New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “And please close my lid. There are ladies in the room.”

  Once Tuluk had gone, the Colonel harrumphed.

  “Miss Lake. I owe you an apology for my conduct a few nights ago. I want you to know that it won’t happen again,” he recited in his grumpy phonographic voice.

  “That it won’t happen again, I can guarantee you,” Lilian said. “Unless you wish me to unscrew your head and use it to play skittles.”

  The Colonel’s eyes rolled in their orbits and for a moment Lilian had the feeling that his tremulous moustache was going to jump at her throat like a rabid ferret. He blushed a deep burgundy and finally exhaled a whining sigh, the way a pierced balloon would.

  “I stand corrected,” he growled. “Well, maybe not stand …”

  “Very well. Now, let’s forget all about it,” Lilian said. She walked up to the Colonel and, delicately, put a kiss on his blushing forehead. She then lifted Pirouette in order for her to perform a more slobbery version of the same, which delighted him.

  “Are you taking her away?” he inquired worriedly, as they left the room hand in hand.

  “Just to see her mother. I’ll be back.”

  “Be careful, you two,” the Colonel muttered, wondering if heartache could ever be said to apply in his case.

  In spite of the bad weather, Les Halles was thriving that morning, with rows and rows of women lining the pavements to sell dismal vegetables and fruits to the crowds thronging the streets surrounding the glass pavilions. The women’s cries rang through the cold air as if it were an aviary, and when carts full of wicker baskets tried to pass through it got so crowded that Lilian was afraid she might lose Pirouette in the press. She herself got lost for a moment in angry contemplation of a man beating a duck with a stick as if the creature were a pillow.

  “A bombeur,” Pirouette explained. “It makes the ducks look fatter.”

  Lilian could feel Pirouette’s little fist gripping her hand; the closer they got to the rue Pirouette, the stronger the grip.

  “Listen,” Lilian said, kneeling beside her as they drew near her mother’s place. “I’ll go with you to her door and give her some money. She will be pleased to see you, I am sure. If anything bad happens, you know where to find us.” The sulky Pirouette withdrew her cheek from Lilian’s tentative lips, a dejected pout on her face. “Promise you’ll come back, if it goes wrong, all right?” Lilian said in a softer voice.

  “How touching,” said a voice above them that sounded very male and, from Lilian’s perspective, had every reason to do so. She quickly got up.

  “Your mother will be delighted to see you, Pirouette,” the man went on. “She’s been polishing the silverware in your honour. Especially that ladle.”

  Lilian knew this must be Swell-in-the-Sack. He was handsome indeed, with his black curly hair and deep black eyes, but he looked disheveled, as if he had been up all night. He was probably on his way to bed now, and Lilian had no desire to detain him.

  “Excuse us,” she said, as she tried to move past him to the door.

  He put his arm across their way, his long hand on the doorjamb.

  “Saturnin Loupart,” he said. He spoke softly, but Lilian had smelled better breath. “Swell-in-the-Sack to the ladies. And you would be?”

  “A different kind of lady,” Lilian said curtly.

  “Looking for a job in the Quarter? It’s rather lively, and pretty girls haven’t the time to get bored.”

  “I’m bored already. Goodbye, Mr. Smelly Sacks, or whatever your name is.”

  She ducked and passed quickly under his arm. Still, Pirouette had time to smile suavely towards Saturnin, who winked his velvety eye in return.

  Two minutes later, he was in the upstairs room of the Ange Gabriel, facing a man whose disguise as an English tourist (checked jacket, deerstalker hat, red muttonchops, beer belly, glasses hung on a chain resting on his portly chest) was a little too obvious.

  “Come on, Tripotte,” Swell-in-the-Sack joked, “it’s not the Quat’z … arts masked ball yet.” He’d known the policeman since the days when he’d been a simple commissaire’s dog supervising public executions, and so felt he had some leeway with him.

  “Shhh! Don’t say my name here. It’s not exactly one of your cute nicknames.”

  “Leave my nickname alone. It’s not as if it’s something anyone could call you.”

