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: Part 4.18: Against the Day

Frank; Stray

• Scarsdale Vibe addresses a convention of owner types. "We will buy it all up,,, all this country,...[T]he good lowland townfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting out station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us,,, [W]ho will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum, the frozen corpses whose names... have gone forever unrecorded? who will care that once men fought as if an eight-hour day, a few coins more at the end of the week, were everything...."
• Vibe sees an apparition (big, malevolent, face corroded) of his own destruction. He tells Foley that he looks forward to being "one of the malevolent dead."
• Ewball tells Frank about the unquiet dead----it's about unfinished business, accounts to be balanced.
• In Trinidad, Frank sees a big malevolent figure--it's Foley Walker. So Vibe must be in town too. Frank and Ewball argue all in subtext about who gets to kill Scarsdale (and who gets Foley instead). They flip a coin to decide.
• Mother Jones is in town.
• Frank's been carrying around Webb's cartridges all these years. They were for Deuce, but Scarsdale would be a decent alternative. It's now ten years since Scarsdale had Webb killed.
• Frank comes up to Scarsdale with a gun; Scarsdale tells Foley to take care of it; Foley shoots Scarsdale--many times--he empties his gun. He's been waiting for this.
• Ewball wanted more; Frank's satisfied that Scarsdale is dead.

• Stray's doing what she can at the Trinindad tent city. They're surrounded by guns.
• Jesse shows up.
• The Colorado militia is using searchlights on the strikers' camp.
• The Rev. Moss Gatlin is here as well.
• It's getting more violent. Jesse and his Friend Dunn see a Death Special--an armored rail car that lets the riders shoot machine guns without even seeing who they're shooting at. Jesse finally understands that these grownups, the ones guarding the railcar, would kill him.
• Frank runs into Stray in town; she's dressed as a nun for camouflage (literally--the gray habits blend with the landscape). Ewball's left. Stray invites Frank to come stay with them, meet Jesse.
• Linderfelt, who Frank fought against in Mexico, is leading the militia here.
• They'll leave (with Dunn), save their own lives. Frank sends Jesse and Stray to her sister's where they'd been living; he's staying to fight.

Where We're At: Parts 2.17-2.18: Iceland Spar

Dally

• Travels (by train) to New York (where her roommate is Katie, a would-be actress), andl ands a job working for Hop Fong as a girl being sold into white slavery in Chinatown.
• R. Willshire Vibe sees a performance and asks her to be in his Broadway production; she declines at least in part because she's under contract to Hop Fong. Vibe and Fong talk and suddenly there's a lot more money being poured into their scenes, and also suddenly tong wars (between Tom Lee's On Leong tong and rivals Mock Duck and the Hip Sing tong) break out in Chinatown and curtail the white slavery performances.
• Needing work, Dally calls on Vibe. Bad-vaudeville producer Con McVeety is also at Vibe's office; Con has work for her and Vibe doesn't, so Dally goes to work for Con (at his dime museum) as a card girl (the girl who holds cards introducing the acts). (Con also produces a Bowery version of Julius Caesar, called Dagoes with Knives; Dally loses out on a part to a girlfriend of a tong gangster.)
  
• Dally and Katie attend a party at Vibe's, where someone tries to handcuff her and she's rescued by Erlys, her birth mother, whom she goes to live with in a fabulous big apartment with Luca Zombini, Erlys's husband who she left Merle for, and their many children (including Bria, Nunzi, Cici, Dominic, Lucia, and Concetta) who participate in the family magic act.
  
• Parts of Zombini's act are built around using the Nicol prism and double refraction (via Iceland spar). Minor problem is that the double refraction is actually creating two actual people (from one). He's consulted with Vanderjuice, and it's a problem with a hole in time. The only possible way to fix it might be with mirrors which are only available from the Isola degli Specchi (Isle of Mirrors) in Venice.
• Erlys tells Katie that Merle wasn't actually her birth father--it was one Bert Snidell, who was killed before Dally was born and whose family would have nothing to do with Erlys.
• The whole Zamboni family, including Dally, travel to Venice to perform (and for Zombini to try to de-create the duplicate people via a conjurer's mirror from the Isle of Mirrors).

Reef

• Is still with Stray (and son Jessse), mostly, drifting from job to job or scam to scam. (There's another image of the closed frontier here, parlor society, loss of freedom.)
  
• Meanwhile, he's using carousing as a cover for dynamiting. He bombs something too close to home and Stray finds out about his double life. (There's a bit about the day of atonement or possibly the second coming, coming.)
• The anarchists who've died in the conflicts are relying on Reef to continue (or he's hallucinating the following a particularly loud explosion).
  
• It's time for Frank to take up the revenge action, so Frank heads for Denver to find Frank.
• En route to Denver, a man-caused avalanche nearly kills Reef; the Owners Association is after him. Reef returns to Stray, says goodbye, and goes undercover.
• Reef creates himself as "east coast nerve case" Thrapston Cheesely III and meets traveling Englishwoman Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, who brings him along (keeps him) with her band of neurasthenics. They eventually land in New Orleans, where they part after a drunken quarrel.
• Reef meets bandleader Dope Breedlove and travelling Irish insurrectionist Wolfe Tone O'Rooney, who is raising money for the Land League to funnel to the Colorado miners and who mentions that he'd hoped to meet the Kieselguhr Kid, who seems not to be active any more.
• O'Rooney takes Reef in and introduces him to Flaco, another European anarchist dynamiter. Wolfe leaves for Mexico. Flaco and Reef wait for tramp steamer Despedida, which will be going to Genoa where they'll look for work dynamiting tunnels.

This takes us to page 373.