The Good Mayor (5 page)

Mamma Cesare rocked her way from hip to hip down the passage behind the counter and stopped in front of Agathe. From down there, on the floorboards she had polished with nearly fifty years of feet, Mamma Cesare looked up at Agathe balanced on her high stool and smiled like a shark. “Voddayavont?”

“Coffee, please. And a Danish pastry.”

“Have the coffee. The Danish you don’t need.”

Agathe bristled. “I’d still like one. Coffee and a Danish pastry, please.”

“Just the coffee.”

“Look, who’s the customer here? The customer is always right.”

“Not when she’s wrong,” said Mamma.

“Do you talk to all your customers like this?”

At the other end of the counter, Cesare was starting to move. He may even have cleared his throat but Mamma held up a hand and he stopped.

“The customers I talk to like this are the customers that need talked to like this. You don’t need the Danish. Danish will make you old. Don’t let him make you old. You’re not old.”

Agathe slumped on her stool. “Just coffee,” she said.

Getting the coffee took some time. Mamma Cesare had to shuffle back to the coffee organ and pour milk into a tin jug and grind her special mix of blue-black beans and coax steamy whistles from the pipes and flip levers and push buttons and build a crescendo of cream into a swelling finale that frothed in the cup.

She carried it back to Agathe and, reaching up, placed it carefully on the counter.

“Coffee,” she said. “No Danish.” Then Mamma Cesare gently turned the saucer. There, at one side, there was a mouth-sized block of chocolate—two layers, white on the bottom and bitter-dark on top, stamped with the image of a tiny coffee cup. “No Danish.”

“How did you know?” Agathe asked.

“Sometimes I know. Sometimes I see things. Sometimes people tell me things.”

Agathe was embarrassed. “What people? Who knows? Who else knows my business?”

Mamma Cesare gave her hand a reassuring pat. “Not these people. Just people I know. They come here, they talk to me sometimes. Drink your coffee. Let’s talk.”

Agathe took a sip of coffee and looked deep into her cup. “I don’t know what to talk about,” she said.

“How about him?” Mamma Cesare nodded towards the door where a tall man stood at a high table built round an ornate iron pillar. “That’s Mayor Tibo Krovic.”

“I know,” said Agathe. “I work for him. Didn’t the voices tell you that?”

Mamma Cesare harrumphed a little but pretended not to notice. “Every morning, Good Mayor Krovic, he comes in here and stands at that same table. Every morning, he orders a strong Viennese coffee with plenty of figs, drinks it, sucks one mint out of the fresh bag he brings every day and leaves the rest of the bag on the table. Every morning. Always the same, regular as the Town Hall clock. And he does this why? He does this because he is absent-minded and forgetful? No! Not Good Mayor Tibo Krovic. A man can run a town like Dot who is absent-minded and forgetful? No. He does this because he knows I like mints and, if he came in here every day and gave me a bagful, I would have to turn them away. Politely, of course, but it would still very likely cause offence and I would lose a good customer and he would lose a place to drink good coffee. Clever Good Mayor Krovic.”

“He’s a very nice man,” said Agathe. “I like working for him.”

“A nice man—pah! Eat some chocolate.”

Agathe lifted the block between two dainty fingers. She felt it melt a bit under the heat of her skin and she wanted to eat it all in one lump but, instead, she bit it carefully in two and put the other half back in the saucer. A few tiny crumbs stuck to her lipstick. She flicked them away with the tip of a kitten tongue. Men looked. It took ages.

“All I’m telling you,” said Mamma Cesare, “is that you need a man. I know, I know—you look at me and you think I don’t know. I know. This one,” she gestured back along the counter at Cesare standing like a black statue, “where do you think he came from? And all I’m telling you is, when you need a man, make sure it’s a good one. Anybody can get the bad ones. The bad ones there are a lot of. The good ones are harder.”

Agathe almost laughed. “Mayor Krovic is my boss. He’s not interested in me—and I’m not interested in him. I’m a respectable married woman.”

