Lempriere's Dictionary (61 page)

The following two days saw Le Mara back at the quay where Nazim watched as the efforts of the preceding months seemed to loop back on themselves. Cases which had earlier been loaded onto the
Vendragon
were
now taken off. The men employed in this task managed their loads with greater ease than before however. It was apparent that the cases were empty. Nazim watched as a wagon was piled with the containers, then driven slowly through the streets to Le Mara’s house.

Here, the foreman, his helpers and Le Mara alighted. Two further cases, somewhat larger than the others, were added to the load. The hired hands struggled a little under the weight. The wagon moved off once more, and again Nazim followed as it trundled down Thames Street continuing west to London Bridge where it crossed the river. The Borough led both of them south, wagon and its shadow until the wide highway was exchanged for a maze of tiny streets which led them into Narrow Wall Road, thence to the Kings Arms Stairs. The coach turned through a pair of wide gates into a yard. Nazim read the legend: Coade Artificial Stone Manufactory. The sky was leaden, had been so all day. Now a rift opened above, an odd light was streaming through the opening, somewhere north.

The two crates were unloaded and the lid prised off the first. Nazim watched as a young girl was lifted out. Something was wrong with her legs. She looked dazed, pretty, long black hair hung down her back. The two men frog-marched her around the side of the large brick building which formed one side of the yard with several tall sheds at its rear. Beyond these a lower, more extensive building stretched away until a second yard, identical to the first, completed the Manufactory. Le Mara followed the ugly procession.

The second crate remained on the ground beside the wagon. Nazim could hear a sharp knocking, a scrabbling sound coming from within it. The noise came in haphazard bursts. Some minutes passed before Le Mara and his accomplices returned. The girl was no longer with them. Le Mara’s countenance was unchanged. His assistants seemed to step hesitantly. A command was barked and they began levering open the second case. The two men wrestled with its contents under Le Mara’s directions, reached in and manhandled the occupant out. It stood there, blinking even in the failing light. A goat. Le Mara knelt quickly at its side and the goat staggered sideways. Its hind legs would not support it. It fell and twitched on the bricks until it was still. Blood ran out of its throat. The two men picked it up and carried it towards the sheds. The gashed sky was closing itself, the evening approaching.

Events accelerated then. The black coach appeared, driven at speed down the road and into the gates. Le Mara signalled. A figure was making hesitant progress watched by two pairs of eyes. It was the pseudo-Lemprière tripping towards them, stopping midway along the side of the Manufactory, entering a small door set into the brickwork. The black coach disgorged a passenger. The same girl, for a moment, the identical dress, the
same long black hair. Were the features finer, subtly different? Difficult to tell in the twilight and at a distance. The pseudo-Lemprière had entered the Manufactory between the brick building and the sheds. Le Mara had the girl by the arm. The same dazed expression, looking about her as though landed blindfold from the air. The coach pulled away, down the road towards the second yard. Le Mara was leading the second girl behind the building by the same route as the first. Nazim used the coach to mask his progress down the road towards the far yard, trotting at a crouch by its side until the gates were passed and he was on the far side of the structure behind the sheds. The girl emerged. She was clutching something to her face. The coach door opened, the thick-set man had caught hold of her. She fought. Nazim watched as she was cuffed, then the man looked down on her.

‘The bargain was yours,’ he said coldly. The girl struggled. She was led quickly to the coach which made off again at speed. Nazim heard shuffling footsteps somewhere inside, moving faster and faster until the door flew open and the pseudo-Lemprière was suddenly running across the yard. Nazim ducked behind a crate. The boy stumbled, almost recovered, then tumbled, was up again running even faster out of the gates and down the street. Nazim thought for a second, then gave chase.

