The Curator, page 19
Mosi began, “Yes, those were our damned orders, but we gave them to you based on the assurance you made to us that those up on the Highway would roll over in a couple of days. Here it is, four weeks later, and we’d like not to lose the support of the populace, which if we did, might also result in bloodshed—”
“Treaties are complex.” The general folded up his paper. “You want peace and you want justice. I will get those things for you. I have the greatest confidence in the negotiating committee that I assembled with Mr. Lumm’s advice, and they promise me”—he waved his little paper—“right here, that it’s a matter of days now until the terms will be fixed.”
Mosi grimaced and the gaze he settled on Crossley was withering. The general stared ahead, unperturbed.
Lionel indicated that Robert should once again continue.
The lieutenant went on to touch on the gossip that individuals vaguely connected to the old government were being kidnapped. Some of the other heads had mentioned this too. “I even wrote down a few of the names that people gave me, and I checked them against the indictments at the Emergency Court and against the rolls of the detainees in the holding cells at the Magistrates’ Court, but I didn’t find any of them. I agree with what’s been said before, that it’s fair to assume that the missing, loyalists or not, fled the city somehow or other. What concerns me is that I couldn’t convince any of the rumormongers that my information was conveyed in good faith.”
Lumm abruptly came to; he shook himself upright, smacked his lips, popped his eyes, blinked, and said, “Rumors, no matter how foolish or asinine, often hold an emotional truth, and truth, as we all know, is gem-hard. Bury the truth for a thousand years, dig it up, and it’s unchanged. Unchanged. Use truth to score stone. It won’t break. It’s the same truth.…”
The playwright blinked a few times. Robert had the horrible feeling Lumm was trying to remember either where he was, or to whom he was speaking, or both. Over the few weeks of the Provisional Government’s reign, the ancient man’s thin face had cratered; his cheeks had become so concave that if you had laid him on his side, you could fill them with pennies.
“… But if you overmind a rumor—or a superstition—if you pick at, dig at—it acts not like a rock, but like a dandelion. The wind blows it and that’s bad enough. You don’t want to help a dandelion. You want a gardener who acts with the greatest, greatest discernment.
“Emotions are in play at either end. The tender soul can be hoodwinked by sentiment. That’s what the artist writes toward, paints toward, and acts toward in the stage lights. We want to fool the audience and they want to be fooled.
“So.
“So, we have to control our sympathies without losing our sympathies. And then, gentlemen, you find you must fall back on the truth, on that hard, hard truth. Which is gem.”
The playwright clasped his gloved hands and nodded smilingly at Robert, and at the small audience of Volunteers and officers in their seats. A slug of drool shone in the white bristles of Lumm’s unshaven chin.
Robert saw Mosi and Lionel share a look. The student leader raised an eyebrow at the union man. Mosi, who in the midst of these meetings usually gave the impression of a prisoner who had all but relinquished hope of escape, covered his mouth and glanced away. In the chair at the wall, Crossley maintained his rectitude.
“You understand my point,” Lumm said, the drool slipping down to his throat. There was a faint, pleading note in the playwright’s voice.
“Yes, sir,” Robert said, but inwardly he found that he could no longer argue that a degree of skepticism on the part of the common people was unwarranted.
The Metropole: The Sergeant
The men milled around in the hall outside the lounge, and Robert winced at the tracks of mud their boots deposited on the Metropole’s sand-colored carpets. The maids would have their work cut out trying to get them clean.
He spotted Sergeant Van Goor lingering by the elevator. The sergeant was staring at the dial above the golden gate, apparently transfixed by its inching progress from the numeral 3 to the numeral 2. Behind the murmur of conversation there was the jingle of the elevator’s chains.
“You should try it,” Robert said.
Van Goor twitched, laughed. “I don’t know, sir. An old soldier like me, a handsome piece of work like that, I’d probably ruin it somehow.” He gestured to his mud-caked boots. “For goodness’ sake, look at these boots of mine. I should see your lady that fixes them, shouldn’t I? Can she give a nice smart polish too?”
