Where We're At: Parts 3.13-3.15: Bilocations

Kit amd Yashmeen

• Kit's credit line from Scarsdale Vibe has been cut off. ("'You have heard from them?' Had been all along, Kit realized--just wasn't listening.") Why had Scarsdale Vibe been so eager to let him go to Gottingen, anyway?
• Otzovists, god-builders, are all over the university. "A new subset of heretics, this time against Lenin and his Bolshevists... focused on what they call 'the fourth dimension.'" They think Yashmeen knows how to travel in the fourth dimension. Meanwhile, TWIT wants Yashmeen back to London.
  
• Actually, Yashmeen can travel in time--can step outside time.
• Kit is worried that Scarsdale Vibe's people will be trying to kill him--whatever the payoff or deal was, it's ended. They see him as a threat or maybe have guessed how much he knows.
• Yashmeen feels at risk as well, because of the Russian revolution.
• Yashmeen offers to see whether TWIT would be interested in employing Kit.
• Foley Walker is in Gottingen; Kit sees him. Foley appears, as an apparition, in Kit's room at night and explains that Kit knew things and didn't tell the Vibe Corp--Kit was dishonest. Now Foley's there because Scarsdale is curious how someone would react to a philanthropy in reverse.
• After a chloral hydrate party, Foley finds Kit; Humfried, who had previously overdosed and was being brought to the hospital, hides Kit by getting him admitted to the hospital ("'Achtung, Schwester! Here another dope-fiend is!'") and then leaves.
• Foley leaves town.
• Dr. Will Dingkopf is one of the doctors at the (mental) hospital. He's obsessed by Jews. (Again, "what kind of name is ___".)
• Ich bin ein Berliner wordplay-- a patient thinks he's a jelly donut. Turns out Yashmeen sent him, he's not nuts--he's Lionel Swome, TWIT travel coordinator, and this is the only way she could find to get in contact with Kit. Kit tries to escape and ends up sleeping by a fence. Yashmeen intervenes to get him released.
• Yashmeen believes that her father, Colonel Auberon Halfcourt, is involved with the efforts to discover Shambhala.
• Kit believes that for his own safety he needs to be out of Gottingen.
• TWIT is sending Kit and Yashmeen to elope in Switzerland (she's in danger in Gottingen as well). They're to behave as newlyweds until they split up and head in different directions--Kit, eastward toward Inner Asia and Shambhala.
• Sidney Reilly, Chong, recommended Kit to TWIT.
• Kit's to meet with Auberon Halfcourt in Kashgar and get his report on what happened in Shambhala and report back to TWIT.
• "As for what lies beneath those sands, you've got your choice--either Shambhala, as close to the Heavenly City as Earth has known, or Baku and Johannesburg all over again, unexplored reserves of gold, oil, Plutonian wealth, and the prospect of creating yet another subhuman class of workers to extract it."
• Gunther, Yashmeen's boyfriend, is being sent to one of his family's coffee plantations in Mexico.

p. 636

Frank

• Frank had intended to get back to chasing down Deuce but instead is again running arms in Tampico, Mexico with Ewball Oust. By chance they meet Gunther. Gunther tells Frank that Scarsdale Vibe has cut off Kit's funding and that Vibe and his henchmen are after Kit, who's fled Gottingen.
• Ewball runs into an old acquaintance, then called Steve now called Ramon, who is down on his luck and willing to do "anything that's too crazy or dangerous" and invites Ewball, Frank, and Gunther to a party as his villa that evening. All the gringo attendees at the party are ready to flee Mexico at a moment's notice.
• Frank asks Gunther for help wrt a shipment of semiautomatic weapons intended for the Mexican army; Gunther points him toward Eusenebio Gomez, who is acting as the sub-agent.
• Gomez turns out to be Wolfe Tone O'Rooney, the Irish revolutionary who knew Reef. Frank tells Wolfe that he killed Sloat. They talk about Deuce and Frank says that he wouldn't be terribly surprised if Lake ends up killing him--"if all this time she was just playing the long game." Wolfe hits it off with Ewball, and Frank, Ewball, and Wolfe hang out.
• By chance they run into Dwayne Provecho, from jail. Dwayne ratted out Frank and Ewball when they escaped (he was a plant), and he's got money now. He offers Frank and Ewball a consignment of Krag-Jorgensens. Ewball doesn't trust Dwayne but Frank takes the chance and heads off to Juarez for the deal.
• In El Paso, Frank meets his contact for the arms deal, one E. B. Soltera--and it's Stray. She claims to be a go-between.
• Frank tells Stray he's met Wolfe, and Wolfe has seen Reef (three years ago?) in New Orleans. Reef and Stray's son Jesse is staying with her brother and SIL? sister and BIL? , Willow and Holt.
• Stray and Frank run into Hatch and a sidekick with pointy ears; Hatch threatens Stray; Ewball appears unexpectedly.
• Frank's been having dreams about Webb.

