker stepped on to the
fondamenta.
There
was the unmistakable snap of a gunshot.

Sudden as a storm out on the Lagoon,
bodyguards in black were rising up from everywhere, longannealed
teppisti
newly
arrived in town from strikebreaking duties in Rome and the factories of the
North, armed, silent, masked, and on the move.

   
“Christ,
it’s an army,” Reef muttered. “Where’d they come from?”

And here right in the middle of it
came this skinny kid in a borrowed suit, shirtcollar too big, immediately read
as out of place and therefore in disguise and therefore a threat. “It’s that
Tancredi kid, what’n the hell’s he doing here?”

   
“Oh
no,” Kit said. “This ain’t good.”

There was no way to get to him, he
was inside the black funeral train, already rolling, of his terrible intention.

“
Via,
via!
”
they
were kind enough to warn him off, but he kept approaching. He was doing the one
thing authority cannot abide, will never allow to pass, he was refusing to do
as he was told. What was the object he held in his hand, carefully, as if it
might explode at the slightest jar? “His hands were empty,” Pugliese said
later, “nobody found a weapon.”

Mascaregna shook his head, disconsolate.
“He said he had an infernal machine, which would bring down Vibe and, some
distant day, the order Vibe expresses most completely and hatefully. This was
his precious instrument of destruction. It gave off a light and heat Tancredi
alone could sense, it blinded him, it burned fiercely in his hands, like the
glowing coal in the Buddhist parable, he could not let it go. If Vibe was an
acquirer of art, then here was Tancredi’s creation, his offering, the
masterwork he thought would change any who beheld it, even this corrupted
American millionaire, blind him to the life he had been inhabiting, bring him
to a different kind of seeing. No one gave him a chance to say, “Here it is,
here is a bounded and finite volume of God’s absence, here is all you need to
stand before and truly see, and you will know Hell.”

Flame stabbed out of the muzzles of
brandnew Glisentis, shots echoed off the water and the stone walls, tremendous,
ripping apart the silence. Tancredi’s limbs had flown open, as if he were
preparing to embrace as much as he could of what the world had just been
reduced to—the first rounds con

tracted him to a remnant, bowing down
as if before some perverse nobility, around and behind him rising the ancient
splendor of the Palazzo, as he slipped and fell in his own blood and passed
into a void in the day where bells were silent, the city he both loved and
resented taken away, no longer his to transfigure.

At
first it seemed they might only be prodding at the remains with their
boottips—to be expected of professionals, after all, just making sure the
subject didn’t suddenly come to life again. But this grew less tentative, and
soon the
assassini
were
delivering
brutal kicks, as forcefully as they could, shouting insults till the
fondamenta
sounded like a jailyard, while Scarsdale Vibe all but danced up and down in
delighted approval, loudly offering procedural advice.

“Make
sure you damage the face, fellows.
Batti! batti la faccia,
yes?
Destroy it. Give the little shitass’s
Mamma something to cry about.” When his voice was too hoarse to go on, he
approached and looked down for a while on the torn corpse in its bath of public
light, feeling blessed at having witnessed firsthand this victory over
Anarchist terror. Foley, for whom it had once been the vernacular of daily life
in a Union regiment, stood by and didn’t comment.

Rising
fog had begun to mix with the slow dissipation of gunsmoke. A party of rats,
having taken immediate interest, had emerged from the canal. Out of
consideration for any latearriving guests, one of the gunmen, using the boy’s
hat, was trying to sluice away some of the blood from the pavement with hatfuls
of canal water.

Vibe
stood at the highest point of the little bridge without speaking, back turned,
a solid black silhouette, head and cloak, held waiting in an unmistakable
tension seeming not to grow in size so much as, oddly, to take on mass, to
become rectified into an iron impregnability. For an instant, before he made
his deliberate way back into the shelter of the lighted and melodious palazzo,
he turned and stared straight at Kit, leaving no doubt that he recognized him,
and even with the falling night, the
foschia
and the guttering
torchlight, Kit could see enough of the triumphant smirk on the man’s face.
You
pathetic little pikers,
he might have been chuckling,
who
—
what
—
did
you think you were up against?

“
According to the police
, Anarchists specialize,
Foley, did you know that? The Italian ones usually go after royalty. Empress
Elisabeth, King Umberto, so forth.”

   
“Guess
that makes you American royalty,” quipped Foley.

   
“King
Scarsdale. Yes. Has a lilt to it.”

