Against the Day (133 page)

Lew listened guardedly to this
impersonation of a
gemütlicher alter Junge.
According to most of the
Werfner stories he’d heard, lives by the trainload were said to hang on his
every pause for breath. The mystery of why Werfner should be in town at all, so
far out of his ground, so close to his British adversary, would not go away.
There persisted the classic nightmare scene of the man who is standing
where
he should not be.
Despite both professors’ frequent and strenuous denials
of twinship, some symmetry was being broken. Violated. It was enough to drive
Lew back to his pernicious habit of Cyclomitenibbling. He went looking for a
W.C. in which to do this, though he supposed he could surreptitiously spread
the stuff on a biscuit and administer it that way.

“
Werfner’s
in London
,”
Lew
told the Cohen next day.

“So the two N’s have reported.” It
seemed to Lew that the Cohen was looking at him strangely. More than strangely,
and how strange was that? “Things are becoming odd. We’ve other ops on station,
of course, but I think that from here on you’ll be
authorized—trusted—to take any initiative you see fit. Should an
opportunity arise.”

   
Lew
heard a somber note. “Cohen, could you get specific?”

“Metaphorical will have to do. Think
of those two professors as ‘sidewinders’ out on the trail. Sometimes a man has
the luck to avoid them. Sometimes he must take other steps.”

   
“You’re
not suggesting . . .”

“I’m
not suggesting anything. It would be better to have everyone prepared, that’s
all.” Little Nick Nookshaft’s eyes held oh, so wide, lips in a small circle.

It
did not descend all at once upon Lew’s understanding what this meant—much
less what it was they’d been playing him for all this time—but it didn’t
take that long either. Somehow, having managed to get through a nice stretch
over here in England free of gunplay, unexpected knife deployment, blows from
saps, fists, or handy items of furniture, he had grown foolishly to expect that
throwdowns and death maybe were not going to figure quite as prominently in
caseresolution as they once had, back there in the old days in the U.S. How
civilized, how English he thought he’d become, while the T.W.I.T., it was now
growing clear to him, had just gone on, with it mattering nary a bedbug’s ass
if he wore a cowboy hat or a City bowler, or what English vowel sounds or
hidden social codings he might’ve learned, for when the hole cards were all
turned up at last, here he was, nothing more than their hired gunslinger from
the States, on ice, held ready for some terrible hour.

But
one thing about London, hurt pride didn’t hurt for long, because there was
always another insult just around the corner waiting to be launched. Much more
intriguing right now was the Cohen’s utter lack of surprise about the news that
Werfner was in town. It could have been some deep talent of the Cohen’s for
putting on a poker face, but then again, suppose . . .

Lew
sought out the two N’s, who had been eating raspberries marinated in ether, and
now, giggling, found themselves unable to keep from singing, and repeating da
capo, a tune from the third act of
Waltzing in Whitechapel,
which Nigel
accompanied with ukulele chords, thus—

Oh, Sing

ing Bird,

Of Spitalfields—

How lonely i’allfeels,

Wivout your mel

odee! When shall my

Brick Lane bunting

Chirpagain,

To my throbbingbrain,

Her dear refrain,

Softleee? Al

though it’s spring

In Stepney, sowe’retold,

Here in my

Heartit’scold

As anywin

try sea—until my

Singing Bird of

Spitalfields,

Perched on her little heels,

Comes tripping back,

To meee!

           
—(My
darling),

[D.C.]

During
a pause for breath, Lew ventured, “You boys have studied with Professor
Renfrew, right?”

   
“Yes,
at Kings,” Neville said.

“And Professor Werfner, whom we ran
into at the theatre last night—wasn’t he just a dead ringer for Renfrew?”

   
“His
hair was different,” Nigel mused.

   
“Clothing
a bit more distressed as well, I thought,” added Neville.

“But Neville, you’re the one that
said, ‘Oh I say Nigel, whyever is Professor Renfrew talking in that droll
German accent?’ And you said, ‘But Neville it can’t be old Renfrew you know,
not with those frightful shoes,’ and you—”

But
Lew just then was seeing something extraordinary, something he would never have
dreamed possible with these two—they were exchanging signals, not exactly
warnings but cues of hand and eye, the way actors in a vaudeville skit
might—they were
impersonating British idiots.
And in that luminous
and tarnished instant, he also understood, far too late in the ball game, that
Renfrew and Werfner were one and the same person, had been all along, that this
person somehow had the paranormal power to be in
at least
two places at
the same time, maintaining daytoday lives at two different
universities—and that everybody at the T.W.I.T. had known all about this,
known forever, most likely—everybody except for Lew. Why hadn’t anybody
told him? What
else
could they be using him for, that required keeping
him that blindly in the dark? He should have felt more riled about it but
guessed it was no more disrespect than normal, for London.

Once
he was willing to accept the two professors as a single person, Lew felt
curiously released, as if from a servitude he had never fully understood the
terms of anyway. Well. Take his money and call him Knucklehead. So it was
simple as that.

