V. (9 page)

He watched the sun darken and wind flutter the leaves of acacias round Place Mohammed Ali. In the distance a name was being bellowed: Porpentine, Porpentine. It whined in the square's hollow reaches like a voice from childhood. Another fat Englishman, fair-haired, florid - didn't all Northerners look alike? - had been striding down rue Cherif Pacha in a dress suit and a pith helmet two sizes too large. Approaching Aieul's customer, he began blithering rapidly in English from twenty yards out. Something about a woman, a consulate. The waiter shrugged. Having teamed years back there was little to be curious about in the conversations of Englishmen. But the bad habit persisted.

Rain began, thin drops, hardly more than a mist. "Hat fingan," the fat one roared, "hat fingan kahwa bisukkar, ya weled." Two red faces burned angry at each other across the table.

Merde, Aieul thought. At the table: "M'sieu?"

"Ah," the gross smiled, "coffee then. Cafe, you know."

On his return the two were conversing lackadaisical about a grand party at the Consulate tonight. What consulate? All Aieul could distinguish were names. Victoria Wren. Sir Alastair Wren (father? husband?). A Bongo-Shaftsbury. What ridiculous names that country produced. Aieul delivered the coffee and returned to his lounging space.

This fat one was out to seduce the girl, Victoria Wren, another tourist traveling with her tourist father. But was prevented by the lover, Bongo-Shaftsbury. The old one tweed - Porpentine - was the macquereau. The two he watched were anarchists, plotting to assassinate Sir Alastair Wren, a powerful member of the English Parliament. The peer's wife - Victoria - was meanwhile being blackmailed by Bongo-Shaftsbury, who knew of her own secret anarchist sympathies. The two were music-hall entertainers, seeking jobs in a grand vaudeville being produced by Bongo-Shaftsbury, who was in town seeking funds from the foolish knight Wren. Bongo-Shaftsbury's avenue of approach would be through the glamorous actress Victoria, Wren's mistress, posing as his wife to satisfy the English fetish of respectability. Fat and Tweed would enter their consulate tonight arm-in-arm, singing a jovial song, shuffling, rolling their eyes.

Rain had increased in thickness. A white envelope with a crest on the flap passed between the two at the table. All at once the tweed one jerked to his feet like a clockwork doll and began speaking in Italian.

A fit? But there was no sun. And Tweed had begun to sing:

Pazzo son!

Guardate, come io piango ed imploro . . .

Italian opera. Aieul felt sick. He watched them with a pained smile. The antic Englishman leaped in the air, clicked his heels; stood posturing, fist on chest, other arm outstretched:

Come io chiedo pieta!

Rain drenched the two. The sunburned face bobbed like a balloon, the only touch of color in that square. Fat sat in the rain, sipping at the coffee, observing his frolicking companion. Aieul could hear drops of rain pattering on the pith helmet. At length Fat seemed to awake: arose, leaving a piastre and a millieme on the table (avare!) and nodded to the other, who now stood watching him. The square was empty except for Mohammed Ali and the horse.

(How many times had they stood this way: dwarfed horizontal and vertical by any plaza or late-afternoon? Could an argument from design be predicated on that instant only, then the two must have been displaceable, like minor chess pieces, anywhere across Europe's board. Both of a color though one hanging back diagonal in deference to his partner, both scanning any embassy's parquetry for signs of some dimly sensed opposition - lover, meal-ticket, object of political assassination - any statue's face for a reassurance of self-agency and perhaps, unhappily, self-humanity; might they be trying not to remember that each square in Europe, however you cut it, remains inanimate after all?)

They turned about formally and parted in opposite directions, Fat back toward the Hotel Khedival, Tweed into rue de Ras-et-Tin and the Turkish quarter.

Bonne chance, Aieul thought. Whatever it is tonight, bonne chance. Because I will see neither of you again, that's the least I can wish. He fell asleep at last against the wall, made drowsy by the rain, to dream of one Maryam and tonight, and the Arab quarter ....

Low places in the square filled, the usual random sets of criss-crossing concentric circles moved across them. Near eight o'clock, the rain slackened off.

II

Yusef the factotum, temporarily on loan from Hotel Khedival, dashed through the failing rain, across the street to the Austrian Consulate; darting in by the servants' entrance.

