The Curator, page 25
“No,” Anthony said. “I was just there, tidying up. She didn’t come through the back, sir.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, sir,” Anthony said. “How about some sweet coffee, sir?”
“Where’s your roto? What’s going on around here? It smells like twelve hundred shits.” Van Goor’s gaze lit on the escritoire in the corner, situated under a painting of what in the dimness he could only make out as a bird. On the escritoire was a roto.
Van Goor went to it, picked up the mug, and listened. The thick stench made him cough, and he covered his mouth with his sleeve and spoke through the fabric. “We’re going to get some men and dogs and find her. Hopefully she’ll turn over whoever she’s been scheming with in exchange for leniency. I think if I can have a word with her alone I can convince her. What is that smell, man? It’s fucking awful.”
“How about some sweet coffee, sir?” Anthony asked again.
Van Goor dropped his arm and looked at Anthony, who had shut the front door and moved into the center of the room. His long arms dangled at his sides, and his sweaty ape chest shone. “No, I don’t want sweet coffee! I may need a fucking bucket, though. Keep the door open so the air can circulate! Are you stupid? Has the sewer overflowed somewhere? Why haven’t you had someone come to fix it? Even if they couldn’t fix it right away, they could put some lime down and dull the reek. How can you bear this, can’t you smell?”
“You get so you stop noticing,” the man said, and asked, “Lime?” in a musing tone.
“Yes, lime! Because it smells like a slaughterhouse in August!” In his memory, the man had seemed able enough—he’d written that impressive poem about the souls—but it was apparent that Van Goor had been mistaken. He was as dumb as a rock. It was enraging. “What have you been doing? Have you been interviewing the people I sent, or do you just stare at them until they go away? Where are the reports you should’ve sent?”
“Let me get you some sweet coffee, sir,” the man said.
Van Goor waved a dismissive arm. It was hopeless. He couldn’t talk to the imbecile, pay attention to the roto, and concentrate on not choking on the fumes all at the same time.
There was still no sound from the mug. He bent to peer along the wire running from the back of the roto into the darkness behind the escritoire. Van Goor lifted the wire and found it ended in a clean cut.
* * *
For security reasons, Anthony—though that was not his name—had used a pair of garden shears to snip it. A young nurse who had worked for the family of a magistrate had surprised him by shaking off the dose in her coffee and going for the roto. The man who was not actually named Anthony had stopped her easily, but it had been a warning that he’d heeded, and he’d cut the wire.
Afterward he’d put her through a particularly thorough interview, during which the nurse had told him everything, every secret she’d ever kept, every hope she’d ever harbored.
“And do you believe that she loved you too?” he’d asked her near the end. They’d long since moved past her knowledge of the magistrate’s affairs—in fact, she’d only ever even met him once; he wasn’t involved with the younger children, hadn’t been able to tell the twins apart—and had been speaking about her deeper self for quite some time. It was to the matter of an affair she’d had with another member of the house staff, a cook, that they had now turned. “Be truthful, ma’am.”
The nurse’s remaining eyelid had fluttered and she exhaled in a thin whistle. “No… I don’t believe so.…”
She seemed honest, but still, people could be inconstant. If you wanted to get to the bottom of matters, you couldn’t just take their word. “You understand, ma’am, that it’s quite possible that eventually she’ll find herself where you are now, and I’ll be able to check with her?”
The nurse’s lips had turned up in a tiny smile. “Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes… I hope so.…”
The-man-who-was-not-Anthony hoped so too.
The-man-who-was-not-Anthony had always felt apart. It was interesting, getting to know people. They were starting to make sense to him. They were more like him than he’d thought.
Sergeant Van Goor had straightened from the escritoire, and he was holding the limp wire in one hand. He was a small, well-built man with a cranked nose and a swollen sneer. He reminded the-man-who-was-not-Anthony of a fighting dog.
“Why didn’t you say it was cut, you fucking fool? This wild bitch is running around and you’re wasting my time! Was it like this?”
