Against the Day (155 page)

   
Whatever
had happened out there provided its own annunciation, begin

ning upriver from Vanavara and
booming westward at six hundred miles per hour, all through that darkless
night, one seismograph station to the next, across Europe to the Atlantic, via
posts, pendulums, universal joints, slender glass threads writing on smoked
paper rolls driven clockworkslow beneath, via needles of light on coatings of
bromide of silver, there was the evidence
.
. .
in distant cities to the west, “sensitive flames,” some of them
human, dipped, curtseyed, feebly quivered at allbuterotic edges of extinction.
Questions arose as to the timing, the “simultaneousness” of it. New converts to
Special Relativity took a fascinated look. Given the inertia of writingpoints
and mirrors, the transit times at focusing lenses, the small variations in the
speed at which the bromide paper might have been driven, the error of the
seismograph recordings more than embraced the “instant” in which a
hithertounimagined quantity of energy had entered the equations of history.

“Power
being equal to the area under the curve,” as it seemed to Professor Heino
Vanderjuice, “the shorter the ‘instant,’ the greater the amplitude—it
begins to look like a singularity.”

Others
were less restrained. Was it Tchernobyl, the star of Revelation? An
unprecedented harrowing of the steppe by cavalry in untold millions, flooding
westward in a simultaneous advance? German artillery of a secret design more
powerful by orders of magnitude than any military intelligence office had ever
suspected? Or something which had not quite happened yet, so overflowing the
tidy frames of reference available to Europe that it had only seemed to occur
in the present, though really originating in the future? Was it, to be blunt,
the general war which Europe this summer and autumn would stand at the
threshold of, collapsed into a single event?

Dally Rideout
,
still moping around about Kit, not that she expected any word from him, had
gone on maturing into an even more desirable young package, negotiable on the
Venetian market as a Circassian slave in old Araby, pale redhead’s coloring,
bruisable skin inviting violent attention, hair gone beyond the untamed spill
she had hit town with, now a blazing announcement of desire about which no one
was ready to be convinced otherwise. That same summer day, she had been
approached scarcely steps from Ca’ Spongiatosta by a disagreeable gent with the
usual 1894 Bodeo tucked into his belt, no longer willing to cut her any slack.
“Tonight, the minute it gets dark, understand? I’m coming for you. Better be
wearing something pretty.” She went through the rest of the day in dread of
nightfall, with
teppisti
following everywhere and making little secret
of it.

   
Who
was there to talk to about this? Hunter Penhallow was not really the

best choice, more than ever
preoccupied with his own ghosts, failing to retrieve memories which avoided him
as if wishing consciously to be cruel. The Princess was off on one of her
daytime adventures and would not be back till evening, by which point Dally
herself, she reckoned, had best be well hidden.

But
that night it would not get dark, there would be light in the sky all night.
Hunter walked out into quite a different sort of “nocturnal light,” to pass
these unnaturally skylit hours working in a cold frenzy, while all up and down
the little waterways, on bridges, in
campielli
and on rooftops, out on
the Riva, over on the Lido while the moneyed guests in the new hotels stared
down at the beach, wondering if this had been arranged just for them and how
much extra it would cost, all manner of Venetian artists had likewise come out,
with watercolor gear, chalk, pastels, oils, all trying to “acquire” tonight’s
light as if it were something they must negotiate for—or even
with—throwing desperate looks heavenward from time to time as if at a
common subject up there posing, as if to make sure it had not moved or
disappeared, this gift from far away, perhaps another Krakatoa, no one knew,
perhaps the deep announcement of a change in the Creation, with nothing now
ever to be the same, or of some more sinister advent incomprehensible as that
of any Christ fixed in paint on the ceilings, canvases, plaster walls of Venice
. . . .

Cocks
crowed at intervals, as if being reminded haphazardly of their duty. Dogs
wandered bemused, or lay peacefully next to cats with whom they ordinarily
didn’t get along, each appearing to take turns guarding the sleep of the other,
which in any case was brief. The night was too strange. Skippers of vaporetti
were detained wherever they pulled in by insomniac Venetians out lining the
landings who imagined them privy to the doings of some wider world. When the
morning newspapers finally arrived, they were sold out in a few minutes, though
none had any explanation for the cold and gentle light.

Somewhere
in the unsketched regions of Ca’ Spongiatosta, “You are a step,” the Princess
warned, “the turn of an eye, the whisper of a skirt, from the
mala vita.
I
can protect you, but can you protect yourself?” The two young women sat in an
upper room of the great Palazzo, in muted shadow, as reflected waterglare
flickered across the ceiling. The Princess was holding Dally’s face, lightly
but imperiously, between exquisitelygloved palms, as if the price of
inattention would be a sound slap, though an uninformed observer could not have
said which, if either, was in command. The Princess still wore an afternoon
dress of dark gray satin, while the girl was all but naked, her small breasts
visible through the
brides picotées
of her newlypurchased lace chemise,
the nipples darker than usual and more defined, as if recently

and purposefully bitten. In this
fractional light, her freckles seemed darker, too, like a reverse glittering
across her flesh. She would not reply.

Back on the Trieste station
, no longer entirely welcome in Venice, in a warren partially
below ~ steet level, seething with tobacco smoke, most of it Balkan in origin,
Cyprian Latewood conferred with a newlyarrived cryptographer named Bevis
Moistleigh. Gaslight, which remained on through the long day, revealed
aboriginal limestone forming parts of certain walls, and produced ambiguous
highlights off the ebonite valvehandles and chromium plating of communal coffee
urns of quite ancient Italian design, not to mention those individual
macchinette
not secreted in file drawers. The place ran on coffee.

