The Great Game (12 page)

             
Paul thought fast. "The rest will come later," he said.

             
"Well, it better." Loge took a folded paper from his pocket and handed it to Paul. "Here. Although what you want this for is beyond me. When do I get the other five hundred?"

             
"Soon," Paul promised.
"Soon!"
He thrust the paper into his pocket and stalked off as though he knew what this was all about.

             
For the rest of the opera Paul's thoughts dwelled on the paper.

             
What was it that serendipity had tossed his way, information concerning some minor intrigue, or possibly a state secret that would change the course of European affairs for a generation? It took an effort of will for him not to unfold the paper on his lap and try to read it in the light reflected from the stage.

             
Paul couldn't shake off the feeling that someone was watching him from somewhere in the dark seats behind him. But, if so, nobody did anything about it, and, as far as he could tell, nobody displayed the slightest interest in him or Giselle when they left the opera house and boarded one of the carriages pulled up along the curb to go home.

             
The night was clear and chill. Paul wrapped the carriage blanket around the two of them and stared up at the sky. He pointed out the constellation of Orion, the great hunter, chasing the Great Bear through the spring sky. "There's one of the problems we all face as we go through life," he told her, "determining whether we are the hunter or the bear."

             
Giselle examined his profile in the light of the street lamps. "Sometimes," she said, "I don't understand you."

             
"Sometimes," he agreed, "I don't either."

-

             
It was after two in the morning when Giselle left his top-floor flat and wafted down the one flight to her own so that she could wake up in her own bed surrounded by the assumption of morality. Paul carefully double-locked his door, made sure that the curtains on his sitting room window were fully closed, lit the gas ring on his side table, prepared himself a cup of thick black coffee with an excess of sugar, and relaxed. He sank into his easy chair, allowed the persona of
Paul Donzhof, Bavarian bohemian, to drain away and permitted himself to become again, if ever so briefly, Charles Bredlon Summerdane, younger son of a duke, English spy. The only way he knew to play the part he had to play all day every day was to become the person he was playing. He had not made it too difficult for himself; Paul Donzhof was in many ways Charles Summerdane, or what Summerdane would have been had he been born into a middle-class German family. But it was still a welcome respite to think in English, and to think those things that Paul Donzhof kept locked away in the recesses of his mind.

             
It was Charles Summerdane who went to his closet and pulled the folded-up paper from the breast pocket of his evening jacket. He spread it open on the table in front of him. It was a numbered list of seven items that made no apparent sense to him:

-

1.
             
24 AND 26 APRIL

2.
             
THAT WEDNESDAY

3.
             
UNKNOWN

4.
             
ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND RUSSIA

5.
             
UNKNOWN

6.
             
3RD AND 4TH OUT OF 6

7.
             
YES

-

             
Summerdane studied it for a while and the longer he looked at it, the less he knew. A glance at the calendar told him that the 24th and 25th of April fell on a Friday and Saturday.
And so?
But it must mean something, perhaps something important. Well, he'd look at it again. For now he had other work to do.

             
Summerdane assembled the notes gathered from observations, discussions, and reports of his compatriots over the past fortnight, added to them with some insightful comments and observations of his own, and condensed them into one continuous message:

-

Greetings from Vienna.
Austrian general staff has received reports on range and accuracy of new French 12cm short-recoil field piece. Suggests spy in place in French Army high command.

Two battleships in drydock in Pola.
The Kronprinz Erzherzog Rudolph for repair and refitting and the Tegetthoff for complete reconstruction.

I am now member 37 of the GVF. Last night I delivered envelope to man named Brommel at 578 Brandtstrasse.
Was followed there by GVFers.
Don't know whether I am suspected, or it was standard procedure. An assassination attempt is being planned, possibly more than one.
Also something big in progress.
Do not
know what, we apprentice anarchists are told only what we need to know. But hints from several sources indicate major outrage is due soon.

GS tells me the Interior Ministry believes Russian agents increasing activity in Hungary and
Serbia ...

-

             
The report went on for another page and a half. He ended it with the note:

-

I have just come into possession of a list that might be important but at present tells me nothing. I shall continue to stare at it from time to time to see if its meaning suddenly leaps out at me.

