The Curator, page 22
“Wriggles along the ground to get to his victims when they’re distracted, whips out the razor, and slices their tendons. That’s his method.” Rondeau swabbed the foam off his lip with his big gray tongue. “The maligned writer maims them all, leaves them cursing the fat publisher’s name, exactly as he planned, but ultimately feels no better. Which is the moral, you see.”
“I should get back to work,” Brewster said. “My shift starts soon.”
“Law is the salve, and there is no other, my man. A law for every human being, not a law of the rich and the royal only. Revenge can never heal. That’s what my art seeks to demonstrate in this case. But it’s not warm milk to soothe the sick belly of the complacent.” He offered a shy grin at Brewster, clearly trying, in his off-putting way, to be friendly. “Come on, let’s have another and toast to everyone being friends and having enough. Now everyone rides for free, don’t they? You don’t have to tell the lame and the poor they can’t get on because they don’t have any pennies.” Rondeau waved for the bartender. “Must be a load off your conscience.”
“Yes,” Brewster said, although he actually hadn’t thought at all of the wider variety of passengers who rode the tram since the Volunteers had torn out the money boxes. He felt unexpectedly chastened.
Rondeau continued, “Tell me what you know about the committees that are being set up. I’m sure you’ll want to join and—”
“I’m afraid I have to be on my way, Mr. Rondeau,” Brewster interrupted, putting down a coin. He edged a path through the crowd and out the open doorway into the street.
* * *
Warm, gritty wind tousled Brewster’s hair. The Strand lay before him, the river beyond that, and on the opposite riverbank, the city’s seaside fortifications, the salt-scarred gun towers with their rows of fifty-pounders pointing at the mouth of the bay. Gulls wove in the sky, murdering the peace with their torn voices. A single sandpiper was picking in the mucky sand at the water’s edge. Its plaintive call seemed to bemoan the gulls’ racket. A brown cat lazing atop a crumbling rock kiln eyed the sandpiper. The river lapped and mumbled as it made its way into the bay.
Brewster inhaled deeply. As everyone said, with the factories closed, the air was fresher.
The Volunteer’s words set Brewster to considering the plight of the poor. He wasn’t wealthy, but he had a job, hadn’t he? He had food to eat, even if it wasn’t what he wanted to eat. He’d even had enough money to buy that fine blue bowler. There were ones, especially who lived down here at the south end of the tramline, who had nothing, who starved. Brewster saw them reflected in his mirror at the front of the tram: no shoes on their feet, dressed in too many clothes, or dressed in too few, and dirty. Why hadn’t he thought more of them before this?
At the same time, he was supposed to do his job, drive the tram, and that was even more difficult than it had been before. The normal parts of the city had to function properly, or where were you?
Brewster wasn’t a bad man. He didn’t mind personally if rough people rode the tram. It was only the vandals and crooks he opposed. He had nothing against anyone, so long as they weren’t idlers, and made an honest effort for themselves.
An unaccountable and discomforting thought came to the tram driver, as sharp as the steel zing that tickled his nostrils when he threw the lever and the brakes bit on the rails: But what effort did a king make for himself, or the son of any rich man?
Brewster chewed his thumbnail, which tasted of vinegar from his lunch. If only Mary Ann were real, he’d have liked to talk to her about it.
The water of the Fair was blackly solid in the sunshine.
Two strays, a freckled girl in a man’s blue bowler hat that almost covered her eyes and a barefoot boy, ran past. The girl had something clutched under her shirt—a vase, perhaps, by the elongated shape—that she was clearly endeavoring to conceal. This made less of an impression on Brewster, however, than did the bowler.
The driver’s ears flamed. It was not his thief—not Mary Ann’s hooting auburn-haired creator and annihilator—but it was most definitely his hat!
The children entered the Still Crossing and disappeared into the swarm.
