Castle in the Air Read online

  Dubious, Angelo looked around, saying, "I suppose we could open some of these now, and unload the rest later."

  "Opening crates," Vito told him, "is not the same as resting."

  Angelo frowned at him. "Don't you want seven billion lire?"

  "Give me an advance on it now," Vito suggested, "and I'll go hire someone to open the crates."

  "Vito," Angelo said, his manner at the same time patronizing, yet truly sympathetic, "what's the matter with you?"

  "I'm an old man," Vito pointed out. "Until you and that virago came along, I was retired. They never made me work like this in prison."

  "Seven billion lire," Angelo repeated. "You could buy a yacht, and sail the Adriatic."

  "It's polluted," said Vito.

  "Sail the Aegean," Angelo offered.

  "It's polluted."

  "Then sail the Mediterranean!"

  "It's polluted."

  Angelo raised his eyes to heaven. "Then," he said, "sail the Atlantic Ocean!"

  Vito shrugged. "It's polluted," he said.

  "Then don't sail at all," Angelo told him. Angelo had become very angry, mostly because he had no idea how he'd gotten into this conversation in the first place. "Do I care if you sail? Does it matter to me if you sail or not? Don't sail!"

  Infuriatingly calm, Vito said, "I'll sail if I want to sail."

  Angelo, hands clenched into fists, was still formulating his answer when Rosa came striding around the corner of the unfinished building, glaring at them both and saying, "What's with you two? What are you doing?"

  "I'm resting my heart," Vito told her.

  "I'm working?" Rosa demanded. "I'm standing guard out by the road? And you two loaf?"

  "I'll trade places with you," Vito suggested.

  "To do what?"

  "To unload the truck."

  Rosa couldn't believe it. "You," she demanded, "would ask a woman to do such a job? A woman like your own mother?"

  "All right," Vito said. "All right."

  "A woman like your sisters," Rosa said.

  Vito, defeated, climbed back up into the truck, saying, "Yes, yes, I'm going."

  Angelo, cheerful, vaulted up into the truck: "Here we go, then," he said.

  Rosa stepped forward to yell into the truck: "A woman like the Holy Virgin!"

  "All right." Vito's voice came, plaintively, from within the truck. "All right, all right, all right. I didn't mean it."

  ***

  Even Paris has junkyards, and even junkyards can prove unprofitable business ventures. In such a junkyard, containing merely dead auto parts but no fat men in undershirts and not even one killer dog, Andrew Pinkenham and Sir Mortimer Maxwell sat in the sunlight on a pair of ripped and tattered automobile seats tom from their original automobiles, and continued their earlier discussion, while at some distance Bruddy Dunk completed the task of removing all the tarpaulins from their recently acquired truck.

  "Look at it this way, Sir Mortimer," Andrew was saying. "If we don't take it all, how can they be sure of anything? We take half for ourselves, and give them the other half, and nobody the wiser."

  "I'm opposed to it," Sir Mortimer insisted. "It's too dangerous."

  "But it isn't dangerous at all," Andrew assured him. "No one knows precisely how valuable this haul is supposed to be; if the result is less than the expectation, it won't be the first time in the history of the world."

  Bruddy approached from the truck as Sir Mortimer shook his head, saying, "It won't work."

  "Neither will I," Bruddy informed them, "if you two don't hop to it. I'm not the only haul-and-tugger present."

  "Absolutely right, Bruddy," Andrew said, getting briskly to his feet. "Here we come."

  "This discussion," Sir Mortimer said, obstinately, as more slowly and reluctantly he, too, stood up, "remains open."

  ***

  Progress doesn't merely add; it also subtracts. One of the unfortunate subtractions currently under way in Paris is the gradual filling in and removal of the system of canals running northward through the eastern part of the city from the Seine to the suburb of Pantin and beyond. At one time, goods from northeast France, and meat from the slaughterhouses of the 19th Arrondissement, were barged south along the Canal St. Denis and the Canal de L'Ourco into the Bassin De La Villette, just north of the Place de Stalingrad. From there, the waterway tunneled beneath Place de Stalingrad and underwent a change of name, becoming the Canal St. Martin as it zigzagged southward through the 10th Arrondissement. Running through the 11th Arrondissement, the canal has been covered by the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, but the waterway still exists, in slimy and rat-infested darkness, beneath the broad boulevard, and at last re-emerges just south of the Place De La Bastille, where this last section just north of the Seine is called the Gare De L'Arsenal, and is the only segment of the canal still in any kind of ordinary use.

