Against the Day (48 page)

Chick Counterfly, whose allegiances
were to be found in a world more tangible, nevertheless felt, as always, a stab
of guilt at the passion with which Miles reported his visions. As their
Venetian assignment went on, Chick had found himself attending less to
shipboard matters and increasingly drawn to the
sotopòrteghi
of the
city, and the chances for adventure offered by those tenebrous passages. Down
in one of which, one blurry, wet dusk, a young woman named Renata, with a
gesturing of her dark curls, beckoned him in with a cigarettecase of Russian
silver and niello, which sprang open to reveal a collection of “smokes,”
Austrian, Egyptian, American, in varied shapes and sizes, some with
goldimprinted crests and writing in exotic alphabets such as the Glagolitic,
old and new. “I pick them up, here and there, from friends. Hardly ever see two
the same in one night.” Chick selected a Gauloise, and they “lit up,” she
gently holding his wrist in the traditional way, pretending to examine his
patent cigarettelighter. “I’ve never seen one like this. How does it work?”

“There’s a small prism of radioactive
alloy inside, emitting certain
energetic rays,
which can be
concentrated, by specially invented ‘radiolenses,’ and focused at a point about
where the tip of your cigarette is—
scusi,
was.”

Renata was gazing at him thoughtfully
from huge eyes of a curious verdigrised bronze color. “And it was you, Dottore,
who invented these special lenses.”

“Well, no. This hasn’t
been
invented
yet. I found it—it found me?—a fisherman in the fog, casting his
lines again and again into the invisible river, the flow of Time, hoping to
retrieve just such artifacts as this.”

“
Affascinante,
caro.
Does that
mean, if I live long enough, I might get to see this on the Rialto someday for
sale by the dozens?”

“Not necessarily. Your own future may
never include it. Nor mine. It’s not the way Time seems to work.”

“Hmm. My
ragazzo
—well,
more than that, business associate, too—is with the police. He wants to
be a detective someday. He’s always reading up on the latest criminal theories,
and I know he’d be interested in—”

“Nonono, please, I am not one of Dr.
Lombroso’s
mattoidi,
only a simple contract balloonist.”

“But not another Russian.”

“ ‘
Another’
. . .
but can you be sure?” Stroking his whiskers roguishly.

“Maybe I’ve run into one or two and
know the difference.”

“And
. . .
?”

“Would I remember?”

“
Prego
,
professional
curiosity, no more.”

“Come, there’s a
caffè
just
past that next little
bridge. You’ll let me do the cards for you, at least, I hope.”

“Your business associate—”

A shrug. “Down in Pozzuoli, up to no
good.”

They sat at a small veneered table,
with room enough for their cups and the layout of miniature Tarocchi, or Tarot
cards, Renata had produced a deck of from her handbag and shuffled, proceeding
to put down a line of eight, above that a line of four, then two, then one, to
form a rude cusp. “Allowing each of the upper cards to be influenced by the two
just below it. The last card, as always, is the one that matters.”

Which tonight proved to be number
XVI, The Tower. She shuffled and repeated the layout twice more, and each time
it converged to the Tower, causing her to grow still, to breathe less deeply.
The only other Major Arcana dealt up seemed to be gentle suggestions about
character reform, such as Temperance and Fortitude.

“In Protestant lands such as
England,” Chick observed, “those who read these cards believe that The Tower
signifies the Church of Rome.”

“An afterthought. The Tarocchi are
much, much older. From long before Christ and the Gospels, let alone the
papacy. Always very straightforward. This card, on this tabletop, for you, is a
real tower, maybe even old Papa himself.”

“The Campanile in the Piazza? It’s
going to be hit by lightning? Two parties are going to fall out of it?”

“Some kind of lightning. Some kind of
fall.”

Around dawn
, as if it had just occurred to her,
“But—aren’t you supposed to be with your unit?”

“As of midnight I was officially
‘straggling,’ and depending how early the boys are planning to get under way,
why, I could be missing ship’s movement, too.”

