Against the Day (161 page)

Danilo,
having arranged to meet Cyprian at a café just below the Castle, found a pale
and sybaritic youth, the clogged certainties of whose university

English bore overlays of Vienna and the Adriatic coasts. He
also noted a defective sense of history, common among field operatives, given
their need to be immersed in the moment. So it was history—Time’s
pathology—that he must first address.

“I
know it is difficult for an Englishman, but try for a moment to imagine that,
except in the most limited and trivial ways, history does not take place north
of the fortyfifth parallel. What North Europe thinks of as its history is
actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian
killing each other, and that’s about it. The Northern powers are more like
administrators, who manipulate other people’s history but produce none of their
own. They are the stockjobbers of history, lives are their units of exchange.
Lives as they are lived, deaths as they are died, all that is made of flesh,
blood, semen, bone, fire, pain, shit, madness, intoxication, visions,
everything that has been passing down here forever, is real history.

“Now,
imagine a history referred not to London, Paris, Berlin or St. Petersburg but
to Constantinople. The war between Turkey and Russia becomes the crucial war of
the nineteenth century. It produces the Treaty of Berlin, which leads to this
present crisis and who knows what deeper tragedies awaiting us. Ever since that
war, Austria has dreamed of how it would be if the Turks were their friends.
Germans come down here on tours and marvel at how
Oriental
everything
is. ‘Look! Serbs and Croats, wearing fezzes over their blond hair! Blue eyes,
regarding us from behind the Muslim veil! Amazing!’ But as you have probably
seen by now, the Ballhausplatz are desperately afraid. They come to town, these
men so practical and full of daylit certainties, and all the while you can look
at them and see how they have spent the night, they have felt something stir in
the darkness, shapes and masses, as ancient nightmares resume, and once again
the Muslim hordes move westward, unappeasable, to gather, again, before the
gates of Vienna—never mind that it’s been unfortified for centuries, the
old glacis built over with public offices and bourgeois housing, the suburbs
penetrated easily as any Austrian whore—it cannot be true, God would not
permit—but here is their hour at hand, and in their panic, what is the
first thing they think to do? they turn and swallow Bosnia. Yes, that will fix
everything! Leaving us all now to wait, here in the winter twilight, for the
first thunder of spring.”

Cyprian
listened patiently. Bevis arrived, threw himself into a chair, and sat
brooding, no doubt about his AngloSlavic ingenue. When Danilo paused to drink
his raki, Cyprian nodded and said, “We’re supposed to bring you out.”

   
“And
Vienna . . .”

   
“They
won’t know right away.”

   
“Soon
enough.”

   
“By
then we’ll be out.”

   
“Or
dead.”

“We’ll take the narrowgauge to
BosnaBrod, change there, return by way of Zagreb to Trieste.”

   
“Rather
obvious crossingpoint, isn’t it?”

   
“Just
so. The last one they’ll expect.”

   
“And
. . .
how many of these deliverances have
you achieved?”

“Thousands,” Bevis assured him.
Cyprian with difficulty did not flash him quite the look he wished
to—smiled instead at Danilo with one side of his mouth, rolling his eyes
briefly Bevis’s way and back again.

“I
shall need a weapon,” Danilo said, in a tone which suggested that next he would
be discussing money.

“The
Black Hand are the people to see,” abruptly advised Bevis Moistleigh, with a
shrug of the brow meant to be read as,
Isn’t that obvious?
The silence
this released upon them was almost felt, like a drumbeat. What was a lowerlevel
crypto like Bevis expected even to know about that widelyfeared Serbian organization?
It occurred to Cyprian not exactly for the first time that Bevis might have
been set to spy on him, perhaps by Derrick Theign, perhaps by one of the many
elements spying in turn on Theign.

It was a
commonplace
among Balkan
hands that if one was keeping an eye on liberation movements, and looking for
members to turn doubleagent and betray their own, the South Slavic population
would provide slim pickings, if any at all. Nationalists and revolutionaries
here actually believed in what they were doing. “Only now and then might there
be a Bulgarian, or a Russian pretending to be a local person. A Russian will
shop his mother for a glass of vodka.”

And
wouldn’t you know it, who should Cyprian run into that evening, acting just
about that desperate, but his onetime antagonists Misha and Grisha. It was
across the river near the Careva Ulica, in Der Lila Stern, a former Austrian
military brothel converted to more equivocal uses. Cyprian and Bevis drank
Žilavka with seltzer water. A small cabaret band played behind a striking
young vocalist and dancer in hareminspired costume, though the veils were meant
more to be seen through than to protect. “I say,” Bevis remarked, “she’s
smashing!”

“Yes,”
said Cyprian, “and do you see those two Russians heading for our table, I think
they may want to settle an old score with me, so if you wouldn’t

mind pretending to be a sort of armed
bodyguard, perhaps a bit on the impulsive side, there’s a good chap . . .”
nervously fingering the Webley in his inside jacket pocket.

“Kiprskni!” they cried, “imagined you
were dead!” and other pleasantries. Far from bitter over the Colonel Khäutsch
business, the two, as if delighted to see an old familiar face, were not slow
to inform him that they’d left their Prater ways far behind.

“Shoot you?” cried Misha. “No! Why
should we want to? Who would pay money for that?”

“Even if somebody did, it wouldn’t be
worth our while,” added Grisha. “True, you have lost some weight, but
tchistka
would still take too long.”

 
“Your Colonel is somewhere out here now,” Misha mentioned
casually. “There was quite a scene in Vienna.”

