The Good Mayor (22 page)

UPFER AND KEMANEZIC WAS ONLY
two shops away—a glazed door with a brown linen blind and a single broad window with a moustachioed mannequin who had stood in the same spot, impassive as a sentry, never altering his pose or his coiffure since he took up his post these fifty years since, not when the summer sun beat through the glass all day and threatened to melt his wax moustache, not in the winter when he was forced to endure the humiliation of facing Albrecht Street as he modelled the latest heavyweight combinations. He stood solid and steady through it all, the embodiment of the kind of service a Kupfer and Kemanezic customer could expect.

“Imperturbable,” Tibo murmured to himself as he passed under the mannequin’s gaze and opened the shop door for Agathe. “Imperturbable,” a pleasant word—not so nice as “elbow” perhaps, but with a similar clarety roll-in-the-mouth flavour and, now, a kind of a spell about it.

Agathe looked up at him with a question.

“Nothing,” Tibo said. “Sorry. Just … Nothing.”

Inside, the shop was endless—a long canyon of soberly patterned carpet stretching away between towering walls of wooden shelves and drawers marked “socks blue” or “socks black” and numbered according to size and, far away at the other end, Tibo and Agathe saw themselves walking towards themselves, side by side, in a rank of mirrors. It was a suddenly startling image, disturbingly
bridal. A man and a woman like that, so close, nervously comfortable, self-consciously at ease. They glanced at one another in the reflection and quickly turned away as if they had been caught in something furtive.

“Sir, Madam.” It was Kemanezic himself, splendid in a gleaming white shirt with a scarlet handkerchief blazing from his breast pocket and a tiny pansy, almost hidden against the midnight blue of his lapel. And then, with a sudden recognition, he herded a tiny gilded chair towards Agathe and commanded her into it with a tiny nudge on the back of her leg. “Ah, Mayor Krovic. A delight to welcome you to Kupfer and Kemanezic. How can we be of service?”

“A suit, I thought.” Tibo’s voice sounded pipey and reedish.

“Sir.” And like a magician producing a live snake, Kemanezic was suddenly holding his tape measure. It lashed and whipped round Tibo, marking off the size of his chest, his shoulders, the length of his arms, his waist and—“Would Madam care to look through this book of swatches?”—his inside leg.

Kemanezic conjured a tiny leather-bound pad from his inside pocket and made a few quick notes. “I think I have that, Mayor Krovic. If you would care to choose the cloth and come back in a fortnight, we can be ready for the fitting.”

Tibo was defeated. “Yes,” he said, “of course. In a fortnight.” And, after quickly selecting two different materials from the swatch book, he turned towards the door.

“But, in the meantime, the mayor will be needing something to tide him over,” Agathe said. “Something off the peg. You do have something. In this blue, I think.” She held out the sample book, folded open at a soft herringbone cloth.

“Off the peg?” Kemanezic hesitated. “I’ll check, Mrs. Krovic.” And he retreated.

They were alone in the shop then, Tibo and Agathe, and he looked at her gratefully and said, “Thanks.”

Agathe gave a sympathetic smile.

“I didn’t know what to say,” said Tibo.

“And he was relying on that. You mustn’t let people boss you around.”

“I’m all right with the Chief of Police or the Town Clerk—it’s just,” his voice faded to a shuddering whisper, “tailors.”

Agathe looked down at her toes. “Did you notice?”

“Yes. He called you ‘Mrs. Krovic’—I noticed.”

“We should put him right.”

“We should, really,” Tibo agreed but there was something boyish and reluctant and just-five-minutes-more-ish in his voice.

They looked at each other, trying to hold back giggles, until Mr. Kemanezic returned, leading a milky-faced boy who staggered under armfuls of suits and calling them back to a fragile solemnity.

Mr. Kemanezic flicked back the curtains of a cubicle so the rings rattled. “If you would care to try these, Mayor Krovic.”

Kemanezic had the gift—you find it in mothers, really good teachers and villainous butlers in Inspektor Voythek movies—of making the simplest, friendliest request sound like a bloodcurdling threat. He could put an arm-twisting compulsion into a breath and he said, “If you would care to try these, Mayor Krovic,” the way prison governors walk on to death row and say, “It’s time now, son.”