Robert felt his cheeks warm. He had not forgotten about the seeming misunderstanding between them that night at the Magistrates’ Court, the false notion he’d given Van Goor about Dora’s availability; nor, it seemed, had the sergeant. Robert didn’t blame the man, who had undoubtedly grown up roughly and didn’t know any better. But he needed to rectify the misconception. This was the opportunity.
“You’re as good as anyone, Van Goor. Come on, let’s wait for it to come back and ride down together.”
“Is that an order, Lieutenant?” Van Goor’s expression was positively jolly.
“If that’s what it takes,” Robert said. The sergeant’s mention of his rank elicited an unpleasant association with Dora’s habit of mentioning it in a very different context.
“All right,” he said, “a soldier knows his place.”
“But listen,” Robert said, “since you mention it, I should tell you, I was mistaken.”
“No!” Van Goor grinned. “I don’t believe it, Lieutenant! Not you!”
Robert laughed, relaxing. He enjoyed the teasing that went on among the soldiers. “Yes, yes. I was. I’m afraid Dora doesn’t know how to repair boots.”
The sergeant snapped his fingers in comical exaggeration. “Ah! That’s too bad, isn’t it?”
In the time it took the elevator dial to tick its way back from the 2 to the 4, the hallway outside the lounge largely cleared. The elevator clanked into position, and the accordion hinges of the gate clattered open to reveal the compartment. Posted inside was the operator, a young woman in a purple suit with a tasseled usher’s cap balanced on her springy hair, and whose gap-toothed grin gave no indication that she minded the recent change in the hotel’s clientele. Tucked into the corner on the floor was the hotel’s cat. It blinked at them sleepily, and rested its chin atop the curl of its abundant white tail.
The men stepped forward. Robert told the operator, all the way down. She yelped, “Excellent, sirs!” and grasped the edge of the gate.
“You’ll like this,” he said to Van Goor, who was glancing all around the swirling gilt moldings of the ceiling.
“I’m sure I will. I wouldn’t doubt you, Lieutenant.”
“Is there room for two more?” asked a tremulous voice.
Aloys Lumm and General Crossley appeared at the elevator doors. The hunched playwright gripped the general’s elbow for balance. Crossley stood straight and tall and blank-faced.
“Oh—” Lumm said, shoe poised on the threshold. “Look at you.”
It took Robert a moment to determine that he was addressing the cat. Lumm grimaced and waved a finger in the animal’s direction. “Clever, clever,” he said, before shifting his gaze to the humans in the elevator. Lumm’s countenance smoothed and he winked at them. “It knows how to ride an elevator. Isn’t that wonderful. Saves energy for hunting that way, I’m sure. Looks a little crowded in there, General, and we need the exercise, don’t we. Let’s take the stairs.”
Both Robert and Van Goor moved forward, protesting, offering to move the cat or give up their spots, but Lumm, with Crossley for support, had already turned along the hallway toward the stairs. As they moved off he croaked, “No, no, it’s fine, it’s fine.…”
The two men stepped back into the box. In the corner, the cat, shameless, had closed its eyes. Van Goor shrugged at Robert. “Down in the Lees they love their cats. Some still even have little churches to them, you know. Myself, I never saw the point of them.”
His phrasing caused Robert to chuckle. “Oh, I’m not sure animals have a point. We just live, don’t we? I remember, when I was younger, there was a groom in our employ, a big, bald, not particularly talkative man. I asked him why he didn’t have hair, and he looked at me as if I was mad, and he said, ‘Because it didn’t grow.’ Of course, the other grooms fell over laughing. I felt foolish, but the man—his name was Reuter—he didn’t laugh or even smile. Reuter just said, ‘Well, it’s a fact,’ and went back to his work. That’s what I think of when I wonder what the point of something is. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes,” Van Goor said. “That’s good, Lieutenant, that’s really good.”
The operator had shut the gate and thrown the lock, and now she told them to get ready. She cranked the control lever. “This is the exciting part, sirs.” With a slick, tinkling rattle, the elevator began to descend along its chains.
