Against the Day (160 page)

   
“Lucky
bitch, actually. I know what
I’d
have
in mind.”

When Bevis Moistleigh came aboard at
Pola and caught sight of Jacintha, he was instantly and publicly smitten.
Cyprian felt frightfully happy for him of course, there being little enough
passion in the world isn’t there, yes—but decided to keep his suspicions
about the devious dewdrop to himself for the moment, partly to see how much
Bevis could find out on his own.

The
John of
Asia
had begun to pass among island
cities, variations on the theme of Venice, domes, villas, and shrines
arpeggiated along the irregular Croatian coastline, white campanili and towers
less explicable, older, grayer, put up against some ancient approach no longer
definable, and allbutuncharted
strange miniature islets
holding antique
structures too small for worship, sentry duty or imprisonment. Fish known
locally as “sea swallows” darted among the wavetops. From the saloon, where
twoheaded eagles adorned the furniture, the drapes, and for that matter
anyplace else one looked, Cyprian gazed out at the flowing scenery, as Bevis
reeled out a line of patter no girl, however desperate for company, would ever
have sat still for, except that Jacintha here appeared to be listening with a
most peculiar eagerness.

   
“As
many have demonstrated, notably I suppose BadenPowell, one cannot overestimate
the value of appearing to dwell in a state of idiocy. In fact Jacintha did you
know that there is now an
entire branch
of spycraft known as Applied
Idiotics—yes, including my own school, a sort of training facility run by
the Secret Service, near Chipping Sodbury actually, the Modern Imperial
Institute for Intensive Instruction In Idiotics—or M.6I., as it’s
commonly known.”

“How ever so much more exciting
Bevis, than the dull little girls’ academy I must attend, so relentlessly
normal, don’t you know.”

“But I say Jacintha at M.6I. no
aspect of school life was exempt really, even the
food
was
idiotic—in hall for example the chipshop approach was actually extended
to deepfrying such queer items as chocolate bonbons and fairy cakes—”

   
“What,
no fish Bevis.”

“Dear me no Jacintha, that would be
‘brain food,’ wouldn’t it—and the school uniform featured these ever so
excruciatingly tight
pointed hats,
which one must wear
even—indeed, especially—while one slept, and unspeakably awful
neckties of the sort that, out in the civilian world, frankly, only, well,
idiots would ever be found wearing
. . .
one’s
physical training began each dawn with a set of exercises in eyecrossing, lip
relaxation, irregular gaits of as many varieties as there are dancesteps
. . . .
”

   
“That
many? Really?” Jacintha flourishing her lashes.

“Let me show you.” He motioned to the
band. “I say, do you chaps know ‘The Idiotic’?”

   
“Sure!”
replied the accordionist, “we play ‘Idiotic’! You give us money!”

The little orchestra struck up the
lively twostep currently sweeping civilized Europe, and Bevis, seizing
Jacintha, began to stagger quite uncoördinatedly about the pocketsize saloon,
while the game lass did her best to follow his lead, both of them singing,

Out on the floor, used

To be such a bore,

Till we discovered

What thrills were in store, with

That step exotic, known as

‘The Idiotic’ . . .

Head like a pin? drool down your
chin?

Could qualifyyou

To give it a spin, tho’

It sounds neurotic,

It’s just ‘The Idiotic’!

              
Take
all those

Waltzes and polkas,

Stuff ’em alldownahole, ‘coz

There’s a scatterbrained rhythm today
. . .

It’s the new ‘Idiotic,’

And it’s kinda hypnotic,

In its own imbecilical way!

                                    
(Say),

Try, it onceandyou’llfind

You’ve, gone outofyourmind

For—the craze of the moment,

That’s oneofakind,

And it’s justso narcotic, that

I venture to say
. . .
you’ll

Be doing ‘The

Idiotic,’ till they

Gottacome take you away!

“And I must say Jacintha the girls at
the dances we were obliged to attend were not
nearly
as jolly as
yourself. Quite serious you know, obsessed by ever such dark thoughts.
Actually, well, institutionalized, many of them
. . . .
”

“
Oh,
dear,” chirped Jacintha, “how
dreadful for you Bevis, obviously you escaped, but however did you manage to?”