Cyprian had heard the story, which
had entered the folklore of the business. When time had run out for the Colonel
at last, his fellow officers had left him alone in an office at the War
Ministry with a loaded pistol, expecting a wellbehaved, traditional suicide.
Instead Khäutsch seized the BorchardtLuger and began shooting at everyone in
range, shot his way out of the Ministry, into the Platz am Hof—next door
at the KreditAnstalt they thought it was a robbery, so they started shooting
too, the Hofburg briefly became Dodge City, and then Khäutsch was
gone—according to legend, on board the Orient Express, headed east. Never
seen after that. “Never officially,” said Misha.

“Blackmail doesn’t work anymore,”
Grisha all but in tears. “Preferring your own sex? What is that? If anything,
these days, is path to career advancement.”

“They’re not yet that enlightened in
H.M. Secret Service, I fear,” said Cyprian.

   
“Turkey
was a paradise,” repined Misha, “those boys with eyes black as figs.”

“Not anymore, of course.
Constantinople is wasteland. Nothing young about Young Turks, who are in fact
gang of puritanical old busybodies.”

“Though I must say,” Cyprian said,
“they’ve shown admirable restraint about putting the Ottoman lot through the
usual bloodbath, except for unregenerate cases like Fehim Pasha, the old head
of espionage
. . . .
”

   
“Yes,
that Brusa job,” beamed Grisha. “Quite stylish, wouldn’t you say?”

Cyprian squinted. “You two weren’t. .
. in some way. . .
f
actors
in that operation?”

Misha and Grisha looked at each other
and giggled. Somewhat horribly. Cyprian felt an intense longing to be somewhere
else.

“About the only thing English and
Germans have agreed on lately,” said Misha.

“Poor
Fehim,” said Grisha, at which point his companion, who was facing the street
entrance, began acting oddly.

Cyprian, ungifted in the clairvoyant
arts, nevertheless understood who had just walked in. After a bit he risked a
tentative look over his shoulder. Khäutsch wore a monocle that many on first
glance mistook for an
 
~ arificial
eye, and though he gave Cyprian a swift onceover, he did not seem to recognize
him—though that could have been part of whatever his current game was.

   
“I
say but Latewood,” muttered Bevis, tugging urgently at Cyprian’s arm.

   
“Not
now, Moistleigh, I am succumbing to nostalgia.”

   
All
through the descent of darkness, the muezzins had been crying out calls to
prayer from their hundred towers, before sunset, after sunset, and again deep
in the last turn of the day. In here music of similar modality accompanied the
tsiftétélli
as if, like praying, it required of the body conveyance beyond the day’s
simplicities.

A
great many young men in town seemed to know the Colonel, though as many made a
point of steering shy as they came up to greet him. Out of curiosity, Cyprian
drifted over and joined the group loosely gathered around the Colonel’s table.
At closer range he noticed a fatal unevenness in the length of Khäutsch’s
mustache, fraying at coat and trouser cuffs, cigarette burns and the
depredations of moths as well as more earthbound pests. The Colonel was
discoursing on the virtues of the Fifteenth Military District, otherwise known
as Bosnia. “In Vienna the general staff always included some Prussian
component, which made a life of human pleasure difficult if not impossible.
Officers’ honor
. . .
suicide
. . .
that sort of thing.” An embarrassed
silence had begun to descend. “But out here one finds a more balanced approach
to life, and the Prussophiles do less harm.” He plunged in a heavydrinker sort
of way into his own history, a detailed inventory of complaint. Ears did not
exactly perk up. It coldly dawned on Cyprian, however, that Khäutsch wasn’t
that drunk. The eyes remained purposeful as a serpent’s, recalling unavoidably
chastisements Cyprian had undergone at the hands of this droning, seedy pub
bore, some of which he had actually found, at the time, erotic. Was the whining
recital supposed to be a seduction?

   
“It’s
important!” It was Bevis again, pulling him back to their table.

   
“Ever
so sorry, Moistleigh, what was it then?”

“That belly dancer.” He nodded in her
direction, forehead corrugated earnestly.

   
“Lovely
girl, yes, what about her.”

   
“She’s
a bloke!”

   
Cyprian
squinted. “I suppose so. Do wish I had hair like that.” When he looked back at
the other table, the Colonel, curiously, had vanished.

Somehow
they got back to their pension, and next day Cyprian went from one hotel to
another, learning eventually that Khäutsch, booked into the Europe under
another name, had already checked out, having invoked a standing arrangement,
involving either cash or threats of death, that his next address not be
divulged.

Danilo
, who knew everything, showed up at
Cyprian’s room with a warning. “I hesitated to disturb you with this news,
Latewood, for you seemed another of these neuræsthenic youths one finds
everywhere lately. But you must be told. You have come to Sarajevo on a dummy
assignment. All to lure you out here to Bosnia, where it is easier for the
Austrians to take you. Your English employers have shopped you to them as a
‘Serbian agent,’ so that neither they nor, in the current climate, even
Russians will feel especially inclined to spare you. It seems you owe England
nothing anymore. I advise you to go. Save your life.”

   
“And
Colonel Khäutsch’s part in this?”

Danilo’s eyebrows went up, his head
to a doubtful angle. “He has too many precautions of his own to take. But you
might feel more comfortable out of town.”

   
“I
take it you never meant to come out, then.”

“I assumed by now they’d have
resolved the political question.” He looked away, and back. “Even so . . .”

   
“Do
go on, it’s only disposable me.”

“For reasons you may not need to
know, I find it more of a problem now to stay.”

   
“The
Crisis deepens, or something.”

Danilo
shrugged. “Here. You’d better wear these.” He handed Bevis and Cyprian each a
fez. Cyprian’s was so small it had to be forced onto the back of his head with
a sort of screwing motion, while Bevis’s kept falling over his eyes and ears.
“Wait, then, we’ll switch fezzes.” Most strangely, this did not resolve the
difficulty.