The Curator, page 5
When it reopened a minute or two later, Simon the Gentle and his dance partner stepped out with their heads restored to their own bodies. The conjurer grabbed the other’s hand and threw the woman, visibly dazed but otherwise unharmed except for a tiny puncture at the tip of her forefinger, forward in a low bow.
The Gentle’s performance thrilled the public, packing theaters, and everyone wondered, what could be next? How could he top the Vestibule?
He couldn’t.
* * *
A jealous husband stabbed the Gentle half a dozen times in the stomach and groin, and left the conjurer to bleed to death on the floor of the Society. The man’s wife had volunteered to enter the Vestibule during one of the performances, and he accused the Gentle of having taken liberties with her. For the remainder of her life she insisted that it was not true, testifying of her experience inside the closet in the same hazy terms as those of other volunteers: there had been a window, and on its glass a series of shifting visages; the conjurer had helped her to put on his reflection, and he had put on hers, and suggested they dance. They had waltzed out, back in, and back out again. When the woman emerged, her memory was fragmented, but except for a nick on her fingertip she had suffered no injury.
Her husband didn’t believe her, however, and in the wake of the attack he used his knife to ward off the Society members who tried to come close and help the badly wounded man.
“His face…,” moaned Simon the Gentle as he wormed on the carpet. “His real face…”
* * *
There was a faded, maplike stain on the burgundy-colored carpet, which spread across a pair of the triangles, muting their gold to brown. “We think this is him, but we’re not entirely certain,” D’s new friend said. “We’ve remodeled several times since then.” It was a few feet from the stage by a potted plant on a stand.
Throughout the telling of the story the cheery man’s hands had remained in captivity in his armpits, though D noticed that his sleeve had crept up to reveal a cuff of flaking white skin. “Extraordinary, extraordinary history here.”
The end of the story confused her. What had happened inside the closet that made the husband so mad that he had murdered Simon the Gentle? How had the conjurer “taken liberties” with the man’s wife? Perhaps most important, from D’s point of view, was the matter of the conjurer’s pet: What had become of the wonderful spoiled white cat that lived at the fine hotel? She wanted to ask to see the man’s hands, but knew that would be impolite. She also wanted to ask if she could step inside the Vestibule—not closing the door, of course—and touch the walls like Simon the Gentle had done, but did not dare risk this question either.
“Thank you for telling me a story,” D said instead. “I’m sure I’ll understand it more when I’m grown up.”
The man chuckled and commended her for being a likable, likable girl.
Ambrose finally arrived from wherever he had been behind the Hall’s second curtain, and they were soon outside and by foot and tram retracing the journey that had brought her to the redbrick building.
At home, Nurse had managed to prop herself up. “Oh, my terrible nerves!” D’s brother produced a fresh bottle of tonic. This settled Nurse’s shaking just in time, a minute or two before Mother came home.
Ambrose came into her room that night and crouched by her bed. She’d done exactly as he expected, and he was proud of her. His bucktoothed grin hovered in the dimness.
“What did you think of the fellow in the gold vest?”
“I thought he was a funny, funny man,” D said.
“Quite, quite,” said Ambrose, and buried his face in her blankets to muffle his laughter. She had to cover her own mouth as well.
“What do you do in that place?” she whispered.
“I told you, we’re trying to save the world,” Ambrose said. “And maybe not just this world, either. Who knows, maybe we can do good in some other worlds too. Because there are as many worlds as there are hairs on your head, D. We just have to find the places where the strands cross. What do you think about that?”
D reflexively brushed her fingers through her hair. “It makes my head feel itchy,” she said, and that started Ambrose giggling again, and her too.
But her brother died before he could tell her what went on behind the curtain at the far end of the Grand Hall, where only members, like himself and the man in the gold vest, were permitted.
