Against the Day (63 page)

Kit took the elevator as far as it
went and then climbed a spiral staircase of carved mahogany up to the executive
offices, lit all the way to the top through windows showing in stained glass
notable incidents in the history of

the Vibe Corp. Cornering the Pickle Market. The Discovery of
Neofungoline. Launching of the Steamer
Edwarda В. Vibe
. . . .

Should’ve taken some elective courses
in the Drama Department, he thought. He knocked at the dark wood door.

Inside, Foley the dedicated
substitute posed over by the window as if enthroned, against the marine
daylight, a fine silver contour to his face as if it were familiar to the world
as any on a postage stamp, as if proclaiming,
Yes, this is who we are, how
it is, how it always is, this is what you may expect of us, impressive, isn’t
it? It better be.

   
“This
Germany business,” said Scarsdale Vibe.

“Sir.” Kit had expected he’d be
quaking like the young aspen before the mountain winds, but some unaccustomed
light, light under the aspect of distance, had crept round him instead,
bringing if not quite immunity, at least clarity.

   
“Vital
to your education.”

   
“I
believe I ought to go on to Göttingen.”

   
“For
mathematics.”

   
“Advanced
mathematics, yes.”

“
Useful
advanced mathematics? Or—” He gestured in the air to suggest the
formless, if not the unmanly.

“Sometimes the real world, the substantial
world of affairs, possessing greater inertia, takes a while to catch up,” Kit
carefully pretended to instruct him. “The Maxwell Field Equations, for
example—it was twenty years till Hertz discovered real electromagnetic
waves, traveling at the speed of light, just as Maxwell had worked it out on
paper.”

“Twenty years,” smiled Scarsdale
Vibe, with the worn insolence of someone expecting to live forever. “I’m not
sure I have that long.”

   
“All
sincerely trust that you do,” replied Kit.

“Do you think you have twenty years,
Kit?” In the short silence, as the slight but fatal emphasis on “you”
reverberated, Scarsdale was aware immediately that he might have misplayed his
hand, while for Kit things quietly fell into their rightful places, and he
understood that he could not allow hesitation, any more than anger, to betray
him. “Back in Colorado,” trying not to speak too carefully, “what with
avalanches and blue northers, desperate men, desperate and uncivilized, horses
too, all apt to go unexpectedly loco from the altitude and so forth, you learn
there’s no telling what the future holds is all, even one minute to the next.”
And heard Foley over by the window grunt sharply, as if wakened from a snooze.

Scarsdale Vibe beamed with what Kit
could recognize by now as an effort, by no means reliable, to contain some
underdefined rage, the scale of whose

potential for damage maybe not even Vibe himself suspected.
“Your professors are unanimous in recommending you. You’ll be happy to hear.”
He produced a steamship ticket and held it out to Kit, implacably cordial.
“Forward of the stacks. Bon voyage, sir.”

This
might be all in code, but the shape of it was clear. Scarsdale Vibe at this
pitch of things would feel just as comfortable as Kit would with an ocean
between them, and willing to pay firstclass rates if he had to, to put it
there. So back in ’63 had he paid not to have to go and fight—so had he
continued to pay for the elimination from his life of many forms of
inconvenience, including—what doubt could remain? ah, God—Webb
Traverse. There it was, like a conjecture whose truth was obvious to all,
though perhaps never to be proven with the furthest rigor.

No longer waiting, then, as the
interview progressed, for any expression of condolence over Webb, understanding
that the moment for it had passed forever, one of those negative results with
resonance far beyond itself, Kit felt the way he had his first time on a
bicycle, in a slow measured glide, knowing as long as he kept on moving just
this way, he could not fall over. He might not even have to work too hard right
now to conceal his thoughts, except for one pure and steady light he kept well
within—the certainty that one day this would have to be put
right—the moment his to choose, details such as how and where not as
important as the equals sign going in in the right place
. . . .

