The Good Mayor (35 page)

Achilles recognised her tread in the darkness and jumped from the window sill of the flat, silent as dusk, to purr round her ankles. She reached down and tugged his ears. “I know, I know. I love you too,” she said. He coiled about her feet, running a little ahead and rushing back to her again, making happy “meyowrrs,” keeping her company.

Agathe walked hesitantly towards the flat, not trusting her heels on the gritty cobbles and clutching her keys like a knuckleduster, claws of steel and brass poking from between her fingers, ready for the first drunk who stepped out of the shadows.

Achilles, on the other hand, loved Canal Street. When at last, after a week in the flat, sleeping in the box which Hektor had used to kidnap him from Aleksander Street, he had been allowed out to explore, Achilles had felt instantly at home. Everything that Agathe hated about the place, he loved. He loved its dirt and its wildness, its shadow and its threat. He loved the way nobody—except Agathe—ever bothered to put the lids properly on the bins, he loved the rats that skulked near the drains, the broken-down sheds with their flat roofs—ideal for summer sunbathing—the beautiful lady cats with their question-mark tails lifted invitingly high, the midnight fights and, above all, he loved Agathe. Out on the street, he rolled along with a boxer’s liquid stride, walking with swivelling shoulders and easy hips, always ready to spring a flick-knife claw but, with Agathe, he was a kitten looking for cuddles and tummy rubs.

He caressed himself across her calves as she bent to tackle the
lock on the door. “Yes, yes, I know. You’re hungry. Soon have you inside. It’s just so dark here I can’t see what I’m … gottit!”

The door swung open and Achilles hurried inside, brushing past her the way she had brushed past Hektor as he fiddled with the lock on their first night. But tonight, apart from Achilles, the flat was empty. When Agathe went to shut the door, only shadows squeezed through the gap to join her. She was cold and she was lonely and there was a horrible question forming at the back of her mind that she chose to ignore.

“Come on, you. Let’s get you fed.”

Achilles lashed his tail approvingly as she reached under the sink for a tin of fish, opened it and tipped it into his dish. He purred a clanking purr, like the distant Dash ferry heading for port, and bent to eat.

“What about me,” Agathe wondered. She looked in the cupboard. There was a lump of stale bread lying on its wooden board and a lone egg. “Fried-bread omelette. A very small fried-bread omelette. Nobody ever died of it.”

She rubbed the bread with garlic, chopped it into lumps and fried it golden and crispy and, all the time she was doing it and while she beat the egg and peppered it and poured it into the pan, she told Achilles what she was doing, explained every step, as her granny had done, so that one day Achilles might make a fried-bread omelette for himself—if he felt like it.

Agathe slid her omelette on to a blue plate and sat down at the table with the newspaper spread open in front of her. There was nothing to read. Someone had set fire to a sofa dumped outside a block of flats and there was a dire warning from Fire Chief Svennson about the dreadful consequences.

“Small fire, none dead,” she told Achilles. “You know, in some ways, I quite like living in the sort of town where something like that can make the paper. If that’s all they’ve got to talk about, we’re safe in our beds.”

Achilles lay on his back and said nothing. He let his paws flop loosely from the wrist and offered his belly for tickling.

“Yes, yes. I see you, bad cat.” Agathe decided to ignore him.
She tried to make her omelette last but, after four quick forkfuls, it was gone. “It’s going to take me longer to wash up than it did to eat. You know,” she said, “it’s a marvel to me that I never found myself in the
Dottian
. The scandal! But then, that’s not what Mrs. Oktar thought, is it, little cat? I didn’t tell you I’d met Mrs. Oktar, did I? She was asking for you.”

Then, because she wasn’t in the mood to get up and go to the sink, Agathe turned the page and, in just the way that she would have heard her name spoken across the babble of a party, she saw the words “Hektor Stopak” in the middle of a grey page of print. It was there, inside a black box with “Round the Courts” in big letters at the top and a silly picture of a set of scales at one side.

