The Curator, page 38
“Of course,” she said, grateful to put the world off for a few minutes longer.
And D was tired, too. The distance from the prospector’s shack to the Vestibule was only a walk of five minutes, but it felt much farther. A short rest would do no harm. It might help. D took off the blue dress and slipped in beside him under the sheets of the narrow bed.
“You looked sad just now.”
“Did I?” Robert’s body was warm and solid against her hip.
“Will you miss your museum? And all your wax friends?”
“I will, and that’s why, wherever we go, you’ll have to find me a new museum.…”
“That’s just the thing I was going to suggest. Are you sure everything is all right, Dora? You don’t have to be afraid. I promise I’m going to take care of you.”
“I know, Robert. I know.… Maybe I was just thinking about my brother.… He’s been on my mind so much lately.…”
“You never told me you had a brother,” Robert said, but she did not respond. He listened to her sleeping breath, and felt her heartbeat where their bodies pressed. He closed his own eyes.
* * *
Robert was on the deck of a ship, peering down to the darkened first-floor gallery below. Triangular constellations of stars twinkled among the crouching shadows of the exhibits. He couldn’t figure out the up and down and in-between of it, the sky that seemed to be in the floor, the boat floating above it.
Somewhere in the night sky, a horse had broken its leg. A horse broke its leg when he was a boy. He’d heard it all the way up in his bedroom, and he’d fled to his father, who had told him what happened. “You know, Bob,” his father had comforted him, “it’s not the pain that makes the animal carry on that way. It’s just the fear.”
The screams made Robert’s stomach rise, and he lost his balance on the deck. Vertigo overcame him and he plummeted, the starry triangles rushing to meet him.
He jerked upright in the prospector’s bed.
The museum was dark and Dora was fast asleep beside him. Robert’s heart rate started to slow, but the horse’s next scream—a torn and gurgling howl—sent it tripping ahead.
“Dora,” he said, “did you hear that?”
She stirred a little, but her breathing resumed its soft rhythm.
The building vibrated with the thud of a cannon blast. The shelling was starting again and it was close; on the outskirts of the city, he guessed. No other scream came. He was entirely awake, though, hot from sharing the close bed, and shaky from the dream and the piercing cry and the shelling. A smoke would be good.
He eased around Dora and went to the chair where his jacket was hanging. Instead of putting it on, he fished out his cigarette case and his matches. He took the lamp from the table, lit it low, and left the shack through the rear curtain, to keep from disturbing Dora.
As he crossed the fifth-floor gallery to the stairs, trying to convince himself that it must have been an owl that had made the scream, or some other hunting bird, he looked out a window and saw the glow of a light at the former embassy next door. The auxiliary soldier there—Captain Anthony, Robert remembered his name was, with a great black beard—must have been awake, too.
He could go knock on the door of the embassy, renew acquaintances with the man—who had been quite friendly—and find out what reports he had. He could ask Anthony if he’d heard that awful scream.
Near the window was the wax fellow in overalls with the bag of fruit who stood under a tree, and had an empty socket where one of his eyes was missing. It was a shame that Dora had not taken one from Lumm’s delivery to fix his sight for him.
Why hadn’t she ever told him she had a brother? If he was going to be her Bobby, he needed to know everything about her. Except, as he pictured Dora’s dark gaze, he realized that he never could. There was too much to her, and it was too deep. This comprehension amused Robert, and saddened him, and relieved him as well. A great deal of what he loved about Dora—and he did love her, he thought—was that she would never burden him. It could only ever be the other way around. Behind those dark eyes was a set of coolly inviting rooms, rooms and rooms, and he thought he could spend the rest of his life exploring them and never find the secret one where she devised all her plans.
Three more cannon blasts broke the air, gigantic punches delivered into a gigantic bag of flour. He wasn’t worried. Robert imagined the great hulk of the museum building taking a direct hit and, when the dust cleared, standing undamaged, responding with a small belch, like a man stretching after a full dinner.
