Against the Day (42 page)

Lew was greeted by Nicholas Nookshaft,
Grand Cohen of the London

chapter of the T.W.I.T., a person in
mystical robes appliquéd with astrological and alchemical symbols, and a bowl
haircut with short fringes. “Neville and Nigel, allowing for some chemical
exaggeration, tell us they saw you emerge out of an explosion. The question
that arises is, where were you just before.”

Lew squinted, perplexed. “Strolling
down to the creek minding my business. Where else?”

“Couldn’t have been the same world as
the one you’re in now.”

“You seem pretty sure.”

The Cohen elaborated. “Lateral
worldsets, other parts of the Creation, lie all around us, each with its
crossover points or gates of transfer from one to another, and they can be
anywhere, really
. . . .
An
unscheduled Explosion, introduced into the accustomed flow of the day, may
easily open, now and then, passages to elsewhere
. . . .
”

“Sure, like death.”

“A possibility, but not the only
one.”

“So when I went diving into that
blast—”

Grand
Cohen Nookshaft nodded gravely. “You found passage between the Worlds. Your
mysterious assailants presented you with an unintended gift.”

“Who asked them?” Lew grumbled.

“Yet mightn’t they, and others like
them, in providing such passage, be considered agencies of the angelic?”

“All respect, sir, I think not,
they’re more likely Anarchistic terrorists, for Pete’s sake.”

“Tsk. They are shamans, Mr. Basnight.
The closest we in our fallen state may ever come to the uncivilized purity of
the world as it was and shall never be again—not for the likes of us.”

“Can’t buy it, sorry.”

“You must,” insisted the Grand Cohen.
“If you are who we are beginning to believe you might be.”

Neville and Nigel, who had slipped
away during this exchange, returned now in the company of a striking young
woman, who regarded Lew out of eyes from which a suggestion of the Oriental
might not have been altogether absent.

“Allow us,” said Nigel, “to introduce
Miss— Or actually, as she’s a seventeenthdegree Adept, one ought properly
to say ‘Tzaddik,’ except that obviously—”

“Well blimey, it’s really only old
Yashmeen, isn’t it,” added Neville.

“Well put Neville, and why don’t you
go reward yourself with a pie or something?”

“Perhaps Nigel you’d like one up your
nose as well.”

“Silence, driveling ones,” snarled
the girl. “Imagine how idiotic they’d be if they could talk.”

The two gazed back with expressions
in which hopelessly smitten erotic obsession could not really be ruled out, and
Lew thought he heard Nigel sigh, “The Tetractys isn’t the only thing round here
that’s ineffable.”

“Children, children,” admonished the
Grand Cohen. Frankly as if she had not been standing a foot away, he began to
acquaint Lew with the girl’s history. She had been the ward of
LieutenantColonel G. Auberon Halfcourt, formerly a squadron commander in the
Eighteenth Hussars, seconded some while ago to the Political Department in
Simla for the odd extraregimental chore, and currently believed operating
somewhere out in Inner Asia. Yashmeen, sent back here a few years previously
for a British education, had been placed under the protection of the T.W.I.T.
“Unhappily, to more than one element active in Britain, her degree of bodily
safety too readily suggests itself as a means of influencing the Colonel’s
behavior. Our custody hence extends rather beyond simple caution.”

“I can look after myself,” declared
the girl, not, it seemed, for the first time.

Lew beamed in frank admiration. “A
fellow can see that, surely enough.”

“
You
are not soon to find
out,” she turned to advise him.

“Smartly taken at silly point!” cried
Nigel and Neville together.

Later in the evening, the Grand Cohen
took Lew aside and began to explain his personal concept of the Psychical
Detective. “The hope being someday to transcend the gray, literalist world of
hotel corridors and requisition vouchers, and enter
the further condition
—'To
know, to dare, to will, to keep silent’—how difficult for most of us to
observe these basic imperatives, particularly, you must have noticed, the one
about keeping silent.
Have
I been talking too much, by the way?
Frightfully awkward situation to be in, you appreciate.”

