The Curator, page 9
Between them, half sunk in a soup of emerald liquid and chunks of ice, lay Joven’s corpse. Despite the smallness of the body, Lionel found he could not, at first, take in the whole of the man. His gaze traveled from the bumpy crest of the skull with its four or five hairs plastered to the skin to the closed, furrowed eyelids; to the sharp spoon of a chin; to the puddles of green liquid collected in the scoop of each collarbone; to the narrow chest with the two bullet holes, bloodless and black, situated just to the heart-side of the sternum, one below the other; to the large hands, turned up and out of proportion to the rest of the dead man, thick with fat knuckles that ended in calloused fingertips.
Lionel fixed on these fingertips, and the little curls of skin peeling loose from the calluses after being soaked for many days. He thought of the waiter excavating the chicken bones, stripping every last bit of meat.
He felt dizzy and stepped away. His eyes took in the dead man in his fullness, lying there naked in the ice and the chemical solution. A half-lid covered the container starting at the level of Joven’s waist. He looked tucked in. He looked like some terrible sacrifice.
It was all wrong. Everything. Their whole world. Lionel had suspected, but now he knew.
“Honestly,” Bello said, “I don’t expect I’d look any better. Circumstance isn’t likely to be flattering for anyone.”
The expression of sympathy filled Lionel with relief.
“Yes,” he said.
Bello removed the second flask from inside his jacket and paused, resting it on the ledge of the tub. The tufts of cotton protruding from his nostrils shivered with his breathing. He grunted and pointed at the green liquid. “I wouldn’t drink that juice on a bet. Not for every dollar you had.”
“No,” Lionel said.
“No.” Bello drank.
The hanging lamp glowed on Joven’s corpse. The ship creaked. Lionel became aware of the river behind its walls, flowing toward the ocean. He felt himself sobering. “Are you ready to leave?”
“Almost.” Bello tucked away his flask. “I just need to ask him something.”
The assemblyman’s son bent low over the body, bringing his nose near Joven’s. “I only want to know one thing: Are you sorry?”
“What are you doing?” Lionel’s question came out softly, as if he were frightened that Joven would wake up. “Don’t do that.”
If Bello heard, he gave no sign. The cotton flared as he breathed harder, and he reached with his free hand and pinched the dead man’s lips. He squeezed them, making them bulge, and rubbed them back and forth, and the voice he gave to Joven was pathetically querulous: “Oh, yes, oh, yes. I’m so-oo sorry. So-oo sorry.”
Bello lifted his bloodshot eyes to Lionel. “What do you think, Lionel? Should we accept his apology or not?”
“Please,” Lionel said. His gorge rose and he retasted the alcohol he’d drunk earlier.
Bello clicked his tongue. “No. Can’t do it. Scum like this think having coins makes them something, gives them class, but it doesn’t. It just makes them lucky. And you should be grateful for your luck. My father’s piss has more class.”
He took a straight razor from his pocket and opened the blade. “Let me just get a tooth for a souvenir and we can leave this floating cesspool.”
* * *
It was black morning when the last gawker departed and the Morgue Ship’s boatman, Zanes, went to draw in the plank. A cat sat on it. The jewels in its collar twinkled in the night. It was black with a white bib and a white chin. The animal sat neatly, expectantly.
Zanes was a believer. He removed his cap and stepped aside. “Bless you, friend.”
The cat trotted aboard without sparing him a glance. It crossed the deck to the cabin and disappeared through the doorway.
The boatman trailed the animal belowdecks. He found the cat with Joven: it was crouched on the island of the dead man’s chest, kneading the bloodless skin with its claws. It was staring intently at the face of the corpse—and it was purring.
Zanes, pressing his cap to his breast, shuffled closer. He instinctively murmured the daily prayer, “Bless me, friend, and look on me with kind eyes, and show me the way.” He understood that he was in the presence of a holy occurrence.