Someone Who Can Take Some Words Down
At the Emergency Justice meeting that night, the three chairmen of the Provisional Government sat shoulder to shoulder at a table situated below the judge’s bench in the Superior Courtroom. On the walls behind the bench were bleached squares where the portraits of the king, the queen, and the chief minister had hung. The ground-floor rows of the courtroom were filled primarily with Robert’s fellow Volunteers from the university, green armbands knotted tight on their upper arms, but there was a handful of Crossley’s auxiliary soldiers too. Most of the union men were clustered in the balcony and, the lieutenant observed, as if according to some code, wore their green cloths not as armbands but as neckerchiefs.
The first of the chairmen was Jonas Mosi, representative of the dockmen and the other workingmen’s unions; Robert’s peer from the university, Lionel Woodstock, the organizer of the student protests, was the second; and Aloys Lumm, the scattered octogenarian playwright chosen as the acting premier, was the third. Each man seemed fundamentally alien to the other two; it struck Robert as less like a political conference than an encounter between three disparate survivors of a shipwreck on a strange and inhospitable shore. One began to wonder who would be the first to pick up a rock and attempt to brain the others. Robert had hoped for a little more from the transitional leadership, but he told himself that the operation was bound to become smoother and, if nothing else, it was only transitional.
Mosi had declared Lionel’s plans to codify a new legal system from whole cloth pointless. “You set up the person in front of a jury, and you say what they’ve done, and they say what they’ve done, and the jury decides what it was and what it wasn’t.” The labor organizer was an enormous, gloomy, irritable man; he slumped hugely over the table, shoulders bunched, forearms flexed, and glowered from amid his muscles. “What’s wrong with that?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it”—Lionel spoke slowly, blinking behind spectacles, his punctiliousness betraying his experience as a member of the university debate club—“but we need to be sure we know exactly what we’re doing.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Mosi said.
“I never said you didn’t,” Lionel said.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Aloys Lumm, who spoke only in generalities, platitudes, and platitudinous generalities, “we just need to be clear. The people need to see it and the people need to hear it. The questions have to be able to answer themselves, don’t they?”
The playwright, clucking at his own wisdom, nodded his snowy-haired head.
The old man’s interjections were always followed by a silence as Mosi and Lionel tried to figure out whose side he was on.
At the university Robert had read one of Lumm’s plays, A Little Wolf Box. Well, Dora had read it and told him what happened. It was about two men who catch the devil, she said, but actually it’s the devil who’s caught them. Robert had thought it sounded exasperating and bizarre—not, come to think of it, unlike the proceedings that he was witnessing that evening.
“Even a jury trial has to have rules,” Lionel said.
“Trial by jury is a rule,” Mosi said.
“Respect desires authority,” Aloys Lumm croaked, “but does it need authority? I’m not sure that it does. I’m not sure that it does. Conviction and trust, those are the spine of the thing, like the spine of some tremendous beast.…”
It went on like this, and somewhere in the midst of an interminable back-and-forth about the wisdom of Crossley’s decision to summarily dissolve the entirety of the remaining Constabulary and lock the precinct buildings pending the recruitment and training of a new police force, despite Robert’s best attempts to stay focused on the important matters at hand, his mind tiptoed away to Dora. He adored his little maid, adored the way she said “Lieutenant” in that soft voice of hers, snapping each syllable like a piece of chocolate to share into three pieces: lieu-ten-ant. He adored, too, how she’d looked that afternoon, stretched across the model of the bank counter, her body somehow endless in its nakedness. Dora was so easy in the world. It seemed strange to think that she walked on feet. In his mind, she glided from place to place, like a fog. How was it, he wondered, that he was here, when he could be wherever she was, putting his hands on her? How had he let that happen? The revolution was essential to raise the standard of living for the lesser classes and give them dignity and a voice, but there was also Dora, flowing down the counter under the noses of the wax cashiers, and Dora was essential too.
The meeting was gaveled to a close.
