by Hal Duncan
“A little warm,” he says.
“Unlucky,” says Finnan.
His face is so white, hot white, like a light under his skin, like an overexposed film. Powdery moondust, silvered pearl and sheen. No irises to speak of in his eyes, just big black pupils in the whites, open and honest—honest, old friend. Finnan doesn't trust him for a second.
“You know, old friend,” says the Cold Man, “I didn't even know this place was here. Worn did you find it, tucked away in this corner?”
Finnan shrugs.
“Once I've been somewhere, I never forget how to get back there.
” “Thought you said this was your first visit to Sante Manite?”
“But I'm an old friend,’ old friend. Don't you remember me?”
“Well, you know, I truly am sorry, but I clean forgot your name.”
“Finnan.”
“Finnan,” the Cold Man repeats. “Finnan…”
“That's right.”
“So remind me, old friend,” says the barker, “where was it that we met?”
“Prague, maybe? Weren't you there at the Dissolution of Prague?”
“Only saw it on the news. You were there, then? What was it like?”
The barker looks interested, but it's all about getting leverage, trying to figure Finnan out. They may not be unkin, these Cold Men, but they play the same game, all ambiguities and avoidance. If information is power, their communication is a light skirmish. Finnan shakes his head.
“Sure and I couldn't say,” he smiles. “I wasn't there, old friend.”
High Stakes
He flips a card over, a Jack of Swords, places it down over the Queen of Hearts. A little shift in the suits, so it is. So it's started now. The next card is a Page of Chalices, followed by the Ace of Suns—old Shamash Seamus, to be sure—then Knight of Moons and Don of Bones.
The barker shuffles his chair a little forward and a floorboard creaks.
“Wood sounds rotten, old friend,” he says. “You think it's safe to sit here?”
“Sure and the place is just a bit neglected. Ye could fix it up real easy.”
“Hardly worth the trouble.”
“Beer behind the bar, a fan up on the ceiling … ye've got a lot of hot and thirsty people out there looking for refreshment.”
“We offer more of a… spiritual refreshment, old friend.”
“Finnan.”
“Finnan. Anyway, we cater to other kinds of tastes, as you see.”
Finnan nods. The mescaline is laying its feathered arms around him, sending a tickling shudder down his spine. He's not sure how long it is since he dropped the peyote but he's on the slow rise to the peak now. He can feel it.
“So, tell me, old friend… Finnan, I mean… what is it that a man like you is looking for in a place like this? You're not our usual kind of customer.”
“No? In what way?”
“It's hard to say.”
Finnan studies the veins under the skin of his forearm, the green pulse of life, a flow of oxidized copper. He tenses the sinews that come down from the wrist, leans back in the chair and stretches lazily, relishing the feel of being embodied, the real sensual trip you get from good peyote.
“What's your name?” he says. “And what's your game?”
“Harker. What do you mean game’?”
Harker the barker. Nice.
“Game,” says Seamus casually.
He gathers up the pack of cards.
“Poker? Rummy? Blackjack? You know.”
“Ah… right,” says Harker. “I don't really play.”
“Everyone says that,” says Seamus. “But everyone plays.” “Gambling's illegal in this state.”
Finnan riffles the cards, shuffles them. He puts the pack down, to raise his beer bottle. He winks.
“Sure and I don't gamble in any other state,” he says. “Besides, who says we're playing for money?”
“What are we playing for, then, old friend?”
Finnan deals three cards to himself, faceup, the Ace of Suns and the Queen of Hearts again, followed by a Joker.
“Information,” he says.
Harker takes a sip from his beer, places the bottle on the table.
“High stakes,” he says.
“Sure and what other kind of stakes are worth playing for?”
Finnan deals him three cards, facedown, from the bottom of the pack. Two Jacks for this joker—a pair of cowboys, a pair of hooks—and the third card the unspoken secret that the two of them are dancing around. The Queen of Books.
