Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [131]
But though there was to be no terror from above, there would still be some sort of loud destructive device involved. Brentford had protested, but Schwarz had made it clear that this was a question of honour for the anarchists, and therefore not negotiable. It was, however, Hardenberg’s conviction that quality had to prevail over quantity, and that a single, precise, well-timed blast at the right spot at the right time would have as much expressivity on the battlefield as numerous blind outbursts of terror. He had looked upon the map, lost in thought, then all of a sudden had pointed straight at the Greenhouse.
Brentford protested again.
“Too bad,” Hardenberg said with a straight face. “Hothouses are the best things to blow up. All those smithereens. But be at rest, Mr. Orsini, it was a just an idiotic joke. What we’ll do is take the most wickedly useless institution in the city and blow it to freedom come. It would be best if it were both a warning and a well-deserved punishment. I vote for the Northwestern Administration for Native Affairs.”
Brentford, though he hated the idea of any ruins at all in New Venice, deemed the idea a lesser evil. And, after all, ruins, too, were part of the life of a city. A kind of Memento mori. Of Et in Arcadia ego.
Mougrabin was to be entrusted with the whole operation, and Hardenberg had also insisted, for some reason, that it would be Gabriel, and none other, who was to serve as messenger to him. Gabriel was perfectly happy with his self-appointed office as a chaperone to the Elphinstone twins, and had little desire (or perhaps much too much) to go back to the Apostles’. Still, he did not want to be tiresome in these delicate circumstances, and with typical bad grace he finally surrendered.
Which was why, on the eve of the military parade organized to celebrate the Victory over the Inuit, he had stealthily walked out of the underground hideout and by numerous roundabout ways through ill-lit and slushy streets had reluctantly hurried toward the Apostles’, Stella’s featherweight ghost using his stomach as a punching bag.
And when he rapped the code on Mougrabin’s door, it was none other than Stella who opened it. In a man’s dressing gown.
They stood facing each other, paralyzed. Gabriel’s soul fluttered in panic like a emptying balloon, as if trying to find a way out of his body.
“Ah, Gabriel, my good friend!” said Mougrabin from behind Stella, putting on his braces. “I am so happy to see you!!!”
He came to the door and hugged him, until Gabriel could not breath anymore.
“We were very worried for you! Isn’t it true, Zvevdichka, that we worried a lot? Our Zvevdichka loves you a lot, you know,” he added, in a whisper that reeked of onion.
The Little Star, however, had retreated to her room.
“Whatever brings you here, my good friend?” Mougrabin asked, still standing in the doorway, his eyes blinking with emotion.
Gabriel managed to remember the password.
“Do me business in the veins o’ the earth
When it is baked with frost.”
Mougrabin’s face broke out into an ugly porcelain grin. He took Gabriel by the arm and pulled him inside the apartment, closing the door behind him and looking through the peephole for a while.
“At last! It has come!” he exclaimed as he turned back toward Gabriel. “And you have joined our feast of Freedom. By highways or hedges, I always knew you would. Have you heard, Stella?” he called out. “He is now one of us!”
But, locked in her room, Stella did not answer.
Gabriel, trembling and holding his hat like a shy peasant, followed Mougrabin into a small, shabby living room. On the table, near the samovar, from which Mougrabin poured him a cup of steaming tea, and next to a small phonograph, was a strange device he had been cleaning, showing a piston and a cylinder with cooling vanes at the top, small enough to be carried in a coat pocket.
“Do not