“Sir—” he began.
“Did you do this, you fucking hairy idiot? Why?” The sergeant cast aside the wire. “What have you been doing here? Is this stench something you’ve done? Where are my reports?” He stepped forward and slapped his hand into the damp nest of the-man-who-was-not-Anthony’s chest hair.
The larger man stared down at the smaller one, while the smaller one stared at his hand, pressed into the curls that the light of the sconce now showed him were soaked in blood.
Van Goor took one backward step, but the-man-who-was-not-Anthony drew the long pliers from the back of his belt and whipped them into the sergeant’s left temple. The blow sent the smaller man tumbling into a chair that collapsed under his weight. The sergeant was on his knees a moment later, crawling blind and headfirst right into the wall, thud. He flopped sideways and the-man-who-was-not-Anthony saw that the pliers had opened the sergeant’s scalp to the bone; the wound looked like a chunk of spidered white tile. Van Goor twisted onto his back. He wore a drunken expression, eyes unfocused, the tip of his tongue sticking from the corner of his mouth. But his right hand had found the butt of the gun at his hip and ripped it free of the holster. The-man-who-was-not-Anthony swung the pliers down again, breaking three of Van Goor’s fingers and shattering the gun butt too. The sergeant screamed and reached up with his good left hand and grabbed the-man-who-was-not-Anthony’s crotch and squeezed. The-man-who-was-not-Anthony gasped and swung the pliers once more, snapping Van Goor’s left forearm into a V, and loosening the hold.
The-man-who-was-not-Anthony staggered and caught himself against the wall. He took one breath and vomited onto the embassy’s rug. It had been a long time since someone had hurt him. He didn’t mind it. Everything seemed brighter.
On the floor, Van Goor hyperventilated. His ruined limbs were splayed to either side. Somehow a shard of the wooden pistol butt had ended up stuck to the blood and sweat on the sergeant’s forehead.
“… Why?” he asked.
“Because I need to know what you know,” the other man said, taking slow breaths, feeling the shard of ice that connected his testicles to his stomach swell and subside. “I can’t be done with you until you’ve told me everything.”
And he was as good as his word, though it was a long while before they finished. By the time that Van Goor had told all he knew—of the uncertain Provisional Government, of the stalemate on the Great Highway, of the anxiety of the populace, of the legend of the Morgue Ship that sailed sea and land and in-between, of the young maid with the museum and her lover the lieutenant, of where to obtain large quantities of lime—and by the time he had made a full account of all his many offenses—the violations and the cruelties, the indecencies and the depredations—it was a new morning. Only then did his interlocuter very politely cut the sergeant’s throat.
PART III THE CURATOR
Stray Cat
There was a game her brother invented, called Stray Cat. In this game, you waited in a dark place—behind a door, say—and when either Mother or Father or Nurse passed by, you leaped out and pawed at their legs. If they screamed, you were an excellent stray cat.
* * *
Someone’s low-class maid had seen Ambrose in the Lees one afternoon. He denied it, but Mother didn’t believe him. Father didn’t care. D overheard her parents sniping at each other about it. “So what if he went once? Boys roam around,” he said.
Father was a banker. He preferred not to be bothered. The only time he’d ever played with D was a game he made up called Quick Girl.
In Quick Girl, she fetched the newspaper from the front table, gave it to him, and said, “Here you are, sir,” and Father pressed his thumb into her open palm, hard, as if he meant to leave an imprint, and said, “There’s a good girl, here’s your penny.” This had been sort of amusing when he first taught it to her, but that was the whole game. Once he had the paper, she was instructed to go away and be a quiet proper girl.
“Let me deliver the paper to someone else now, Father,” she proposed once.
“Not unless you give me back my penny,” he replied, chuckling behind his upraised paper.
