The Good Mayor (6 page)

“Sometimes it’s the only way to get any sensible conversation.” She handed him his letters. “The mayor of Umlaut has written. Something about celebrations for the anniversary of their town charter. He’s inviting a delegation from Dot. It’s on top of the pile.”

Tibo snorted. “That’s as much as my job’s worth. You know how much the Dottians hate the Umlauters. But I’ll have to look at it, I suppose. Thanks for pointing it out. And what did you mean, ‘another coffee’?”

Agathe realised that Tibo had no idea she was at The Golden Angel earlier and, for some reason, she decided that she didn’t want him to know. “Sorry. Slip of the tongue. Nothing at all. Would you like a coffee? That was all I meant. Any coffee at all? No?”

“No, thanks,” said Tibo.

“Right. As you like. You’re on duty at the Magistrates’ Court at
ten thirty. Just to remind you. The clerk says it’s the usual routine stuff. Mostly drunks and wife-beaters.” Agathe closed the door on her way out.

Tibo got up, walked the long way round his desk and opened it again. For the hour or so until he left for court, there would be glimpses of her.

By nine twenty-five, he had gone through the post. Most of it was rubbish and could wait until the afternoon. At nine twenty-seven, he asked Agathe back to his office so that he could dictate some urgent letters. As she sat down and crossed her legs, Tibo looked very hard out the window, studying the dome of the cathedral.

“To His Honour Mayor Zapf, Town Hall, Umlaut,” he said efficiently. “I need two copies of this. Begins. Dear Mayor Zapf, The mayor and council of Dot have received your invitation to attend celebrations marking the anniversary of the Umlaut town charter. After due consideration, the mayor and council of Dot have decided to reject this thinly disguised insult. You cannot believe that Umlaut’s history of treachery, deceit and double-dealing can be wiped out by the offer of beer and mouldy sandwiches, knocked up in that unhygienic brothel which passes for a Town Hall. Speaking for myself, I would rather be the plaything of a Turkish cavalry regiment than soil my shoes by visiting your sordid little village. However, I understand the Turks are fully occupied with the wives of the councillors of Umlaut. Yours etc. Can you read that back please, Mrs. Stopak?”

She did.

“I don’t like ‘brothel,’” said Tibo. “Harsh word. Make it ‘bordello.’ Much nicer.”

Agathe made a few tiny marks with the point of her pencil. “Bordello,” she said. “Two Ls and two copies.”

Tibo looked back at her from the window. “Ready for the next one?”

She nodded.

“To Mayor Zapf of Umlaut. Begins. Dear Zapf, Thanks for the invitation. Hope to return the favour soon. I’m planning a fishing
trip the weekend after next. Usual place. Bring beer. Best, Tibo. Just one of those, Mrs. Stopak, and send it in a plain envelope, not the city stationery, and nothing on file, thanks. Oh and you’d better mark it as personal. Thanks, that’s all for now.”

Agathe stood up to leave and Tibo watched her go, waiting for the very last sight of her before he sat down again at his desk. Agathe’s typewriter began to click and whirr in the room next door and Tibo listened, imagining.

At ten o’clock, the bells of the cathedral rang out over the square again. Tibo checked his watch and got ready to leave for court.

The three letters were already waiting in a folder on Agathe’s desk. She held it up to him as he passed. “For signing, Mayor Krovic.”

Tibo tapped his pockets, found his pen and signed two of the letters. He wrote something quickly over the last envelope, folded it roughly and placed it inside his wallet. “That’s a very nice dress,” he said. “You’re looking very nice today. Well, as usual, that is. Very nice.”

“Thank you,” said Agathe, modestly.

“Very. Nice.” Tibo was beginning to stumble. “The colour. Nice. And that …” He gestured vaguely at the piping Agathe had taken so long to stitch into place. “It’s very …” Tibo hated himself then. He could stand in front of the entire council and talk about anything, argue about anything, persuade anybody about anything, order anything but, in front of this woman, he was left mumbling “nice.” Still, with Agathe, even “nice” seemed to please her. It did please her. Good Tibo Krovic was the only man in Dot who ever said “nice” to her. “Nice,” he said again. “Right. Court.”

Tibo put his pen back in his pocket and walked out of the office, past Anker Skolvig and his heroic hand gestures and back into the square.