The cat purred and kneaded, and the river murmured against the ribs of the boat, and the ice in the dead man’s tub clicked against the tin.
After a while, the animal was contented. It stopped kneading, yawned, stretched, and hopped off Joven’s chest down to the floor.
Again ignoring Zanes, the black-and-white cat pattered out and up the stairs, the tag on its collar jingling, and hopped from the Morgue Ship to the wharf a second before the vessel’s moorings loosened and dropped away from their cleats.
Zanes returned his gaze to the dead man. Joven’s lips parted.
* * *
Lionel woke up in his rooms with a hangover and his shirt speckled with vomit. He washed quickly and dragged himself to a carrel in the deep stacks of the university library. For the rest of the morning he ignored his pounding headache to focus on the composition of an impassioned document that he entitled A MORAL CALL FOR THE BETTERMENT OF THE POOR AND THE VOICELESS. When he finished, he let himself into the offices of the campus newspaper, and used the press to make copies.
The Salute
The lieutenant was happy when he visited her that evening. They went inside the engineman’s cabin of one of the exhibition trains. Robert sat on the engineman’s stool and she rode him. “Wave to the people, you dirty girl! Wave to all the people watching us roll by!”
Over Robert’s shoulder, a strapping waxwork fireman leaned forward with an empty shovel to fill the iron belly of the firebox, which was also empty but painted red inside to show its heat. The fireman was stripped to the waist, navy suspenders lolling at his hips. His glass eyes were set at a sidelong angle, so that he would appear to be communicating with the engineman at the front of the cabin, except that D and Robert were in the way, which made it seem as if he were quietly observing what they were doing. She liked that idea and followed it while her lieutenant babbled.
She imagined the waxwork man continuing to shovel, not saying anything, just calmly watching, plunging the blade into the coal, lifting, pitching, plunging, not letting himself be hurried, just lifting, plunging, making his own steady pace, lifting and plunging.… The fireman would stink, she thought, not like sweat, but like coal and ash, stink like he’d been rolling in it, like he was made of it. There would be nothing said, just his eyes and her eyes, and the force between them as they tried to break each other apart.
She was close when Robert shuddered, groaned, and pulled the rope for the whistle. It shrieked through the museum’s third floor. D was yanked back to herself in a thudding instant.
“Oh, damn.” He laughed wheezily. “I think we crashed.”
D put her hand into the curls on his bare chest. She wanted to rip them out. “Sad,” she said, and withdrew her hand, and lifted herself off him.
“What are you doing? Dora? You’re just going to leave me naked on this train going to—? My God, I don’t even know where it’s going.”
D dressed quickly. By the time Robert stepped from the compartment, she had taken a seat on a nearby bench and was jotting in a notebook.
“I don’t like the looks of that train’s fireman. He’s got a sneaky expression. What are you writing down?”
“Coal or wood for the firebox.’ ”
“What firebox? For the boiler in the basement? You don’t think this barn is cold, do you?”
She glanced up and saw him wiping himself with the checkered handkerchief that had been sticking from the fireman’s back pocket. Her ears still rang from the train whistle.
“The firebox on the train is empty. It looks like he’s shoveling air.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize you were planning to take this seriously. Good for you.” He cast around, holding the soiled handkerchief out from his body. “You should have been a lady with an estate, Dora. You’ve got the mind for those little details that men can’t appreciate until women show them.”
Before he did it, she predicted to herself that he was going to toss the handkerchief into the shadows under the train car—and then he did.
“Too late now,” D said. “There won’t be any more ladies under the new system. Or lords.”
This elicited a frown from Robert as he picked his pants off the floor and shook them out. “No, that’s true.”
In a framed photographic portrait of his family that he kept in his room, Robert’s mother was a sparrow of a woman, small hands clasped at the level of her waist, vividly uncomfortable to be seen by the camera. What did he think would become of her now? What actually would become of her? D had been irritated by the whistle and the handkerchief, but these questions softened her. It was the Bobby in Robert who had done those things, and she suspected it was the Bobby in him who hid from the potential ramifications of the revolution for his landed parents.
