Where We're At: Parts 4.1-4.2: Against the Day

Cyprian Latewood

• Cyprian, who we last saw mooning after Yashmeen at Cambridge, is posted to Trieste to monitor the docks and emigrant traffic to America. (Trieste and Fiume have become destinations for Austro-Hungarians who want to head west.) He's tracking who goes out, who comes back, and so forth.
• He'd previously been in Vienna, where Russians Misha and Grisha recruited him for a secret (must tell no one) something for someone they don't identify.They leave messages for him scheduling appointments at various locations; they're watching him. Finally he's summoned to an address in the Jewish quarter, where he's blindfolded, handcuffed, and caned by the Colonel. (who?) These assignations continue.
• Cyprian randomly runs into Ratty McHugh, his old school chum. He assumes that Ratty is working for some part of the British foreign service ("which Desk") and asks him to get him out of Vienna. Ratty needs to know exactly what kind of trouble Cyprian is in; he's in contact with people who might be able to help. ("[I]t isn't's if one starts off intending to live this way... 'Oh yes planning, you know, to seek a career in sodomy.'")
• Ratty arranges an appointment with Derrick Theign. Someone from Misha and Grisha is watching Ratty; Derrick plays it as a seduction.
• Derrick ditches the tails and sends him to Trieste. (Ratty wanted to return to England--but that's not safe, and actually he might be better off even further east than Trieste.) Then he (Derrick) sets up Grisha--he'll be arrested for having led Cyprian, as his ward, into an immoral life. Cyprian is told that the Colonel (an expert in south Slavic politics) knows where he's being sent (or where he is before he goes?). Derrick's shop has the Colonel arrested and Cyprian is free to go, owing (and now working for) Derrick.
• Derrick and Cyprian are moved to Venice--"It was occupied a fateful geopolitical cusp ever since it lay at the ancient intersection of Western and Eastern empires--as it still does in our day, though the empires have mutated around it".
• Derrick's a senior lieutenant in the navy, in the Naval Intelligence Department. He's nominally in Venice to look into stolen engineering documents. He explains that the Russians, meanwhile, have an aerial surveillance program going, in ships that are invisible.
• Derrick and Cyprian become lovers?
• Derrick's people lose track of Misha and Grisha.
• Derrick's actually in Venice to set up RUSH (rapid unit for shadowing and harassment), a crew of motorcyclists who will be able to maintain communication when war closes off telegraphs and trains, etc. Cyprian's to be one of the motorcyclists.
• Derrick sends Cyprian back to Vienna. Cyprian's of interest to British, Russian, (and Italian?) operatives all of whom want him dead.

• Cyprian returns to Vienna
• The Colonel was Max Khautsch.
• Cyprian meets Miskolci (a vampire who had worked for Theign; the vampires have their own telephone exchange in Buda-Pesth, which is of use to Theign); Dvindler, who Theign recruited in the baths (spas), Yzhitza, a whore. They all work or worked for Theign.
• There are many Socialist demonstrations going on.
• Cyprian randomly runs into Yashmeen. She's working at a dressmakers, apparently through some workings of TWIT. She complains that she's being watched, by someone local and also by Russians. She's scared. Cyprian says the Okhrana can be bought but the Austrians (Kundschaftsstelle) might be more of a problem.
• Cyprian takes Yashmeen's problem to Ratty McHugh.
• Ratty sees Yashmeen's problems relate to the "Shambhala Question" and thinks that Auberon should have been pulled back years ago.
• Ratty and Cyprian and Yashmeen meet. She tells them that she'd been contacted by Germans at Gottingen, and had been sent to Buda-Pesth where TWIT(?) was investigating the 'parapsychical.' (The Russians who've been following her are either part of the Anglo-Russian alliance or socialists.) Some of these Buda-Pesth people believe that they can predict the future. Ratty wants to know why they all left Vienna when Yashmeen did--did someone foresee something? Yashmeen explains that they were scared and no, it had nothing to do with Yevno/Monsieru Azeff, "notorious for blowing up Romanoffs whilst shopping his comrades". Yashmeen doesn't know why they left; apparently whatever they brought her to Buda-Pesth (where Mme. Eskimoff, Swome, agent Lajos Halasz, the Cohen, and others had been bickering) to do, it became clear that she couldn't.
• Cyprian returns to Venice and asks Theign to help Yashmeen.

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