The Good Mayor (39 page)

“Coffee?” said Cesare.

“That would be lovely.”

“Just as you like it, Mayor Krovic, Viennese style.”

“Lovely. Yes.”

Cesare unstoppered the jug, poured out two cups and raised his in a toast. “Enjoy,” he said and then, “Oh, I forgot. Pastry, Mayor Krovic?” He offered the basket. “Some kind of waiter I am.”

Tibo tutted generously and picked out a pain au chocolat. “Here, you are a guest, Mr. Cesare. As you are a citizen of Dot, it is my pleasure to wait on you.”

Silence again. Munching. Sipping of hot coffee. Mayor Krovic found himself studying Cesare’s moustache, the tiny crumb of icing that had attached itself to it, its sleek blackness, the thread-thin line of grey where it had outpaced the dye brush.

They smiled and nodded at one another and munched and sipped and said nothing. The point of Cesare’s visit, if there was one, seemed elusive and distant but Tibo was ready to wait. “Business good?” he asked.

“Can’t complain. Always plenty to do. But we don’t see enough of you these days, Mayor Krovic.”

“No, I …” Tibo hesitated. “No, I must look in more often. Yes.” He bit a lump out of his pastry. It gave him an excuse for not
saying more but it took an age to chew and he swallowed it like half a brick.

“And you, Mayor Krovic,” Cesare gestured with a stub of cake, “business good with you?”

“Oh, just the same,” said Tibo. “Like yourself—always enough to do.”

Another pause.

“Anyway,” said Tibo. “How can I help?”

Cesare passed his tongue over his front teeth lest any stray pastry should be lurking there. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, indeed. More coffee, Mayor Krovic?” He held out the jug. “Still hot.”

Cesare shared out the last of the coffee but he left his own cup steaming on the desk and went to look out the window, hands in pockets, rocking on his heels. “Have you seen the new picture at the Palazz?” he said after a time.

“No. Any good?”

“I liked it so much I think I’ll go again. Spy story. Elmo Rital, he’s the hero.”

“He’s always very good.”

“Yes. Always good.”

Tibo put his cup down in its saucer. “Mr. Cesare, if there is something I can do for you then you must, please, feel free to speak.”

“It’s difficult,” said Cesare. “Delicate.”

“You can talk to me in complete confidence. Nothing will leave this room.” And then, shamefully fearful that Cesare might be about to offer him a bribe, he added, “Nothing legal at any rate.”

Cesare sat down again, knees wide apart, head in his hands. “It’s nothing like that. Not business. A family matter. I need advice, Mr. Mayor.”

“Then we’ll talk like friends. Tell me. Start at the start.”

Cesare puffed a deep sigh and slumped in his seat. “Mamma—you know she is three years dead.”

Tibo shook his head. “Really? So long. It’s like yesterday.”

“Like yesterday,” Cesare agreed. “We miss her every day.”

“Everybody does. Dot will never be the same. But you have your wife now. She must be a great help.”

“Yes,” said Cesare and he said nothing more.

Tibo decided that this was one of those occasions when the silence should be allowed to develop and he reached for a Danish pastry.

When half the pastry was gone and while Mayor Krovic was flicking crumbs from his lapels, Cesare said, “I never, you know, felt happy about marrying while Mamma was alive.”

Tibo nodded slowly.

“But when she was gone and I went back to the old country …”

“Oh, come on—you’ve lived here longer than I have.”

“I know, I know but, still, I think of it that way. And there was Maria. So young and so beautiful and I brought her home.”

Tibo leaned forward on his elbows. “Problems?”

“Me and Maria? No, never. But not long after she came, her brother Luigi arrived and, not long after him, comes Beppo.” Cesare began to tell his story, starting with the brothers’ feud and the quarrel over the pizza, everything, until he got to, “It’s Luigi. He’s been sharing a flat with one of the waiters. This morning, Luigi—my own brother-in-law—he came to work … My own brother-in-law … Maria—she loves him so much.” Cesare passed a limp hand over his face.

