The Curator, page 32
“Good evening, Dora.”
“They’re marching to reopen the city,” D said.
“That’s right,” he said.
“What does the Provisional Government say, sir?”
“ ‘Any day,’ they say.”
“Do you think so, sir?”
“I don’t know anything, really. I just attend to the men and women they send me. Examine their stories. But it does seem like the public has exhausted its patience.” He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “You aren’t aware because you were away. It’s not just the short supplies and the bad bread and the waiting. Three days ago, there was an incident in the Lees. Ugly. A beer room full of dead sousers and dead soldiers, and no one to hang for it. Killers must have escaped, and there’s no Constabulary to find them because they all got fired.
“Those armbands that Crossley vouched for and put up on the box, the dockman and the other two, they seem to have lost the handle. They’re making promises, but they’ve been making promises all along. Folks seem to be feeling like it may have been safer the way it used to be.”
Amid the crowd, a woman on a horse waved a flaming broom. Sparks gusted from the burning straw and snowed on the ranks behind her.
D wondered if Robert was safe. At least she knew Sergeant Van Goor had not got to him. She worried about Ike too, but reassured herself that he was too slippery to be caught. “Sir… the lieutenant who appointed me to this post, did he visit while I was away?”
“No,” her neighbor said. “Didn’t see Lieutenant Barnes.”
She exhaled.
“If I do see him and he asks, I’ll have to tell him you were absent from your duties for three days. You understand, Dora.”
“Yes, sir,” D said.
“You know, a couple of times, I thought those figures of yours were about to scamper on me. Off to the side, I’d catch one, seeming to lean”—she watched him lift his hand in the dark and tilt it—“just a little, like they were waiting for me to turn, so they could make their move.”
D did not immediately respond to this statement. There was something nearly hilarious about standing out in the dark, talking to him like an actual neighbor—but only nearly. He was insane and, she was certain, had definite plans to murder her when his schedule opened up.
“Yes, sir,” she said nonetheless, because he wasn’t a person with whom you disagreed. “They do look real sometimes.”
The lights of the torches flowed upward with the slope of the avenue, like the lights of the mountain pass that she’d seen on the other side of the door.
“Can I tell you something?” she asked without thinking. There was a hideous intimacy between them. It was like a sore that her finger wandered off to test without her permission.
“Oh, heavens, yes. Anything,” he said. “That’s what I’m here for.”
“I’ve been looking for my brother for years, sir,” D said, “even though he died of cholera when I was young. I had this dream that he was too beautiful and good and special to really be gone, that he loved me too much to really be gone, and that he must have only traveled to some other place, and if I searched, I could find him there. I don’t know if I really believed it, but I think I did find him, and it was another place, but I don’t believe he lasted after he made it. I believe he is all gone. I think a cat had been trying to tell me, but then I saw for myself. My brother was tricked by a monster: the monster showed my brother an illusion of what he wanted most and while he stared on that illusion, the monster burned my brother’s soul for fuel. I think I saw his ashes. They were in a lamp. A woman told me that if I didn’t want to know, I shouldn’t have uncovered my eyes. That’s what she meant. That my brother burned.”
Her neighbor frowned thoughtfully. The white insects danced around his head. The parade, thinning, chanted, “Open it up! Open up the Highway! Open up the port! Open it up!”
“That’s quite a story, Dora,” he said. “The part about the cat especially. People say they come from the devil, from some part of him. Here’s something I’ve mused on: the same people who say they’ve come from the devil worship them because they’re holy, but if they came from the devil, wouldn’t they be unholy?” He winked at her and tapped his nose. “It’s probably all the same. In any case, a story like that, it makes sense they’d be involved.”
The words had needed to be spoken for her to truly know them, but now D wished she could take them back. “A fancy, that’s all, sir.”
“But I could be convinced,” he said. “I’d need to hear it again, check it from over here and from over there, so we had all the facts neat. But I could be convinced.”
Her neighbor wished her good night and, carefully pulling his bad leg after himself, went inside the former embassy, leaving the street to D.
* * *
D returned to the museum.
