New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  Thomas’s face darkened. After a moment, he said, “Let’s get to work.” Though it was his mission not to let anyone see the contents of the Gladstone bag, in such surroundings it didn’t seem to matter whether Blanche saw the Colonel or not. He opened the bag and lifted out the head of the Colonel.

  “Phew. About time,” the Colonel said. He took in his surroundings and his eyes fell on the gaping Blanche.

  “Good evening, Miss. A pleasure to meet you,” the Colonel said in his suavest voice, which was not so suave as he thought.

  “Good evening …” Blanche said waveringly, looking wide-eyed to Thomas for an explanation.

  “And you thought you could impress me with Major Yronwoode,” Thomas bragged good-naturedly. “This is a colonel.”

  The Colonel went on as if unawares. “Truly charming place, by the way,” he said. “So you’re going to fry my brain again, Tuluk? Is that any way to treat your own father?”

  Blanche looked at Thomas with an expression both quizzical and stunned, but he merely shrugged. “All right,” he said to Tuluk and the Colonel. “We’ll leave you fellows to yourselves. We’ll be back in a jiffy with Brentford and Gabriel. Keep your eyes open, Tuluk.”

  Blanche led Thomas off along another route, through more corridors of skulls and bones, towards a location she said was directly beneath her mother’s house.

  “Is that thing truly his father?” she finally asked.

  “So it seems.”

  It was a few moments before she observed, “They’re strange things, families, aren’t they? Even your own doesn’t always seem familiar.”

  After a few more twists and turns, they passed by a small fountain. “They called it Lethe,” Blanche said.

  “I’ve heard that name somewhere before,” Thomas commented.

  “The river of forgetfulness,” Blanche reminded him. “The dead who drink from it forget their past lives.”

  “Oh, really?” He kept to himself that he had, in effect, crossed it once before, and all that remained of his past life was an uncertain, shimmering city, as fleeting as a dream at dawn. He knew that he wasn’t ready to forget Blanche the way he’d forgotten New Venice. He was about to tell her so when she suddenly raised her hand.

  “Shh! I hear footsteps,” she hissed.

  They hid behind a pillar and, a few seconds later, saw Louis d’Ussonville pass before them in his evening jacket, an electric light shining from the tip of his cane and sending twisting shadows up the walls. He held a crumpled note in his hand.

  “What’s he doing here?” Thomas whispered, once he judged that her uncle was out of earshot.

  Blanche looked embarrassed, but shrugged her slight shoulders.

  “Some business of his own, I suppose. Let’s hope he doesn’t come across your friends. It’s too late to warn them now.”

  After following yet more corridors, they reached a narrow staircase. They were almost at the top when suddenly they heard the sound of echoing mayhem coming down the halls they’d left only moments before—shouts at first, and then the distinct and unmistakeable sound of a gunshot.

  They froze on the spot.

  “My uncle!” Blanche exclaimed, growing even paler.

  “I’ll go and see what’s going on,” said Thomas, squeezing her hand. “You go ahead and fetch Brentford. Hurry!”

  Blanche nodded and did her best to rush ahead, huffing so he could smell her breath through her veil as she passed him. It pained him to be separated from her, to watch her leave and to remain on his own in the Empire of Death, an inverted Orpheus, trapped in the Hades from which he wanted to set her free.

  III

  Ebony Whistles

  From the courtyard, Mme. de Bramentombes’s house looked like a shop window at Christmas, full of expensive clockwork toys. There were about sixty people inside, ladies in blooming dresses and men in severe dark tailcoats—“ebony whistles,” as they were called. White hair wavered everywhere like an opium field rippling in the breeze. It was not a particularly young crowd—old people, rich people, important people … even the former Regent-Doge of New Venice felt a twinge of backwater shyness as he was about to be introduced. He stored it next to the twinge that came from Lilian’s absence.

  “Whom may I announce?” a servant asked, with the air of someone about to sneeze.

