The Curator, page 34
Mosi poured out into the hall. The soldier on the floor had something of the grasshopper about him: he was long-limbed and bug-eyed and had a jutting Adam’s apple. To judge by the gray hair sticking out from under his cap, he was also old enough to be a grandfather. Mosi stomped his bare foot on the geezer’s crotch and felt something important to the man pop under his heel. The soldier screamed, the scream turning into a raspy wheeze.
The one who had shot into the ceiling crouched against the wall, gaping, clutching his rifle. The dockman ripped the gun from his hands. This man was old too. A single wild white eyebrow bristled with dandruff above his close-set eyes, and when Mosi whipped the bayonet across the old soldier’s face, it opened a bone river between his eyebrows and his eyes. Blood splashed across Mosi’s neck and face. The man collapsed.
He reset his attention to the first one, the baldy who’d led the charge.
The remaining auxiliary soldier was a few feet away. He’d got the blanket off and was regarding Mosi coolly. He was not so elderly as the other two, perhaps only four or five years older than Mosi himself, and had a muscular build. While the soldier watched Mosi, he patted his bandolier, feeling for a bullet.
The attacker Mosi’d stepped on was making a noise like he had a chicken bone stuck in his throat and clawing halfheartedly at the butt of his rifle beside him. The other soldier was convulsing, soaking the rug with his blood. Down by the door to the stairwell hunkered a brown Siamese cat, observing it all.
None of the doors opened and there were no other sounds. Mosi figured they’d cleared the place out to do the assassination—smart. His skin was on fire where the bullet fragments had hit him.
“You killed him, didn’t you? You killed my fella.”
The bald soldier had found a cartridge and taken it out but made no move to load. It must have dawned on him there wouldn’t be time. If he tried to prime another shot, Mosi would be on him before he could get it off. They were going to finish up with the bayonets. The soldier slotted the cartridge back into his bandolier.
“We did,” he said.
“Did you make it quick?”
The soldier nodded.
Mosi rubbed a fist across his wet eyes. “Thank you. Did Crossley send you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” The soldier laughed. “We’re with Lumm.”
“Really?” said Mosi, and he wondered if they had been very stupid, or if Lumm had been very clever.
The soldier twisted his neck and rubbed one of his scraped-looking cheeks against his shoulder. As he did so, his other cheek showed, and Mosi discerned that it wasn’t scraped—it was tattooed: wavy red lines broken by a red triangle. They all had tattoos like that, all three of them.
“You’re old for a soldier.”
For some reason this drew a chuckle from the soldier. “Not in my particular army.”
“I suppose you thought tattooing your face couldn’t make you more unsightly,” Mosi said. “You were wrong.”
“That so?” the soldier asked.
“It is.” The dockman wasn’t in the condition he’d been in in his younger years, he was wounded and half-naked, and the soldier looked to be made of firmer stuff than his companions—but it would make no difference.
“I’m going to kill you,” Mosi told him.
“No,” the soldier said, and his posture relaxed. He lowered his rifle to his side.
This irritated Mosi. “I don’t accept your surrender—” he began, unaware that the man on the floor had at last got hold of the dropped rifle.
The prone man pulled the trigger with a burble of rage. The bullet sheared through the dockman’s torso, and bits of his stomach and ribs painted the wallpaper, and that was how the second-youngest leader of the Provisional Government died.
The Lear
The white cat debarked ahead of D, but instead of staying with her or running ahead to scratch something, it went underneath the tram stop’s bench. Once there, Talmadge XVII curled her paws beneath herself and stared from the shadows, not at D but at the front of the Lear Hotel across the avenue.
It seemed that D’s escort had concluded. She could only assume this meant that, as far as XVII was concerned, she was on the right track.
D crossed the street.
* * *
“You hear that, sir?” the doorman of the Lear, in his gray uniform with black piping and black rope at the shoulders, asked a guest in a cream-colored suit for whom he had been about to open the door. There had been two pops in the distance.
