Against the Day (176 page)

Dally
had been staring, her expression more and more radiant. He narrowed one eye
quizzically. “What?”

“That
was the last card she turned up for me,” Dally said. “At Earl’s Court. The
Star.”

“Well,”
Lew angled his thumb aloft and eastward, where sure enough a very bright,
luminous object had been slowly on the rise all evening, “it’s a

good one to get, all right.” It was the Dog Star Sirius,
which ruled this part of the summer, and whose blessings, tradition held, were
far from unmixed.

“Tell me, then,” she asked, as if it
was an affliction they shared, “who was it? When you finally tracked them down.
Who turned out to be The Star?”

His
usual practice at this point was to say, “Well, now, I might’ve been exaggerating
about that one, I never did find out, exactly.” But, much as Lew would rather
go off to the terrace down beside the dark little lake and smoke a cigar by
himself, he had some business with this young lady.

   
“Can
you spare a minute, Miss Rideout?”

She had been having a fairly pleasant
time up till now, but these parties did tend to have their payback
arrangements, and she guessed this was tonight’s. She put down her Champagne
glass, took a deep breath, and said, “Sure.”
 
A pulse of silence swept the terrace, leaving a stray half
bar of danceorchestra music, unexpectedly dissonant, to stain the evening,
before it resumed, playing now in 3/4, too fast to be called a waltz or for any
but the determinedly athletic or the insane to keep up with, and as a result
couples were dancing at a number of different speeds, trying to arrive
someplace recognizable at the end of each four bars, everybody crashing into
furniture, walls, each other, staggering away from these collisions at
unpredictable angles, giggling incessantly.

   
“The
fellow you came here with.”

   
“Mr.
Crouchmas.”

   
“Known
him long?”

   
“Who
wants to know?”

   
“I’m
only the gobetween,” Lew said.

   
“For
who? The T.W.I.T.?”

   
“It’s
not them, but I can’t say any more.”

“Clive and I are ever such good
friends,” Dally said, as if Crouchmas were any of who knows how many West End
juveniles.

“Some folks who take a lively
interest in his business dealings,” said Lew, “would pay handsomely for certain
information.”

“That’s if I knew what it looked
like, which I wouldn’t, being’s I don’t exactly read the financial pages, can’t
even understand the headlines, if you want the truth.”

   
“How
about German?”

   
“Not
a word.”

   
“Know
it when you see it?”

   
“Guess
so.”

Out in the dark grounds, a peacock
suddenly made a loud gargled “Ooohkh(?)” then cried “HAI!” in almost a human
voice.

“Brother Crouchmas has picked up a
few German connections over the years,” said Lew. “Started back with Turkish
railway guarantees—he’d rake in

the money for a year or two, then he’d either resell the
lines outright, or the operating licenses for them, mostly to respectable
German firms through the Deutsche Bank, where in fact he’s kept a personal
account, right up to the present day, by now in the fairly welloff range. When
asked how patriotic or even loyal can that be, he’ll tell you the King is the
Kaiser’s uncle, and if that isn’t a connection, he’d like to know what is.”

“Man has a point. But now, just for
argument’s sake, how ‘handsomely’ are we talking here?”

“Oh, a nice retainer fee.” He wrote a
number on a business card and handed it to her, aware that eyes were directed
their way. “How come I don’t see waterworks, nose elevation, none of that usual
howdareyou routine? Most young ladies by now—”

“I’m only Clive’s little tart, ain’t
I. What wouldn’t a girl like that do for a sum like this?”

She ought to have
felt worse about her espionage
expeditions, at least that she was “betraying” him, but somehow she couldn’t
get that deep about it. Time and again it was emphasized to her, byway of Lew
Basnight, that this wasn’t personally directed against Crouchmas, it was more
in the nature of gathering information, as much of it as possible, given the
rapid changes in Turkish politics. Even if she’d read any of the documents,
which she hadn’t, there would’ve been no way for her to tell how much, or even
if, he could be hurt by them.

“Someone is clearly fascinated,” it
seemed dismally to Hunter, “with Crouchmas’s simultaneous attachments to
England and Germany. As if just having discovered a level of ‘reality’ at which
nations, like money in the bank, are merged and indistinguishable—the
obvious example here being the immense population of the dead, military and
civilian, due to the Great War everyone expects imminently to sweep over us.
One hears mathematicians of both countries speak of ‘changes of sign’ when
wishing to distinguish England from Germany—but in the realm of pain and
destruction, what can polarity matter?”

It was a tall
building
, taller than
any in London, taller than St. Paul’s, and yet no one had ever been able to
make it out with enough clarity for it to qualify as a “sight” tourists might
be impressed by—more a prism of shadow of a certain solidity, looming
forever beyond the farthest street one knew

how to get to. The exact way to enter, let alone visit,
remained a matter of

obscurity, indeed was known only to adepts who could prove
they had business within. The rest of the town looked up, and up, past a slate
confusion of rooftops, and of course it was there, massively blocking the sky
and whatever city features might lie behind it, a blackness nearly obsidian,
hovering, all but breathing, descent built into its structure, not only the
shedding of rain and snow but more meaningfully within, the downward transfer
of an undiscussed product from the upper levels to hidden cargo docks below, by
chute, by lift, by valves and conduits—though the commodity was not
exactly a fluid, the equations governing its movement were said to be
hydrodynamic in nature.