Her lieutenant began to tell her about the transcription he’d been called upon to take the previous night, in the office of the chief magistrate. The former currency minister had recounted how, along with renting out the army, the Crown had borrowed vast sums to enrich itself. “Meanwhile, there are people in the Lees who suffocate in the winters because they sleep so close to each other to stay warm.”
D had heard talk of worse things even than that happening in the Lees, but she just nodded.
Sundown dimmed the gallery. Inside their train car the engineman and the fireman were now a pair of featureless silhouettes. D led the way upstairs as Robert talked about how the minister claimed that he had only killed Joven because the factory owner’s insanity had been briefly contagious.
“It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever heard. He wasn’t ashamed, not in the slightest. Can you believe it, Dora?”
“No,” D said, but of course she could. Not all the rich young men at the university had been as enlightened as Robert. There were plenty who she thought would have felt Westhover’s actions had been more than justified—ones like the assemblyman’s son, who had expected her to hold up the spittoon for him to hock his tobacco juice into. She worried about her lieutenant’s capacity for incredulousness. It was extravagant this early in the nation’s renewal.
When they arrived at the fifth floor, D brought him to the prospector’s shack, which she had chosen for her accommodations, because it contained the only bed in the museum. D had swapped the gritty sheets on the bed for the ones she’d taken from the assemblyman’s son’s apartment. On the prospector’s small table, she had set out a lamp, a pitcher of water, and a pair of glasses. Built for exhibition purposes, the structure had no roof and only three walls—front and sides—so to enclose the space D had strung one of the old sheets across the open side. The solid walls were made of raw timber sealed with daubing.
She lit the lamp.
Robert ceased speaking of the degeneracy of the currency minister and paused at the threshold. “You’re actually going to live here? In the tramp’s house.”
“It’s an exhibit for prospecting. The prospector is the one panning for gold out in the glass river. It’s my responsibility to look after the museum. I signed an oath. I’ve got to stay somewhere.”
Robert stepped inside. “What if the ghosts who lost their homes in the fire next door at the Sorcery Society or whatever it was move in here and inhabit the wax dummies, and begin to move about? You know, if I was a ghost, Dora, the first thing I would do is inhabit one of these wax men and molest you.”
“It hadn’t crossed my mind,” D said. “Do you think I should be concerned?”
“Probably better to try to put the idea out of your mind altogether. You do understand I won’t be able to stay with you every night? I have a detail, commitments.”
His droll tone, which she was usually so comfortable with, chafed. D understood more about commitment than Robert would ever learn.
But she kept her tone measured. “Yes, I know. I’ll lock the doors.”
“We’re stretched thin. They’ve had to dispatch units to deal with some holdouts who have a position on the highway.”
This made sense of what Bet had said that morning about the cavalry leaving the city. “Is it serious?”
“No. What’s left of the real army is up to its ass in snow a thousand miles away. This is just the dregs. They do have a good position on the highway, though, so the leadership wants to avoid a frontal attack. The two sides are already negotiating. Well, negotiating to negotiate.” He traversed the tiny room in three steps and bent to examine the bed. “It slows us down, makes it harder to arrange elections, agree on judicial procedures, but that’s all it does.”
“Things will be getting back to normal, though? The factories starting up and the river opening to ships?”
“Things will be getting back to better than normal,” her lieutenant said. He pinched the sheets of the bed between his thumb and forefinger. “Is it odd that the prospector has silk sheets? That doesn’t seem accurate.”
“Perhaps he had a gold strike not long ago.”
Robert acquiesced to this logic with a shrug and sat on the bed. He rocked forward and back, sighed at the springiness, and lay on his side. He propped his head on his fist. His feet dangled over the edge. “It’ll be tight.”
“We’ll manage.” Before she could join him, however, she needed to go through the museum and turn down the lights. “I’ll only be a few minutes.” She picked the lamp up from the table.
