The Difference Engine (53 page)

“I see.”

“Then tell me what you see, my friend, for I myself am very much in the dark.”

The Eye. All-seeing, the sublime weight of its perception pressing in upon him from every direction.

Oliphant hesitated. Ash from his cigar fell unnoticed to Arslau’s rich carpet. “I have yet to meet Sybil Gerard,” he said, “but I may be able to offer you information regarding this formula you’ve mentioned. It may even be possible to obtain a copy. I can promise nothing, however, until I myself am allowed to interview the lady in question, privately and at some length.”

Arslau fell silent. He seemed to look through Oliphant. At last he nodded. “We can arrange that.”

“She is not, I take it, in custody?”

“Let us say that we are aware of her movements.”

“You allow her apparent freedom, yet observe her closely?”

“Precisely that. If we take her now, and she reveals nothing, the trail goes cold.”

“As ever, Arslau, your technique is impeccable. And when might it be arranged for me to meet with her?”

The Eye, the pressure, the pounding of his heart.

“This evening, if you so desire,” said Monsieur Arslau of the Police des Chateaux, adjusting his gold-embroidered cravat.

The walls of the Cafe de l’Univers were hung with paintings, etched mirrors, and enamel plaques advertising the ubiquitous product of Pernod Fils. The pictures, if one could call them that, were either grotesque daubs, seemingly executed in a messy imitation of Engine-stippling, or queer geometric formulations suggesting the restless motion of kinotrope-bits. In some cases, Oliphant supposed, the painters themselves were present — or such he took them to be, these long-haired fellows in velvet caps, their corduroy trousers smeared with pigment and tobacco-ash. But the majority of the clientele — according to his companion, one Jean Beraud — consisted of kinotropistes. These gentlemen of the Latin Quarter sat and drank with their black-clad grisettes at the round marble tables, or held forth on theoretical matters before small groups of their peers.

Beraud, in an unseasonable boater and a brown suit of intensely Gallic cut, was one of Arslau’s mouchards, a professional informer who referred to the kinotropists as members of “le milieu.” He was fresh and rosy as a young pig, he drank Vittel and peppermint, and Oliphant had taken an immediate dislike to him. The kinotropists seemed to favor the absinthe of Pernod Fils; Oliphant, sipping a glass of red wine, watched the ritual of glass and water-decanter, of sugar-lump and trowel-shaped spoon.

“Absinthe is the bed of tuberculosis,” Beraud said.

“Why do you suppose that Madame Tournachon would choose to appear tonight in this cafe, Beraud?”

The mouchard shrugged. “She is a familiar of le milieu, monsieur. She goes to Madelon’s, also to Batiffol’s, but it is here, in l’Univers, that she most nearly finds companionship.”

“And why is that, do you think?”

“Because she was Gautier’s mistress, of course. He was a kind of prince here, monsieur, it must be understood. Her relationship with Gautier has necessarily limited her contacts with ordinary society. He taught her French, or such French as she has.”

“What sort of woman, exactly, do you take her to be?”

Beraud smirked. “She is perhaps attractive, but cold. Unsympathetic. In the manner of Englishwomen, you understand.”

“When she arrives, Beraud — if she arrives, I should say — you are to take your leave immediately.”

Beraud raised his eyebrows. “On the contrary, monsieur —”

“You are to go, Beraud. Take your leave.” A measured pause. “Vanish.”

The sharply padded shoulders of Beraud’s brown suit rose at the word.

“You will instruct the cab to wait, and the stenographer as well. The stenographer, Beraud — his English is adequate? My friend — my very good friend. Monsieur Arslau — has assured me that this is the case . . . ”

“Entirely adequate, yes! And monsieur” — getting up so quickly that he nearly overturned his bentwood chair — “it is she . . . ”

The woman now entering l’Univers might easily have been mistaken for a modish Parisienne of more than common means. Slender and blond, she wore a somber merino crinoline with matching cloak and bonnet, narrowly trimmed in mink.

As Beraud continued his hasty retreat into the depths of the cafe, Oliphant rose. Her eyes, very alert, very blue, met his. He approached her, hat in hand, and bowed. “Forgive me,” he said in English. “We have not been introduced, but I must speak with you regarding a matter of great urgency.”

Recognition dawned in the wide blue eyes, and fear.

“Sir, you mistake me for another.”

“You are Sybil Gerard.”