“Who sleeps alone. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Agathe looked into her cup again. “No, you’re not wrong.”

“Coffee, chocolate. Drink, eat.”

Agathe obeyed like a schoolgirl.

“I’m not telling you to jump into bed with Tibo Krovic. But the time is coming, my girl, and you could do a lot worse, a lot worse. Finish your coffee.”

Agathe gulped it down. It left her with a frothy white moustache.

“Now turn the cup over, spin it three times and give it back to me. Use the saucer. Don’t touch the cup any more.”

Now it was Agathe’s turn to look disapproving. “You’re making fun of me,” she said. “You can’t read my fortune in a coffee cup. Nobody reads coffee cups. It’s tea leaves. People read tea leaves.”

“Just give me the cup!” said Mamma Cesare. “Tea leaves, coffee cups, it doesn’t matter. In the old country, I am strega from long line of strega. If I tell you I can read the future in your bath water, you should listen.” Mamma Cesare turned the cup over and looked closely at the milky patches inside. “Huh, like I thought. Nothing. I knew it.”

“Don’t say that. I must have some future. Don’t say ‘nothing.’ Tell me what you see! Tell me.”

Mamma Cesare made an impatient noise in her throat. “I see you are making a journey over water to meet the love of your life, I see you are coming back here to talk to me at ten o’clock tonight and I see you are going to be late for work.”

Agathe sat up straight on her stool and looked anxiously at her watch. The high table by the pillar was empty except for an almost-full bag of mints, and the big double doors were closing quietly. “I have to go,” she said. “I’ll be late for work.” She got down awkwardly from the stool and her dress rode up improperly over her thigh.

“Ten o’clock,” said Mamma Cesare. “There’s something I want to show you. Now run.”

“For goodness’ sake, I can’t come back at ten. It’s late.”

“Ten o’clock. Pay for the coffee then. I won’t wait.”

Agathe banged the door on the way out and hurried into Castle Street.

Outside, the sun was still shining brightly. Agathe stopped in front of the big curved window of The Golden Angel, put on her gloves and checked her reflection in the glass.

Mamma Cesare waved at her from behind the counter, a tuberous hand appearing above the mahogany, like the last glimpse of a drowning sailor about to vanish beneath the waves. Everything was neat, everything was straight, Agathe was ready for work but she would have to hurry.

Above the noise of the traffic she imagined she could hear machinery starting to whirl up in the towers of the cathedral, weights shifting, chains uncoiling, great metal gears whirring. Agathe hurried down Castle Street without even bothering much to watch herself in the shop windows. By the time she reached Verthun Smitt’s, the big double-fronted ironmonger’s, she could see Mayor Krovic up ahead, just stepping on to White Bridge. Somewhere up on the hill, doors were opening above the cathedral’s great west front, a painted copper apostle with a shiny brass halo was getting ready to roll out on his trolley and a black enamel devil was getting ready to run away for another hour.

Mayor Krovic had crossed the bridge and he was stepping smartly into City Square but Agathe was close behind him, a little out of breath. She hurried on.

An old woman raised her red umbrella—honestly, an umbrella on a day like this—and waved it. “Mayor Krovic, Mayor Krovic, a word please. It’s my grandson’s school.”

And Good Mayor Krovic, because he always stopped to listen to the people of Dot, stopped to listen to the old woman with the red umbrella as the first, deep, bronze-throated stroke of nine o’clock filled City Square and Agathe trotted past towards the Town Hall steps. “Good morning, Mayor Krovic,” she panted and he nodded at her politely. Agathe never even noticed the queue of ducklings quacking in the waters of the Ampersand she had just crossed.

NSIDE THE TOWN HALL, PETER STAVO WAS
clanking away from the bottom of the green marble stairs with his bucket. “I’ve washed that!” he yelled as Agathe ran for her office.

“Sorry, I’ll be careful.” She slipped off her shoes and trotted upstairs. When he came in from the square a moment later, Good Tibo Krovic saw the image of Agathe’s toes was still evaporating from the stone and he sighed.

