The Curator, page 16
As the fog cleared, the two smugglers had to squint at the brilliance of the dawn. The dory was run up on the same patch of Fairside sand they’d pushed off from the evening before. In the hold, the merchandise they’d planned to sell on the Continent, gold-flecked plates and bowls from the home of a minister, had been destroyed.
There was no sign of Bartol. He was still missing.
* * *
In the shadows beneath the South Fair Bridge, a destitute family, a husband and wife with two young children, had made a camp. The wife, because her husband was sick, left in the morning to get help from someone in the Provisional Government, medicine, food, a day’s labor, something, anything. The day waned and she did not return.
Her husband awakened from a fevered sleep at the sound of a heavy chain rattling slickly and the sploosh of an anchor dropping into water. His hot eyes found a ship rocking in the dark beneath the bridge’s closest arch.
“Ginny!” a voice was calling. “We could use a hand!”
“Sir? All right, sir.”
His wife, Ginny, was down the bank and wading in the shallows.
The stricken husband tottered up from the mound of rags and paper that was the family bed and croaked for her to stop, come back, the currents were stronger than they appeared.
“Another sort of current already took me, my love,” she replied to her husband. “Kiss the little ones for me. Good-bye.”
A rope ladder clapped over the ship’s railing. Ginny climbed it, and as her husband begged for her to stop, fog smoked up around the ship, and the last he saw was a baldish man reaching out his hand to help her aboard.
* * *
A gambler and his lawyer, out of work like everyone else who wasn’t a soldier or a Volunteer, were sharing a melancholy bowl of opium in the lawyer’s study.
The gambler poked the shoulder of his lawyer, rousing him from his stupor: a ship was bobbing in one of the lawyer’s many mirrors! They watched it float into the gilt frame—and reappear in the next mirror on the wall.
The addled men followed the ship as it sailed from one mirror to another. They pressed their noses to the glass to see more than a dozen men and women at the vessel’s railing. One of these passengers was the spitting image of an operator named Bartol, whom the lawyer had defended on larceny charges more than once, and even helped to get a job in the laundry of one of the great houses.
They pressed their ears to the walls between the mirrors and heard the boat creaking and the rigging grinding and the people on the deck talking amongst themselves. “We need to find a landing,” someone aboard the boat in the wall said.
The gambler dug out his pocketknife and slashed the silk wall coverings to find the wood beneath. “We’ve got to get them out of the wall, Charlie!”
“You idiot,” his lawyer said, yanking him back. “Do you want to drown? There’s an ocean in the walls too!”
The salt water that leaked from the cut in the wall dried in a long white tear.
* * *
It could be no other than the Charmer himself, the gathering whispers concluded; it was Joven who captained the Morgue Ship now that it was free. He had risen from his tub of ice, cut the ship’s lines, and taken the wheel, with Zanes, the boat’s custodian, for his first mate.
The ship sailed only at night, but it sailed everywhere: on the Fair, in the Hills, in the Government District, in the Lees, on the west side of the river and on the east, in cheap watery mirrors, in paintings of the sea, through the woods of the Royal Fields, and down narrow, mucky alleys.
At the Western Bluffs, a birdwatcher tucked in the boughs of a pine tree had also seen the Morgue Ship appear aloft. The ship floated just off the cliff’s edge and extended a ramp to one of the viewing decks for a woman who wore the badge of a magistracy official to stride aboard. A ptarmigan was perched on the wheelhouse, the birdwatcher noted, and stayed there as the ship and its new passenger glided into the obscurity of the billowing gray cloud cover.
The university’s night librarian reported the ascension of the rector’s dog man to the ship as it hovered in the air over the middle of the quad just before dawn. The ship was about twenty feet above the grass, he claimed, and a ladder was lowered and the dog man scampered up it. “After the ship had sailed into the branches of the great linden tree and disappeared amid the leaves,” the night librarian said, “I rushed to the spot. Do you know what I smelled? The unmistakable pong of wet dog. That was the rector’s man, his stink. It was, it was.”