A few seconds later, Hob Rondeau emerged, hipping and assing people out of his way, saying, “Yup—yup—yup,” where most would have said, “Pardon.” In each hand he carried a jar of beer. He held one out for Brewster. “Thought you had to go. You forgot your beer, brother—” Rondeau paused, reading his expression. “What’s this?”
“Right off my fucking head!” Brewster blurted, and took a step toward the saloon.
The Volunteer got in front of him. If he’d been wronged, there was a right way to handle it.
Rondeau guided Brewster a few yards away, and while they drank from their jars Brewster explained about his hat and the thief who’d snatched it, and the stray, wearing the same hat, he’d just seen enter the Still Crossing.
“Funny,” Rondeau said, “but I believe I may have encountered your snatcher myself. He was with a young woman when I met him. She was very proper, had a paper that gave her a caretaker position at a museum, but I didn’t like the looks of him. Snotty mouth.”
Brewster had calmed somewhat, but he was still in an angry state of mind. Right off his fucking head! Something needed to be done.
“We don’t want to be rash,” Rondeau said, nodding at his own advice. “There’s more than one criminal involved, perhaps an entire syndicate. That girl, the one I met with your thief—if he’s the same—she might even be in danger, under duress.” He suggested they see the man who handled the public’s queries, a sergeant in General Crossley’s chain of command. This sergeant, a Van Goor, could usually be found at a table near the tiger statue in the Magistrates’ Court.
The Fields, Pt. 2
“I looked for you everywhere,” Robert said when she raised her head from the desk to see him sitting on the opposite side. “I thought you’d run off with one of your wax swains. I don’t think they like me, Dora. Especially the clamdigger with her little beach. She reminds me of someone’s very formidable mother. It’s discouraging. I find this whole place discouraging, but her especially. She looks so pleased and certain of herself, swinging along with that bucket. Dora, she looks victorious. I have this feeling that she’s about to tell me that her daughter, who I love, has already agreed to the proposal of a richer man’s son. Or maybe to the proposal of one of the wax miners.”
Dora blinked her sticky eyes. She had fallen asleep in the curator’s office. Her lieutenant regarded her with his elbow propped on the desk and his clean-shaven chin propped on his fist. A groggy dustiness filled the small room.
“Are you throwing me over for one of the miners?”
“No. The telegraph operator. What time is it?”
“Just after noon. Isn’t the telegraph operator… oh, I remember, the small room by the chemist’s laboratory, Telegraph Service above the door. The operator wears a white suit? Holds a notepad and a pencil? Portly?”
“Yes.”
“He has jowls.” Robert used a hand to shape a jowl in the air around his own face. He frowned. “They don’t have parts, do they?”
She shook her head. “No, they don’t. They’re smooth. But the telegraph operator pleases me in other ways, Lieutenant.”
“That son of a bitch. I’ll have to kill him.” He spoke without any conviction whatsoever, leaned back in his chair, and crossed his legs. He nodded at the tintype of the old king on the wall. “You should take that down.”
He was right. D stood and grasped the sides of the framed picture of the old king, whose murky eyes were seeded beneath wooly eyebrows. What Ike had said after seeing the kings carved into the rowboats was true; if you took away the medals around his collar, he was a mutt. The old king could have been the brother, in fact, of the nightsoil man on the second floor, who hunched arthritically under the arms of his barrow.
D lifted the picture off the wall and revealed the bright-yellow window of paint beneath.
“You look wretched,” Robert said.
D set the picture on the floor against the wall. “The telegraph operator hardly lets me sleep.”
“Enough.”
“It’s funny, but that’s what I said to the telegraph operator last night.”
Robert said he was taking her somewhere for a few hours, wherever didn’t matter, she needed some sunshine, needed to get away from this place.
“It smells awfully ripe too,” he said. “Have you looked to see if something crawled into the basement and expired?”
* * *
The park was the obvious place for a walk, and D thought Ike would be happy to know that she’d seen the rowboats he’d mentioned. She made the suggestion and her lieutenant thought it was perfect.
