Against the Day (143 page)

“Oh, he stopped your money, hell
that’s societypage gossip, not hot lead from ambush.”

“Breeze in, howdy, Mr. Vibe how you
been keepin and what a surprise seeing you here in Venice Italy—sure,
Reef, you know what’ll happen.”

   
“What’ll
happen?”

   
“Man
wants me out of the way, I’m tellin you.”

Dally growled in some impatience with
all this dawdling. “Listen now, you two do understand don’t you, there’s others
lined up waiting for a shot at this

buzzard, and you ain’t exactly next.”

Reef, as if this was news to him,
“You don’t say. Why, you mean there’s actually other people hate him as much as
we do?”

“You’re in Anarchist country,
buckaroo. Sooner or later over here, they’re bound to run out of royalty to
shoot at and start lookin around for more of the riffraff—politicians,
captains of industry, so forth. And that’s a list Scarsdale Vibe has been on
for some time.”

   
“You
know any Anarchists?”

   
“In
town here, plenty.”

   
“Reef
thinks he’s one,” noted Kit.

“You really think they might have
somethin in the works already?” Reef said.

   
“Most
of it’s talk. You want to go have a look?”

They got off at the San Marcuola stop
and walked over a couple of bridges and under a
sotopòrtego
and into
alleyways so narrow they had to walk single file till Dally said, “Here.” It
was a caffè called Laguna Morte. Inside were Andrea Tancredi and some artist
friends, and as it happened the topic under discussion was Scarsdale Vibe, as
the latest in a series of American millionaires who had come here with designs
against Venetian art.

“The newspapers like to call it
‘spoils of war,
’ ”
declared
Tancredi, “as if it is only some metaphorical struggle, with large dollar sums
replacing casualty figures
. . .
but
out of everyone’s sight and hearing, the same people carry on a campaign of
extermination against art itself.” Even with Kit’s Italian on the sketchy side,
he recognized this as passion, and not the usual coffeehouse eyewash.

“What’s wrong with Americans spending
money on art?” objected a piratically bearded youth named Mascaregna,
“
macchè,
Tancredi. This town
was built on buying and selling. Every one of those Great Italian Paintings
sooner or later has had a price tag. The grand Mr. Vibe isn’t stealing
anything, he’s paying a price both sides have agreed on.”

“It’s not the price tag,” Tancredi
cried, “it’s what comes after—investment, reselling, killing something
born in the living delirium of paint meeting canvas, turning it into a dead
object, to be traded, on and on, for whatever the market will bear. A market
whose forces are always exerted against creation, in the direction of death.”

“
Cazzo,
let them have
whatever they can take away,” shrugged his friend Pugliese. “Clear some room on
these crumbling old walls for us.”

“The
American’s sins are far greater than art theft, in any case,” Mascaregna said.
“We must not forget the vast unmapped city of unprotected souls he has brought
to the edge of the abyss. Too many even for God to forgive.”

“What Mr. Vibe needs,” said Tancredi,
“is trouble he cannot pray himself out of.”

   
“
La macchina infernale,
”
Dally
ventured.

“
Appunto!
”
Tancredi, known as reluctant to
touch anyone, gave her an appreciative squeeze. Kit, noticing this, swung her a
look. She let her eyes go as wide as possible and twirled an invisible parasol.

The
boy shook hands shyly with Kit and Reef. He did not, this particular afternoon,
seem like one driven to any desperate pass. “This Vibe, eh?”

It
would have been as good an opening as any. The brothers exchanged a look, but
somehow let it pass.

   
Later
they would remember his eyes.

“
How serious
you think this kid is?” Reef wanted to know.

“Lately,” Dally said, “he’s been
talking a lot about Bresci, Luccheni, and some other famous Anarchist gunhands,
enough to make folks nervous anyway.”

“This was supposed to be easy,” Reef
said. “Just plug the son of a bitch and be done with it. Now all ’f a sudden
we’re lookin to hand the job over to somebody else?”

