V. Page 7

  Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved away into a hostile March wind nearly a year before, a great deal of nonsense had been spoken and written about him. Much more was to come, some is still being written today. He was the greatest alto on the postwar scene and when he left it some curious negative will—a reluctance and refusal to believe in the final, cold fact—possessed the lunatic fringe to scrawl in every subway station, on sidewalks, in pissoirs, the denial: “Bird Lives.” So that among the people in the V-Note that night were, at a conservative estimate, a dreamy 10 percent who had not got the word, and saw in McClintic Sphere a kind of reincarnation.

  “He plays all the notes Bird missed,” somebody whispered in front of Fu. Fu went silently through the motions of breaking a beer bottle on the edge of the table, jamming it into the speaker’s back and twisting.

  It was near closing time, the last set.

  “It’s nearly time to go,” Charisma said. “Where is Paola.”

  “Here she comes,” said Winsome.

  Outside the wind had its own permanent gig. And was still blowing.

  chapter three

  In which Stencil, a

  quick-change artist,

  does eight imperson-

  ations

  V

  As spread thighs are to the libertine, flights of migratory birds to the ornithologist, the working part of his tool bit to the production machinist, so was the letter V to young Stencil. He would dream perhaps once a week that it had all been a dream, and that now he’d awakened to discover the pursuit of V. was merely a scholarly quest after all, an adventure of the mind, in the tradition of The Golden Bough or The White Goddess.

  But soon enough he’d wake up the second, real time, to make again the tiresome discovery that it hadn’t really ever stopped being the same simple-minded, literal pursuit; V. ambiguously a beast of venery, chased like the hart, hind or hare, chased like an obsolete, or bizarre, or forbidden form of sexual delight. And clownish Stencil capering along behind her, bells ajingle, waving a wooden, toy oxgoad. For no one’s amusement but his own.

  His protest to the Margravine di Chiave Lowenstein (suspecting V.’s natural habitat to be the state of siege, he’d come to Mallorca directly from Toledo, where he’d spent a week night-walking the Alcázar, asking questions, gathering useless memorabilia): “It isn’t espionage,” had been, and still was, spoken more out of petulance than any desire to establish purity of motive. He wished it could all be as respectable and orthodox as spying. But somehow in his hands the traditional tools and attitudes were always employed toward mean ends: cloak for a laundry sack, dagger to peel potatoes; dossiers to fill up dead Sunday afternoons; worst of all, disguise itself not out of any professional necessity but only as a trick, simply to involve him less in the chase, to put off some part of the pain of dilemma on various “impersonations.”

  Herbert Stencil, like small children at a certain stage and Henry Adams in the Education, as well as assorted autocrats since time out of mind, always referred to himself in the third person. This helped “Stencil” appear as only one among a repertoire of identities. “Forcible dislocation of personality” was what he called the general technique, which is not exactly the same as “seeing the other fellow’s point of view”; for it involved, say, wearing clothes that Stencil wouldn’t be caught dead in, eating foods that would have made Stencil gag, living in unfamiliar digs, frequenting bars or cafés of a non-Stencilian character; all this for weeks on end; and why? To keep Stencil in his place: that is, in the third person.

  Around each seed of a dossier, therefore, had developed a nacreous mass of inference, poetic license, forcible dislocation of personality into a past he didn’t remember and had no right in, save the right of imaginative anxiety or historical care, which is recognized by no one. He tended each seashell on his submarine scungilli farm, tender and impartial, moving awkwardly about his staked preserve on the harborbed, carefully avoiding the little dark deep right there in the midst of the tame shellfish, down in which God knew what lived: the island Malta, where his father had died, where Herbert had never been and knew nothing at all about because something there kept him off, because it frightened him.

  One evening, drowsing on the sofa in Bongo-Shaftsbury’s apartment, Stencil took out his one souvenir of whatever old Sidney’s Maltese adventure had been. A gay, four-color postcard, a Daily Mail battle photo from the Great War, showing a platoon of sweating, kilted Gordons wheeling a stretcher on which lay an enormous German enlisted man with a great mustache, one leg in a splint and a most comfortable grin. Sidney’s message read: “I feel old, and yet like a sacrificial virgin. Write and cheer me up. FATHER.”

  Young Stencil hadn’t written because he was eighteen and never wrote. That was part of the present venery: the way he’d felt on hearing of Sidney’s death half a year later and only then realizing that neither of them had communicated since the picture-postcard.

  A certain Porpentine, one of his father’s colleagues, had been murdered in Egypt under the duello by Eric Bongo-Shaftsbury, the father of the man who owned this apartment. Had Porpentine gone to Egypt like old Stencil to Malta, perhaps having written his own son that he felt like some other spy, who’d in turn gone off to die in Schleswig-Holstein, Trieste, Sofia, anywhere? Apostolic succession. They must know when it’s time, Stencil had often thought; but if death did come like some last charismatic bestowal, he’d have no real way of telling. He’d only the veiled references to Porpentine in the journals. The rest was impersonation and dream.

  I

  As the afternoon progressed, yellow clouds began to gather over Place Mohammed Ali, from the direction of the Libyan desert. A wind with no sound at all swept up rue Ibrahim and across the square, bringing a desert chill into the city.

  For one P. Aïeul, café waiter and amateur libertine, the clouds signaled rain. His lone customer, an Englishman, perhaps a tourist because his face was badly sunburned, sat all tweeds, ulster and expectation looking out on the square. Though he’d been there over coffee not fifteen minutes, already he seemed as permanent a landscape’s feature as the equestrian statue of Mohammed Ali itself. Certain Englishmen, Aïeul knew, have this talent. But they’re usually not tourists.

  Aïeul lounged near the entrance to the café; outwardly inert but teeming inside with sad and philosophical reflections. Was this one waiting for a lady? How wrong to expect any romance or sudden love from Alexandria. No tourists’ city gave that gift lightly. It took—how long had he been away from the Midi? twelve years?—at least that long. Let them be deceived into thinking the city something more than what their Baedeker’s said it was: a Pharos long gone to earthquake and the sea; picturesque but faceless Arabs; monuments, tombs, modern hotels. A false and bastard city; inert—for “them”—as Aïeul himself.

  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 Chérif Pacha in a dress suit and a pith helmet two sizes too large. Approaching Aïeul’s customer, he began blithering rapidly in English from twenty yards out. Something about a woman, a consulate. The waiter shrugged. Having learned 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, Aïeul thought. At the table: “M’sieu?”

  “Ah,” the gross smiled, “coffee then. Café, you know.”

  On his return the two were conversing lackadaisically about a grand party at the Consulate tonight. What consulate? All Aïe
ul could distinguish were names. Victoria Wren. Sir Alastair Wren (father? husband?). A Bongo-Shaftsbury. What ridiculous names that country produced. Aïeul 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 in tweed—Porpentine—was the maquereau. 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. Aïeul 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 pietà!

  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. Aïeul could hear drops of rain pattering on the pith helmet. At length Fat seemed to awake: arose, leaving a piastre and a millième 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, Aïeul 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 crisscrossing 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 décolletages 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 four hundred 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. Delcassé, 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 hide 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 no one happened to be in earshot they traded insults, some coarse, some ingenious, all following the Levantine pattern of proceeding backward through the other’s ancestry, creating extempore at each step or generation an even more improbable and bizarre misalliance.

  Count Khevenhüller-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, for “them”? He might as well be a fixture on the wall.

  But that will change, he smiled, grim. Soon he was daydreaming 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 he
ar 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.