“Go on,” said Tibo. “He came to work and?”

With a great sigh, Cesare said, “And he was dressed as a girl. He says we are to call him Louisa.” In the chair on the other side of the desk, Cesare sat with his head in his hands, close to tears. “Mayor Krovic,” he said, “I don’t know what to do.”

“I’m the mayor,” Tibo said helplessly. “I’m just the mayor. I’m not a doctor or a priest. What do you want me to do—have him arrested?”

“Could you have him arrested?” asked Cesare hopefully.

“Do you want him arrested? Is that what Maria wants? You came to me for that?”

Cesare was silent. He looked hard at the carpet between his shoes. He said, “Mayor Krovic, I came to you because you are a
good man and you made something of your life. You know about life. Tell me what to do.”

Tibo felt ashamed and embarrassed. A good man—how often had he heard that? Good Mayor Krovic. Could there be a more terrible burden to bear for any man? He was Good Mayor Krovic when he worked for three days without sleep after the Ampersand broke its banks. He was a good mayor. But a good man? A good man would have stopped working and gone to his old Aunt Clara to save her things from the flood.

The mayor found time for everybody but not for that old lady and when she died of it, died of the pain of losing all her things, Tibo knew he had killed her. Killer Krovic—
that
was what they should have called him. And yet here was Cesare asking for advice because he had made something of his life, because he knew about life. Tibo had had long enough to consider. He knew he had made his own life empty and pointless. He had done it alone and made himself alone and his reward for that was that people called him “good” and asked him what to do. Tibo was affronted. He knew himself to be a fraud and he covered his face with his hands and almost wept. They sat there together, Tibo and Cesare, two disappointed men, both of them ashamed, both of them sad, both of them saying nothing until, finally, Tibo said, “Mr. Cesare, you have paid me a great honour by putting your confidence in me this way.”

Cesare wiped his eyes and blew a great, rasping honk into a vast red handkerchief.

Mayor Krovic waited for the echoes to subside and said, “I can’t advise you as the mayor. Let me advise you as a friend and I’ll tell you this. This is what I know about life. I have learned there is not so much love in the world that we can afford to waste it. Not so much as a drop of it. If we find it at all, no matter where we find it, we should store it up and enjoy it as much as we can, for as long as we can, down to the very last kiss and, if I were you …”

There was a knock at the door and Agathe stuck her head into the office. “Just to remind you about the Planning Committee at eleven,” she said.

Cesare snuffled loudly. “You’re a busy man. I should go.”

“No. Stay,” said Tibo. “Mrs. Stopak, please send my apologies to the committee. Councillor Brelo can take the chair.”

“It’ll make his day,” she said and vanished behind the door again.

“If I were you,” Tibo went on, “I would throw a party to welcome my new sister-in-law.”

“It will be a scandal. He’ll be a laughing stock. Think of it—the shame, the suffering.”

“Are you thinking of his suffering or yours? If he can bear it, I think you can bear it. Life is short.”

Cesare used his handkerchief noisily again and dabbed at his eyes. He said, “I knew I was right to come to you, Mayor Krovic. You are a man who knows about life but I never knew it had cost you so much to study.”

Tibo suddenly found his blotter deeply engrossing again.

“No, no. Listen to me,” Cesare said. “A moment ago we spoke as friends. Let me speak now, as your friend. I am an ordinary man and I’m getting old. But I am strega from a long line of strega. Why should a beautiful girl like Maria marry a man like me? Because I made a love charm, that’s why. I can do the same for you. Just a few hairs from a comb, that’s all it needs. So easy.”

Still looking down at his blotter, Tibo snorted. It was a ludicrous notion. Maria loved Cesare for the man he was or, maybe, for the life he could give her—not for some stupid spell and, anyway, he didn’t want a love potion. Tibo wanted a curse—some vicious, vitriolic, vengeful curse, something to make her suffer as he had suffered, something that would hurt and gnaw and never, ever go away.

“I can do that too,” said Cesare.

“Do what?”

“What you said.”

