More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Daphne, who must have slid somehow into a nostalgic daze, is reminded it’s back to the present tense.
“Looking for me, Schätzchen?” “Long way from Friedrichstraße tonight.” She tries to turn and step back out but her way is blocked by Hitler-happy adolescents,
“Need a ride, sister, I’ll be right with you.” Since she began flying the autogyro, something in Glow Tripforth del Vasto has begun to stir, something deep and each time less disposed to forgive.
Daphne runs and climbs into the mother-in-law seat in
front of Glow, hollering, “Noisy rig, ain’t it?”
up into the sky they’re taken. Or what, with a gyro, passes for sky. Because down this low, as Daphne is soon to learn, the ground also figures as part of the flight…not really transcending the earth, not soaring into some higher
element, but following perfectly the nap of the terrain, every hollow and haystack, every turn of creek, tobogganing hill, and lover’s leap…
Daphne finds herself next day almost relieved to be clamorously back in the air, moving at pretty much the altitude and speed of lucid dreaming, slipping along the terrain so unexpectedly close below, fields of cloud stretching away like prairie, then all at once a hell of a lot of trees. Glow’s laughter streaming across the altitudes like a white silk aviator’s scarf.
“Whatever it is that’s just about to happen, once it’s over we’ll say, oh well, it’s history, should have seen it coming, and right now it’s all I can do to get on with my life. I don’t care to know more than I need to about the
mysteries of time,”
“You’re expecting spiritual wisdom from little G. T. del V.? you’ll be waitin...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Once a major port of embarkation for the New World, bright and bustling, Fiume now is a tattered ghost city with a sordid history of secret treaties and sellouts, edging its way through what the Fascist Italian regime calls Year Ten, continuing to collapse in on itself,
Hop goes through it again and of course it keeps coming out even less convincing,
“So…all this time you were pretending to be a klezmer clarinetist, romantically involved with an heiress to an American cheese fortune, meantime gathering intelligence on
the sly, sending faithful summaries, about what and back to whom, exactly, not for the likes of me to imagine.” “Not ex...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“What did you think would happen?” “No idea. Besides which, the gumshoe’s code, no daydreaming on the job, so forth.”
Bruno had been hearing about Fiume since it was still an independent state under D’Annunzio. What brought him there in person was a scouting assignment on behalf of the InChSyn, which by then had grown more global and sinister in scope, avoiding central headquarters, instead choosing a more distributed model,
just after the War, when d’Annunzio’s republic was young and Fiume had a reputation as a party town, fun-seekers converging from all over, whoopee of many persuasions, wide-open to nudists, vegetarians, coke snorters, tricksters, pirates and runners of contraband, orgy-goers, fighters of after-dark hand-grenade duels, astounders of the bourgeoisie…Bridges,
At night the lights of the villa shine far out over the sea, all night long,
always awake late and up
to something—night owls, freeloaders, accidental walk-ins, practitioners of esoteric arts, fearers of the dark, compulsive socializers, secret police, jewel thieves, firefly girls, drug dealers, cigarette-factory workers, tobacco smugglers, ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
surrounded by a blinding halo of disgruntlement, Ace arrives at Bruno’s villa with no clear plan in mind.
Rogue nuns in civilian gear are two-stepping with bomb-rolling Marxist guerrillas. Fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down. Wagnerian sopranos are learning the hillbilly guitar chords to “Wabash Cannonball.” Pirates are getting soused with peddlers of
marine insurance.
Porfirio is deep in earnest dialogue with former Berlin chorus girl Lady Forsythia Bladesmith, who’s trying to remember if they’ve met.
“Buenos Aires, perhaps, around the time of the coup? Teatro Colón, performance of Tosca, Apollo Granforte sang Scarpia.
Ace Lomax wanders by, spots Hicks and Zoltán von Kiss. “Sorry about those Cubs, four straight in the Series like that, damn.” “Murderers’ Row,” Hicks shrugs, “what did anybody expect?” “And Babe Ruth calling that shot, huh?”
“This sub—you’ve seen it?” “Maybe. It was at night, they told me that’s what it was. If it apported in, it was on a scale bigger than I’ve ever been comfortable working at…in any case I’m told not everybody gets to see it.” “I went through the same routine back in M’waukee.”
one of whom seems to be Egon Praediger, nose merrily aglow, presently able to scramble away on hands and knees, giggling. Bruno gazes after him. “Well. So-fa, so good…” “Congratulations,” Hicks with a touch to his hat brim, “there goes the collar of his career, he’s been after you forever.”
Abandoned after the War, the old Whitehead factory, where the torpedo as we have come to know it was invented, has fallen into ruin, occupied these days by unhoused squatters and motorcyclists passing through. Few care to stay much longer than overnight, because it’s said to be haunted
by the ghosts of submarines long dismantled
no doubt…Some of us, if consciences had toenails, would be hanging on by just that margin. Yet conscience must find ways to go on operating inside history.”
Enough on the secret history of the InChSyn,
send the whole business up in one giant fondoozical cataclysm.” “And whatever’s left gets grabbed up by pikers and riffraff—Kraft, Unilever, the Cheese Exchange in Sheboygan,
Meantime on the Korzo who should show up one morning at Caffé Impresa but Dippy Chazz Foditto, wearing a Borsalino, a bespoke Neapolitan suit, and Lenthéric Men’s After Shave Lotion, waving around an unlit full-length Toscano. Being deported, in style it seems, back to his ancestral Sicily,
Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World is said to stand a wonder of our time, a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman draped in military gear less ceremonial than suited to action in the field. Nothing else around for uncounted miles of ocean, only the lofty figure, wind,
weather, ocean.
As Hicks begins to understand he’s not going back to the States
whatsoever—but someday
they’ll lose that innocence. They’ll find out.” “Maybe they’ll keep finding new ways to be innocent.” Which got me a funny look. “Better if somebody tells you now—innocent and not guilty ain’t always the same.”
