Against the Day (45 page)

“What? Oh. The color, I guess.”

“Lovely shade of purple, isn’t it,
boiled logwood I believe, chef puts it in everything—go on, it won’t
poison you, bit of tannin, perhaps, if that.”

“Well, and then these, um . . .”
holding up a fragment of this muffin and pointing to a number of inclusions in
some vivid, unmistakably turquoise shade.

“For pity’s sake Lewis, don’t eat
them
all
!”
cried
Neville, followed closely by his coadjutor, both of them traveling along in
some curious ~exhiliration, inches above the floor.

“And see what we’ve found!” Nigel
producing a sort of dinner pail with a quantity of beige substance in it which
Lew recognized immediately.

“Happy Birthday!” they all but
screamed in unison.

“Whose bright idea—”

“Come come Lewis, you are a Gemini,
that’s obvious, and as for the precise date, why, Madame Eskimoff knows all.”

“Speaking of whom—”

At their last meeting Dr. De Bottle
had asked Neville and Nigel plaintively when, if ever, Britain would get the
Ashes back, and the boys had agreed to consult the ecstatica.

“Next year,” Madame Eskimoff had
replied, “but only if they’ve the sense to select this Middlesex spinner, young
Bosanquet, who’s been working on an absolutely fiendish ball, which looks as if
it will be a legbreak but then goes the other way. Amazing physical dynamics,
virtually uninvestigated. Said to be an Australian invention, but they’ll be
utterly confounded at finding a Pom who knows how to bowl it.”

“I shall run to my bookmaker,” Dr. De
Bottle assured the boys graciously.

It was decided
that Lew should go up to Cambridge
with the Cohen to meet Professor Renfrew.

“Oh, I get it. You want me along for
muscle.”

“No, actually, here comes our protection
now.” A gent of average height and unthreatening appearance was approaching
them with a watercress sandwich in a gloved hand. “Clive Crouchmas. You may
recall his voice from Madame Eskimoff’s séance the other night.”

This person greeted the Cohen by raising
his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as
to form the Hebrew letter
shin,
signifying the initial letter of one of
the preMosaic (that is, plural) names of God, which may never be spoken.

“Basically wishing long life and
prosperity,” explained the Cohen, answering with the same gesture.

Earlier in his career, Clive
Crouchmas had been your bogstandard public official, unreflectively ambitious
but not yet as greedy as he would soon find it possible to be. He worked at the
Ottoman Public Debt Administration, an international body which the Turkish
Sultan had authorized some years before to collect and distribute tax revenue,
as a way of restructuring the debt of his overextended Empire. In theory the
P.D.A. took the taxes on sales of fish, alcohol, tobacco, salt, silk, and
stamps—the socalled “Six Indirect

Contributions”—and passed the
money on to various bondholders in Britain, France, AustriaHungary, Germany,
Italy, and Holland. No one acquainted with the Second Law of Thermodynamics,
however, would have expected a perfect transfer of funds—some of those
Turkish pounds would always be lost in the process, creating opportunities it
would have taken someone much farther along the illmarked path to sainthood than
Clive Crouchmas to pass up.

Ordinarily, Crouchmas had little to
do with metaphysics, would not, indeed, recognize any appearance of the
metaphysical even in the act of
morsus fundamento.
It was as alien to
him as frivolity, of which there was plenty at these functions he seemed to be
haunting these days. “Oh, Clivey!” three or four female voices at the edge of
selfinduced laughter would sing out in unison across the palmabundant reaches
of some hotel ballroom. Crouchmas was not even willing to say “What?” in reply.
It would open doors allowing too many creatures of farce to commence running in
and out.

But, oddly, he had been resisting
material temptation. As the Eastern Question degenerated into an unseemly
scramble for the vast wealth of the Ottoman Empire, expressed most vividly in
the intrigues over which nation would end up getting the “Bagdad” Railway
Concession, Clive was observed at Chunxton Crescent, silent, robed, for all the
world like someone seeking a more spiritual path, though according to gossip—a
secular force the T.W.I.T. would never transcend—he was there out of a
mute fascination with Miss Halfcourt, welcoming any excuse to share her
company, since he had mastered as yet few of the arts of moneyed lechery, being
in that phase of his career where work still claimed priority over leisure
pursuits.