Tibo looked nervously at Agathe but she shooed him on with a slight flap of the hand.

The curtains rattled on their pole again and Tibo was alone in a tiny wooden room. There was a dim lamp in a ground-glass shade overhead, a mirror screwed to the left-hand wall, two coat hooks side by side on the right-hand wall and a small brown bent-wood chair jammed in the corner. He sat down and undid his shoes, stood up and prised them off, toe to heel. He took off his jacket and hung it on a coat hook, undid his trousers, held them carefully by the cuffs, gripping them under his chin until the creases were properly lined up and hung them on the back of the chair. They slid off with a sigh and concertinaed on the floor. Tibo picked them up and laid them across the seat. They stayed.

He looked in the mirror glumly. Black socks, white legs, shirt tails hanging down. “I look like a turkey,” he whispered to himself
and he bubbled his cheeks out. He wondered how any woman, let alone the pink and plump and “Tahiti”-fragrant Mrs. Agathe Stopak, could ever look at him and want him. “But you wouldn’t normally start with the trousers,” he told himself. “You’d start at the top and work down.” But that left the socks. Tibo imagined himself standing naked in just his black socks and he moaned, “Oh, Walpurnia!”

“Everything all right in there, sir?” said Kemanezic.

The curtain gave a suspicion of a twitch but Tibo’s fist shot out to grip a bunched and decisive knot of fabric. “Fine!” he barked. “Thank you. I’ll just be a moment.” He released the curtain warily. It made no sign of suddenly flying open.

After a moment’s watchfulness, Tibo tugged a pair of trousers from the first of the hangers provided by Mr. Kemanezic. Sensible blue cloth, deep pockets, half-lined to the knees, adjustable straps at the sides with black buttons to keep them in place. These were trousers. And they fit. He slipped his shoes back on. They actually fit! Tibo was admiring himself in the mirror when CHIIIIIIING! the curtain whipped back and there was Mr. Kemanezic, knuckles white as he gripped the ends of the tape measure that hung from his neck. “Is everything all right, Mayor Krovic? If I might be permitted to assist.”

With another magician’s gesture, Mr. Kemanezic swirled the jacket off its hanger and moulded it to Tibo’s body with sweeps of his hands. “Single-breasted, Mayor Krovic. Very flattering style. Four-button cuff. Single vent. Very modern.”

“I thought …” said Tibo.

“Very wise, sir, and I agree with you. The double-breasted style is really suitable only for the slimmer gentleman.”

Kemanezic poked two fingers down Tibo’s waistband and ran them round his body. “Good fit here, sir, not too snug.” Then he gave an eye-popping tug on the back seam. “Enough room in the seat, is there? We pride ourselves on our generous cut.”

“Thank you,” Tibo gasped. “I was just thinking that or something very like it.”

“I am so pleased to hear that, Mayor Krovic. Why don’t we give the excellent Mrs. Krovic a chance to pass her eye over our efforts?” And, with a single swinging waltzing move, he twirled Tibo through the curtain and back out into the shop.

Agathe stood up and welcomed them with a smile. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. Well, come here then—let me see.” There was a chivvying pride in her voice that was more than friendly. She had the sort of tone that is reserved for wives and Tibo noticed it and wondered if he liked it and decided that, yes, he did like it. He felt she was entitled to it.

It was the voice “the one” would have used, if she had ever come, if he had ever found her, and, now, hearing Agathe speak, Tibo knew that she
had
come, he had found her. Agathe was the one.

She had been at his finger ends for years and now, in Kupfer and Kemanezic, here under the gaze of drawers marked “socks blue” and “socks black” and standing in front of glazed cabinets full of underpants and nightshirts, with racks of glowing, garish ties standing round like spectators at a road accident, he saw that she had been the one all that time. But she was Mrs. Agathe Stopak and, though she walked out of Kupfer and Kemanezic with him, she would leave him. She would leave him at the next tram stop and go back to Aleksander Street and Stopak, the paperhanger. He saw everything as clearly as if he had been looking down on the whole of Dot from the crown of my cathedral, he saw it all and he said, “So, what do you think?”