The court of Dot is not its most inspiring civic building and Tibo’s dread of the place grew deeper the closer that he got to it. The city fathers who built it skimped on the job. They chose a cheap, dung-coloured sandstone and the rain had soaked into it
and bubbled it and winter frosts had sliced whole sheets of rotten stone off it.

Now my image carved over the door was indistinct and runny—almost bloated—as if I had been dragged from the Ampersand like a week-old suicide.

Outside, at the entrance, the court’s “customers” gathered every day in dirty clumps, smoking, swearing, squabbling. The pavement there was dotted with foul blobs of spit and gum and cigarette stubs. Tibo despised these people. He hated them for making him their mayor. He wanted to be mayor of honest, hardworking people who swept their doorsteps and washed their children before tucking them into clean white sheets. But he had to be mayor of these people too. He was also the mayor of scum. Whether they bothered to vote or not, they were his. He had to protect them—from themselves and from each other—and he would give his life for them. He knew it—just like Anker Skolvig—but he didn’t expect them to be glad of it or grateful or paint his picture in heroic poses or even say thanks. Tibo set his mouth into a stern flat line and walked firmly past them. Nobody spoke to him. One or two glared at him. Somebody spat but it landed on the filthy pavement and not on him.

Inside the courthouse it was just as bad—everything painted in shades of municipal sludge, bile yellow over baby-turd brown or dead-cat green, the smell of the bleach bucket mingled with the grease and old cigarettes of the crowd and, always, inevitably, one lamp, someplace, broken or missing.

Tibo looked into the courtroom. The place was deserted except for Barni Knorrsen from the
Evening Dottian
, sitting in the press box, reading a paper. The court would be quiet until the business started. Nobody liked to have to abandon their smoking and spitting until they really had to.

“Hello, Barni,” said Tibo.

“Good morning, Mayor Krovic. Any excitement for us today?”

“I’m afraid not—just the usual drunks and wife-beaters, I’m told.”

“It’s been ages since we had a good murder!”

“And luckily that would be out of my league,” said Tibo. “But listen, Barni, I was hoping I’d run into you here. There’s a bit of something out of nothing that I wanted to show you—might make a tale for the paper. Here, tell me what you think.” Tibo reached into his jacket and took out his wallet. There was Agathe’s second copy of the letter to the Umlauters, bent to fit with “Private. In confidence” scrawled over one side in pen.

“No, that’s not it,” said Tibo and he put the slip of paper on the broad wooden lip of the press box. Barni was slow to notice so poor Tibo had to keep up a pantomime of burrowing into his wallet for quite a time. “No. No, that’s not it either.” Good God, there were only four pockets to go through. Small wonder Barni had never graduated to a big-league paper. “Maybe I should just take everything out and start from the beginning.” Finally, Barni casually picked up his folded newspaper and flicked the letter on to the floor of the press box and covered it with his foot. “Does that man never polish his shoes?” Tibo wondered. He put everything back into his wallet. “Sorry to have wasted your time,” he said. “It’ll turn up.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mr. Mayor.”

At the far side of the room, a door opened and the black-robed clerk nodded at Tibo. “We need you on the bench now, sir. Business is about to commence.”

Tibo signalled his agreement. “Sorry, Barni, got to go. Busy, you know. Sorry. I’ll be in touch about that other thing.”

When Tibo took his seat on the court dais at precisely ten thirty, he looked across at the empty press box and smiled.

By eleven o’clock, Tibo had dealt with the first two cases of the day—an old drunk who had spent the night in the cells and a docker who’d come home from a night’s drinking and hit his wife with the kitchen table when she asked where his wages were. The drunk was easy enough. There was no helping him. He had no money for a fine—every penny that he could scrounge from playing a wheezing accordion on windy street corners went to the cheapest rotgut vodka he could find. You could see him every day, sitting on a bench under the big holly tree in the old graveyard, guzzling it straight from the bottle. Nobody bothered him and
that was how he liked it. Next winter would find him frozen to the ground on a shroud of stiff brown holly leaves and nobody would mourn—least of all him. But, last night, some zealous new constable had found him asleep, nursing a bottle wrapped in lilac tissue paper, and decided to do his duty.

“So you spent a night in the cells?” said Tibo in the sort of voice people reserve for deaf old aunts.