Her lower-lip was trembling now, and Oliphant experienced an abrupt, powerful, and entirely unexpected sympathy. “I am Laurence Oliphant, Miss Gerard. You are presently in terrible danger. I wish to help you.”

“That is not my name, sir. Pray let me pass. My friends are waiting.”

“I know that Egremont betrayed you. I understand the nature of his betrayal.”

She started at the name, Oliphant in terror of her swooning on the spot, but then she gave a little shudder and seemed to study him quietly for a moment. “I saw you in Grand’s, that night,” she said. “You were in the smoker with Houston and . . . Mick. You had a gammy arm, up in a sling.”

“Please,” he said, “join me.”

Seated opposite her at his table, Oliphant listened as she ordered absinthe de vidangeur in quite passable French.

“Do you know Lamartine, the singer?” she asked.

“I’m sorry, no.”

“He invented it, ‘scavenger’s absinthe.’ I can’t drink it otherwise.”

The waiter arrived with the drink, a mixture of absinthe and red wine.

“Theo taught me to order it,” she said, “before he . . . went away.” She drank, the wine red against her painted lips. “I know you’ve come to take me back. Don’t gull me otherwise. I know a copper when I meet one.”

“I have no desire to see you return to England, Miss Gerard —”

“Tournachon. I’m Sybil Tournachon. French by marriage.”

“Your husband is here in Paris?”

“No,” she said, lifting an oval locket of cut-steel on its black ribbon. She snapped it open, displaying a daguerreotyped miniature of a handsome young man. “Aristide. He fell at Philadelphia, in the great inferno. He volunteered, to fight on the Union side. He was real, you know; I mean, he actually existed, and wasn’t just one of them the clackers make up . . . ” She gazed at the little image with a look of mingled longing and sadness, though Oliphant understood that she had never in her life set eyes upon Aristide Tournachon.

“It was a marriage of convenience, I take it.”

“Yes. And you’ve come to take me back.”

“Not at all, Miss . . . Tournachon.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You must. A great deal depends upon it, not least your own safety. Since you departed London, Charles Egremont has become a very powerful, a very dangerous man. As dangerous to the well-being of Great Britain as he is no doubt dangerous to you.”

“Charles? Dangerous?” She seemed suddenly on the verge of laughter. “You’re gulling me.”

“I need your help. Desperately. As desperately as you need mine.”

“Do I, then?”

“Egremont has powerful resources at his command, branches of Government easily capable of reaching you here.”

“You mean the Specials, and that lot?”

“More to the point, I must inform you that your activities are even now monitored by at least one secret agency of Imperial France . . . ”

“Because Theophile chose to help me?”

“Indeed, that seems to be the case . . . ”

She drank off the last of the vile-looking concoction in her glass. “Dear Theophile. What a lovely, silly sort of cove he was. Always in his scarlet waistcoat, and madly clever at clacking. I gave him Mick’s set of fancy cards, and he was terribly kind to me then. Spun me up a marriage-license and a French citizen-number rat-tat-tat. Then, one afternoon, I was to meet him here . . .”

“Yes?”

“He never came.” She lowered her eyes. “He used to boast of having a ‘gambling modus.’ They all do, but he talked as if he meant it. Someone might have believed him. It was foolish of him . . . ”

“Did he ever speak with you about his interest in the Engine known as the Great Napoleon?”

“Their monster, you mean? Your Paris clacker speaks of little else, sir! They’re mad for the thing!”

“The French authorities believe that Theophile Gautier damaged the Great Napoleon with Radley’s cards.”

“Is he dead, then, Theo?”

Oliphant hesitated. “Alas, I believe so, yes.”

“That’s so vicious bloody cruel,” she said, “to spirit a man away like a rabbit in a conjuring trick, and leave his loved-ones ever to wonder, and worry, and never rest! It’s vile.”

Oliphant found that he could not meet her eyes.

“There’s a deal of that about in this Paris, there is,” she said. “The things I’ve heard their clackers jest about . . . And London, they say, is no better, really, to them as know. Do you know they say the Rads murdered Wellington? They say the sappers, the sand-hogs, hand-in-glove with the Rads, cut a tunnel beneath that restaurant, and the master sapper himself tamped the powder and set the fuses . . . Then the Rads lay the blame on men like . . .”

“Your father. Yes. I know.”

“And knowing that, you’d ask me to trust you?” There was defiance in her eyes, and perhaps a pride long-buried.