“In the States, ‘detective’ doesn’t
mean—” Lew started to point out.

“Admittedly, ours is an odd sort of
work
. . . .
There is but one ‘case’
which preoccupies us. Its ‘suspects’ are exactly twentytwo in number. These are
precisely the cadre of operatives who, working in secret, cause—or at
least allow—History upon this island to happen, and they correspond to
the twentytwo Major Arcana of the Tarot deck.” Going on to explain, as he had
times past counting, that the twentytwo cards of the Major Arcana might be
regarded as living agencies, positions to be filled with real people, down the
generations, each attending to his own personally tailored portfolio of
mischief deep or trivial, as the grim determinants appeared, assassinations,
plagues, failures of fashion sense, losses of love, as, one by one, flesheating
sheep sailed over the fence between dreams and the day. “There must always

be a Tower. There must always be a
High Priestess, Temperance, Fortune, so forth. Now and then, when vacancies
occur, owing to death or other misadventure, new occupants will emerge,
obliging us to locate and track them, and learn their histories as well. That
they inhabit, without exception, a silence as daunting as their near
invisibility only intensifies our challenge.”

“And the crime, sir, if I’m not being
too inquisitive, just what would be the nature of that?”

“Alas, nothing too clearly related to
any statute on the books, nor likely to be
.
. .
no, it is more of an ongoing Transgression, accumulating as the days
pass, the invasion of Time into a timeless world. Revealed to us, slowly, one
hopes not terribly, in a bleak convergence
.
. .
History, if you like.”

“So I can assume none of this will
ever see a courtroom,” said Lew.

“Suppose there were no such thing,
after all, as Original Sin. Suppose the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was never
symbolic, but a real being in a real history of intrusion from somewhere else.
Say from ‘behind the sky.’ Say we were perfect. We were lawabiding and clean.
Then one day
they
arrived.”

“And
. . .
and this is how you explain villains and badmen among an otherwise
moral population?” Not that Lew was looking for an argument. He was genuinely
puzzled.

“You will see it in practice. I just
wouldn’t want it to be too rude a surprise.”

As if innocence
were some sort of humorous disease,
transmitted, as in a stage farce, from one character to another, Lew soon found
himself wondering if he had it, and if so who he’d caught it from. Not to
mention how sick exactly it might be making him. The other way to ask the
question being, who in this was playing him for a fish, and how deep was their
game? If it was the T.W.I.T. itself using him for motives even more “occult”
than they’d pretended to let him in on, then this was a serious manure pile,
and he’d best find a way out of it, soon as he could.

There were mysteries enough.
Windowless carriages were arriving at Chunxton Crescent in the middle of the
night amid scientifically muffled hoofbeats, impressively sealed documents were
shuffled aside whenever Lew approached the Grand Cohen’s desk, less than
professionally clandestine attempts were made to have a look in his own
fieldbooks. Was it by way of a friendly word of caution, or did somebody
want
him to be suspicious? maybe even trying to provoke him into doing himself
some damage?

Miss Yashmeen Halfcourt seemed to him
the most trustworthy of the bunch, both of them having been picked up, you
might say, in more or less helpless condition, and brought here in under the
protection of the T.W.I.T.

apparatus, for reasons that might not
have been fully shared with them. How much this gave them in common, of course,
was open to question.

“Is this what they call ‘walking
out’?”

“I hope not.”

It was breezy today—Lew was
packing the usual umbrella, slicker, dry socks, and miners’ boots against the
several kinds of weather to be expected during the average day in south
England. Yashmeen was gathering appreciative looks from passersby male and
female. No surprise, though she was turned out no more glamorously than anybody
else.

Their route took them through the
Park, generally toward Westminster. All around them, just behind a vegetational
veil tenuous as the veil of
maya,
persisted the ancient London landscape
of sacred high places, sacrificial stones, and mysterious barrows known to the
Druids and whoever they had picked up their ways from.