All
day it had been raining. Up here the dark glass facings captured shapes of
storm clouds rushing by, as if camouflaging, in its own illusion of movement, a
warship of Industry sailing the stormflows above the city. Inclined windows
passed the smoky and violent light down into deserted passageways. Dally could
search here, room after room, for days—open drawers and cabinets and find
strange, officiallooking documents concerning foreign arrangements never made
public
. . . .
A royal charter, signed
by King Ernest Augustus, granting some affiliate of Crouchmas’s shadowy firm
the right to build a tunnel across the North Channel of the Irish Sea, between
Galloway and Ulster, intended for the transport of military forces and a
pipeline for illuminating gas. A railroad rightofway, straight across the
Balkan Peninsula, conceded in Cyrillic and Arabic script all woven in and out
of the loveliest green guilloche by the nolonger quiteunabsorbed entity of East
Roumelia. A deed for a huge tract of British soil, in Buckinghamshire a bit
east of Wolverton and north of Bletchley, leased in apparent perpetuity to
sovereign Obock, no typist’s copy but the original deed, an impressive document
heavy as leadfoil and edged with an elaborate steelengraved cartouche, glowing
all but tropically in the misted greens, yellows, and oranges of some color
process too proprietary even to have a name, depicting in fine detail palms,
dhows, natives collecting salt or loading coconuts onto merchant vessels,
historic moments such as the 1889 occupation of the fort at Sagallo by the
Cossack adventurer Atchinoff and the archimandrite Païsi (faces too direct in
their gazes to be merely fanciful), which ended in a shelling by French
warships and seven innocent dead. Smoothsliding wood drawer after drawer,
stuffed with these territorial mysteries. No one seeming to care who opened
them, who looked in—she had encountered no guards, no demands for
identification, not even locks. Where there had once been locks were now open
cylinders, corroded, occupied by nothing but shadowy exemption from the
unrelenting rainlight she worked in now, breathing carefully, wait

ing to be walked in on in the act of
reading forbidden data. But no one walked, up here.

Outside,
the wind was pouring fiercely over figures she herself might have posed for not
that long ago, reproduced now by hundreds in some modern variation on Portland
stone which seemed to ring faintly in the long gusts, ring down the afternoon,
with no one to listen. Frieze creatures, upperfloor caryatid faces, mineral
loneliness. Where were any human eyes, let alone the blank lunes that served as
eyes for others of their kind, to be met across these perilous chasms? They
must be content to register the shadows that raced among the versatile
diffractions of soot ascending to the summits of these towers daily scrubbed
nacreous by the winds, so polished as to reflect the shapes of the clouds as
they soared distant above the dark, the golden citytop, clouds edged like
faces, cleanly contoured as handclaps, chasing beyond city limits across the vistas
of bleared glacial grassland this day of storm, above this wet misfortune of
country spaces
. . . .

The
lift bore her smoothly to the street floor. It felt like ascent. Invisible
within her celebrated beauty, she glided through the lobby and back out into
the clamorous city.

   
“Is
that the young lady, sir?”

   
“Oh,
God . . .” Clive Crouchmas in a stricken voice. “God help me
. . . .
”

“Sir,
we’ll just need this signed then, as proof we’ve delivered the service we were
engaged for.”

Dally hailed a cab and was driven
away, the detectives touched their hats and slid around the corner, the rain
started up again, Crouchmas continued to huddle in the grand falseEgyptian
entryway. Those with business there came and went, casting glances. Night fell
in a long hum, resonating across the bases of lowering clouds with a great
frictional gathering of electromotive force, while beneath crept a solemnity of
omnibuses, arriving or leaving every few minutes. Crouchmas had forgotten his
umbrella. He made his way through the rain to a dingy establishment near the
docks where soddenness was not remarked upon and drank for a while, ending up
at the one place in London he was still able to think of as home, the
establishment of Madame Entrevue, where, though requests for certain activities—mutilation
of the poor, ritual sacrifice—more easily come by out in the economy at
large, might be reason to turn a client away, for most needs they had to let
one in the door. Cigar smoke scented the rooms. Telephones rang faintly down
corridors not always visible.

As
he had often noticed them doing lately, his thoughts now flew south

ward, as if by magic carpet, to Constantinople. “I’ll shop
the bitch to a

harem, is what I’ll do.” That this was no longer an option in
the New Turkey did not at the moment occur to him.

Madame
was her usual sympathetic self. “But did you think all this time it was about
your looks? Your inexhaustible virility? Consult the mirror, Clive, and come to
terms. You have a solid reputation for hardheadedness, why go sentimental now?”

   
“But
she was not one of the usual, I was actually—”

   
“Don’t
say it—we don’t use language like that in here.”

   
Later
in the evening he happened to run into old “Doggo” Spokeshave.

“Well
if you’ve Constantinople in your plans, Crouchmas, it happens that old Baz
Zaharoff’s WagonLits arrangement ought to be free for a bit.”

   
“You
have the disposition of that, do you Spokeshave.”

   
“I
shouldn’t think he’d mind, no, Crouchmas.”

   
“And
where’s B.Z. off to then?”

“Japan,
so the rumor goes. If not himself, then his people certainly. All very queer in
his shop at the moment, Crouchmas, I must say.”

“But
I say Spokeshave, shouldn’t the Nip have a rather complete weapons inventory by
now?”

“Yes
but it’s
they
who want to sell
him
something, you see. Everyone’s
being ever so dark about it. The item doesn’t even have a name anyone agrees
on, except for a Q in it somewhere I think. Something they came into possession
of a few years ago and now have up for sale on most attractive terms, almost as
if. . .”

   
“As
if they don’t really need it, Spokeshave?”

   
“As
if they’re afraid of it.”

   
“
Oh
dear. Who’s old Baz think he’ll sell
it to then?”

   
“Oh,
there are always climbers in the game, aren’t there, why Crouchmas just look at
your own territory.”