* * *
It was the fawning over them, Van Goor had meant, the point of that; of adoring them and keeping them as pets for fancy hotels and leaving scraps for them, such as some people did who didn’t even have enough to feed themselves. It wasn’t just that the rude schoolboy talked to him like he was stupid, it was that the rude schoolboy was so fucking sure of his own brilliance. First he had made the offensive assumption that Van Goor was illiterate. Then he had decided that Van Goor had never taken an elevator, although he had taken one that very afternoon in order to reach the fourth-floor lounge!
What form would the next insult take? Would he offer to show him his left from his right? Give him tips on using a fork and a knife? Would the young bastard cut right to the chase and propose to teach him how to wipe his own ass?
The sergeant did not need the irritation. As rosily as Crossley had put it to the so-called leaders of the Provisional Government—and a wonderful team that was, a rock-skulled porter, another schoolboy, and a babbling corpse—the situation on the Great Highway was not nearly resolved. That was pure ass-covering on Crossley’s part.
Envoys had come down from the Crown’s encampment, but from what Van Goor had been told the talks had hardly advanced past the introductory cock-measuring stages—the arguments over who would be speaking for whom, the schedule, the location, the arrangement of the fucking tables and chairs, that sort of bullshit. Contrary to Crossley’s description, Van Goor saw no signal that the Crown was ready to wave a white flag. They seemed content to stay where they were, singing the royal anthem behind their fortifications, shooting game, and letting summer change to fall. For Van Goor, this meant that he was at his post by the tiger statue at the Court at nearly all hours, redirecting orders from the command post on the Highway, and answering the stupid questions that stupid people wanted answered. If it wasn’t some openmouthed corporal with his fly unbuttoned, too blind to see the mess tent standing in the middle of the square, it was a clerk from the Currency Ministry, or a librarian from the Foreign Ministry, or some other nervous underling—a gamekeeper, a milkman, a rich lady’s dresser, a magistrate’s children’s nurse, that stinking fucking dog man, you name them. Every idiot in the city who no longer had a master to tell them what to do since the old masters had run off north urgently required his direction. Van Goor swiftly sent these bewildered inferiors off to Legate Avenue to make their confessions and receive their little slaps on the wrist, but it was exhausting. The sergeant hadn’t thought of Barnes since the night of Westhover’s interview, and if not for this latest volley of high-handed abuse, it was likely he’d have been blessed never to think of him again.
Enough was enough. He’d been generous to let the first slight go, but Van Goor had his self-worth to maintain. Without self-worth, you were just something for other people to use, a cigarette to smoke up and flick away, a stair to drop a bootheel on as you climbed.
* * *
Van Goor, as a youngster, had been bound in a provincial town to a wheelwright, a remarkably rude individual named Karnel, who believed he had discovered the key to all wit in his assistant’s surname. Van Gunk, Van Cunt, Van Piss, Van Sweeper, Van Shit Shoveler, Van Sloppy, Van Lazy, Van Slow, Van Dumb, Van Poor, Van Whore, Van Please, Van Sorry, Van Weepy, and Van on and Van on. For two years, Van Goor had absorbed the wheelwright’s nasty, belittling gibes and his hitching, screeching crow’s laugh, hee-hee-hee, hee-hee-hee.
One day a soldier brought a military carriage into the wheelwright’s barn to have its jumpy wheel tightened. It had been a simple job, but Karnel put on his usual show of pacing around the carriage, sighing and pinching his flabby throat, lamenting the state of the hubs and the rims, and acting in general as if the fix might be impossible. This was all a run-up for him to demand an inflated fee and, following the completion of the task, to smugly declare that “not many other could have managed, but I did!”
The soldier threw him off, though, brusquely asking, “Well? Have I come to the wrong man?”
“No, of course not!” Karnel snapped, and yelled at Van Goor to bring him the second-smallest mallet. When Van Goor brought it, Karnel threw it back at him, hitting his underling in the knee and giving him a bruise. “I told you to get the smallest mallet, Van Shit!” While he went about the business of resetting the wheel, the wheelwright, in a fury at being prodded by the soldier, rained a continuous stream of abuse on Van Goor. “Van Puke, hurry up!” “Van Waste, are you Van Deaf?” and so on.