She closed the steel door behind her, and drew the bolt. The oil in the lamp was low, so she went into the small office to refill it from a can that she had left there.
There was a dress spread on the desk, and a cloth pouch was set there too. These items had not been there the last time she had been in the office, the day Robert had taken her to the Royal Fields. D guessed that Ike had come to check on her during the three days that elapsed while she was in the Vestibule, and had the luck to avoid her neighbor.
D put the lamp on the seat of the desk chair. She saw no note.
She lifted the dress by its shoulders, shifting it close to the light to see the details. It was navy blue with velvet flowers at the shoulders and white ribbons at the waist. “My own Ike,” she said, pleased in spite of everything. It would look lovely on the wax teacher in the classroom exhibit.
D put the dress down and turned her attention to the pouch. She undid the cord that cinched the neck. The contents glistened faintly. When she put her hand in, her fingertips felt cool, rounded glass—marbles! D picked one out and examined it. The marble was painted as a pale-green eye with a perfect black pupil.
She laughed aloud at the boy’s ingenuity. “How many blind men did you have to rob for these?” she planned to tease him. She slid her hand in again, letting the glass eyes run between her fingers and over her palm.
A ringing cry caused D to flinch, and a handful of glass eyes jumped from her hand and went scattering along the floorboards. “Ho! Ho!” the voice cried. It sounded like he was trying to hail a carriage. The carriage wouldn’t stop, though, and the voice continued to bellow. “Ho! Ho!”
She lowered herself to her knees and searched for the glass eyes. The wails of the man who was being tortured next door carried on. D wondered what sound she would make when it was her turn. She tried to steady herself, but each scream made her twitch, and she dropped the eyes she’d picked up. They went rolling again, glass twinkling in the guttering light of the lamp.
By the time she found them all, D was sweating heavily, and the man’s howls of pain had grown further apart and lost some of their volume. She wobbled from her knees, blinking at spots, using the wall for support. Her shoulder brushed against the ragged tweedside jacket hung on the coat hook, the one that presumably belonged to her predecessor, the museum’s previous curator. The jacket slipped and fell with a soft rustle. This revealed, beneath, still hanging from the hook, a brilliant gold satin vest.
At the sight of it, D recalled the cheery man who had been so kind and attentive to her that day at the Society while she waited for her brother. He had told her the story of the legendary conjurer—“Canny, canny business”—and showed the exhibit of the conjurer’s implements and the stain on the rug from where he had bled to death, but she had never learned his name or anything about him. He’d worn a gold vest.
The glass eyes dropped from her hand again, but she did not move to pick them up.
A Collection of Cards
In the pocket of the gold vest was a collection of cards:
A. Lumm, Curator, National Museum of the Worker, 1 Little Heritage Street
A. Lumm, Senior Librarian, The Horological Institute, 2 Little Heritage Street
A. Lumm, President of the Society for Psykical Research, 3 Little Heritage Street
A. Lumm, Head Scholar, Archives for the Study of Nautical Exploration and Oceanic Depth, 4 Little Heritage Street
A. Lumm, Choreographer Emeritus, The Madame Curtiz Academy of Dance and the Human Shape, 5 Little Heritage Street
A. Lumm, Chairman of the Board, The Museum of Dollhouses and Exquisite Miniatures, 6 Little Heritage Street
A. Lumm, Chief Warden of the Association of the Brotherhood of Tram Workers, 7 Little Heritage Street
Mr. Aloys Lumm, 131 National Boulevard, Apartment 3B, Lear Hotel
* * *
Before the sun rose, D washed herself in the garden, dressed in the smart navy dress that Ike had left, and plaited her hair in the clear side mirror of the boxy gun wagon driven by the soldiers with the painted faces.
It was graying when she set out. Across the street, at the same second-floor window where she’d seen him before, she glimpsed the vulturous man who roosted in the Archives for the Study of Nautical Exploration and Oceanic Depth, observing her. Their eyes met for a second, and his curtains jerked shut.