“Yezzor! Yezzor!” The old drunk spoke through vocal cords scorched by vomit.

“Better than sleeping in the graveyard, I suppose.”

“Yezzor! Yezzor! Nuffadat to come. Yezzor!”

“Did they give you a good breakfast?”

“Yezzor! Yezzor, but I din eat it. I’m not muchava one fer fewd.”

“No,” said Tibo, “I imagine not. Right. Listen. This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to let you go with time served. But I don’t want to see you again or the consequences will be severe.”

“Yezzor.”

“Is that understood?”

“Yezzor.”

“Right, out you go.”

The old man shuffled out of the dock. All around him, as he passed, others held back from him and the stench of his thick tweed coat, a vile blanket greased with years of his own filth. From his high chair at the front of the court Tibo could read on their faces exactly what he had felt for them. As low as they had gone, they were not so poor as to have nobody to despise. Tibo wondered who was looking down despising him.

“Next case!” yelled the clerk. “Pitr Stoki.”

A little man with a swaggering stride sat down in the dock. Tibo watched him. There was a leery insolence about him. Cocky—a man who walked with his shoulders. Stoki sat down in the dock, looking from side to side with a challenge in his glance, sniffing repeatedly and brushing the tip of his nose with a curled finger.

Tibo leaned down from the bench. “Mr. Stoki, you are accused of assaulting your wife. Are you guilty or not guilty?”

Yemko Guillaume, the fattest lawyer in Dot, stood up to speak. Across the court, Tibo could hear his knees creak. Guillaume’s belly was so vast that it hung in front of him in two lobes, he had breasts like jelly moulds and Tibo was left trying to outstare a hair-fringed navel that winked from his gaping shirt front. It brought to mind the county fair when fat farmers came in from the outlying places and tried to cheat the carnival folk by squinting at the sideshows through the gaps in their tents.

“I represent Mr. Stoki,” said Guillaume. His voice came in strange wheezes, like the high pipes of an organ choked with lard. “Mr. Stoki pleads not guilty.”

Then the clerk called the constable, a solid middle-aged man with respectable whiskers, who told of being called to Stoki’s house when neighbours complained of screams and breaking furniture, and Mrs. Stoki’s black eye and the story she told, which he noted at the time, word for word, in this very notebook, of what had happened.

“And was Mr. Stoki sober at the time?”

“No, Your Honour, Mr. Stoki was not sober at the time.”

“So was Mr. Stoki drunk at the time?”

“Oh, Mr. Stoki was undoubtedly drunk at the time.”

In the dock, Stoki sniffed some more and glared at the constable, jabbing his shoulders round like a bantamweight. The constable remained unimpressed and sniffed back.

On the dais, Tibo waved the end of his pen to signal that Guillaume was now free to speak.

“Constable, did you see my client strike his wife?” he asked.

The constable rocked on his big thick boots. “Good heavens, no, sir! In my experience, them as has the uncontrollable tempers and can’t help themselves, always can when a constable’s around.”

Tibo snapped a reprimand, “Try to stick to the question, please, Constable.”

“That is of no consequence, Your Honour, I have no more.” Guillaume rolled back to his seat, descending gradually like a collapsing balloon and then suddenly crumpling into the complaining, squealing, straining chair.

“There’s only one more witness,” said the clerk, “the complainer.”

Tibo recognised her. He had seen her in court every week. When the clerk said “the usual drunks and wife-beaters,” this was the usually beaten wife. She was familiar—a pallid, stifled shriek of a woman with cowering eyes and a knuckled grip on herself. The same woman every week. The same blows. The same tears. The same screams. The same woman again and again.

Good Mayor Krovic stifled his fury and spoke to her in a flat and level voice. “I have to tell you, Mrs. Stoki, that you are not obliged to give evidence against your husband.”

From the dock, Stoki nodded at her with a sharp jerk of the head and wiped his nose violently. She read the signal.

“No,” she said. “I want to.” She raised her hand to make the oath and, little by little, the story came out. Her eyes flickered between Tibo and the man in the dock as she told it.

No, her husband was not drunk. No, he had not stayed out that night. Yes, they had argued but that was her fault. It was nothing. She had nagged him. No, he definitely did not hit her.

Tibo saw the arm go back.

Yes, the chair broke but that was because she fell on it awkwardly. She was always clumsy that way—always falling and breaking things.