They left Little Heritage Street and headed north. Robert hooked his elbow through hers. As their steps carried them past the former embassy, she averted her eyes.
“All the nice places are on Great Heritage: the National Arts Museum, the National Science Museum, the National Historical Institute. That’s where we should have set you up. I should have insisted. All the places on Little Heritage are odd. It should be called Very Little Heritage.”
He gave her a piece of chocolate. The chocolate tasted slightly of the wool of his pocket, but mostly like heaven. She moaned at the taste, and he gave her another piece, and that one was even better. They left Legate and walked on a street that smelled like late-summer roses. D felt the sun on her face and hair, and breathed, and felt herself loosening inside her skin.
“I shouldn’t have said you looked wretched,” Robert said. “You couldn’t look wretched if you tried. I meant you looked tired.”
“You shouldn’t be so kind to me,” she said.
“Why not?”
“It’ll make me suspicious,” she said.
Robert cleared his throat, revealing everything in the three or four seconds too long that it took him to respond. “No more chocolate for you.”
D patted his arm. She wasn’t mad. “You’re a good soldier, Lieutenant.” She leaned against him, and felt him relax as he absorbed her weight.
* * *
It had been roughly a year earlier, the evening D saw the same handsome boy who’d run away from the crowd of other boys—ball under his arm, crowing, “Never, never, never!”—go into the university library, and decided to indulge her curiosity.
D went to the circulation desk and informed the notoriously eccentric night librarian that she had been asked to fetch a book for a professor and bring it to him along with his clean sheets.
The librarian looked up from the flyer he had been studying with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Though they were upside down, D could read the big words at the top of the paper: A MORAL CALL FOR THE BETTERMENT OF THE POOR AND THE VOICELESS. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen the pamphlet. It was all over campus.
“Be my guest, girl,” the night librarian said, accepting the story without interest. “Look, though: some comedian’s been littering in the books!”
Hunched over their work, the students at the long tables in the study hall didn’t look up as she moved through, stepping softly, to the stairwells.
D searched for the handsome boy until she found him in the deep stacks of the library basement, crouched between two high shelves, peering at the spines of the books. The newly wired strings of electric lights in the high recesses of the ceiling were weak, doing barely more than warm the highest shelf. At the whisper of her shoes, he glanced without standing.
“Hello, there—?”
“I’m Dora, sir,” she said.
“I recognize you. I’m Robert Barnes. I’m afraid you’re in the wrong section, Dora. This is the Drama-That-No-One-Has-Read-in-Fifty-Years Section.” He gestured down the aisle. “The Sheets Section is over there past the History-Books-That-No-One-Has-Read-in-a-Hundred-Years.”
“I recognize you, too, sir. I’ve seen you playing sports in the field. You’re very talented.”
“Thank you. That’s nice of you to say. Unfortunately, Dora, I’m not quite as talented at the classroom sports. I’ve missed too many classes of my Dramaturgy Seminar. My professor sent me here to get a book to read for extra credit, but I think his real plan may have been to cause me to ruin my eyesight as punishment.”
Robert Barnes smiled a smile of such openness and generosity, it could only belong to a person who had never been hurt by anyone in his whole life. From that look, D couldn’t imagine someone not liking him immediately; and she couldn’t imagine him imagining someone not liking him. For his rooms, she pictured surfaces polished by maids, rows of shoes polished by bootblacks, and on the hangers in the closet, jackets with sagging pockets of loose, forgotten coins. The shadows seemed to retreat from his clean, handsome face.
“Can I help you look, sir?” D asked. “A fresh pair of eyes can help sometimes.”
“By all means. I’d be grateful,” he said.
D held out the bundle of sheets for him to take. Robert rose and accepted them. “Thank you, sir.” She asked him the name of the author and he told her. D ran a finger along the spines of the shelves, reading her way down to the bottom where the boy had been looking—last names starting with LU. D tucked her skirts under herself and sat.