  The rest of the canal is nearly dead. Plans are afoot not merely to cover the canal over-as in the Boulevard Richard Lenoir section-but actually to fill it in, to stop the flow of water forever. And from a practical standpoint the canal-while remaining rather attractive here and there-has ceased to be useful. The locks don't work, the roofs make barge traffic impossible, and only the smallest rowboats can negotiate the canal at all.

  The death of the canal has decreed a kind of slow death to many of the buildings which once served it as warehouses and offices, storage areas for the goods shipped along the waterway. Particularly in the northeast corner of the city, up around Boulevard Macdonald, the big hulking empty warehouses remain, their stone walls lapped by the dirty, idle, useless water of the canal.

  It was in one such abandoned warehouse that Herman Muller and Otto Berg and Rudi Schlisselmann briskly unloaded the truck they'd so recently acquired at the Arc De Triomphe. Much of the contents of this truck was building blocks, large blocks of shaped gray stone, very heavy and authentic-looking, and it was while carrying one of these that Otto suddenly said, "Look at this. These blocks are all numbered."

  "Naturally," Herman told him. "That's so the building can be properly reassembled."

  "This one," Otto said, squinting to read the painted-on numbers, "is L-274."

  Rudi, just emerging from the truck with another block, said, "Mine's L-273."

  "They must go together," Otto suggested.

  While Herman went back into the truck, Otto and Rudi put their blocks down side by side. Looking around, Otto said, "I wonder where L-275 is."

  Rudi started poking through the blocks they'd already removed from the truck: "Most of these are different first letters. Here's some R's, here's a couple F's…"

  Emerging from the truck, Herman said, "L-275? I've got it here."

  Taking it from him, Otto said, "Good, good." He placed it in its proper position with the first two.

  Rudi, still poking among the other blocks, said, "Here's L-267."

  "Not yet," Otto told him. "Put it to one side."

  ***

  Subway systems both expand and contract. New York, London, all the older systems have no-longer-used stations, even no-longer-used sublines. Paris is no exception, with several abandoned Metro stops, such as the one, for instance, under the intersection of Rue Du Four and Rue Du Cherche Midi, on the Left Bank, not far from the center of artistic Paris, the corner of Boulevard St. Germains and Boul' Mich'. This unused stop is on Line Number 10, the one between Porte D'Auteuil and the Gare D' Orleans/Austerlitz. The stop is, in fact, between the still-used stops of Sevrds-Babylone and Mabillon, and may be seen from your Metro window; look closely.

  At such an abandoned station, on an equally-abandoned spur line, the two yellow boxcars from the freight yards stood behind the Gare de la Chappelle, along with the little switching locomotive which had removed them from the ken of the railroad. The boxcar doors were open, and Charles Moule and Jean LeFraque were carrying out an endless array of sofas, chairs, lamps, tables, beds and other furniture and furnishings. Renee Chateaupierre stood to one side, thoughtfully consid
ering the platform, on which a room was gradually being assembled, under her instructions:

  "Put that there. Yes, that's right, put it right there. And that lamp over there. No, wait; I think it would be better over there, next to the love seat. No, don't put that there, it clashes with the sofa. Let me see now, it should go, hmmm…"

  "Decide, will you?" Charles asked, plaintively, the cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth. "This is heavy."

  "I'm doing my best," Renee told him. "There, I think. Put it there. We can always move it later, if it offends."

  12

  The atmosphere in the Robespierre Suite of the Hotel Vendome was gloomy in the extreme, except for frequent lightning flashes. His Excellency Escobar Lynch, El Presidente of Yerbadoro, paced the Persian carpet with the purposeful tread of the Grim Reaper himself, while his wife Maria moved about in short violent bursts of unfocused energy, like a catamaran on a gusty sea. The police detective who had drawn the short straw back at Headquarters that chose him as the one to interview El Presidente Lynch and his First Lady on the subject of the theft, serially, of their castle from various points around Paris, had the pained expression of an agnostic in a lion's den, and the two uniformed police officers who had come here with him remained firmly and silently in the background, pretending to be floorlamps.