“Ah. Certain arrangements. Always
possible among gentlemen and no hard feelings.”

“Then you are still with the same . .
.” the lightly foreign shading she put on vowels producing its inviting effect,
“gentlemanly apparatus?”

Now, Bevis’s having been tipped for
Idiotics instruction had been no random decision. No, no—indeed, crypto
genius and all, in other areas of life idiocy came as naturally to him as a
gift for legspin delivery might to another youth. A girl aboard an Austrian
vessel, attending a Tsarist school and accompanied by English nobility, could
of course be working for any number of shops—and Entente or not, in the
present climate of annexation and crisis, Cyprian supposed due diligence called
for a spot of intrusion about now.

But
young Jacintha was ahead of him it seemed. She had approached him and, standing
quite close, begun pulling at his necktie with some insistence. “Come Cyprian,
you simply must dance with me.”

No
one could remember ever seeing Cyprian dance. “Sorry
. . .
under a court injunction, actually
. . . .
” Jacintha, her head set at a sweetly enticing angle,
begged as if her heart would be broken forever if he did not immediately jump
up and make a fool of himself all up and down the saloon. “Besides,” she
whispered, “however bad you think you are, you
must
be better than your
friend Bevis.”

   
“Oh,
must I. Those charming feet are to be adored, not assaulted.”

“We shall have to see about that too,
then, shan’t we,” with a steady gaze experience would no doubt improve to a
point where men would offer to pay her to speak just these words—for now
Cyprian could not avoid thinking of Yashmeen in a similar exchange, though
loyalty, if that’s what it was, did little to moderate the erection he seemed
to have been visited by, here. Jacintha regarded it with an all but predatory
little smile.

Meanwhile, out on deck, Lady
Quethlock was engaged in conversation with two other spies pretending to be
idiots.

“No, no,” she was saying, “not gold,
not gems, not oil or ancient artifacts, but the source of the world’s most
enigmatic river.”

   
“What,
the Nile? But—”

   
“Eridanus,
actually.”

   
“But
that’s the old Po, isn’t it?”

“If you believe Virgil, who’s fairly
late in the game—but the geography, regrettably, doesn’t bear it out. If
one goes back to the Argo, in Apollonius of Rhodes’s account of that strange
transpeninsular passage from Euxine to Cronian Seas—the forces of Colchis
both in pursuit and waiting in ambush, the personal complexities of Medea to be
dealt with and so forth, the Argonauts sailing into the mouth of the Danube and
upstream, and somehow, nervously one imagines, emerging into the
Adriatic—cannot be credited unless at some point they go by underground
river, most likely the Timavo, a river to the sea at whose mouth according to
Apollonius lie so many islets that the Argo can scarcely thread her way among
them. The Po Delta has few if any such islands, but over on this side of the
Adriatic, just over there in fact off our port beam as we speak, it’s a
different story, isn’t it.”

   
“But
Virgil—”

   
“Is
confusing Padus with Timavus, I expect.”

“So these,” a gesture out to the
passing shore, “are the Amber Islands of legend.”

   
“May
be. I am hoping to resolve the question.”

   
“Ah,
the lovely Jacintha.”

   
“Have
you a moment Aunt? I do need some advice.”

   
“You
are perspiring, girl. What have you been up to?”

Jacintha had her hands behind her
back and her head bowed, a proper little captive. Through her translucent dress
the company could see every fine movement of her limbs, and were duly
entertained.

Though Cyprian
and Bevis
had decided to
go in by way of the Herzegovina, Metkovic having for a few seasons now been
implausible as a tourist destination because of the fever, they continued down
to Kotor before debarking, Jacintha’s company being a useful pretext for not
getting off earlier at Ragusa. Cyprian, with no more than a vague code about
honoring the idiocy of others, blinked rapidly but went along with the change
in plan.

