New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  Now Encausse looked surprised.

  “It could, yes,” he said, “technically speaking, though only until the effect wore off. But I must admit I’ve never thought of this. Is this what you were referring to when you said that the crown behaved in mysterious ways?”

  Gabriel was improvising. “Positively,” he said. “I must confess: I put our Master’s crown on my head, and … I really felt I was dying.”

  “Can you describe that?” Encausse inquired, leaning across his desk with a sparkling glint in his eyes.

  “Well … My body just disappeared, and I could see my whole life revolve around me, and then I realized that it wasn’t mine,” Gabriel elaborated from his memories of the Transpherence he had undergone.

  “This is fascinating,” Encausse said, his head bobbing in approbation. “Your master probably wanted to record some message for you to experience after his death. Maybe he put his most cherished memories in there. But the crown may also have recorded the very instant of his death, or the minutes that followed, when his astral self fought to leave his earthly body. I must admit, such possibilities never occurred to me. You see, what I call neuric forces I could just as well call vital fluid. I could call them life itself. Nothing could possibly be more powerful than this. I would like very much to examine this particular crown more closely, if you don’t mind. May I take it with me?”

  Brentford and Gabriel exchanged a quick look. “We’re sorry,” Gabriel said while Brentford quickly put the crown back in the bag, “but it’s a personal legacy that has been entrusted to us. It was stipulated by the deceased in his will that we should not separate from it.”

  Encausse angered quickly. “If this how you are going to thank me for my time …”

  “Our gratitude will be the greater for your understanding,” Brentford countered. “We promise to keep you abreast of any further developments. Thank you very much, Doctor.”

  “I have in my turn one question, gentlemen,” Encausse boomed as they got to the door.

  “Certainly, Doctor,” Gabriel said.

  Their interlocutor sounded unpleasantly suspicious, as he said, “You are, you say, from a Canadian lodge called Polaris. Would that be near the Arctic Circle?”

  Brentford and Gabriel looked at each other. Uh, thought one; oh, thought the other. “Sixty degrees north. The northernmost lodge in the world,” Gabriel boasted.

  “Would you by any chance have heard of any Palladian influence in your chapter?”

  “Palladian influence? What would that be?” Brentford asked, sincerely puzzled.

  “Never mind. I suppose that Fort Smith is far removed from the current concerns of European lodges. I envy you. There has been a lot of talk lately about a secret location in the Arctic where Palladian or Luciferian so-called Masons printed antichurch pamphlets. You have never heard of it, of course?”

  “Never before,” Brentford insisted.

  “That is what I thought. Goodbye, gentlemen,” Encausse said, with a knowing smile that Brentford read as contemptuous and Gabriel as malignant.

  Once outside, back on the quays, Brentford took a deep breath, which felt like a razor blade to his lungs. The day was evaporating and the worn beige colour of Paris, which made it look like a seashell, now turned a severe stony grey. The mist was ascending around the dusky houses, and they began to look like memories.

  “I thought that would never end,” Brentford said. “By the way, that was a brilliant lie you came up with about how we got the crown.”

  “It wasn’t a lie. It was a fiction. We just got more truth out of it than we first put in.”

  “It made me think of something I’d never thought of before. As Jean-Klein told us, the crown that de Lanternois wore would be a fairly recent invention here. Then there’s the notion that it bears a message about a Paris smothered under snow, which is, indeed, the way things are now … And then your mention of our supposed Arctic location, precisely where de Lanternois was found with the crown, elicited a strong interest from Encausse … Are you starting to see a pattern?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “I’m not that crazy,” he said.

  II

  The Phantom Members’ Club

  Brentford still hadn’t unraveled all the implications when he arrived at the hotel—alone, since Gabriel had decided he’d rather spend the evening walking around—and found the colony in turmoil, thanks to an accident that took him some time to piece together.

  “This Inuk was with the Colonel,” Tuluk explained in his room, trying hard to retain his seriousness. There were clothes all over the floor, and all kinds of strange Inuit objects, and the scene added powerfully to Brentford’s ongoing sense of chaos.