(The first pop was the bullet that shot through the blanket and peppered Mosi’s bare neck and chest; and the second was the shot that went into the Metropole hall’s ceiling.)
D was stepping up onto the curb a few feet away. She hesitated, making some business of adjusting her sleeve, and keeping a sidelong eye on the two men in front of the Lear’s doors.
There was a third pop. (This was the shot that killed Jonas Mosi.)
“I think I did hear something,” the gentleman in the suit said, and yet another sound, more distant but bigger, a pillowy boom, punctuated his assent.
* * *
(This larger, farther-off sound belonged to Gildersleeve’s artillery; they had opened fire on the encampment of Crossley’s Auxiliary on the Great Highway.
The general had landed on the northeastern tip of the country four days previous and, in nightly groupings, moved his army on foot to gather in the forest a mile behind the Crown’s encampment. His engineers had dismantled three of their big guns and, using handcarts with greased wheels, quietly rolled the pieces up the steep footpaths to the plateau. At the top, by lamplight, the cannon teams had reassembled the guns, concealed behind the famed stone monoliths. Loads of lead and smoke shot had been brought.
Gildersleeve ordered his infantry commanders, meanwhile, to convey to their squads that anyone in their path or in their sight should be treated as an enemy fighter.
“And when we reach the city limits, sir?” a captain had asked.
His stomach pain had reduced Gildersleeve to making his preparations and directives from a flat position on a hammock in his tent. No longer could the general keep down even water-thinned cottage cheese.
He checked his letter with the red symbols, folded it away. “Captain, we have intelligence that they’ve dressed many of the traitors from the Auxiliary in civilian clothes, even disguised them to masquerade as women. Shoot anyone that shows themselves.”
“Yes, sir,” the captain said.
When King Macon XXIV visited, General Gildersleeve apologized for his inability to rise. “There’s an evil sickness in my belly, my lord.”
The king graciously excused him, and asked if they were ready.
Gildersleeve said, “If it pleases you, my lord.” It did please the king, and His Highness issued the order to begin the attack. Gildersleeve—who despite his physical incapacitation still wore his uniform, one of the new ones with the triangular shoulder patches that his letter had told him to add to the army’s regalia—drifted into his deathsleep as the surprise shelling on Crossley’s position began.
Later in the morning, by the time his army overran the remainder of the single unit of Crossley’s Auxiliary on the Great Highway, and began to reorganize and draw up the larger body of the cannons for the assault on the city proper, the general’s flesh would be good and cold, his soul rather warmer.)
* * *
“There’s another,” the doorman said after another distant boom. He leaned out to gaze up the street in the direction of the city limits, and with his hand on the long brass handle of the door, pulled it wide.
D saw this, and stepped for the door.
“Definitely something,” remarked the man in the cream-colored suit.
D slid around him and, drawing her skirts close and keeping her head low, swiftly moved into the Lear Hotel, unnoticed and unquestioned.
* * *
The central feature of the Lear’s lobby was a parallel row of black-potted, red-leaved Japanese maple trees. They formed a runway to the grand staircase, and divided the lobby into two sections. To the right was the hotel saloon and the Concierge’s desk; to the left was the reception area. The elevator, a later addition to the original structure, was behind and to the left of the grand staircase. Its gold door was pulled aside, and the elevator operator was visible, slouched on her stool inside the box. There was an auxiliary soldier stationed at attention at the bottom of the grand staircase, and another right outside the elevator door.
As D entered, nearly everyone in the massive room—auxiliary soldiers, hotel workers in the Lear’s gray and black livery, a few young men with Volunteer bands tied around their arms—was reacting to the sounds, looking up from their places at the mahogany counters of the reception area and their seats in the ivy-patterned armchairs around the hearth in the saloon toward the Lear’s wide plate-glass windows to see if there was something going on in the street. Beside the hearth, a violinist in tails continued to play a sunny melody.