   
“What
is this? I can’t read it—all these little circles
. . . .
”

“It’s
the Glagolitic alphabet,” explained Bevis. “Old Slavonic. Orthodox Church texts
and so forth. You’ve been out here awhile, I’m surprised you haven’t learned
it.”

   
“Little
occasion to go into any Orthodox churches.”

   
“Not
yet. The time comes, however.”

Cyprian
found he could neither pronounce nor make sense of the strings of characters
the young crypto wizard was showing him, straight or transliterated.

“Of
course not, it’s in code, isn’t it,” said Bevis. “Fiendish code, I might add.
Right off I noticed it uses both Old and New Style alphabets—quite
pleased with myself until twigging that each letter in this alphabet also has
its own
numerical value,
what was known among ancient Jewish students of
the Torah as ‘gematria.’ So, as if there wasn’t quite enough threat to the old
mental balance already, the message must now be taken also as
a series of
digits,
wherewith readers may discover in the text at hand certain
hidden
messages
by adding together the numbervalues of the letters in a group,
substituting other groups of the same value, so generating another, covert
message. Furthermore, this particular gematria doesn’t stop at simple
addition.”

   
“
Oh,
dear. What else?”

“Raising
to powers, calculating logarithms, converting strings of characters to terms of
a series and finding the limits they converge to, and— I say Latewood, if
you could see the look on your face
. . . .
”

“Feel
free, please. As there’s little enough hysterical giggling out here, why we
must snatch it wheree’er we find it, mustn’t we.”

   
“Not
to mention fieldcoefficients, eigenvalues, metric tensors—”

   
“I say, it could take forever, couldn’t it. How many working
here in your shop?”

Bevis
indicated himself, with a single finger, held like a pistol to his head. “You
can imagine how quickly it all rushes along. So far I’ve been able to decipher
one word,
fatkeqësi,
which is Albanian for ‘disaster.’ First word of a
message intercepted months ago, and I still don’t know what to have looked out
for back then, or even who sent it. The event, whatever it was, is long over
with, the lives lost, the mourning frocks handed along to the widows next in
line. The EasternQuestion brigade, having done their worst, pass along to
promotions, gongs, landed ease, and whatever, leaving us ashcats of the Balkans
among their miserable debris, with all the tidyingup to do. Irredentism? Don’t
make me laugh. Nothing out here is ever redeemed, or for that matter even
redeemable—”

“All
quite chummy then?” Derrick Theign with his head in the door, an inspection
visit no doubt, “excellent, boys, do carry on
.
. . .
”

   
“That
person gives me the chills,” confided Bevis.

   
“Step
carefully, then.”

   
“
Bevis,
”
Theign was in the
habit of pronouncing each time he looked into young Moistleigh’s
cubbyhole—“
the Story of a Boy.
”
Before the cryptographer could even look up in annoyance,
Theign had passed along the corridor to perplex someone else.

“And
another peculiar thing,” Bevis regarding with suspicion Theign’s form receding
into the smoky establishment, “he has me working on Italian ciphers. They are
supposed to be our allies, are they not? Yet day after day, all this naval
material finds its way onto my morning pile. They have this practice in the
Royal Italian N. of encrypting long articles from the daily papers, so one can
practically break the code in one’s sleep as long as one is willing to read a
good deal of rubbish every day, then endless typing, translation into both
English and German, a tremendous drain on one’s time don’t you know—”

“German?”
no more than idle curiosity, really, “Bevis, where are these deciphered messages
being routed, exactly?”

“Dunno—one
of Theign’s people takes care of that. Oh I say, German, I never thought of
that, they’re
not
supposed to be allies, are they?”

   
“Another
of his elaborate games no doubt.”

They
turned back to the intractable blocks of Glagolitic code. By now enough
caffeine had found its way to the brain centers which took care of such matters
for Bevis that he felt comfortable moving to greater questions. “And
further—suppose the messages could be inscribed somehow into ‘the world,’
into a selfconsistent collection, analogous to a mathematical ‘group.’

The physical engine would have to be designed and built of
course, perhaps something along the lines of Mr. Tesla’s Magnifying
Transformer. And because the ‘great world’ is no more than the distribution,
dense without practical limit, of just these symbols, written in just this
code, any errors in the original inscription, however minor, could in time
prove immense—even if not obvious immediately, one day someone will
notice an inevitable blur, a cascade of false identity, a disintegration into
massive absence. As if some great departure that no one can quite make out were
under way, an emigration of reason itself.”

   
“Something
on a scale—” Cyprian imagined.

“Hitherto
unprovided for in the future tense of any language. No matter what alphabet
it’s written in. As we like to say, ‘High ~susceptiblity to primordial
variables.
’ ”

   
“A
departure—”

   
“An
emigration.”

   
“To
. . .
?”

   
“Or
worse—some sort of Crusade.”

When
they stepped outside at last and went to supper, Cyprian happened to notice the
sky. “Something’s wrong with the light, Moistleigh,” as if it were physics he
hadn’t studied, some form of reverse eclipse that a cryptanalyst could explain,
and possibly even repair. But Moistleigh was standing stricken, like the crowds
in the Piazza Grande and along the
Rive,
glancing nervously upward from
time to time though not gazing steadily, for who knew what sort of
counterattention that might invite?

After leaving
Venice
, Reef had caught up
with Ruperta at Marienbad, and for a while the old sad routine recommenced. He
won more at the table than he lost, but on the other side of the ledger,
Ruperta kept finding occasions, some describable as desperate, to claim his
attention. Neither of their hearts must have been in it any longer, however,
because one day she just took off without telling him. An empty bedroom, no
information at the front desk, fresh vasefuls of flowers waiting for the next
happy couple. The lapdog Mouffette, whom Reef had always suspected of being a
cat in disguise, had vomited in his Borsalino.