The Good Mayor (41 page)

N THE MORNING, FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE
the day he bought the entire stock of Rikard Margolis’s flower shop, Good Mayor Krovic did not go to The Golden Angel for coffee. He got off the tram two stops early as usual but, when he walked down Castle Street, he hurried past the cafe, slapping his folded copy of the
Daily Dottian
against his thigh as he went, like a jockey urging speed from his horse. Tibo was embarrassed. He knew he could not stand there at the high table by the door, sipping coffee and pretending to read the paper while Cesare smiled at him like a plotter. He hurried on to work. “I’m busy,” he told himself. “Tomorrow.”

As he crossed White Bridge, the swallows were screeching low over the Ampersand, tipping and shifting between the piers and snatching flies from the air as they passed. They would be leaving soon, gathering their children on telegraph wires and roof ridges and leading them back, through thousands of miles of empty sky, to Africa. It was wonderful, almost incredible—like the idea of Cesare’s spell. You could believe that swallows slept the winter away, buried in mud at the bottom of the Ampersand or you could believe they found their way back from Africa every summer. You could believe Agathe Stopak had spent three years wondering what it would be like to sleep with you or you could believe she had been bewitched by a love spell. It was obvious really. You simply had to choose which was the more incredible.

Tibo crossed City Square, he said “Good morning” to Peter Stavo, who had just finished mopping the vestibule, he nodded
gravely at the picture of Mayor Anker Skolvig and he stood aside for Sandor, the boy who delivers the mail, as he ran up the stairs towards the Planning Department.

It was just an ordinary day and Tibo was determined to keep it ordinary. He wouldn’t make a fuss about that business the day before but he wouldn’t ignore it either. It was said and couldn’t be unsaid. And, anyway, Cesare’s spell had ripened by another day. It would be stronger by another day. Whatever it was that had driven Agathe before would be driving her all the harder now—like a drug, like alcohol, flooding her by drips until she gave in. Tibo was prepared to wait.

He had waited and waited so he would wait a little longer as if he were waiting for some especially gorgeous peach to ripen and fall off the branch. He pretended to himself that it didn’t matter that the peach was not his own or that he lacked the courage even to steal it; it was close to falling and the pocket it fell into would be his. That was enough.

On an ordinary day—a day a little more ordinary than this one—Tibo would have spent at least twenty minutes in The Golden Angel. Twenty minutes took a long time to pass alone in his office with nothing to do. He stood at the window in the corner. From there, he could see Castle Street and the bridge and a long way down Ampersand Avenue. It didn’t matter from which direction she came, he would see her. Tibo stood still there for a long time, looking down at the opposite corner of City Square where a peculiar bunch of people had caught his eye—a circus strongman dressed in a leopard-skin rug, a girl with a white terrier which leapt and bounced through the hoops she held out as if it had been drawn on strings and two girls who stood a few yards apart, juggling Indian clubs. Tibo thought it strange that nobody paid them any attention. They seemed to be simply passing the time doing circus tricks the way that other people might stand looking at the clouds, jingling the change in their pockets. But then, when Agathe turned the corner into the square, the strongman stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled, the girls snatched their clubs out of the air the way the swallows snatch the flies and the dog
stopped in mid-jump, folded his legs under himself and fell straight down to the pavement.

Across the square and behind the windows of his office, Tibo felt the shriek of that whistle stabbing in his ears but Agathe seemed not to notice. It was as if she didn’t hear and she gave no sign when the circus people formed up in a knot behind her and came hurrying across City Square with the little dog running round in yappy circles as they went.

Tibo was alarmed. He didn’t like those people. They had the look of a gang of pickpockets or bag-snatchers or white slavers and Tibo was prepared to bet they couldn’t produce a licence for that little dog either. He hurried out of his office and down the stairs but, when he reached the square, Agathe was alone.

“Were those people bothering you?” Tibo asked.

“What people?” she said and she pushed past him and on, up the stairs.

Tibo looked round. They had gone. There was a leprous-looking pigeon with one foot, limping along beside the fountains and two old women sharing a bag of cherries on a bench in the sunshine but, apart from that, the square was empty. No strongman, no yappy little dog, nothing. Tibo went back into the Town Hall and followed Agathe up the stairs to his office. At the door, he put on his “kind and generous” face, a stupid “There, there, I understand—kiss it all better” look that only a woman as wonderful as Agathe could ever forgive without slapping him first.

She was already sitting at her desk, pale and miserable and sad-eyed and, when Tibo came in, she looked up and read that look on his face and looked away again quickly.

Tibo had planned something bright and chirpy. Sitting in his kitchen in the old house at the end of the blue-tiled path, he had plotted the moment of their meeting that day—him perched on the edge of her desk as she arrived for work, legs flung out in front of himself, looking cheeky and relaxed, murmuring a confident “Hello” but it had all gone wrong again. She couldn’t look at him for more than a moment and, when she did, it was with something like pain in her eyes.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

“Yes, thanks. Fine.” Agathe busied herself with her paperclip tray.

“Fine?”

“Yes. Fine, thanks. Feeling much better.”

“Fine.” That was what she had said on the day she ran out of The Golden Angel. “Fine.” Everything was “fine.” She wasn’t upset. He hadn’t done anything wrong. And then she had left him.

“Fine,” said Tibo. “Glad to hear it.” And, in a couple of long paces, he was inside his office and closing the door.

But he was still there, still standing with his back to the door, cursing himself for making such a hash of things when he heard her there, behind him, her shoes on the hard floor, her fingers brushing over the wood at his back.

He held his breath until she said, “Tibo?” It was just a whisper. “Tibo, can you hear me?”

