A Lion Among Men (22 page)

“Bit of a local scrabble,” said Mister Mikko, “but if we had the money you might bring us, we’d put it on the Eminent Pastor in Old Pastoria. Her name is Mumbly.”

“Her name is Mammly.”

“Her name is immaterial. Mumbly, Mommy, will you let me finish, old darling? She keeps to herself. She’s distantly related to Pastorius, who was the last Ozma Regent before the Wizard’s takeover. She probably has the most legitimacy to stand up to the Emerald City in case of an attempt at reannexation, though I don’t know if she would. I don’t think she has the conviction of exceptionalism that Nessarose possessed.”

“We use the same currency, in any event,” added the Boar, “so how could there be a prohibition against our reclaiming our retirement funds?”

Brrr left them to their nattering and sunk into a haze of anticipation. Could this work? A legitimate job serving two populations at once? If he helped to resolve the labor crisis, surely that would confer upon him a legitimacy that had hitherto eluded him in human society?

It had been several years since he’d left the Emerald City. He could return in triumph, circling north to Shiz first, of course, to begin the negotiations.

He fell asleep in front of the fire and dreamed of gratitude.

IN
THE
MORNING
, Brrr managed to cadge from the two old bachelors an advance on future earnings-a sack of fifteen mettanite florins. With mounting hopes he made his way back overland to Shiz. Back from the farthest habitable corner of Munchkinland, back to life. Scheming all the while. He’d spend a third of the money on a new wardrobe, first; then secure a pied-à-terre in a respectable neighborhood. Someplace better than Ampleton Quarters: that was important. People would notice.

For a week, no more, he would bring himself out to cafés and concerts. He’d condescend to recognize none of his former associates. It would be enough to be seen. Brrr’s back. Brrr’s back in town. Delicious. He’d returned: a Lion unafraid of human society. Let it be said of him that he was the first of the Animals to emerge from hiding. He’s the first, you know. Who’d have thought it of him?

Let it be said that he held his head high.

His mane is a ruff of bronze. Adversity has strengthened him! Let that be said, too.

His knees were shaking, though, behind the panels of his red velvet greatcoat-cut intentionally long to hide just such a syndrome-when he got up the nerve, at last, to present himself to the governor general of the banking house identified by Professor Lenx.

He gave his name as Sir Brrr, Namory of the Palace of the Throne of Oz. He didn’t specify his rank nor identify his district, which proved a smart move. The governor general apparently thought it impolite to enquire. (An Animal Namory was an aberration in and of itself, so far, and perhaps, Brrr speculated, the GG of the bank didn’t care to be seen ignorant of the conventions, however newly established.)

Somewhat shocked by Sir Brrr’s request, the banking officials couldn’t quickly enough find out a reason to reject his petition. In the end it was a matter of deciding what fee to apply against the withdrawal sum for the backbreaking work of having kept Professor Lenx’s deposit secure all these long years, while said absentminded Professor had gone lollygagging about without so much as a postcard over the holidays.

When they announced the amount that they would take-30 percent-Brrr was shocked. He understood at once that he had undersold himself as to the percentage of his own fee. But how easy to exaggerate by 5 percent what the bank had charged, and pocket the difference. He was worth it. Without his skill at negotiation and his nerve, the Animals back in Stonespar End would be getting nothing.

Carrying a letter of assurance, Brrr traveled back to Munchkinland. He avoided the high road, fearful of bandits-he was carrying cold cash-so it took a while to arrive. In the time he’d been gone, Mister Mikko had suffered a viral infection of some sort and lost all his teeth, and he refused to come out of his room.

For his part, Professor Lenx was irate to learn that his investment, far from growing, had lost 50 percent of its original value. But to have some cash was better than having none. He thanked Brrr profusely with tears and scratchy embraces, and introduced him to a neighbor from Three Dead Trees, a crippled old Tsebra, whose family also had a sizeable trust fund in a Shiz cash emporium…

Thus did Brrr’s career as a professional adjustor of personal finance-his own-root and thrive. He took new digs in Shiz at the top of a converted palace. He had a private lift and he hired a personal valet-a human, what a delicious touch-and from his salon at night he could see the glittering lights of the banks reflected in the black waters of the Suicide Canal. The pelt of a tiger was draped across the piano.

