Against the Day (168 page)

Later
, at Cimiez, with the northeast wind
driving the seasonal visitors indoors, when Yashmeen began to hear reports of a
shootout near the Arsenale, between what might’ve been Austrian mercenaries and
what might’ve been Dalmatian revolutionists, she put her faith, like a good Emotional
Anarchist, in the Law of Deterministic Insufficiency.

   
“What’s
that?” said Reef.

   
“Like
a card comes up that you could never have predicted.”

   
“Oh
but hell darlin, if you’ve been counting ’em careful enough—”

“That
may be true for only fiftytwo cards. But when the deck is orders of magnitude
larger, perhaps approaching infinity, other possibilities begin to emerge
. . . .
” Her own way of saying,
Vlado is
immortal. Able to take care of himself, impossible to worry about
. . . .

Reef
studied her, backing into a baffled smile he’d found more and more occupying
his face. At first when she talked like this, he had put it down to some kind
of belief without proof—religious, or superstitious anyway. But then
wheels all up and down the Riviera, at Nice, Cimiez, Monte Carlo, Mentone,
through the winter season and into the spring, like village gossips, had begun
to chatter a different story. Pockets began to go out at the seams from all the
winnings being stuffed into them.

The
system had its origins in a ride she’d taken with Lorelei, Noellyn, and Faun on
the Earl’s Court Wheel, centuries ago in her girlhood. “Thirtyseven numbers on
the wheel,” she instructed him. “The zero belongs to the house. Of the other
thirtysix, twelve—if you include one and two—are primes. Going
clockwise, taking three numbers at a time, in each set of three you will find
exactly one prime.”

   
“So
they’re spread out pretty even.”

“But
the wheel makes more than one revolution. The numbers repeat again and again,
like a very fast clock with thirtyseven hours. We say thirtyseven is the
‘modulus’ of the wheel, as twelve is the modulus of an ordinary clock. So the
number that a roulette ball comes to rest at is actually that number ‘modulo
thirtyseven’—the remainder, after dividing by thirtyseven, of the total
of moving compartments the ball has had a chance to fall into.

“Now,
by Wilson’s theorem, the product
(
p
–1)
factorial, when taken modulo any prime
p,
is
always equal to minus one. On the roulette wheel,
p –
1 is

thirtysix, and thirtysix factorial also happens to be the
number of all possible permutations of thirtysix numbers. It is thus obvious
from the foregoing that—”

She
was interrupted by the thud of Reef’s head on the table, where it remained.

“I
don’t think he’s been following this,” she muttered. But continued to whisper
the lesson to him, as if choosing to believe he had only fallen into a light
hypnosis. Apparently it worked, because in the coming days he began to win at
roulette far outside the expectations of chance. If she continued to whisper
further educational advice at appropriate moments, neither would discuss the
matter.

Why
Reef should be finding her this irresistible, when the rule as he had come to
learn it was that desire always fades, was not a question he lost much
recreational time over. Her irresistibility filled the day, leaving little time
for thought. No sooner would one of them be over the doorsill than she was
lifting her skirts, or reaching for his penis, or simply lying back, eyes
steely and wet, holding his gaze in a grip he knew no way out of, while she
caressed herself, until, without needing to decide, he came to her. Always him
to her, he noted to himself, that was the pattern, best to keep that in mind.

One day
she remembered the schoolbook Vlado
had given her, stuffed into her luggage and forgotten. She began to read in it,
a little of it every day, like a devout person with a religious text. She read
not in hope but in terror, not in certitude but a terrible broken anxiety over
Vlado’s fate. She found she could make out some of the symbols, vector and
Quaternion notation she remembered Kit showing her back in Göttingen. It
appeared to be a mathematical argument of the classic sort, one even Riemann
might have made, except that everywhere terms containing time stood like
infiltrators at a masked ball, prepared at some unannounced pulse of the clock
to throw back their capes and reveal their true identities and mission. There
were moments in the text when she felt herself about to grasp an intelligence
so grand and fatal that she deliberately retreated, willed herself to forget
whatever gift for mathematical linkage or analogy might allow her to go on,
into certain madness. What she could not make herself forget was Vlado, the
living hand that had made these marks across this paper, the hand she still so
hopelessly wished to feel buried in her hair, resting against her lips.

yprian came churning back at last in to a winter mirage of
Venice, no sleep to speak of for weeks, bedraggled, squinting at the tarnished
city through the rain on the Lagoon, shivering in the wind’s raking assault,
eyes scratchy, hair all jagged and drastically in need of attention from Signor
Fabrizio—he longed for some time in a steaming tub with a cold bottle of anything
alcoholic with bubbles. Pity the
galleggianti
wouldn’t be open till May.
At the moment he must settle for lighting up another Sobranie, coughing
repellently, and ranging the wet deck trying to stay on his feet. Filthy
weather. What had he ever seen in this place, that had brought him back? Who
cared anymore where he was or if he’d ever return? Yashmeen, of course, was the
answer he hoped for, but after his turn on the Peninsula, he found it would not
serve to be thinking ahead in too chirpy a fashion.

