The Good Mayor (26 page)

He took off his dripping coat, shook it, hung it on the stand in
the corner of the room and sat down at his desk. It was the first time Tibo had looked inside that drawer for some time. It slid open easily. There at the back, at fingertip reach, he found a paper bag printed with “Municipal Galleries, Dot” and, inside, just as he had left them, two picture postcards. He took the one printed with the Venus of Velázquez, the rich, creamy, pink and scarlet woman lying on her couch, gazing in the mirror with a look of longing and welcome, the one he had bought because—he could admit it now—it reminded him of Agathe. The other, whatever it was, he stuck back in the drawer without even looking at it.

Tibo glanced up at the town arms that hung opposite his desk and huffed a long sigh which he hoped I might recognise as a cry for help. He flicked his wet hair back over his head to ensure that it did not drip on the postcard, rubbed his hand on his trouser leg to dry it off and picked up his pen. He wrote, “Mrs. Agathe Stopak, Office of the Mayor, Town Hall, City Square, Dot” in rows on the side marked “This side for address” and sighed again. Such a tiny square of white cardboard—half the size of an envelope—that was all there was left to write on, all the space there was to tell her. Tell her what? Another sigh. Another glance up at me in my place on the shield and he began to write again. “You are more beautiful than this. More precious. More to be desired. More to be worshipped than any goddess. Yes, I AM your friend.” The card was full. He jammed “K” into the bottom corner and went to look for a stamp in the light that spilled from his room on to Agathe’s desk and, when he found one, he dropped a coin into petty cash.

It would take too long to explain how Tibo put his coat on again and crashed about in the dark back down the stairs to City Square. Just hurry through that part and imagine him there, standing at the double-fronted postbox on the corner of White Bridge, with its enamel signs marked “City” on one side and “Country or Foreign” on the other. Tibo pushed the card into the “City” slot and held it there until the very last moment. There was still time to pull it out and think about this again. It was just a postcard. But even so. It was evidence. It was something in writing. Dammit, what did that matter? Evidence of what? But was it even
the right words? Was it enough? The card slipped from his fingers and nestled deep in the locked iron box and Tibo turned away for the tram, breathless, his heart racing. “You’ve done it now,” he said, all the way up Castle Street. “You’ve done it now.”

The enamel sign on the posting box promised, “A final collection will be made from this box at midnight” and the postal authorities were true to their word. The postman came at midnight. Not at five minutes to midnight, when he was at the top of Castle Street, not at ten past midnight when he was outside the Opera House. Midnight. The midnight postman was not an art lover. He did not notice Tibo’s card and, anyway, although he had the ordinary human curiosity about other people’s business, postmen do not have the time to snoop at every card or speculate about every scented envelope or every bill printed in red. They have sacks to fill, they have mail to dump down the big brass hoppers outside the main Post Office with its statues over the door, really quite beautiful statues that reminded some people of angels—one holding out a bronze letter and the other holding a lightning flash. “That’s for telegrams,” the postmaster explained to every new recruit.

Tibo was long ago in his bed, washed warm again in a hot bath, suit hanging from the kitchen ceiling and drying in the warm air rising from the stove, when his card arrived under their care. It slid down the wooden chute that led from the brass hopper and spilled on to a broad table in the middle of the hall where Antonin Gamillio, who was not really a postman at all but a writer who worked nights at the Central Post Office to keep himself in paper and ink until his novel of working life in the main post office of a medium-sized provincial town was finally accepted by a publisher, glanced at the address and flicked it deftly towards a sack marked “Central” which hung open against the wall. Antonin was rightly confident of his flicking skills. So confident, in fact, that he had already begun to read the address on the next letter he picked up before Tibo’s card had even landed in the sack. It was a matter of pride to the mail sorters in the Central Post Office that they did not have to watch the mail as it glided towards its sack, which is a pity because, seven years before, a letter addressed to Mr.
A. Gamillio from one of the biggest publishing houses in the capital had missed the sack marked “Parkside,” hit the wall behind and slid to the floor to stand upright against a table leg, where it remained to that very night, clouded in grey dust.