A well-known lunatic dubbed Beat Your Dust was said to have been seen to dive headlong into the fountain in Bracy Square, and fail to come up for air. An observer had gone to peer over the fountain’s lip. Far under the water, she glimpsed Beat Your Dust, shrunken to the size of a chess piece, swimming toward a boat, also tiny and far below. In the next second, the wavelets created by his plunge shattered the scene.
* * *
Those who boarded the Morgue Ship, like Ginny and Bartol and Beat Your Dust, could not again be found in the daylight. These poor folks were dead, surely, and Joven had made their ghosts his crew. It was a curse on the city and its population. The Charmer was sailing away with doomed souls and the capacity of his vessel was without limit.
The Fields, Pt. 1
For the price of the story, Ike insisted on the flies’ suspenders too. He thought they’d do nicely for Dora’s bricklayers, who couldn’t be expected to get along with twine for belts.
Since bringing the former maid her clamdigger’s bucket, he’d contributed several additional items to the National Museum of the Worker: a thick pair of gloves and a shawl for the wax clamdigger, for which he’d traded with an actual clamdigger; several small cans of paint (white, black, red, and blue) to spruce up any number of exhibits; oil (for hinges, for the great gears, for the train whistles, for the spokes of the demonstration industrial loom that wound the demonstration threads, and for the mechanisms of a dozen other gummed-up devices); a piece of copper and a hammer for the tinker on the museum’s second floor who had looked particularly pathetic without either a tool for his raised, clenched hand to hold or an object to fashion; a two-handled basket for the vendor to carry the wooden sweets that had been left scattered around her feet; and a great many odd garments to replace those that had been worn out. Added to how Dora had washed the place down and straightened it up, the museum was looking refreshed. Ike took some pride in this—it was right that the people should look like people did, even if those people were wax, and a bit creepy by their very nature—and, more important than that, he was pleased that Dora seemed so pleased to have his help.
There was still a long list of pieces she wanted, like the surgeon’s implements he’d expected to find in the doctor’s office, and still sought. It was not simply a romantic imperative that he should find these things, but a matter of professional pride. A good thief didn’t stop trying to steal something just because it wasn’t in the first place he trespassed.
With the problem of the surgeon’s implements in mind, Ike thought to pay a visit to a horse doctor who, like not a few horse doctors, had a sideline treating the kinds of human ailments that required a strong arm, such as bone-setting, tooth-pulling, and minor amputations. This horse doctor actually operated uptown, at the carriage stables at the Royal Fields, was reputed to be unusually skilled, and, most important for Ike’s purposes, was known for the cleanliness of his tools.
“If you ever need your dick cut off real clean and quick, that fella that handles the horses up to the Fields is the one to see. Got a whole rack of silver knives. He’s the one took off Groat’s pecker for him,” Rei liked to remark.
(At this, naturally, Groat was ready with a bushel of the Deadly for anyone who dared to come at his manhood with a knife. Conversation at the Still Crossing tended to proceed in a circular fashion, inevitably coming around to the decrepit man’s poisonous fungus.)
There was no one with such clean tools in the Lees; in the Lees, operating tools were tools. Certainly rich folks didn’t visit this horse doctor to see about their broken legs and sore mouths, but the people who worked for the rich folks did. If the horse doctor was around, perhaps Ike could make a bargain with him for a pair of spare forceps or something. If he wasn’t around, if he’d gone off somewhere, or been taken off somewhere—this possibility, which snagged on the story the fly had told him like a strand on a nail head, Ike did not pause long to consider—he could just claim them.
* * *
Since it was an hour’s walk uptown, Ike opted for the tram. The first to arrive at the So Fair stop was packed from stem to stern. Ike hustled along beside the rolling wheels and hauled himself onto the driver’s step. The tram driver told him to go hang from a lamppost. The trammer was sleepy-eyed and grimacing, as if all of his energy had been used up in the production of his mustache, which was florid and black. He wore a bright-blue bowler hat.
Ike said, “Hold on, I only came up here because my sister wants to know how she can marry a trammer. She thinks it’s a glamorous way of life and that all you drivers look gentlemanly.”
