Where We're At: Parts 3.16-3.17: Bilocations

Reef

• Reef and Flaco are working as tunnel dynamiters in Europe. The Austrian Alps are hot; Austria wants to be able to move troops south into Italy as it sees fit. There's also a big tunnel in progress between Brigue, Switzerland, and Domodossola, Italy. They' re running into problems there because there are hot springs where the tunnels should go.
• The tunnel crews also include Nikos, Fulvio, Gerhardt, the opera singer, the Albanian (Ramiz), some of whom are "part-time Anarchists interested in furthering their chemical education."
• Ramiz is on the run from an Albanian family revenge situation. There's talk about how revenge works there versus the (American) West.
• Fulvio earlier met up with a Tatzelwurm--a snake with paws and sharp teeth; they live in the tunnels in Europe. Is the Tatzelwurm hell? Or are the dynamiters hell for the owners?
• Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin happens to visit as part of the Euro-spa circuit. She's got Rodolfo as an (kept?) escort. Reef's sleeping with her again; she mentions that Scarsdale Vibe is buying up Renaissance art. He (Vibe) headed for Venice; Ruperta is as well.
• Philippe is involved when Reef saves Ramiz from a Tatzelwurm; Ramiz now is obligated, by Albanian tradition, to repay Reef. There's something here about reflections, maybe? Light?
• Reef leaves for Venice with Roberta. On the train going there, he has a visitation (or a vision) he still needs to avenge Webb; he needs to take out Scarsdale Vibe.

Kit and Yashmeen--and Reef

• Kit and Yashmeen take the train to Switzerland
• Yashmeen talks about the stranniki--underground men who felt a holy mission "ambassadors from some mysterious country very far away, unable to return because the way back was hidden." They're forced to wander the world seeking... something. She's one of them now--she had to leave Gottingen, didn't leave by choice. She's been expelled from the garden. She won't tell Kit why.
• Yashmeen reconnects with the TWIT at a sanatorium at Lago Maggiore; Kit tags along. And whoa, there's Reef. Reef: "[b]e content that you held out longer'n me, at least." Kit: "Just stupid. Just slow. Can't believe how long it took me to see."
• (Has Ruperta trained her spaniel, Moufette, to provide intimate services [to Ruperta]? Or did Reef just imagine it?)
• Kit introduces Reef to Yashmeen.
• Kit moves into the sanatorium where Reef and Ruperta are.
• Reef tells Kit that Scarsdale Vibe is heading for Venice. They should kill him?
• Madame Eskimoff shows up; she holds a seance and they talk to Webb, maybe. Reef calls it a con. She suggests that he try being the medium; he (with hanger-on Algie as the fourth) channels Webb: "I sold my anger too cheap." But what he doesn't say is that they should kill Scarsdale Vibe because Vibe had hired his (Webb's) killers. Reef doesn't know who he is any more; how did he sell out when in New Orleans he chose anarchism?
  
• Kit dreams of Webb. He'd turned against Webb when he accepted Vibe's money for school. Vectors never would have been Kit's salvation. He needs payback.
• Kit tells Yashmeen he wants to go to Venice; can she square it with Lionel Swome? Yashmeen says that getting her out of Gottingen was the main objective; Kit was convenient but isn't indebted. TWIT believes that Yashmeen owes her continued existence to them; they're taking her to Vienna and the Buda-Pesth, not her choice, for some sort of psychical research thing--she's to be the subject. He can write her care of her school pal Noellyn Fanshawe, who will forward letters.

(p. 677)

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)