Fortunately, although such tricks of fate are popular in novels as a means of provoking misunderstandings and unhappiness between lovers, nothing of the kind happened to Tibo’s card. After a while, the bag marked “Central” was taken from its place on the wall and carried to a bank of wooden pigeon holes, each row labelled with a street name, each individual box labelled with a number, except for the very end of the very bottom row where four boxes had been knocked into one and marked “Town Hall.” Shortly before 3 a.m., Tibo’s card landed in that box, tied with a red rubber band between a letter complaining about a broken pavement on the corner of Commerz Plaz and another in a brown envelope with a cheque inside for the Licensing Department. Imagine it—a naked goddess sandwiched between stuff like that! But that was how she travelled—not wafted on wave tops or carried by cupids but bound in rubber bands and dropped in a sack and swung through the door of the Town Hall post room by half past eight in the morning. And, when Agathe arrived for work forty minutes later—she was late mostly because she could think of no good reason to hurry to work—the card was waiting on her desk.

Look at her now. Look at her, slicing her way through the morning’s post and then she finds the card. “That’s odd,” she thinks, “that’s odd, that’s strange, that’s unusual.” She picks it up. She turns it over. She reads, “more beautiful than this, more precious, more to be desired, more to be worshipped” and she reads “K.” Who is “K”? But it says, “I am your friend.” No. No. It says, “AM your friend.” It says, “I AM your friend.” See that? It’s the answer to a question and “K” is for Krovic. “K” is Tibo.

Do you know the word for this? It’s “glee.”

Look at her. Look at that smile. A bit of cardboard and a few words, that’s all it took. So little. And look at her now, turning the card over, looking at the naked goddess lying there and thinking,
“More beautiful than this? Am I more beautiful than this? More desirable?”

Of course! Of course, because the woman in the painting is just blobs of colour on a bit of card but Agathe Stopak is warm pink flesh—the real thing. The woman in the painting was shovelled into a whore’s grave in Madrid centuries ago but Agathe Stopak is here now, blood in her veins and breath in her lungs. Look at her. Look at her now, hurrying into Tibo’s empty office, to stand in front of the town shield and hold up the card as if to say, “Look what I did at school today!” And she’s bobbing that pretty curtsey of hers and saying, “Thank you!” with a smile because she’s a good girl and polite.

And now she’s hunting in her drawer for a tack and she’s pinning the card to the wall above her desk and she’s sitting there, just looking at it and that’s exactly what she was still doing when Mayor Krovic came into the office looking like a man who thinks he’s in a lot of trouble.

But Agathe smiled at him with a twinkle and, with the tip of a shaped and polished fingernail she tapped the bottom corner of the postcard, not so much to straighten it as to draw attention to it.

“Good morning,” Tibo said. There was a quaver in his voice. “Lunch? I mean later. Would you like to go for lunch? Later? With me?”

“That would be lovely, Mr. Mayor.”

“Good,” said Tibo. “Good. Look, I have to go out now so would it be all right if I saw you there—at The Golden Angel—about one?”

“That would be lovely, Mr. Mayor,” she said.

“Right. And I’m sorry about the other thing. About before. The friend thing. Sorry.”

“I know,” she said. “All forgotten.” And she gave the postcard another little adjustment with the tip of her finger.

Agathe was already sitting in the window seat of The Golden Angel by the time Tibo came hurrying up Castle Street just after one. He saw her smiling at him through the glass and he pushed through the lunchtime customers to join her.

Agathe lifted her handbag from the seat it had been protecting on the opposite side of the table. “I ordered for you,” she said. “I’m getting daring in my old age.”

“Good,” said Tibo. “What are we having?”

“Same as usual—whatever Mamma Cesare decides is good today.”

They laughed and Tibo said, “I brought you a present.” He put the brown paper parcel down on the table and slid it towards her. “It’s a book.”

Agathe gave him a look that said, “I guessed that,” and picked up the parcel.

