The Curator, page 33
As was usual for the early hour, Lionel stepped out to find that the elevator door was closed and the entire span of the third-floor hall was empty—except for the latest incarnation of the King Macon’s mascot, Arista, at the door to the back stairs. Like all of her predecessors, she was a chocolate-colored Siamese.
Arista stood and trotted along the red-and-gold-patterned carpet runner to meet him, and twined her lithe body between Lionel’s legs.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he said to the animal, and petted her between the ears. Lionel forgot if this Arista was XXII or XXIII. She was also in the wrong hotel. The Metropole belonged to Talmadge. “I’m glad to see you, but you’re supposed to stay at the Macon. If Talmadge sees you, I’m afraid there’ll be trouble.”
Arista purred softly. “Are you smiling at me, little thing? I’ll make it worth your while if you do. Come see me at breakfast and I’ll give you a piece of bacon, and I’ll bet that my fella gives you two pieces.”
Lionel continued down the hall. The cat darted after him and shot between his legs, which caused Lionel to stumble, but he caught himself against the wall. His palms made a soft thump, and he looked back to make sure that no one opened their door. No one did.
He returned his attention to Arista. The cat had reset herself in front of the door to the stairs. Her amber eyes focused on him steadily as she meowed.
He put a finger to his lips. “I understand,” he whispered, although he didn’t, and moved around the cat. It meowed yet again. “I’ll give you bacon,” he said quietly over his shoulder.
* * *
The Provisional Government’s youngest leader opened the door and went through.
“Sir,” said a soldier in an auxiliary uniform sitting on the steps to the fourth floor. He had a tonsure of gray hair and raw cheeks. Set across his knees was a rifle.
“What is it?” Lionel asked. He didn’t have time to be frightened before the second soldier, the one who had been on the right side of the doorway, put a bayonet through his back. He sank sideways, and a third soldier, stepping around the closing door, caught him and hoisted him up. Huge waters crashed around inside Lionel’s head, and it felt like most of his body disintegrated. He could only feel his toes jammed into his shoe tips and the damp hand clamped over his mouth.
His killer drove the blade into his belly, yanked it free, and stabbed it in again. The old soldier on the steps did not rise from his seated position. He scratched his scalded cheek and met Lionel’s eyes with an expression that might have been faintly apologetic.
Lionel thought, I just wanted to help people.
He thought, I should have listened to that cat.
He thought, I hope that Jonas knows I loved—
On the Tram
Brewster didn’t give the large, bushy white cat a second glance. Cats wandered onto the trams all the time. This one climbed the stairs at the north stop of the Legate–National Boulevard Station, trailing a woman in a neat blue dress. Brewster picked her for a teacher, or a member of one of those charity societies. The animal hopped onto a seat and set to cleaning its leg. The woman sat across from it.
The driver threw the tram into gear and it began to trundle ahead.
It was quiet following the clamor of the previous night’s march. Only a half dozen passengers sat in the linked tram cars, a combination of drunks and morning-shift workers, most of them half-dozing. Brewster was tired himself. He had not slept since he’d heard about the killings at that saloon in the Lees. Thoughts of the dead bodies and the lost lives and the anger it had kindled, of what he had set in motion with that damned Hob Rondeau by going to see that sergeant about his stolen bowler, would not stop rolling around in his head.
Brewster swore to himself that he’d never wear a hat again so long as he breathed. He wanted to punch the haberdasher who had lured him into the shop and sold him the gaudy bowler. He wanted to punch Hob Rondeau. Above all else, he wanted someone to explain himself to, someone who loved him and thought the best of him, and who would tell him that he wasn’t to blame. But there was no one like that. For a few minutes that other morning, with the quick boy hanging onto the side of his cab, the tram driver had believed there could be, but Mary Ann had only been a tease. Those people at that saloon were dead. He’d caused it, him, Brewster Uldine.
In the overhead mirror at the top of the tram’s windscreen he searched for a distraction, and found the reflection of the woman in the neat blue dress. “And where are you headed today, miss?” he asked.
“The Lear Hotel,” she said.
* * *
Robert rubbed his cheek where Willa had slapped him after he told her he didn’t want to meet with her anymore. He guessed he’d deserved it, but it had felt perfunctory; she hadn’t really cared for him either. He hoped that Dora did care for him. It had never seemed important before, but suddenly it was. The revolution was sagging, there had been a massacre in the Lees, and the people were marching for relief. She was the only thing that seemed solid.
The lieutenant needed Dora to care for him—the maid of no family, the Lodgings girl who could not play piano, or draw, or dance, or do anything beautiful. He felt she did care for him, and it wasn’t because he came from money, or because he was intelligent, or because he did things for her. Money wasn’t important to her; she was smart enough on her own; and there would be no shortage of other men who would do things for her if she wanted one.
“Don’t just stand there dreaming,” Willa said, “get the fuck gone. That’s what it means when a woman slaps you. It means get the fuck gone.”
He left through the Metropole kitchens. When he got to the foot of the alley that separated the King Macon and the Metropole, Robert lit a cigarette.
