The Good Mayor (46 page)

“Unusual,” said Tibo.

“Most,” said Yemko. “In settlement of a debt, you know.”

Yemko made a sucking, tweeting noise with his mouth and, just as he promised, a pangolin shuffled out from the gloom at the back of the shelf, rocking his head, brushing past the frozen cobras with a rattle of his bony body.

“Allow me to introduce Leonidas.” And, with a slight bow to each, he said, “Mr. Mayor, Leonidas the pangolin; Leonidas, Mayor Tibo Krovic.”

Leonidas looked up expectantly and Yemko scratched the tips of his pink piggy ears. “Yeeeees, you like that, don’t you?” he cooed affectionately. “The scales of the pangolin are smoked as a cure for syphilis, you know,” he told the mayor.

“In a pipe?”

“No, like fish. I don’t know what you do with them after that. Chew them? Make tea with them? Rub them on the affected part? Who knows?”

Yemko turned away to coo at his companion, tweaking the
plump little ears lovingly. “But we won’t let the baaaad men do that to little Leonidas, will we now? No, we won’t. Bad men with their nasty stinky bits. No.”

In a corner of the room, there stood a desk—the desk that Yemko had risen from in order to answer the door. Most of the room was deep in shadow but Yemko’s desk was lit by two poseable lamps and there was a huge magnifying glass on a stand fixed over a tiny vice—the sort of thing that fishermen hunch over in winter as they prepare artificial flies for the coming season. A glass inkwell shone with violet ink and the rest of the desk was lost under a snowdrift of rice grains.

Yemko waved at it vaguely. “A hobby, you know. Would you like to see?” He motioned Tibo towards the chair with a gesture of invitation and moved the magnifying glass into position. “I’m a mere beginner,” he said modestly. But there, quite distinctly, were the opening words of some strange poem written on a grain of rice—“‘What a place for a snark,’ the Bellman cried”—with all the punctuation properly in place.

Amazing. Tibo took his eye from the glass. Without it, he could barely see the ink marks on the rice.

“I once got as far as ‘Forgive us our’ when I was doing the Lord’s Prayer but I ran out of rice. I’ll try again. That’s pretty much the standard text for those who share my silly obsession. I can’t see why. Or why it must be a complete piece. Why not entire books of broken sentences in a pocket of grains? Reconstituted poetry in tiny snatches? A risotto of love letters, a paella of sagas, a pilaf of sonnets, a jumbled jambalaya of dictionaries? Everything so small, except the ideas. Small. I think that’s what I like. I buy a packet of rice and lay it on the table, examine each grain in the hope it may be the one that has defied the ordinary bounds of rice-dom, expanded a little beyond the ordinary, left a tiny gap for one more idea, but I do not find it. Nature is remarkably uniform. She has set a limit on everything from diatoms to the blue whale. Everything except for me. I defy her border controls. Forgive me. I must sit.”

Tibo hurriedly rose from the chair and helped Yemko into it. He deflated with an exhausted sigh.

“Think at what labour and expense these tiny grains are achieved. How many hours of toil in flooded fields buzzing with gnats, the exhausting, sucking plod behind the buffalo, the slap of his tail, the burning sun, the leeches, the back-breaking stoop, a lakh of times repeated, and all to produce this.” He pushed a few grains around with his finger.

“Even once it has been brought round the world to the food hall of Braun’s Department Store, it sells for pennies—so cheap is human sweat. And look at it, how white it is—a by-word for whiteness and yet not white at all. Look at this one.” He held up an individual grain. “Pearly grey. Some are almost translucent, like ground glass, some have that deep white eye trapped in the middle—see? It reminds me of the insects stuck in those bits of amber that roll up on our beach sometimes but this is like a tiny piece of snow trapped in ice. Why, I wonder. What can possibly cause that? There is a book to be written about rice, I think. It lingers in someone’s typewriter. Not mine, I fear. At my back, I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot. There would even be room for a paragraph about that hideous, cheap yellow long grain they import from America and perhaps a chapter for Arborio, a discursive chapter following the slow wander of the Po and skating, like a mosquito on a pond, over its malarial swamps past Turin to end in a puddle of squid-ink risotto. And there must be page after page for Basmati. Basmati is the prince of rice, you know. That scented, aromatic, almost floral flavour. I could eat it alone, just as it is, with a little salt for the savour. Thousands do, millions, I suppose, every day.

“Many millions more content themselves with something less or with nothing at all. The Indians, when they cook it, they have a proverb. They say the grains should be like brothers—close but not stuck together. Basmati is the rice of choice for those who follow my strange calling. It’s the flat-sided grains, you know—the ideal surface upon which to write. And regular, as regular as anything in nature, yet all different—no two of them just exactly the same, never quite the same size, never quite the same shape, always
slightly chipped or slightly curved or slightly misshapen. Very like us, Mayor Krovic. Very like we Dottians for whom you care so deeply, each of us slightly chipped or slightly curved or slightly misshapen. Perhaps that applies even to you, Good Tibo Krovic. Is that why you have come to my house at dead of night?”

Tibo said, “Once, long ago, you offered me your help. As I recall, we met in the gallery and you told me …”

Yemko raised a single finger to silence him. “Of course, knowing you as I do,” he said, “there can be no possibility that a man of your background and reputation could ever be involved in anything which would require my professional assistance or advice.”