A
LION
COULD
move in circles that others could not. Once he established himself as a professional arbiter, Sir Brrr began to demand-and get-the more useful sort of testimonials. Letters from the proper officials that permitted his passage across the Oz-Munchkinland border at the checkpoint called Munchkin Mousehole. A good thing, too. Much safer than the off-road scurry that black-market enterprise favored. Still, the fear of highway robbery remained strong, since the wheels of the rented phaeton had bronze rims that rang out an alarm-the progress of money over here!-as they struck the yellow brick paving.

Brrr’s valet doubled as a chauffeur. He carried a cosh and a pistol and looked like a bandit himself, which was perhaps useful. His nose ran constantly and he seemed to enjoy his toddy at all hours of the day and evening, which Brrr overlooked since everything else seemed in order. He was called Flyswatter.

The need for Brrr to approach his old chum the Scarecrow in the Emerald City had never arisen. A good thing, too, as the Scarecrow had stepped down or been stepped over. Indeed, Flyswatter-speaking for the demimonde-insisted that the Scarecrow had disappeared. The power in the EC now devolved upon the improbable person of Shell Thropp, who had boasted publicly of his estrangement from his famous and powerful sisters, Nessarose and Elphaba. And then he had ordained himself Emperor.

On what authority? He’d had a conversion. The Unnamed God had chosen him to lead Oz. The Unnamed God had selected in Shell a servant and a steward of this great people, this deserving nation, this heap of goodness, this blessed verdant pasture ringed by stinging deserts…well, the rhetoric was almost as bountiful as the moral surcease with which Oz credited itself.

Brrr took little notice, except to be glad he hadn’t needed to approach the Palace of the Emperor of Oz. Instead, he involved himself in more traditional credits of the double-entry bookkeeping sort.

The banks didn’t like seeing their deposits dwindle, but those in the know were always muttering about the cost of an impending military strike. Who could say when deposits might be impounded by the Throne for the purpose of funding the army? If the banks could charge 30 percent for every withdrawal by an Animal and then use magical accounting to disappear their earnings as thoroughly as Ozma herself had been disappeared, they were in some ways ahead.

Any in-house scruples were easily suppressed. A certain Loyalist strain had never accepted that Shiz banks should be holding Animal funds in the first place. Tainted!

So the banks prospered in the short term, and hid their gains; the Animals received some capital after a long period of penury; and Brrr thrived. His own account accumulated like-well, like magic. He paid off old debts involving Ampleton Quarters, and he invested shrewdly in the less gaudy of Hiiri Furkenstael’s gilded engravings. Not for trade, but for his own pleasure.

The Lion ran into Piarsody Scallop one afternoon at the Fine Engraving Exchange this side of Ticknor Circus. She had not aged well, growing purple in the face and kitted out in an unsuitably girlish gown, all white ruches and pink furbelows. Her boot was undone because she suffered from elephant ankle. The malady forced one shoulder lower to the floor than the other, but Miss Scallop bolted upright with surprise to see him. She came stumping across the sawdusty floor with both hands flung in the air as if she were about to hurl a watermelon. He cut her.

He lived it up, he put on weight, becoming almost portly as befitted a gentleman in middle age. He ate well. It showed.

He called it gravitas, but it was mostly gravy. He was swimming in gravy.

Until the gravy boat spilled him.

It happened so slowly this time, so genteelly, that he didn’t even see it coming. He paid little attention to conversations in the club about the need of an Animal workforce to shore up the Gillikinese manufacturing sector. No significant improvement noted in that area yet, worried the captains of industry. But Sir Brrr-he used the title now-didn’t feel implicated. For one thing, he wasn’t a laborer himself, as was patently clear. For the second, though he had initially proposed to the Shiz banks that a loosening of monetary policy would result in a rise of Animal workers hunting for jobs, the bankers seemed to be exercising due patience. The banks were still culling huge fees from the withdrawals. “What do they have to complain about?” he muttered to his valet, expecting no answer. Flyswatter gave him none.

Whatever else was barked and bellowed, Loyal Oz saw no return to the Animal Adverse laws. In fact, those hoary old containment strategies were retired in ceremonies dripping with public symbolism.
COME
HOME
TO OZ read the full-page government advertisements.

