Against the Day (170 page)

In
addition, through 1906 and ’07, not yet accountedfor amounts of time and money
had been spent, not to mention discomfort inflicted, up to and including
anonymous death in unfrequented corners of the cities of Europe, to see that no
AngloRussian understanding ever came about. It having been of the essence to
Germany that England and Russia be enemies forever, the operatives most active
in this must have been German or their creatures the Austrians, without doubt
including Theign’s handpicked praetorians. But with the Entente in force,
Theign must have been waiting, with his usual predator’s gift of patience, for
reassignment. It would probably be best to move quickly.

As
Cyprian’s field skills, held to the whetstone of European crisis, had
sharpened, so Theign’s, from overindulgence in various luxuries, including
Viennese cuisine, had deteriorated. Cyprian would never become a Venetian, but
he had learned a useful thing or two, among these that whatever rumors were
worth in other towns, here in Venice they could be trusted as scientific fact.
He went out to Castello, and sat at caffès and
bàcari
and waited, and
presently there was Theign, accompanied by his brace of pluguglies. Cyprian
recited the appropriate formulae and became invisible. Before long,

in the intricate though mismatched
dance which then began, he had learned every minute of Theign’s daily
timetable, and managed to hover unobserved within mischiefmaking distance,
hiring pickpockets to make off with notecases, arranging at the fishmarket for
Theign to be assaulted with a dubious haddock, taking to the rooftops of Venice
himself to launch the odd furtive tile at Theign’s head.

One
night he happened to shadow Theign to a palazzo in San Marco, near the Rio di
San Zulian. It was the AustroHungarian consulate, for pity’s sake. How much
more blatant did the man imagine he could be? Cyprian decided to materialize.

He
had the Webley ready, calibrating exquisitely his placement half in, half out
of the fog. Theign, secure in some cloak of exemption, did not appear to be
surprised. “Well, it’s Latewood. We thought you were dead.”

   
“So I
am, Theign, I’m haunting you.”

“Reports
to the Belvedere on your mission have been simply glowing, the Crown Prince
himself—”

   
“Spare
us both, Theign, and make your arrangements.”

Theign
lurched defensively, but Cyprian had vanished. “You do move quickly for a lazy
sod!” Theign cried into the empty courtyard. Once Cyprian might have felt some
remorseful twinge at this appeal to their past.

As the crisis
approached
, he found
himself less able to tolerate the everyday. He wasn’t sleeping. When he drank
to get to sleep, he found himself awake again after less than a fitful hour of
dreams in which Yashmeen betrayed him, again and again, to some apparatus
known, for the purposes of dream, as “Austria.” But even in the dream he knew
it could not be that. He woke imagining that the true name had been revealed,
but that the shock of waking had dislodged it from his mind.

“It will be tonight, then
, if all goes well,” the Prince said,
with a smile whose bleakness had more to do with inconvenience than regret. He
and Cyprian had arranged to meet, furtive as an assignation, in the late
afternoon at Giacomuzzi. “You have every right to be present.”

   
“I
know. But with the Ottician brothers in town, it is best now to step out of the
way and allow them their repayment.”

   
The
Prince peered back doubtfully. “There was more you wished?”

   
“Only
to thank you for your efforts in this matter,
Altezza.
”

   
 
The Prince had always possessed the princely gift of knowing
when and

how to conceal his contempt. This was necessary in the world
not only because truly murderous people could be overly sensitive to insult,
but also, incredible as he would once have imagined it, he himself was wrong
now and then. A man who does not know how much to ask for is of course
contemptible—but sometimes, not often, he will simply want nothing for
himself, and that, must be respected, if only for its rarity.

   
“You will
come out to the island next week for our annual ball?”

   
“I’ve
nothing to wear.”

He smiled, allowing Cyprian to think
it was nostalgia. “The Principessa will find something for you.”

   
“She
has exquisite judgment.”

The Prince squinted at the sky
through his glass of Montepulciano. “In some things, most likely.”

The moment he
emerged
from the station
and set foot on the Ponte degli Scalzi, Theign understood that he ought to have
remained in Vienna. Protected, if not safe. At the moment his praetorians were
all elsewhere, on assignment at various borders of his domain, but if necessary
Vienna itself would have enfolded and defended him. He tried to imagine that he
had not come to Venice, perhaps for the last time, in any way because of
Cyprian Latewood. Those fires certainly had been banked for ages. He was
unwilling, however, to let the pale little sod have the last move in this.
Latewood had been merely, inexcusably lucky, but had not been at the game long
enough to deserve his luck.

At first Theign was more annoyed than
alarmed at the absence of Vincenzo and Pasquale. It had always been their
custom to meet him at the platform, and this time he had given them ample
notice. As he ascended the bridge, he likewise rose into the cold light of a
suspicion that he might have sent them word too soon, allowing the message to
be intercepted and unwelcome forces to mobilize.

“Signor Theign, I believe you have
forgotten something back on the
terraferma.
”

Unknowns, standing at the peak of the
bridge. Night was falling. He could not make out either of their faces clearly
enough.

They brought him to an abandoned
factory at the edge of Mestre. Associates surrounded the place, keeping to the
shadows. “Ghosts,” Vastroslav said. “Industrial ghosts. Your world refuses
them, so they haunt it, they walk, they chant, when needed they wake it from
its slumbers.”

Rusted pulleys and driveshafts with
broken leather belts drooping from them ran everywhere overhead. The floor was
stained black from campfires

built by transient visitors. On a
metal shelf were various instruments, including a gimlet, a butcher’s saw, and
Zlatko’s 11 mm Montenegrin Gasser, should a quick end become necessary.