Later, lying in the cool quiet of the cellar, Nazim questioned his choice. He might have searched the Manufactory, its interior would surely have told him more than the events which followed. The pseudo-Lemprière had collapsed, wheezing, a few hundred yards down the road. Passersby stared curiously at him. He seemed oblivious as he continued erratically, veering in and out of the road towards the nearest tavern. Nazim saw him order a glass of brandy, then another. Someone barged against him and he lashed out catching the offender on the top of the head. He was hit back and fell to the ground, then was thrown bodily out the door by a group of men. He reentered and would have suffered worse but a black-garbed figure appeared out of the rough mass and stood by the young man. The group surely might have defeated him but something stayed their hands, something in his bearing. The pseudo-Lemprière was scooped off the floor by his rescuer, whom he then tried to punch. More drinks followed. As he turned from the counter Nazim saw that the rescuer was the visitor to Le Mara’s house two days before, the untrusted one whose footsteps he had not heard. And, as he watched through the grimy window of the tavern, he fancied there was a resemblance between them, very slight, growing slighter as the bruises came up around the pseudo-Lemprière’s face.

The two of them downed glass after glass and Nazim knew that he had made the wrong choice. He should have followed the coach, or the wagon, or searched the Manufactory. He would learn nothing here. Even
posthumously, the Lemprière had deceived him again. He had turned from the tavern and walked home by Westminster Bridge where an old woman had pestered him to buy apples. They filled his pockets as he gained the house in Stonecutter Lane. Karin was asleep, lying on the floor above his head. Nazim had lifted the trap door and climbed silently into the room. Drawing the apples out quietly, one by one, he laid them next to her. He climbed back into the cellar. He had made another error, chosen a blind alley rather than the trail. More than ever before he felt at sea, awash with competing, contradictory waves, out of his depth. More than ever before he felt that he must fail for want of a single good bearing. The woman had woken, found the apples lying next to her. The sun rose finally, a bright brilliant ray. Lying in the cellar, Nazim heard the woman’s teeth crunch on the apples. He listened as she chewed and swallowed. He smiled to himself, and the Lemprière chuckled at his side.

Now, strong wings unfold over the wider canvas. March peels off the African coast and spreads north over the Mediterranean up into the Adriatic’s stubby pelagic isthmus. Here, where the brave tunny swims amidst glittering shoals of sardines, the ocean currents have almost given up their ghost. Waters nudging the coast around Trieste, Fiume and Venice have taken four decades to reach this point, four more will flow past before they see the Straits of Gilbraltar again. The March winds which whip fake white crests out of the wave-tops meet this collar of land and shoot up to bring weird weather systems down on the geography hereabouts. Snow still dusts the Hungarian Steppes, drifting in the Klagenfurt Basin where warming foehns blow the loose powder around before threading through the broken country of Bosnia and on through the dry valleys of Herzogovina and Dalmatia. The notorious Hungarian winter is at an end and the Campaign Season is afoot once more. About the valleys of the Save, Drave, Danube and Unna, around Belgrade, Choczim, Wihaoz and the three quite different Gradiskas, the armies of the Emperor Joseph and the Grand Seignor of the Sublime Porte at Constantinople are circling, feinting, indulging one another’s tactical caprices; matching each other’s different territorial claims, though, from far above, a lazy bellyroll and
flap, flap, flap
in aether warm with spring sunshine, they are different forms of the same imperial tiredness, Roman indeed, but two-headed, the static north versus flesh-bound south. The old empire might have gone either way but having chosen both, Byzantium is coming after the pretender again, and vice versa as the Imperial Internuncio’s declaration of
war in Constantinople is printed in the German gazettes and that hoary campaigner General de Vens instantly orders the destruction of Dresnick. Turkic cannonades puff uselessly against the Austrian howitzers’ noiseless smoke-plumes thousands of feet below until the hapless Musselman defenders are marched off to Karlstadt for eventual ransom or the Austrian galleys. A dismal column trudges over the Croatian maize plains, one or two perhaps looking up and seeing a flying, what, a gull perhaps, right size and shape certainly but seemingly much higher, implying a much
bigger
sort of bird. The names of Mahometan angels pass up and down the column, furtive mutterings with half an eye out for Sergeant Vittig who enjoys battering the infidels to death with a piece of wood he calls The Imam. Soon, the Imperial Internuncio has disappeared without trace and the Venetians have allowed a Turkish squadron to operate out of Castel Nuovo. The emperor himself travels to Trieste. In Vienna, the Venetian ambassador is rarely seen in public, never at court. Stories concerning his private habits circulate the city and, thinly coded, re-appear in those German gazettes. The Turkish squadron sails up and down the Adriatic. On land, matters military go badly. Supply lines are erratic, Belgrade is encircled (General de Vens again, growing ever more sprightly as the campaign gathers pace) and the Reis Effendi argues with the Captain-Pashar who is barred from the Divan by order of the Grand Seignor. Meanwhile, three chasseurs sculling gently over the blue-grey waters of the Unna one day are blown to the right-hand bank and besieged in a farmhouse for a day and a night until relieved by a detachment of Croatian patriots. The three have already killed eighteen of their besiegers and are rightly promoted. Eighteen janissaries lie dead with their hashish-dreams, the first of the summer’s flies drinking from the tear ducts of eyes open to the sky which is bent around and mirrored there. Clouds scudding over the sun, birds, one larger than the others, huge in fact, flying corner to corner are lost for a moment in the pupil’s darkness, before re-emerging and dwindling to an infinitely prolonged point, the rear view of an arrow headed west, away from this fumbling conflict, over the Bavarian Alps and the Swabian hop fields into France. Hundreds of miles away, at Constantinople, the standard of Mahomet is unveiled in the seraglio to excite the war-like ardour of the people. Still no word on the Imperial Internuncio.