“Mr. Cesare, I didn’t say anything.”

“No, Mayor Krovic, as you said—nothing. Anyway, I should be going. You are a busy man and I have a business to run and a party to organise, thanks to you.”

They walked together down the green marble staircase and shook hands in City Square, saying their goodbyes politely with no mention of spells.

But, when Tibo came back to his office and passed Agathe’s empty desk, his eye was drawn to her handbag sitting on the floor by her chair and there, sticking out of it, was her hairbrush. Good Tibo Krovic, who denied God and the power of the saints—even St. Walpurnia—bent and tugged a few dark strands free. It was a desecration. He knew it. Tibo Krovic was not the man to rifle a woman’s handbag—least of all the handbag of Mrs. Agathe Stopak. And he had done it with the promise of Cesare’s spell still fresh in his mind. It was inexcusable. He hated himself for the poor shrivelled creature he had become. He hated her for making him that way.

Tibo wound her hair around his finger and kissed it, pretending to himself that he could find her smell amongst it. It was the first time in three years he had ever touched her and even then it was distant and disembodied, the ghost of a touch.

He heard the unmistakable scrape of her heels on the terrazzo of the back stair. By the time Mrs. Stopak returned to her desk, the door to the mayor’s office had clicked into place.

Agathe sat down. She turned to look at the door of Tibo’s room. She saw the two coffee cups left, one stacked on top of the other, beside the coffee machine. She resented the unspoken, take-it-for-granted command they contained. “Just wash these up, would you, Mrs. Stopak?” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and tutted. She leaned her elbows on the desk and slouched forward. She noticed again, for the thousand thousandth time, the drawing pin, rusted into the wood there and remembered the picture it had once held.

“Ploink.” With the very tip of a polished fingernail hooked under its cymbal-lid, she coaxed a tiny note from the pin. She sighed a bored sigh and swivelled in her chair. Her foot collided with her handbag, open on the floor beneath her desk. She looked down, saw the hairbrush poking out and pressed it a little further in. She closed the bag. Something was not right.

Like a bird that will abandon her nest if she returns and finds it disturbed, Agathe knew that something was out of place. She looked in the drawers of her desk. She lifted her handbag from the floor, opened it again, checked her purse. Nothing.

“Ploink.” It had become a habit with her, flicking away at that drawing pin. It made her remember. Sometimes she could go for days without remembering even when, night and morning, she had sat at her desk, looking at the drawing pin and never seeing it. And then, for no reason she could imagine, all the old thoughts would come back and she would realise that she had forgotten to remember.

“Ploink.” She remembered lying on her bed—Hektor’s bed—as he painted her, the first of many nudes he had started and never finished. She remembered lying there and looking at the marks on the ceiling and wondering about Tibo and that question. She had never asked that question. She had never said, “Tibo, if, just once, you and I, we made love, knowing it was just that once, would that make things better for you? Would that be enough? Would that heal you?”

“Ploink.” She stood up quickly and walked to the door of Tibo’s room and, for the first time in three years, she walked in without knocking, just flung the door open and walked in and there he was, sitting at his desk, stuffing something into a brown envelope, and he looked up and smiled because she hadn’t knocked and he had had no time to put on a scowl and his natural reaction was to smile at the very thought of her so he smiled, just as he used to do in the old days whenever she came into his room.

And she said, “Mayor Krovic …” and stopped. She stopped because it was impossible to go on. No sentence that began with “Mayor Krovic” could ever end with an invitation to come to bed. Agathe shut her pretty mouth so hard that her teeth rattled and she turned and went out. A moment or two later, Tibo got up from his desk and shut the door again.

HE NEXT MORNING, WHEN GOOD MAYOR
Krovic got off the tram two stops early and walked down Castle Street to The Golden Angel, he had with him that same brown envelope which Agathe had seen when she burst into his office. As he walked, his hand went repeatedly to the inside pocket of his jacket and, with a flick of the finger, he assured himself that, yes, the envelope was still there, held safely behind his big black wallet.