Petty Magic Page 5

  We have converted into apartments such vanished gems as the Singer and New York World buildings. It’s still possible to take a stroll through the Vauxhall Gardens on a Sunday afternoon. You can catch She Stoops to Conquer at the Nassau Street Theatre or diving horses at the Hippodrome. We use the old Pennsylvania Station for an exhibition space. The printing houses that put out seditious pamphlets during the Revolutionary era still produce our weekly newspapers, though if you remove them from the warren the words vanish off the page.

  All our neighborhoods have retained their original character. The Pandora Securities Company is located in the Gillender Building on Wall Street, for instance; there’s Boston Avenue for the swanky gals (who still throw nightly cocktail parties at the Stewart and Astor mansions), Little Hammersley for the fauxhemians, and Cat’s Hollow for those of us who don’t mind the lingering whiff of squalor. Oh, it’s not so grim as you might suppose; only the structurally sound tenements have been preserved by the reclamation board, and they’ve long since cleared the riffraff out of Mulberry Bend. No one’s training polecats or picking pockets these days—quieter and cleaner than your ordinary Chinatown, now, that’s for sure.

  Life must be easier in old-world cities, where “demolition” is a four-letter word, and so there is little need for hidden streets and all the requisite jiggery-pokery at post office and electric company. In places like London, Paris, and Edinburgh there are plenty of dark nooks where one may dwell undisturbed, where we doddering biddies of impossible age merely add to the atmosphere. European beldames have their warrens too, but they’re smaller, and the buildings inside them are often a thousand years older than ours are.

  Our graveyards are hidden everywhere, though—urban or rural, old-world or new—to avoid the troublesome truth that the deceased was two hundred fifty years of age. We have our own undertakers.

  Now, you might be wondering how one gets into a warren, provided one lives there. We enter our neighborhoods through gated alleyways: red-bricked, ivy poking through the wrought-iron slats so you can’t see in. Posh but inconspicuous, like the entrances to Grove Court or Milligan Place. There are such crannies all over the city, no matter how completely the skyscrapers and hotels appear to have gobbled up the landscape.

  But where one would expect to see a lot of quaint old town houses around a leafy courtyard, one finds instead the places vanished long since: a stable yard without any horses; a tiny swath of virgin forest above a tinkling stream; or a colonial cemetery, headstones poking out of the tall grass at precarious angles and inhabitants with names like Amos or Josiah. Let’s say I pass through the gate on West Houston. I’ll cut through one such graveyard, full of shadows even at noon because of the apartment buildings all around it. I turn the corner at the end of the alley and I’m on Little Hammersley Street, with its brownstones gutted in fires and corner gardens lost to the concrete jungle.

  In the downtown warrens especially one finds a gallimaufry of architectural styles, rustic colonial dwellings wedged between posh Beaux Arts office buildings and so forth. Some warrens are always bustling and others look deserted in the daytime. Population-wise, the only thing that sets our neighborhoods apart is that they’re disproportionately female, and the absence of automobile traffic is, of course, another remarkable aspect. Otherwise, they look much like ordinary streets: chic young women sail by on vintage three-speeders and sip vanilla lattes in the parlors of old brothels; folks take a tipple at any of the clapboard taverns erected by the Dutch, with their low doorways and empty kegs lined up along the curb, those last few drops of ale ever dripping from the bungholes onto the cobblestones. Grannies thumb through leather-bound grimoires in secondhand bookshops or climb the steps into a crumbling church, now a covenstead, for a spell of quiet reflection. We save all the churches the Christians tear down—it’s the irony we relish above all else.

  Now, I know what you’ve been thinking: Evelyn, that doesn’t make any sense. How can you live in a building that was torn down a century ago? I shall endeavor to explain.

  All over the world there are isolated pockets in which time and space cease to correspond, so that more than one person or edifice or what have you can be said to coexist in exactly the same location. Whether or not they exist at precisely the same time is still a matter of dispute among our physicists. Who knows, we might be living on the lip of a wormhole.

