The Curator, page 24
She opened the door and bolted through.
* * *
The smell slammed into D, hitting her in the eyes, reaching into her open mouth with her inhalation, and grabbing her stomach. She retched and lurched toward the right side of the garden, toward the barrier of boxwoods that separated the museum plot from the Society’s side lawn. The bucket that she’d left on the ground tangled her feet, and she stumbled, breaking through the trellis of tomato vines, splintering the wood, sprawling flat and feeling the warm tomatoes burst through her blouse.
She scrabbled to her feet, tore off her bonnet, and flung it in the direction of the stone wall that bordered the embassy. She ran to the boxwoods and began to eke and thread her way through the mazy, ropy limbs. Spiky branches snatched at her hair and apron and skirts, but she yanked herself forward, ripping fabric, tearing hair. The sound of the leaves rattling and the limbs banging had an awful hilarity to it, as if the bushes were cackling at her as she tried to claw her way through them.
D shoved herself through a last loop of branches on her hands and knees. She emerged into the ankle-high grass of the Society side lawn, pushing up to stand and moving dizzily for the broken wall of the burnt building. Blood was loud in her head, but from the other side of the boxwoods, she heard the jiggle of the doorknob and the door clacking open.
D caught herself against the charred wall and hurried alongside it in the direction of the street.
“Maid Dora, what’s this about?” said the sergeant from the other side of the boxwoods. “Oh, isn’t this a shame? You’ve gone and trampled your tomatoes. But which way did you go? I see your lovely bonnet over there, but…”
Three-quarters down the length of the building’s wall, D heard him smashing through the hedge. At the corner of the ruin, she broke left and kept to the wall, hustling away from the museum, heading for the empty frame that had held the Society’s front door. The squeak of her breath, like the highest key on some sick organ, made D furious. She ran faster.
Once through the empty doorway, she clambered onto one of the central mounds of rubble. It rose in uneven ridges and waves of broken brick and split timber. Ahead, on the small, jagged platform that was all that remained of the Society’s second floor, was the white cat that she had seen before. It was calmly sharpening its claws on the Vestibule’s doorframe, leaving pale gouges of raw wood in the charred surface, indifferent to D’s plight.
“I know you’re just having a joke on me, Maid Dora, I like a good joke as much as anyone, but there’s nothing funny about thievery and whoring!” His voice was closer, coming around the museum-side wall. “It’s rude to make a man run all over like this when he’s trying to look after the public good.”
The fragments shifted under D as she scrabbled upward. She reached, grabbed, and a handful of blackened papers crumbled into powder between her fingers. She slid down the mound and immediately pushed up and kept ascending. She wasn’t going to let this chuckling pig kill her.
The blackened rectangle of the Vestibule stood on its island of floor a few yards to her right. D stopped climbing and sidestepped on a rim of piled wreckage, making for a valley sunken between sections of the mound. She ducked through the gap and scaled a loose ramp of scree to the bottom of the Vestibule’s doorframe. The white cat’s unreadable face peered down at her over the edge. D grabbed the section of jutting floor and hoisted herself up. She staggered, brushing past the cat, into the Vestibule’s gaping black interior.
* * *
Pressed to the left wall of Simon the Gentle’s Vestibule, she inched toward the rear corner, where she would be hardest to see from her pursuer’s eight o’clock angle at the Society’s gaping entryway. It was the obvious hiding place, though—the one semi-intact structure inside the collapsed building. Unless she was lucky, he would be coming, and he would find her, and when he did, she’d be trapped in it with him.
“Smart, throwing off your bonnet like that, but I do believe I heard you go through the brush!” The sergeant had entered the building shell; no obstacle dulled his voice now. “Don’t be rude, Maid Dora! Come on down here! I’m not mad”—there was clinking, scraping, and a grunt, as he began to make his ascent of the rubble—“but I may get there if this game goes on too long!”
Conjurers’ closets had false walls; how else to explain the illusions of disappearance? That was her one hope.