“Dora?”
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
He studied her in a searching way, absently tracing a knuckle along his mustache. In the lamp glow his hair looked polished. “I’m sorry about the way that I go on sometimes. I know it’s dull, all the politics.”
“Lieutenant—”
“Sometimes I like it when you just call me Robert.”
“All right, Robert.”
“You know I know how smart you are. Don’t you? It doesn’t matter to me that you worked. You’re as fine as any woman.”
There was a strangeness about the way he was attending to her, the tone of contrition. Did it have to do with the sheets? If he asked where they had come from, D would tell him the truth, that she requisitioned them, and moreover—the truth, again—that she had been certain he would approve. But why would he apologize for something that she had done? For that was the sense of it, that he was feeling guilty toward her for some reason, which didn’t seem to fit either. What could he ever do to harm her? There was no vow between them to break and she had never asked for one. Her family was dead. All she possessed, really, was herself—and, for the moment, the museum.
“Thank you, Robert,” she said. “You’re very kind to me.”
He smiled, and flopped onto his back on the bed. “I’ll try not to fall asleep while you’re gone. No promises.”
She said all right and went to the door.
“Listen.” He coughed. “If that Sergeant Van Goor who gave us the paper ever comes around and I’m not here, come find me straightaway. Don’t stop to give him a tour or anything. Right away you come and get me. It’s nothing serious, nothing to be alarmed about, he’s a good man, just unsophisticated. He tends to get confused about things, so it’s better that I should handle him. If he shows up, you get me straightaway, do you promise?”
D promised and left, but the exchange nagged at her. There was something he wanted to tell her without actually telling her.
To get to the stairs she first had to walk past the glass river, dark and twinkling with its silver fish. A few steps beyond, D passed through the small orchard of three wooden fruit trees. The one-eyed fruit picker from whom she’d borrowed the satchel—since returned—standing under the central tree, seemed to gaze on her expectantly. “Do you know what that was about?” she asked him, but he didn’t, of course, and D moved on.
She descended to ground level. She checked the bolt on the front doors, extinguished the wall lights, and moved to the next gallery. Once she had darkened the second floor, D noticed the way the moonlight altered the faces of the two bricklayers who stood at their waist-high wall frosted in crumbles of ancient cement. The cheerful grins they wore by day warped into pained grimaces, as if they were tired of each other, of each other’s jokes and smells and noises. Who could blame them? If immortals don’t eventually long for their own deaths, they must surely long for the deaths of fellow immortals.
On the third floor, D went to the dark train car and fished underneath to retrieve the soiled handkerchief, which she stowed in the pocket of her apron to wash later. An owl whooped outside, its strangled, burbling complaint penetrating the museum’s thin windows and startling D so that she almost dropped the lamp. The next time it screamed she could ignore it, and she put out the fourth-floor lights, putting to sleep the bank tellers and the telegraph operator and the teacher in the little classroom whose bangs had been vandalized with scissors. Before moving to the stairs, she stopped at a window on the Society-side and looked upon the wreckage. The white cat sat on a pile of rubble, cleaning itself, arrogantly indifferent to the owl’s threat.
On the fifth floor she retraced her path to the fruit trees and wished the fruit picker good night, then continued toward the glass river.
“Please!” yelled the fruit picker, but there was something wrong with his voice; it sounded like he had a cold. The l rolled into a phlegmatic garble before exploding into the last part of the word. D paused. A gunshot exploded, and the begging man—a real man, not one made of wax—fell silent.
* * *
A minute or two later the heavy door at the rear of the embassy banged wide. D had gone to the nearest window overlooking the stone courtyard behind the embassy. She flinched but stayed to watch. The soldier who stepped out carried a long object wrapped tight in a covering and hoisted over his shoulder. The wrapped thing might have been a rolled rug, but D knew that it wasn’t; by the moons’ light she could see vivid stains on the material.