  The common language between the detective and the Lynches was neither French nor Spanish but English, in which El Presidente was fluent, Maria was voluble, and the detective was extremely gallic. As when, in an accent as soft and twisty as a croissant, he said, "We are making progress, Mister President."

  "I had a castle," Escobar Lynch pointed out, "and now I do not have a castle. I fail to see how that could be termed progress."

  "We have made several arrests," the detective said. "Our police are scouring the slums."

  Dangerously quiet, like a distant thunderstorm, Escobar said, "You expect to find my castle in the slums?"

  Maria paused in her spurting and tacking hither and yon to wave her arms over her head and cry, "Why doesn't somebody do something?"

  "We are making progress, Madam," the detective promised her, with a tiny apologetic smile that begged for mercy.

  Maria had no mercy: "You must be quick," she said, tacking toward the detective, pointing a long-nailed, sharp-nailed, ruby-tipped finger at his nose. "You're much too slow."

  The detective blinked and swallowed. "We have already made several arrests," he said.

  "You said that before," Escobar pointed out.

  "It remains true," the detective said. "A castle is not that easy to hide. Surely before long we-"

  Escobar said, "Before long is not good enough. By then, they may have… stolen things from it. Valuable paintings, perhaps, uh, things of sentimental value."

  It was not the detective's job to wonder what things of sentimental value the Lynches might possibly possess. It was his job to soothe them, to the degree that such soothing could be effected, and to hope that his compares in the field actually were making progress in the discovery and return of Escondido Castle. "We have the bills of lading," he assured Escobar. "The castle and its content are fully itemized. When we find it-"

  "Yes," Marie said, swooping close. "When you find it. That's the question, that's it in a nutshell. When will you find it?"

  "We are making progress," the detective stammered, thoroughly rattled by Maria's swooping manner. "We have already made several arrests."

  The dryness of his tone suggesting he might become murderous at any instant, Escobar said, "And you are scouring the slums."

  "Er, yes."

  Turning on Escobar, Maria said, "If this man remains in our room much longer, I believe I shall bite him on the neck. Very hard."

  The detective blanched, and raised a protective hand shakily to his neck.

  His manner almost kindly, Escobar told the detective, "Perhaps you had best return to your duties."

  "We will report ail developments," the detective promised.

  "Grrr," said Marie.

  "By telephone," the detective said, and fled.

  13

  Through the piles of fenders, heaps of bumpers, mounds of hubcaps, monkey-bars of axles, doughnut-trays of tires, through the whole rusting, glinting, metal crazy quilt of the abandoned junkyard, Eustace Dench, successful (yet again) master criminal, steered his poot-pooting motorcycle, with Lida Perez, the beautiful revolutionary, in the sidecar. Eustace steered the machine around a final fortress of hoods, and stopped in a small clearing where Bruddy and Andrew and Sir Mortimer labored away at the unpacking of many, many crates. All three looked up at the sound of the motorcycle's roar, then went back to work again when they saw who it was.

  Eustace switched off the motor and jumped off the cycle; Lida remained in the sidecar, looking valiant but short. Approaching his unpacking countrymen, Eustace said, "Well, well, well, and how's it coming along?"

  Removing from a crate a hideous red-and-gold table lamp with a fringed shade and a woodland scene on the base featuring nymphs and shepherds in fairly graphic contact, and holding this object aloft, Sir Mortimer said, "These people have execrable taste."

  "It isn't their taste we care about," Eustace pointed out. "It's their income."

  "Well put," Andrew said, carefully putting to one side a ceramic cigarette box whose handle was a pair of fornicating goats.

  "None of this income come through here yet," Bruddy said.

  "Well, keep on with it," Eustace said. "I have the walkie-talkies in the sidecar, give me a tinkle if you find anything."