They were up in the grand dining room
at the BauerGrünwald eating roast tenderloin of lamb and guzzling Pommery. The
room was busy with eaters whose supply of cash far exceeded any degree of
hunger they could remember or imagine. Waiters conversed in undertones which
only just managed to be polite, in which the word
cazzo
occurred often.
Chandeliers, whose crystalline arrangements were set to exquisitely fine
clearances, shivered and chimed as if able to sense each negligible settling of
the building into the primeval Venetian ooze beneath.

Later
Scarsdale was astonished to see Foley out carousing on the embankment, whirling
round and round with not one but three young women, accompanied by some local
maniac with an accordion. From time to time, firecrackers went off as well.

   
“Foley,
what in heaven’s name?”

   
“Dancin
that tarantella,” Foley replied, out of breath.

   
“Why?”

   
“Celebrating.
Just happy that
they
didn’t get you.”

   
If
Scarsdale heard an emphasis on “they” he gave no indication.

“
Where’n the hell’d
all ’em pistoleros come from?”
Reef had been repeating, like a sort of prayer in time of defeat.

“They were hired for the evening,”
Dally said. “And there’d have been no way to buy them off, not with what your
Mr. Vibe was paying them.”

“Why didn’t somebody say something?”
Reef more annoyed than plaintive.

“I did—you just didn’t want to
hear about it. Everybody else in these
calli
knew.”

“We figured there’d be extra hands,”
Kit said, “just not so many. Dumb luck we got away, we could look at it like
that.”

“That kid sure didn’t get anyplace,”
Reef scowling at his brother. “Sorry, Dahlia.”

She was shaken, more than she was
willing to let on. It seemed years she’d been dropping by to see Tancredi and
his paintings. She was aware in almost a neural way of all the creation that
would not happen now, the regret and horror at what she had almost been a part
of, and worst of all the shameful, shameful relief at still being alive. They
might never have become lovers, but shouldn’t they have been allowed some time
to find out? He was a virtuous kid, like all these fucking artists, too much so
for the world, even the seen world they were trying to redeem one little
rectangle of canvas at a time.

“I
should’ve seen it coming,” Dally said. “Somebody shopped him. This miserable
town, a thousand years of ratting to the law.”

   
“I
could at least have said be careful,” Kit mumbled.

“Listen, children,” Reef throwing
things in a valise, “when they invent the time machine, we’ll buy tickets, hop
in, come back to last night, and all shall be made jake. Meantime the old
sidewinder has took his charmed life someplace else, and no telling when we’ll
get another shot. If ever. I sure don’t know how the hell long we’re supposed
to keep doin this.” He went out the door, and they heard him on the stairs.

“Well I’m just as glad it didn’t
happen,” she said quietly. “One dead is one too many.” Looked up at Kit and the
silent term was clear in her face—one dead, one about to head off into
exile.

Kit paused in his efforts at
disguise, mostly to do with combing shoe polish into his hair. “I do keep my
promises, Dahlia.”

She nodded, kept nodding, figured
there was plenty of time later to get around to crying.

   
“You
know if there was any way I could stay—”

   
“There
isn’t. You don’t need my permission.”

“Vibe saw me there, at the scene. If
he didn’t already figure it out, he has now, and there’s none of them who’ll
just let it be anymore.”

   
“That
case you’d best get going, don’t end up the same way.”

Though Kit had never made much sense
of Venice, it almost seemed normal compared to what he was headed into. Dally
recognized the condition. “Here they say
bagonghi,
the way it feels when
you go staggering around all over the place like a circus clown.” He went to
sleep and woke with the single operatic image of Vibe turning to stare him
mercilessly in the face, having known all along exactly where he’d been
stationed across the little canal, while all around them daywage assassins
revealed themselves, as if Time’s own prætorians had risen up to defend it. The
rosedyed smile, the smile of a pope in a painting, framed in a face that didn’t
customarily smile, one you’d prefer never to see, for it meant trouble on the
tracks.

It
was probably also the undeniable moment, if one had to be singled out, of Kit’s
exclusion from what had been spoken of at Yale as a “future”—from any
routes to success or even bourgeois comfort that were Scarsdale Vibe’s to
control. Kit was not sure how much he’d ever wanted that, but now there wasn’t
even the choice. Yashmeen’s
stranniki
had delivered themselves entirely
into the service of God and the Mysterious Death, but as far as Kit could see,
this journey ahead of him was not for God, not for Yashmeen, who was the love
of somebody’s life no doubt, just not Kit’s, nor any longer even

for the cause of
Vectorism—maybe nothing more than the simple preservation through flight
of his increasingly worthless ass.

They might have
imagined some effortless departure into a golden fog, but as it turned out, the
brothers did not part on what you’d call affectionate terms. As if the gunplay
at the Palazzo had been catching up with Reef or something, he’d now cranked
himself into a grim mood.