Against the Day (134 page)

Only thing to
do really was to try and take
Renfrew by surprise. On the way up to Cambridge once again, English country,
green and misty, booming past, brick courses inside the little tunnels spinning
by in helical purity, the smell of fens, the distant reach of watersky
reflecting the German Sea, for the first time in a good while Lew felt the
desolate stomachspasms of exile, and found himself longing for Chicago, and an
early evening in autumn, with or without an appointment to be kept later in the
evening, just about to walk into Kinsley’s at suppertime, where there’d be a
steak waiting with his name on it.

And
then he was running back over the years since Troth had left him, and wondering
how much had really happened to him and how much to some other version of Lew
Basnight, bilocated off somewhere he could gain no clear sense of. He drifted
into one of those minuteandahalflong midafternoon dozes, whose subject seemed
to be the little vestpocket .25caliber FN Browning he was packing, nice unit,
strictly for selfdefense, not the kind of piece you’d go out gunning for
anybody with
. . . .
He woke as a
voice, maybe his own, whispered, “Not to mention a good suicide weapon . . .”

Whoa
there now, Detective Basnight. It was routine to have these, what were known in
the business as Grumpy Thoughts now and then, and he guessed he’d known
socially or worked alongside of more than enough Pinks and finks who’d ended up
clocking out before shift’s end, and who’s to say how far Lew might have taken
his own contrition at working as long as he had on the wrong side, for the
wrong people—though at least he had tumbled early, almost from the start,
to how little he really wanted the rewards his colleagues were in it for, the
motorcars, lakefront galas, introductions to desir

able women or useful statesmen, in an era where “detective”
was universally understood code for antiUnion thug
. . .
somewhere else was the bilocational version of himself,
the other, Sherlock Holmes type of sleuth, fighting criminal masterminds hardly
distinct from the sorts of tycoons who hired “detectives” to rat on Union
activities.

Could
be all those Catholics he’d run into in this line of work, Irish and Polish in
Chicago, Mexicans in Colorado and so forth, had it right all along, and there
was nothing in the day’s echoing cycle but penance, even if you’d never
committed a sin, to live in the world was to do penance—actually, as his
teacher Drave had pointed out back during that winter in Chicago, another
argument for reincarnation— “Being unable to remember sins from a
previous life won’t excuse you from doing penance in this one. To believe in
the reality of penance is almost to have proof of rebirth.”

He found Renfrew
in a hectic mood, as close to
desperation as Lew could recall. The Professor’s shoes did not match, he seemed
to be drinking cold tea out of a flower vase, and his hair was at least as
neglected as Werfner’s the other night. Lew thought about passing a few pointed
Jack the Ripper remarks, just to get the fellow going, but reckoned that
Renfrew by now either knew Lew was onto the real story or he was more likely
past caring, and in any case it would be a distraction from the business at
hand, which Lew had yet to get any inkling of. Renfrew had meantime pulled down
a gigantic tenmilestotheinch wall map of the Balkans, in several rarely
encountered colors which just failed to be rose, amethyst, orpiment, and
cerulean.

“Best
procedure when considering the Balkans,” instructed Renfrew, “is not to look at
components singly—one begins to run about the room screaming after a
while—but all together, everything in a single timeless snapshot, the way
master chess players are said to regard the board.

“The
railroads seem to be the key. If one keeps looking at the map while walking
slowly backward across the room, at a certain precise distance the structural
principle leaps into visibility—how the different lines connect, how they
do not, where varying interests may want them to connect, all of this defining
patterns of flow, not only actual but also invisible, potential, and such rates
of change as how quickly one’s relevant masses can be moved to a given frontier
. . .
and beyond that the teleology at
work, as the rail system grows toward a certain shape, a destiny— My God
I’m starting to sound

like Werfner.

   
“Poor
fellow. This time he has taken a long walk down Queer Street I fear,

far beyond the last stop of any known rail line which can
bring him back. He has been working on his own longrange solution to the
Macedonian Question, kept secret among the secrets of the Wilhelmstraße but
brought only recently to my attention. His plan,” one hand poised as if holding
an invisible fescue, “is—insanely—to install all across the
Peninsula, from a little east of Sofia, here, roughly along the Balkan Range
and the Sredna Gora, coincident with the upper border of the former Eastern
Roumelia, and continuing on, at last to the Black Sea—
das Interdikt,
as
he calls it, two hundred miles long, invisible, waiting for certain
unconsidered footfalls and, once triggered, irreversible—pitiless
. . . .
” He fell silent, as if some agency
had been attending and as silently instructed him to go no further.

“And this
Interdikt
concern
again, what was it, exactly?” Lew had the sudden certitude that right now in
Göttingen some bilocational Lew was asking Werfner the same question, whose
answer neither of him wanted to hear but were helpless not to ask. And that in
both places both Lew Basnights would be getting the same offended narrow stare.

His recent lack of sleep evident,
Renfrew sighed pointedly. “It’s long been under study at Charlottenburg, I can
assure you of that.”

“Thanks, Professor, that clears it
up. Well! If there’s nothing more, I guess I’ll go find a pub and do some deep
analysis on this. Care to join me?”

“It’s to do with our Gentleman
Bomber,” blurted Renfrew, “oh, the Gentleman B. is indeed very much in this
now, which makes his immediate detection and apprehension that much more
necessary you see.”

   
Lew,
who didn’t see, paused at the door, one eyebrow up encouragingly.

“He has been reported in the
Cambridge vicinity,” said Renfrew, almost importunate. “On the lurk round
Fenner’s, as if he were reconnoitering.”

   
“And
when’s the next cricket match there?”

   
“Tomorrow,
with I.Z.”