The soldier, whom Van Goor never did see again, had taken a seat on the bottom step of the stairs to the hayloft. He sprawled with his polished, red-striped black boots stretched out.
Van Goor was accustomed to Karnel’s invective, but the presence of the soldier, overhearing it as he relaxed in his shiny boots, made him horribly ashamed of his own scuttling lowness.
When the work was done, the soldier gave the wheel a shake with his hand and a tap with the toe of his boot, and said it was satisfactory. He handed Karnel his money and nodded mildly in Van Goor’s direction. “I’m surprised he puts up with you talking to him like that. Rude makes rude, in my experience. Hurts morale.”
“He puts up with it and he’s grateful,” the wheelwright said. “Van Grateful, I call him, hee-hee-hee.” The scrawny man’s neck wattles flapped and wobbled with his cackles. “Hee-hee-hee!”
“Maybe,” the soldier said, in that way people did when they actually meant, “No,” and climbed onto the carriage. He clicked at his horses and drove away, rattling up the long dusty road that led to the main thoroughfare.
The exchange shook something awake in young Van Goor, though.
For some time, he had been supposing, disconsolately, that he would probably have to murder Karnel, or else lose his mind. It wouldn’t be hard. Van Goor was young and strong, the wheelwright close on sixty. The problem was that upon killing his master, his own hanging would soon follow.
What the soldier said altered his consideration. His notion of the possibilities turned on the soldier’s key word: rude. Karnel had been rude to Van Goor, outrageously, ceaselessly rude. And as the soldier said, rude made rude. More than that, Van Goor thought, rude deserved rude.
Now, murder—murder was a little more than just rude. It was also letting them off the hook. If you murdered someone, they didn’t have to live with the feeling that rudeness put on you, the invisible dirtied feeling that made you feel less than human. Yes, rude deserved rude.
Anything short of murder, however, anything that left the subject alive, would qualify. That left quite a menu of discourtesy for young Van Goor to peruse and contemplate.
The wheelwright’s servant lay on his pallet in the hayloft and deliberated on his revenge, and further, mused on the relaxed way that the soldier had draped himself over the steps and stuck out his long, shiny boots. If you wore a uniform and had fine red-striped boots, people must know better than to call you names.
He decided that the next day he would break his contract and enlist. Van Goor was enthusiastic about the idea of the army, where there were standards of behavior, consideration was given to morale, and you received excellent boots.
Before departing, Van Goor, armed with a metal spoke, waited in the gray of the predawn, in the breezeway between the house and the shed. When Karnel emerged, on his way to his morning piss and fumbling with the button of his underwear, Van Goor clubbed the spoke across the back of the wheelwright’s skull. He dragged the unconscious man to the barn, roped his arms and legs across a sawhorse, and waited for him to regain his senses.
And when Karnel did, blinking and moaning, he begged to be let go. “I was only teasing, Van Goor!” he cried.
“That’s Van God to you,” Van Goor had replied, and proceeded to do something terrifically rude to the wheelwright. It was such a rude thing, in fact, that he knew the wheelwright would never go to the authorities about it, or about his servant breaking their contract.
Later, he heard from an acquaintance that Karnel walked with a bad limp. The news made Van Goor laugh, “Hee-hee-hee!”
Even in the military, the problem of rudeness cropped up disappointingly often. Rude foreigners waving legal documents written in foreign; rude privates questioning his handling of prisoners; rude saloonkeepers nagging about his bill; rude prostitutes making filthy comments in his ear while he was trying to concentrate; and once, a breathtakingly rude drunk in a saloon in the Lees, who had commented, “What are you, champ, nearly forty? You look nearly forty. And not even a captain yet? What’s holding you back? Something about you that the quality-type folks don’t appreciate?”
At a certain point, it was out of your hands. You did what was natural. Rude made rude and rude deserved rude, and, when necessary, Van Goor believed he could be ruder than any other man alive.
* * *
The elevator, clink-clinking down its chain, descended from 4 to 3 to 2.