He let his breath out slowly.

“Tibo?” Still just a whisper. If he had been sitting at his desk on the other side of the room he would never have heard it.

“Tibo, can I talk to you, please?”

“You are talking to me.” He passed his hand gently over the wood of the door, sure that his fingers and hers were barely separated, almost touching.

“Tibo.”

“I’m listening.”

“Tibo, please. I’m in trouble.”

“I’ll help you.”

“You said that yesterday.”

“Yesterday was different. Yesterday you hit me in the face with a doorknob.”

Agathe was quiet. With his ear pressed against the door, Tibo could hear the snakeskin whisper of her hands as they passed.

“I hurt you,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No. The other thing. I really hurt you.”

Tibo said nothing.

“I need you to help me.”

“I’ll help you. You’ve always known that.”

She was quiet again.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Hektor.”

That was all she said but, when she said that word, it came up from her heart and filled her mouth and Tibo’s hands balled into fists when he heard it.

“Tibo, he’s in trouble.”

“Yes.”

“Please. It’s all been a mistake. Tibo. Please, Tibo. He’s been to court and, Tibo …”

“Stop saying my name.”

But she said “Tibo” again anyway.

“Just tell me!” he said.

“Eighteen hundred.”

Tibo said nothing.

“Eighteen hundred or he goes to jail.” And then she said: “Tibo.”

“You were ready to whore yourself for him.”

“No, Tibo. No. I didn’t know anything about it until yesterday. Last night. Not until last night. I swear.”

“Yesterday. Just once. You and me. For eighteen hundred. You whore. Come for a walk with me and I’ll show you girls who do it for twenty.”

“Don’t say that.”

It made Tibo ashamed and, after a little, he said, “What do you want me to do?”

“I thought … maybe … I thought you could just write it off. I thought you could just tell the court. Have a word with somebody. Maybe.”

“That’s what you thought. You thought I could just break the law. You thought I could just bend the rules a bit, twist things a bit, call in a few favours because that’s what happens. That’s how it works. Everybody’s a crook. Everybody’s a thief. Everybody’s on
the take. Everybody’s the same and I’m like everybody. You thought that.”

She didn’t say anything.

Tibo said, “Go away from me.” He pushed himself away from the door and went and sat down, leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk.

There was a dusty-smelling breeze coming in at the window and it blew the thin net curtains in and out in lazy billows as he sat, thinking of nothing, watching the dome of my cathedral as it appeared and disappeared between the breathing curtains. And then, at one o’clock, when a grey mist of pigeons rose up from the cathedral and, a moment later, the sound of the bell arrived at his office, Tibo went to look out the window and down into City Square. Before long, Agathe arrived, carrying her sandwiches wrapped in newspaper and sat on the edge of a fountain.

Tibo turned quickly away, took his chequebook from the drawer of his desk and walked out of his office on to the back stair. It took a few minutes to reach the Court Clerk’s Department, up one floor to Planning and then into the corridor that ran, like a bit of gristle through a chop, linking this building and that, weaving through attics and down fire escapes until it died out against a pile of folding chairs and cans of green paint in the Municipal Buildings on the other side of the square. Tibo pushed through the last door and came out next to an office marked “G. Ångström, Clerk to the Court.” He did not knock. It seemed that knocking had become suddenly unfashionable.

Mr. Ångström was eating a boiled egg sandwich and reading the paper when the mayor pushed into his office. It was not a large office, oddly shaped and jammed in under the roof with a sloping window that looked out into a dark courtyard where competing drainpipes pushed up towards the light like creepers, and, when Tibo flung the door open, it bounced off Mr. Ångström’s desk.

“Oh,” said Tibo, “sorry.” And, when Mr. Ångström didn’t say anything, he said, “Look, I’ve got this friend—he’s in a bit of bother. Got a fine. I want to take care of it.”

Mr. Ångström swallowed a large mouthful of egg sandwich. Then he said, “Name.”

“Stopak. Hektor Stopak.”

“Canal Street?”

“That would be him.”

“I’ll take care of it, Mayor Krovic.”

“It’s eighteen hundred.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mayor Krovic.”

“What do you mean?”

Ångström winked confidentially. “It’s taken care of.”

Tibo slapped his chequebook down on the desk so it made a sound like a starting pistol and he began writing furiously. The noise made Ångström sit up nervously.

“I am making this out to the Town Council of Dot,” said Mayor Krovic. “I expect it to be cashed.” He glowered from the other side of the desk as Ångström wrote out a receipt and, when it was ready, he folded it and put it in his wallet. He said, “Look for another job, Mr. Ångström,” and he banged out of the office.

Three times that afternoon, as Tibo watched the shadows fattening around the cathedral dome, Agathe came and knocked at his door. Each time he said, “Go away from me.” The last time he heard her crying.

IBO DID NOT MOVE FROM HIS CHAIR. WITH
his feet on the desk and his hands cupped behind his head, he sat there, until his joints set like concrete, thinking about what he had done and what it had cost him. He might have bought Agathe, used her in ways only a customer could demand—but he loved her and the price of that was that he could never have her. He might even have left Hektor’s fine unpaid, gone round to wait at the end of Canal Street, good suit on, shoes polished, nicely shaved and scented, to watch the constables take him away, but that would have made Agathe sad. So he had the worst of all worlds—the money gone and nothing to show for it but Hektor Stopak free to love her again tonight and the next night and the night after that while she believed that he had “fixed it,” that he was the same as everybody else, the same as Ångström. “Not everybody is the same. I am not like everybody else.” It was his only comfort.