He gave the fruit picker a nod and a pat on the shoulder, walked on to the stairwell, went through the door, and headed below.
A Lot of Dead People to Bury
Weeks earlier, on the day of the revolution, he was paid a dollar to dig a grave in a little family cemetery. He had been wandering the midday streets, listening to people talking about the unrest and the strikes, about the pamphlets that said the king and the government were robbing them all, and about the army that was lost on the other side of the ocean. The particulars were of no interest to him, but the unease was exhilarating. It felt like something remarkable and terrible might happen. He hoped he would be close when it did.
“You, there,” a man called to him. “What’s your name?”
“Hubert,” he said, plucking a name that he’d seen on a discarded oats box in a gutter and that had adhered to his mind. He never got too attached to any name.
The man who addressed him wore a vest with a prominent watch chain and had an important manner. He said that his mother was being prepared for burial in the family cemetery, but the gravedigger had not arrived. “You look strong enough to dig a hole, Hubert. I’ll give you a dollar. What do you say?”
The-man-who-was-calling-himself-Hubert said, “Yes, sir. I’m a hard worker.”
“That’s fine.”
The-man-who-was-calling-himself-Hubert followed the watch-chain man from the street to a large, handsome house. Behind the house was a neat cemetery bordered with a wrought iron fence. Every stone bore the name Bello.
* * *
The gravedigger opened the required hole at the foot of the newest stone and retreated to the shadows of the trees behind the small family cemetery. No one had paid him. He didn’t care about that anyway. Money was even less important than a name. He leaned on the shovel he’d been given and watched. It was late afternoon when the coffin came.
A churchman spoke a few words, and waved around a cross. The family members in their black suits and black dresses bowed their heads and prayed. A sniffling scarecrow tossed a piece of paper into the hole, and the watch-chain man led the scarecrow—his father, presumably, the husband of the deceased mother—away from the gravesite back to the house. The other mourners followed, leaving only a round-faced young man.
The round-faced man rested a flank against one of the stones. He removed a bottle from a pocket of his black suit.
The gravedigger emerged from the trees and doffed his hat. “My condolences, sir.” He nodded to the open grave. “Is it all right?”
“By all means,” the young fellow said, and took a drink from his bottle.
Though it was a mild night, the young fellow had a moist, sweaty look, like worked clay. The gravedigger surmised that the bottle he was sipping was not the first he’d sampled that afternoon.
The-man-who-was-calling-himself-Hubert went to the pile of earth beside the new stone—CAMILA MARIA BELLO, WIFE OF ANTHONY—and plunged his blade.
“Granny’s lucky, I think, to be missing this foolishness,” the young fellow said. “This riffraff carping on when we already give them everything so they can sit in their trash piles and be drunk all day. It’s grotesque. It’s not our fault they can’t clean up after themselves and catch cholera. You feel you can’t even breathe for the stink of their filth.” He tipped his bottle at the gravedigger and winked. “You’re pretty ripe yourself, my friend.”
“Sorry, sir,” the gravedigger said.
“That’s a hell of a big beard you have, isn’t it? Think you might have a few spare nibbles stuck in there that you’re saving for later? Yummy, yummy.”
“No, sir.”
“Kidding you!” He winked again. “I was at the university before they shut it down. I won’t go back. It’s radicals and fools, the whole place.”
The-man-who-was-calling-himself-Hubert pitched a blade of dirt into the grave. It made a gritty splash on the coffin lid.
The young fellow drank, gasped as he lowered the bottle, and shook himself. “Poor Granny…
“I saw that Joven before the Morgue Ship floated off. Now, there was a smell. Stuffed my nose with cotton and I still wanted to puke. Westhover was generous to put him down as quick as he did. Slow hanging would have been more appropriate. What do you think of that?”
“I don’t know anything about it, sir.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t know anything whatsoever. It’s a credit to you that you see that. Pet a cat, thank the furry little crapper, thank the king, do your work, don’t bitch about your betters, be happy. That’s the correct attitude. What do you think of the protests?”