   
“Thank
you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. Become the next
Edison.” The man sat there smirking, secure in unquestioned might, unable to
imagine how all he believed protecting him had just turned to glass—if
not to be smashed to bits quite yet, then shaped for now into a lens that
promised close and merciless scrutiny, or maybe someday, when held at the
appropriate distance, death by focused light. And he should have said Tesla,
not Edison.

Kit found himself at Track 14 in the
Grand Central Station in time for the 3:55 back to New Haven, with no idea how
he’d got there, having apparently by some buggyhorse reflex walked through the
sulfurous city safe from all misadventure by streetcarbrake failure, armed
assault, mad dogs, or unbribed coppers, straight to this poised and seething
express. Some always had homes to return to, Kit had departure gates, piers,
turnstiles, institutional doorways.

He still had no idea whether or not
he’d got away with something, or whether he’d just put his life in danger. Back
at Pearl Street, the two Vibes were sitting over brandy and cigars.

“A tough one to figure, that kid,”
Foley opined. “Sure hope we ain’t got another Red in the root cellar like his
old man.”

“Our duty would be no less clear.
There are hundreds of these abscesses suppurating in the body of our Republic,”
an oratorical throb creeping into Scarsdale’s voice, “which must be removed,
wherever they are found. No other option. The elder Traverse’s sins are documented—once
they were brought to light, he was as good as lost. Should there be moral
reservations, in a class war, about targeting one’s enemies? You have been in
this game long enough to appreciate how mighty are the wings we shelter
beneath. How immune we are kept to the efforts of these muckraking Reds to soil
our names. Unless—Walker, have I missed something? you aren’t developing
a soft spot.”

As
Scarsdale’s was not the only voice Foley had to attend to, he erred, as usual,
on the side of mollification. He held out his glowing Havana. “If you can find
a soft spot, use it to put this out on.”

   
“What
happened to us, Foley? We used to be such splendid fellows.”

   
“Passage
of Time, but what’s a man to do?”

“Too easy. Doesn’t account for this
strange fury I feel in my heart, this desire to kill off every damned socialist
and so on leftward, without any more mercy than I’d show a deadly microbe.”

“Sounds reasonable to me. Not like
that we haven’t bloodied up our hands already here.”

Scarsdale gazed out his window at a
cityscape once fair but with the years grown more and more infested with
shortcomings. “I wanted so to believe. Even knowing my own seed was cursed, I
wanted the eugenics argument to be faulty somehow. At the same time I coveted
the bloodline of my enemy, which I fancied uncontaminated, I wanted that
promise, promise unlimited.”

Foley pretended his narrowing of gaze
was owing to cigarsmoke. “Mighty Christian attitude,” he commented at last, in
a tone as level as he could make it.

“Foley, I’m as impatient with
religious talk as the next sinner. But what a burden it is to be told to love
them, while knowing that they are the Antichrist itself, and that our only
salvation is to deal with them as we ought.”

It did not help Foley’s present mood
that he had awakened that morning from a recurring nightmare of the Civil War.
The engagement was confined to an area no bigger than an athletic field, though
uncountable thousands of men had somehow been concentrated there. All was
brown, gray, smoky, dark. A lengthy exchange of artillery had begun, from
emplacements far beyond the shadowy edges of the little field. He had felt
oppressed by the imminence of doom, of some suicidal commitment of infantry
which no one would escape. A pile of explosives nearby, a tall, rickety wood
crib of shells and other ammunition began to smolder, about to catch fire and
blow up at any mo

ment, a clear target for the
cannonballs of the other side, which continued to come in, humming terribly,
without pause
. . . .