Mother was, in many ways, even more indifferent. She was generally occupied with appointments—shopping, lunches, concerts. Some days D only saw her at bedtime, when she’d give D a light kiss after Nurse tucked her into bed. “There’s a girl, you’re all set for your dreams now,” she’d pronounce and quickly stride out into the hall and shut D’s door, leaving a trace of lavender perfume in the dark room.
The rumor about Ambrose disordered Mother, though. It was like the time she’d discerned a wrinkle in the dining room wallpaper. She hadn’t been able to eat, her eye kept darting to it. Father finally ordered the serving maid to stand in front of it so she could manage to take a few bites, and a man came in first thing the next morning to redo the paper.
“What was Ambrose doing down there?” She jerked the hairbrush through a snarl in D’s hair. For the first time D could recall, Mother had sent Nurse out after bath and come in to attend to her daughter herself.
“He didn’t go down there,” D said. She actually had a hunch that he probably had gone to the Lees—her brother certainly went to the Society in the afternoons, so he might go other places as well—but he hadn’t told her so. She hoped that, if she was loyal and denied it, Ambrose would tell her in the future.
“Boys have bad ideas sometimes,” Mother said.
Girls had bad ideas too. D had imagined what it was like when her brother beat the mean boys with the ash shovel, and it had not made her feel even a little sad. In fact, it had made her happy. Mother wouldn’t understand that. She wanted D to be smooth like wallpaper.
“And if you follow through on a bad idea,” Mother continued, “and do something bad, it’s like a stain. Some stains come out, but most don’t. The Lees are full of people that had bad ideas and got stained. That’s why they have to live down there in all their filth.” Mother dragged the brush, and D thought she could feel her scalp lifting free of her skull, but she bit her lip and held still. “No one wants a girl with a stain, I can tell you that, Dora.”
“Can you see it? The stain?”
“Sometimes,” Mother said, voice dropping to a whisper. “But it doesn’t look like a stain. It looks like bumps. It makes you sick and everyone can see it.”
* * *
Ambrose was annoyed. D had reported everything to him about Mother’s suspicions. It was night and the rest of the house was asleep.
“She thinks I’m going to catch the Pox.” He sat on the edge of her bed.
“You do go to the Lees, don’t you!”
“My travels take me all over the city.”
“Are you going to catch the Pox?”
“No.”
“What is the Pox, Ambrose?”
“Just another thing that can kill you. You’re better off worrying about being stabbed by a thief or catching cholera.”
D knew about cholera. Glove on the door, walk on some more; taste a dirty drip, you’ll take a sailing trip.
“Most people are gullible,” Ambrose said. “It’s a survival instinct. Because they aren’t strong like we’re strong. The thing Mother can’t see is that for actually wanting to know, she’s one of the stupidest ones, because she’s not equipped to know the full truth.”
“What about me?” she asked. “Am I equipped to know the full truth?”
It was too dark to see the rabbit grin, but it was in his voice. “For now, maybe just half the truth. There are incredible forces out there, D. Forces that if we could learn to control them, would give us power over everything. Power to stop the wars, power to make enough for everyone. Power to see into the future and avoid whatever pitfalls may await us. Power over death even. Power to save the world. Power to leave this world altogether. I can’t say any more. When you’re older.”
After he said sweet dreams and left, she worried that Ambrose would steal away in the night, and go to live with his friends at the Society for Psykical Research, and read books beneath the giant mobile of the universe and eat his meals beside the great fireplace, and do whatever it was you did when you were trying to learn to control the incredible forces that could save the world—and he would forget about her. D would have to follow him. What scared her, though, was that she might go up the walk to the neat building of cheery red brick and knock on the red door with the silver triangle, and this time no one would come to let her in. That she’d be shut out. But they had to let her in. Wherever he went, she needed to be allowed to go; without her brother, she didn’t even have a name.
* * *
A few days later Ambrose asked if she wanted to come with him on an errand. She did; of course she did.
