The Good Mayor (40 page)

Inside The Golden Angel, Tibo stood at his usual place at the high table by the door, sipping his usual Viennese coffee with plenty of figs and pretending to read the paper. The envelope itched in his pocket, just as the postcards had done years before. His ears burned with the shame of it but, today of all days, today when he most wished to be invisible and anonymous, there was no peace for Tibo in The Golden Angel. Every waiter in the place brushed past him apologetically where he stood.

Each one in turn wished him, “Good morning, Mayor Krovic,” so he was forced to say, “Good morning,” in return and then, as they flitted soundlessly across the cafe, every waiter he had already greeted would smile and nod again. Tibo folded his paper and buried himself in an article about Dot’s oldest goldfish until the last of his coffee was gone. He looked at his watch. Ten to nine. He took a mint from the bag he had bought at the kiosk by the tram stop and rolled it, stuttering, along his teeth as he laid the envelope on the table in front of him. His fountain pen was loaded with
black ink. He wrote “Mr. Cesare” in a big, angry hand, put the bag of mints on top of the envelope as if to stop it from blowing away, piled his saucer with change and walked out of the cafe.

Tibo made a point of arriving at the office a little before nine every day and Agathe always made it her business to arrive a little late. They had never made the arrangement formal—it was just something they had fallen into. It suited them. It meant fewer painful meetings on the stairs, fewer awkward silences or odd glances that might be taken as resentful or longing or reproachful. It was easier, that’s all. And, knowing that he was in the office first let Tibo perform his silly ritual of listening for her step and rushing to the door and flopping to the carpet and squinting.

So that’s exactly where he was, that’s exactly what he was doing when Agathe came in to work a few minutes later. Poor, good, love-struck Mayor Krovic was lying in his usual place on the carpet, watching Mrs. Stopak’s beautiful pink toes when they did an amazing thing and turned towards him. It took Tibo a second or two to realise what was happening and scramble to his feet. By that time, it was too late and, as the door swung open, it hit him in the side of the face. It made a noise like the time that coal lorry reversed into the statue of Admiral Count Gromyko but Agathe was brisk and unapologetic. “Tibo, stop carrying on like a baby and sit down!” She pointed him at the chair Mr. Cesare had used the day before and watched him as he nursed his jaw and probed for broken teeth with his tongue. “Tibo, I don’t have time for this,” she said.

Mayor Krovic felt his lip beginning to swell outrageously but he managed to say, “That’s the second time you’ve called me ‘Tibo.’”

“I should never have stopped.”

“And the second time you’ve come in here without knocking.”

“I don’t have time to waste on formalities,” she said. “This is urgent. This is an emergency.”

Tibo was suddenly concerned. He stopped rubbing his jaw and said, “Tell me. Whatever it is, tell me and I’ll help.”

So she asked him the question. “This can’t go on,” she said. “You think I don’t know but I know. You think I don’t see but I see. I have to help you finish this.” She took his hand. “So once, Tibo, just once and then never again. To end it. To bring the curtain down.”

Good Mayor Krovic sat there for a long time, not saying anything, looking a bit angry, a little shocked, listening to the thumping pulse in the side of his head until, eventually, Agathe said, “Say something. Talk to me.”

“Get out,” he said. “Get out of my bloedig office right now.”

Agathe stood up quickly. There was something glinting in the corner of Tibo’s eye that she recognised. Hektor had it and, when it showed, Agathe had learned to stay away. She hurried out of the room and back to her desk.

“And shut the bloedig door!” Tibo screamed. It was fortunate that she was already sitting back at her desk and typing furiously when he whispered, “Bitch.”

Tibo said a lot more when Agathe was out of earshot. He got out of the visitors’ chair so angrily that it tipped over and rolled on the floor. He ignored it and fought his way round the desk to his own chair, growling like a bear. He kicked the tin wastepaper basket. He didn’t mean to but it was in the way and it collided against his foot with a noise like a bursting drum so his fury exploded and he kicked it again so it bounced off the wall and again and again until it ricocheted off his shins and made him stop. He fell into his chair and raged some more. “That bitch! That bitch! Dear God, if she came in here again, I’d strangle her with her own stinking knickers. They couldn’t find a bloedig jury to convict! Bloedig little tart! After all this time, just to dangle it in my face like that. That’s what she thinks. She thinks I’m safe. Thinks I’m some bloedig poodle. Pick me up and put me down. Bitch!”

