V. (28 page)

He descended into the kitchen. Horrible screeching noises were coming from inside. Naturally leery of anything deviating from his private norm, Ferrante dropped quietly to hands and knees, crawled cautiously up behind the stove and peered around it. It was the old woman, playing some sort of air on a viola da gamba. She did not play very well. When she saw Ferrante she put the bow down and glared at him.

"A thousand pardons, signora," Ferrante said, getting to his feet. "I did not mean to interrupt the music. I was wondering if I might borrow a skillet and some oil. My supper. Which will take no more than a few minutes." He waved the squid at her placatingly.

"Ferrante," she croaked abruptly, "this is no time for subtlety. Much is at stake."

Ferrante was taken aback. Had she been snooping? Or merely in her son's confidence? "I do not understand," he replied cautiously.

"That is nonsense," she retorted. "The English know something you did not. It all began with this silly Venezuelan business, but by accident, unaware, your colleagues have stumbled on something so vast and terrifying that they are afraid even to speak its name aloud."

"Perhaps."

"Is it not true, then, that the young Gadrulfi has testified to Herr Stencil that his father believes there to be agents of Vheissu present in this city?"

"Gadrulfi is a florist," said Ferrante impassively, "whom we have under surveillance. He is associated with partners of the Gaucho, an agitator against the legally constituted government of Venezuela. We have followed them to this florist's establishment. You have got your facts confused."

"More likely you and your fellow spies have got your names confused. I suppose you are maintaining as well this ridiculous fiction that Vheissu is a code name for Venezuela."

"That is the way it appears in our files."

"You are clever, Ferrante. You trust no one."

He shrugged. "Can I afford to?"

"I suppose not. Not when a barbaric and unknown race, employed by God knows whom, are even now blasting the Antarctic ice with dynamite, preparing to enter a subterranean network of natural tunnels, a network whose existence is known only to the inhabitants of Vheissu, the Royal Geographic Society in London, Herr Godolphin, and the spies of Florence."

Ferrante stood suddenly breathless. She was paraphrasing the secret memorandum Stencil had sent back to London not an hour ago.

"Having explored the volcanoes of their own region," she went on, "certain natives of the Vheissu district were the first to become aware of these tunnels, which lace the earth's interior at depths varying -"

"Aspetti!" Ferrante cried. "You are raving."

"Tell the truth," she said sharply. "Tell me what Vheissu is really the code name for. Tell me, you idiot, what I already know: that it stands for Vesuvius." She cackled horribly.

He was breathing with difficulty. She had guessed or spied it out or been told. She was probably safe. But how could he say: I detest politics, no matter if they are international or only within a single department. And the politics which have led to this worked the same way and are equally as detestable. Everyone had assumed that the code word referred to Venezuela, a routine matter, until the English in formed them that Vheissu actually existed. There was testimony from young Gadrulfi, corroborating data already obtained from the Geographic Society and the Board of Inquiry fifteen years ago, about the volcanoes. And from then on fact had been added to meager fact and the censorship of that single telegram had avalanched into a harrowing afternoon-long session of give-and-take, of logrolling, bullying, factions and secret votes until Ferrante and his chief had to face the sickening truth of the matter: that they must league with the English in view of a highly probable common peril. That they could hardly afford not to.

"It could stand for Venus, for all I know," he said. "Please, I cannot discuss the matter." The old woman laughed again and began to saw away once more on her viola da gamba. She watched Ferrante contemptuously as he took down a skillet from a hook in the wall above the stove, poured olive oil into it and poked the embers into flame. When the oil began to sizzle, he placed his squid carefully in it, like an offering. He suddenly found himself sweating, though the stove gave off no great heat. Ancient music whined in the room, echoed off its walls. Ferrante let himself wonder, for no good reason, if it had been composed by Palestrina.