“I don’t know about glamor,” the driver said. His grimace deepened before he added, at once defensive and hopeful, “It is a sound career.” He shifted the tram into second gear and it clattered along rapidly as Ike stood on the step and clung to the door handle. The man’s bowler was nifty, Ike thought, too nifty for a mustache that drove a tram. “They can’t just get rid of you like with some jobs. These machines don’t run themselves. That’s what the public doesn’t comprehend. You have to be able to mind them and that requires considerable experience. What’s your sister like?”
“Do you know the woman lies on the wave curling up in the middle of the fountain in Bracy Square? She looks just like that, but you’d never find her lazing on top of a wave. She’s always cooking and sewing.…”
For the next mile and a half, Ike regaled the driver about his sister Mary Ann: her experience as an artist’s model, the enormous inheritance she was due to receive from a woman for whom she’d cleaned house, and her romantic obsession with tram drivers. “She’s amazed by the strength it takes to move that stick in and out the gear.”
It was another two miles north to the Royal Fields, but as they drew opposite the No Fair, Ike spotted a pair of callow youngsters carrying rocks in their shirtfronts and felt duty bound to alter his plans.
“There’s one thing about my sister, though, that you might not care for,” Ike cautioned.
“I don’t know if that’s true,” said the trammer, who in the course of their talking seemed to have become attached to Mary Ann.
“She would never suck a stupid man’s cock. Shave your ugly mustache!” Ike darted out a hand, snatched off the driver’s blue bowler, and dropped running from the step. He chased after the two youngsters and caught them at the foot of the No.
“I haven’t got all day,” he announced, and the trio hurried out to the middle of the bridge.
Ike won the first game with a deuce on a scrap of netting. The second game, he gave the pair of little strays double or nothing plus let them play together, and won again, this time by sinking a sheet of newspaper.
“Put that in a frame to admire!” Ike cried. “Hang it up over the mantelpiece and show it to visitors!”
“That’s nothing,” the boy stray protested, and the girl stray said, “It was already mostly under the water.”
“Listen, children, that was a master shot by a master shooter,” Ike said. “I know you’re frustrated, but you disgrace yourselves with moaning. I’m truly wonderful at this game, one of the very best in the entire town, and you can take pride in losing to me. Now hand me the treasure.”
The strays disconsolately forked over their three pennies, a satiny black pincushion bristling with silver needles, and a tiny, jaundiced-looking turtle that, peeking grouchily from under its shell, strikingly resembled Groat.
“What’s your names?” Ike asked.
“We got lots of names,” the boy said.
“Tell me what to call you, you mysterious little fucker.”
“Len,” said the boy. Len had black hair and close-set eyes like a gull.
“Zil,” said the girl.
“Len and Zil. I’m Ike. What do you know?” Ike asked.
“What’s it worth?” replied Zil. Freckles sprayed her face up to her eyebrows.
Ike pointed to the rail of the bridge. “Should we find out if you can swim?”
Though late summer was bending into fall, it was still warm out on the bridge. The river breeze smelled like the horses that pulled the carriages over the bridge and the shit that the horses dropped in their wake. Say what you wanted about the Crown’s government, but they had remembered to shovel the shit.
“Why are you wearing a hat on your hat?” Len asked.
Ike had stuck his new blue bowler on top of his old brown cap. “Because I’m the greatest living dribser. I set the fashion and I ask the questions here.” He flicked Len’s ear. “Now tell me something.”
The boy blew out his nose and crossed his arms, making a show of thinking, as if he possessed so much valuable information it was hard to decide which piece to share. “They’re giving out bread morning and night at the feeding stations.”
“Bread’s mostly ashes,” Zil said.
“Everyone knows that,” Ike said. “What else?”
“Been no cargo ships since yesterday morning. Not a one.”
“Interesting. What else? You hear any talk about missing folks?”
The strays exchanged glances, and Ike had his answer. He didn’t care for it.