Tibo sat there, gritting his teeth and gripping the arms of his chair so hard his hands hurt. The breath came down his nostrils in hot snorts until, little by little, it slowed and calmed, his jaw worked less furiously, the pain in his hands forced him to loosen
his grip and, quite soon, there was nothing left of his anger but a sore hotness in the back of his throat and a kind of shamefaced hurt.

All across the floor of his office Tibo noticed a trail of torn envelopes and crumpled papers and cedar-scented pencil sharpenings. He decided he had better tidy them up. He looked round for the tin wastepaper basket, picked it up and began to squeeze and haul and punch it back into shape. He found it calming but it was less than successful. Where the bin had been round and smooth and regular, now it was distorted and pineapple-ish. Tibo put it down on the desk. It tilted and rocked. It made him smile. He took it and went down on his hands and knees, pinching up little bits of spice-scented pencil-shavings, tossing in balls of paper with a heartening “clunk.”

And it was when he finished picking rubbish off the floor and stood up, grunting, one hand pressing down hard on his desk to support himself, that Tibo started to wonder about the spell. How long did it take to cast a spell, after all? How long did they take to work? Could it happen in ten minutes? Was there time? The envelope he left for Cesare must have been in his hands within moments. The doors of The Golden Angel would still have been swinging on their hinges when Cesare opened it and, when he saw Agathe’s dark hair nestled inside, he would have known at once what to do. Could such things be done straight away with just a few words, a few mystical passes, or did it need a full moon and an unsuspecting kitten? No, it was suddenly obvious to Tibo, Cesare had cast his love-spell in the time it took to walk down Castle Street and it was starting to work. Agathe was starting to fall in love with him again. She was fighting it but she couldn’t help it. That was the only possible explanation for her stupid, clumsy offer and Tibo generously forgave her. “Poor kid,” he said and he hurried out of his office, calling to her, “It’s all right. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.” But she was gone. He stood for a moment, holding his battered waste bin under his arm and looking at her empty chair until Peter Stavo arrived in the doorway, snapping a pair of pliers like castanets.

“Agathe said to tell you that she’s not well and she’s gone home for the day.” He gave another flick of his pliers. “Mentioned something about a drawing pin that’s been annoying her. I’m supposed to take care of it—and you look as if you could use a new bin, boss.”

F COURSE, AGATHE WAS NOT SICK AND SHE
hadn’t gone home. She left the Town Hall by the back stair, making her excuses at Peter Stavo’s glass booth and she hurried through City Square to Braun’s department store where she sat in the mirrored cafe and ordered coffee for one and cakes for three. They came piled high in a spectacular, silver-plated ziggurat of confectionery, scones on the bottom, sensible slabs of fruit cake in the middle and a ridiculous, impossible fanfare of cream cakes and meringues on top. Agathe ate them all and as she ate, she glared out of the window, across the street at my statue on top of the Ampersand Banking Company and commanded more coffee with wide, rolling waves of the hand.

Agathe abandoned her dainty silver pastry fork. It was too slow. She let it clatter on her plate and she began pulling at the mountain of cakes with her hands and forcing them into her mouth and, all the while, she stared at me, at poor, warty, hairy Walpurnia, unloved Walpurnia, left all alone to stand in all weathers on top of the bank, and cursed me. “You fraud! You phoney! Liar! Cheat!” And then, out loud, she shouted, “Moe aw-hee!” through a mouthful of eclair and waved her empty cup at a passing waitress.