IX

Adjoining the prison which Evan had recently vacated, and not far from the British Consulate, are two narrow streets, Via del Purgatorio and Via dell'Inferno, which intersect in a T whose long side parallels the Arno. Victoria stood in this intersection, the night gloomy about her, a tiny erect figure in white dimity. She was trembling as if she waited for some lover. They had been considerate at the consulate; more than that, she had seen the dull pounding of some knowledge heavy behind their eyes, and known all at once that old Godolphin had indeed been wrung by a "terrible need," and that her intuition had once more been correct. Her pride in this faculty was an athlete's pride in his strength or skill; it had once told her, for example, that Goodfellow was a spy and not a casual tourist; more, had revealed to her all at once a latent talent of her own for espionage. Her decision to help Godolphin came not out of any romantic illusion about spying-in that business she saw mostly ugliness, little glamour-but rather because she felt that skill or any virtu was a desirable and lovely thing purely for its own sake; and it became more effective the further divorced it was from moral intention. Though she would have denied it, she was one with Ferrante, with the Gaucho, with Signor Mantissa; like them she would act, when occasion arose, on the strength of a unique and private gloss on The Prince. She overrated virtu, individual agency, in much the same way Signor Mantissa overrated the fox. Perhaps one day one of them might ask: what was the tag-end of an age if not that sort of imbalance, that tilt toward the more devious, the less forceful?

She wondered, standing stone-still at the crossroads, whether the old man had trusted her, had waited after all. She prayed that he had, less perhaps from concern for him than from some obvoluted breed of self-aggrandizement which read the conforming of events to the channels she'd set out for them as glorious testimony to her own skill. One thing she had avoided - probably because of the supernatural tinge men acquired in her perception - was the schoolgirlish tendency to describe every male over the age of fifty as "sweet," "dear," or "nice." Dormant in every aged man she saw rather his image regressed twenty or thirty years, like a wraith which nearly merged outlines with its counterpart: young, potent, possessing mighty sinews and sensitive hands. So that in Captain Hugh it had been the young version she wished to help and make a part of the vast system of channels, locks and basins she had dug for the rampant river Fortune.

If there were, as some doctors of the mind were beginning to suspect, an ancestral memory, an inherited reservoir of primordial knowledge which shapes certain of our actions and casual desires, then not only her presence here and now between purgatory and hell, but also her entire commitment to Roman Catholicism as needful and plausible stemmed from and depended on an article of the primitive faith which glimmered shiny and supreme in that reservoir like a crucial valve-handle: the notion of the wraith or spiritual double, happening on rare occasions by multiplication but more often by fission, and the natural corollary which says the son is doppelganger to the father. Having once accepted duality Victoria had found it only a single step to Trinity. And having seen the halo of a second and more virile self flickering about old Godolphin, she waited now outside the prison while somewhere to her right a girl sang lonely, telling a tale of hesitation, between a rich man who was old and a young man who was fair.

At length she heard the prison door open, heard his footsteps begin to approach down a narrow alleyway, heard the door slam to again. She dug the point of her parasol into the ground beside one tiny foot and gazed down at it. He was upon her before she realized it, nearly colliding with her. "I say," he exclaimed.

She looked up. His face was indistinct. He peered closer at her. "I saw you this afternoon," he said. "The girl in the tram, isn't it."

She murmured assent. "And you sang Mozart to me." He did not look at all like his father.

"A bit of a lark," Evan bumbled. "Didn't mean to embarrass you."

"You did."

Evan hung his head, sheepish. "But what are you doing out here, at this time of night?" He forced a laugh. "Not waiting for me, surely."

"Yes," she said quietly. "Waiting for you."

"That's terribly flattering. But if I may say so, you aren't the sort of young lady who . . . I mean, are you? I mean, dash it, why should you be waiting for me? Not because you liked my singing voice."

"Because you are his son," she said.