  “We talk about New Venice in your room,” Tuluk explained, his barely contained smile threatening to split his face. “Miss Lilian knocks the door. She looks for you. The Colonel, he says, like this: ‘What you need Brentford for?’ he says, and the Colonel, he puts out his tongue, a very long tongue. He says like this, ‘I can still pleasure a lady.’ And then Miss Lilian she is very angry, very angry. She …” Tuluk made a wide sweep with his hand.

  “Slapped him?” Brentford asked.

  “Yes. She slaps him on the face. And she says, ‘That pleasured me, thank you very much.’ ”

  It certainly sounded like her. Brentford could almost hear her voice.

  “How did the Colonel react?”

  “Nothing. The Colonel says nothing. This Inuk is afraid that she breaks something in him. Miss Lilian, she walks away. She slaps the door …”

  “Slams, you mean?”

  “Yes. Slams. Very strong. Like a crazy bear woman.”

  “The Colonel is all right?”

  “The Colonel, he is all red. Very not happy. But this Inuk, he looks in the box, and he finds it is all good.”

  Tears of suppressed laughter were now streaming from the corners of his eyes.

  But although he would have liked to join in the chorus, Brentford felt it was his duty to intervene.

  “How are you, Colonel?” Brentford asked.

  The Colonel, “seated” on the bedside, rolled his eyebrows so forcefully that Brentford deciphered it as, “If I had shoulders, I’d shrug.”

  “Tuluk told me about the the incident with Lilian,” Brentford persisted in his best neutral voice.

  The Colonel answered nothing, but stared ahead, as if watching an enemy line bristle on the horizon. “Never complain, never explain,” his whole demeanour insisted.

  “I’m sorry it happened,” Brentford continued.

  The Colonel emitted a clicking sound and heaved a rubbery sigh that Brentford thought painful to hear. “You’re a man and a decent chap, Orsini,” he said. “Maybe we can talk about these things, you know, between men.”

  “That’s what I’m here for, Colonel.”

  The Colonel remained silent for a while, then harrumphed. “Well, I wouldn’t wish anyone to be in my place, not for a second, old son. But you have to understand that even if I don’t look like one, I am still a man, and men will be men. I may not have much in the way of body or appendages, but as long as there is a brain up there, I have sensations, and a rather awful lot of them, that I have few occasions and little means to satisfy.”

  “I understand.” Brentford said. “Phantom, er, members.”

  “That’s it, old son, there are but phantom members in my club.” This was followed by a creaky attempt at laughter that Brentford’s musical ear was not especially eager to hear again.

  “Is there any way I can help?”

  The Colonel thought for a while. “Well. Hmm … Paris is renowned for certain houses, as you know, and I wondered if one of you could take me to one.”

  Brentford let the words sink in. If there were anyplace in the whole wide world where a head mounted on gears would have a chance to get laid, surely it had to be Paris. But still …

  “Colonel, please understand,” he began cautiously, “I have nothing against this in principle and I am sure
that Parisian professionals are very open-minded. But given our situation, it would be unwise, to say the least, to have you out womanizing around town. I do not doubt that you would be a success in your own way. But, by nature, prostitutes are linked to policemen, and I would not want one to snitch on you. I truly do not wish to find myself having to explain why I happen to be carrying a talking head in a Gladstone bag around to brothels under a false identity.”

  The Colonel took it in, straightening what remained of his neck. “Thank you for trying to help,” he said curtly. “If you’d be kind enough to tell Tuluk that I’m hungry.”

  During the entire, harrowing trip that had taken them to Paris, Brentford had avoided Lilian as much as someone can be avoided in cramped compartments and dollhouse-sized cabins. Over that time they had exchanged only a few, noncommittal words, nothing that amounted to a real conversation. When they talked, it was indirectly, mostly through Lilian’s merciless remarks on men, politics, or any other topic that could ricochet and hit Brentford in the eye. But now it was time for an actual dialogue.

