Against the Day (167 page)

   
“Where
you been stayin?”

   
“Trieste.
Not sure I should go there anymore.”

By
the time they reached Venice the storm had blown on over the
terraferma
and
the moon was out in high spooky shine. They moved cautiously into the skein of
little canals, the engine throttled back to a muffled grumble, everything in
the night queerly lit, just about to ascend into some glow less bearable. At
last they stepped onto a narrow
fondamenta.
“We’ll hide this for you in
a little
squero
we
use,”
Rocco said. “It will be safe.”

   
“Buy
you boys a gin fizz next time I see you,” Reef touching his hat.

“If God wishes,” said Pino. The
midget submarine moved off, the boat in tow at a lopsided angle.

They climbed a couple flights of
stairs, first marble, then wood. Reef let them in to a room full of moonlight.

   
“Your
place?”

“Some boys from down the Amalfi
coast, we’ve done business together, they keep it handy for whoever. Good for a
couplethree days maybe.”

He found a bottle of grappa, but she
waved it away and collapsed on the divan, allowing herself only one utterance
of Vlado’s name, her whisper as close to defeated as anyone, including herself,
had heard it.

“He could have got away in all that
confusion—tell you what, I’ll go out, ask around a little. There’s a
bathtub in there, soap and so forth, you take her easy, I’ll be back soon.”

   
“This
needn’t be—”

“It ain’t. Figure like that I’m
trying to accommodate a friend of my brother’s is all.”

On
the way back down the stairs he allowed himself the couple minutes of descent
to calculate that Kit was likely out someplace on a camel right now fighting
off half an army of screaming Chinese and probably had more on his mind than
what this very strange young lady might be up to. Which didn’t excuse how Reef
had turned his back and walked away. Just a shitheel way of

proceeding, and he couldn’t even remember why anymore.

   
He
found an allnight bar off the Campo Santa Margherita that had always

been good for uptotheminute gossip till the Rialto cranked
back up to

speed in the morning, stood drinks, kept his ears open, once
in a while asking a stupidcowboy question or two. Everybody had heard about the
shootout over on the Lido, and agreed that the only thing preventing war with
Austria was that no Italians had been directly involved. The
mavrovlaco
was
well known and a sort of outlaw hero in these parts, being, like his people for
generations before him, an enemy of Austria and her ambitions in the Adriatic.
Every time he left his mountain stronghold, they tried to follow and capture
him, and this time the sea had betrayed him, for no one human ever would.

Reef
got back to find Yashmeen fallen asleep on the divan, having spread her wet
hair out behind her on a towel to dry. The celebrated Venetian moonlight came in
the window, everything looked sketched in chalk. He stood over by the window
with his back to the considerably haunted city and smoked and watched her
sleep.

She
was wearing a white batiste shift of some kind, transparent to moonlight, and
in her sleep it had drifted above her hips. One hand rested between her legs,
which were slightly apart. Reef somehow found himself with this erection.

Fine
thing. On the run, her beau in some very deep trouble indeed, and what
dishonorable thoughts was he entertaining here? She chose that moment to shift
in her sleep, turning so that he was now gazing at her, you’d say, admirable
ass, and though what he ought to be doing now was taking a walk over to that
Piazza or something, instead, true to his idiot nature, he’d unbuttoned his
trousers and begun stroking his penis, unable not to gaze at the pale buttocks
and dark cleft, the black spill of hair and naked neck, just a step or two
away. As he was hitting the runup to his grand finale, she rolled over and
regarded him with shining, enormous eyes, which had been open for some time it
seemed, her hands pretty much occupied the same way as his. He let go of his
penis long enough to shrug, smile and turn his glistening palms up and outward,
in an appeal, charming so he’d been told, for forbearance.

“Are
you committed to this disgusting activity,” she inquired, her attempt at a
Girtonian drawl undone by a tremor she could not suppress, “or might the vagina
hold some interest for you, beyond the merely notional?”

Before
he understood this was not a request for information, he had taken the two or
three paces that mattered and was quickly on the divan and inside her, and not
a moment too soon, as it turned out. She fastened her teeth, hard and
unapologetically, between his neck and shoulder and let out thus muffled a long
cry that was at least half a growl. He grabbed a handful of her

hair, which he’d been wanting to do
since he came in the room, brought her face around to his, and surprising
himself, for he was not that much of a kisser, kissed Yashmeen until she
started biting his lips and tongue and then maybe half a minute more, just to
make sure of what was going on.

She
pulled away long enough to hiss, “You unprincipled swine,” and they were
kissing again.

He
was expecting reproaches, but she was more interested in his Egyptian
cigarettes. He located his matchsafe and lit one for her. After a minute she
said,
  
“Did you find out
anything?”

   
“Not
much.”

   
“You’d
better tell me. I am not some frail American wildflower.”

   
“They
took him inside the Arsenale.”

She nodded gravely, and in the
lamplight he could see the color leaving her face.

   
“We
could get in,” he said.

“Oh?
Then what? be shot at again.” When he didn’t answer, “And what else?”

He
flicked ash into his trouser cuff. “How serious are you about the way you look
right now?”

She
peered into the chevalglass. “You don’t approve? We have it off once, and
you’re my fashion adviser?”

He
blew a smoke ring, on the chance it would get her attention. It rotated,
expanded slowly into the moonlight, becoming a keen ghostwhite. “Those were
Mannlichers tonight over on that Lido, so I calculate them Austrian amigos of
yours were not just out for a day of trapshootin. They were surely lookin for
your friend Vlado, but if they also have a description on you now—”

She
took a lock of her hair and examined it in the mirror. “Then I shall need a
disguise, and some of this will have to go.” She waited, as if for him to
reply. “Well. When a girl needs a marcel wave in a hurry, there’s only one man
in this town to see.” Reef had already fallen into snoring oblivion.

