Where We're At: Part 5: Rue du Depart

End: Dally, Kit; Reef, Yashmeen; Frank, Stray, Jesse; the Chums.

• Dally is in Paris. She broadcasts (once) to Merle on the radio (she doesn't exactly KNOW that he's listening)--tells him all she's done since she left Telluride. She's appearing in a Wilshire Vibe-produced operetta. Earlier (1915), she'd married Kit. They'd lived in Torino; the war had begun and they were miserable together; she ran into and gotten back together with Clive Crouchmas (never mind that he'd tried to sell her into white slavery). Kit's in Ukraine or somewhere now "off on some grand search after she didn't know what". He keeps sending letters, and sometimes sounds like he wants to come back; she's not sure she wants him.
• Earlier in Torino, Kit went to the address Mulciber had given him and got work doing aircraft aerodynamics. He'd run into people from Gottingen. He'd invited Dally to come with him flying--she said no, didn't realize how important it was at the time. Divebombing a biplane at Torino factory strikers with his friend Renzo, Kit realized that it was all political; the strike was crushed, strikers killed.
• [Remaining in earlier in Torino] Dally had randomly seen Yashmeen and Reef, with Ljubica, walk by her building; they were refugees and had come looking for Kit; Kit and Reef made up; Reef worked for the Italian army rigging cableways (against Austria).
• Colfax Vibe showed up in Torino, too.
• Kit began flying for Italy. The nosedives are like bombing in Colorado. After a fight which started about who the real enemy was, Dally had left for Paris. She sent Kit a postcard with her address when she got there.
  

• Reef, Yashmeen, and Ljubica left Torino (and Kit), sailed to America claiming to be Italian immigrants. They made their way west looking for "someplace, some deep penultimate town the capitalist/Christer gridwork hadn't got to quite yet" and in Montana ran into Frank, Stray, and Jesse who are looking for the same thing. They join up. Jesse's a bit uncomfortable; he's been calling Frank "Pa". Yashmeen becomes pregnant again (daughter Plebecula); Stray and Frank's daughter Ginger is around Ljubica's age. Yashmeen and Stray may become lovers--it's not clear.

• Dally, Paris. She randomly runs into Kit's old friend Policarpe, from Belgium. He says that peace and plenty are the illusion; they're still in Hell and have been since 1914. And there's Kit. He'd seen Vanderjuice in Lvov after the war; Vanderjuice had earlier intended to kill Scarsdale and been saved by the Chums (who would take him or Kit wherever either would want to go). One day Vanderjuice vanished. Kit left and wandered and somehow was in Shambhala; he'd been on one of their stamps; and somehow he's also in Paris.

• The Chums watch postwar Paris from the sky. The wives are still there; they all become pregnant; the ship has expanded into a whole city; there are kids, dogs, pets. The Inconvenience has become its own destination "where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted. For every with to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard Inconvenience has yet observed any sign of this. They know... it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace."

End.

Where We're At: Parts 4.12-4.13: Against the Day

Dally; Crouchmas

• Hunter and Dally arrive in London (from Venice). The Principesa had wanted to pimp Dally to some Italian nobleman and Dally doubted that Kit would return to Venice, so why stay?
• Ruperta gets Dally set up in a bedsit while Hunter returns to the family house somewhere posher. Ruperta's vaguely jealous of Dally wrt Hunter even though she's not actually interested in him.
• Ruperta introduces Dally to sculptor Arturo Naunt, who needs a new model for his AODs (angels of death) for soldiers' tombstones.
• Meanwhile, Ruperta has been trying to make Hunter doubt Dally, and has heard from TWIT about Hunter's activities, and appoints herself as an anti-muse, trying to keep his work out of the public eye. But at a Vaughan Williams concert in Gloucester Cathedral she (literally) levitates to the ceiling on the music, and gets humility or religion or something She knows she's been horrible and needs to atone for every one of her bad deeds.
• Hunter's paintings begin to show odd empty spaces, as if a person or thing is missing in the compositions. He won't tell Dally what it is that he won't show.
• Dally randomly runs into Wilshire Vibe, who's producing in London and casts her in several of his shows. She becomes a big hit, taking bigger roles and attracting all sorts of attention.
• Among Dally's new suitors is Clive Crouchmas, "into whose gravitational field Ruperta [a friend or acquaintance since childhood] had been able to steer the girl." Crouchmas has become some sort of powerful government spending expert, and since spending is intimately connected with arming, he's in touch with "noted death merchant Basil Zaharoff." Actually, it's because Zaharoff is so attracted to redheads that Crouchmas is hanging around Dally at all.
• So Dally's being kept again, like in Venice--this time by Crouchmas.
• Dally randomly meets Lew Basnight at a party; he tells her about looking for the twenty-two major arcana and tells her about number XVII, the Star. Lew is the go-between between people he won't identify (not TWIT) who want to know how well Dally knows Crouchmas-- they might be willing to pay a lot for certain information about his business dealings related to railway guarantees. Lew's presenting it as about gathering information about Turkish politics rather than a personal betrayal of Crouchmas, who's involved with both England and Germany.
• Dally snoops in Crouchmas's papers in some large, looming, invisible building; detectives Crouchmas hired see her there. He decides to shop her to a harem. (Meanwhile, Zaharoff is trying to buy some Q-named weapon from Japan which the Japanese seem to be afraid of.) Crouchmas tells Dally he needs to go to Constantinople and invites her along; Lew okays it to her but warns her that no one trusts Crouchmas.
• Lew wonders whether Dally is tarot number XVII, The Star.
  

