V. (27 page)

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near-obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-shoe Sidney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line.

But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it. The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it. Brought up by a pair of bleak Nonconformist aunts, he had acquired the Anglo-Saxon tendency to group northern/Protestant/intellectual against Mediterranean/Roman Catholic/irrational. He had thus arrived in Florence with a deep-rooted and chiefly subliminal ill will toward all things Italian, and the subsequent conduct of his running mates from the secret police confirmed it. What sort of Situation could one expect from such a scurvy and heterogeneous crew?

The matter of this English lad, for example: Godolphin, alias Gadrulfi. The Italians claimed they had been unable after an hour of interrogation to extract anything about his father, the naval officer. Yet the first thing the boy had done when they'd finally brought him round to the British Consulate was to ask for Stencil's help in locating old Godolphin. He had been quite ready to answer all inquiries about Vheissu (although he'd done little more than recapitulate information already in F.O.'s possession); he had gratuitously made mention of the rendezvous at Scheissvogel's at ten tonight; in general he'd exhibited the honest concern and bewilderment of any English tourist confronted with a happening outside the ken of his Baedeker or the power of Cook's to deal with it. And this simply did not fit in with the picture Stencil had formed of father and son as cunning arch-professionals. Their employers, whoever they might be (Scheissvogel's was a German beer hall, which might be significant, especially so with Italy a member of the Dreibund), could not tolerate such simplicity. This show was too big, too serious, to be carried out by any but the top men in the field.

The Department had been keeping a dossier on old Godolphin since '84, when the surveying expedition had been all but wiped out. The name Vheissu occurred in it only once, in a secret F.O. memorandum to the Secretary of State for War, a memo condensed from Godolphin's personal testimony. But a week ago the Italian Embassy in London sent round a copy of a telegram which the censor at Florence, after informing the state police, had let go through. The Embassy had included no explanation except for a scribbled note on the copy: "This may be of interest to you. Cooperation to our mutual advantage." It was initialed by the Italian Ambassador. On seeing Vheissu a live file again, Stencil's chief had alerted operatives in Deauville and Florence to keep a close eye on father and son. Inquiries began to be made around the Geographical Society. Since the original had been somehow lost, junior researchers started piecing together the text of Godolphin's testimony at the time of the incident by interviewing all available members of the original Board of Inquiry. The chief had been puzzled that no code was used in the telegram; but it had only strengthened Stencil's conviction that the Department was up against a pair of veterans. Such arrogance, he felt, such cocksureness was exasperating and one hated them for it, but at the same time one was overcome with admiration. Not bothering to use a code was the devil-may-care gesture of the true sportsman.

The door opened hesitantly. "I say, Mr. Stencil."

"Yes, Moffit. Do what I told you?"

"They're together. Mine not to reason why, you know."

"Bravo. Give them an hour or so together. After that we let young Gadrulfi out. Tell him we have nothing really to hold him on, sorry for the inconvenience, pip-pip, a rivederci. You know."

"And then follow him, eh. Game is afoot, ha, ha."

"Oh, he'll go to Scheissvogel's. We've advised him to keep the rendezvous, and whether he's straight or not he'll meet the old man. At least if he's playing his game the way we think he is."

"And the Gaucho?"

"Give him another hour. Then if he wants to escape, let him."

"Chancy, Mr. Stencil."

"Enough, Moffit. Back in the chorus line."

"Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," said Moffit, soft-shoeing out the door. Stencil heaved a sigh, leaned forward in the chair and recommenced his dart game. Soon a second hit, two inches from the first, had transfigured the Minister into a lopsided goat. Stencil gritted his teeth. "Pluck, lad," he muttered. "Before the girl arrives the old bastard should look like a blooming hedgehog."

Two cells away there was a loud morra game in progress. Outside the window, somewhere, a girl sang about her love, killed defending his homeland in a faraway war.

"She's singing for the tourists," the Gaucho complained bitterly, "she must be. No one ever sings in Florence. No one ever used to. Except now and again the Venezuelan friends I told you about. But they sing marching songs, which are useful for morale."

Evan stood by the cell door, leaning his forehead against the bars. "You may no longer have any Venezuelan friends," he said. "They've probably all been rounded up and pushed into the sea."

The Gaucho came over and gripped Evan's shoulder sympathetically. "You are still young," he said "I know how it must have been. That's the way they work. They attack a man's spirit. You will see your father again. I will see my friends. Tonight. We're going to stage the most wonderful festa this city has seen since Savonarola was burned."

Evan looked around hopelessly at the small cell, the heavy bars. "They told me I might be released soon. But you stand a fat chance of doing anything tonight. Except lose sleep."

The Gaucho laughed. "I think they will release me too. I told them nothing. I'm used to their ways. They are stupid, and easily gotten round."

Evan clenched the bars furiously. "Stupid! Not only stupid. Deranged. Illiterate. Some bungling clerk misspelled my name Gadrulfi, and they refused to call me anything else. It was an alias, they said. Did it not say Gadrulfi in my dossier? Was it not down in black and white?"

"Ideas are so novel to them. Once they get hold of one, having the vague idea it is somehow precious, they wish to keep possession of it."

"If that were all. But someone in the higher echelons had got the idea Vheissu was a code name for Venezuela. Either that or it was the same bloody clerk, or his brother, who never learned to spell."

"They asked me about Vheissu," the Gaucho mused. "What could I say? This time I really knew nothing. The English consider it important."

"But they don't tell you why. All they give you are mysterious hints. The Germans are apparently in on it. The Antarctic is concerned in some way. Perhaps in a matter of weeks, they say, the whole world will be plunged into apocalypse. And they think I am in on it. And you. Why else, if they are going to release us anyway, did they throw us into the same cell? We'll be followed wherever we go. Here we are, in the thick of a grand cabal, and we haven't the slightest notion of what's going on."

