Aurorarama (14 page)

H
oly Cod!” thought Gabriel, as he saw Brentford waving to him through the large window of the Nordlicht Kaffee. Their eyes had met and it was too late to pretend that he had not noticed him. There was no other choice but to go into the Kaffee and pray that no Gentleman of the Night or affiliated spy was witnessing the scene. However, the past few days had convinced Gabriel that this was a rather idle hope.

The Nordlicht Kaffee was an über-chic spot located off Koldewey Canal in an area of gabled, finely sculpted Gothic houses
known as Neu-Vineta. This quarter, which specialized in luxuries, drew its name from a Baltic harbour that according to some German legend had been doomed and drowned because of its riches. It emerged, said the tale, for a single day once in a century, and plunged back into the depths if the merchants failed to sell their splendid goods to some unsuspecting stranger. Needless to say, prices tended to drop dramatically as the day advanced. But though the mythical source of the Sales Period could be traced back to this Anti-Venice, it had become in the New Venetian Neu-Vineta but a distant, irony-tinged memory, and Gabriel hoped no one was counting on him to break a similar curse these days, for the prices here were now well beyond his grasp.

The Kaffee itself was supposed to be reminiscent of the
barocco
ice city that the wintering crew of the
Tegethoff
had built out of boredom on the floe that had imprisoned them. But the result was nothing if not slightly pretentious. The walls and ceiling seemed to be made out of whipped cream, the furniture to be glazed with dark chocolate. The room was decorated, on the rare moulded panels that were not hung with engravings of the
Hansa
or the Payer-Weyprecht expedition, with extracts of the famous
Nordlicht
poetic cycle by Theodor Daübler, most of them about Venice. Gabriel’s command of German was rather shaky, and all he knew was this: It had been at a masked ball in Venice that the adolescent Daübler had experienced his revelation, his “aurora of the soul.” For him, the Northern Lights were the proof that the Earth “longed to be a shining star again,” and would one day become “the spark of freedom in the universe.” The Seven Sleepers may have thought about this when—well, according to the local pronunciation—they put the
ice
back in
Venice
and Venice back on the ice. Or maybe they were
pillortoq
, simply stark raving mad.

Brentford was sitting on a curved plush sofa just against the window, basking in a slanting sunray in front of a light
breakfast of coffee and croissants, a mooring post of sanity to Gabriel’s loose gondola. It was a strange place and time to see him, but then it was also a strange place and time for Gabriel to be there. His own excuse, however, was this: on “sick leave” from Doges College, he had spent the night, as he had every night since he had met her five days earlier, roaming through the city with Stella, pausing in their ramblings only for strong drinks and endless kisses, and he was now heading home to sleep through the few hours of remaining daylight. To speak frankly, it showed a bit. Brentford was not long in noticing, as he shook his friend’s hand, that he had sagging, ashen cheeks and haloes around his eyes that looked like pools of oil. But what he could not perceive was that Gabriel used this exhaustion to cover up his anxiety about a meeting whose outcome he feared for both their sakes.

“What are you doing here?” asked Gabriel, falling into more than sitting on the sofa in front of Brentford, and huffing a breath that carried the bitter whiff of absinthe.

“I quarrelled with Sybil,” admitted Brentford, with a wry smile to show it was nothing too worrying. “About the guest list. I discovered she had added Surville at the last moment. I certainly do not want to see him.”

It took Gabriel a migrainous while to understand the fuss was about Brentford’s former sweetheart.

“Seraphine’s husband?”

“Ex-husband, yes. But nevertheless. And the spokesman of the Council. Go figure.”

“Why would Sybil invite him?”

“I do not know, really. Sybil has an address book the size of
Moby Dick
. I think he is a kind of sponsor to the Cub-Clubbers, or something.”

Gabriel refrained from wincing at the name of the band, which was everything he detested. Though he had to admit that Sybil was, well, attractive.

“It infuriated me all the more,” continued Brentford, after Gabriel had ordered a double coffee with the vague, but visible, hope that he would not have to pay for it himself, “because I have an appointment with the Council this afternoon. I’ll spare you the details. Having to cope with them twice a day is beyond my patience, these days.”

Gabriel started at the mention of the appointment. He hoped that it had nothing to do with the book Brentford was, not without reason, suspected of having written. But he also realized that if they were seen together now, on display in the window, it would only mean to
them
that Gabriel was warning Brentford of the danger, which would point to his friend as the culprit and himself as his accomplice. The noose tightened around his throat. Since his failed attempt to send poor Phoebe with a message, he had decided to stay away from Brentford, hoping it would benefit both of them. What a brilliant success, he thought, not withholding the wince this time.

