Against the Day (169 page)

   
Ratty
threw an inquiring stare. “And your own, ehrm . . .”

   
“Don’t.”

“We know she’s not in Trieste
anymore. Stopped here for a bit, left in the company of some American, parts
unknown, I’m afraid. I did promise to keep an eye on her, but—”

   
“Shame,
Ratty, special circle of Hell for that sort of thing.”

“Knew you’d understand. See here, I’m
back to London tomorrow, but in case a clear angle of fire should open
up—” He took a mallet and began to strike vigorously at a nearby Chinese
gong. A person in a checked suit put his head in the door and raised his
eyebrows. “This is my colleague Giles Piprake, no known problem he can’t sort
out.”

   
 
“Your bride’s never complained,”
muttered Piprake.

“Cyprian here needs to go speak with
the Principe Spongiatosta,” said Ratty.

   
“I
do?” puzzled Cyprian.

“Exactly how Ratty expressed it to
the vicar, and look what happened,” said Piprake. “I gather this is about
Derrick ‘Rogue Elephant’ Theign.”

   
“Prince
who again?” inquired Cyprian in some dismay. “Surely not, umpire?”

   
“Among
the very best of our reliables,” Ratty informed him.

“He and Theign were regular
associates. If not partners in the deepest sorts of evil enterprise. In
fact—” looking nervously over at Piprake.

“Theign once arranged an assignation
for you with the Prince, yes, we know. How did it go, I always meant to ask.”

“Aaaahh!” screamed Cyprian,
attempting to hide beneath an open dossier on Ratty’s desk.

“Sensitive,” Ratty said, “hasn’t been
in the business long—Latewood, do pull yourself together, there’s a good
chap.”

“I must remember not to wear yellow,”
Cyprian as if making a note to himself. Piprake, eyebrows oscillating, withdrew
to telephone the Prince.

“You’ll keep us apprised,” said
Ratty. Cyprian rose and put on his hat with one of those musichall flourishes.

   
“Indeed.
Well Ratty tata, and best to your wife.”

“Don’t go near her I’m warning you,
she’ll have you married to some horribly unsuitable friend of hers before you
can remember the word ‘no.
’ ”

The Princess was nowhere to be seen
at Ca’ Spongiatosta, but the Prince was in the entry before the
valletto
could
even take Cyprian’s hat, cheerful and splendid in some shade of heliotrope
hitherto unobserved upon the planet.

   
“
Facciam’
il porco,
”
the
Prince greeted him, eagerly yet one hoped in jest.

   
Angling
his head in regret,
“
Il mio ragazzo
è molto geloso.
”

The Prince beamed. “Exactly what you
said last time, and in that same phrasebook accent.
Qualsiasi, Ciprianino.
Captain
Piprake tells me that we may share an interest in neutralizing the plans of a
former mutual acquaintance who has since chosen a most dangerous path of vice
and betrayal.” They ascended to the
piano nobile
and passed through a
gallery hung with the Prince’s collection of modern Symbolists, including some
oils by Hunter Penhallow, notably his meditation on the fate of Europe,
The
Iron Gateway,
in which shadowy multitudes trooped toward a vanishing line
over which broke a hellish radiance.

The Prince gestured him into a room
notable for its Carlo Zen furniture and vases by Galileo Chini. In the corner
was a pale cream writingdesk accented with copper and parchment painted in
spidery designs.

   
“Bugatti,
isn’t it?” Cyprian said.

   
“My
wife’s taste,” the Prince nodded. “I tend toward the more ancestral myself.”

Servants brought cold prosecco and
glasses on a silver antique tray, and Alexandrian cigarettes in a Byzantine box
at least seven hundred years old.

“That he should have pursued his
schemes from Venice,” the Prince said, “this clouded realm of pedestrian mazes
and municipal stillness, suggests an allegiance to forces already long in
motion. But that is only the mask he has chosen. Other nations, Americans
notoriously, style themselves ‘republican’ and think they understand republics,
but what was fashioned here over corroded centuries of doges’ cruelty lies
forever beyond their understanding. Each Doge in his turn became more and more
a sacrificial animal, his own freedoms taken, his life brought under an
impossibly stringent code of conduct, taking comfort, while he wore the
corno,
in a resentful brutality, waiting each day for the fateful escort of thugs,
the sealed gondola, the final bridge. His best hope, pathetically slender,
might be for some remote monastery and a decline into everdeeper penitence.

 
“The doges are gone, the curse remains. Some today, often in
positions to do great harm, will never come to understand how ‘power’—
lo
stato
—could have been an expression of communal will, invisibly
exercised in the dark that surrounds each soul, in which penance must be a
necessary term. Unless one has performed in his life penance equal to what he
has exacted from others, there is an imbalance in Nature.”

   
“Which
must be—”

A princely hand ascended into the
tobacco smoke. “I was speaking of Venetian history. Today that antique
machinery of choice and limitation is available no longer. Today
. . .
suppose there were a foreign Crown
Prince, for example, who passionately hated Italy, who upon succession to the
throne of his empire would, certain as the sunrise, go to war with Italy to
take back territory he believes to be his family’s
. . .
and further, suppose there were living and working in
Italy agents of this emperortobe, particularly active in Venice, men whose
lives had become dedicated only to promoting the interests of the
enemy—if no other life, no number of lives mattered, no loyalties, no
code of honor, no ancient tradition, only these agents’ pure wicked need that
their Principal prevail at all cost
. . . .
”

“Whom could one trust then to defend
the interests of the Nation? The Royal Army? the Navy?”

   
“In
theory. But an enemy with Imperial resources can buy anyone.”

   
“If
there is no one who cannot be bought. . .”