“I don’t know anything about that either, sir, I just do my work.”
“The king needs to be firm. He ought to order that Crossley who’s in charge of the Auxiliary Garrison to shoot them all. What do you think about that?”
The shadows had swelled and grown long from the trees, smoothing the small cemetery in gloom and leaving only a few scratches of sunset brightness on the lawn. Pots and pans were banging around in the house, the cooks preparing dinner for the mourners. The gravedigger could no longer restrain the smile that was rising up inside him.
“That would be a lot of dead people to bury,” he said.
“Yes, it would!” The round-faced grandson of Camila Bello chortled and threw back his head to drink some more.
The gravedigger glanced at the house: not a face in any of the windows. He stepped forward and drove the blade of the shovel into the laughing man’s guts.
Young Bello made a sound—“Hllk!”—and was draped over the shovel, speared on the tip of the blade. His bottle fell on the ground and emptied itself into the grass. Blood came up over his lips. He scrabbled at the handle, blinking at the gravedigger with hurt eyes. “Hllk! Hllk!”
“Hllk!” the gravedigger said back to him. “Hllk! Hllk!”
He dragged Young Bello, spiked on the shovel blade, around to the open grave, and kicked him off into it, where he landed with a thump on the coffin top. The-man-who-was-calling-himself-Hubert cast the shovel aside and jumped in after him, boots clomping onto the wood.
“Hllk!” Bello cried once more, louder this time, before the gravedigger put his hands on his throat. He squeezed until the man’s eyes rolled up in his skull.
The-man-who-was-calling-himself-Hubert lifted his head above the grave. The gravestones stood around him at eye level, and the lawn rolled darkly away. There was still no one. From the house, the pots and pans banged some more.
He stared down at Young Bello. Blood soaked his shirt and streaked over the sides of the waxed oak coffin. He was breathing, hand fluttering at his side, fat ruby thumb ring tapping the wood. The gravedigger had no use for jewels, but he was interested in the piece of paper lying on the wood by the prone man’s shoes—the paper the scarecrow had thrown in. Over the course of the-man-who-was-calling-himself-Hubert’s life, he’d noticed that people often wrote things that they didn’t dare say out loud.
He picked up the paper, opened it, squinting to read in the dimness. “Soul of the Souls,” he made out, the title at the top of the page. You are the soul of the souls now, my darling, the heart of all the hearts, my darling, the poem began, but the reading tired his eyes. The-man-who-was-calling-himself-Hubert tucked the paper away to study later.
The gravedigger climbed from the hole. He picked up his shovel and shifted the remaining dirt into the hole, burying the unconscious man and the coffin containing the unconscious man’s grandmother both.
Shots rang out, and a commotion started in the street, horses and yelling. Some sort of attack was taking place. Chaos was triggered in the house, with all of the inhabitants rushing to load some wagons with luggage in preparation for taking flight. “Where’s Tom?” a woman cried, but they wouldn’t find him.
The gravedigger removed his hat before the turned soil, and bowed his head out of respect for the dead.
The racket in the street grew louder. In the morning he would look for a new job. Whatever change came, there was always a place for a hard worker.
* * *
“I met someone else who had a ring like that, Lieutenant.”
The-man-who-was-not-Anthony nodded at the hand Robert cupped around the mug he’d given him. When the lieutenant had knocked on the door, he’d invited him inside for some sweet coffee in the former embassy’s sitting room.
“It’s a university ring,” the lieutenant said, and smacked his lips. He sat in one of the armchairs. The-man-who-was-not-Anthony sat opposite. “I’m actually not anymore, though. A lieutenant. That’s something to tell you that I should.” He smacked his lips again, and flexed his jaw. “Something I should tell you, I mean. I’m just Robert now. Just call me Robert.”
“Oh?”
“I resigned,” he said.
“And what about the young lady? Does she still hold her position at the museum?”
“Dora…?”