“Nothing serious, I hope,” he managed to grumble. He had decided not to add to Brentford’s trouble and said nothing of his own interview with the Gentlemen of Night.

“Well, they do not exactly invite you over every day, so I guess they want to convey the idea that it
is
serious. The reason is rather technical, a little litigation over hunting quotas between the army and the Inuit. But I expect they will take advantage of it to embarrass me some way or other.”

Gabriel nodded, but he was not in a state in which technicalities were of any interest to him. It would give too much credit to his mind to say that it was
racing
to find an excuse to get out, but, at last, it tried to.

“You seem a bit tired,” said Brentford, not wishing to dwell on his own problems.

“I met a girl.”

“You look like you met two or three.”

“Sort of, yes. She’s very energetic. She’s called Stella, but she should be called Tesla, really. High-voltage girl.”

“The Earl of Real versus Stella Tesla. It sounds good,” said Brentford, who wondered how long this latest fling, or his friend’s nerves, would last. “What does she do?”

“Pretty much everything.”

“For a living, I mean.”

Gabriel smiled at the motherly tone of the question.

“Oh. She’s a vaudeville artist, I guess. Relatively new to the city. She is now working for a magician.”

“Handyside?”

“What?”

“The name of the magician is Handyside?”

“I don’t know. She works at the Trilby Temple.”

“That’s the one. Sybil wanted a magician for our wedding and I’m supposed to see him perform there tonight. I guess I will see your Stella.”

“You won’t see anything but her,” said Gabriel, with a streak of pride that did not linger too long. The coffee had arrived and he lost himself in the smoke, eyes half closed, not exactly liking what he saw reflected through a cup, darkly.

“Speaking of coincidences,” said Brentford, “the Scavengers have found a dead woman in a sled in Niflheim. She held a mirror with
Lancelot
written on it.”

“Cracked from side to side?”

“Not yet. Maybe next time I quarrel with Sybil, who now owns the thing. Why do you ask?”

“For no reason. It reminded me of a poem. But then everything does.”

“I wondered if you might have a clue or simply feel concerned.”

“I do not date dead women as a rule.”

Oops, thought Gabriel, hoping he had not offended Brentford, whose longing for Helen, concealed as it was, nonetheless was well known to him. However, this time Brentford easily read his friend’s mind, as if in a comic book: the arched eyebrows, the pursed lips. He decided not to take offence, but discovered that, indeed, he wanted to speak about Helen. Gabriel was perhaps among the few persons who would not consider such talk as pertaining to alienism—and the only one among them whom Brentford himself would not regard as a lunatic.

“I think I have news from Helen, by the way.”

“Dream incubation?”

“Yes. She has given me an appointment on the North Pole for March the first. Geographical, that is.”

Gabriel nodded appreciatively.

“You’re going there?” he asked, a bit jealous.

“Well, I’m of two minds. I do not think I will risk it, but still I am getting the
Kinngait
ready.”

“Nice honeymoon trip.”

“Yes, you’re right. I do not think Sybil would be too happy with me going there right after the wedding.”

“By the way, this North Pole thing reminds me of something,” said Gabriel, who felt a sudden relief at having found a reason not to stay that was nobler than simply going to bed. “I have to go visit the Inuit People’s Ice Palace. I met a friend of Bob’s who is helping with the staging of it all. He invited me to visit it before the opening.”

“I do not think this palace is the best idea,” said Brentford with a frown.

“I recited the lesson you taught me about it. But you know how it is: curiosity got the better of me. I am actually late,” he added, standing up, searching for a wallet which he knew was empty. Brentford waved his hand appeasingly, to signify that he would gladly pay the bill.

“Don’t forget you’re supposed to be my best man on Saturday,” he added, as he shook hands with Gabriel. “Don’t forget to make up with the bride, then.”

Through the window, Brentford watched Gabriel go away, and felt vaguely worried. Since he had first met him twenty years before, watching in disbelief as “the hurling earl” crawled uninvited on all fours into his Doges’ College dorm room to vomit in the washbasin, Brentford had acquired a rather large spectrum of expectations about what could be regarded as right or normal for his friend. Now Gabriel was undoubtedly tired and could have his moody spells, but knowing him as he did, Brentford sensed there was something else. Gabriel had seemed nervous, elusive, pulling relentlessly on his sideburns while casting quick glances at the street. This “Lancelot” story would normally have goaded him into inventing thousand hypotheses and he would have given more thought to the North Pole trip than he had, as it was a longtime fascination of his. Was this Stella to blame? Or something else? He reverted to his own already numerous problems and found with a sigh that Gabriel’s eerie behaviour had been added to them.