“Oh, God! Oh, Walpurnia! Oh, Hektor, no!” Agathe slapped a hand down flat over the page and folded the paper shut and then, when Hektor’s name and whatever he had done were safely hidden away, she drew her hand out again.

At her feet, Achilles was bunching himself for a spring into her lap. He danced about, shifting his paws a shade forward, a whisper left, judging just the right angle for a leap through the narrow gap under the table, changed his mind and, instead, stood with his paws on her knees, like a baby demanding to be lifted.

Agathe laid him over her shoulder like a stole, stroking the purrs out of him as she stared blankly at the
Evening Dottian
with its front-page advert for the winter sale at Braun’s and, inside, tales of abandoned furniture on fire and sauerkraut and something worse. She sat like that for a time, staring ahead at nothing while Achilles, eyes closed and smiling in an ecstasy of relaxation, lay draped over her shoulder until, at seven thirty, the mechanism of the alarm clock ticking on the window sill fell into place with a sharp click. “Time’s getting on,” she said and she stood up to wash the dishes.

While the kettle boiled and Achilles paced about looking huffy and offended, Agathe counted out the change left in her purse. There wasn’t much—tram fare into work tomorrow and that was about all—certainly not enough for a trip to The Golden Angel and back as well.

“I won’t go,” said Agathe. “I have to go. I said I’d go. I promised.”

She tipped the money out on to the draining board and started to count, flicking the coins off the counter and into her palm. There was enough for two tram fares.

“Go there, come back, walk to work? Walk there, tram back, tram to work? Go there, walk back?”

The kettle was boiling. Agathe gathered up the coins and put them back in her purse. “Hektor’s bound to have some money left. He can’t have spent it all.”

She washed the dishes. She dried the dishes. She put them away in the cupboard without even once looking at the newspaper on the table.

She rolled down the sleeves of her blouse and buttoned them and smoothed down her skirt and checked her hair in the mirror and then there was nothing to do until her meeting with Mamma Cesare—and that was a couple of hours away. Nothing to do but read the paper. Nothing.

Agathe went and sat on the bed. She could see the paper, lying, closed, in the middle of the table. She lay down and looked at the marks on the ceiling again. She sat up. The newspaper was still there. She went back and sat at the table again, not touching the paper, hands flat on either side of it, just looking at it. She looked at it for quite a while and then she clapped her hands together and screwed the paper into a ball. The noise of it startled poor Achilles who broke off from licking his bottom and looked round the room with a surprised expression.

“Right, that’s it! I can’t stay here. Walk. Come on, Achilles, we’re going out.” And, before the alarm clock had ticked many more ticks, she had put on her coat and hurried Achilles out to the street. But, before the alarm clock had ticked even another ten ticks, she had come back to snatch the balled-up newspaper from the table.

There was a secret in it, something Hektor did not want her to know about, something he was ashamed and heartbroken about and so, Agathe decided, he must never know that she had even
bought a paper. It didn’t matter that she had refused to read it—who would believe that? Hektor must simply never know. Walking along Canal Street, Agathe wandered close to the railings and let the paper fall into the water. She saw it in the weak light of the street lamps, floating white against the black of the canal and then slowly unfolding like a rose and spreading and collapsing until it sank.

Agathe walked on. She was pleased with herself. She was proud of her resolve. She had made a decision not to pry and she had stuck to it. And she allowed herself a little “holier-than-thou” glow too. Hektor had done a bad thing. She forgave him. Worse, he had tried to deceive her about it. She forgave him. In fact, to protect him and love him the better, she would deceive him and pretend that she had been deceived. Poor Agathe, how little she knew about lies.

T WOULD BE TOO TIRESOME TO WALK ALL THE
way into town with Agathe, too painful to watch her lingering outside The Three Crowns, talking kindly to the cold children told to “wait there for ten minutes,” listening for the sound of Hektor’s voice at the window, standing with a hand on the door, hesitating and hurrying away when it swung suddenly open. Too painful. Never mind that she crossed the road before she got to Aleksander Street. Too private. Don’t linger there on Green Bridge as she stands watching the river passing, lumps of black water throwing back random sparkles from the street lights. Too cold. Try not to notice as she throws a glance up at the warm light of the Oktars’ flat on the corner. That’s her business.