"I hope you didn't believe them. Diplomatic people always talk that way. They are living always on the verge of some precipice or other. Without a crisis they wouldn't be able to sleep nights."

Evan turned slowly to face his companion. "But I do believe them," he said calmly. "Let me tell you. About my father. He would sit in my room, before I went to sleep, and spin yarns about this Vheissu. About the spider-monkeys, and the time he saw a human sacrifice, and the rivers whose fish are sometimes opalescent and sometimes the color of fire. They circle round you when you go in to bathe and dance a kind of elaborate ritual all about, to protect you from evil. And there are volcanoes with cities inside them which once every hundred years erupt into flaming hell but people go to live in them anyway. And men in the hills with blue faces and women in the valleys who give birth to nothing but sets of triplets, and beggars who belong to guilds and hold jolly festivals and entertainments all summer long.

"You know haw a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he'd had for some time that his father is not a god, not even an oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such faith. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairy tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father.

"I thought Captain Hugh was mad; I would have signed the commitment papers myself. But at Piazza della Signoria 5 I was nearly killed in something that could not have been an accident, a caprice of the inanimate world; and from then till now I have seen two governments hagridden to alienation over this fairy tale or obsession I thought was my father's own. As if this condition of being just human, which had made Vheissu and my boy's love for him a lie, were now vindicating them both for me, showing them to have been truth all along and after all. Because the Italians and the English in those consulates and even that illiterate clerk are all men. Their anxiety is the same as my father's, what is coming to be my own, and perhaps in a few weeks what will be the anxiety of everyone living in a world none of us wants to see lit into holocaust. Call it a kind of communion, surviving somehow on a mucked-up planet which God knows none of us like very much. But it is our planet and we live on it anyway."

The Gaucho did not answer. He walked to the window, stood gazing out. The girl was singing now about a sailor, halfway round the world from home and his betrothed. From down the corridor floated cries: "Cinque, tre, otto, brrrr!" Soon the Gaucho put his hands to his neck, removed his collar. He came back to Evan.

"If they let you out," he said, "in time to see your father, there is also at Scheissvogel's a friend of mine. His name is Cuernacabron. Everyone knows him there. I would esteem it a favor if you would take him this, a message." Evan took the collar and pocketed it absently. A thought occurred to him.

"But they will see your collar missing."

The Gaucho grinned, stripped off his shirt and tossed it under a bunk. "It is warm, I will tell them. Thank you for reminding me. It's not easy for me to think like a fox."

"How do you propose to get out?"

"Simply. When the turnkey comes to let you out, we beat him unconscious, take his keys, fight our way to freedom."

"If both of us get away, should I still take the message?"

"Si. I must first go to Via Cavour. I will be at Scheissvogel's later, to see some associates on another matter. Un gran colpo, if things work right."

Soon footsteps, jangling keys approached down the corridor. "He reads our minds," the Gaucho chuckled. Evan turned to him quickly, clasped his hand.

"Good luck."

"Put down your bludgeon, Gaucho," the turnkey called in a cheerful voice. "You are to be released, both of you."

"Ah, che fortuna," said the Gaucho mournfully. He went back to the window. It seemed that the girl's voice could be heard all over April. The Gaucho stood on tiptoe. "Un' gazz'!" he screamed.

VIII

Around Italian spy circles the latest joke was about an Englishman who cuckolded his Italian friend. The husband came home one night to find the faithless pair in flagrante delicto on the bed. Enraged, he pulled out a pistol and was about to take revenge when the Englishman held up a restraining hand. "I say old chap," he said loftily, "we're not going to have any dissension in the ranks, are we? Think what this might do to the Quadruple Alliance."

The author of this parable was one Ferrante, a drinker of absinthe and destroyer of virginity. He was trying to grow a beard. He hated politics. Like a few thousand other young men in Florence he fancied himself a neo-Machiavellian. He took the long view, having only two articles of faith: (a) the Foreign Service in Italy was irreparably corrupt and nitwit, and (b) someone should assassinate Umberto I. Ferrante had been assigned to the Venezuelan problem for half a year and was beginning to see no way out of it except suicide.

That evening he was wandering around secret police headquarters with a small squid in one hand, looking for someplace to cook it. He'd just bought it at the market, it was for supper. The hub of spy activities in Florence was the second floor of a factory which made musical instruments for devotees of the Renaissance and Middle Ages. It was run nominally by an Austrian named Vogt, who worked painstakingly during the daylight hours putting together rebecs, shawms and theorbos, and spied at night. In the legal or everyday segment of his life he employed as helpers a Negro named Gascoigne who would bring in his friends from time to time to test out the instruments, and Vogt's mother, an incredibly aged butterball of a woman who was under the curious illusion that she'd had an affair with Palestrina in her girlhood. She would be constantly haranguing visitors with fond reminiscences about "Giovannino," these being mostly colorful allegations of sexual eccentricity in the composer. If these two were in on Vogt's espionage activities, no one was aware of it, not even Ferrante, who made it his business to spy on his colleagues as well as any more appropriate quarry. Vogt, however, being Austrian, could probably be given credit for discretion. Ferrante had no faith in covenants, he regarded them as temporary and more often than not farcical. But he reasoned that as long as you'd made an alliance in the first place you might as well comply with its rules as long as was expedient. Since 1882, then, Germans and Austrians had been temporarily acceptable. But English most assuredly not. Which had given rise to his joke about the cuckolded husband. He saw no reason for cooperating with London on this matter. It was a plot, he suspected, on Britain's part, to force a wedge into the Triple Alliance, to divide the enemies of England so that England could deal with them separately and at her leisure.