  Gabriel d’Allier and Brentford Orsini introduced themselves, and it was d’Ussonville himself who came to greet them. “Oh! You two know each other?” the Sleeper asked genially, not bothering to hide his surprise. “Freight insurance and poetry walking hand in hand, so to speak. What a pleasant allegory,” he went on.

  “Just like Plutus and the Boy Charioteer,” Gabriel said, pleasantly enough, although Brentford understood that it was also meant to put the Sleeper off balance a little. Apparently Gabriel succeeded, for d’Ussonville gave only a short laugh in response, then said, “Consider this house yours. Maybe we can talk later, when it’s a little calmer around here. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have business to attend to.”

  As he left the room, the two New Venetians summoned faded memories of their future-past life as bright young things, and bravely entered the crowd. Like dutiful bees in a field of flowers, they went from cluster to cluster, hoping to make a little honey from the pollen of gossip. Whatever they could learn about the Loups des Bois de Justice or the de Lanternois affair might well prove crucially important. And Thomas had intimated that there might well be a lot to learn here.

  But no such luck.

  “D’Allier, d’Allier … Interesting name,” said a bald man with a moustache that would have been at home on a walrus, as he focussed his look on Gabriel through his eyeglass like a man studying a germ through a microscope. “I take it that you are of French descent?”

  “I would not dare claim so grand a privilege without being sure,” Gabriel said impatiently—he’d never been able to tell his French stock from his Irish, nor had he ever found a compelling reason to do so—“but only the autopsy will tell, I’m afraid.”

  The man, who had begun to bow in appreciation of the patriotic compliment, straightened up suddenly, a flash of worry crossing his face. Had he detected a lapse in taste? A whiff of insolence?

  “The autopsy? What do you mean?”

  “I mean that being French …” Gabriel kept on, feeling he was skidding a bit but already too far gone to help it, “… is in your marrow, I suppose, or written all over your internal organs. Does not ontogeny recapitulate nationality? Or does it? Could it be, God forbid, that nationality is only a superficial, insignificant layer of the onion that is your being? What would you think of the man who would say of himself ‘I am an overcoat’ just because he happened to be wearing one?”

  Flabbergasted, the man muttered, “I suppose I’d never thought of it that way.”

  “How very French,” Gabriel said with a smirk, raising his glass of Bourgueil. The man nodded, but then went suddenly empty-eyed, and, pretending to spot an acquaintance across the room, briskly walked off.

  Brentford was no luckier in his own first encounter, which was with a short young fellow who said his name was Marcel and who had a ridiculous moustache and rings around his eyes that would have made Gabriel green with envy. He was mostly boasting about a novel he had just started to write—Jean something—but from time to time through his tangled sentences glinted innuendos of a rather improper nature about the male servants of the house. Once or twice, it even seemed to Brentford that the little fellow was giving him the eye.

  He tried to steer the young man back to safer topics. “So what were you saying just now, about writing? That was interesting …”

  “Oh, nothing!” the young man blushed. “All these intellectual theories, they’re so useless in the end, don’t you think? It is all about memory, the memories of our past loves”—here he fluttered his eyelids—“and how they came to pass. Memories are what define our true selves, don’t you agree?”

  “Memories?” Brentford reflected. The l
ittle fellow didn’t realize how right he was, he thought. These past few days, the rare moments when Brentford had felt like himself were those when New Venice had appeared to him in dreams and sketchy visions; the moments when—thanks to a gesture, an arrangement of buildings and light, a fleeting emotion that recalled another—he had breathed again the air of his city. And he thought about how a sudden recollection of a scene with Lilian could pierce his heart as neatly as the first time … and perhaps even more deeply.

  “Involuntary memories, mostly, yes,” Brentford sighed. “They represent what we truly are. We have to be as true to them as to our own country.”

  The little writer gaped at Brentford, as if some fundamental truth had been revealed to him, and Brentford took advantage of his stupefaction to take leave with a bow.