For over a decade, the P.D.A. had
also been collecting local tithes earmarked specifically for railway
guarantees, to be paid yearly at so much per kilometer of track, to various
European railway companies, before anyone else, even the Turkish government,
got to see a piastre. This had not escaped the attention of a cabal within the
P.D.A., which included Crouchmas. Pseudonymously and in carefully underdefined
relation to the Imperial Ottoman Bank group of Paris, they had set up a small
firm of their own designed to deal mainly with rogue bond issues, deemed by the
Bank’s advisory committees too unstable to get involved with, or indeed touch
with a bargepole.

“It’s too good to pass up,” he
groaned aloud to Grand Cohen Nookshaft, his spiritual adviser. “Isn’t it?”

“I’m thinking,” said the Cohen, whose
money had been in threepercent consols for longer than he could remember, or
remember why, “I’m thinking.”

“I’ve never understood,” said Clive
Crouchmas, “why, with all the precogni

tive talent around this place, no one
has ever . . .” He paused, as if seeking a diplomatic way to go on.

“Some serious dissonance between
psychical gifts and modern capitalism, I’d imagine,” said the Cohen, somewhat
shortly. “Mutually antagonistic, you’d have to say. We also do try not to
become too mental, like some in your own shop, over this railway Concession.”

“Were I not out here walking free
amongst you all,” declared Clive Crouchmas, “I should be Best Boy at Colney
Hatch. The other night, for just half a second, I saw
. . .
I thought I saw . . .”

“It’s all right, Crouchmas, one hears
this sort of thing all the time.”

“But. . .”

“Enlightenment is a dodgy
proposition. It all depends how much you want to risk. Not money so much as personal
safety, precious time, against a very remote long shot coming in. It happens,
of course. Out of the dust, the clouds of sweat and breath, the drumming of
hooves, the animal rises up behind the field, the last you’d’ve expected, tall,
shining, inevitable, and passes through them all like a beam of morning
sunlight through the spectral residue of a dream. But it’s still a fool’s bet
and a mug’s game, and you might not have the will or the patience.”

“But suppose I did stick it out. I’ve
been curious for some time—as members here move closer to enlightenment,
is there any sort of discount on the dues we pay?”

It was raining
when Lew arrived in Cambridge.
Newspaper headlines announced—

ANOTHER ENCYCLICAL FROM PROF.
MCTAGGART

VATICAN’S STRONGLY WORDED PROTEST

G. H. HARDY UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT

“
Multi
et Unus
”
—Complete
Text Within

Chalked up on the ancient walls were
graffiti such as
create more dukes
and
expropriate chuckers
.

After they had left Yashmeen at the
Girton gatehouse, Lew and Clive Crouchmas proceeded to the Laplacian, a
relatively remote mathematicians’ pub beside a canal, where they were to meet
with Professor Renfrew.

“Trinity people here, mostly,”
Crouchmas said. “No one’s likely to recognize him.”

“Why should that bother him?” Lew
wondered aloud, but Crouchmas ignored the question, nodding out the door into
the onset of evening.

Slowly, through the impure fenlight,
the Professor’s face became distinct, exhibiting a brightness
. . .
no, a denial of ordinary vision
. . .
a smile that would never break forth
from any interior cordiality.

After three obligatory rounds of the
dense, warm, unaerated product known on this island as beer, Crouchmas went off
on mischief of his own, and Lew and the Professor made their way to ~Refrew’s
rooms at one of the lesser quadrangles. When they had lit cigars and allowed a
pulse of watchful silence to elapse, Renfrew spoke.

“You are acquainted with the ward of
Auberon Halfcourt, I believe.”