“I didn’t have my war then,”
Scarsdale had been saying. “Just as well. I was too young to appreciate what
was at stake anyway. My civil war was yet to come. And here we are in it now,
in the thick, no end in sight. The Invasion of Chicago, the battles of
Homestead, the Coeur d’Alene, the San Juans. These communards speak a garble of
foreign tongues, their armies are the damnable labor syndicates, their
artillery is dynamite, they assassinate our great men and bomb our cities, and
their aim is to despoil us of our hardwon goods, to divide and subdivide among
their hordes our lands and our houses, to pull us down, our lives, all we love,
until they become as demeaned and soiled as their own. О Christ, Who hast
told us to love them, what test of the spirit is this, what darkness hath been
cast over our understanding, that we can no longer recognize the hand of the
Evil One?

“I am so tired, Foley, I have
struggled too long in these thankless waters, I am as an unconvoyed vessel
alone in a tempest that will not, will never abate. The future belongs to the
Asiatic masses, the panSlavic brutes, even, God help us, the black seething
spawn of Africa interminable. We cannot hold. Before these tides we must go
under. Where is our Christ, our Lamb? the Promise?”

Seeing his distress, Foley meant only
to comfort. “In our prayers—”

“Foley, spare me that, what we need
to do is start killing them in significant numbers, for nothing else has
worked. All this pretending—’equality,’ ‘negotiation’—it’s been
such a cruel farce, cruel to both sides. When the Lord’s people are in danger,
you know what he requires.”

   
“Smite.”

   
“Smite
early and often.”

   
“Hope
there’s nobody listening in on this.”

“God is listening. As to men, I have
no shame about what must be done.” A queer tension had come into his features,
as if he were trying to suppress a cry of delight. “But you, Foley, you seem
kind of—almost—nervous.”

Foley considered briefly. “My nerves?
Cast iron.” He relit his cigar, the matchflame unshaking. “Ready for anything.”

Aware of the Other Vibe’s growing
reluctance to trust reports from out in the field, Foley, who usually was out
there and thought he had a good grasp on things, at first resentful and after a
while alarmed, had come to see little point these days in speaking up. The
headquarters in Pearl Street seemed more and more like a moated castle and
Scarsdale a ruler isolated in self

resonant fantasy, a light to his eyes these days that was not
the same as that

old, straightforward acquisitive gleam. The gleam was gone,
as if Scarsdale

had accumulated all the money he cared to and was now moving
on in his biography to other matters, to action in the great world he thought
he understood but—even Foley could see—was failing, maybe fatally,
even to ask the right questions about anymore. Who could Foley go to with this?

Who
indeed? He had at least brought himself to reckon up what the worst outcome
might be, and it came out the same every time. It was nothing to recoil from,
though it did take some getting used to—maybe not massacre on the
reckless, bloodhappy scale of Bulgarians or Chinese, more, say, in the moderate
American tradition of Massachusetts Bay or Utah, of righteous men who believed
it was God they heard whispering in the most bitter patches of the night, and
God help anybody who suggested otherwise. His own voices, which had never
pretended to be other than whose they were, reminded Foley of his mission, to
restrain the alternate Foley, doing business as Scarsdale Vibe, from escaping
into the freedom of bloodletting unrestrained, the dark promise revealed to
Americans during the Civil War, obeying since then its own terrible inertia, as
the Republican victors kept after Plains Indians, strikers, Red immigrants, any
who were not likely docile material for the mills of ~of the newly empowered
order.

“It is a fine edge here,” the tycoon
had hinted one day, “between killing just the one old Anarchist and taking out
the whole cussèd family. I’m still not sure which I ought to do.”

 
“There’s thousands of em out there, and we’ve done away with
our share,” Foley puzzled. “Why even bother singling any of em out?”

   
“This
boy Christopher, for one thing. He’s different.”

   
Foley
was no innocent. He’d been down to Cooper Square and the Tenderloin, passed an
evening, maybe two, in the resorts where men danced with each other or dolled
up like Nellie Noonan or Anna Held and sang for the crowds of “fairies,” as
they called themselves, and it would have figured only as one more item of city
depravity, except for the longing. Which wasn’t just real, it was too real to
ignore. Foley had at least got that far, learned not to disrespect another
man’s longing.