The Good Mayor (45 page)

And then, on a second deck:

It was Hektor, the “promising young artist and leading figure of the Ampersand school.” Tibo folded the paper so the sports section was outermost and went down to the kitchen where Agathe was waiting with a pot of coffee and toast standing on the stove to keep warm. Tibo looked at the pile of blankets curled into a nest on the floor.

“You slept there?” he said.

“Yes. It was surprisingly comfortable. Here, have some toast.”

It sounded like gravel in his head and he swallowed cup after cup of coffee to force it down.

“When Hektor left,” he said casually, “did he mention where he was going?”

“No.”

Tibo struggled to peel back the layers of meaning in that word. “Did he say when he might be back?”

“No. More toast?”

“No, thanks. So he just left? No reason? Just went?”

“Some friends came for him.”

Tibo was suddenly hopeful. Friends. For a man like Hektor Stopak “friends” could mean only one thing—criminal associates. Some underworld deal gone sour, a smack on the head and over the railings into the canal.

“So, were these men he knew from The Three Crowns, perhaps?”

“I don’t think so, Tibo. Coffee?”

“Yes, a little. Would you know them again?”

“Oh, absolutely. There were four of them—a strongman with a big handlebar moustache, two juggling girls and a girl with a performing dog.”

Tibo was delighted. The gang of vagabonds he saw in City Square. “And those people are friends of Hektor?”

“No, Tibo, friends of mine. Sort of. From Mamma Cesare’s haunted theatre, upstairs in The Golden Angel.” And she told him the whole story.

At the end of it, Tibo couldn’t think of anything to say except, “I see. I don’t think you should bother coming to work today.” And he left the house and walked up the hill towards the tram stop, swinging the bell as he passed. “Ambergris,” he said.

As usual, people spoke to him while they waited for the tram. They spoke to him on the way into town. Tibo ignored them. At the Town Hall, he ducked into the side door and found Peter Stavo waiting to meet him.

“There are two policemen in your office,” he said.

“I see,” said Tibo again. He walked slowly up the stairs.

OOD MAYOR KROVIC ALMOST BURST OUT
laughing when he saw his visitors. They stood up to greet him like caricatures of detectives, great lumpy men, not long off the farm. One of them had trousers that flapped well above his ankles. The other wore his far too long so they flopped down over his boots.

Long trousers said, “I’m Welter—this is Detective Sergeant Levant.”

Tibo shook hands. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

Welter nodded at the newspaper under Tibo’s arm. “It’s about the dead bloke—Stopak.”

“Ah, yes. I’ve been reading about it. But I’m afraid I don’t know any more than I read in the paper.”

“And what about your secretary?” said Levant.

“What about her?”

“Mayor Krovic, you must know that Stopak and her, they were shacked up—had been for years.”

Tibo felt himself make a face of disgust. “You must ask her about that,” he said.

“That’s why we’re here,” Levant said, in a sneery sing-song.

“Do you know where we can find her?” Welter asked.

“I’m afraid she hasn’t been at work for a time,” said Tibo, which was true but not an answer to the question.

“That’s a worry,” said Welter. “All her stuff’s gone from the flat—not that that says much. Everything’s gone. Canal Street,
you know what they’re like, Mayor Krovic. Picked the whole place clean right down to the plaster, so they did.”

“Nothing left for you, then,” said Tibo. “I mean by way of clues, of course.”

“I know what you meant, sir,” said Welter. He took a card from his top pocket and held it out. “If she shows up, sir, we need to talk to her.”

When they left, with another handshake, Tibo fell into his chair. Any last shred of hope that this might be a bad dream had disappeared when he saw the policemen in his office.

There is nothing more ordinary than a policeman, nothing more calculated to blow away any lingering wisps of self-delusion. A policeman in the office is a bucket of cold water for the soul.

And now he had lied to them—or, at the very least, withheld information—all so he could protect the woman he loved, who might very well be a murderer but who was, anyway, almost certainly mad and who was intent on dragging him into her fantasies with lunatic talk of haunted theatres and a ghostly strongman! Except that he had seen the strongman. And the juggling girls. And the girl with the performing dog. He had even seen the dog—and yet he had said nothing to the police. The one real clue, the one thing that might have taken suspicion off Agathe and he had said nothing. And now he couldn’t. There was no going back now, no way he could walk into Welter’s office and say, “Oh, I forgot to mention the circus strongman and, of course, I only know about him because Agathe told me but she seems to think he might be a bit of a ghost, and I may also have forgotten to mention that she’s staying at my house because I’ve loved her for years but I wouldn’t bother talking to her because she’s turning into a dog.”

The more that he thought about it, the worse it looked—ruin, ridicule, disgrace, all the things he had feared, all the things which had made him hold back before, all the things which had cost him Agathe were looming now and, behind them all, he heard the squeak and clang of the prison door.

Tibo suffered the hunted, panicked feeling that only comes in
nightmares, when “they” are just behind the door, when flight is compulsory and escape impossible, when capture would be almost a blessing if only as a release from the fear. He left his desk and stood at the window, watching the street, nervously combing his hair with his fingers. He paced the room. He left to make coffee. He changed his mind and came back. He noticed, for the first time, the new wastepaper basket Peter Stavo had found for him and thought it touching.