The words of the cheery stranger in the spangly gold vest who had conducted her through the Society fifteen years before recurred freshly to D: “The conjurer tells you an impossible tale and then gives you proof that it’s true.… Like thievery, but what a conjurer steals is faith, and the man who made tricks on this stage was the most wonderful, wonderful criminal you can imagine.” A “funny, funny man,” she’d called him, and Ambrose had said, “Quite, quite,” and they’d had to smother their laughter to keep from waking up Mother and Father. Only a few weeks later the men had wrapped her beautiful brother in his own bedsheets and taken him away in a wagon to be incinerated. She smoothed her palms over the wood as she moved along the wall. Dust ground softly under her shoes on the closet floor.
The depth of darkness in the Vestibule confused D. The evening light seemed to fizz around the edges of the doorframe, unable to enter, and past the threshold, it was inky night within, so thick that D could not see her hand, let alone the wall she touched.
“Do you think he’s coming, your Lieutenant Barnes? He’s not. I saw him walking away. Truth be told, I may have hung back and waited for him to walk away.”
Her fingers found a raised shape with three sides—a triangle. She jabbed at it, but nothing gave. It wasn’t a button, just a carving. Over slightly was another raised triangle, and another, and another. She pushed on them each in turn, and they were solid. Somehow her squeaking breath had found a higher key.
“But I’m sure he’ll come around later, and won’t that be an amusing surprise for him? See, I do like a good joke, but I’m picky about who gets to make it—”
A light, she needed a light to see which triangle was the button, the button that opened that secret door. D stuck her hand into the pocket of her apron to check for matches, and the fine tip of the tiny drill bit— FOR TAKING SAMPLES FROM SMALL METEORITES —that she’d meant to polish stabbed into the flesh between her forefinger and her thumb. D bit her lip and yanked back her hand, the fresh blood spilling hot across her palm, while the breeze from the rear of the Vestibule stirred her torn skirts.
* * *
D came to the end of the long hall at the back of the Vestibule, and opened a door into a summer’s day.
Purple wildflowers covered a series of three hills, each cresting higher than the one before. Clouds like sheared wool were stuck to the blue sky. There was ocean in the air, and a sugary, tattling breeze. She heard, faintly, a meow, a cat scratching at a door.
D glanced over her shoulder. The door she’d come through stood upright in the grass. Scratch, scratch, scratch, meow.
What was the story the believers told? There was a tree in the desert, and a black cat… and it scratched the tree like the white cat scratched the charred doorframe, and… that was how the wanderer found her way.…
D took a step to open the door, to let the cat in—or out?—but the breeze whispered through the hairs at the back of her neck and drew her gaze around.
A window hung in the air. D saw her reflection in the glass. It smeared, like paint, and she comprehended that in this place, she could see herself however she wished.
The smear collected into the image of the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, an apple-cheeked actress who had mugged on a theater poster that Nurse pointed out to her when D was a child. “That’s Lorena Skye,” Nurse had said. “With a name like that, how else could she look?” D saw herself smiling serenely as Lorena’s gorgeous twin, but she could feel that she was still breathing hard, and she didn’t want someone else’s face.
The couple in the moving picture had worn blindfolds with painted eyes. D brushed at her face. She felt something—much lighter and thinner than a blindfold—tear away, and the world changed.
Where the three hills had sloped gently upward, the moons poured a sick and vibrant yellow over three towering columns—large, larger, and largest—and the shadows of the stones warped across a rocky plateau. A pass lit at intervals by illuminated globes led downward.
The window was revealed to be a guillotine. Below its blade was a wicker basket. Beside it, an ancient woman perched upon a stool. Her white hair draped to the ground and she stared at D with sleepy eyes. In her hand she held an oversized, shining needle threaded with a length of black string. Tattooed on her forehead was a dark-red triangle.