"Late!" shouted Meknes, leader of the kitchen force. "And so, spawn of a homosexual camel: the punch table for you."

Not a bad assignment, Yusef thought as he put on the white jacket and combed his mustaches. From the punch table on the mezzanine one could see the whole show: down the decolletages of the prettier women (Italian breasts were the finest - ah!), over all that resplendent muster of stars, ribbons and exotic Orders.

Soon, from his vantage, Yusef could allow the first sneer of many this evening to ripple across a knowledgeable mouth. Let them make holiday while they could. Soon enough the fine clothes would be rags and the elegant woodwork crusted with blood. Yusef was an anarchist.

Anarchist and no one's fool. He kept abreast of current events, always on lookout for any news favorable to even minor chaos. Tonight the political situation was hopeful: Sirdar Kitchener, England's newest colonial hero, recently victorious at Khartoum, was just now some 400 miles further down the White Nile, foraging about in the jungle; a General Marchand was also rumored in the vicinity. Britain wanted no part of France in the Nile Valley. M. Delcasse, Foreign Minister of a newly-formed French cabinet, would as soon go to war as not if there were any trouble when the two detachments met. As meet, everyone realized by now, they would. Russia would support France, while England had a temporary rapprochement with Germany - meaning Italy and Austria as well.

Bung ho, the English said. Up goes the balloon. Yusef, believing that an anarchist or devotee of annihilation must have some childhood memory to be nostalgic about by way of balance, loved balloons. Most nights at dreams' verge he could revolve like the moon about any gaily-dyed pig's intestine, distended with his own warm breath.

But from the corner of his eye now: miracle. How, if one believed in nothing, could one account . . .

A balloon-girl. A balloon-girl. Hardly seeming to touch the waxed mirror beneath. Holding her empty cup out to Yusef. Mesikum bilkher, good evening; are there any other cavities you wish filled, my English lady. Perhaps he would spare children like this. Would he? If it should come to a morning, any morning when all the muezzins were silent, the pigeons gone to bide among the catacombs, could he rise robeless in Nothing's dawn and do what he must? By conscience, must?

"Oh," she smiled: "Oh thank you. Leltak leben." May thy night be white as milk.

As thy belly . . . enough. She bobbed off, light as cigar smoke rising from the great room below. She'd pronounced her o's with a sigh, as if fainting from love. An older man, solidly built, hair gone gray-looking like a professional street-brawler in evening dress-joined her at the stairs. "Victoria," he rumbled.

Victoria. Named after her queen. He fought in vain to hold back laughter. No telling what would amuse Yusef.

His attention was to stray to her now and again throughout the evening. It was pleasant amid all that glitter to have something to focus on. But she stood out. Her color - even her voice was lighter than the rest of her world, rising with the smoke to Yusef, whose hands were sticky with Chablis punch, mustache a sad tangle - he had a habit of unconsciously trimming the ends with his teeth.

Meknes dropped by every half-hour to call him names. If one happened to be in earshot they traded insults, some coarse, some ingenious, all following the Levantine pattern proceeding backward through the other's ancestry, creating extempore at each step or generation an even more improbable and bizarre misalliance.

Count Khevenhuller-Metsch the Austrian Consul had been spending much time in the company of his Russian counterpart, M. de Villiers. How, Yusef wondered, can two men joke like that and tomorrow be enemies. Perhaps they'd been enemies yesterday. He decided public servants weren't human.

Yusef shook the punch ladle at the retreating back of Meknes. Public servant indeed. What was he, Yusef, if not a public servant? Was he human? Before he'd embraced political nihilism, certainly. But as a servant, here, tonight, "them"? He might as well be a fixture on the wall.

But that will change, he smiled, grim. Soon he was day-dreaming again of balloons.

At the bottom of the steps sat the girl, Victoria, center of a curious tableau. Seated next to her was a chubby blond man whose evening clothes looked shrunken by the rain. Standing facing them at the apices of a flat isosceles triangle were the gray-headed man who'd spoken her name, a young girl of eleven in a white shapeless frock, and another man whose face looked sunburned. The only voice Yusef could hear was Victoria's. "My sister is fond of rocks and fossils, Mr. Goodfellow." The blond head next to her nodded courteously. "Show them, Mildred." The younger girl produced from her reticule a rock, turned and held it up first to Victoria's companion and then to the red face beside her. This one seemed to retreat, embarrassed. Yusef reflected that he could blush at will and no one would know. A few more words and the red face had left the group to come loping up the stairs.