In Paris, divisions are less tangible, more devious. An invisible order is defining itself beneath the visible. Only the King does not know this. Placing his
arrêt
on the Official Statement of the Revenues, and again refusing to abolish the
lettre de cachet
, he soothes a fractious Parlement: “My Parlement ought to submit with respect and in silence to whatever my wisdom judges proper. I lastly forbid you to renew your deliberations on
this subject.” He has said this four times now. He is troubled. Someone keeps moving the orange trees and this means something he cannot quite divine. Both Himself and Monsieur are dropsical. Madame has promised to reorganise her household for a saving of fifty thousand louis d’or; it is encouraging. The king has abolished a number of tax offices; an opera is ordered in celebration. News from the Vendée is that discontented smugglers, dispossessed of a livelihood by his tax reforms have taken to gun-running. The Assembly of the Notables announces the revenues to be one hundred and eighty-five million francs. The King is delighted. In deficit. King depressed.

Annd…. The airs above Paris are pleasant zephyrs, teasing gusts and thermals, splendid for swooping and diving, for just keeping pleasantly airborne while the arriving warmth of spring fills the sky. The air-gods are ambient, endlessly accommodating as they body about, tumbling him downwards, metropolitan angel, OK, mission-wards…. Compared to them, the city is a cracked launch-pad, a broken plate, ceramic trash with the Scum River cutting it in two, riddled with hermetic cells and insurgents’ convening points, all the engrams of furtive meetings and dealings which stand out like weals, criss-crossing, zigzagging, deepening in colour where they overlap. The most livid marks are his business, the places of the most intense convergence. It seems so casual, that the Cardinal should call upon Monsieur Calonne, that Duluc should rent an enfilade of cellars running directly beneath the Palais de Justice or Protagoras commission a survey of the catacombs which riddle the city and give access to the most obscure and surprising parts of that city, many of these exits yet to be discovered, hence the survey…. What could be more natural than
les Cacouacs
’ tendril-like operations, their measured expansion and gradual preparations? Monitored from this distance, it seems so clear, so obvious. How could anyone fail to see it? Especially those closest, in the thick of these whispered assents and noiseless understandings, tipped winks and clammy handshakes, almost encircled by the whole business. And who
is
moving the orange trees?