While she examined the volumes on the bottom shelf, she waited for Robert to say something else. He didn’t. He stayed quiet, a pair of trousered legs beside her, smelling like the camphor in the university’s laundry’s soap.
A miniature symphony played at a barely perceptible volume: the slow, fat, cracking swell of ten thousand leather book covers, the hum-sizzle of the electric bulbs, the murmur of the dust, the tender hurrying of mice. It was nice, to be in the mostly dark with this young man, to have his patience, and the walls all around them that kept everyone else far away. It made D feel less like herself, and she liked that. If she wasn’t herself, then she hadn’t ever lost anything, and didn’t want anything. If she wasn’t herself, she was somebody else. And when it came to somebody else, there was nothing—nothing in the world—that they might not do.
Between two thicker books was a skinny one with its spine turned inward, the pages facing out. D wiggled it free: A Little Wolf Box by Aloysius Lumm; the book he’d been trying to find. The cover illustration was of a pair of disembodied hands clapping. Oozy musical notes issued from the palms.
D got to her feet. “It was jammed in so you couldn’t see the binding.”
They went through the operation of exchanging the sheets for the book. When the transfer was finished, she didn’t move away, and they stood close, face-to-face in the aisle. D could smell his cigarettes and his hair tonic.
“Thank you, Dora,” he said. “That was kind of you. I know you had somewhere you were going and you stopped to help me.” The young man’s expression turned serious, skin clenching around his soft eyes and long mouth. “I want to tell you: where I grew up, I know the men who work with horses, and the men who plant and tend and harvest, and I consider them my friends. I believe they have value beyond the value our society gives to them. I don’t believe it’s right that some people should have to do everything while a few other people get to have everything. This fellow I know, Lionel, he started a group that wants to make it all a lot fairer, and I’ve joined up with it.”
D wondered if the men who planted and tended and harvested considered Robert their friend. She thought they probably didn’t, but nodded. “All right, sir.”
His face relaxed. “Believe it or not, I actually have a rank in the group—like in the military. I’m a lieutenant.”
She nodded again; if that was how he wanted it. “All right, Lieutenant.”
“I didn’t mean for you to”—Robert laughed—“oh, well. I suppose I asked for it, didn’t I? I can’t believe that old nut of a librarian sleeps here. Where’s his hole?”
“He doesn’t sleep here.”
Her lieutenant angled his head at her. She guessed it had probably occurred to him that she’d come for him, but he was too intelligent to believe it. “What are you doing down here with those sheets, then?”
“I followed you, Lieutenant,” she said. “I was only carrying the sheets so no one would notice me. They’re not for anybody. But maybe you’d like to have them. Maybe you can find something to do with them. Maybe we can together.”
* * *
There were, D thought, a lot of loose boats all of a sudden these days.
The one in the pond, at least, appeared unmanned by ghosts: it ticked counterclockwise out in the middle of the water. It also gave their idyll a purpose: to retrieve it, and restore it to the boathouse and the bosom of its fellow royalty.
Robert insisted that D should have the honor of selecting the vessel for their rescue mission.
She walked the boards of the covered dock that grew from the empty pavilion, inspecting the severe countenances of the ships that were tethered to labeled brass moorings and knocking softly in their individual slots. D settled on Macon XI, who had the gape of a man in the throes of a coronary attack and leaves of whitish-green algae caked around his nostrils.
“Because he’s the fiercest and the most putrid?” Robert asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Excellent,” he said.
He climbed in and helped her to a seat on the bench opposite. The boat was big enough for four, and the seats were padded with white cushions.
Robert fitted the two oars into the locks, D unknotted the ropes, and they skimmed from the shade of the boathouse into the bright of the open water. The pond’s blue-green expanse was glazed and cracked with silver and gold. On the bank, the pavilion’s pale-gray flagstones and wrought iron tables looked like they’d be hot to the touch, and the arcing wooden observation bridge was half obscured by the haze that rose off the water.