The other men in his row, eager to escape the packed, stifling room, abruptly forced Robert to his feet. He shuffled in an awkward hunch. What, if any, legal principles had been agreed upon, or whether the matter of the Constabulary had been sorted out, he did not know—or, for the moment, care. His current concern was to not graze a comrade with his erection.
Someone gripped his elbow and it was like a hand reaching into his stomach; he was sure someone must have noticed his arousal.
“Hell, but they like it specific, don’t they? On and on. Listen, sir, I don’t suppose you have a free moment, do you? I hate to bother you, but I need someone who can take some words down. For a confidential matter. I’d consider it a great favor.” Robert twisted and saw Sergeant Van Goor, the Crossley aide who’d helped them that morning. He was moving along the neighboring aisle. “You’re bent a little there. You didn’t strain your back, did you?”
“Just a little stiff.” Besides being embarrassed, Robert was annoyed by how observant the man was. “You want some words taken down? Just any words? In any particular order?”
Van Goor brayed. He still had Robert’s elbow and they moved closely together along their respective aisles. There were several lunches on his breath. “No, no, nothing fancy, sir, I swear! Just need someone with a good hand. I took a note of how quick and handsome you did that paper for your miss this morning.”
Most of the soldiers from Crossley’s Auxiliary were taciturn, if not outright hostile to the university students and union men who had formed the Volunteer Civil Defense and now held positions of authority in the Provisional Government’s committee assignments. Robert didn’t blame them. Their first loyalty was to their general. They were uneducated and poorly remunerated; the most valuable item that most of them possessed was the uniform they received as an advance on their wages upon enlisting. Van Goor, though as untaught as his brethren, was a genial exception—which must have been the reason Crossley had chosen him as an aide.
When the assignments had gone around the night they seized the government buildings, it was Van Goor who had brought Robert the handsaw to use if he had to cut the telegraph wires. “You see powder flashes, that’s it, time to go. Give her a chop with this, wires’ll split clean. Kick off your boots, jump over the side, and swim in the direction that’s away from the shooting. That end of the bridge is low. Might sting when you hit, but you’ll be all right. It’d take a lucky shot to sink you in the dark,” he had said. “Stay close to shore, all right?” Robert had managed to whisper, “Right,” and Van Goor thumped his shoulder and told him he was gold.
Small, sallow, and bowlegged, the sergeant had a nose like a staircase from some beating he’d taken. He reminded Robert of the hired men who had worked around his family’s estate, with whom he felt a lasting bond. It hadn’t been his father, the master, but those hired men who had imparted to Robert how to set a trap and to smoke a pipe, and, with a stallion and a mare for examples, candidly narrated the mechanics of the sexual act.
Robert wasn’t, in fact, at all convinced that his father fully grasped this last piece of information—or wished to. Procreation was naked, and there was nothing that men like his father feared more than nakedness of any kind.
The next link in this chain of consideration being his mother and father’s activities behind their bedroom door, the lieutenant found that he was no longer erect.
Whatever Van Goor needed, Robert said, of course he’d be happy to write it, and the sergeant could rely on his discretion. He straightened as they emerged into the side aisle where the crowd was looser. Robert supposed the man must be illiterate.
“Oh, that’s glorious! Grateful to you, Lieutenant Barnes, sir.”
The aide led him to a side door at the rear of the courtroom. Van Goor’s spurs jingled in time with his hustling stride.
It occurred to Robert that the confidential matter he was being squired away to write up was probably the dictation of a love letter to Van Goor’s sweetheart. Dora would enjoy that. “Did he say anything romantic about her womb, Lieutenant?” he could hear her asking, and pictured how she’d lower her lids. “I insist on a full report. You know how I enjoy romance.”