“Ha,” said Brrr to Flyswatter. “Come home to Oz. That’ll be the day.”

“What day would that be, sir?”

Brrr explained. The Animals who had emigrated to Munchkinland or to the outback of the Vinkus remained cautious about emerging from their obscurity. Hardly better integrated into the Free State of Munchkinland, where the Wizard’s Animal Adverse laws had landed a weaker blow, many Animals nonetheless lived in relative tranquility. “Exiled for a generation now, some of them, they go largely unmolested about the rural reaches of the Hardings and the Fallows. They keep to themselves. They’ve found their safe haven and they’ll stick to it. Smart of them, too, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

Brrr thought it over. Few Animals tried to reinvent themselves in Shiz or the Emerald City as he had done. Abroad-in Fliaan, in Ix-it was another matter, but the sands that surrounded Oz made it likely that anyone who managed to survive an oversand trek to a foreign country stayed there.

Oz-Loyal and not-remained, in all its own breadth and vitality and distance, isolated from anything like a comity of nations. The vessel had yet to be built that could sail the desert sands on sledge runners, though inventors and madmen had imagined such a thing for generations.

“Troops amassing on the Munchkinland border, they say,” he murmured to Flyswatter once. The valet was giving him a whisker trim. “That long-anticipated strike against Munchkinland’s life support?”

“What life support would that be, sir?”

“The lake called Restwater. Huge thing. Don’t you read the papers?”

“I keep to myself, sir.”

Brrr turned to the financials. It looked as if Shell, the human Emperor of Oz, had run his treasury bankrupt by building up the military for the possible invasion.

“That’s enough for now, Flyswatter.” Brrr decided to get to the bank. He’d seen that the Emperor’s chancellor had ordered an audit of the banks, hoping to find pennies of taxable profit.

The bank manager was too busy to see him. He came home and watched the matter unfold in the papers, listened to the gossip in the clubs.

Hold on, cried the auditors. What’s this? Shiz deposits draining into the breakaway state of Munchkinland?

Possibly funding the military of that upstart nation?

And in a time of social unrest, what with the labor shortage, the drought still upon them, the tax base eroding as incomes fell?

Fie, cried the chancellor, and the bankers shrugged, and the fie! rolled off their shoulders. It lay like a judgment upon the shoulders of Brrrr.

Or perhaps Flyswatter turned him in. In any event, the constabulary showed up one morning and the valet had bolted, so Brrr answered the door himself. He was wearing a regrettably adorable robe, beige satin woven with stripes of darker beige, and pink piping, very cuddly, very oh-what-a-night-and his mane went every which way. Bumblebee advocates of the new journalism-on-the-spot flash-lit photogravures-were waiting behind the shoulder of the constable to ambush the Lion.

“Aiding and abetting the enemy,” said the constable, as if pronouncing a sartorial crime. “Is that a Rampini knockoff?”

“It’s an original,” said Brrr, letting it drop to the floor. The nakedness of Animals always made humans profoundly uncomfortable. It was the best he could do as a protest, given such short notice. “Am I allowed to dress myself?”

“We’re gentlemen here. Make it snappy, though.”
CLAP
HIM
IN
CHAINS
said the caption that evening, and IF
SIR
BRRR
LIKES
STRIPES
SO
MUCH
, WE
CAN
SHOW
HER
SOME
STRIPES
IN A
PRISON
GARMENT
.

Clap some more as he is led to prison, was the point, and we go free for the virtue of our fingering him.

“I am only a delivery service,” Brrr declared to the court registrar. “You want the bankers, not me.”

The registrar raised her eyebrow. Brrr knew she was saying: Bankers are always pure. Bankers are purer than priests. Something about money insulates them in virtue.

“I charge you with fraud, to start with,” said the first magistrate he saw in Shiz, known as the doorbell magistrate for his job of cobbling together the initial court definition of an indictment. “You’re a villain.”

“I charge you with exaggeration,” shot back the Lion. “I’m a fall guy.”

The accusation of fraud was entered into the register-fraud perpetrated not against the victims, for some reason (who regards victims?), but against the banks themselves. Fraud in the service of treason. (Had he been turned in by one of his pool-hall cronies?) The complaints were written in such convoluted language that Brrr couldn’t follow them. Nonetheless, his gizzard seemed cooked, but good.