“To
save everyone trouble,” Vastroslav said, “there is nothing you can tell us.
Nothing you can pay us. You have stepped into a long history of blood and
penance, and the coin of these transactions is struck not from metal but from
Time.”

   
“Do
let’s get on with it then, shall we?” said Theign.

They
took his right eye with a woodworker’s gouge. They showed him the eye before
tossing it to the rats who waited in the shadows.

“One
eye was missing from Vlado’s corpse,” Zlatko said. “We shall take both of
yours.”

“Two
eyes for an eye,” Zlatko smiling grimly, “this is Uskok practice—for we
are savages, you see, or in a moment,” approaching with the gouge, “you
don’t
see.”

“Whenever
you people torture, you try merely to cripple,” Vastroslav said. “To leave some
mark of imbalance. We prefer a symmetry of insult—to confer a state of
grace. To mark the soul.”

Soon
the pain had driven Theign past words into articulated screaming, as if toward
some rhapsodic formula that might deliver him. Zlatko stood by the shelf of
tools, impatient with his brother’s philosophical approach. He would have used
the pistol straight off, and spent the rest of the evening in a bar.

One day Cyprian
had a message
from
Yashmeen, which began “I must see you.” The rest of it he wouldn’t remember.
She had been apparently to visit Ratty, who had passed on Cyprian’s
whereabouts.

She
and the American, who today was not in evidence, were staying at a
pensione
near
San Stae. She greeted Cyprian in a pale shirtwaist and skirt that looked simple
but must have cost at least two hundred lire. Her hair bobbed to about shoulder
length. Her eyes fatal as ever.

“So
old Ratty’s back in town. You certainly must have charmed him, either that or
he’s growing careless.”

   
“I
was happy to see him again.”

   
“Been
a while, has it? “

   
“Since
Vlado and I left Trieste, I suppose. I can’t remember.”

   
“No.
Why should you?”

   
“Cyprian—”

   
“And
Vlado looked after you all right, did he.”

   
Her
eyes grew larger and somehow darker. “I owed him my life, more than once.”

“In
that case I suppose I must rescue you sometime as well, and see what happens.”

“He
wanted you to have this.” She was holding out to him some sort of school
copybook, ragged, faded by the elements.
The Book of the Masked.

After
hesitating, Cyprian took it from her. “Did he actually say it was for me? Or do
you only want it off your hands?”

   
“Cyprian,
what am I to do with you? you’re acting like a perfect bitch.”

“Yes.”
Suddenly reluctant to breathe. “It’s
. . .
everything
just lately. Nothing. Haven’t slept.” Nodding at the bed. “Appears you haven’t
either.”

“Ah.”
Her expression changed. “Of course Reef and I have been fucking, we fuck
whenever we can find a moment, we are lovers, Cyprian, in all the ways you were
never permitted. What of it.”

He
was rectally possessed by fear, desire, least resistibly hope. He had seldom
seen her this cruel. “But I would have done—”

   
“I
already know that. “

   
“—anything
you commanded
. . . .
”

“ ‘
Commanded.’ Oh and shall you, then?”
She stepped closer, took his trembling chin between gloved finger and thumb.
“Perhaps then if you behave, someday, some exquisite night, we shall allow you
to admire us from afar. Restrained appropriately, I expect, poor Cyprian. Quite
helpless.”

He
was silent, met her eyes, looked away as if before a danger he could not bear
to see.

She
laughed as if she had just detected, by clairvoyant means, a question. “Yes. He
knows all about you. But he’s not as easy as I am. Much as you might desire
him.” He kept his gaze down and did not speak. “Tell me I am mistaken.” He
risked another quick glance. Her eyes were implacable. She held his head still
with one hand and with the other struck him in the face, surprising them both,
then again, repeatedly, the scent of gloveleather flooding him, a smile slowly
possessing her own face, until he whispered what she wanted to hear.

   
“Hmmn.
You shall not so much as look at him without my permission.”

   
“What
of his own—”

“His
own what? He’s an American. A cowboy. His idea of romance begins and ends with
me on my back. You are a curiosity to him. It may be years before he gets
around to you. It may be never. And meanwhile you shall have to suffer, I
suppose.”

“What
about ‘Welcome back, Cyprian, so lovely to see you alive,’ and so forth?”

   
“That
too I imagine.”

“I
mean I no more than step across the street for a packet of cigarettes and
you’re—” He gestured with his head at the eloquent bedsheets, his eyes
desolate. Desolate enough, he hoped.

“You
went out
there,
”
she
said, “when you didn’t have to. How was I supposed to feel?”

   
“But
we had agreed, I thought—”

   
“Had
we.”

And
then one of those silences fell, and a curious thing had happened to time, for
although they were the same people they had been when he had stepped on board
the S.S.
John of Asia
last year, at the same time they were two entirely
different people who had no business being in the same city together let alone
the same room, and yet whatever it was between them was deeper now, the stakes
were higher, the danger of how much there was to lose terribly,
incontrovertibly clear.

In the scales
of the average working day,
Cyprian’s selfregard, almost uniquely among gentleman ops of the day, had
seldom accounted for much more than a newborn gnat’s eyelash. Colleagues had
been routinely astonished to discover that he avoided the higher social
circles, indeed owned no formal attire. Though more than happy to remark upon
the appearance of others in regard to dress and grooming, Cyprian himself often
went days without shaving or changing his collar or dittoes, on the assumption
that he was all but invisible before the public gaze. At first Derrick Theign,
among other handlers, had assumed it was a pose—
“ ‘
Who, little C.L.?’ Come off it Latewood, even tattered as you
are, you’re not exactly a drug on the market of desire quite yet, princes of
world industry might be sniveling at your shoetops if you’d only do something
about your hair for example.”