Dora wasn’t the way you expected a maid to be. There was her confidence with him, the little game of authority that they played, and there was the way she concealed herself around everyone else. She wasn’t illiterate either, like Van Goor and most other men and women of their class. On more than one occasion, as on that time with Lumm’s inscrutable play, he’d awoken to find her propped on the pillows beside him, reading one of the books from his classes by lamplight. When he asked what she thought of a particular text, she’d say something like, “Oh, I was just wondering if there was anything filthy,” and set the book aside, but Robert suspected she was really interested in bettering herself.
And she would be able to now.
They had done it, the whole bunch of them, literate and illiterate alike: thrown the brakes on the machine and brought it to a halt before it could swallow up any more lives. They’d taken back the nation’s wealth for the people who made it. If Dora wanted to join one of the women’s committees that would eventually be formed, or take on some other role in support of the new representative government, she would be able to do that.
And if the sergeant wanted his assistance in writing a pornographic letter to his true love? It seemed the least he could do for a comrade in arms.
“Right through here we go.” They entered a dark hall of oaken panels. At the far end was a heavy-looking door, and beside it on a bench sat a man in a livery uniform—tailed coat and a scarlet scarf knotted around his top hat. His arms were tightly crossed, his chin tilted and clenched. Robert concluded in a glance that he was thankful not to be the man’s horse.
“How did you make out, by the way?” Van Goor paused as they came to the door, ignoring the sulking driver seated on the bench. “With the facility your miss volunteered to see about? Psykic something? Or was it a doctors’ club? On Heritage, I recall. Or was it on Little Heritage?”
“We secured the premises,” Robert said. He didn’t care to explain the Society for Psykical Research to Van Goor; he might find it interesting. For the sake of camaraderie, he would set pen to paper to describe Van Goor’s tumescence, but he drew the line at a discussion of whatever superstitions the aide might subscribe to. As for the modification he’d made to Dora’s declaration of authority, it wasn’t worth mentioning.
“Glorious!” Van Goor rapped the wall with a knuckle. “Lovely girl, your miss.”
“She’s not my miss.” It was all right for some of his friends to know that he was associating with a maid, but the lieutenant didn’t care to become the subject of gossip among the rank-and-file soldiers. He told himself this was as much for Dora’s sake as his own. “Just an ally of the movement.”
“Naturally, sir.” The aide said this last in a flat, offhand tone that seemed to rule out sarcasm, and anyway, he had opened the door before Robert could respond.
They entered the chief magistrate’s chambers. A freighter of a wooden desk captured one end of the room. It was bracketed on either side by bookshelves with leather-bound books in green and red. The river unspooled in a broad, silvery vein beyond the picture window at the back of the chambers.
Two men sat in chairs before the desk, as lawyers must have done in private sessions with the chief magistrate. The first, dressed in an officer’s uniform with braided gold tassels at the shoulders and several badges on his chest, was none other than General Crossley, commander of the Auxiliary Garrison. This took Robert aback, causing him to reset his sense of the situation entirely. He shot a glance at Van Goor; the sergeant grinned, evidently relishing his surprise.
The second figure was a rotund man in a bright white jacket, which made him look as if he had arrived from an afternoon paddling on the Royal Pond; he was evidently a civilian. Both men smoked cigarettes and drank brown liquor from cut crystal glasses. Crossley maintained a ramrod posture and a dour expression, but the man in the holiday suit seemed to be in an excellent mood, blowing his cigarette smoke in long streams.
“—cottage cheese is the only thing he can keep down; he lives on it,” the civilian was saying.
He turned at the sound of the opening door and said, “Ah, you found a secretary,” and indicated for Robert to go around and have the place behind the desk. Pens, ink, and paper were already laid out.
Once Robert was seated, the man in the white jacket looked expectantly at the general. The general checked a note, then tucked it away in a pocket and started to interview his companion, beginning by asking him to state his name. The other man’s wide face and the cliff’s edge of fair yellow hair above his forehead were strikingly familiar, but it wasn’t until he gave his Christian name as Ronald John Westhover that Robert realized he was the now-deposed currency minister.