By
the time she got down to his insufferably fashionable corner of San Marco, just
behind the BauerGrünwald, Signor Fabrizio was just opening for business.

   
“And
our Ciprianuccio, he is safe and well?”

“Traveling on business,” she said,
not it seemed calmly enough to keep the
parruchiere
from crossing
himself fretfully. His mood did not improve when he learned what she wanted. Of
the many men and women who had worshipped her hair, Fabrizio was the extremist
with the zealous roll to his eyeballs that one tried not to arouse
unnecessarily.

   
“I
can’t cut it off.
Macchè,
Yashmeen. How could I cut it off?”

   
“But
it will belong to you, then. You can do whatever you want with it.”

   
“If you
put it that way . . .”

She followed his gaze. They were now
both looking at his penis. “No. You wouldn’t.”

   
He
shrugged.

   
“It
gets worse. I want to be blonde. Dark blonde at least. A Cadorina.”

   
“Mother
of God.”

   
“And
if anyone can do this thing . . .”

The
penis pleasantry was only Fabrizio’s little joke, of course. Yashmeen’s hair
was to have a peculiar and not altogether dishonorable fate. It was to be
bleached gently, recurled, and fashioned into an elaborate wig in the
eighteenthcentury Venetian style, appropriate for a Carnevale costume, as part
of which in fact it was to appear in the near future, at a fateful masked ball.

When the
Campanile
in the Piazza
San Marco collapsed, certain politically sensitive Venetian souls felt a
strange relocation of power. Somehow, they believed, the campanile of San
Francesco della Vigna, a little north of the Arsenale, where the angel visited
St. Mark on the turbulent night recorded by Tintoretto, a close double of the
one that fell, had come to replace it as a focus of power, as if by a sort of
coup in which the Arsenale, and the bleak certainties of military science, had
replaced the Palazzo Ducale and its less confident human struggles toward
republican virtue.

Like
the cemetery island of San Michele visible across the water, the Arsenale also
presented to the civic view a Mystery surrounded by a wall, high pale
brickwork, blank except here and there for a decorative iron tensionrod
retainer or a tile rainspout, and topped by crenellations in a twobladed halberd
shape. All around the forbidden perimeter, the people of Castello went on with
daytoday lives, dogs shit on the pavingstones, church bells were heard,
vaporetti put in and departed, pedestrians walked in the shadow of the Mystery
as if it were not there, as if it were there but could not be seen. The ancient
maps showed that what was visible from the entrances amounted only to a
fraction of the entire works. To those forbidden to enter, the maps were like
visions of prophets, in a sort of code, outward and visible notation for what
lay within.

Vlado
Clissan, aware of a region of silence behind him, risked a glance back at the
walls of the Arsenale, obstructing the salt wind, ascending, blank and
functional, to take up half the sky. A veil of masonry. Mysteries there. He
knew that before long a door, somewhere in the wall, usually kept invisi

ble, would open. He would pass with
his captors inside, and the next world would commence.

In
a longabandoned corner of one of the ancient foundries he had had fitted out as
an office, Derrick Theign was sitting on a folding chair, eyes quiescent and
pale in a white face he was able somehow to relax into a mask never
contemplated in Venice, which everyone, and particularly those in Vlado’s
position, ought nonetheless to recognize. It had been known to frighten
subjects into blurting information they didn’t actually have, confessing to
acts they had never thought of committing.

“Your people are trading in naval
secrets. Uskok piracy brought up to date, I suppose—no point in seizing
physical ships, when one can traffic in their souls.”

Vlado laughed. “If I were a pirate, I
would prefer a physical ship carrying a physical cargo worth physical money.
And I would get to deal with a better class of middleman.”

Theign
might have been hoping for a more intellectual discussion, though it remained a
given that, in the process now under way,
a moment would arrive.
Chats
like this, delaying things, giving the subject any reason to hope, however
transitory, would provide a much more effective blow to the spirit when the
Webley finally did make its appearance—that drop into stillness useful to
executioners, a paralysis of Will, or whatever it is analogous to Will that
kept these people so perversely resisting to the end.

“I
saw you with someone, didn’t I, over on the Lido? Only a glimpse in all the
confusion, but she seemed quite appealing. Actually.”

   
“To
you?” Careful not to seem too puzzled and provoke anything too soon.

Theign
shrugged. “More to the point, how appealing to you? And how deeply of your
persuasion? Or would she’ve been there more in a decorative role?”

   
“Are
you asking, what would I consider trading her for?”

“Of
course that does happen now and then. But I did not wish to insult either of
you.”

   
“I
don’t know where she is. Even if I did, she’d be of little use
. . . .
”

Theign watched Vlado’s face until the
unpleasant thought had fully surfaced there, then nodded, one grown man to
another. “Right. Unless our plans for both of you were the same. In which case,
if you told me, it wouldn’t matter so much.”

   
“Where
she is.”

   
“That’s
if you knew, of course.”

This was not the same as being in a
tavern where an enemy puts a pistol in your face and says, “Make your
arrangements with God, for you are about to

be a dead man.” In a tavern, always,
somewhere, close enough to hand, there would be a second pistol, a third, a
chance. In this sober and unsociable vacancy, no such hope was evident. Any bet
made in here would be for the highest possible stakes.