“What do you know about Brother
Nookshaft?” Lew was wondering. “What was he before he was a Cohen, for
instance?”

“Anything,” she supposed, “from a
schoolmaster to a petty criminal. I don’t see him as exmilitary. Not enough of
the indices there. Beginning with the haircut, actually. I mean it’s not
exactly Trumper’s, is it.”

“Think he might have only tumbled
into all this? Some family business he’s taken over?”

She shook her head, scowling. “These
people— no, no, that’s just the trouble, they’re all so unanchored, no
history, no responsibility, one day they just appear, don’t they, each with his
own secret designs. It might be politics, or even some scheme to defraud.”

“You sound like a detective. What if
they’re sincere about who they say they are?”

An amused flash of her interesting
eyes. “Oh then I’ve judged them ever so unfairly.”

They walked in silence, Lew frowning
as if trying to think something through.

“On this island,” she went on, “as
you will have begun to notice, no one ever speaks plainly. Whether it’s Cockney
rhyming codes or the crosswords in the newspapers—all English, spoken or
written, is looked down on as no more than strings of text cleverly encrypted.
Nothing beyond. Any who may come to feel betrayed by them, insulted, even hurt,
even grievously, are simply ‘taking it too seriously.’ The English exercise
their eyebrows and smile and tell you it’s ‘irony’ or ‘a bit of fun,’ for it’s
only combinations of letters after all, isn’t it.”

It seemed she was about to go up to
University, to Girton College, Cambridge, to study maths.

Lew must’ve been giving her a look,
because she turned to him rather sharply. “Something wrong?”

He shrugged. “Next they’ll be letting
you folks vote.”

“Not in your lifetime,” she scowled.

“Only a bit of fun,” Lew protested.
It was dawning on him that Yashmeen might be more than what others were
claiming on her behalf.

Evening drew on, the vast jangling
thronged somehow monumental London evening, light falling seemingly without a
destination across the windattended squares and haunted remnants of something
older, and they went to eat at Molinari’s in Old Compton Street, also known as
the Hôtel d’Italie, reputed to be one of the haunts of Mr. Arthur Edward Waite,
though tonight the place was only full of visitors from the suburbs.

Αt first a
greenhorn
as to the true
nature of the work, Lew depended on traditional readings of the Tarot deck,
which in London in those days were pretty much referred to the designs provided
by Miss Pamela (“Pixie”) Colman Smith under the guidance of Mr. Waite. But Lew
was soon disabused. “In the grammar of their iniquity,” he was instructed, “the
Icosadyad, or Company of Twentytwo, observe neither gender nor number. ‘The
Chariot’ can turn out to be an entire fighting unit, not infrequently at
regimental strength. Go calling on the Hierophant and the door could easily
open on a woman, even in some way striking, whom you may in time come to
desire.”

“Man, oh man.”

“Well, not necessarily you see.”

As if testing a new policeman on the
beat, the twentytwo lost little time in demonstrating to Lew this nomenclatural
flexibility. Temperance (number XIV) proved to be an entire family, the
Uckenfays, living in a disagreeable western suburb, each of whom specialized in
a different pathological impulse he or she was unable to control, including
litigiousness, chloral addiction, public masturbating, unexpected discharges of
firearms, and, in the case of the baby, Des, scarcely a year old and already
four stone, that form of gluttony known to students of the condition as
gaver
du visage.
As of the latest information, The Hermit (IX) was the cordial
proprietor of a cigardivan where Lew soon became part of the regular clientele,
The Wheel of Fortune (X) was a Chinese opiumden landlord, based in the
Midlands, whose life of luxury was derived from “joints” all over London as
well as Birmingham,

Manchester, and Liverpool, The Last
Judgment (XX) was a streetwalker from Seven Dials, sometimes accompanied by her
Pimp, and so forth
. . . .
Fine with
Lew, who always liked to meet new and interesting people, and the chores they
brought with them by way of selfintroduction were easily disposed of. But then
they started coming at him in twos.