“Ye don't mind playing with the Joker, do ye?” he says. “Only there's one card missing from the deck and I've been looking all over for the fooker, but I'll be fooked if I know where it's gone.”
“Fair enough,” says Harker. “What will we be playing?”
Finnan takes a swig from his beer, swallows, draws a Camel out of the pack and puts it in the corner of his mouth. He picks up the Zippo. Chunk, snik—fsssh— chuk. Takes a draw.
“The name of the game,” he says, “is Find the Lady.”
three
THE STRANGER IN THE MIRROR
A WICKED SIDE
18th March. Tamuz and I had coffee in the kasbah late last night, in a tiny hostelry down one of the many alleyways in the Ink Merchants Quarter, a dark brew flavoured with cardamom and rosewater and other sweet, unnamable spices. The tastes of the East are often pungent, acrid, exotic, but, Anna, how they stimulate the palate in a most pleasurable way. Even the tobacco in the hookahs offered by the wandering kifim is mixed with molasses and anise, I think, giving it a rich licorice quality like some heady mixture of tar and absinthe.
I am a little ashamed of myself, Anna. I'm afraid to say that coffee and tobacco weren't all we had. I thought I might loosen his lips, you see.
Smoke trails in wisps up from Tamuz's mouth—open just a little, the bottom lip jutting out in a half pout—until he leans his head back and exhales a thick cloud, heavy-scented with hashish. He grins.
“You were expecting me to cough, Carter Bey?”
Carter laughs.
“I can see you're a lot more used to this than I.”
Tamuz gives a shrug almost French in its loucheness, not so much Idon'thnow as well, what can I say.
“My sister,” he says, “she does not like for me to smoke the hashish. But the Eyn, he is here many nights, and he say to me, Tamuz, what your sister does not know cannot make her angry. The Eyn has a wicked side. But we all have a wicked side, Carter Bey, no?”
A look of mischief on his face, he nods at Carter, leans over the table to hand him the mouthpiece of the pipe.
“Even you have a wicked side, I think,” he says. “You… English captain with stiff upper lip, but you like the hashish.”
Carter takes a few quick sharp puffs, holds the smoke in his mouth like smoke from a cigar, not inhaling too deeply.
“Your Eyn sounds like something of a rogue, Tamuz,” he says. “What else does he say?”
We talked late into the night and I learned much about von Strann that Samuel's letters covered only briefly—how he moved to this area for health reasons, his photography little more than a hobby before the purges of the aristocracy back home cut off his family's support, forced him to use his new skill as a means to make ends meet. Incredibly, according to the boy, many of the man's clients are honestly interested in the man's works as classical studies of the male form. So they profess, at least. I dare say a few might be, but I find it a little hard to believe.
The boy seems quite at home with von Strann's unhealthy interests, though I am less sure now exactly what relationship these two have. In many of the photographs that adorn the walls of the Baron's studio, I've noticed, Tamuz features as the model, and I had rather assumed there was some sort of—to be frank— Uranian affair between the two, but last night something he said last night rather surprised me.
“Oh, yes, Carter Bey.”
Tamuz lands on the cot with a thump and rol
ls back, hands behind his head. Carter steadies himself against the sink, splashes a little more water on his face before turning the tap off, raking his fingers through his hair to dry them. He has no idea what time it is, but it's late. They must have been talking for hours. Well… Tamuz has been, at least, chattering Carter's ear off.
“Oh, yes,” says Tamuz, “the Eyn say to me, Tamuz, if that is what they want, who am I to judge them? Each to his own. But I think sometimes he is more like you.”
Tamuz sits up, crossing his arms, a mock frown furling his brows.
“A little more sad and less salacious, Tamuz. You're not a satyr, Tamuz”—he swings his legs off the bed—”and on and on he go. Why your people all so serious, Carter Bey?”
But he doesn't pause for an answer, just rattles on, laughing at the ridiculous repression of these Europeans, when—
“My people, Carter Bey, we see no shame in the skin. You and me, Carter Bey, we could lie together, my skin to your skin, and there is no shame.”