  "I have the walkie-talkies in the sidecar," echoed Sir Mortimer, his mouth curling like that of a rabid dog. "That such a sentence is even possible in English almost makes me lose hope."

  Andrew said, "Don't forget the tinkle."

  "We'll be off, then," Eustace said, hopped on his motorcycle, gave them all a cheery wave, started the engine, and roared away.

  ***

  When Eustace and Lida and the motorcycle and the sidecar arrived at the site of the incomplete apartment building, they found the Italian contingent completely surrounded by plumbing. Tubs, sinks, bidets, urinals, medicine cabinets, shower stalls, all were scattered here and there in the mud, sprinkled with excelsior and garnished with shredded wood. Ignoring the mutinous expressions on the faces of Rosa and Angelo and Vito, Eustace gaily hopped off his machine once more and strode through the mud, calling, "And how are we all doing, eh?"

  "You see what we have here," Vito said, in Italian, gesturing with his horny hand at all the porcelain in sight.

  "Seven billion lire," Angelo said, in tones of deepest sarcasm and disgust. "What we have is seven billion bathrooms."

  "Now, don't you boys start talking Italian at me," Eustace said, with a smile and a playful waggle of his finger; he was in too good a mood from the success of the operation to be seriously bothered by these continuing linguistic problems. Turning to Rosa, he said, "No success yet, eh?"

  But Vito hadn't finished speaking Italian: "I was dragged out of retirement for this," he said. "To become a stevedore in my old age."

  Nor was Angelo: "And to be driven on," he said bitterly, "like a mule, by a harridan of a woman."

  "So that's the way you talk about me, is it?" Rosa demanded, flaring at him, hands on hips. "In front of foreigners?"

  "He doesn't understand," Angelo said. "He doesn't understand anything."

  "Well, I understand," Rosa told him, "and I-"

  "Rosa, Rosa," Eustace said. "Please, Rosa, speak to me and speak in English. I take it you've had no luck yet."

  "Luck?" Rosa echoed. "Oh, we've had luck. Wonderful luck. We have enough bathrooms here for a Hilton hotel. That's the kind of luck we have."

  Eustace peered into the back of the truck, saying, "You still have a chance. It's almost half full."

  Gesturing disdainfully at Angelo and Vito, Rosa said, "These weaklings had to stop for a nap." Then, turning to the men under consideration and switching to Italian, she yelled,
"A nap you had to stop for!"

  "If I ever get back to Italy," Angelo told her, "I will hire a woman to kill you."

  "Oh, yes, you're full of talk," Rosa said. "All you do is talk."

  Coming close to Eustace, looking him in the eye and opening his mouth to show his old, stained, cracked, broken teeth, Vito said, "You led us on this Children's Crusade, Englishman. Are you pleased with yourself?"

  Smiling amiably in the teeth of those teeth, Eustace said, "Yes, we're all doing our best. But I have to go now." And he retreated from the teeth, hopping once again onto his motorcycle, giving Lida a bright and meaningless smile.

  "Perhaps," Angelo said with grim cheerfulness to Rosa, "this lunatic will run you down with his motorcycle."

  "Yes, you're doing just fine," Eustace told Angelo. He waved, he started the motor, and he cycled away.

  ***

  One end of the platform of the unused Metro station had become a kind of stage set, a sort of living room without walls, completely-perhaps overly-furnished with sofas, chairs, lamps, carpets, tables and so on. A few of the lamps were even lit, increasing the effect, and the final touch was the beautiful Renee, seated on a sofa with a bright lamp beside her, feet curled under her lovely bottom as she leafed through a copy of Elle.

  Eustace and Lida entered, stage left, looking around in disbelief. Renee, the proper hostess, got to her feet to welcome them, tossing the magazine onto a coffee table. "Ah," she said. "Our first guests. Come in and sit down."

  Eustace didn't need to understand French to comprehend the gist of what she'd said. "Incredible," he responded, shaking his head. Then he said, "Where's Jean?" He repeated the name three times, with three different approximations of a French accent. "Jean. Jean. Jean. Where-is-he?"

  With a careless wave toward the far end of the platform, Renee said, "The men are at work."