Against the Day (135 page)

Four

Against the Day

yprian’s first post was at Trieste,
monitoring the docks and the emigrant traffic to America, with side trips over
to Fiume and newcomer’s rounds at the Whitehead torpedo factory and the
petroleum harbor, as well as down the coast to Zengg, headquarters of the
increasingly energetic New Uskok movement, named after the sixteenthcentury
exile community who at one time had controlled this end of the Adriatic, then
as much a threat to Venice at sea as to the Turks back in the mountains, and
even today a dedicated cadre for whom the threat of Turkish inundation,
immediate and without mercy, remained living and verifiable. Who continued to
wait, all along the Military Frontier, night and day, for the fateful
breach— manning the ancient watchtowers and recording on military maps of
the region every least spark appearing in the terrestrial night, its
compassbearing and magnitude, keeping ready the dry tinder and paraffin for the
alarm beacons, never allowing themselves more than half a minute before
deliverance into light. Obvious implications for the Macedonian Question.
Heaven knew what esoteric bureaux Cyprian’s NeoUskok reports found their way in
among.

Trieste
and Fiume, on either side of the Istrian Peninsula, had both become points of
convergence for those in AustriaHungary seeking to embark for passage west.
Most, in the daily streaming of souls, were legitimate, though enough were
traveling in disguise that Cyprian must loiter all day at dockside, and keep
detailed logs of who was going to America, who was coming back, who was here
for the first time. Out and In—like debits and credits, entered on facing
pages in his operative’s notebook. After a few years of false

uttering in a number of hands,
allowing a lurid carnival of identities to enter

his writing—he had returned to
his schoolboy’s script, to distant Evensongs,

to the wolving of the ancient chapel
organ as the last light is extinguished and the door latched for the long
night.

   
At
sunset he could be found still lingering down by the docks, looking out to sea.
Work did not hold him—sunsets had precedence. The promise of the
evening—a density of possibility here that was decidedly absent in places
like Zengg. Sailors, it went without saying, seacreatures everywhere. A sky of
milkblue flesh descending to vermilion at the sea, the theatrically colored
light thrown back to stain every westfacing surface . . .

Cyprian’s descent
into the secret world had begun only the year before in Vienna, in the course
of another evening of mindless trolling about the Prater. Without thinking, he
had drifted into conversation with a pair of Russians, whom he took, in his
state of innocence at the time, to be tourists.

   
“But
you live here in Vienna, we do not understand, what is it that you do?”

   
“As
little as possible, one hopes.”

   
“He
means, what is your work?” said the other one.

   
“Being
agreeable. And yours?”

   
“At
this moment? Only a small favor to a friend.”

   
“Of
. . .
excuse me, a friend of both of you?
All quite friendly are we?”

“A pity that one must not quarrel
with sodomites. The insolence in his voice, Misha, his face—something
ought to be done about it.”

“By this friend, perhaps,” replied
saucy Cyprian. “Who doesn’t much care for insolence either, I expect.”

   
“On
the contrary, he welcomes it.”

“As something he must patiently put
up with.” Holding his head a little averted, Cyprian kept sneaking glances at
them, up and sidewise, through restless lashes.

The other man laughed. “As an
opportunity to correct a perverse habit he does not approve of.”

“And is he also Russian, like
yourselves? knoutfancier, that sort of thing perhaps?”

Not even a pause. “He much prefers
his companions unmarked. Nonetheless, you might at least think before using
your interesting mouth, while it remains yours to use.”

Cyprian nodded, as if chastened. The
exquisite reflex of rectal fear passing through him then could have been simple
cringing before a threat, or a betrayal of desire he was trying, but failing,
to control.

   
“Another
Capuziner?” offered the other man.

   
The
price they settled on was not so high as to provoke more than ordinary
curiosity, though of course the topic of discretion did arise. “There are wife,
children, public connections—usual impedimenta we imagine you have
learned by now to deal with. Our friend is very clear on this point—his
reputation is of absolute importance to him. Any mention of him to anyone, no
matter how trivial, will get back to him. He commands resources that allow him
to learn everything people say. Everyone. Even you, cuddled down in your frail
nest with some manly visitor you believe really wants to ‘keep’ you, or
bragging to another forlorn butterfly, ‘Oh, he gave me this, he bought me
that’—every living moment, you must
attend to what you say,
for
sooner or later your exact words are recovered, and if they are wrong words,
then, little miss, you will find you must go fluttering for your life.”

“And
don’t imagine ‘home’ as a very safe place to be,” his companion added, “for we
are not without resources in England. Our eye is ever upon you, wherever those
little wings should take you.”