Lew guessed that Crouchmas in his
fascination had been unable to keep from bringing her name up. He shrugged.
“Routine chaperoning job, up and back, Mr. Crouchmas thought I should have a
look in, was all, say howdy, so forth.”

Which
did not quite exempt him from a suspicious squint. “Poor Halfcourt. The man
simply does not understand how things are done. Worse than Gordon at Khartoum.
The desert has created in him fantasies of power which in Whitehall,
mercifully, are felt to be impractical. And you have no idea how the girl’s
protectors at the T.W.I.T. have again and again blighted my life. One cannot
make the slightest move, however innocent, without attracting their, I must
say, zealous attention.” It seemed to Lew that Renfrew’s upper and lower jaws
were moving independently, like those of a ventriloquist’s figure. The voice at
times did seem to come from somewhere else.

“They have one or two peculiar ways,
I guess. But they pay good.”

“Ah. You’ve worked with them before.”

“Pickup and delivery—one or
two, whatever you folks call them
. . .
muscle
jobs.”

“Do they have you under any sort of
contract?”

“Nope. One chore at a time, and cash
on the barrelhead. Better for everybody, see.”

“Hmm. Then if, for example,
I
wished to engage you . . .”

“Would depend on the work, I guess.”

“Young Crouchmas says you can be
confided in. Come. Tell me what you think.”

Pinned to a cork board on the wall
Lew saw a photograph of a shadowy figure in white with a cricketer’s bag, posed
against one of those noteworthy arrays of cloud the Headingly ground was known
for. The face was blurred, but Lew took a few steps back till it came more in
focus.

“You recognize him?”

“No
. . .
thought for a minute I might.”

“You recognize him.” Slyly nodding as
if to himself.

Lew had a gastrically dismal feeling
but saw no reason to confirm the Professor’s guess. Instead he sat through the
same story he’d heard from Coombes De Bottle about the mystery gasbomb thrower.

“You want me to find him? Collar him,
hand him over to the police?”

“Not directly. Bring him to me first,
if at all possible. It would be of the keenest importance that I speak with
him, facetoface.”

“Suppose he was right in the middle
of carrying out one of those phosgene attacks?”

“Oh, there would be a hazardousduty
bonus, I’m sure,
I
can’t pay you that
much, you see how reduced things are around here—it’s as if my life had
been subjected to its own sort of gas outrage—but others would be most
generous, if you delivered him safely.”

“So it’s not what you’d call
personal.”

“Larking about at the seaside with
Mrs. Renfrew sort of thing
. . .
so
sorry, no
. . .
afraid not
. . . .
” The expression on his face was one
Lew had noted from time to time among the British, a combination of smugness
and selfpity, which he still couldn’t explain but knew enough to exercise
caution around. “No, a bit more, hm, general in scale. Which is why you might
run into a spot of uproar with the police. They’ve been round more than once to
tell me to keep out of it. Came all the way up from London, in fact, to inform
me that the ‘subject’ is theirs alone to deal with.”

“I can ask around at the Yard, see
what that’s all about.” Then, unable to resist, “Your German colleague, what’s
his name, Werfner—is he as interested in this bird as you are?”

“No idea.” Renfrew’s reaction might
have included as much as a blink, but too quickly for Lew to be sure, “though I
really doubt Werfner knows a bosie from a beamer. Oh but haven’t you met yet? I
say what a treat you’ve in store!”

He motioned Lew to a smaller room,
where a globe of the Earth hung gleaming, at slightly below eyelevel, from a
slender steel chain anchored overhead, surrounded by an æther of tobacco smoke,
housedust, ancient paper and book bindings, human breath
. . . .
Renfrew took up the orb in both hands like a brandy
snifter, and rotated it with deliberation, as if weighing the argument he
wished to make. Outside the windows, the luminous rain swept the grounds. “Here
then—keeping the North Pole in the middle, imagining for purposes of
demonstration the area roundabout to be solid, some unknown element one can not
only walk on but even run heavy ma