  Meanwhile, no sooner had Gabriel extricated himself from the French patriot than he’d fallen prey to that most dreaded species of conversationalist: the heraldry fiend. He’d met plenty of them in New Venice, especially in the heyday of the arcticocracy craze, when, in homage to the Two Hundred and Ten builders of the city, the Rossinis had magically become Orsinis and the Daleys changed to d’Alliers, all allowed to drape themselves in imaginary peerages. His own father, in fact, had worked for the House of Honours and Heraldry, and so Gabriel had been raised among the glamorous grammar of coats-of-arms and the obscure boasts of mottos, and he saw both the fascination with them and the inherent futility of it all. And what gave them such allure? Did it come from some ingrained need to scrawl an instant history on the blank-page whiteness of the brand-new city? Or, on the contrary, did it have more to do with a desperate attempt by the founders to train the inhabitants of New Venice with this stuttering tendency to quote from the past? Or was it simply an aspect of the classic, fatal mitosis of Mankind: Us against Them?

  Whatever the reasons, Gabriel recognized in titles and nobiliary particles a childish dream of grandeur, the safety of a self-assertion grounded entirely on mimicry, the white-gloved but still slightly simian rituals of reciprocal back-scratching. As such, it was a lesson in the way mere words could redefine reality. But it still amazed him that grown-ups could take these magical noms de scène as seriously as they did.

  The heraldist, rubbing his long-nailed hands like a fastidious dung fly, swayed softly as he spoke, diffusing as he did so greasy whiffs from his long, unkempt, greyish hair.

  “I seem to remember there was a Gabriel d’Allier in the fifteenth century,” he insisted, as if to reassure his interlocutor that if his nobility were to be tested, it would not be found wanting. All the same, a sly, dreamy, condescending smile on his face suggested that the name was not exactly first-class.

  “You don’t say,” Gabriel replied. “Probably some puffed-up, illiterate peasant, as they all were to begin with. Or someone servile or brutal or self-serving enough to have earned a particle in the first place.”

  As the heraldist stopped oscillating to stare at him in bafflement, Gabriel excused himself and got lost in the crowd. They tired him out, these people who had no idea of their own lives beyond what could be classified and tagged, as if they were potted plants in a botanical garden.

  On the other side of the room, the conversation wafting towards Brentford stopped him in his tracks and he looked up to see, encircled by onlookers, a stocky man with an Alpine Hunter officer’s uniform and a Napoleon III moustache who held a telephone receiver in one hand while applying his other palm upon the ear of a fellow guest. The listener smiled in astonishment, not so much at the sound of music coming from the theatrophone network that linked the city opera house to private homes, than at the fact that he could hear the performance streaming right through a clammy hand.

  “It’s incredible!” the man with the hand clamped to his head declared.

  “Has it anything to do with effluvia?” one of the ladies looking on asked.

  “No, no,” the stocky man with the moustache explained. “It is our muscular fibres that carry the signal as well as any wire. Effluvia are a different thing.”

  “I’ve never understood them, anyway,” someone was saying, as Brentford approached.

  “There are two kinds of effluvia,” the Alpine Hunter explained with evident pleasure. “Static, which is like a fluff of little sparks that surrounds you, and dynamic, which is when the nervous fluid is projected outwards and is more like flames.”

  This man must be Colonel de Rochas, Brentford thought—the very man I planned to see and then never had the time.

  “So it’s the vibration rate of the projection that changes the colour?” some young polytechnician in uniform was asking.

  “No, no,” de Rochas responded. “The colour depends on the polarization. The right side of the body is usually blue, or violet, while the left side is red.”

  Odic force, effluvia—they were one and the same, then, or close enough, thought Brentford. It reassured him to know that the machine that had brought him here would be considered vaguely possible by these crazy Parisians. Somehow, he felt that this raised the odds of his getting home.

  “Ha! Colonel! I was looking for you …” a man just behind Brentford called out to de Rochas. The voice was familiar, and it was Brentford’s good luck to recognize it before he turned his face towards its owner: Dr. Gérard “Papus” Encausse.

  Brentford ducked his head and in a few strides was back at the side of the young writer with the circles around his eyes. Brentford took him by the arm. “I’m sorry—what was your name again?—Marcel?—you were telling me about your memories …?”

