The Good Mayor (37 page)

What was so wonderful about lifting the ghost of a heavy weight and, anyway, where would the ghost of barbells come from? Or the ghost of Granny’s moustache? The thought of it was so ridiculous that she burst out laughing again but she stopped when the tram turned along Ampersand Avenue and there, coming out of The Three Crowns, she saw Hektor. He was drunk, shambling like an ape with his hands in his pockets, almost bent double to the pavement as he waltzed from wall to gutter and back again. Agathe looked at him with horror and disgust, just as she would have looked at any shabby drunk but then she remembered that she loved him and how ashamed he was for whatever it was that he had done and she remembered how it felt to kiss him and she felt sorry for him. Poor Hektor.

Agathe hurried from the tram at Foundry Street and ran, clippity-clip, through the tunnel, over the cobbles, down Canal
Street and back to the flat. She lay in bed against the wall when Hektor came in, plump and pale and feigning sleep, while he blundered round as only a drunk trying to be silent can.

Even when he knocked over the chair, she pretended not to notice and, when he threw back the covers and came to bed like a falling tree and passed out on his back, Agathe only waited for a moment to tuck the blankets around him and wrap a leg over him and kiss him. The bristles round his mouth had a familiar prickle about them.

“My granny had a moustache,” she said and she kissed him again and fell asleep.

She was still there, tangled in him, legs and arms jumbled together as if they had gone to sleep in a paupers’ grave, when the alarm clock went off.

Agathe rolled to the floor. Hektor did not stir. She washed and dressed and, when she returned, he had curled into the empty warmth she had left behind, his body filling the shadow of hers pressed in the mattress.

There was nothing to eat, no breakfast to make, nothing to do but go to work, but she needed money and the only money was in Hektor’s trousers. He had managed to fling them over the hook on the back of the door before he went to bed and, when Agathe reached stealthily into the pockets, the heavy buckle of his belt rattled against the wood.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Shhhhh. Go back to sleep.”

But he didn’t go back to sleep. He half sat up in bed, looking angry and sick. “Are you going through my pockets?”

“No. I’m sorry. I just need some money for the tram. I have to go to work.”

“Get your own bloedig money.”

“What?”

“You don’t go through my pockets. You don’t do that to a man. Have a bit of respect.”

Now she was getting angry. Now she was beginning to feel a little
afraid so she calmed herself. “Hektor, I’m not going through your pockets. I just need the tram fare.”

“I don’t have it.”

“But I gave you all my money yesterday.”

“Well, it’s gone and you’re going to have to get some more. A lot more.”

There was a dark edge in his voice now, enough to make her worry about how she answered him. “I don’t understand,” she said.

Hektor rolled down into the bed again, turned away from her so the curl of his lip was magnified through his whole body. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand,” he mocked her in a stupid, whiny singsong. “Look, I’ll make this so simple even you can get it.”

He threw back the covers and walked towards her.

Even yet, months after the first time, Agathe felt something gush through her when she saw him move that way but, this time, it was different and she found herself shrinking back into the corner by the sink as he drew near, flinching as his hand shot out past her head to grab his trousers from the hook.

Hektor’s pockets were sagging and swollen with loose change after a night in The Three Crowns. He jabbed an angry fist and brought up a handful of coins and forced them on her. “Here, take it! Want more?” And he did the same again so that Agathe was left standing there with money spilling out of her fingers and bouncing on to the floor.

She cradled her hands over the table and put the money down in a rough heap. She said, “Hektor, just enough for the tram—that’s all I need.” And she began picking a few coins out.

“Well, I need more. I need money for paints and canvas and a man’s got to be able to buy his mates a beer or is that not allowed any more or something?”

“No, Hektor. It’s allowed. Of course it’s allowed.”

“Right, then.”

He was still standing in front of the door, naked, holding his trousers in his hand and Agathe would have stayed all day waiting by the table rather than try to push past him and go.

Finally, after a few moments of silence, he put his trousers on.

“I’d better go,” she said.

“Yes.” She imagined pages of embarrassed apology in that one word—as if he had come to his senses after a drunken party burdened with hazy memory of some shameful incident. He stood aside and even opened the door for her, looking at the floor like a little boy standing in the naughty corner.

Agathe picked up her coat and bag and hurried past him.

“Wait a minute!”

Her heart sank.

“Don’t I get a kiss?”

She turned back. “’Course you get a kiss.” She kissed him.

“A proper kiss.”

She kissed him again, right there on the doorstep and he tasted of bile and dry morning-mouth and unbrushed teeth and he smelled of beer and old cigarettes and sweat and man and she wanted more and more of him until he had to push her off and say, “Go. Go to work or come back to bed.”

“Work,” she said. “Money for paints.”

All the way to work, running up Canal Street, waiting at the tram stop, jostling along Ampersand Avenue on the top deck, Agathe had the taste of him in her mouth. She searched it out on the tip of her tongue, tracing every fragment of it and wondering what it was that made her afraid of Hektor and yet more afraid to pull away. She had never been afraid of Stopak—not once in all those years—and she could think of nothing about Mayor Tibo Krovic that would ever make her frightened. But Hektor did. There was something. Maybe because he was a man, a real man, a man’s man, the kind of man she’d never known before. But such a boy too. A little boy ashamed to tell her the truth about what he had done and why he needed the money. “Silly boy,” she thought. She would pay his fines and be glad to do it and he need never even say, “Thank you.” Just knowing—that would be her reward.