   
“We
must fall back on probabilities and ask who is
likely to remain unbought.
”

   
They
sat and smoked until the room had taken on a threedimensional

patina, as if from years of fine corrosion. “Not a
straightforward problem, you see,” said the Prince at last.

“There are friendships,” it seemed to
occur to Cyprian, with a narrowing of the eyes translatable as,
Of course we
have not been discussing anyone in particular.

“Yet may not friends, too, defect,
often for reasons less predictable than a cash arrangement? Unless . . .”

“I have recently returned,” said
Cyprian carefully, “from a place where it is much more difficult, at least for
the great Powers, to subvert personal honor. A place less developed no doubt
than the sophisticated cultures of the West, still naive, if not quite
innocent.”

   
“Despised,
disrespected, beneath suspicion,” suggested the Prince.

“They do not require vast sums, nor
advanced weapons. They possess what all the treasuries of Europe cannot buy.”

   
“Passion,”
nodded the Prince.

   
“May
I make some inquiries?”

He saw a look of sympathy come over the
Prince’s face. “I am sorry about your friend.”

   
“Yes.
Well. He had many friends. Among whom—”

But the Prince was making another of
those princely gestures, and before he knew it, Cyprian was back out on the
salizzada.

One day
, on the Riva, in front of the
Metropole, Cyprian came unexpectedly facetoface with Yashmeen Halfcourt, on the
arm of a battered and rangy individual from whom, having been for some time in
a state of unsatisfied desire, Cyprian found himself struggling to keep his
eyes averted, not to mention a minute and a half’s worth of disorientation at
seeing Yashmeen again. Her hair was shorter and lighter, and she was
expensively turned out in aubergine taffeta trimmed with silver brocade,
elbowlength sleeves with three or four lace ruffles, capeskin gloves in a dark
claret, lovely kid boots in the same shade, a hat with plumes also dyed to
match and its brim raked to one side, one or two curls swinging roguishly as if
disarranged in passion. Cyprian, while making this inventory, realized with
dismay how far from even presentable he must look.

“You’re alive,” she greeted him,
difficult to say with how much enthusiasm. She had been smiling, but now her
demeanor was oddly grave. She introduced Reef, who had been scrutinizing him in
the direct way he’d come to associate with Americans.

“I heard about Vlado,” Cyprian said,
hoping she would at least not play at salon sociability.

She nodded, folded her parasol and
tightened her grip on Reef’s arm. “It was a near thing that night, they might
have got me too, and if Reef hadn’t been there
.
. . .
”

   
“Really.”
Deciding to give her cowboy the onceover after all.

   
“Just
happened to show up,” Reef nodded.

   
“But
too late for Vlado.”

   
“Sorry
there.”

“Oh,” detaching his gaze, “it’s being
taken care of. The story isn’t over. Not by a long chalk.” Presently he sidled
off down the Riva.

For
the next week or so, Cyprian managed to go a little crazy, resuming, though not
on a fulltime basis, his old trade of compensated sodomy. In this city there
was no shortage of pale men with tastes he understood, and he would need money,
a pile of a certain height of it, to go after Theign properly. When his lapse
into squalor had earned him enough, he went down to Fabrizio’s to have his
curls abbreviated into a more combative look, and then caught the evening train
to Trieste.

Heading
once more over the Mestre bridge, into the smoky orange sunset, Cyprian felt
the sadness peculiar to the contemplation of recent time unrecapturable.
Anything earlier, childhood, adolescence, they were done with, he could get by
without any of that—what he wanted back was last week, the week before.
He refused, though not altogether successfully, to think about Yashmeen.

In
Trieste the neoUskok membership, now being led by Vlado’s cousin Zlatko Ottician,
greeted him warmly, having heard some exaggerated accounts, already half
folkloric, of his adventures on the Peninsula.

They
sat eating gibanica and sardines and drinking some herbal grappa called
kadulja. Everybody was talking a dialect part coastalČCakavstina, part
seventeenthcentury Uskok maritime slang. Opaque to Cyprian, but more important,
to Vienna.

How
to proceed? There was a good deal of discussion, in the caffès and taverns, out
walking the Rive, of ways and means. No argument that Theign must be killed.
Some favored a quick end, unnamed assassins in the dark, while others wanted
him to suffer and understand. Poetic justice would be to shop him to some
instrumentality famous for torture. Qualified as they were, none of the Great
Powers would really serve this purpose, because Theign had done regular
business with them all, likely thinking that would be enough to keep him
protected. So his reckoning must come from a less exalted direction, the lower
parts of the compass rose, the faceless, the despised, the Mavrovlachi of
Croatia. Vlado’s own.

“As
many guns as you need,” Zlatko promised.

   
“You
chase him into our sights, we’ll do the rest,” said his brother Vastroslav.

On looking into
Theign’s Austrian connections,
Cyprian was fascinated to discover how intimate he had grown with the military
Chancellery of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, who from the Belvedere in Vienna
directed a web of intrigue aimed at refashioning the map of Europe, by way of
protégés such as the current foreign minister Aerenthal, architect of the
annexation of Bosnia.

“Which does suggest,” murmured
Cyprian to himself, “that Theign must have known about the annexation long,
long before the step itself was taken, yet he pretended to be as surprised as
any of us. Effectively, it was the first phase of their damned general European
war, and he sent me into the thickest of it, where I could take no action that
would not lead to my destruction. I say, I must kill this evil bastard
immediately, really I must.”

As
long as it remained in the interests of both England and AustriaHungary that
Russia be kept from acquiring too much power in the Balkans, Theign had been
able apparently to justify any degree of cooperation with the Ballhausplatz by
pleading the Macedonian Question, remaining thereby safe from any suspicions of
treason.