The nice ladies who take their morning coffee at Braun’s were not sorry to see her go and, to tell the truth, Agathe was not sorry to leave. The fit which had seized her had passed. She felt bloated and, when the girl at the cash desk made little, twittery, halfhearted gestures of disgust, fanning her weakly with a paper napkin,
Agathe was ashamed to see a huge blob of cream on her nose, endlessly reflected in the coffee room’s mirrored walls. She wiped it off with the back of her hand, the way the kids in Canal Street wipe their snotty noses, and fled, rattling down the stairs, through haberdashery, through cosmetics and perfumery and out, into the sunny street.

She was hot and breathless and sick. She might have gone home. She might even have enjoyed the sunshine and walked along the Ampersand. She glanced in that direction, thought about it and walked the other way.

Agathe knew enough about sadness to recognise all its shapes and colours. There was a particular kind of sadness waiting in Canal Street, one that she rubbed out every night with heat and shame and sleep but, standing in the street outside Braun’s with the shadow of my statue falling on her like a blessing, she could feel something different. She almost recognised it, like the face of someone she used to know a long time ago, a pleasantly painful kind of melancholy like the tingle of pins and needles that only comes in a limb which is telling us it is not, after all, dead. There was just a glow of it, enough to notice and Agathe wanted more. She wanted to enjoy it for a little longer. She wanted to blow on it without blowing it out. She began to walk. She walked a little faster as she passed City Square, sticking close under the windows of the Town Hall in case Mayor Krovic might be looking out to catch her malingering.

She turned right into Radetzky Street and came out on the corner opposite the Palazz Kinema where they were showing
The Weeping Violin
with Jacob Maurer, and
The Weeping Violin
looked like just the sort of thing to feed the little gnaw of misery she was cradling inside. But the picture was almost over and the next show wasn’t due to start for half an hour so she walked on to the end of George Street and the Municipal Art Gallery and Museum.

Now, Agathe was not much of an art lover, not a regular customer at the Municipal Art Gallery, but she had worked for Tibo Krovic long enough, seen enough minutes of the Arts and Libraries Committee, to know the sort of thing they contained—
repentant harlots about to throw themselves off a midnight bridge; sad children and sympathetic puppies; old ladies waving goodbye from cottage windows—acres and acres of gloomy canvas, the perfect place to wait for the second show at the Palazz.

The uniformed doormen were there to greet her—still in their jobs mostly because the doormen of Umlaut were still in theirs. They smiled and nodded, “Morning, Miss,” one on each side of the double doors and they snapped to attention in perfect time, each reflecting the other in a row of polished brass buttons.

Agathe stepped into the cool shadows of the gallery but she never reached the sad paintings she had come to see. There was a lovely marble statue of a naked lady, lying on her back and making half-hearted efforts to fend off a beautiful, butterfly-winged boy angel. She stood in front of that for a bit, wondering about her own fending-off technique and whether she would bother to use it if ever she woke and found a butterfly-boy hovering over her bed. Agathe wandered casually round the statue and admired him from the rear and decided, no, she probably wouldn’t.

She looked up guiltily and saw, across the hall, the gallery shop and, shining out at her, small and distant but unmistakable, unforgettable, Tibo’s postcard. It drew her. It called her. She looked at it in puzzlement, almost unable to believe that such a thing existed—as if Tibo’s card, her card, the card she had destroyed, had been the only one in the world and this was some miraculous resurrection.

Agathe counted the coins from her purse, took the card in its paper bag and hurried from the gallery, checking her watch as she went.

Along the road at the Palazz there was another shower of coins, rattled into the egg-shaped wooden bowl set in the counter of the box-office and another change from sunshine to shade as she plunged into the deeper darkness of the cinema. A girl with a tray of sweets and cigarettes hung round her neck, carrying a torch shrouded under a red hood, led Agathe down the sloping aisle to a seat in the front stalls. She sat down and looked around. The place was almost empty. Agathe had the whole row to herself. She
slipped her coat off her shoulders and settled in the chair with her handbag on her knee. The postcard was sighing to her. She took it out and slipped it from its paper bag, tipping it forward to look at it in the silver-blue of the flickering newsreel. “More beautiful than this, more …” It was all so long ago yet Agathe found herself smiling. She was warm and tired and replete with cake. Before the main feature started, she was sound asleep.