There was no one to know. Mother was out shopping and Father was at work. Nurse had taken too much medicine and been sick and, just as the funny, funny man who talked to D at the Society for Psykical Research had suggested, Ambrose had given her more medicine. This made Nurse feel better, but she had lain down for a nap and fallen heavily asleep.
They rode the tram to the end, to a stop near the South Fair Bridge. As they traveled farther down the line, the passengers who wore nicer clothes, like their own, got off, and passengers in older, less nice clothes got on. The air that streamed through the open windows became smoky and fishy. D rocked from side to side with the braking and shifting of the tram in her seat on the bench beside Ambrose. The women on the tram held wicker bags, and muddy shoe tips protruded from beneath their muddy skirt hems. An unshaven man with a chapped, blood-crusted lip and a hat with a broken eagle feather dangling from the band winked at D. A trail of red-white blisters started at the corner of his eye and hooked up around his eyebrow. She wanted to stare, but she pulled her gaze away to the passing scenes: a bushy striped cat perched on a windowsill, a man with a shovel spreading dirt, a black cat slinking along the ledge of a roof, a woman beating a rug, a white-bibbed cat curled up in front of a door with a black glove under the knocker—goodness, there were so many pretty cats in this part of town, no one had told her.
At the same time, the feeling of the stranger’s wink was like a fly had landed on D’s bare arm and there was no way to brush it off. She sensed that he was still watching her.
When they got off the tram, the broken-feather man followed them. He called in a croaky voice, “You there, young scholar, you taking her to sell to someone?”
Ambrose grabbed D’s elbow, guiding her farther away.
“Just funning!” the man cried. “I fought alongside Gildersleeve, you know. Penny for an old soldier?”
D’s brother leaned close and whispered, “Ignore that rummy. He’ll be dead of the Pox in a month or two.
“Now, listen: you’ve probably wondered if I did something to those boys who were rude that time when I went back out with the ash shovel. I think you’ve probably decided that I did.”
“Yes.”
“Good. So you know you’re safe with me and you don’t have to be afraid.”
She was afraid anyway, but she nodded. If she admitted she was afraid, he wouldn’t ask her to come next time, and he might go to live at the Society and leave her behind forever.
They went downhill for several blocks and continued into a neighborhood of tightly packed buildings where the street was just a four-wide path of planks. D could tell that they were close to the level of the river; below the planks was scummy brown water that lapped the foundations. Black mold scorched the doors as high as the knobs. The buildings themselves were clapboard, and all shrugged noticeably to the left, as if they were trying to get away from something.
There were, above all, dozens and dozens of cats. They peered from behind windows, from the ledges of roofs, from the sparse branches of the few sun-starved trees, from the tops of jumbled fences, from the stoops, from the irregular gaps between buildings, from perches on broken barrels or broken crates. D sensed more of them—hundreds and hundreds, so many more than she’d seen from the tram—moving through the crooked corridors and rooms of the leaning buildings, warm and quiet and aware.
“They pray to them in these places, the ones that don’t know any better,” Ambrose said softly, noticing her looking around at the animals. There was a note of disdain in his voice and she sensed that he was reciting something he’d learned, probably from his friends at the Society. She remembered that the cheery man had disapproved of the conjurer’s love for the fancy cat that lived in the hotel. “That’s why there are so many.”
D wanted to ask what was wrong with that—she found the cats so intriguing; it would be interesting just to follow them for a while, to see what they did, where they went; you could tell they had secrets that would be worth knowing—but she had to hurry to keep up with Ambrose’s quickening pace as they went deeper into the swampy neighborhood. He ignored the frowns of the other pedestrians, slack-mouthed men in rumpled jackets and tired-faced women in mended dresses.
At a nondescript alleyway he made an abrupt left, taking them along an off-shooting plank pathway. A few steps brought them to a building’s side door.
They went inside and ascended a dim stairway. Sawdust squeaked under their steps and the only light came from holes in the exterior walls. Somewhere a woman was singing to a crying baby and a man was hacking. It smelled like sick. D pressed her hand over her nose.