“I really don't think—”
“But this is shameful thing for you, no? But we all have our wicked side and— I am sorry, Carter Bey. I talk too much tonight, I think. I see you are tired from the hashish, no? And the raki. With me it is the coffee make me like this, make me talk. But I am tiring you.”
“The day is rather catching up with me,” says Carter.
Tamuz's eyes shine in the lamplight as Carter unbuttons his shirt and peels it off. There was a time he would have been uncomfortable, the way the boy watches him, but ten years in the army rather teaches one not to be such a bloody girl. And frankly he's not sure he bloody cares. That's the good thing about raki and hashish.
“The Eyn, he would like to photograph you, I think. I think someone would pay much for the picture. I think…”
Carter pinches the bridge of his nose, rubs his eyes. Tamuz's eyes glint dark in a gaze unbroken even by a blink, a single bat of lashes. He stands up.
“I think I have talked enough for tonight, eh, Carter Bey?”
THE IDEAL OF THE EPHEBE
There is one photograph taken by von Strann in which his ambiguous attitude to the military ideal is most evident. In the faded sepia tones of the albumen print we see a soldier, young and dashing, in the uniform of a British Army officer—a uniquely modern image in von Strann's oeuvre—standing over a supine Arab youth. It has long been the fancy among historians that the subject of this photograph is none other than the elusive Captain Carter, although this has recently been cast into doubt (Bildunger, 1989). What we can say for sure is that there is in the image a duality of austere nobility and brutal grandeur which is redolent of the neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David, and which is unique to this example of von Strann's work. There seems a complex set of ideas at play here. Are we to read a reference to the classical values of the ancient Greek hero, the young warrior, the ideal of the ephebe”? Or to the martial honor of the Prussian nobility of von Strann's traditional upbringing, outcast as he was from it? Or to the very Futurist militarism that had destroyed that old order?
The composition references Sir Joshua Montague's Achilles Mourning Patro-clus, but where Montague's Achilles holds his sword up to the sky, swearing vengeance, von Strann's soldier holds his with its point at a still-living Patro-clus's throat. And with the angle of the warrior's head turning his face away from the viewer—dehumanizing him, rendering him unknown and unknowable—he seems not just seductively fetishized but also alarmingly lethal.
——
Carter mashes his lips against Tamuz's, fingers of one hand sifting through the boy's hair, with the other on his hip, just touching lightly, stroking it curiously, like a burn half healed but too tender not to touch. He doesn't grab, doesn't grasp, just holds with his lips and kisses gently with his fingertips until he feels the arms wrappling him down to the bed and then the two of them are skin against skin, a grip switching from his shoulder to his biceps, soft inner thigh pressing his waist, the weight of Tamuz on him, shifting, sliding unsheathed cock in the squeeze of groin against his stomach, Carter's own cock solid in the air. Straddled, all he can do is pull Tamuz tight into the lock of his arms with a handful of buttock and an arm around his waist. Soft words of a strange language whisper in his ear as the boy slides forward and pulls out of his grasp, sits up, spits in his hand and reaches back behind him to slick Carter's cock with his saliva, slick as it is already with desire. Carter pushes up into the grip, but as Tamuz shuffles back, raising himself to guide Carter's cock into place, Carter's hands are on the boy's hips to stop him.
“No.”
Inextricable from the romance of the warrior as an unattainable object of an idealistic, idealizing desire, von Strann's photograph also speaks to us of the Nights of Terror, the pogroms and concentration camps that were the New Reich. Beneath the intense homoeroticism of the image is an equally intense fear of those men who had risen to power during the revolution by their shameless savagery, latching on to Futurism as an excuse to exercise their cold and callous self-interest. Somewhere in there, perhaps, is a suggestion of Futurism itself, the aesthetics of the mechanistic, the “ethics of the automaton” as Churchill famously described it. But if the sword is surrogate phallus and this warrior dominant over his prostrate victim is to be read as a sexual conqueror, if, as F. B. Herbert said, every murder is a rape, then might we also read the reverse into this image?