Don’t pester her as she walks along Cathedral Avenue, going the long way to town, from street lamp glow to shadow to street lamp glow. She has her own thoughts and don’t intrude when she climbs the stairs up to the cathedral, to stand for a few minutes outside the doors that are locked against her. If she has something to say, it is not for you to hear. Why not walk ahead a little? Wait for her down Castle Street, outside The Golden Angel.

Now, nobody could say that Agathe had hurried to her appointment with Mamma Cesare but, when she arrived, it was barely nine o’clock and she was already cold. She put a hand on the bright, polished handle of the door—so different from the door of The Three Crowns—and pushed into a warm world of light and quiet and steam and almonds and coffee.

It was still busy with couples sharing a late supper after a visit
to the Opera House and kids out to impress their new girlfriends with espresso coffees and cigarettes and single men with frayed shirt cuffs who would rather pay for someone else to cook a risotto than risk burning down their own kitchens, but Agathe found an empty table in the corner, far away from the big bay window and she waited there, quietly, with her gloves laid out flat on the table in front of her until Mamma Cesare came over.

“You’re early,” she said and not in a welcoming way.

“I’m sorry. Does it matter? I’ve nothing else to do. I thought I’d just wait.”

“What would you like?” Mamma Cesare asked.

“Thank you. Just a coffee would be lovely.”

“I come back. But we stay open till ten. You want maybe the paper to read?”

“No!” It came out a little more urgently than Agathe had meant. “No. Thank you. Just the coffee is fine.”

Mamma Cesare went to the coffee organ and pulled some levers and gushed some steam and squirted some hot water and rattled an old tin jug and returned to Agathe’s table with a beautiful, quivering, puffy cappuccino—a cumulonimbus of a coffee—but this time with no chocolate in the saucer.

Mamma Cesare dug into the pocket of her apron, pulled out a little notebook with a leaf of carbon paper tucked under the top sheet and wrote out a bill.

“Oh,” said Agathe, “I didn’t bring any money.”

Mamma Cesare made gimlet eyes and picked up the bill again. “You are guest. Is no charge for guests.”

But Agathe noticed, when the old lady went back to the till, she jammed the bill down on a copper spike and dropped a few coins in the cash drawer.

Agathe knew how to make a cup of coffee last an hour. She looked up at the clock hanging high on the back wall behind the counter and she promised herself one sip every four minutes. Between times she would watch the people in the cafe, make up stories about them, imagine their lives, what they did when
they weren’t watching a lonely evening drip away in The Golden Angel.

It was a game she had played before but somehow, tonight, she could find only sad stories to tell. That man sitting alone had been coming to The Golden Angel every evening since his wife passed away. That woman had decided to treat herself to a night out and, tomorrow, she would go to the Post Office on Commerz Plaz and ask again why there was no letter from her husband telling her to join him in America. That couple holding hands was married—but not to each other—and tonight they would part for the last time and forever.

After a dozen sips Agathe had managed to make herself miserable and then, with ten minutes to go until closing time, the hands of the clock stuttered into place and, like the mechanical apostles up on the tower of my cathedral, the waiters of The Golden Angel glided into action. One stepped briskly to the door, shot the bolts and produced a large brass key which he turned in the lock with a noise like a pistol. The customers looked up from their coffee cups and saw him standing there, barring the door against latecomers, ready to show them out. And, before they had time to feel offended, ashtrays were vanished from their tables, picked-over plates were cleared away with a curt “Finished, sir?” that didn’t really require a question mark and tablecloths were brushed decisively. It was an expert operation—efficient, proficient, practised and just a pencil-moustache width this side of actual rudeness. The customers started to leave—the lonely widower, the star-crossed lovers, the deserted wife. As she stood at the door, tying a scarf over her head, Mamma Cesare called out to her, “Tomorrow, that letter comes. You see. Tomorrow.”