-

             
When he was done, he put the pen back in its holder, capped the inkwell in his small writing desk, and carefully checked over what he had written. It said what he wished to say; it was comparatively tersely written; it would have to do. He spent the next two hours encrypting the report with his own specially devised cipher: page after page of a specially composed "Paul Donzhof" tone poem for chamber orchestra, written with thick black pencil on pre-lined paper. The musical score he created was playable—not enjoyable, but playable; and that would suffice. Then he carefully burned all his notes and the plain text message in the room's small fireplace and went to sleep.

-

             
Late the next morning, when most of the citizens of workaday Vienna were done skittering about on their way to their employment, Herr Paul Donzhof hailed a passing fiacre and took Fraulein Giselle Schiff to the
Café
Prinz Eugene for breakfast.

             
"I do so enjoy being out with you," Giselle said as they settled at an outdoor table to the right of the entrance, one that would get more of the March sun and less of the March breeze. She looked up at him with a wide smile on her full red lips and her head arced just so. "We are such an attractive couple, passersby cannot help but stop and admire."

             
"Well," Paul said, "half of us
is
, anyway. You must have practiced in front of a mirror to look so artless."

             
"For hours," she agreed. "Klimt is painting me as Mary Magdalene with just this look."

             
"Ah!" Paul said. "In that case your wonderful innocent look might become quite well known. Klimt's work has been described as 'degenerate' by the
Neues Wiener Tagblatt,
which
might draw a large audience to his next show." He intercepted a passing waiter and demanded two coffees and the pastry tray.

             
"What do they mean, these critics, when they say 'degenerate'?" Giselle asked.

             
Paul considered. "It depends on just
whom
the 'they' is," he told her. "The word has come into vogue, and different groups are using it to mean just what they choose it to mean, neither more nor less, as Humpty Dumpty once said."

             
"Who is this Humpty Dumpty?"

             
"A childhood friend, never mind about him."

             
Two waiters descended on them, one with their coffee and the second wheeling a heavily laden pastry cart. After due deliberation they made their selections: a Linzer
törtchen
for Giselle and a
mohn strudel
for him.

             
"This is, perhaps, degenerate, is it not?" Giselle suggested.
"Pastry for breakfast?"

             
"Decadent at least, if not fully degenerate," Paul agreed. "But then breaking one's fast at"—he twisted around to peer at the clock on the wall inside the
café
and then twisted back—"almost eleven, would be considered in itself degenerate enough by the respectable burgers of Vienna. Early rising is synonymous with morality and industry."

             
Giselle used her knife and fork to cut a tiny sliver from her
törtchen
and convey it to her mouth. "And what else is degenerate, my sweet?"

             
"I know that voice." Paul said. "You're wondering now many degenerate acts we can accomplish before you sneak out of my room tonight."

             
"No such thing!" Giselle stated, contriving to look shocked.

             
Paul laughed.
"All right.
Let's see," he said, "there's the church's definition of degenerate: Whenever you hear a priest fulminating against degenerate behavior, you can be pretty sure he's talking about s-e-x. Then there's the Italian Doctor Cesare Lombroso, who thinks that criminals are degenerates, and he can pick them out by the shape of their nose and the angle of their earlobes. The police have a problem with his theories, as they've had little luck identifying criminals by their earlobes, and besides the police's definition of 'degenerate' usually involves blatant homosexuality. If the homosexuality isn't blatant, then the person involved is spoken of in hushed tones as an 'invert.' "

             
"This is something I do not understand, homosexuality."

             
"You wouldn't," Paul said. "Any man who doesn't look at you with great interest is beyond your understanding."

             
"Well, I am interesting to look at, am I not?" Giselle asked, arching her back slightly and smiling her most innocent smile at him.

             
"You certainly
am
," Paul agreed. He continued his linguistic excursion: "There's the pseudo-Darwinian theory of degeneration, based on a misunderstanding of the theory of natural selection, which holds that some races of humans or animals or plants— although they don't seem very interested in plants—are reversing their evolutionary rise to higher forms and degenerating back into lower forms. Lombroso's notions are an offshoot of this sort of thinking."

             
"And this is not so?" Giselle asked.

             
"Evolution does not have a direction," Paul explained. "Wherever it gets to is where it was going.
"

             
"
So."

             
"And then there's the inventive pan-Germanic idea of the degenerate: anyone or anything that is not German, particularly if it is Czech, Hungarian, or Jewish."

             
Giselle thoughtfully cut herself another sliver of
törtchen
.
"Sometimes you surprise me with these things that you know," she said.

             
"I believe that mankind can best be studied by its follies," Paul told her.