It
had not occurred to Cyprian that this city might, by now, have anything more to
reveal to him beyond the promise of unreflective obedience, day into night, to
the leashpulls of desire. Certainly, outside the Prater, and its role as a
reservoir of Continental good looks, to find Vienna exhibiting behavior even a
little more complex, especially with (it seemed here impossible not to gather)
a political dimension as well, predictably sent his boredom coefficients
swooning off the scale, and any number of alarmdevices into alluring cry.
Perhaps the pair of gobetweens had already detected in him this shallowness of
expectation. He was handed a card with an address printed on it—in
Leopoldstadt, the Jewish quarter north of the Prater, across the railroad
tracks.

   
“So.
A Jewish friend, it seems
. . . .
”

“Perhaps
one day a detailed chat on Hebraic issues could bring you some profit,
financial as well as educational. Meanwhile let us proceed in orderly steps.”

For
a moment a wing of desolate absence swept down across the garden tables here at
Eisvogel’s, eclipsing any describable future. From somewhere in the direction
of the GiantWheel came the infernal lilt of yet another twittering waltz.

The
Russians, selfdesignated Misha and Grisha, having obtained one of his
addresses, a coffeehouse in the IX Bezirk, were soon leaving messages for Cyprian
there about once a week, scheduling appointments at unfrequented corners all
about the city. As he grew more aware of their surveillance, as perhaps he was
meant to, he spent less time in the Prater and more in cafés reading
newspapers. He also began taking daytrips, prolonging them,

sometimes through the night, to see
what radius of freedom the watchers would allow him.

With no chance to prepare, he was
summoned at last one night to the address in Leopoldstadt. The servant who
opened the door was tall, cruel, and silent, and almost before Cyprian could
step across the threshold, he was manacled and blindfolded, then roughly
propelled down a corridor and up some stairs to a room with a peculiar absence
of echo, where he was unbound only long enough to be stripped and then
resecured.

The
Colonel himself removed the blindfold. He wore steelrimmed eyeglasses, the
bonestructure beneath a rigorously shaven scalp betraying to the keen student
of ethnophysiognomy, even in the room’s exhausted light, his nonPrussian,
indeed cryptoOriental, blood. He selected a rattan cane and without speaking
proceeded to use it on Cyprian’s unprotected naked body. Being chained tightly,
Cyprian was unable to put up much resistance, and his unfaltering erection
would in any case have made any protests unpersuasive.

So
these assignations began, once a week, always conducted in silence. Cyprian
experimented with costume, maquillage, and hairstyles in an attempt to provoke
some comment, but the Colonel was far more interested in whipping
him—wordlessly and often, employing a strange delicacy of touch, to
climax.

One
evening, near the Volksgarten, Cyprian was out in the street just drifting,
when from somewhere not immediately clear he heard a chorus of male voices
hoarse from hours of repetition singing “Ritter Georg Hoch!” the old PanGerman
anthem, and here in Vienna, these days, antiSemitic as well. Understanding
immediately that it would be better not to have to encounter this lot, he
slipped into the first wine cellar he saw, where whom should he run into but
old Ratty McHugh, from school. At the sight of a face from a past all at once
too measurably more innocent, he began to sniffle, not enough to embarrass
anyone but so surprising them both that old Ratty was moved to inquire.

Though
Cyprian had developed by now a clearer idea of the consequences if he spoke of
his arrangements with the Colonel—death certainly not being out of the
question, torture certainly, not the pleasurable sort he expected of his
mysterious client but the real article, nonetheless he was tempted, almost
sexually so, to tell all to Ratty in a great heedless rush, and see how much
would in fact get back to the Colonel, and what would happen then. He had
intuitively kept shy of any guessing as to whom his old school chum might be
working for these days, and in particular from which Desk. With the sense of
taking a step into some narcoticallyperfumed and lightless room, calibrating
the seductiveness of his tone, he whispered, “Do you think you could get me out
of Vienna?”

   
“What
kind of trouble are you in?” Ratty of course wanted to know. “Exactly.”

   
“ ‘
Exactly’ . . .”

“I
am in regular contact with people who might help. Though I mayn’t speak for
them, my impression is that the more detailed your account, the further they’d
be prepared to extend themselves.” The old Ratty had never spoken with quite so
much care.

“Look
here,” Cyprian imagined he could explain, “it isn’t’s if one starts off
intending
to live this way
. . .
‘Oh yes
planning, you know, to seek a career in sodomy.’ But—perhaps less at
Trinity than at King’s—if one wanted anything like a social life, it was
simply the mask one put on. Inescapable, really. Every expectation, most of us,
of leaving it all behind after the final May Week ball, and no harm done. Who
could have foreseen, any more than the actress who falls in love with her
leading man, that the fiction might prove after all more
desirable—strangely, more durable—than anything the civilian world
had to offer
. . . .
”

Ratty,
bless him, didn’t blink any more than he usually did. “My alternatives were a
bit less colorful. Whitehall, Blackpool. But it’s only fair to warn you, you
might have to absorb a bit of character assessment.”

   
“From
your lot. Rather harsh, are they.”