  In the evening sometimes I look out my back window and watch the traffic on the East River, and I see awfully strange ships, boats looking entirely too old to float, furling their sails as they pull into the old slips. But I don’t spend much time thinking about it. We’re all of us living in the past anyhow, so what does it matter? Nostalgia poisons the present, that’s what I always say—but somehow I can never seem to help myself.

  The Mission

  8.

  The wise are of the opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there, too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude.

  —W. B. Yeats, “The Sorcerers”

  WE HAVE our own language, too, which we use mostly for the recitation of spells. Latin, Greek, Aramaic: all are playpen chatter compared to the words we use in secret. Our tongue is so old it doesn’t have a name for itself, which is why they say it was the language spoken in the Garden.

  It’s also the language we speak whenever there’s an international gathering of beldames. I know most European languages, of course, but back in the day we used it whenever we found ourselves in a place where the walls had ears. You must know there were loads of us in secret service.

  They say certain personality types are naturally attracted to, and suited for, a life of espionage. Those who enter into it for material gain usually die without a farthing, though they do tend to outlast the conflicts they exploit—and that, sad to say, can’t be said for the majority of their nobler colleagues. After all, the most infamous were by definition the most inept; folks tend to forget that Mata Hari met her end before a French firing squad. Jonah was one of the best, and now hardly anyone remembers him but me.

  We are deviant, naturally deceitful. Lies come as easily as breathing, though not by some innate pathological defect—it’s just that our nature necessitates it. No surprise, then, that so many beldames chose the life I did. We hid refugees and resistance members in our warrens and memorized military dispatches in a single glance, cracked safes with the tap of a finger and garbled enemy radio signals with a flick of the tongue. We spread black propaganda far more quickly than anyone from Morale Ops could have done, and made it all the more convincing. As I say, we couldn’t change what fate had already decided, but that distinction grew so nebulous that on plenty of occasions we wound up squandering our efforts. We accomplished so much and berated ourselves for not doing more. Isn’t it always the way?

  Morven wasn’t going back into nursing either. She scored off the charts on a series of cryptography exams and was sent to Arlington Hall early on in the war. (It was around that time she found our apartment in Cat’s Hollow, though it would be years before we could actually live there.) The Signal Intelligence Service very magnanimously lent Morven to MI6, and they kept her there until V-day. She “broke”—translated, that is—plenty of codes from other beldames behind the lines, and at the end of the war they made her a member of the Order of the British Empire. She still keeps the medal in a box on her bedside table.

  Yes, sir, the Harbingers pulled their weight. Uncle Heck and Uncle Hy were two of the most celebrated pilots in the U.S. Air Force; they volunteered for missions that seemed tantamount to suicide and came home again without so much as a ding in the chrome. Together they flew a B-26 Marauder all over Europe, yet the plane never made a blip on an enemy radar screen before it reached its target; the only evidence of its presence was a shadow gliding over wide green pastures in the moonlight. One could
take over if the other ran low on oomph. They called them the “Immortal Duo.” They really did seem invincible back then.

  In many ways espionage was even more frustrating than nursing. You had very little idea how your own bit would be of value, because you were never meant to know too much in case you were captured. No matter how trivial the errand, you trusted it mattered a great deal in the grander scheme, and so you put everything you had into fulfilling it safely. Get your hands dirty without leaving a smudge: that was the trick. Every detail was crucial, no matter how minute, for a man’s life was forfeit if an SS officer noticed his buttons were sewn parallel instead of crosswise. And if your luck ran out, you had to destroy the evidence and be prepared to die at your own hand. But I had all my oomph in those days—before there was a hide to slough—so there was little for me to fear in that regard at least.