“Oh, I like it. Very smart.” She turned to Mr. Kemanezic. “Do you have another one like it in black?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“Exactly like it?”

Kemanezic was icily polite. “Exactly alike, Madam. In every respect. Exactly.”

Agathe gave a winsome smile. “Then I think,” she exchanged a quick glance with Tibo, “we’ll take one. Black. Would you bag them both, please? We’ll be wanting the hangers.”

Mr. Kemanezic made a little bow, like the little bow Yemko
had made in the bookseller’s, in recognition of a worthy opponent and he withdrew.

And, after that, there was no more than a moment of embarrassment at the counter—the commercial equivalent of biting down on a wad of cotton wool once the tooth is out. Tibo opened his chequebook on the scratched glass top of a cabinet containing endless rows of folded white vests, filled out a jaw-droppingly huge amount and took possession of two bulging brown paper bags, each printed with “Kupfer and Kemanezic” in dusty red letters, diagonally across the front.

Kemanezic hurried from the till to open the door and stood like a half-closed penknife as they passed.

“Those suits are absolutely wonderful,” Agathe said breathily.

“Thank you, Madam. Thank you. We can assure you of years of satisfaction.”

“So wonderful, in fact, that Mayor Krovic will not, after all, be requiring the made-to-measure ones, but thank you for your trouble.”

The door closed so firmly behind them that the wax mannequin rocked against the glass of his window as if, finally, he had decided on a fretful bid for freedom.

Tibo grinned. “You are so clever. Thank you.” He turned back and saw Kemanezic glowering from a corner of the brown linen blind which quickly twitched back into place over the door. “Come on,” he said, “before they set the dogs on us.”

In a gesture befitting the Mayor of Dot, he offered his arm and, in a gesture befitting the one, she gripped it with two hands and pressed her face close against his shoulder.

They were walking together like that—like a man carrying suits, walking with the woman who loves him, along Albrecht Street, past the Ko-Operatif Shoe Shop and towards Commerz Plaz—when Tibo noticed a taxi, moving very slowly, coming towards them, banking heavily to the pavement like a schooner rounding Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale and, inside, holding on to the leather strap that hung down beside the rear window, was the lawyer Yemko Guillaume. As the taxi laboured past, he turned
his head slowly, as an unassailable turtle would turn its head to observe some harmless log that floated by. He did not smile. He did not nod. He did not wave. There was no gesture of recognition as he drove past but his eyes met those of Tibo and held them blankly as if he did not see. But he saw and then the taxi passed and Tibo stood looking after it and the back of Yemko’s head, facing directly away, straight ahead, through the windscreen.

That evening, sitting alone in the house at the end of the blue-tiled path, looking into a fire that whispered and sighed and settled, Tibo saw himself in Albrecht Street suddenly stiffen, suddenly chill. He saw himself straighten, lifting his head away from where it had rested against Agathe’s, suddenly becoming formal and correct, arriving at the stop for the Aleksander Street tram like a bank messenger arriving with a parcel to be signed for and saying, “I think this is where you catch the tram, isn’t it?”

He said it over and over again as he beat the iron poker into the embers—“I think this is where you catch the tram, isn’t it? I think this is where you catch the tram, isn’t it?”—mocking himself. “You couldn’t invite her for a drink, could you? You couldn’t ask her for a coffee. You couldn’t just walk with her.” Tibo thought of walking with her, all the way through Dot, from one end to the other, her body pressed against his until they found themselves out in the country in the dark and Agathe suddenly came to her senses—or not—and they spread their coats under a tree like blankets and lay down together. “But, oh, no! You couldn’t do that, could you, Mayor Tibo Bloedig Krovic? Not after the lawyer Guillaume looked at you, not after he spotted you. Oh, no, that wouldn’t be at all right, you bloedig idiot!” He dropped the poker in the hearth with a clatter and went to bed.