  While the unflappable young fellow spooled off his silky sentences as if they’d never been interrupted, Brentford observed Papus and de Rochas from the corner of his eye. They had drifted over beside the curtained windows and, half-hidden there from the shimmering, clinking crowd, they spoke with animation.

  Suddenly, at the other end of the salon, the maître d’hôtel announced: “Monsieur Pierre Hébert.”

  There was a ripple of silence, and Hébert’s wheelchair rolled in, creaking on the parquet floor, pushed by a colossal servant who looked more like a bodyguard. Brentford had no doubt that this was the white-bearded druid he had seen in the torchlight procession some nights ago (how many? he had lost count). But he saw him now as someone else: Blankbate’s murderer.

  Papus and de Rochas went to shake his hand, and the ripple of silence turned to a hum of whispers.

  “The kind of man who does no good to a salon’s reputation,” the young writer murmured to Brentford. “It is strange to see what the world is coming to these days.”

  “Did you see what I saw?” a voice whispered at Brentford’s shoulder. Gabriel had glided closer—unnoticed by Papus, thank God.

  “It’s what I’m seeing now that worries me,” Brentford answered through his teeth.

  Mme. de Bramentombes, who had been waddling through the salon like a turkey in peacock’s feathers, had a brief word with Hébert. Then the maîtresse de maison, turning a chalky shade of pale, took her guest and Papus towards another room—a library, Brentford guessed, judging by a golden flash of book spines. She closed the door behind them, instantly fanning the whispering, which spread and crackled through the crowd. D’Ussonville, Brentford noticed, was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was in the library as well.

  “Not him!” Gabriel hissed, signalling with his head towards the door of the salon, where he’d just noticed a new entrant.

  “Who’s that?”

  “The priest. Father Tonnerre.”

  Brentford watched the bulky robed figure slithering towards the door of the library. “You know him? Is that the priest Tuluk stole a petrol bike from?”

  “The same, yes. Though maybe a bit humbler now.”

  “And what do you think he’s doing here?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What in heaven’s name could they all have to say to one another?” Brentford asked, as if talking to himself. “Occultists and Catholic priests. Aristocrats and garbage
collectors …” Meanwhile, it was obvious that many of the other guests were asking themselves the same question—albeit in cautious, almost timorous terms.

  “Shouldn’t we find out?” Gabriel pressed. “If we want to learn anything, we should act while they’re all talking together. There must be a way to listen in.”

  “We need to find Blanche and Thomas,” said Brentford. “They know the house.” His growing sense of urgency was only interrupted by a sudden worry. “Shouldn’t they be here already?”

  Gabriel thought for a moment. “There’s something I could try. I’ve never done it before, but theoretically it’s possible.”

  “What is it? Wait—there’s Blanche!”

  She was at the other end of the room, pale as death and giving Brentford a look that implored him to come closer.

  “Try whatever it is that you have in mind,” he told Gabriel as he moved towards her. “It’s vital that we know what’s going on.”

  “All right. Find me in the bathroom in twenty minutes,” Gabriel said, as he bumped into the young writer, who had continued to hover near Brentford.

  “Sorry?” said Marcel.

  “I was talking to my friend,” Gabriel replied hastily.

  The young writer sighed, a little spitefully, as he watched Brentford making his way through the crowd towards Blanche de Bramentombes.

  Gabriel lost no time after locking himself in the white marble bathroom. Searching the pocket of his paisley waistcoast, he drew out a sandpacket, then perched on the toilet to unfold it on his knees. He had only done Supreme Selenium Standard once before, and it was not a pleasant memory, but Needs must when the devil drives. And after all, the effect lasted only ten minutes or so, he told himself, and there was very little chance he wouldn’t find his way back.

  So, summoning his courage, he bent close to the packet, rigid in his fear of exhaling, inserted an index finger into it and—lifting one eyelid after the other—gently daubed the shimmering crystals into the corner of each eye, mumbling, “Okay. See you later … or not …” as the crystals stung and blurred his view.