“What will happen?”

“They could send a shore party after
me, I guess
. . . .
See anybody
suspicious out there?”

“Only the breakfast boat. Come on,
I’ll buy you something.”

Two local fellows in a small boat had
emerged from the luminous blur of the
sfumato,
which would not burn off
till later in the morning—one rowing and the other tending a small
charcoal stove whose glow was just about to be absorbed in the nacreous swell
of daylight. Musselgatherers could now be seen out in the water, which came
only up to their waists, moving about like

harvesters in a field. Produce boats
up from the Ponte di Paglia glided by, and small boats loaded with green crabs
whose rattling struggles could be heard in the dawn.

Breakfast was ungraciously
interrupted by Darby Suckling, who came abseiling down from some overhead
purchase, sneering, “Gee, how
típico.
Let’s go, Counterfly.”

“
Pax
tibi, Darbe.
Say
hello to Renata.”

“Arrivederci, sister.”

“You used to be such a pleasant kid.
What happened?”

“Eeeyynnhh, too many feebs to deal
with over the years, I guess—oh
I’m
sorry, hope I’m not
offending—”

“What if I
don’t
come
back to the ship?”

“Sure—first you, then one by
one, like some damned
Farewell
Symphony, we blow out our candles, walk
off, resign from the Sky. I don’t think so.”

“You’d never miss me, soon the
winds’ll be shifting, then it’ll be winter routine—”

“The Sky’s been good to you,
Counterfly.”

“It’s the future I’m thinking of. I
have some problems with the retirement plan.” An old pleasantry in the
business—there was no retirement plan, in fact no retirement. Chums of
Chance were expected to die on the job. Or else live forever, there being two
schools of thought, actually.

“Guess I could hit you with a sap and
drag you back somehow,” grumbled Darby. He had joined them at a small table
outside for a breakfast of broiled fish, rolls, figs, and coffee.

“Lot of work,” Chick said.

They strolled along the Riva, past a
line of torpedo boats tied up there.

“Get a ground job?” Darby said, “sure
thing, sucker. But what doing? not as if there’s much call for our skills down
below.”

“We’ve aviated ourselves away from
the clambake, that’s certain,” Chick said.

“Bet you Padzhitnoff doesn’t feel
that way.”

“That’s government work. According to
my sources at the Italian War Ministry, he’s based across the Adriatic, in
Montenegro, doing photo ~reconaissance of the Austrian installations in
Dalmatia. The Ministry is keenly interested, not to mention Irredentist
elements in both countries.”

“Lot of this dang Irredentism going
around lately,” it seemed to Darby.

“Austria has no business down here in
the Adriatic.” Renata declared. “They were never a maritime nation and never
shall be. Let them stay up in their mountains and ski, eat chocolate, molest
Jews, whatever it is they do. We got Venice back, and so shall Trieste be ours
again. The more they meddle here, the more certain and complete shall be their
destruction.”

·
    
·
    
·

The
Inconvenience
was
in a remote part
of the Arsenale, out of drydock at last, shining and shipshape and somehow
increased in size. Chick greeted his shipmates, who were athrum with excitement
over reports that their Russian counterparts had been observed getting up
buoyancy, carrying on board their ship a number of mysterious crates and casks,
as if preparing for an engagement.

“Who with?” Darby shrugged. “Not us.
How could it be us?”

“Any way of reaching Padzhitnoff?”
Chick wondered.