Wagons and carriages were clattering in both directions. Across the street, in front of the Lear, a man was shoveling shit into a barrel.
An old auxiliary soldier leaned on the wall of the King Macon on the opposite corner of the alley. Robert saluted him. The soldier’s gray hair fell down from under his cap and puddled in curls on his thin shoulders. He gripped a cane in one hand, and he had a hunch too. Robert was disheartened. What was a man like this supposed to fight, a bowl of oatmeal?
The soldier saluted in return and hacked a few times into his elbow. “Just waiting for some friends, sir.” There was a tattoo of a triangle on the back of his wrinkled hand.
“Wonderful,” Robert said.
* * *
The tram driver had a drained look. D imagined an apartment of cheap furniture, crumbs of a lunch made by the landlady on the table, a newspaper covered in fingerprints after already being read twice, and on a shelf some insipid luxury object, some small totem of male pride to pour his love into: a schooner in a bottle to polish, or a loud-colored hat to brush.
“What do you think of the news about those murders down in the Lees?” he asked, and she sensed that her destination was irrelevant, and he had just been seeking an undefended ear for the real subject of his interest. “I think it’s a terrible tragedy, but things like that seem to happen down in those parts. It seems wrong to throw around blame.” His tone was defensive, as if he expected to be challenged.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about it,” she said.
* * *
The new sergeant at the table in the Magistrates’ Court told Rondeau he couldn’t help him, he didn’t know where Sergeant Van Goor could be found.
Rondeau informed the man that he was wrong.
“You can help me, and you will help me. I need a word with Sergeant Van Goor. I need him to explain to me this dear fucking mess that’s he allowed to come to pass in the Lees that has endangered the entire project of this society we’re trying to build where not everything that’s dismal and rotten and sick is piled on the backs of the poor, and the fat ones eat clotted cream and drink champagne and merrily rub their cocks on silk for the fun of it. You can help me, and you will help me.”
The sergeant who absorbed this diatribe felt as though he’d been ambushed by a thunderstorm out of a clear sky.
“Listen, I just took over here,” he said. “I mean—” He ruffled through some papers that Van Goor had crabbed with his blocky print. There was one with a list of twenty or so names, and an address—76 Legate Avenue.
“Seventy-six Legate Avenue!” he cried, seizing on it as the quickest means of diverting the intemperate Volunteer. “That’s where you should go. That’s where he is, I bet.”
* * *
“I’m sure if the people there’d behaved themselves, no one’d been hurt. What happened, it proves how dangerous they were, that’s what I think. If you’ve ever heard of that saloon, you know it’s a rathole of thieves and cheat artists. That’s well known.”
The tram driver’s opinion of a saloon where some murders had apparently occurred was of no interest to D. She was thinking about what she had to do. She was thinking about how Ambrose had trusted Aloys Lumm.
The tram rattled past the rows of theaters, all of which were shuttered, the framed posters on the walls outside advertising plays that had last been performed the night before the government fled. The white cat finished its bath and curled up in the canvas pocket of its seat.
D reached forward to examine the cat’s collar. The cat regarded her with a half-lidded eye, but did not otherwise shift. Talmadge XVII—Resident of the Metropole Hotel, read the collar’s small silver tag. D brushed the top of its head once lightly, not making too much of the creature—it did not present as the kind of cat that appreciated cosseting—and leaned back into her own seat.
The cat’s eye closed, and though its whole body trembled with the motion of the tram, it appeared to fall into a sound sleep.
* * *
It’s impossible to know what XVII may have been thinking, or if she dreamed as she went to sleep on the tram seat; whether she missed her home at the Metropole Hotel where the staff had become increasingly worried about her absence of the last few days, especially in light of all the trouble that the Lear had gone through in recent times with its cats disappearing; how she might have reacted to an Arista in one of her hallways; whether she was comfortable in the small, rocky dugout that she had chosen for her new home amid the ruins of the Society; what had compelled her to twice sneak into the museum to sharpen her claws upon the wooden box with the lens; if XVII understood anything at all, or if she was entirely driven by instinct.
But she did purr in her sleep. Her stomach was digesting the mouse that she had feasted on in the ruins at dawn. She had crushed it in one pounce, pinned it between her paws, and batted it around for a while before she slit its guts and ate.
* * *
Elgin tottered his way across the So Fair. He was so drunk he didn’t know if he was going east or west. He was so drunk he forgot a promise he’d made to himself, and let his gaze drift over the railing to the river, where he feared he’d see Joven and the Morgue Ship and his dead friends from the Still Crossing.
There was nothing but the water, though. The Fair was a gray-green wrinkled sheet in the fog. Elgin exhaled. The sun, muted by banks of cloud, sat on the horizon somewhere past the bay. He was all right.
A hand touched his shoulder.
“Don’t be afraidt, brother,” Marl said, stepping forward to stand beside him.
The drunkard’s corpse went unnoticed for quite some time. Sprawled on the ground beside the bridge’s railing, he only looked to be sleeping.