He blew his nose and tugged at his lapels and then, before he even knew he was going to do it, he fell on his knees in front of the town arms on the wall, covered his face with his hands and said, “Walpurnia, help me!” He said, “Help me. I have tried. I have really tried. I’ve tried to do the right thing for Dot and much good it has done me. And, if you won’t help me, at least help her. Walpurnia, show me what to do.”

That was all he said. It was all he could find to say. If a man is beaten and broken there are few words but, as little as he had left to say, he remembered Agathe and, as little as he said, it was enough.

It’s hard to say what happened. A “tearing”—that might be the best way to describe it. Something that was torn or shifted or moved aside and, from the other side of it, I stepped through. It was a magnificent manifestation. When I stepped down off that shield, I was absolutely radiant. My robes shone, my skin glowed, my eyes sparkled, my long blonde hair whipped about in an orchid-scented breeze straight from the gates of Heaven. I was gorgeous. Of course, Tibo Krovic saw me as a warty old nun with a long black beard but, when he took his hands away from his face and found his whole office twinkling with starlight, the effect was much the same. Poor Tibo. A tiny bit of heavenly endorsement, the thought that somebody had noticed all his hard work—that was all it took to make him happy.

It was all so lovely that, when I spoke, it didn’t matter that the words came out from under a big, bristly moustache. I said, “Good Tibo Krovic, this is what you must do—love. Love. Love. And, more than that, be loved and ready to accept the gifts of love in return.”

Then, because it’s more or less obligatory to end with something gnomic on these occasions, I told him, “You are better loved than you know, Tibo Krovic, and there is a friend who will help you when the dogs are running. Seek him out.” I said that bit a few times more as the last of the stardust settled into the carpet and the gossamer curtain came back down and I stepped into the town shield again. “Seek him out. Seek him out,” I said. I may have overplayed that part a little.

But, when the room was quiet again and Tibo found his breathing calm and even, when he hauled himself to his feet and ran his hands across the shield to make sure that it was really nothing more than wood and paint, he felt happy and he knew what to do.

“I am the Mayor of Dot!” he said and he strode off to Agathe’s desk and took out a sheet of notepaper with the town arms on it. He wrote something briefly, in quick strokes of his fountain pen, and all but ran out of the Town Hall. In Ampersand Avenue, he hailed another cab and seven minutes later—because of the lorry-load of newsprint blocking the road outside the
Dottian
offices—Tibo arrived at the District Court. He nodded his way through the familiar staff and, outside No. 1 Court, he folded his bit of notepaper in half and handed it to a man in blue uniform standing by the door.

“Give this to the lawyer Guillaume, please,” he said.

“Certainly, Mayor Krovic. Nice to see you back.”

“Thank you. I’ll wait for the reply.”

The doors of the court swung shut against Tibo’s nose and he stood, hands in pockets, whistling “The Boy I Love” until, a few moments later, they opened again.

“There we go, sir,” said the court attendant and he held out the same folded sheet of paper.

Tibo opened it. There, under his own scrawled note, was another, just as brief, in a still larger and more flamboyant hand. It said, “My dear Krovic, I hope I may be of some assistance. Feel free to call at my home, 43 Loyola Street, any time after 9 this evening.” And then, “I trust you are not allergic to pangolins. YG.”

HE SUMMER DUSK WAS FALLING ON LOYOLA
Street and fat little bats were tumbling between the popping street lamps when Tibo arrived for his appointment. He came under the arch at the back of Copernicus Park and into a world of shadowed laurel hedges and iron gates set between mossy pillars. Stained-glass windows with images of overflowing fruit baskets or ample girls in inadequate clothing made of whiplash traceries of foliage glowed out above every door except for No. 43. There the glass was quite plain but for the letters XLIII marked out in black. At the end of the path, the front door was standing open and a sheet of notepaper was trapped under the huge iron knocker with the invitation “Come in, Krovic.”

Tibo gave a single, thunderous rap with the knocker, caught the sheet of paper as it fell and walked into the echoing building, announcing himself with hellos as he went.

The house was illimitable in the darkness—a vast, unplumbable thing of shadows and echoes and hinted vistas of closed doors. Tibo stood at the foot of a gigantic staircase, something stolen from the wreck of a foundered ocean liner, and called up into the dark, “Hello? Yemko? Yemko Guillaume? It’s me—Tibo Krovic,” until a door opened behind him and an oblong of butter-yellow light fell across the floor.

“You needn’t look for me up there,” said Yemko. “The top of my own stairs has been terra incognita to me these many years. There are seventeen rooms, I think. Sometimes I see them in
dreams.” He held out a hand. “I apologise for the lack of a welcome, Krovic. I heard your knock and raced to answer it with all the fleetness of foot at my disposal. Come in.”

But, before they began the long, slow walk back into the room, Yemko raised a questioning eyebrow. “Did I ask? Are you allergic to pangolins?”

“Yes, you did,” said Tibo, “and, as far as I know, having never met a pangolin, I am not.”

“Never met a pangolin? My word, what a strangely sheltered life you have led. We must remedy that.”

Up on the shelf at the back of the darkened room there was a posed taxidermy of a stuffed and mounted mongoose locked in battle with a pallid cobra. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Tibo saw another dancing round a dry branch and another where the cobra lunged at its feet. Half a dozen in all—a dusty gavotte of death and venom, a frozen forest of twisting, writhing, fang-bared poisonous combat.