Against the Day (177 page)

   
“What?
The rugriders.”

“Any
number of Balkan interests as well, I shouldn’t wonder. Especially if Baz could
price it cheaply enough, don’t you know.”

“Well
I shall certainly have a look into it when I’m out there. Might take you up on
Compartment Seven as well. Never hurts to be seen as an intimate of old Baz,
does it?”

   
“I
should know, shouldn’t I.”

“
I
may have to go
to Constantinople for awhile,” he said smoothly. “It’s
those old Ottoman railway guarantees again. Ghosts—they never go away.
Even with the new regime figuring them in as budget expenses at so much

per mile, there are still tidy sums to be obtained, if one
can find one’s way through the Young Turkish labyrinth. But the thing must be
done in person. I don’t suppose you’d be able to pop down for a few days, join
me.”

“The
new show won’t go into rehearsal for a while,” she said. “Let me see if it’s
possible.”

Lew
after making a brief telephone call gave her the goahead. “They say anything
you can find out down there will be of ‘inestimable value.
’ ”

“That’s
it? No ‘Good luck Dally, of course we’ll pay per diem,’ nothing like that?”

   
“No,
but on a personal note—”

   
“Why,
Detective Basnight.”

“Watch
your back. Please. I hear things about this Crouchmas fellow. Nobody trusts
him.”

“There’s
some would say he’s a sweet old duck, and I’m a mercenary minx.”

“Oh hell, now you’re just flirting.”

To
make sure he thought so, she lightly touched his sleeve. “I will be careful,
Lew, don’t worry.”

He’d
found himself wondering lately if it was Dally who might have turned out to be
The Star. Some announcement of Lew’s final release from his obligations, if any
still existed, to the T.W.I.T. Would the light of her innocence—minx or
whatever—even be enough to show him decisively that the “Major Arcana” he
had dogged for so long had never necessarily been criminals or even in a
condition of sin? And that the T.W.I.T. had judged them so out of a profound
and irreparable condition of error?

He
felt it within his remit to accompany her to Charing Cross. The platforms
smelled of sulfurous coalsmoke and steam. The engine trembled, muscular,
Prussian blue under the electric lamps. One or two grinning devotees asked her
to sign their shirt cuffs. “Don’t forget to bring me back some Turkish
Delight.”

“About
the only kind I’m likely to see—it’s just a working holiday for ol’ D.R.”
When he handed her her valise, she leaned up and kissed his cheek. “Well,”
adjusting her hat and turning to ascend the iron steps, “here I come,
Constantinople.”

he idea in Clive Crouchmas’s mind of shopping Dally into a
harem had been fine as far as it went, but revenge for some is not as sweet as
profit, and it had soon occurred to him that she might more constructively
serve as a bribe to somebody useful. Besides, the puritans now in power in what
some were beginning to call Istanbul were resolved to do away with all vestiges
of the sultanic, and actually Clive was obliged to put up with some rather
disrespectful treatment in the very offices of the Ottoman Debt Agency in
Cagaloglu where he had once engineered some of his more, he supposed, Byzantine
schemes. Even worse, others—German, to no one’s surprise—had been
there before him, and pickings were slim. With the prospect of returning to
England more or less emptyhanded, Clive, blaming Dally for the whole
contretemps, had an episode of insanity in which it seemed the only way to come
out of this ahead would be to sell her into white slavery someplace else, by
way of unreconstructed elements of the Old Turkey, and their Habsburg coadjutors
in what finally turned out to be Hungary.

   
Somehow,
because his description of Dally had included her celebrated red hair—a
feature widely associated with the traveling companions of Basil
Zaharoff—her wouldbe abductors Imi and Ernö had fallen under the impression,
as they boarded the Orient Express at Szeged and made their way, stealthy as
operetta pirates, both wearing peculiar black Central European Trilby hats,
toward Dally’s compartment, that this was to be the kidnapping of a
Zaharoff
girl,
for whom the international arms tycoon would pay a tidy sum in ransom
money.

   
Kit
Traverse, meanwhile, was sitting in a WagonsLits train headed the

other way, toward Paris, which according to schedule
should’ve been rolling into BudaPesth about now, except for a slow start owing
to mysterious revolutionary activities on the line, so that both his train and
Dally’s happened to arrive at the same time in Szeged. Kit looked out the
window and observed across the tracks in the train opposite a presentable
redhead in some kind of trouble. There might still be five or ten minutes to
just stroll over there and see what was what.

“
Zaharoff
girl
!”

   
“No—who,
me?”

   
“Zaharoff
girl! Red hair! Look!”

   
“Suggest
you get them meathooks out of my hair,” said Dally.

The two looked at each other as if
they might have to consider some remote possibility of error. A moment of
thought processes ensued.

   
“Zaharoff
girl!” they started screaming again.

“Fellas,”
Kit Traverse in the doorway beaming, “think you may have the wrong compartment
here?”

   
“That
can’t be you out there,” said Dally.

Kit
made out a young woman in a smart traveling ensemble, sunlight streaming in the
train window behind her, lighting up her hatless hair. He focused in till he
was sure of who he was seeing. “Well.”