“All right, say he’s fixing to toss
one of those suffocation specials of his— what’s that got to do with this
Interdikt
scheme of your”—he might have
hesitated—“colleague, Dr. Werfner?”

No reply, only weaving now a bit
insomniac facing his multicolored map, having moved so close to it that his
nose was only an inch—ten miles—above the terrain.

   
“Poison
gas? Werfner plans to use it somehow as part of this
Interdikt?
”

   
“I’m
not at liberty, actually.” Whispering.

“But the Gentleman Bomber might be
more forthcoming, if somebody could just detain him long enough to ask, is that
it? Well. I’ll see if I can’t round up some more crew for tomorrow, and maybe
we’ll just get lucky with this galoot.”

Lew went over to Fenner’s cricket
ground, through the owllight, some rain threatening, just to have a look. There
was always the possibility, frankly attractive, that Renfrew had gone off his
head at last, owing to the stress of international events. It would certainly
make Lew’s life easier. But wait now— who was this, standing on the
cinder path, in the corruption of lateafternoon light, the world all at once
evacuated, as if in response to a civic warning everyone but Lew had heard?

He watched the figure’s hands and
feet, waiting for the appearance, in the everthickening gloom, of a sphere of a
certain size. He unbuttoned his suit jacket, and the weight of the little
Browning swung itself easily within his reach. The figure might have noted
this, for he began to move away. “Say, haven’t we met?” called Lew in the most
American tones he could locate given the cloudiness and uncertainty of the
hour. The reply was a laugh, unexpectedly blithe, and an acceleration off into
the evening and the approaching rain. By the time a light drizzle had begun,
the stranger had vanished, making no appearance next day, at the match, which I
Zingari, beginning on a rather damp pitch, eventually won by eight wickets.

Back in London
, Lew went out again to Cheapside to
consult Dr. Coombs De Bottle, who seemed a bit more tattered and fretful than
last time.

“You’re the tenth, or perhaps
hundredth, person to ask me about carbonyl chloride this week. Somewhere in
that order of magnitude. The last time the hierarchy all got this curious, it
was just after the Jameson Raid. Now they’re driving us mental again. Whatever
do you imagine could be afoot?”

“Hoping you could tell me. Just got a
fast look at our old pal the Gentleman Bomber, up at Cambridge, but it was too
dark to get in a shot at him. What you folks call bad light.”

“The Metropolitans have fallen
curiously silent about him. I’d rather hoped he’d left the country, like Jack
the Ripper or something.”

“This phosgene story I
heard—it’s a different modus, more like a triplever concern that just
sits there till a target comes along, and all on a much bigger scale than a
single bombthrower.”

“Sounds like a combination of gas
projector and land mine,” in a tone of mild astonishment, as if this were an
altogether new one on him.

   
“About
all I can tell you. Kind of sketchy, I guess.”

“Phosgene vaporizes at fortysix
degrees Fahrenheit, so it would have to be stored in pressure tanks of some
sort. The triplever would then, through suitable linkage, simply open a valve.
The pressure in the tank could be higher or lower depending on how forcefully
one wished to project the gas.

The theory as I understand it is to direct the agent along a
line, say against a line of troops advancing. One reckons in weight deployed
per unit length of line, say pounds per yard, per hour.”

   
“Try
tons per mile.”

   
“Good
God. How extensive is this?”

“War Office boys must already know
all about it, but the figure I have is two hundred miles. You could talk to
them.”

The Cohen was
inclined
to a
philosophic view. “Suppose the Gentleman B. is not a simple terrorist but an
angel, in the early sense of ‘messenger,’ and in the fateful cloud he brings,
despite the insupportable smell, the corrosive suffocation, lies a message?”
According to Coombs De Bottle, some did survive the attacks. Even in fatal
cases there could be a delay of up to fortyeight hours. Successful treatment
was known to require four or five hours of absolute rest. “So phosgene is not a
guarantee of certain death,” said the Cohen. “And perhaps victims are not meant
after all to die, perhaps the Messenger’s intention is actually benevolent, a
way of enforcing stillness, survival depending as it does upon a state of
quiescence in which his message could be contemplated, possibly, later, acted
upon
. . .
?”

Then one morning
Lew stumbled down to the breakfast
salon to find that everyone had left town. If this had been Colorado, it might
have suggested an imminent visit by a sizable party, heeled no doubt and in the
mood for triggerplay—in which case leaving town would’ve been no more
than a prudent step. But no one in particular showed up at Chunxton Crescent.
Lew waited, but somehow the place only went along, breathing silently, the
corridors empty, the wall surfaces inside and out sending back echoes that
arrived at each ear a tiny fraction of a second apart, producing an illusion of
spiritpresences repeating the words of the living. Acolytes and servants crept
about as always, without much to say. Cohen Nookshaft and Madame Eskimoff had
vanished, Neville and Nigel as well, no one seemed to be in charge. Deliveries
of coal, ice, milk, bread, butter, eggs, and cheese continued to arrive.

It
rained. The rain ran down the statuary in the garden. Dripped off the noses of
satyrs and nymphs. Lew contemplated a photograph of Yashmeen, in the gray light
through the garden windows. He’d had a postal from her a week ago, bearing
regular Swiss stamps as well as the bright red private hotel stamp of the
Sanatorium BöpfliSpazzoletta, saying she was off to BudaPesth, no reason given.
An impersonation of carefree youth out touring the Continent, it seemed to Lew.
Except that the same red stamps were showing everywhere among the daily post at
Chunxton Crescent like drops of blood in the snow. Postal cards, envelopes of different
sizes, not likely all sent by Yashmeen. Was that where everybody had gone,
Switzerland? Without telling Lew, of course. Hired gunhand and so forth, no
need, was there.