p. 651

Where We're At: Part 2.19: Iceland Spar

Frank Webb (who last we saw previously under attack by the Bob Meldrum or someone, in Telluride)

• Has escaped to "Old Mexico" ("was to spend months that seemed like years traipsing to no purpose around an empty shadowmap, a dime novel of Old Mexico, featuring gringo evildoers in exile, sudden deaths, a government that had already fallen but did not yet know it, a revolution that would never begin though thousands were already dying and suffering in its name.") with the Gaston Villa band and meets Ewball Oust, whose family is paying him to stay in Mexico and try to earn a living as a mining engineer/metallurgist. Oust sees that what Frank is really after is the spar (properly called espato in Spanish; colloquially also called espanto, "which is something either horrifying or amazing, depending"), not the argentaurum. Frank has seen ghosts through the spar.
• Frank and Ewball cross into Mexico and end up at Guanajuato. Frank keeps dreaming of Deuce Kindred, who keeps telling him that he's not here, he's miles away. Frank stumbles on a street that's been in his Deuce dreams.
• Frank and Ewball are arrested for something political. In jail they meet Dwayne Provecho. Someone's funneling money to Ewball from outside and jail is okay. Jailer Sgt Amparo Vasquez (female) tells them that the charge was something that one of them did "a long time ago, on the other side." Frank assumes it's him; Ewball has been bribing people all along but that's not enough to imprison them both for.
• Dwayne Provecho has been sent there on a mission to offer Frank contract employment because it's widely believed (in the both US and Mexico) that Frank is the Kieselguhr Kid. Apparently Ellmore Disco and Bob Meldrum both believe this--and this is why Meldrum didn't kill him on first sight ("'I frightened Hair-Trigger Bob?' 'More like professional courtesy.'")
• Frank and Ewball break out of jail. Dwayne stays behind. Frank and Ewell take off deeper into Mexico with anarchist El Nato and his parrot, Joaquin. Joaquin talks with Frank about double refraction/espato (vis-a-vis cities and states--Zacatecas, Zacatecas, etc-- being named the smae). Frank is being haunted--there's something in his past he needs to take care of. After a failed attempt to steal dynamite, Ewball drives off army men attacking Tarahumare Indians then takes off northward; El Nato peels off as well.
• Frank travels with the Indians, including El Espinero (the dowser) and his (unnamed) wife and her sister, Estrella, and heads north as well into the Sierra. El Espinero leads Frank to a large, perfect calcite; in it Frank sees Sloat Fresno (where he is), but not Deuce Kindred. Years later Ewball explains that since Ewball and Frank saved two lives, something about two lives owed to them. Deuce is one; Huerta (the leader of ???) should ideally be the other.
• Frank splits with El Espinero and ends up in a cantina somewhere, and Sloat Fresno is there. Frank kills him. The locals tell him that Deuce Kindred has already left. "This had been so quick, even, you could say, easy. He would soon begin to understand how it all might turn, was already, well before he had the godforsaken little town at his back, turning, to regret.
  

Page 396.