The cards had confirmed that this stranger—and the other strangers she had spotted in some of the buildings on Little Heritage Street—were interlopers like herself. The previous Curator of the National Museum of the Worker (or the previous Head Scholar of the Archives for the Study of Nautical Exploration and Oceanic Depth) was busy elsewhere, functioning as acting premier of the Provisional Government.
The former curator was the same cheerful man she’d met that long-ago day in the Grand Hall of the Society for Psykical Research, her brother’s friend who’d told her the story of Simon the Gentle and wore a shiny gold vest; and he had a name: Aloys Lumm.
Aloys Lumm must be very old now. In his stories about the Provisional Government’s meetings, Robert made it seem that the playwright was half-senile. D remembered how Robert had been assigned to read one of Lumm’s plays for a class, but only she had.
Their first night together in his rooms, unable to sleep but not wishing to leave yet, D had picked the library copy off the side table. In service there was scant opportunity to read, and the university masters disapproved of their domestics doing so, holding that it would only confuse and distract them.
While Robert slept beside her, she read the whole thing, a story of a devil tricking a father into murdering his sister, and the father’s son into murdering the father. The men thought they’d trapped the beast, but he had let himself be caught. After the son committed suicide, the devil excused himself, stepped off stage left, and reemerged from stage right as a young man in the costume of an impresario. Thus changed, he invited a “Beautiful Young Woman” onstage. He asked her if she’d drink the blood of foolish people if it meant she could live forever. “Really?” the Beautiful Young Woman replied, and the devil said, “Truly!” and she had mused—smiles coyly, the stage directions instructed—before starting, “Since we’re being honest—” just as the curtain dropped and the orchestra reprised the play’s theme.
When Robert woke, she’d told him the play was about two hunters who thought they’d snared a devil, but really it was the other way around. D thought she might better have described the play as an elaborate recounting of some executions. The devil was never in any real danger, and planned every event with complete success. She had not liked it; it had seemed mean to her. What was the fun if the characters never had a chance?
Not that she planned to engage Aloys Lumm on the interpretation of his literary output.
She only wanted to ask him, “What happened to my brother, Ambrose? Why is a horrible future bleeding out of your magic box and into the walls of my museum?”
And, ultimately, “Why should I let you live?”
There was smoke in the air from the previous night’s fires, but it was also chill and damp. Knee-high autumn mists spread over the streets. D had borrowed the purse from the wax woman in the yellow sand mining exhibit. It was an odd purse, made from a slightly shimmery, slightly sticky material, with an interior of turquoise silk. The name GUCCI was printed on a tag on the inside, presumably the woman’s name. At a glance, though—especially a man’s glance—it would not seem out-of-the-ordinary. D had put the pouch of glass eyes into it, along with the peculiar, blocky stage pistol that had been fastened in the female soldier’s holster. The stage pistol was metal, like a real pistol, but not as heavy as its shape suggested. It would only be useful to gain a moment’s distraction. Anyone with the wherewithal to look closely at the gun would quickly realize it was fake; the smooth grip flowed up to the barrel with no cylinder in between: there was nowhere to put bullets. Also, the trigger was frozen.
On Legate Avenue, D quickly left the former embassy behind. She also thought of the morning that Nurse had got sick, and she had done exactly as she’d promised Ambrose, and traveled alone to fetch him.
She thought of the morning that Robert had accompanied her to take possession of the Society for Psykical Research, and how they’d joked about souls being incinerated.
Those previous mornings seemed impossibly close to this morning, as close as the other world had been to the charred Vestibule all along—just a step. D half-expected to meet her earlier self, approaching from the opposite direction.
Her heels clicked lightly on the sidewalk. She was aware of the dress’s unfamiliar bustle behind her.
D was aware, too, that she was being followed. At the edges of her vision, she noticed the cats, darting soundlessly, small shadows slinking inside the fog that clung to the foundations of buildings. As one dropped off, another picked up the trail.
Their company did not frighten D. Not that she supposed that they regarded her with any special affection. What she sensed, above all, was their insistence. D’s feeling was that they had their own particular aims, and those aims somehow aligned with hers—to this point, at least.