Tibo said, “But …”

Yemko lifted an eyebrow. “There can be no buts,” he warned. “It goes without saying that you are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing and you have come here to ask my advice on behalf of an unfortunate friend.” Yemko tugged gently at the ears of the pangolin which lay curled on his vast belly. “Tell me all about it. In fact, better yet, tell Leonidas all about it. Your next words should be ‘Leonidas, I have a friend …,’ I think.”

Yemko sank back in his chair and his huge head disappeared into the shadows which seemed drawn to him the way the moon pulls the seas. Light glowed from the grains of rice sparkling on the desk, everything else was velvet.

Tibo said, “Leonidas, I have a friend and, for some time, this friend has been in love with Mrs. Agathe Stopak, the secretary of the Mayor of Dot.” Tibo could not have imagined a more astounding admission. In a few words he had acknowledged to Yemko Guillaume the most amazing secret of creation, a truth he had hidden from everyone, the reason the stars hang in the sky, the secret engine that drives the seasons, and Yemko’s only reply was a polite little cough which may have been intended to mask a titter.

“Forgive me, Mayor Krovic, but Leonidas has known that for years. I think he had it first from Sarah, the girl who gives out the change in the second-best butcher’s in town. La toute Dot has known it for years. Please tell Leonidas something a little more startling.”

If Tibo had been merely astonished, he would probably have been unable to go on but the sudden realisation that his secret was known, that he was the only man in Dot who did not find it ordinary and commonplace—boring even—was far beyond astonishing. His mouth flapped uselessly for a second or two and then, grateful for the confessional blackness that filled the room, he told his story.

At the end of it Yemko gave a sigh, as travellers in the far north say they have heard the great whales make in the midst of an ocean of ice, and he said, “This is almost too much to believe. Transmogrification is one thing—after all, Leonidas used to be a dancing master at a private academy for young ladies until things became too much for him and, I suppose, a phantom circus operating all unknown at the heart of our city is believable, more or less. Yes.” He twiddled his thumbs. “Yes, I could convince a jury of that but the idea that the Mayor of Dot, Good Tibo Krovic—or, at any rate, his close personal friend—could knowingly harbour a fugitive in a murder case? Well, it’s preposterous, it’s ridiculous, it’s utterly fantastical.” He turned to Tibo with delight and said, “You know what this means?”

“It means nobody will believe it and I have worried myself needlessly about nothing?”

“Good God, no, Krovic! It means ruin, disgrace, loss of reputation. It means prison and, above all, total extinguishment of pension rights! Krovic, they would hang you for it if they could and small children and old ladies would be trampled in the rush. You are the same as them, Krovic. How can you possibly expect them to forgive that?”

Tibo sat down quietly in a shadowed corner. He knew it was the truth. “You told me, if the hounds were in pursuit, you would help me.”

“And I meant it. Are you willing to put yourself completely in my hands?”

“Of course.”

“Then I will call on you tomorrow evening. Go to work as
usual. Behave normally. Remain calm. Now, be a good fellow and let yourself out.”

Tibo rose to go but, before the door clicked shut on the room, Yemko spoke out of the shadows again. “You are not exactly like them, you know. After all this time, Tibo Krovic, I think I may have found my odd grain of rice.”

HE HONEYSUCKLE WAS SPENDING ITSELF ON
the night air and drunken moths were beating themselves senseless against the street lamps as Tibo walked home through Copernicus Park, his black brogues crunching on the well-kept paths. When he reached the old house at the end of the blue-tiled path, he was careful not to touch the bell beside the gate and he had left the front door unlocked so he could come in quietly without disturbing Agathe. But she was waiting for him anyway and she came running to the door to meet him and danced round in happy circles in the hall. Her transformation was complete.

In the hours that Tibo had been gone, Agathe had abandoned clothes just as she said she would and she was now utterly Dalmatian. She wagged at him joyously and said, “I knew it was you, I knew it was you. I could hear you at the end of the street.”

“No, you couldn’t.”

“Yes, I could and the bell on the path gave you away.”

“I didn’t touch the bell.”

“It sings with happiness when you pass, Tibo. Didn’t you know?”

“I didn’t know,” he said. He could not keep the grief from his voice. “I’m going to bed now.”

At the bottom of the stairs, watching him go, she said, “I love you, Tibo Krovic.”

“I love you too, Agathe.”

“Ah, but I love you as you deserve to be loved, as a dog loves,
without asking anything in return but the chance to love you more.”

Tibo said, “I have loved you like a dog for as long as I can remember. Now will you sleep on the kitchen floor again or will you come to bed?”

Agathe said nothing and Tibo lay down alone, on top of the counterpane his mother had stitched long ago. He left the curtains open so the sun would wake him gently in the morning and he looked down the bed at the mirrored wardrobe and the reflection of the soles of his feet. He was wakeful.

After a while, Tibo heard the sound of Agathe climbing the stairs, the click of her black toenails against the parquet. She stopped in the doorway and sat down, watching him silently. He looked at her, saying nothing. He patted the mattress encouragingly. Agathe came forward, head low, to where his hand hung over the side of the bed and licked at his fingers. She climbed on the bed and curled over his feet. The moonlight through the window made her white skin silver, made the black marks that dotted it inky. He stroked her gently. “I am very glad,” he said, “that becoming a dog has not robbed you of the gift of speech.”

“Oh, Tibo, don’t be silly. All dogs can speak. We simply choose not to. We listen more than we talk. It’s a way of loving.”

“Are there other ways?”

“Yes, Tibo.” And then it was morning.

N SPITE OF EVERYTHING THAT YEMKO HAD
told him—“Go to work as usual. Behave normally. Remain calm”—for Tibo, the day was not usual. He could not behave normally. He was not calm.