Dally; Kit

• Clive Crouchmas decides to use Dally as a bribe rather than sell her to a harem-- he's greedy more than he's out for revenge.
• Imi and Erno, the men working for Crouchmas, have heard Dally described as having red hair. Zaharoff's girls are also redheads; and Imi and Erno confuse Dally with a Zaharoff girl and prepare, on the Orient Express, to kidnap her.
• Meanwhile, Kit is on another train heading for Buda-Pesth and ultimately Venice and sees through the train windows what's happening to Dally and goes to help her. Imi and Erno let slip that Crouchmas hired them.
• Kit and Dally flee together into Szeged. Kit's already been on the run since accidentally saving the life of the wrong man (an enemy of CUP, the Committee for Union and Progress) in Pera. (In Pera, Kit had just earlier randomly run into Viktor Mulciber, from Ostend. Mulciber tells Kit that engineers (which he believes Kit to be) are in huge demand for aircraft companies, particularly one specific company in Turin which he referred Kit to.)
• Kit and Dally fall in love again; Imi and Erno go back to Buda-Pesth.
• Kit and Dally decide that their best bet is to get to Buda-Pesth then on to Venice.
• Dally tells Kit about Crouchmas, both the relationship and his discovery of her spying.
  

(p. 918!)

Where We're At: Parts 2.9-2.11: Iceland Spar

TWIT/Lew Basnight:

• Lew Basnight is in London.
• Because they found him "emerg[ing] out of an explosion" Nigel and Neville have sponsored him for membership in TWIT (the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys), a psychic thing, like Madame Blavatsky ("[these groups] and other arrangements for seekers of certitude, of whom there seemed to be an ever-increasing supply as the century has rushed to its end and through some unthinkable zero and on out the other side"). He's to be a psychic detective for TWIT.
• The Grand Cohen of the London chapter of TWIT is Nicholas Nookshaft.
• Nookshaft explains the explosion as a passageway from another world and therefore Basnight may be some sort of something.
• Yashmeen Halfcourt is a Tzaddik (high level TWIT). She'll be studying math at Girton (Cambridge). She doesn't entirely believe that TWIT is what it claims to be ("it might be politics, or even some scheme to defraud").
• Yasmeen was a ward of Lt.-Colonel G. Auberon Halfcourt, who's believed to be somewhere in India.
• TWIT's mission is to track those 22 people or groups who embody the major arcana of the Tarot.
• The Devil, card #XV, is rival university professors Renfrew (at Cambridge) and Werfner (at Gottingen), who are competing experts and power-brokers in the relationship of the west, and specifically western development, in the Balkans and Asia Minor ("the Eastern Question"). The major issue at the moment is the development of the Baghdad railway (Europe through Turkey and on to the Persian Gulf--a major improvement in trade routes, even more beneficial than the Suez Canal)--who (Germany or Britain) will be allowed to do it and therefore will control it.
• Madame Natalia Eskimoff is a psychic. She used to be The Fool (one of the 22), but changed allegiances to the other side. She predicts that either Renfrew or Werfner will murder the other.
  
• Clive Crouchmas is a low-level TWIT member who works for government doing something related to the Ottoman territories in his day job--he's a channel between TWIT and Renfrew and Werfner.
• Basnight is still looking for Cyclomite dynamite, the hallucinogen.
• Dr. Coombs De Bottle runs something which investigates anarchist bombs and bombers. He's found bombs (poison gas grenades, actually) which are disguised as Australian cricket ball (Australia-England cricket matches are coming up) and which are being placed by the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly.
• Basnight is sent to Cambridge to meet with Renfrew. Renfrew is also trying to find the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly (?), who Basnight may recognize, and tries to hire Basnight to work for him (Renfrew) instead of TWIT--to bring the Bomber to him. Basnight tells the Cohen.

The Chums are in Venice.

• Their mission is to locate the Sfinciuno Itinerary, "a map of chart of post-Polo routes into Asia, believed by many to lead to the hidden city of Shambhala itself."
• The Bol'shaia Igra (Padzhitnoff) is present as well; Padzhitnoff is Counterfly's rival with a waitress.
• Domenico Sfinciuno is the Shadow-Doge-in-Exile. His family has been trading with the east (inner Asia) since the 1300s; their trading route (a chain of oases and Venetian settlements) developed into an alternative to the Silk Road that the Chums are supposed to locate.
• The Sfinciuno Itinerary is a spiritual quest and not a physical map or itinerary. Maybe. Stuff on page 249 about parallel worlds. Artisans on the Isola degli Specchi (Isle of Mirrors) (now flooded and underwater and uninhabitable, maybe unfindable) developed mirrors that revealed parallel worlds--the mirrors are paramorphoscopes. The Sfinciuno Itinerary "was encrypted as a paramorphic distortion meant to be redeemed from the invisible with the aide of one particular configuration of lenses and mirrors, whose exact specifications" have been lost. Something about Iceland spar and mirrors.
• Miles sees a vision that tells him that their quest for the Sfinciuno Itinerary is more for their own benefit than for Sfinciuno's. They're on a Pilgrimage--which is compared to the Franciscans' development of the Stations of the Cross to allow parishioners to journey to Jerusalem in place--"to save us from the blinding terror of having to make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day of Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem."
• Chick meets Renata, who reads his Tarot and finds XVI, The Tower--which signifies that the Campanile will be hit by some kind (metaphoric?) of lightning and two parties of some sort will fall.
• Something from some other existence fires at the Inconvenience and the Bol'shaia Igra and topples the Capanile.
• The Bol'shaia Igra have been trying for two years to assassinate Mr. Ryohei Uchida, in Japan; his Black Dragon Society tried to hire the Chums last year for routine aerial surveillance. The Black Dragon Society's purpose is to destroy the Russian presence in Manchuria--it's technically Russia's but Japan wants it for its opium and gold. (And here's another South Africa/gold reference.)
• Is the Bol'shaia Igra looking for the Sfinciuno Itinerary as well?

(p. 259)