Events Leading to the Overthrow of the Provisional Government, Pt. 1
The grind of Jonas’s snores informed Lionel that his lover had been awake worrying most of the night before fatigue finally pulled him under. Once they’d agreed to give General Crossley the ultimatum to either clear the Great Highway—by receiving the immediate surrender of the government holdouts, or by launching a full-on assault—or else relinquish his command, Lionel had fallen asleep easily. As things had worsened, as the public’s discontent had swollen and the peace negotiations had stalled and the standoff extended, as Crossley had become more impenetrable and Lumm more confused, Lionel, conversely, felt growing within himself an odd, capricious assurance. Problems were always difficult—until they were solved. They were on the verge of it.
“It’s bound to go right eventually,” he’d explained to Jonas, and Jonas had said that was not at all true, damn it. Jonas had called him a sweet fool.
“You’ll see,” Lionel had said and kissed him, and Jonas kissed him back, and said in a clenched voice, “Griffin’s Eggs!” which was some sort of dockman’s slang.
Lionel was careful not to wake him as he dressed. He paused in the doorway to fondly regard his dockman. Jonas’s tension lines loosened in sleep, stripping twenty years from his face and giving him an expression of ingenuousness that Lionel thought reflected the man’s true character. It was not the flinty dockworker who had taken a courageous stand on behalf of the poor and the indigent, and for law and fairness; that man had seen too much to believe in a new order. It was some deeper, younger part of him that had answered the call.
His thick arm, atop the sheets, was tattooed with a rope that wound from his wrist to his elbow. Lionel loved to trace the rope with his finger. It looped around on itself, so that it had no visible ends.
“That’s right, fella,” Jonas said, which was what he had taken to calling him, to Lionel’s delight. “That’s because I tied the knot where you can’t see it.” He’d winked and flashed one of his rare gap-toothed smiles.
Lionel was Jonas Mosi’s fella. How could everything not turn out for the best, when that had?
Once, when Jonas thought he was asleep, Lionel heard his lover pray. “Strike your paw down on the things that would hurt us, and hunt the wickedness back in its hole,” he murmured. His belief moved Lionel. Jonas was so proud, and yet he asked for help, humbled himself before the invisible.
Lionel had an urge to go and sit beside Jonas and slide his finger along the tattooed rope again, and whisper to him that there was nothing to worry about, they could never go wrong, not if they were together. But dawn was burning along the lower slats.
“See you at breakfast, Jonas,” Lionel said to the sleeping man, and went out into the hall, shutting the door softly behind himself.
* * *
Mosi dreamed of Lionel.
Lionel was at the rail of a ship’s stern. He removed his hat and put it over his breast and looked solemnly upon Mosi, who was back on shore. There were dozens of other men and women on either side of Lionel at the rail. One of these passengers he recognized as the little saloonkeeper of the Still Crossing, who had a sideline as a fence. Another was Joven, short, bald, and sour-mouthed.
The condition of the ship appalled Mosi: violent green barnacles muscled up to the gunwales, and the deckhouse looked like a clapboard shanty. He called to Lionel, “Fella, be ready to swim!”
* * *
Since the days immediately after the uprising, Lionel and Mosi had been installed in rooms at the Metropole. This made it easier for Crossley’s security to protect them. (Lumm had steadfastly refused to be dislodged from his own apartment across the street at the Lear.)
The luxury of the great hotel embarrassed Lionel, but he could not deny the convenience of the situation. Though no one who knew either man well would ever doubt their integrity, both were acutely aware that it was not strictly appropriate for two of the three leaders of a democratic undertaking to be involved in a romantic relationship with one another; however, this housing arrangement made it easy for them to move between each other’s rooms undetected. Jonas’s room was on the third floor and Lionel’s was on the fifth. Their guard detail was stationed in the lobby, and the domestic staff was closely monitored, allowed to tidy the rooms only in the afternoons when the men were at meetings or other business, and under protection. The simple key, therefore, was to avoid the elevators, where the operator might take note of Lionel leaving Jonas’s floor at the odd hour of six in the morning, and stick to the stairs.