  “Listen, my dear little Saturnin,” said Tripotte with a frown. “It’s lucky for you that I find that your abilities are better employed in the streets than behind bars—which, you will readily admit, is where you belong. Or perhaps on the teeter of the guillotine?”

  Swell-in-the-Sack sniggered. “I’ve been close enough to the guillotine as it is, thank you. As recently as last night, in fact.”

  “If you don’t want to get closer, you’d best show me a little more gratitude—a word I don’t suppose you know, but it means, roughly, that you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

  “I’m not sure who’s feeding whom, though.”

  “Nature, when well ordered, is a perfectly balanced cycle. You feed me, and then I’ll feed you. Let’s keep it as God in his infinite wisdom wanted it. Now”—he silenced the retort he saw coming from Swell-in-the-Sack with a wave of the hand—“did the little girl come back from the hotel?”

  “As it happens, just now. But it wasn’t your Canadian spy who returned her—it was a woman. Thirty-something, well groomed. She thinks herself brave, it seems.”

  “French?”

  “No, though she speaks it a little, with an English accent. Or would it be Canadian?”

  “That would be the one who has papers under the name of Lilian Lake. Don’t congratulate me; she’s the only woman of the lot. I wonder what Orsini needed this Pirouette for.”

  “I can think of plenty of things he would have needed her for. She’s quite a little devil, you know.”

  Another gesture from Tripotte signalled his disappointment.

  “He’s not the type. The people at the hotel would have told me. I told them to watch him closely, but nothing unseemly happened. No, there’s something to this that I don’t understand …”

  Swell-in-the-Sack smirked. “It’s called kindness—a word I don’t suppose you know, but roughly it means that these people should be easy to deal with.”

  III

  The Talk of the Hashisheens

  Coming back from Notre-Dame along the Boulevard St. Michel, Gabriel decided to call at Paul Vassily’s flat. It was barely two o’clock in the afternoon, but as a disheveled, red-eyed, grey-faced Vassily opened the door, Gabriel realized that his friend lived in a different time zone, one where the rosy fingers of Dawn pointed towards the bed, and the bird of Minerva took its flight around breakfast time.

  He excused himself profusely as Vassily introduced him into a red-draped living-room that remained totally impervious to the light of day. Here, thought Gabriel, was a man who re-created for himself the long perpetual winter of the Arctic wilderness. Thulé-des-Brumes, indeed. Vassily himself looked pretty rough, not unlike something at the tip of a ragpicker’s crook.

  “Just a cigarette and I’ll be ready,” he drawled.

  But as it turned out, it was a cigarette that involved long and meticulous preparation and, when he finally managed to ignite it, had the rich smell of the mysterious Orient.

  “Be my guest,” he said, offering the cigarette to Gabriel. “You are used to it, I suppose.”

  “I’d even say it is used to me,” Gabriel answered, snuggling back in the armchair. He took a puff, and quite instantaneously, freshness sparkled round his head and a luminous draught softly whistled through his bones. It also loosened his tongue.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Paul. I wondered if, among all your strange books, you would have a book … a book about … succubi.”

  Vassily nodded silently for a moment, then extended his hand with somnambulistic grace. Gabriel gave him back the cigarette. “Sorry, no,” Vassily finally answered throu
gh a wisp of sweet-scented smoke. “I wouldn’t have much use for one.” He looked at Gabriel. “Have you had a visit?”

  Gabriel hesitated. “Something very faint … forcing itself out of the darkness.”

  “Female?”

  “Thank God, yes.”

  More nods, and then: “Anything carnal?”

  “Perhaps. But I did not find it arousing, to say the least.”

  A long time elapsed in silence, and then Vassily said suddenly, “Gourmont.” He was pointing rather dramatically towards Gabriel, but then Gabriel realized he just wanted the cigarette back. He obliged him.

  “Gourmont. Rémy de Gourmont?” Gabriel asked.

  “You know him? I am supposed to go and see one of his new dramas tonight. ‘Silent Theatre’ he calls it. You will find it, I presume, more soothing than Mallarmé. And the location is wonderful.”

  “The location?”