“Yes, Dora,” the-man-who-was-not-Anthony said. “The young lady was absent for a few days recently. I looked after the museum while she was gone. I happened to come across this.” He held a paper for Robert to see—it was the declaration that gave Dora authority over the museum. “This says Society for Psykical Research, but that’s been crossed out and replaced with National Museum of the Worker. Now, prior to finding this document, I had a talk with Sergeant Van Goor. We covered a number of topics, but in the course of our conversation he had mentioned that it was his recollection that the young lady was only ever given authority over the Society building. My fear is that she may have altered this paper without permission.”
A sorrowful expression played across Robert’s drooping face and he sighed a huge shoulder-lifting sigh. “The coffee…”
The-man-who-was-not-Anthony asked, “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Hmm…?”
“That’s all right. You must meet a lot of people. It’s just that it was you who directed me into this service. I called to you that I was looking for work, and you sent me on my way to Sergeant Van Goor, who hired me. Do you remember now? I want you to know how grateful I am, and I hope, in spite of the circumstances, you can feel good in yourself about having done a stranger a fair turn.”
Robert’s head fell against the chair back. His mouth lolled and his eyes seemed to settle on the flag that hung from the eagle-headed gold standard in the corner. When the-man-who-was-not-Anthony had first moved in, every room in the embassy had been outfitted with one—the pattern of red and white stripes and a dark-blue window with a scatter of stars—and a lucky thing too. He had run out of rugs and canvases to shroud the bodies, and fallen back on using the flags.
“I don’t know why they make it look like that,” he told Robert, “the meaning of the symbols, but I’ve developed a fondness for it.”
Outside
A blast of thunder spilled a wash of snow down on the interior of the shack and woke D. It had been weeks since she’d had such a long, deep, and unbroken sleep. She sat up and took a sharp, startled breath and swallowed a lungful of dust, and fell off the bed to the floor, hacking. There was another crash, and another sheet of dust and grit hissed down from the rafters.
Robert’s jacket was hanging on the chair, but he wasn’t in the room.
She went out to the fifth-floor gallery in her underthings, coughing and calling for him. Another nearby blast reverberated through the building and made the trail of yellow sand on the glass stream jump and spread. She sensed that it was early morning, but the light through the windows was mustard-colored, varnishing the figures and the exhibits with an acid sheen. Between the blasts, bells were ringing, tower bells and ambulance bells and fire bells. There were cracks, too: bullets shooting, an irregular rain of them, too many to count.
It was happening: fighting in the city.
Robert, she needed to find Robert.
D returned to the shack, and hurriedly dressed in her work dress and apron. She grabbed the square pistol from the lieutenant’s jacket.
* * *
The front door was closed, but the bench Robert had put there as a brace had been dragged away. He’d gone out to see what was happening, the fool. It was obvious what was happening: a war.
D pushed outside into a thick smoke, sharper and thicker than earlier, a fuzzy, undulating brown curtain that hovered on top of a solid, waist-high mist. Above, the sun was a flake of dull quartz.
She held her skirt in one hand and the gun in the other, and moved in the direction of the corner. She couldn’t see the ground under her feet or the buildings on the other side of the street. “Robert!” D called.
Rifle fire crackled. There were more bells, bonging and dinging, and panicked voices, squeezed and warped by the filtering air, seeming remote and near at the same time. It smelled like a wet fireplace had vomited its ashes across the city.
She came to the corner. She could tell it was the corner because the embassy building had emerged faintly visible in the brown haze to her right. Hooves clattered, and the leathery flank of a riderless horse smashed the smog half a foot from where D stood. Without realizing she had walked a little past the sidewalk onto the street; two more steps and she would have been trampled.
D retreated to the sidewalk. “Robert!” she called.
“They’re shooting everyone! They’re shooting everyone!” someone yelled, as if in response. They were running past, but D wasn’t sure if it was from the direction of the river or the direction of the city center. “Stay inside! They’re shooting us!”