“That’s cannon,” a gruff voice pronounced from the saloon side.
From this point, there was no way to make herself small enough to avoid being noticed. D let her skirts unfurl and slowed, forcing herself to keep her steps moderately paced. She tilted her chin. A woman of status, a woman who belonged in the lobby of the Lear Hotel, did not rush. The deep carpet sank under her steps. She had Gucci’s purse tucked in her armpit, where it seemed to contain her heartbeat.
There were murmurs of concern as the gruff voice went on: “Heard it enough times in the Ottomans with Sleevey.”
A Volunteer in a green armband, a university boy whom D recognized from her time in service, came running down the grand staircase. His name was Dakin, she remembered, and he had been very specific about how to starch his collars and used to leave notes for the laundresses that said things like, I don’t consider it too great a request to ask you to do things right.
She looked past him and didn’t break stride. Dakin hurried by, sparing her just a short, puzzled glance.
“Get ahold of Lionel!” she heard him call to someone. D was halfway across the lobby.
Ahead, a member of the hotel staff stepped out from between two pots on the right, about to cross the lane of trees to the left side, but paused, noticing D’s approach. This man, full-faced with an immaculately combed beard of gray-blond hair, had an insignia on his breast that identified him as a manager of the hotel. His rooms, she guessed, were pin-clean: three mugs on three hooks, sheets turned down, windowsills dusted, a sealed letter in the top drawer of the bedside table detailing how his affairs should be dispatched if he died unexpectedly.
He gave D a measuring look, and she thought, It’s still too far to run.
But that was all right. Why would she run? She was a valued guest.
Before the manager could decide whether to move on or to greet her, D quickened her steps and flicked a hand at him, mimicking the gesture of irritable toleration that she had seen the rector’s wife use on the mornings that the domestic staff cleaned the rector’s residence and had to pass through her sitting room, disturbing her breakfast.
“Sir,” she said.
He bowed, training taking precedence over the extraordinary circumstances. “Good morning, madam. Are you finding the Lear to your satisfaction?”
D counted to four before answering. “It’s fine,” she said, indicating clearly by the interval that it was the opposite.
“Excellent, Madam—?” The manager frowned as he tried to place her name, which he should already have known. All the manager really needed to remember was that her husband was the kind of man who could still afford the rates even in these turbulent days, and that there were other hotels glad to take their money.
“There’s a girl out front begging,” D said sharply. “I’ve never experienced anything like it. They don’t allow things like that to go on at the Metropole, I can promise you.”
He clicked his heels and bowed again. “Madam, I apologize on behalf of the Lear. I’ll have the doorman see to it immediately.”
“Thank you,” D said. “The creature scattered when I shooed it away, but I expect she’s lurking around somewhere in the vicinity.”
“Trust in me, madam. You won’t be bothered again.” The manager swiveled off his original course and moved toward the hotel entrance.
Another soft boom caused the red leaves of the potted trees to flutter lightly. The violinist playing ceased with a sharp squeak.
D went on; at the end of the lane of trees, she nodded to the auxiliary soldier at the foot of the grand staircase—“Ma’am”—and curled around the left newel post. She walked to the second auxiliary soldier by the elevator.
“Officer,” she said.
“Ma’am.” He had a black mustache waxed into jolly points, a few broken capillaries beneath his eyes, a patch of glossy pink scar tissue at the right line of his jaw, and a wide, benevolent smile that seemed to invite you to share a laugh and a few sips too, if you had the time. D thought his rooms were jumbled and full of family: sons, daughters, and a wife who also enjoyed a laugh and a drink.
“I just need to see your key,” the friendly soldier said.
She reached into Gucci’s purse, brushing her hand over the strange pistol, and found the pouch containing the glass eyes.
* * *
What had worked with the manager would not work with a soldier. She removed the pouch and gave it to him. “I’m not a guest, actually. I’m supposed to deliver these to Mr. Lumm on the third floor.”