  “The Théâtre-Salon, in Pigalle. It is said to be the smallest theatre in Paris. It’s a former chapel and a former painter’s studio. The theatre they run there now is for … the happy few. And you can be a part of it.”

  “I’d be delighted. And what is Gourmont’s relationship with succubi?”

  A pause expanded, stretched, and slithered slowly around the room.

  “With what?”

  “The succubi.”

  “The succubi?” Vassily exhaled a plume of smoke behind which he disappeared. “Ah! Gourmont is writing a book on them, I’ve heard. Not under his own name. But I’m sure it will be magnificently researched. His erudition is delicious, delicious …”

  “Delicious, that’s a word to snuggle in.”

  “To smuggle in. In the word—the word itself.”

  “It’s exactly that.” Gabriel nodded. “You feel how it slurps. How it drips.”

  “Dripple. Dripple. Dripple-icious. Drool precious.”

  “You can blunder with a blunderbuss but you can’t omni with an omnibus,” Gabriel noted.

  “Omni soit qui mal y bus.”

  “I just said that.”

  “No, you did …”

  Several hours passed in this manner. It was night by the time they tottered off to St. Sulpice to catch the brown omnibus to Pigalle.

  IV

  The Golden Dawn at Dusk

  Brentford would have done anything to shake off the weight of Blankbate’s death. Of course, Gabriel had been right when he tried to reassure him by observing that there should be another Blankbate still living in New Venice, but still … The tattvas were, he found, a diversion as good as any other while he waited for Lavis’s laboratory results, and, perhaps, he hoped, they were not a totally useless distraction at that. In spite of his efforts to jot down everything he could remember, his recall of New Venice hadn’t improved a whit since their arrival and had even, he suspected, deteriorated—the city had grown nebulous and patchy in his mind, as if he couldn’t convince himself of its existence or, more exactly, as if it couldn’t convince him of its existence.

  So, with de Couard’s recommendation neatly tucked in his breast pocket, Brentford took a ride to the western suburb of Auteuil, where the Ahathoor temple had recently been relocated. What he had gathered from the painter’s hesitant and confusing explanations the day before was that it had been founded a few years earlier by a certain McGregor Mathers as the Parisian branch of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The move to Paris, de Couard supposed, had been a way for Mathers to get closer to the Secret Chiefs who had given him original—and extremely important, as well as extremely valuable—Rosicrucian documents. There was also something fashionable to it, probably, Paris currently being not just the Capital of the Arts but the Capital of the Occult. Moreover, Mathers’s artist wife, Moina, was French—the sister of a young rising star of French philosophy, Henri Bergson, who, could perhaps, contribute some funds.

  In any event the neighbourhood looked rather affluent to Brentford. It was residential and uncannily calm, and the snow made it still more lifeless. He never ceased to wonder why people would live in such dead-quiet residential areas—it felt like walking through a necropolis. The address, 43 rue Ribeira, supposedly the entrance to the temple, had behind its green door a curious tunnel-like passage guarded by griffins. This, at least, had some allure. He noticed a small calling card on the doorstep and bent down to pick it up. It was entirely white on both sides. Not sure what to do with it, he put it in his pocket. Then, using a secret code that de Couard had given him, he banged on the door.

  It was opened by a slightly square-jawed woman with burning eyes under a shock of jet-black hair: Mrs. Mathers herself, a figure straight off a Tarot card, and not without a wild kind of beauty. There was no servant, Brentford realized: clearly, the Rosicrucian documents passed on by the Secret Chiefs had not included the philosopher’s stone and the recipe for gold.

  At first, the high priestess of Isis looked rather uncertain about the visitor: Brentford supposed that the occultists—always imagining themselves at the centre of a network of rival lodges and dark forces—tended to develop wariness as a second nature. On the other hand, the glint in her eyes made Brentford feel that she welcomed the visit … any visit, perhaps …

  Mr. Mathers, she informed him—or the Hierophant Ramses, as he apparently liked to be called—was indeed at home and would soon join them. A tall, taut man with a military moustache, he had a certain charisma, but also a definite nervousness, and a heavy whiff of whiskey on his breath. Brentford quickly got the sense that this was a man who had launched himself into an adventure that he now doubted increasingly that he could control. Not that he pitied him—Brentford didn’t understand people like Papus or this fellow, nor did he understand exactly what they were after.