There was a way about Agathe Stopak, a way she had of doing things that made people look at her. She didn’t mean to do it—in fact she had no idea she was doing it and, if she had, it would never have captured people the way it did. But, sometimes, she would move or look or just be and she would move or look or be more perfectly, more beautifully than anybody else had ever thought of doing any of those things before. She did it then, lifting the parcel to her mouth as if to kiss the knots that held it closed, gripping the string in her teeth and tugging it open. She brushed her fingertips over the worn gold letters on the front of the book. “Homer.” It was half a question.

“You said you wanted one for your house in Dalmatia. When you win the lottery.”

“I’m not much of a reader, Tibo.”

“That doesn’t matter—you’re not the one doing the reading, remember. You’ll be lying in a cool bath, drinking red wine while I feed you olives.”

She smiled and raised the book to her nose and drank in its scent. “It smells like the beach—the beach on a sunny day. Thank you. It’s lovely. I will keep it safe until you want to read it to me.”

“Now’s a good time,” said Tibo.

“Not quite now—not with our pasta on its way. But I’ve got something to show you.”

“My turn for presents,” Tibo said hopefully.

“Sorry. I haven’t got you anything, but you can share this if you like.” Agathe opened her bag and brought out a notebook. It bulged, the pages splayed fatly as if there were a thick bookmark between each one. “Look,” she said, “this is my house on the coast of Dalmatia. I carry it round with me all the time. This is where you can read me Homer.”

Agathe flicked through the pages and showed him the pictures she had torn out of magazines and saved there. “Look, I want big flowerpots like this standing by the front door with lavender and rosemary growing in them and thyme down among the cobbles.”

Tibo thought of the coal dust between the cobbles on the road through the docks and the whores and the men in the shadows.

She said, “I used to keep paper scraps like these when I was a girl and swap them with my friends in the playground. You could buy them from the newsagent. I used to like the ones with pictures of fat angels, leaning their elbows on clouds and looking grumpy—like Mr. Guillaume.”

Tibo opened the book and pointed. “Tell me about this,” he said but, just then, the waiter arrived and put down two huge bowls of pasta.

“Penne picante,” he announced and he waved his magician’s passes with the pepper shaker and the Parmesan shaver and hurried off.

“That’s how I want the fireplace,” said Agathe, “big enough to sit in, out of the draughts in the wintertime. When I move to Dalmatia, I’m never going to be cold again.”

“I won’t allow it,” said Tibo.

Agathe almost purred at that. She wriggled a little in her seat and said, “I’ll bet” with a wicked smile and then Tibo felt stupid and awkward because she had out-brazened him. He had tried to be louche and dangerous and man-of-the-worldly and she had seen through him in a couple of words.

Tibo looked into his plate. “Eat up,” he said and then, after a bit, “It’s very good, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s always good here but I could do just as well.”

“You like to cook?”

“And I’m very good at it. Not that anybody notices these days.” She stabbed at her pasta.

“Tell me what you like to make.”

Agathe was enthused and smiling again. “Granny taught me,” she said. “I make man food.”

Tibo groaned inwardly. “Yes, you do,” he thought. “You’d make perfect man food. You are man food.” But he had learned enough to say nothing and he just nodded an encouragement.

“Men like something meaty, something they can get their teeth into.”

Tibo almost whimpered.

“Are you laughing at me?” she asked. “Food’s a serious business. It’s how you show somebody that you love them. Well,” she looked into her plate again, “one of the ways. Finding just the right ingredients, choosing a nice bit of meat and cooking it right and serving it up nicely on a nice table. That’s a nice thing to do for somebody. It shows you care. It’s kind.”

Tibo knew that you can be cruel to someone without doing anything at all, without hitting them or shouting at them but simply by denying them the chance to be kind. He put his hand on Agathe’s. “What would you cook me?”

She thought for a moment and said, “I would cook you fish soup—no, beef soup. Beef, and I’d cook you my rabbit in cream and mustard sauce and I’d make you a big creamy rice pudding with plenty of nutmeg and loads of fat raisins.”

“I’ll get fat as a raisin myself.”

“Not if I had my way,” Agathe thought. “I’d keep you fit. I’d work it off you, Tibo Krovic, you lovely, lovely man.” But what she said was, “Well, you could do with building up and, anyway, you’ve got a long way to go before you catch up with Mr. Guillaume.”