He did not, he realized, have to ask for explanation: wouldn't have to stammer, how did you nt my father, how did you know I was here, that I would've released? It was as if what he'd said to the Gaucho, back in their cell, had been like confession; an acknowledgment of weakness; as if the Gaucho's silence in turn had served as absolution, redeeming the weakness, propelling him suddenly into the trembling planes of a new kind of manhood. He felt that belief in Vheissu gave him no right any more to doubt as arrogantly as he had before, that perhaps wherever he went from now on he would perform like penance a ready acceptance of miracles or visions such as this meeting at the crossroads seemed to him to be. They began to walk. She tucked her hands around his bicep.

From his slight elevation he noted an ornate ivory comb, sunk to the armpits in her hair. Faces, helmets, arms linked: crucified? He blinked closer at the faces. All looked drawn-down by the weight of the bodies beneath: but seemed to grimace more by convention - with an Eastern idea of patience - than with any more explicit or Caucasian pain. What a curious girl it was beside him. He was about to use the comb for a conversational opening when she spoke.

"How strange tonight, this city. As if something trembled below its surface, waiting to burst through."

"Oh I've felt it. I think to myself: we are not, any of us, in the Renaissance at all. Despite the Fra Angelicos, the Titians, Botticellis; Brunelleschi church, ghosts of the Medici. It is another time. Like radium, I expect: they say radium changes, bit by bit, over unimaginable spaces of time, to lead. A glow about old Firenze seems to be missing, seems more a leaden gray."

"Perhaps the only radiance left is in Vheissu."

He looked down at her. "How odd you are," he said. "I almost feel you know more than I about the place."

She pursed her lips. "Do you know how I felt when I spoke with him? As if he'd told me the same stories he told you when you were a bay, and I had forgotten them, but needed only to see him, hear his voice, for all the memories to come rushing back undecayed."

He smiled. "That would make us brother and sister."

She didn't answer. They turned into Via Porta Rossa. Tourists were thick in the streets. Three rambling musicians, guitar, violin and kazoo, stood on a corner, playing sentimental airs.

"Perhaps we are in limbo," he said. "Or like the place we met: some still point between hell and purgatory. Strange there's no Via del Paradiso anywhere in Florence."

"Perhaps nowhere in the world."

For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence. For them the music was sweet and painful, the strolling chains of tourists like a Dance of Death. They stood on the curb, gazing at one another, jostled against by hawkers and sightseers, lost as much perhaps in that bond of youth as in the depths of the eyes each contemplated.

He broke it first. "You haven't told me your name."

She told him.

"Victoria," he said. She felt a kind of triumph. It was the way he'd said it.

He patted her hand. "Come," he said feeling protective, almost fatherly. "I am to meet him, at Scheissvogel's."

"Of course," she said. They turned left, away from the Arno, toward Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele.

The Figli di Machiavelli had taken over for their garrison an abandoned tobacco warehouse off Via Cavour. It was deserted at the moment except for an aristocratic-looking man named Borracho, who was performing his nightly duty of checking the rifles. There was a sudden pounding at the door. "Digame," yelled Borracho.

"The lion and the fox," came the answer Borracho unlatched the door and was nearly bowled over by a thick-set mestizo called Tito, who earned his living selling obscene photographs to the Fourth Army Corps. He appeared highly excited.

"They're marching," he began to babble, "tonight, half a battalion, they have rifles, and fixed bayonets -"

"What in God's name is this," Borracho growled, "has Italy declared war? Que pasa?"

"The Consulate. The Consulate of Venezuela. They are to guard it. They expect us. Someone has betrayed the Figli di Machiavelli."

"Calm down," Borracho said. "Perhaps the moment which the Gaucho promised us has arrived at last. We must expect him, then. Quickly. Alert the others. Put them on standby. Send a messenger into town to find Cuernacabron. He will likely be at the beer garden."

Tito saluted, wheeled, ran to the door on the double, unlocked it. A thought occurred to him. "Perhaps," he said, "perhaps the Gaucho himself is the traitor." He opened the door. The Gaucho stood there, glowering. Tito gaped. Without a word the Gaucho brought his closed fist down on the mestizo's head. Tito toppled and crashed to the floor.

"Idiot," the Gaucho said. "What's happened? Is everyone insane?"