The soldier undid the cord and looked into the pouch. “Are those—?” He barked a laugh. “Isn’t that just like our Mr. Lumm? If it’s not books he’s getting, it’s something else—big crates of tea from Russia, special black wood for his fireplace. He had a statue come of a man with an octopus for a head that’d give you nightmares, and so heavy it needed to be pulled up the side of the hotel and in through his window with block and tackle. What a quiz he is! Course he’d need a supply of glass eyeballs. Good old Mr. Lumm!”
The soldier stirred his finger in the pouch of glass eyes. They tinkled against each other. He shook his head, laughed again, redid the cord, and handed the pouch back to D.
“Thank you,” D said, smiling lightly in return.
She returned the pouch to her purse and took a step—before the soldier’s arm intruded between her and the elevator. “I apologize, ma’am. I know a lovely thing like you would never hurt anyone, but we’ve got to check with Mr. Lumm first.”
There was another soft boom, and another tide of worried voices from the lobby.
“Of course,” D said. She stepped back.
“Vanessa, can you ring Mr. Lumm and tell him there’s some glass eyeballs for him?”
The elevator operator, a middle-aged woman with loose brown hair and half-spectacles who had been morosely observing their interaction, climbed from her stool. “Yuh.” She unhooked the bell of the house roto that hung on a wall of the elevator, stuck it over her ear, and spoke into the com. “3B.”
“We’ll get you right up, ma’am,” the soldier assured her. D smelled his mustache wax.
Another cottony boom resounded. The soldier’s smile wavered, but he took a deep breath and pulled it back together. “No need to panic,” he said, and rubbed his scar with a thumb.
D thought he was talking more to himself than to her.
“Good morning, sir,” the elevator operator said, keeping her ear pressed to the bell. “This is the lobby. Sergeant Gaspar has a young lady with a delivery for you. She comes from—” The woman glanced at D. “Ma’am?”
“I’m employed by the manufacturer. It’s for the National Museum of the Worker. Mr. Lumm is the museum curator.”
“It’s for the National Museum of the Worker. The delivery is some glass eyeballs.”
The operator listened, nodding. She looked to D again. “And your name, ma’am?”
Sergeant Gaspar smiled down on D with his glistening mustache tips.
A fresh boom interrupted them, which gave D long enough to calculate that, as well as she’d done to get this far without raising an alarm, she couldn’t get around Sergeant Gaspar and Vanessa; even if she drew Gucci’s gun on them, an alarm would be raised, and someone would stop her on the third floor before she ever got to Lumm’s suite; she was going to have to run, after all; she wasn’t going to be fast enough and she was going to be arrested; and, on that other morning years before, Lumm had told her all he would ever tell her—about the conjurer, Simon the Gentle, “the most wonderful, wonderful criminal you can imagine”—and she would never know for certain what had happened to her brother.
The echo of the cannon receded. “Ma’am?” A wrinkle appeared between the sergeant’s eyebrows and he angled his head at her. “Your name, ma’am?”
It occurred to D that, actually, she did have one trick left:
“Simona Gentle,” she said. “My name is Simona Gentle.”
Events Leading to the Overthrow of the Provisional Government, Pt. 3
General Crossley hesitated at the open door of Lumm’s suite. “Tell me again how it will go, Mr. Lumm?”
Lumm was at the table, soaking his poor hands in a bowl of hot water.
“Check your paper, dear,” he said to Crossley, observing as the general took from a pocket the small piece of paper that had been his closest companion over the last several months.
When they had decided that they were ready to acquire a military man, Westhover had written the Red Letter in the traditional way—using the fibula of a cat as his pen and some of his own blood as ink—and mailed it to the general. This method of control was taxing to prepare and only worked on the weak-minded or the very sick, but they had chosen well in their selection of Crossley. The paper was creased and feather-soft from handling, the red drawings and markings blurred.