“Who’s to say,” Kit carefully, “we
couldn’t get it done quicker by just standing back, letting the forces of History
roll on over him?”

   
“That
Harvard talk?”

   
“Yale,”
Kit and Dally said together.

   
Reef
blinked at them for a minute.
“ ‘
Who’s
to say’? Well, to begin with . . .”

The Principessa had
finally talked Dally into going to the ball that night, and had also let drop
the interesting piece of news that one of the guests would be Scarsdale Vibe.
Sheltering indoors from an unusually insanityinducing bora, Kit, Reef, and
Dally sat playing poker and discussed this development, drinking grappa, Reef
filling the air with malodorous smoke from his cheap Italian cigars. Everybody
waiting for something, a good hand, a cheerful thought, the carabinieri at the
door, beneath a strange heavy feeling of bad news rolling up the rails.

   
“Ever
seen one of these?”

   
“Whoa,
where’d that come from?”

   
“Torino,
Italy.”

   
“No
I meant—”

“Simple
sleight o’ hand, Venice is a colorful town but there’s too many blind corners.
They call this the Lampo, cute, ain’t it? Repeater, fires a Gaulois 8 mm, this
li’l finger ring here’s your trigger, middle finger fits right in
there”—she demonstrated—“muzzle just peeks out of your fist, push
out and the bolt goes back, squeezin your hand again chambers a round—
bam.
”

   
“Well
hell, you could go right up to him with this.”

   
“Could,
I guess.”

   
“But
you wouldn’t.”

   
“Boys
. . .”

   
“He’s
teasin you,” said Kit.

   
“Guess
I was,” Reef sighed dramatically.

   
“Liven
up the evening anyway,” Dally supposed.

“Hey! Maybe you’ll meet some Italian
prince, fall in love, at least git outside of some good eats.” Reef, laughing
at his brother’s annoyance, started coughing out clouds of cigar smoke.

   
“Strangle
on ’at thing while you’re at it, why don’t you?”

 
“Too bad I never went in for jewelthief activities, Dahlia,
you’d be the perfect accomplice.”

   
“Jeez,
Kit, your brother is so charming.”

   
“He
smells good too,” muttered Kit.

“You go on ahead, Dahlia,” Reef said,
“a party’s a party, never turn one down, raise all the hell you want, anything
useful comes your way just let us know, we’ll be outside doing some
reconnaissance. Somehow there’ll be a way to get him.”

Outside,
citizens were being blown horizontal, hanging on to whatever they could, shoes
flown off their feet sailing away out over the stormy Lagoon. Roof tiles were
picked away one by one, gondolas bounced booming end over end down the Riva,
leaving spalledoff chips of lacquer to eddy behind in tiny black tornadoes, as
overhead, shed feathers counterwhirling in a pale silvery turbulence, tutelary
Venetian angels sought shelter among untended bells, windbeaten, signaling now
hours canonical only to storm, calling celebrants to invisible masses for the
souls of the wrecked and seataken, as below the grounded pigeons and waterbirds
were fleeing the Lagoon shivering into sotopòrteghi, into courtyards within
courtyards, denying sky, pretending citizenship in the labyrinths of earth,
gone glittereyed and shifty as rats in corners. Venetians pulled on rubber
boots and waded through the

high water. Visitors, taken by
surprise, went teetering along elevated duckboards, negotiating rightsofway as
they might. Hastily fashioned signs with painted arrows appeared at corners to
indicate drier routes to take. Water heaved crazily out in the canals, gunmetal
gray, smelling like the sea, some sea somewhere. Piazza San Marco was a great ornamental
basin, belonging to the sea, dark as the sky it was reflecting, a ground for
oblongs of orange light from the windows of the caffès and shops under the
Procuratie, images scattered and rescattered by the wind.

“
Now but what about
that old Dahlia,” said Reef
later, when she’d gone back to Ca’ Spongiatosta, “time comes to get out of town
in a hurry, how you fixin to handle that?”