  Lilian was in her room getting ready for the evening, brushing her blond hair in front of the cheval glass, her taut body sheathed in a cream silk dress that outlined angles and curves that Brentford tried simultaneously to imagine and forget, being successful at neither. Had he been a head mounted on a box of clockwork gears, he couldn’t have felt more inadequate than he did now.

  “You could have killed the Colonel,” he told her.

  “Don’t tell me that thingummy is alive,” she replied savagely.

  “It seems he is still too alive for you.”

  Lilian turned towards him, her eyes hard as gems. “What was I supposed to do, the Dance of the Seven Veils? His head is already on a plate anyway.”

  “Certainly not. I just wish that we all could keep up a minimal solidarity. Things are complicated enough as they are, without us going around slapping each other.”

  “Complicated, really? Who got us into this mire, Mr. Know-it-all? Why don’t you go and get Orsini?”

  “Come on, Lilian … It’s not as though I’m not in this too. I’m truly sorry I brought you here, and now, I promise, I’m doing my best to get us home. Though it may seem impossible …”

  “It does, indeed,” Lilian interrupted, “and I’ll bet it’s actually even more difficult than that …”

  For a moment Brentford thought she might be angry not only at the whole maddening situation, but also at his incapacity to please her. But that was probably wishful thinking.

  “Okay, Lilian. Forgive me. Please,” he said with a sigh.

  “I promise I’ll forgive you when we’re home, Stinky.”

  Dismissing him, she turned back towards her mirror, revealing a wedge of typical New Venetian pallor. It had always been Brentford’s dream to spend the night drawing on it. He waited a few seconds for the storm to pass.

  “How’s your back?” he asked hesitantly.

  “Not too bad, judging by the way you’re looking at it,” she said. “Once you’ve rolled your tongue back into your mouth, perhaps you could help me by fastening my necklace.”

  “You won’t consider it bad form if I keep my mittens on?” It had been one of his best private jokes, but she ignored it.

  “Are you planning to go out tonight?” he eventually asked, straining for the proper note of small talk, while his hands trembled slightly as he took the necklace from her nonchalant hand.

  Goddamn fingers. Goddamn lock.

  “Why not?” she asked him. “As long as we’re stuck here, we might as well enjoy it a little. I’m going to a séance, led by the medium we met yesterday at the hospital. Do you want to come along? Maybe she’ll tip us off about what the future holds in store.”

  “I’ve had my share of abracadabra today, thank you. Are you going with Thomas?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re jealous of that oaf? You know I don’t have that thing for uniforms women are supposed to have.”

  “That’s why you’re always hanging out with him?”

  “More like he’s always hanging on to me. And at least he’s not the jealous type. Unlike with you, when he’s talking nonsense, I can easily entertain myself with my own thoughts. I find it very relaxing.”

  “So, he’s joining you?”

  “If he hasn’t forgotten. He is a bit of a scatterbrain, isn’t he?”

  “I met him at La Salpêtrière this morning. Trying to find his way to the right end of a morphine syringe, I suspect.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. Just pay attention to him. If you please.”

  “Do I really have to be responsible for all your filthy friends’ vices? What a lovely mission. I’m not your baby brother’s keeper, you know.”

  “Then ask the spirits for a solution,” Brentford tried to joke.

  “Only if they’re high spirits, Brenty boy. Those are the only ones I’m interested in tonight.”

  III

  The Spiritype

  “How’s your arm coming along this evening?” Lilian asked Thomas, as they tucked themselves into a cab, a plaid on their knees and their feet on a warm brick.

  Thomas flexed his biceps as if he wanted Lilian to feel them. What she didn’t ask was who had scribbled a heart onto his plaster. “The cast itches a bit, but I guess I’m all right.” He chuckled.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to stop here for a little refreshment?” she inquired, noting that they were trotting past the Salpêtrière.

  Thomas blushed and hemmed. “No, thank you. I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. So now be a good boy and stop sniffing all the time. It gets on a lady’s nerves.”