He
spent the rest of the day upstairs among the T.W.I.T. library stacks, trying to
reduce his ignorance some. There turned out to be several shelves of books and
manuscripts, some in languages he didn’t even recognize, let alone read, on the
strange and useful talent of being two places or more at

once, known in the Psychical field for about fifty years as
“bilocation.” North Asian shamans in particular seemed to be noted for it. The
practice had

begun to filter into ancient Greece around the seventh
century
b.c.,
and become a feature
of Orphic, and presently Pythagorean, religions. It was not a matter of
possession by spirits, demons, or in fact any outside forces, but rather a
journey the shaman took from within—observing a structure, from what Lew
could gather, much like dreaming, in which one version of you remains behind,
all but paralyzed except for basic activities like snoring and farting and
rolling over, while another goes calmly off to worlds unexpected, to fulfill
obligations proper to each of them, using daytime motor skills often extended
into such areas as flying, passing through walls, performing athletic miracles
of speed and strength
. . . .
And this
traveling double was no weightless spook—others could see it solid and
plain enough, in fact too plain, many reporting how figure and ground were kept
separate by an edge, overdefined and glimmering, between two distinct
kinds
of light
. . . .

At
some point Dr. Otto Ghloix, a visiting alienist from Switzerland whom Lew
recognized from the T.W.I.T. messhall, stuck his head around a corner, and they
fell into conversation.

“This
person Renfrew/Werfner appears afflicted,” it presently seemed to Dr. Ghloix,
“by a deep and fatal contradiction—deeper than consciously he can
appreciate, and as a result the conflict has no other place to go but outward,
ejected into the outside world, there to be carried out as what technically we
call
Schicksal
—Destiny—with the world around him now obliged
to suffer the disjunction in himself which he cannot, must not, admit. . . so
pretending to be two ‘rivals’ representing the interests of two ‘separate
nations’ which are much more likely secular expressions of a rupture within a
single damaged soul.

“And
after all, who better than a fallen geographer to be acting this out, to occupy
Number XV, The Devil—someone who might have answered the higher calling,
learned the secret geographies of the
beyul,
or hidden lands, and
brought the rest of us in our raggedness and dust, our folly and ignorance, to
far Shambhala, and rebirth in the Pure Land? What crime more reprehensible than
to betray that sacred obligation for the shoddy rewards to be had from
Whitehall or the Wilhelmstraße?”

“I
guess what’s bothering me right at the moment,” said Lew, “is how much
cooperation he’s had—I guess I say ‘he’—from folks here at the
T.W.I.T.”

   
“Because
no one told you what they knew.”

   
“Well
wouldn’t you take it a little, I don’t know, personally?”

“You
may not need to, it is after all quite common in these occult orders to find
laity and priesthood, hierarchies of acquaintance with the Mysteries, se

cret initiation at each step, the assumption that one learns
what one has to only when it is time to. No one decides this, it is simply the
dynamic imperative operating from within the Knowledge itself.”

“Oh.” Lew was able to keep a straight
face, nod, and silently roll himself a cigarette, which he lit up in the
deepening dusk from the coal of Dr. Ghloix’s Corona. “Simplifies things, in a
way,” he supposed, through an exhalation of Turkish smoke. “Considering the
time I might have gone on wasting with detective stuff. Trying to get their two
stories to jibe—eyewitness accounts, ticket stubs, surveillance reports,
hell, if any of it ever came to court, well there’d go the whole concept of an
alibi, wouldn’t it?”

After the Doc had taken his leave,
and dark had fallen, and Lew had lit a small Welsbach unit on the table, and
the dinner gong, hushed by distance, had sounded, who should appear but the
Grand, soon to be Associate, Cohen, bringing a tray with a tall glass of
parsnip juice and some vegetarian analogue of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie
cooling on a china plate. “We missed you at supper.”

   
“Guess
I lost track of the time. Thanks.”

“There’s to be a poetry reading in
here tonight, Indian bloke, mystical stuff, quite a smash with the sisters,
perhaps you’d help me light off the old P.L.” by which he meant the
Plafond
Lumineux,
a modern mixed arrangement of gasmantles and electric
incandescent bulbs arching across the entire library ceiling and covered by a
pale translucent canopy of some proprietary celluloid which smoothed these
sources, when at last they had all been lit, into a depthless dome of light
somehow much brighter than their sum.

The
Cohen glanced at the table where Lew had been reading and taking notes.
“Bilocation, eh? Fascinating topic. Rather up your street I imagine, stepping
back and forth over thresholds sort of thing.”

“Maybe I’ll go in the shaman
business, find some nice li’l igloo, hang out my shingle.”

Cohen Nookshaft’s expression was not
unsympathetic. “You’d have to get cracking, learn a systematic approach. Years
of study—if it was what you wanted.”

   
“If
it was what I wanted.”

They
stood and watched the ceiling, its smooth and steady radiance. “Quite pleasant,
isn’t it,” said the Cohen. “Of course it helps to have some allegiance to
light.”

   
“How’s
that?”

   
As if
imparting a secret Lew could not help thinking he had somehow,

without knowing how, become ready to hear, the Cohen said,
“We are light,

you see, all of light—we are the light offered the
batsmen at the end of the

day, the shining eyes of the beloved, the flare of the
safetymatch at the high city window, the stars and nebulæ in full midnight
glory, the rising moon through the tram wires, the naphtha lamp glimmering on
the costermonger’s barrow
. . . .
When
we lost our æthereal being and became embodied, we slowed, thickened, congealed
to”—grabbing each side of his face and wobbling it back and
forth—“this. The soul itself is a memory we carry of having once moved at
the speed and density of light. The first step in our Discipline here is
learning how to reacquire that rarefaction, that condition of light, to become
once more able to pass where we will, through lanternhorn, through windowglass,
eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is
an expression in crystal form of Earth’s velocity as it rushes through the
Æther, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction
. . . .
” He paused at the door. “Atonement,
in any case, comes much later in the journey. Do have something to eat, there’s
a good chap.”