* * *
The knife Bet used to cut her wrists, one of the carvers that she’d taken from the university kitchen, fell from her fingers and stuck its tip in a floorboard. She sat in Gid’s chair by the hearth with her arms flung out. The blood was hot on her skin. She heard it pattering faintly. Someone had murdered her Gid, and so she had murdered herself.
Cruel as life had been, Bet harbored no expectations for an afterlife. She did not anticipate that the Mother Cat would carry her to a warm place; or that she would meet the mother and father who had left her to grow up, disparaged and abused, in the Lodgings; or to be reunited with Gid. She expected more cruelty. Her best hope was for nothingness.
Bet’s head tipped to the side. She stared at the knife stuck in the floor. Blood was pooled around it, and more blood was falling, falling out of her. Bet listened to it patter, and other noises grew up behind the patter, clanking chains, lapping waves, a man bellowing to send out the dinghy and fetch that poor woman.
* * *
Although they’d never know, Len and Zil had only missed D by an hour. They had come to make a “Social Call,” an activity that Zil had wanted to try out ever since she had heard a rich lady say it on the street outside the theaters once. But no one answered their knocks on the doors of the museum.
“Do you think she said yes to his proposal?” Zil asked. “He looked sharp.”
“Maybe. He looked all right.” Not only was Len skeptical of the concept of the “Social Call,” which ritual Zil had insisted required him to wait in line at a pump and wash his face in ice-cold water beforehand, but his opinion of Ike had peaked at the factory, and been on the decline ever since. The older boy carried himself too big, that was Len’s view: “That Ike isn’t so good a dribser as he talks. It’s tiresome.”
Len nodded at the wreck of the Society building. “Would you look at that pile.”
Zil knew this was his way of saying that he wanted to go play in the filthy ruins.
“Do you want to go play in it?” She knew he’d never admit it.
“Play in it?” he scoffed. “No! I was just observing.”
“Let’s go then.”
Len grunted and kicked at nothing. He had, in fact, wished to play in the filthy ruins. “Social Calls are a lot of shit,” he said vengefully.
Zil ignored his sulking. She was disappointed not to learn how Ike’s proposal had turned out, and she was intensely curious to meet his intended; but at the same time, she had been nervous about how he might be taking the news of the gruesome murders at the Still Crossing. The quick girl had got the idea that he was quite fond of Rei and them that had died.
She was a step behind Len at the corner of Legate when Len blurted, “Back it up,” and grabbed her arm. “Green armband coming.”
They hustled past the museum, and ran through the empty doorframe of the shattered building to hide.
On the second floor of the former embassy, the man who inhabited that place happened to spy the ragged boy and girl before they disappeared from the corner. He was fond of children, especially the mischievous sort, which he himself had been. He hoped they stayed in the neighborhood. He would like to meet them.
The clack of the embassy’s knocker echoed from below. He limped downstairs and invited Hob Rondeau inside.
* * *
With a twanging screech, the tram halted at the station in the center of the National Boulevard that was set between the Metropole and the King Macon on the eastern half of the thoroughfare, and the Lear on the western.
“May a cat smile on you,” the tired-looking tram driver said to D as she rose to leave.
Events Leading to the Overthrow of the Provisional Government, Pt. 2
The scratching and whining woke Mosi.
A cat was clawing at the door. He lay on his side and blinked in the light that filtered between the slats of the street-facing blinds. He sensed without looking that Lionel had left the bed.
Mosi sat up, feeling like his whole body had collapsed into his stomach, and that his body was made of stone. If Crossley refused to follow their orders, if he refused to give the command to move his forces on the loyalist position on the Great Highway and finish this thing, they were going to have to relieve him and issue the order themselves. If Crossley’s auxiliary soldiers didn’t like the order, they were dead.
Lionel said they couldn’t fail. Mosi had come to love Lionel, had found in the younger man someone he could laugh with like he had never laughed with anyone else, and he had come to understand that he was totally sincere, that there was nothing he wanted more than to make life better and fairer and less sick. For such a smart person, however, he was maddeningly optimistic. Oh, sweet fella! Of course they could fail!
A key fitted in the lock, click. Which was unusual, because Lionel didn’t have a key. Their arrangement was for Mosi to leave the door ever-so-slightly unlatched. The maids had a key, but it was too early.
Mosi, wearing nothing but his drawers, stood as the lock turned over, and swept the blanket off the bed.
A baldheaded auxiliary soldier with scraped cheeks came in after the opening door with his rifle and bayonet pointed. Two more red-cheeked auxiliary soldiers crowded after him. Mosi threw the blanket over the first man, and the soldier fired, blasting a hole in the cotton.
A dozen tiny teeth bit Mosi’s bare chest and neck as he roared forward. He caught the blanketed soldier around the neck and hurled him into the men who were following. The collision of bodies sent the rearmost man banging into the hall’s opposite wall, and his rifle went off, blasting the weapon’s single round into the ceiling. Plaster spattered the rug. The second man fell on the floor with a croaky gasp and dropped his rifle. The soldier covered in the blanket went twisting, trying to stab his way free of the blanket with his bayonet.