  Thomas overplayed his difficulty in finding a handkerchief and blew his nose with a flourish that would have made trumpeter Landfrey green with jealousy.

  “You’re quite the hylic type, aren’t you?”

  “The what?”

  “Nothing, darling.”

  They turned and looked out their individual windows, staring into the night in silence as the cab crossed the Austerlitz bridge under a drizzle of snow. On the right, the black shape of Notre-Dame crouched on its arches, like a malevolent spider. On the left, the icy Seine was a light-grey ribbon of rubble, meandering among ranges of snow-smothered sand heaps until it reached a backdrop of night sky that looked solid and thick as a wall. They trotted slowly towards the Place de La Bastille, passing along the Arsenal harbour, where barges wintered in the ice, some of them frozen aslant like wrecked ships, until suddenly Thomas thought he recognized the New Venice pennant on the mast of a small yacht. But even as he twisted in vain to catch sight of it again, it came to him that this was impossible. Still, he could have sworn … He didn’t mention it to Lilian, who, he thought, had yet to get over her brush with the Colonel, or even more likely was lost in her own reveries about home.

  A tall column rose at the centre of the Place, a golden genius on its top that looked like the dying flame of a wax candle. The cab, turning right into the rue de Charenton, was confronted by a maelstrom of carriages that were circling the famous square—for no other reason, Lilian suspected, than that people wanted to get high on noise and light. Parisians, evidently, had decided to behave as if their situation was normal and under control. And why not? After all, that was the way New Venice had been built—or would be built, she corrected herself.

  The drivers exchanged Homeric insults, which were more like ritual spells for fluidifying traffic. The cab finally bounced free, moving eastward through streets that grew more and more featureless. It was as if the city was, mile after mile, simply losing interest in itself. The rue Montgallet, where they were headed, started under a railway arch and, as if disheartened by such modest beginnings, continued on uninspired between sad houses and farmyards. Number 42 was near its end.

  Just as they arrived, Lilian saw a carriage stop in front of the house and a man in a cape and top hat step down from it. They joined hi
m at the door, where a griffin served as a knocker. The man held it in his large gloved hand, looking at it intensely instead of banging it. He was over six feet tall, dapper but built like a heavyweight boxer, and the sparse gaslight revealed a long, haughty, angular face with strongly marked eye sockets but no brows to speak of, a nose both long and broad, and a jutting chin. He had, in short, the look of an Easter Island head carved in ivory. That, coupled with the slightly contemptuous pout of his thin lips, gave an overall impression that would have been threatening had it not been for his playful eyes, whose irises seemed to be speckled with gold dust.

  He let go of the knocker to tip his hat.

  “I suppose,” he said, with an accent that deserved an O.B.E. for sheer, unflagging Britishness, “that we are going to the same event. Allow me to introduce myself. Lyonel Owain Savnock, at your service. You can call me Milord, if you prefer.”

  Thomas and Lilian prudently introduced themselves.

  “I am truly enchanted,” Savnock said with complete indifference. He turned abruptly to Thomas. “Excuse my mentioning it, sir, but this is a uniform I do not know.”

  “Royal Military College of Canada, Milord. The Navy,” Thomas said, reciting his lesson.

  “Oh. I see. Fairly recent institution, Officer Cadet Smith. Isn’t that the nickname you cadets are given?”

  Thomas looked at him and then at Lilian, puzzled and embarrassed, but Savnock, after a sidelong smile, turned back to the griffin head and gave the door a few slow, strong, solemn knocks.

  A maid admitted them, and with a lamp in her hand preceded them up the winding stairs without speaking a word.

  The apartment was on the third floor. The maid led them along a cluttered maze of narrow corridors until eventually they came to a small red salon, where she asked them to take a seat.

  Morgane Roth soon joined them, wearing a black dress and a tight little black ribbon around her neck. Lilian could now observe her more closely than she had been able to so far: she was a dark, sinuous beauty in her thinnish thirties, with maliciously glinting black eyes that belied her world-weary smile.