  In any event, de Couard’s recommendation was well received, and the colourful couple promptly gave Brentford a guided tour of the Temple, during which he noticed with surprise that they referred to each other as Monsieur le Comte and Madame la Comtesse. He had to give them credit for living their personal myth to the full. As a New Venetian, this was something he respected.

  As it turned out, however, it was a short tour. As Brentford understood it, the entrance hall of the villa was the temple itself. This was a purely domestic operation, with the sort of grandiloquent cheapness he had observed at Papus’s lodge. The white-marble staircase at one end, probably used as tiers during ceremonies, was surrounded by homemade painted panels of Egyptian deities, among whom Brentford recognized only Osiris. On an altar that still smelled of heavy incense, beside a nosegay of lotus flowers, a little white flame sprang from a Tibetan lamp made of green stone.

  “It comes from Lhasa, the sacred city,” Mathers explained with great reverence. “Observe how its three sides are slightly uneven,” he added, nodding in appreciation, as if Brentford was supposed to understand the mystical meaning of the observation. There was more than a hint of the confidence man about the “Count,” but there was also a strange intensity of conviction, and it was hard to draw a line between the two—even, perhaps, Brentford surmised, for the man himself.

  “And this is a sistrum,” he went on, lifting another curious object off the altar: a metal loop on a handle, crossed by four bars hooked on both sides and fitted with rings. “It’s traditionally used for the worship of Ahathoor. The handle is the alpha and the other end is the omega. Each metal rod signifies an element, and the five jangling rings represent the action of the forces of nature as moved by the Divine spirit.”

  “Of course,” Brentford replied, as he watched with a benevolent irony this grown man waving his rattle. Brentford doubted that this was what the gods asked of men … but who knew, maybe the gods liked a good laugh.

  “So,” Mathers asked, after leading Brentford to a small, quiet drawing room. “What is it you are seeking?” De Couard’s recommendation, it seemed, had indeed helped him pass muster.

  “Enlightenment through inner vision,” Brentford said, honestly enough. “I was especially impressed by the tattvas
I saw at Monsieur de Couard’s.”

  “That is indeed part of our early initiation. But first you have to be given the grade of neophyte, which requires a course of studies. Although … are you by any chance an advanced student of the tradition?”

  “Not really, but I have had experiences of astral flight with an entity whom I have good reason to believe was the Helen of Simon Magus.”

  Which, roughly, was the truth. Still, Brentford was surprised that he’d managed to keep a straight face while telling it, although it always felt good to talk about Helen.

  And his candour seemed to have worked wonders, for Mathers looked deeply impressed.

  “Good reason?” he asked.

  “She said so herself.”

  Mathers pondered this and found it convincing.

  “If that’s the case, I’m not worried about your ability to master the mysteries of the grade. I’ll just give you a list of readings. You read hieroglyphs, don’t you?”

  “Oh. Only the big print,” Brentford said modestly, thinking it was a good line until he realized he had stolen it from someone. That goddamn Sson of a wizard. What could he be doing “now”?

  Mathers gave a short snort, which Brentford preferred to think was a laugh.

  “The Egyptian Book of the Dead, that’s the key for a start,” he said, handing the list to Brentford.

  Suddenly Brentford had a memory of riding towards the pyramid of Giza and almost falling from his horse, Gabriel laughing somewhere behind him. He had never been there, but he could feel it all, the muffled galloping, the sand in the eyes, being wrapped in a woolen heat. He kicked the vision shut and resurfaced. Not a second had lapsed.

  “Of course, if I can contribute in any way to the order …” he said, as he imagined the situation demanded.

  Mathers’s swarthy face brightened.

  “Come back to me when you’re ready, Mr. Orsini. We’ll have time to discuss these things later. Let not the material world get in the way of our real aims.”