  As I say, foreign languages are a cinch for the likes of us. Still, I thought I might like to live in Berlin for a while, get fluent and such. I was there over twenty years but it passed like a blink: by day I studied this and that at the Universität, and for my living I read palms and tarot cards in a fusty parlor teeming with aspidistra; by night I drank pink champagne with kohl-eyed nancies in sequined chemises. The Romanisches Café was the best spot, the only spot. I’d drink lager by the quart before supper and tip a dainty bottle of Underberg at the finish—aids in the digestion, you know.

  There was little I didn’t do and few I didn’t meet. I even ran with the socialist crowd from time to time, though I could only take their company in limited doses; they were angry men who deprived themselves of meat and drink and sex, rather like monks who’d lost their religion. The circus clowns weren’t much better—they were so sarcastic they could exhaust anyone who made an effort to engage them. They would stare at you over their empty beer steins, yellow stains under the arms of their undershirts, traces of greasepaint still ringing their nose and eyes, and tell you stories of their cheerless childhoods.

  But oh, the acrobats! I tell you, making love to an acrobat is a singular experience. Sarrasani was Europe’s finest circus and Dmitri Nesterov—one of the aforementioned acrobats—its finest performer. I used to turn myself into a pigeon and roost on a tent pole so I could watch him perform every night high above the sword eaters and flame throwers.

  And yet there was another member of the circus who was even dearer to me: the magician who called himself Neverino, a Bavarian shoemaker who’d fought in the first war and later reinvented himself as an Italian monk-turned-prestidigitator. He had gotten his stage name, Fra Carnevale, from an obscure Renaissance painter whose depiction of the Annunciation had brought him to tears as a young man in a museum in Munich. The vivid blue of the Virgin’s robe had recalled the only memory he had of his mother, who had died in childbirth when he was four years old, and when he gave his first magic show that night they introduced him as Fra Carnevale. He never did tell me what his real name was—the name his parents had given him, I mean—but I suppose you could say Neverino was his real name.

  He pulled roses out of my ears and pfennigs fell from his lips every time he laughed, and he even sawed me in half a few times when his assistant was too sauced to come on. Neverino was the closest thing to a father I ever had, and he was the only person in Berlin who knew me for what I was. He was also the one who introduced me to the members of the Centaur network, with whom I collaborated for a good few years.

  Neverino and I spent many happy midnight hours in the backyard of his little half-timbered house in Werder admiring each other’s tricks, me turning toad to raven to Doberman in the span of seconds, and though he wasn’t able to best me there, he did show me how to play dead even more convincingly than a two-day-old corpse. He had spectacles, though he didn’t need them, wore a tonsure and a rough brown robe both on and off the circus stage, and affected an Italian accent whenever it might give him an advantage.

  As I say, the art of glamoury is best used to make oneself as inconspicuous as the light fixtures. I could, on purpose, drain the luster from my hair, my eyes, my complexion, and once I’d put on a drab serge suit and sensible shoes no one would ever suspect a thing of me.

  In many respects it was better than being invisible, and I made terrific use of it on tours of various German munitions factories in ’33 and ’34. Neverino posed as a Canadian industrialist all too eager to praise the Germans’ superior technologies. (Just imagine it: a native German speaking his own language with a pitch-perfect North American accent! My, but he was brilliant.)

  It is a universal truth that flattery will get you anywhere, even into the belly of a Panzer. Back then the Germans had no intention of starting a war with the British—a powerful race, Aryan as theirs—and they were anxious to show off their new feats of engineering. The Germans hardly noticed the bland young woman holding a small typist’s notebook, nor could they have known that the notes wrote themselves under the red cardboard cover.

  For a time I was afraid our partnership would be short-lived. Hitler had seized control of the Reichstag in early 1933, and the following year Sarrasani took his circus on a tour of South America to evade the Nazi arsonists. They’d been lucky enough to stay in business after the first time the tent was torched. Neverino went too, but he promised he’d be back.