To Yusef he held up five fingers: "Khamseh." As Yusef busied himself filling the cups, someone approached from behind and touched the Englishman lightly on one shoulder. The Englishman spun, his hands balling into fists and moving into position for violence. Yusef's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. Another street-fighter. How long since he'd seen reflexes like that? In Tewfik the assassin, eighteen and apprentice tombstone-cutter - perhaps.

But this one was forty or forty-five. No one, Yusef reasoned, would stay fit that long unless his profession demanded it. What profession would include both a talent for killing and presence at a consulate party? An Austrian consulate at that.

The Englishman's hands had relaxed. He nodded pleasantly.

"Lovely girl," the other said. He wore blue-tinted spectacles and a false nose.

The Englishman smiled, turned, picked up his five cups of punch and started down the stairs. At the second step he tripped and fell; proceeded whirling and bouncing, followed by sounds of breaking glass and a spray of Chablis punch, to the bottom. Yusef noted that he knew how to take falls. The other street-fighter laughed to cover the general awkwardness.

"Saw a fellow do that in a music hall once," he rumbled. "You're much better, Porpentine. Really."

Porpentine extracted a cigarette and lay while smoking where he'd come to rest.

Up on the mezzanine the man with the blue eyeglasses peeked archly from behind a pillar, removed the nose, pocketed it and vanished.

A strange collection. There is more here, Yusef guessed. Had it to do with Kitchener and Marchand? Of course it must. But - His puzzling was interrupted by Meknes, who had returned to describe Yusef's great-great-great-grandfather and grandmother as a one-legged mongrel dog who fed on donkey excrement and a syphilitic elephant, respectively.

III

The Fink restaurant was quiet: not much doing. A few English and German tourists - the penny-pinching kind whom it was never any use approaching - sat scattered about the room, making noise enough for midday in Place Mohammed Ali.

Maxwell Rowley-Bugge, hair coiffed, mustaches curled and external clothing correct to the last wrinkle and thread, sat in one corner, back to the wall, feeling the first shooting pains of panic begin to dance about his abdomen. For beneath the careful shell of hair, skin and fabric lay holed and gray linen and a ne'er-do-well's heart. Old Max was a peregrine and penniless at that.

Give it a quarter of an hour more, he decided. If nothing promising comes along I shall move on to L'Univers.

He had crossed the border into Baedeker land some eight years ago - '90 - after an unpleasantness in Yorkshire. It had been Ralph MacBurgess then - a young Lochinvar come down to the then wide enough horizons of England's vaudeville circuits. He sang a bit, danced a bit, told a number of passable barnyard jokes. But Max or Ralph had a problem; being perhaps too daft for small girls. This particular girl, Alice, had shown at age ten the same halfway responses (a game, she'd carol - such fun) of her predecessors. But they know, Max told himself: no matter how young, they know what it is, what they're doing. Only they don't think about it that much. Which was why he drew the line at sixteen or so - any older and romance, religion, remorse entered blundering stagehands to ruin a pure pas de deux.

But this one had told her friends, who became jealous - one at least enough to pass it on to the clergyman, parents, police - O God. How awkward it had been. Though he'd not tried to forget the tableau - dressing room in the Athenaeum Theatre, a middle-sized town called Lardwick-in-the-Fen. Bare pipes, worn sequined gowns hung in a corner. Broken hollow-pasteboard pillar for the romantic tragedy the vaudeville had replaced. A costume box for their bed. Then footsteps, voices, a knob turning so slow . . .

She'd wanted it. Even afterward, dry-eyed among a protective cordon of hating faces, the eyes had said: I still want it. Alice, the ruin of Ralph MacBurgess. Who knew what any of them wanted?

How he had come to Alexandria, where he would go on leaving, little of that could matter to any tourist. He was that sort of vagrant who exists, though unwillingly, entirely within the Baedeker world - as much a feature of the topography as the other automata: waiters, porters, cabmen, clerks. Taken for granted. Whenever he was about his business - cadging meals, drinks, or lodging - a temporary covenant would come into effect between Max and his "touch"; by which Max was defined as a well-off fellow tourist temporarily embarrassed by a malfunction in Cook's machinery.