She was no longer in Trieste. He had
spent a week there looking for her, everywhere he could think of, and learned
only, from Vlado Clissan’s associates, who had vowed to take revenge, of
Vlado’s melancholy fate at the hands of Derrick Theign. “He has gone mad,” said
Vlado’s cousin Zlatko Ottician. “He is dangerous now to everyone.”

“I’ll have a look round Venice.” Even
if Vienna was now the more likely place to find Theign. Cyprian was moving in a
stunned vacuum his skin could not successfully define. It did not improve his
mood to reflect that he might be as much to blame as anyone—Vlado had
been his one dependable operative, as much as possible in this game his friend,
and it was difficult to see Theign’s behavior as anything but a sort of murderous
housecleaning.

“Must. . . stay on feet
. . . .
” There! at that exact moment, he
spotted the treacherous bastard himself in a
traghetto,
emerging from
the mists, standing

up in his usual pose, as ever too selfabsorbed to pass for
Venetian, gliding past oblivious to the little steamer and Cyprian at its rail
taken by an unexpected rage. The apparition faded again into the rain. “No,
no,” Cyprian muttered, “won’t do
. . . .
”
Some reap the whirlwind, he was left to glean the undelineated
fog—penance, he supposed, for never having learned to think analytically.
Now when he most needed a clever plan, his mind was become all staring Arctic
vacancy. The far more resourceful Bevis Moistleigh, whose interests just then
were if anything more precarious than Cyprian’s, would be off with his charming
Jacintha someplace annoying, larking among the early daffodils or whatever.
Expecting gratitude was of course a mug’s game, one paid back obligations in
timely fashion at the going price, and gratitude figured in hardly at all
. . .
but, well, really.

Cyprian’s only comfort at the moment
was the loaded WebleyFosbery service revolver in his kit. If worse came to
worst, which it must, failed expectation being the rule of this business, why
he could always produce the firearm, couldn’t he, and use it against some
target to be designated when the moment arrived. Theign preferably, but not
ruling out himself.
Cazzo, cazzo . . .

He found the old
pensione
in
Santa Croce occupied by a party of British tourists who took him for a local
cicerone seeking employment. The bora howled among the chimneys, as if amused.
Nobody there knew anything about previous tenants, but Signora Giambolognese
downstairs recalled their many evenings of high drama, screaming and thumping
about, and greeted Cyprian with one of those wary smiles, as if he were about
to tell a joke. “He lives in the Arsenale, your friend.”

   
“
Macchè,
nell’
Arsenale
—”

   
She
turned up both palms, shrugged.
“
Inglesi.
”

Outside again, on a sudden whim he
turned into the
calle
of
the
traghetto
to the Santa Lucia Station and saw, just coming out of the
British consulate, who but Ratty McHugh, assuming Cyprian to be a streetbeggar
and twitching his gaze away. But then back again—“Oh I say. Latewood?”

   
“Hmmn.”

“We’ve
got to talk.” They went back inside to a remote courtyardwithinacourtyard where
Ratty had an office. “First of all, we’re deeply sorry about what happened at
the Arsenale. Clissan was a good man, among the best, which you must have known
better than anyone. “

It
turned out that Theign was not really
domiciled
inside the Arsenale but
maintaining offices there to be used for a piedàterre when he was in town.
  
“Not to mention damned convenient
for gathering any naval intelligence one might wish to pass on to one’s
Austrian masters.”

   
“And
the Italian Navy don’t especially mind?”

   
“Oh,
it’s the usual. They think he’ll lead them to some greater apparatus, he’s
content to let them go on dreaming. Bit like marriage, I suppose.”

Cyprian
then noticed a pale gold wedding ring. “Gorblimey. I say congratulations old
man, major step in life, can’t imagine how I missed it in the Bosnian papers,
who is she and so forth Ratty?”

“Oh
it’s old Jenny Invert, you remember her, we all used to go to Newmarket
together.”

Cyprian
squinted. “That girl from Nether Wallop, Hants, three feet taller than you ’s I
recall, wizard trapshooter, president of the Inanimate Bird Association chapter
down there—”

“The
very lass. She believes I’m some sort of junior diplomat, so if you two ever do
meet again, though I shall try my best to see it never happens, you won’t
suddenly start, well, reminiscing about any of. . . this—”

“Silent
as the grave old man. Though she could be ever so useful at the moment with our
problematical acquaintance couldn’t she, dead shot and all.”

“Yes
the last time you joked about that Cyprian, in Graz wasn’t it, I may’ve acted a
bit shirty, though I’ve since been thinking it over and, well . . .”

“No
need to apologize Ratty, as long as you’ve come to your senses on the subject’s
the main thing isn’t it.”

“He’s being very careful. Never out
of doors without at least two great simians looking after his flanks.
Itineraries subject to change without notice, always in code in any case, which
no one really can break, as the key also changes day to day.”

“If
I could locate Bevis Moistleigh, I’d put him to work on it. But, like you, the
only chords on
his
ukulele these days are for ‘I Love You Truly.
’ ”

   
“Ah
yes wait that’s F major, C seventh, Gminor seventh—”

   
“
Oca ti
jebem,
” a
Montenegrin
pleasantry Cyprian had found himself using with some frequency lately.