  To my delight, he returned to Berlin within the month. Over a spaghetti dinner he told me that he hadn’t been to South America at all, but to London. He had managed introductions with some of the people who would later head the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, and had passed along the notes we’d made on the factory tours. They’d given him instructions to set up one of the early Nazi surveillance and resistance networks, the Centaur circuit, and he wanted me to keep working for him. He paused only to laugh at the red wine rising in his glass.

  And once the war started, Neverino proved himself one of the most ingenious hoax-masters for the Allies. It was his idea to plant phony intelligence memos on corpses in uniform and his idea to build ersatz military complexes out of wood and rubber to fool the German bombers. Yes indeed, Neverino was a mastermind, an inspiration. His friendship meant a lot to me, and it meant even more in hindsight. I would never have known Jonah without him.

  Nibble, Nibble, Little Mouse

  9.

  By one of those contradictions so frequent in the Satanic realm it was the oldest and most hideous and repulsive witches who knew the recipes for the most efficacious love-liquors.

  —Grillot de Givry, Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy

  MORVEN’S PETTY magic is as selfless as mine is not. My sister spends most of her afternoons with her friend Elsie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they wander from room to room looking out for pairs of lonely people whom they might bring together by “happy accident.”

  For instance, one rainy Saturday afternoon two students were sketching the same gilded statue of Saint-Gaudens’s Diana in the courtyard of the American Wing. Each was seated on a bench in good view of the statue, but perhaps ten or twelve feet from one another; they were clearly unacquainted. The girl was checking her mobile at frequent intervals (in hopes that a particular someone might have called her, so much seemed plain), and she grew more and more dejected each time she tucked the phone away. In aspect the young man was as kind—and as sad—as she. They looked to be roughly the same age but too absorbed in their own private woes even to notice one another, let alone make any overture of friendship.

  “Do you mind if I sit here?” said Elsie to the girl as my sister was speaking the same words to the young man. Both gave each jolly old dame a distracted “Not at all,” and went on with their work.

  Several minutes went by, during which time both ladies gazed up at the statue of Diana the huntress in idle appreciation. Then, with a few silently mouthed words, Elsie proceeded to break the charcoal stick in the girl’s hand, and each stick following it. The girl huffed in frustration as she rummaged through her knapsack.

  “Pardon me,” Morven murmured to the man be
side her, “but I believe that young lady over there has just broken her last stick of charcoal.” She nodded to the full box of charcoal vine at his side. “Do you think perhaps you might …?”

  “Oh?” he said, momentarily confused, and then: “Oh! Of course.” And as he ventured across the way to offer the girl a spare stick of charcoal Elsie slipped away under some silly pretense, a coughing fit perhaps. Both ladies watched from behind a nearby statue as the boy complimented the girl on her sketch, she thanked him graciously, and they inquired as to their respective places of study, and how she smiled when he asked if he might sit beside her.

  They have hundreds of stories like that one. I’ve been up to the Cloisters with them on sunny summer afternoons and watched as my sister stimulated three pairs of pheromones with a few carefully chosen words in the gallery of the Unicorn Tapestries, then instigated a cordial debate on the best method for the restoration of egg tempera between two pasty-faced academics—and that was only in the first five minutes.

  Helena disapproves of these excursions, says it’s meddling and that most lonely people have nobody but themselves to blame for it anyhow. Morven has invited me to come along again today, but I’d rather make my own mischief back in Blackabbey.

  I’m not used to prowling in the daytime. The sun feels so nice on my smooth bare arms and I feel positively giddy. I shift the cake box from hand to hand as I amble down the mews, sundress flouncing round my calves. I pass Dymphna coming out of her shop and she gives me a vague smile, thinking me one of Helena’s progeny, though she knows what I get up to well enough.

  Picture Fawkes and Ibis in the gloom of early evening: the steamer trunks and Wunderkammers, the bronze busts of forgotten statesmen and voodoo poppets fresh off the bayou, the danse macabre carousel that plays “In the Hall of the Mountain King” when wound. The walls are cluttered with English portraits and Renaissance engravings, lords and ladies in stiff white ruffs and naked men contemplating their own innards.