Halfway along the corridor to his office, Tibo stopped in the middle of the thick blue carpet and looked admiringly at the big picture hanging outside the council chamber—
The Siege of Dot
. And there were Mayor Skolvig and half a dozen friends, holding out in the tower of the old Customs House, still firing at the invaders as they pillaged the town. The graceful stonework of the windows was half shot away, everybody but Skolvig was battered and bandaged and he stood there, in a manly suit of black and a stiff lace ruff, his arm raised in heroic encouragement, urging them on to one more fusillade. Tibo found himself standing in front of the picture as if it was a mirror, raising his arm to mimic Skolvig and, as he posed there, he wondered, “Would I? Could I?” Tibo’s name was already written in gold on the wooden panels that recorded all the mayors of Dot—“Tibo Krovic” gleaming in last place at the end of a long line that ran through Anker Skolvig and back to times before there were surnames to “Vilnus, Utter, Skeg,” men lost at the bottom of a well of history who existed only
as bits of broken seal on scraps of parchment locked in the charter box.

Inside the council chamber, all around the walls and on either side of the stained-glass windows hung portraits of the mayors of Dot—men with magnificent whiskers in respectable, broadcloth suits, fading into the shadowy darkness of treacle-tarry varnish. In the quiet of the empty chamber, Tibo sat for a while in his grand chair and picked out a spot on the opposite wall. “There,” he thought, “I’ll go there, I think.” And, for a moment, he imagined all the councillors’ desks cleared away, the chandeliers lit and the chamber filled with guests drinking to his health before he walked out of the Town Hall for the last time. And what then? There would be time to fix that garden gate but, after that, what?

Tibo pictured himself doddering back into the Town Hall on a cane, just at the hour for morning coffee, and slipping into the councillors’ lounge. He saw himself giving wise advice to a new mayor and a new generation of councillors who met, every week, under his portrait and grew up fed on stories of what Tibo Krovic had done for Dot. He saw their embarrassed smiles. He saw them looking at their watches and recalling urgent meetings as they tried, politely, to get away. “But do call in again at any time,” they would say. “Always a welcome for Tibo Krovic. No. No. Stay and finish your coffee. Help yourself to biscuits.” And the door would bump politely shut and he would be alone.

“That’s years away,” said Tibo sadly and he went back out into the corridor and past
The Siege of Dot
again. In spite of the blood and the gun smoke, Anker Skolvig looked suddenly smug. “You had it easy,” said Tibo and he opened the door to his office.

Agathe was already at work on the morning post when he arrived and he smiled at her as he walked past her desk and on into the inner office. He couldn’t help it. He’d tried but everything about her just thrilled him—the way she was holding that envelope, her sharp, efficient wielding of the paperknife, the dainty way she dropped the “special” stamps into that old jam jar on her desk, the tip of her tongue held in the corner of her mouth, her
eyelids opening and closing, the smell of her, her smile. “Good morning again, Mayor Krovic,” said Agathe.

“Hello, Mrs. Stopak. Sorry I’m late.” And the lush municipal carpet felt as queasy as molasses under Tibo’s feet as he covered the last few paces to his desk. She was watching him. She knew. She could see how he felt. He knew it. But, when Tibo looked back from his doorway, Agathe hadn’t even moved in her chair. She sliced through the last envelope, removed the folded letter inside and added it to her pile. Without so much as turning round, she called, “I’ll bring the post in shortly. Would you like another coffee?”

Tibo put his jacket on a wooden hanger and hooked it over the hat stand in the corner of his room. “I’ve just had one, thank you,” he answered. And then,
“Another
coffee? How did you know?”

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, took out his pen and sat at the desk. From the other side of the room I looked down at him like a motherly Santa Claus suspended on the town coat of arms.

“Much help you are,” he told me angrily.

Agathe overheard him from the door. “Did you say something?”

“No, I was just talking to myself,” said Tibo. “It’s old age catching up with me.”