The
7.62 mm Nagant tucked in his belt had not escaped the attention of either Imi
or Ernö, who began quickly to adjust their demeanor to suggest mental
soundness.

   
“This
is Compartment Number Seven, yes?”

   
“So
far so good.”

   
“Always
reserved for Zaharoff
úr,
and his esteemed lovely Zaharoff girls. You
are coming from Vienna?”

   
“No,”
said Dally.

   
“Zaharoff
girls always board at Vienna.”

   
“Well
now see that’s just it—”

   
“Imi,
Crouchmas
úr
did say ‘Zaharoff girl,’
didn’t he?”

   
“That’s
what he said.”

“You,” Imi turning to Kit, “are Mr.
Zaharoff? Crouchmas
úr
told us you would be somewhere else.”

   
“Clive
Crouchmas sent you two? Why that miserable toad,” declared Dally.

“Now
then,
Fönök,
”
Ernö
in a confidential voice, pretending to draw Kit to one side, “say that we
wanted to buy a submarine . . .”

Quick
as that Imi had a little FN Browning in his hand.
“
Bocsánat.
”

“First
of all I am not Basil Zaharoff the wellknown merchant of death, and this is not
a Zaharoff girl but in fact my wife Euphorbia, yes and we are planning to spend
our honeymoon in Constantinople, the British War Office were kind enough to
make available to us this accommodation, which is vacant this week owing to Mr.
Z. as you already pointed out being elsewhere—”

The
chef de brigade
stuck his head in about then, and all weapons abruptly
vanished. “Madame
. . .
messieurs? We
shall be pulling out shortly.” He saluted, allowing himself a quizzical stare
at everybody.

“You
gentlemen’ll excuse me for a moment I’m sure,” Dally herding them all like chickens
out into the corridor.

“We’ll
be playing a little
kalabriás
in the smoking salon,” advised Ernö. “We’d
like to resolve this before we reach Porta Orientalis.”

“You’ve
got the wrong folks,” sang Kit wearily. “Ask around—the chief, the
conductors, ask anybody.”

“If
you have bribed them,” Imi pointed out, “we can always pay more than you.”

“Not
if I’m really Basil Zaharoff,” Kit, resisting the urge to wink, ducked away
down the corridor. As a logical puzzle, it might not have passed muster at
Göttingen, but here it might buy him five minutes, and that was all he needed.

He
jumped off Dally’s train in time to see his own disappearing down the tracks in
the general direction of Paris, France, so it seemed he would be here
in—what was the name of this place?—Szeged, for awhile.

Years
later they would be unable to agree on how they found themselves on the
SzéchenyiTér tramline, fleeing into the heart of the city. Kit knew that this
was the sort of story grandfathers told to grandchildren, usually so that there
could then be a grandmother’s version, more practical and less inclined to
grant slack
. . . .
Which is to say
that what Kit recalled was running a perilous evasive action while squads of
homicidal Hungarians, notable for their stature and eagerness for gunplay, kept
appearing at unexpected moments during the escape—while Dally remembered
only shifting quickly into a sturdier pair of boots and packing a few
necessities in a satchel, which she threw down to Kit and jumped after onto the
tracks with the train already rolling out of the station, and took his hand,
and off they went. It wouldn’t be till Kiskúnfélegyháza an hour down the line
that Imi and Ernö would notice that the young couple were missing.

As
they ran across the tracks, their hearts were pounding. They both agreed on
that.

   
Kit
as a matter of fact was already on the run. He had been living in Con

stantinople, tending bar at the Hôtel des Deux Continents,
off the Grande Rue over on the European or honkytonk side of the Golden Horn in
Pera, long enough almost to’ve come to believe his life had found its
equilibrium at last. Folks out here talked about fate, but for Kit it was a
matter of stillness.

   
It
had taken him a while, from Kazakh Upland to Kirghiz Steppe to Caspian
Depression, short hops in little steamers along the Anatolian coast, the
invisible City ahead of him gripping him ever more surely in its field, as he
felt the weight of reverence, of history, the nervous bright edge of
revolution, around the final cape and into the Bosphorus, the palaces and small
harbors and mosques and ship traffic, beneath the Galata Tower, docking at last
at Eminönü.

Pera was a
consummate border town
,
a little state, a microcosm of the two continents, Greeks, Jews, Syrians,
Armenians, Bulgarians, Persians, Germans up to their mischief. Since the
dramatic march of the “Army of Freedom” from Salonica to Constantinople to put
down the Sultan’s threatened counterrevolution, things had been hopping, both
at the Pera Palace bar and, on a less exalted level, at the Deux Continents.
Though the Committee of Union and Progress had declared itself no longer a
secret organization, the intriguing, hasheesh conspiracies and backalley
beatings and murders went on as always.

Ottomanists,
nationalists, and panIslamics within the C.U.P. struggled for power, and
outside it strikers,
komitadji,
socialists, and dozens of other factions
each pursued its claim to a piece of the New Turkey. All showed up at the Deux
Continents sooner or later.