Agathe was smiling when she stepped off the tram and walked into the Town Hall. The morning mail was waiting on her desk ready for sorting—a heap of ordinary-looking letters for Mayor
Krovic, a grey cardboard file from the Town Clerk, a couple of tender documents to do with roof repairs at the abattoir and, underneath it all, placed in the middle of her desk before the mail boy arrived, a sheet of paper with the Mayor’s handwriting. It said, “There is a note on the door of The Golden Angel saying ‘Closed due to bereavement.’ Please find out what’s happened and if there is anything we can do.” And it was signed “K.”

HREE YEARS HAVE CHANGED A LOT OF
things in The Golden Angel. The little wedding photo in its finger-worn frame, the one that used to stand on Mamma Cesare’s dressing table, hangs now in a place of honour in the parlour. And above it is a larger one in an ornate frame of gold showing a middle-aged man with suspiciously black hair and a dark-eyed woman in a jelly mould of a dress. It is Cesare and Maria, his much younger wife who feeds him pasta every day and tells him every night that she likes Dot, even if it is cold and far from the old country.

Maria has not come alone. There is little Cesare now—he can almost climb out of his cot already, which is good since little Maria will be needing it when she arrives soon. And there are the “uncles,” Luigi and Beppo, Maria’s brothers, who looked down a dried-out well on a two-goat farm and decided that waiting tables in their new brother-in-law’s faraway cafe might not be such a bad thing.

Cesare was astonished at how quickly his reputation as a millionaire businessman had spread in the old country but, he reasoned, family was family and, if it made Maria happy, it would make him happy.

It made him miserable. Luigi and Beppo hated each other and they were fiery—not at all the sort of men Cesare would have hired to stand like Swiss Guards around the Vatican of his cafe. They jabbered at each other from one side of the room to the other and no amount of eyebrow flashing from Cesare could persuade them to stop. Sometimes—thank God Mamma hadn’t lived to see it—
he had been forced to step out from behind the coffee organ and speak to them—actually speak to them—before they would shut up. But it never lasted. Before long, they were hissing and spitting like cats or jabbing fingers and jutting chins and biting thumbs in vile gestures which, happily, meant nothing to the quiet, untravelled customers of Dot.

“This won’t do,” he told Maria.

“Put one of them in the kitchen with me. Tell them it’s a promotion. That’ll sort it out.” And she kissed him.

So, first thing next morning, Cesare tapped Luigi on the shoulder and said, “Good news—you’re being promoted. Report to Maria in the kitchen. There’s no pay rise.”

But it was a mistake. Maria had always liked Luigi better and Beppo knew it. From the time they were little children, when Beppo went out to catch lizards or to watch the men killing a pig or to throw stones at little birds, Luigi was always at home with Maria, making dolls out of a bit of knotted cloth or picking flowers in the orchard and giggling. Now Beppo saw this imagined promotion as another rejection, just one more chance for the two of them to huddle together in the kitchen and talk about him.

Beppo fumed. He started to take a perverse delight in ordering the wrong things from the kitchen only to bring them back and say, “They changed their minds,” or, “They say the minestrone tastes like sewage. Luigi must have made it.” And then there would be another explosion of babbling and a crashing of plates and a banging of shutters.

“This can’t go on,” said Cesare. “Our beautiful home has turned into a battlefield.”

But Maria just kissed him some more and said, “They are brothers. It’ll sort itself out.”

She didn’t help. She worked hard on the menu and when, one day, she invented a new pizza, she called it “Pizza Luigi.”

“What about me?” Beppo asked. “When are you going to make a Pizza Beppo?”

“I will, I will,” Maria said, “just as soon as I get enough arse-holes for the topping!”

That cost The Golden Angel another cup and half a dozen plates.

“Take them out for a drink,” Maria advised. “If they could just sit down over a few beers, they could sort this out.”

Beppo was eager to go, even if it meant cutting into his own, private drinking time but Luigi never would. Every night after work, he hung up his apron and hurried back to the little flat he shared with Zoltan, a whey-faced waiter with a thick moustache who looked out at the world from beneath a long lick of dark hair. They never invited anybody round. They never went out.

Cesare wondered what they found to do with their time.

“They play mummies and daddies,” Beppo snorted and Maria smashed another cup on the wall behind his head.

“Many a true word,” Cesare thought.

And it wasn’t very many days afterwards that he came in to the cafe and found Zoltan slouched at a corner table with the mop bucket steaming, unused beside him.

“What’s wrong with you?” Cesare said.

“I got a letter. My parents are coming on a visit.”

“Why is this a bad thing and why does it stop you mopping my floors?”

Zoltan stood up and leaned on the mop. “My parents hate me.”

“And you’re upset because it’s your job to hate them, is that it?”

“They hate me because I wrote home and told them I was living with a girl. Now they are coming to meet her.”

“And you’ll look foolish because there’s no girl. Serves you right. Why on earth would you tell them such a stupid, cruel lie?”

“So I wouldn’t have to tell them something even worse,” said Zoltan and he slopped the mop on the floor and began to scrub.

“Get on with your work,” Cesare said. He went and stood by the coffee organ and pretended that he hadn’t understood.

But there was no pretending when the door swung open a few minutes later and Luigi walked in. To be fair, he looked wonderful and Cesare found himself watching, swivel-eyed, as this dark-eyed
beauty, all curls and heels, swayed into the cafe but, when she spoke—“I am Louisa and I’ll be working here from now on.”—Cesare gaped in astonishment. In fact, he was so astonished that he never even moved from his spot by the coffee organ and “Louisa” walked on, through to the kitchen, with no more than a wave at the smiling Zoltan.

The pigeons on the cathedral dome rose up in a cloud when they heard Maria’s scream and she came running from the kitchen, her apron thrown up over her face, crashing blindly into the tables and howling as she went.