The Hard Worker
Look at this poor, shabby steer, Van Goor had thought, taking the measure of the towering, bearded man in the ragged shirt and pants who stood in front of his table by the stone tiger at the plaza in the noon light, holding a hat that was mostly holes pressed against his chest. “Lieutenant Barnes sent you?”
“That’s the name he gave me, sir,” the man said. “And he said you were the one to talk to about a job. I’m a hard worker, sir. I can do whatever you need, doesn’t matter how dirty. I just want to be able to make my bread.”
“You know he’s not a real lieutenant?” Van Goor credited the young Volunteer for his balls, showing up that morning and requesting an entire building as a present to his favorite fuck, but he was no soldier, whatever they called him. “Those green armbands those university boys wear, those are just pieces of cloth.” The sergeant tapped the rank insignia on his breast pocket. “This is the actual.”
“Yes, sir.” The filthy giant nodded. “I’m a hard worker, sir. I’ll outwork anyone.”
“So you say, but so far as I can tell, the only thing you’re good at is making a lot of shade. What am I supposed to give you to do?”
“I’m a hard worker, sir.” He smiled a little red smile, a bright vein amid the black tangle of his beard.
“That’s three times you’ve said that.”
The man blinked. He was a cow through and through. That was fine, though. Every army required a large complement of cows.
Van Goor grunted and picked up a sheaf of documents, requests for men at various positions. He flipped through them, glancing occasionally at the looming figure, pondering his considerable magnitude. He asked the man if he had his letters, expecting him to say no. But the man said yes.
He removed a square of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and passed it to Van Goor. “Here’s a poem I wrote.”
The sergeant took it. The title at the top was “Soul of the Souls.” You are the soul of the souls now, my darling, the heart of all the hearts, my darling… it began.
Van Goor was favorably impressed. “Handsome.” The fellow might look like a great stack of shit, but those were real words. A university boy like Barnes couldn’t have made it nicer. The bottom of the paper was signed Anthony.
“All right, Anthony, here’s what we’ll do with you.…” The sergeant returned the paper and instructed him to go to the outfitters for a uniform, and after that to proceed to an address on Legate Avenue, a vacated embassy, and set himself up to take notes.
Van Goor would be sending low-level servants and retainers of the previous regime for his examination; they had professionals to interrogate captured prisoners, but they needed someone to interview these minor associates of the Crown and they didn’t need any more crowds milling around in the plaza. This particular embassy he was being assigned to belonged to a country that the Provisional Government didn’t plan on inviting back anytime soon, so he could make himself comfortable.
“First, you take their names,” Van Goor said. “Then you have a little talk. You say sternly, ‘Tell me everything you know about the greedies you worked for, plus anything else I might find interesting—all of it.’ And you write down what they say. When that’s finished, you put them on their way and send a report back on your conclusions. You think you can manage that?”
He said he could, this Anthony. He could give them a little talk. He was a hard worker.
That was three weeks ago.
* * *
It was night when Van Goor gave up his search. He’d looked for over an hour in the ruin. The maid wasn’t there—not behind any of the piles of rubble, not in the burnt closet, not hiding under a layer of ash. He snatched a lump of melted brick and threw it at a white cat perched on the jutting fragment of a second floor, and screamed his frustration. The lump of brick sailed past the cat, disappearing into the dark with a dull thud. For its part, the cat did not even move, just sat idly, regarding him with its shiny blue eyes. The way it stared at him, Van Goor had half an idea that the whore had somehow transformed herself, but that was peasant nonsense. He told the animal it wasn’t worth the bullet and stormed out through the empty doorway.
Before coming out into the small garden behind the museum he’d been certain he heard her breaking through the hedge, but the sergeant wondered now about the bonnet on the ground. It had been near the wall that set off the courtyard on the opposite side, which belonged to one of the former embassies on Legate.
Rather than squirt his way back through the foliage again like a fucking garter snake, Van Goor walked through the high grass in front of the ruins to the street and directed himself toward the corner of Little Heritage and Legate. If the maid wasn’t in the former embassy with the courtyard, he could use the roto there and call the switchboard at the Magistrates’ Court to send for reinforcements. With a half dozen men and a couple of dogs, they’d search the whole block, and find her before dawn.