Pugnax arrived in the company of
Mostruccio, a small, illhumored Venetian dog, with an ancestral resemblance to
those observed in works of Carpaccio, Mansueto, and others, some of whom had
had their own private gondolas to ride around in. Emerging from dreams in
which, winged as any lion, he had soared in pursuit of pigeons above the
rooftiles and among the chimneys, Mostruccio was obliged to spend his waking
hours back at ground level in embittered assaults upon the ankles of the unwary
. . . .
He had found in Pugnax a
sympathetic soul, for, owing to often weeks of being cooped up in the gondola
of the
Inconvenience,
Pugnax also dreamed of release, running, in the
early morning, into a brisk wind, leaving behind whatever humans had
accompanied him, along the wild beaches of Florida hard as pavement, or the
frozen rivers of Siberia where Samoyeds raced alongside in a spirit of friendly
competition. He approached Randolph, arranged his eyebrows in a format of
petition, and inquired “Rrr Rrrrururu rrf rrrrff, rr rrff rrffr?” or “May
Mostruccio come aboard as my guest?”

Pedestrians below
were moving at their accustomed
gaits, sitting at the tables in front of Florian and Quadri, if Francophile
raising toasts to Bastille Day, feeding, photographing, or cursing the pigeons,
who, aware of some baleful anomaly in their sky, stuttered wildly into the air,
then, reconsidering, settled, only to sweep a moment later heavenward again, as
if on the strength of a rumor.

Seen from the ground, the rival
airships were more conjectural than literal—objects of fear and prophecy,
reported to perform at speeds and with a manoeuvrability quite unavailable to
any official aircraft of the time—condensed or projected from dreams,
estrangements, solitudes. In the moments just preceding those in which the
Campanile came down, to whom was it given to see the fight in the sky but to
certain
lasagnoni
,
always
to be found about the Piazza, recorded over the seasons by thousands of
touristphotographers

and their images taken home in silent
autumnal diaspora—blurry as bats at twilight, often scarcely visible as
more than sepia gestures against the dreaming façade of the Basilica San Marco,
or the more secular iterations of the Procuratie—because, it is said, of
the long exposures necessary in the humid light of Venice, but in reality
because of the aeronauts’ dual citizenship in the realms of the quotidian and
the ghostly, it was to the
lasagnoni
that the clarity of sight to
witness the engagement was granted. To them alone. Dreamblown as the notorious
pigeon population, contemplating the sky, they became aware that morning of
something else about to emerge from the
sfumato,
some visitation
. . .
something that was to transcend both
Chums and Tovarishchi, for all at once there was a great stunning hoarse cry
from the invisibility, nearly a material thing, a lethal impedance in the air,
as if something malevolent were making every exertion to take form and be
released upon the world in long, dry, cracking percussions, as if jarring the
fabric of fourspace itself. At each salvo the two skycraft slid away at angles
almost impossible to read correctly, so distorted had become the medium up here
through which light must pass.

A giddiness of judgment seemed to
have possessed both crews. The weaponssighting situation oppressed them all,
like a curse, with the littleunderstood enigmata of the simultaneous. By a few
degrees or even minutes of arc, their gunners were abolishing Time—what
they saw “now” in the sights was in fact what did not yet exist
but what
would only be
a few seconds from “now,” dependent on platform and target
each maintaining course and speed—or idealizations of “course and speed,”
since winds were acting to modify both in not entirely predictable fashion.

The Campanile flowed hugely past on a
severe diagonal, pigeonstained, blotched both pale and dark, visibly out of
plumb, leaning in as if about to confide a secret, haggard as the town drunk
. . . .

In the next instant, Padzhitnoff saw
the ancient structure separate cleanly into a multitude of fourbrick groupings,
each surrounded by a luminous contour, and hang an instant in space, as time
slowed and each permutation of shapes appeared, to begin their gentle, undeadly
descent, rotating and translating in all available modes, as if endeavoring to
satisfy some demented rouptheoretical analysis, until the rising dustcloud they
collapsed into obscured all such considerations in a great rawumber smudge of
uncertainty.

Among their weapons the lads had been
packing their own unique model of
aerial torpedo
,
invented by Dr. Chick Counterfly for the purpose not so much
of annihilating or even damaging an opposing airship as of “reminding it of its
innate susceptibility to gravitation.” The normal complement was six
projectiles—known to the Chums as “skyfish,” and listed in
Inconve