“Knowing that Charles Egremont betrayed your father, Walter Gerard, unto his destruction; that he betrayed you as well, bringing about your ruin in the eyes of society; yes, I must ask that you trust me. In exchange, I offer you the complete, utter, and virtually instantaneous negation of your betrayer’s political career.”

She lowered her eyes again, and seemed to consider. “Could you do that, really?” she asked.

“Your testament alone will serve. I shall be merely the instrument of its delivery.”

“No,” she said at last, “if I were to denounce him publicly, then I would expose myself as well. Charles isn’t the only one I need to fear, as you yourself have said. Remember, I was there that night, in Grand’s; I know how long an arm revenge can have.”

“I’ve not suggested denouncing him publicly. Blackmail will suffice.”

Now her eyes were far away, as if she walked the distant pavements of memory. “They were so close, Charles and my father, or so it seemed . . . Perhaps if things had taken a different turn . . .”

“Egremont lives daily with that betrayal. It is the crucial grain of constant irritation around which his depraved politics have been allowed to form. Your telegram galvanized his guilt — his terror of those early Luddite sympathies being revealed. Now he would tame the beast, make political terror his constant ally. But you and I stand in his way.”

The blue eyes were strangely calm. “I find I wish to believe you, Mr. Oliphant.”

“I will keep you safe,” Oliphant said, quite startled by his own intensity. “So long as you choose to remain in France, you shall do so under the protection of powerful friends, colleagues of mine, agents of the Imperial court. A cab awaits us, and a stenographer, to take down the details of your testimony.”

With a tortured, flatulent wheeze of compressed air, a small panmelodium was activated at the rear of the cafe. Oliphant, turning, caught the eye of the mouchard Beraud, who was smoking a Dutch clay pipe amid a cluster of chattering kinotropistes.

“Madame Tournachon,” Oliphant said, rising, “may I offer you my arm?”

“It’s healed, has it?” She rose in a rustle of crinoline.

“Entirely,” Oliphant said, remembering the lightning-stroke of the samurai’s sword, in Edo, amid the shadows. He had been attempting to hold the fellow off with a riding-crop.

As the Engine-driven music of the grand panmelodium brought the grisettes from their chairs, she took his arm.

A girl burst in, then, from the street, her naked breasts daubed with green. About her waist were strung angular constructs of copper-foil, like the leaves of a date-palm approximated by a kinotrope. She was followed by two boys in a similar lack of attire, and Oliphant felt utterly lost.

“Come then,” Sybil said, “don’t you know they’re art students, and been to a bal? It’s Montmartre, you know, and the art students, they’ve such a mad and lovely time.”

Oliphant had entertained the gallant notion of personally delivering to Charles Egremont a transcript of Sybil Gerard’s testimony. But upon his return to England, those symptoms of advanced syphilis which Dr. McNeile had incorrectly diagnosed as railway-spine temporarily overcame him. Disguised as a commercial traveler from M. Arslau’s native Alsace, Oliphant went to ground in Brighton’s hydropathic spa, to take the waters and dispatch a number of telegrams.

Mr. Mori Arinori arrives in Belgravia at a quarter past four, driving a new-model Zephyr gurney leased from a commercial garage in Camden Town, just as Charles Egremont is departing for Parliament and a most important speech.

Egremont’s body-guard, on assignment from the Central Statistics Bureau’s Department of Criminal Anthropometry, a machine-carbine slung beneath his coat, watches as Mori descends from the Zephyr, a diminutive figure in evening-clothes.

Mori marches straight across the new-fallen snow, his boots leaving perfect prints upon the black macadam.

“For you, sir,” Mori says and bows, handing Egremont the stout manila envelope. “Very good day to you, sir.” Donning round goggles with an elasticated band, Mori returns to his Zephyr.

“What an extraordinary little personage,” Egremont says, looking down at the envelope. “One hasn’t seen a Chinaman, got up like that . . .”

Recede.

Reiterate.

Rise above these black patterns of wheel-tracks,

These snow-swept streets,

Into the great map of London,

forgetting

MODUS

The Images Tabled

The Language of Signs

The circular arrangement of the axes of the Difference Engine ‘round large central wheels led to the most extended prospects. The whole of arithmetic now appeared within the grasp of mechanism. A vague glimpse even of an Analytical Engine opened out, and I pursued with enthusiasm the shadowy vision.