After a farewell whose poignancy if
any, was lost on Cyprian, he and a signally glum Bevis Moistleigh ate at a
waterfront restaurant that served a local brodet full of skarpina, eels, and
prawns, then proceeded to the quay and engaged a boat which took them along the
south shore of the Gulf of Cattaro, beneath all manner of fjord scenery,
through a narrow canal known locally as “the Chains” and into the Bay of Teodo,
all under the gaze of lenses, multiplied beyond counting, stationed at every
vantage, though the specular highlights that twinkled at them from shore were
not due only to optical devices. At Zelenika they sat drinking sageflavored
grappa before boarding the train for Sarajevo, which took them all the way back
along the coast, through Hum and feverridden Metković, where they turned
inland and began to climb into the Herzegovina toward Mostar, six hours away,
then six more to Sarajevo.

In Sarajevo
pale minarets rose above the trees.
Swallows traced fading black trails across the afternoonlight, beneath which
the river through town appeared red. At the Café Marienhof across the street
from the tobacco factory, down at the Turkish bath, in dozens of chance
meetings in the Bazaar, immediately, unable to help it, someone would be
remarking on the Austrian outrage.

“Vienna must no longer be content
with drifting along ‘occupying’ us as it has since 1878, bringing us the
blessings of Austrian progress—railroads, prostitution, horrible
furniture—”

   
“Jesuit
operatives everywhere trying to turn us all Catholic.”

“—yet till now it was all
delusion, a sort of gentle madness, for we remained a part of Turkey, as we
have always been.”

“And now Austria’s harmless phantasy
has become acute suicidal mania. This ‘annexation’ is a Habsburg deathwarrant.”

   
“Perhaps
one for Europe as well
. . . .
”

   
And
so on. Silence, however welcome, would have betrayed the unspoken Law of the
Café, which was that jabbering, regardless of topic, never pause. Voices
enough, this autumnal crescendo of danger, were blowing along the river valleys,
following the trains and mountain diligences, hounding, begging,
unquiet—breezing in to remind native and tourist alike of how quaint,
excitable, and precipitous was the national character
. . .
calling out, beware, beware the lover up all night with a
girl he desires, and who will not yield to him. Beware the Black Hand and the
Macedonian hotheads, beware even the Tarot cards the Gypsies set out for money
or idle divertissement, beware the shadowed recesses at the MilitärKasino, and
the whispers therewithin.

And
presently, from somewhere in the city, perhaps up on one of the hillsides,
where the Mahommedans lived, or from around windings of the river, there would
come an explosion. Never too close—almost exotic, almost an utterance in
a language one never had to bother to learn till now
. . . .

Though
wearing a Turkish fez whenever the situation demanded—in Bosnia the fez
was like the veil, an emblem of submission, and wearing it one of the costs of
doing business—Danilo Ashkil was descended from Sephardic Jews who had
fled the Spanish Inquisition three and a half centuries earlier, eventually
settling in Salonica, which even then, despite being Turkish, was already
recognized as a welcoming environment for Jews on the run. Danilo had grown up
in a fairly respectable Ma’min household but was soon down by the waterfront
hanging around with “dervishes,” gamblers, and hasheesh smokers, getting into
the usual trouble but finally proving too much of a social liability for his
parents, who sent him here to Sarajevo to live with a Bośniak branch of
the family, some of whose devotion to work and piety they hoped might rub off.
True to his destiny, however, he was soon out on the street, having learned
early in childhood to mock the confusion of tongues he was obliged by the day
to move among, having come, in this way, by adolescence, not only to master
Italian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian, Arabic, SerboCroatian, and Romany
as well as the peculiar Jewish Spanish known as Judezmo, but also when necessary
to be taken for a native speaker of one or another tongue without in every case
wishing to correct the impression. Well before the Austrian annexation, his
skill with languages and gifts of permeability among all elements of the
population had brought him to the attention of the Evidenzbüro. For traveling
operatives of all the Powers, he had become the one indispensable man in the
Balkans to drop by and visit. But now he was in danger, and it had fallen to
Cyprian and Bevis to see him to safety.