Van Goor thought out his next steps: he’d take the maid around a corner for questioning; she’d make a move for his weapon, and he’d have to shoot her to protect himself. While it was less satisfying than what he’d planned, it amounted to the same thing, a valuable lesson for the “lieutenant”: if you are a rude prick, someone may lose their temper and kill your whore. And who knew? If Barnes absorbed the lesson, perhaps they could leave the matter there.
The fire of his outrage had quickly consumed what energy he had in reserve, leaving him merely surly. He had been tired before, and he was more tired now; not even sure, in retrospect, if he would have been able to give the bitch the kind of treatment he’d intended. While the Lieutenant Barneses of the world fluttered around, men with real responsibilities got no rest; as soon as he dealt with the maid, he needed to be on to the next task. In the morning he was scheduled to go downtown and attend to the thief who had taken this fool tram driver’s stupid fucking hat, and as he was at it, clean out all the rats in the black-market rathole in the Lees where said thief apparently lurked.
To the sergeant’s way of thinking, it was striking a harder line than was necessary or strictly prudent, with people becoming restless about the blockade that was keeping them out of work and creating shortages—but Crossley was clear he wanted an example made.
“They say they want constables to keep the peace. We’ll show them that we can do that. We’ll show them how we pay out to ones that take advantage,” the general had explained to Van Goor about the order, and added that he was also sending along a couple of reporters to write up the raid for the press, so the news was spread far and wide.
Crossley was a cool one, fish-cool. You couldn’t imagine him breathing hard. He was forever looking at his special paper. He kept it in his pocket and checked on it the way that some men checked their watches. Van Goor had been close behind him once when he’d taken it out and he’d got a look at the general’s special paper. There was no proper writing on it that Van Goor could recognize, just small drawings of serpents and clocks and triangles, all done in red ink. What was that about? Some kind of lucky charm? Some kind of code? Not that it made Van Goor doubt him, it was just odd.
Van Goor turned right at the corner of Legate. He unbuckled his pistol from its holster in preparation for shooting the lock off the abandoned embassy.
The putrid air around the place was like nothing that Van Goor had ever breathed, meaty and shitty and rotten and acidic. It stung his tears from his eyes. All he could compare it to was the smell of a battlefield, but none of the battlefields Van Goor had been on—and he’d been on several—had ever been so potent.
At the bottom of the embassy steps, Van Goor pulled up short at the sight of the white numbers fastened to the lintel, 76.
Hold on a moment… he knew this address! He’d written it down two dozen times, at least, for various men and women who’d come to his table at the plaza: 76 Legate Avenue. This was where he’d set up that big lout—Anthony, his name was—to take down information from the Crown’s low-level sorts who turned up.
That would certainly make things easier. Anthony could help him look for the woman. Van Goor holstered his pistol.
He climbed the steps and rapped on the lacquered door.
While he waited, Van Goor breathed through his teeth and searched his memory of Anthony. It occurred to him that even as he had been regularly sending on minor officials and staff of the former government for interviews, he had heard nothing in return from Anthony, received no reports.
The door opened, and a gush of air spilled out that was so ripe it made Van Goor gasp and recoil.
Anthony stood barefoot, dressed only in his uniform pants; the pelt of his chest hair glistened with damp. Van Goor supposed the knocking had awakened him from his sleep—too fucking bad.
“Sergeant?”
Van Goor shouldered past the oaf into a small sitting room. “I’m looking for a woman. She’s been squatting in the building behind you.” The sitting room was illuminated by a single bulb in a sconce, which did little more than render the shapes of a few armchairs, a low table, a hearth, an escritoire, and the door to the next room. “She’s a saboteur, very dangerous. I came to bring her in for questioning and she ran. It’s possible she came through the back. Have you seen her?”