Bildunger traces the many ways in which this photograph represents von Strann's comment on the sexuality of politics, but might it not also be considered a comment on the politics of sexuality, on the relationship of dominance and submission, active and passive, soldier and victim, man and youth? Perhaps it is not just the sword that represents the phallus, von Strann seems to be saying, but the phallus that represents the sword.
Carter thinks of a French sailor standing outside a Bordeaux brothel who, like him, had entered the establishment only half an hour earlier, both of them awkwardly drunk and recognizing why neither had stayed inside with his comrades. A waiter in a London club who'd held his eyes with a gaze of invitation with every drink he laid down on the table. An actor in a hotel in Cairo who'd been such a swish that Carter had regretted it instantly, but who'd won him with a recitation from A Midsummer Night's Dream, the epilogue, delivered with a port in one hand and a flourish of the other—Give me your hands, if we he friends. All of them brave enough to make a move while Carter simply stood, unable to strike, unwilling to flee. And now Tamuz.
He feels the hand on his waist tighten its grip, the wet fingers that part his buttocks, and the gentle pressure for entry that makes him arch his back, push his cock into the rumpling of bedclothes. The arm his head rests on—he gazes off to one side, toward the camera and the dark room, seeing Tamuz only as a shifting shape over his shoulder, in the periphery of his vision—twitches, tenses, and then the boy's mouth is at his ear again, a breath of air, a word, a brush of hair against the back of his neck, and he relaxes into a shudder at this tickling of him open, relaxes into the furl of linen under him and opens up, closes his eyes and opens up to Tamuz's fingers and the cock squeezing in a little way, not far enough for pain yet and not far enough for pleasure, not until he opens up fully, trusting, surrendering to trust, to faith, surrendering to this beautiful youth inside him; and then the cock is sliding in, penetrating to the exquisite point of pain and pleasure, to the groan, like only a few before it, God how he hated them and loved them all.
And now Tamuz.
A Glint of Sun on Flashing Wings
“Bastards,” says Carter.
Tamuz looks up from his lunch, some Lebanese porridge based on lentils, not unlike hummus or baba ghanouj but more aromatic, more subtle, almost Siamese in its delicacy. Carter tears off a lump of unleavened bread and dips it into the bowl in front of him.
“I have to trace these two scoundrels to their—”
Tamuz cocks his head, darts his eyes to the side, and Carter glances out through the open restaurant window into the
square around the hulking block of the Beth Ashtart. A group of Turkish militia stand within earshot, gathered around a local who shrugs, points vaguely in the direction of the restaurant. Carter nods, bites into the bread. His journal lies open on the table, the latest entry just notes from his conversations with the storekeepers.
Two “foreigners” (Samuel's assailants?) seen talking with Turkish militia. And dark-haired European. Been around a day or two. Askingfor English captain. Russian accentCf)
He closes the journal over, slips it back into his satchel and slides the satchel under the table.
Bastards, he thinks. He was getting somewhere.
“Are we going somewhere, Jack?”
Carter sparks the lighter, sucks the cigarette into life. He looks at Tamuz, his oh-so-innocent native guide standing there with an ancient temple to a whore goddess at his back—the Beth Ashtart, the House of Ashtaroth.
“I'm paying a little return visit, Tamuz, to an antiquities shop I came across the other day. Curious to see if you recognize it. This way.”
“Those streets are not safe. Bad part of town.”
Carter smiles. There's few streets in this part of the city that aren't filled with the jabber of business and theft but he's got little to fear from that here, he thinks. The batlike shape of an ornithopter passes overhead—a glint of sun on flashing wings, a glint of war. Bloody Prussian engineering, he thinks. Bloody Prussians, bloody Russians and bloody—