“Nonsense,” he said. “Whatever’s being said. Fish don’t walk on land and boats don’t sail on land or in the sky. The Charm’s dead, he was murdered by that minister, and it’s too bad, but when you’re dead, being dead is your job all day. You can’t captain a boat and be dead simultaneous. Take it from this Ike, you won’t make it out here believing in anything you can’t put in your mouth or stick in your pocket.”
“Charm’s boat isn’t a regular boat.” Zil jutted her jaw at Ike. “It’s magic.”
Despite himself, he softened. Tenderness was no favor to a Lees child, he knew it better than anyone, but Ike couldn’t help it. “All right. And what kind of magic would that be, that steals people from their homes? Nice magic.”
Len piped up. “Maybe he’s not stealing them.” His smile showed a handful of yellow baby teeth. “Maybe he’s rescuing them.”
“Maybe,” Ike said, surrendering again to his gentler instincts. “Speaking of stealing”—he tapped the pincushion—“one of these things is not like the rest.”
Zil was defiant. “So? The door was open and you could tell other people had already been through. I just ran in and snatched the first thing I saw. It’s just a pincushion.”
“Good for you,” Ike said, “but if one of those green armbands shakes you out and finds it, you’ll be got and in a cell. Flip it or hide it. Never hold too long. They’re stupid, but that’s no excuse for you to be stupider. You know the Still Crossing? The bartender there, Rei, she’ll give you a reasonable price.”
He returned the pennies, the cushion and needles, and the tiny turtle. “We’ll mark this one down as a lesson. You’ll have to excuse me now. A man can’t spend all day teaching children the art of the game. He has to make a living.
“You boil that turtle in clean water for a good long time before you eat it.” He took the nifty blue bowler—which was too big for him anyway, and besides he already had the brown bowler to match his brown suit—and jammed it on top of Zil’s head and over her eyes, and strode away as she yelled after him.
A block or two from the bridge, he saw people waiting to be fed. He might have stopped—ashy bread was better than no bread—but the line was hours long.
He quit the avenues for the residential streets of the moderately well-to-do, moving north through yards and under trees as much as possible, keeping an eye out for signs of abandonment, houses that he might want to return to visit after dark. Nothing jumped out, however; he heard voices out several open windows, and at one neat yellow house a piano playing from behind an alabaster curtain, some light frolicking tune that gave him a brief vision of himself, in his fine suit, dancing with Miss Dora. In his head, she wore the dress he’d chosen for her and he gracefully led her in between the exhibitions and the wax figures in one of the galleries. The vision ended as he came around the side of the yellow house and saw the splintered knob of the kitchen door, as well as the little spatter of dried blood on the granite step and the wheelbarrow piled with a silver serving set and some folded sheets.
The piano playing ceased and a man’s gruff voice drifted out. “We shouldn’t fuck around too much longer.”
Ike jogged into the stand of trees that divided the yard from the next and continued on to the Royal Fields.
* * *
When he reached the park, Ike slid down to walk in the culvert that hugged the arterial path. Caution was especially important now; you didn’t want to be seen in the vicinity of a place you robbed. And if there were other rough sorts around like those at the yellow house, from the culvert Ike could escape into the woods in three steps. Although it was called the Royal Fields, save for the footpaths and carriage trails, the odd tennis court or set of wooden climbing bars for kids, and the Royal Pond, it was largely forestland. The chatter of the neighborhoods gave way to the creaking of bark and the fizz of afternoon insects. The trees, ancient and tall, made a full green canopy above the arterial, punched through only here and there with pipes of light. He passed no one.
Soon the arterial brought Ike alongside the Royal Pond, which might have been called a lake. It bulged to a span of half a mile at its widest juncture, and it was more than twice as long. There was no one here either: not seated at the spidery wrought iron tables crouched on the stone pavilion, or standing at the rails of the wooden bridge that arced over the pond’s waist, or paddling through the lilies that coated the water. A few ducks slid across the water; partially screened by the tall grass at the far bank, a black cat, tucked low, watched them with yellow eyes. A single rowboat, which must have snapped free of its mooring in the boathouse, floated on the pond.
