V.

Bung ho, the English said. Up goes the balloon. Yusef, believing that an anarchist or devotee of annihilation must have some childhood memory to be nostalgic about by way of balance, loved balloons. Most nights at dreams' verge he could revolve like the moon about any gaily-dyed pig's intestine, distended with his own warm breath.   But from the corner of his eye now: miracle. How, if one believed in nothing, could one account . . .   A balloon-girl. A balloon-girl. Hardly seeming to touch the waxed mirror beneath. Holding her empty cup out to Yusef. Mesikum bilkher, good evening; are there any other cavities you wish filled, my English lady. Perhaps he would spare children like this. Would he? If it should come to a morning, any morning when all the muezzins were silent, the pigeons gone to bide among the catacombs, could he rise robeless in Nothing's dawn and do what he must? By conscience, must?   'Oh,' she smiled: 'Oh thank you. Leltak leben.' May thy night be white as milk.   As thy belly . . . enough. She bobbed off, light as cigar smoke rising from the great room below. She'd pronounced her o's with a sigh, as if fainting from love. An older man, solidly built, hair gone gray – looking like a professional street-brawler in evening dress – joined her at the stairs. 'Victoria,' he rumbled.   Victoria. Named after her queen. He fought in vain to hold back laughter. No telling what would amuse Yusef.   His attention was to stray to her now and again throughout the evening. It was pleasant amid all that glitter to have something to focus on. But she stood out. Her color - even her voice – was lighter than the rest of her world, rising with the smoke to Yusef, whose hands were sticky with Chablis punch, mustache a sad tangle - he had a habit of unconsciously trimming the ends with his teeth.   Meknes dropped by every half-hour to call him names. If one happened to be in earshot they traded insults, some coarse, some ingenious, all following the Levantine pattern proceeding backward through the other's ancestry, creating extempore at each step or generation an even more improbable and bizarre misalliance.   Count Khevenhuller-Metsch the Austrian Consul had been spending much time in the company of his Russian counterpart, M. de Villiers. How, Yusef wondered, can two men joke like that and tomorrow be enemies. Perhaps they'd been enemies yesterday. He decided public servants weren't human.   Yusef shook the punch ladle at the retreating back of Meknes. Public servant indeed. What was he, Yusef, if not a public servant? Was he human? Before he'd embraced political nihilism, certainly. But as a servant, here, tonight, 'them'? He might as well be a fixture on the wall.   But that will change, he smiled, grim. Soon he was day-dreaming again of balloons.   At the bottom of the steps sat the girl, Victoria, center of a curious tableau. Seated next to her was a chubby blond man whose evening clothes looked shrunken by the rain. Standing facing them at the apices of a flat isosceles triangle were the gray-headed man who'd spoken her name, a young girl of eleven in a white shapeless frock, and another man whose face looked sunburned. The only voice Yusef could hear was Victoria's. 'My sister is fond of rocks and fossils, Mr. Goodfellow.' The blond head next to her nodded courteously. 'Show them, Mildred.' The younger girl produced from her reticule a rock, turned and held it up first to Victoria's companion and then to the red face beside her. This one seemed to retreat, embarrassed. Yusef reflected that he could blush at will and no one would know. A few more words and the red face had left the group to come loping up the stairs.   To Yusef he held up five fingers: 'Khamseh.' As Yusef busied himself filling the cups, someone approached from behind and touched the Englishman lightly on one shoulder. The Englishman spun, his hands balling into fists and moving into position for violence. Yusef's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. Another street-fighter. How long since he'd seen reflexes like that? In Tewfik the assassin, eighteen and apprentice tombstone-cutter - perhaps.   But this one was forty or forty-five. No one, Yusef reasoned, would stay fit that long unless his profession demanded it. What profession would include both a talent for killing and presence at a consulate party? An Austrian consulate at that.   The Englishman's hands had relaxed. He nodded pleasantly.   'Lovely girl,' the other said. He wore blue-tinted spectacles and a false nose.   The Englishman smiled, turned, picked up his five cups of punch and started down the stairs. At the second step he tripped and fell; proceeded whirling and bouncing, followed by sounds of breaking glass and a spray of Chablis punch, to the bottom. Yusef noted that he knew how to take falls. The other street-fighter laughed to cover the general awkwardness.   'Saw a fellow do that in a music hall once,' he rumbled. 'You're much better, Porpentine. Really.'   Porpentine extracted a cigarette and lay while smoking where he'd come to rest.   Up on the mezzanine the man with the blue eyeglasses peeked archly from behind a pillar, removed the nose, pocketed it and vanished.   A strange collection. There is more here, Yusef guessed. Had it to do with Kitchener and Marchand? Of course it must. But - his puzzling was interrupted by Meknes, who had returned to describe Yusef's great-great-great- grandfather and grandmother as a one-legged mongrel dog who fed on donkey excrement and a syphilitic elephant, respectively.       III   The Fink restaurant was quiet: not much doing. A few English and German tourists - the penny-pinching kind whom it was never any use approaching - sat scattered about the room, making noise enough for midday in Place Mohammed Ali.   Maxwell Rowley-Bugge, hair coiffed, mustaches curled and external clothing correct to the last wrinkle and thread, sat in one corner, back to the wall, feeling the first shooting pains of panic begin to dance about his abdomen. For beneath the careful shell of hair, skin and fabric lay holed and gray linen and a ne'er-do-well's heart. Old Max was a peregrine and penniless at that.   Give it a quarter of an hour more, he decided. If nothing promising comes along I shall move on to L'Univers.   He had crossed the border into Baedeker land some eight years ago - '90 - after an unpleasantness in