The Good Mayor (7 page)

Tibo heard the slap. Tibo saw her fall.

It was all a mistake. The neighbours got excited about nothing. Stoki was a good man, a good husband.

Tibo saw a little boy, standing with his fists raised, tears streaming down his face and a father’s giant fist beating him aside. It was all such a long time ago. That was what he must try to remember. All such a long time ago. He was not a little boy any more.

“Mr. Guillaume, have you any questions?”

“No questions, Your Honour. I would only invite you to rule in this case and excuse my client from the court.”

Tibo laid his pen down on the notebook in front of him and pinched the bridge of his nose between tired fingers for a moment before he spoke. “Stand up, please, Mr. Stoki.”

The little man stood up in the dock and shot his cuffs confidently.

“Mr. Stoki, it is my duty to consider all the evidence laid before this court, decide who is telling the truth and how much of the truth they are telling and come to a decision. Nobody tells all of the truth, no matter what they promise when they come here. I have to separate the wheat from the chaff. Having listened carefully to the testimony of your wife, I have come to the decision that she is as black a liar as I have ever heard and that you are as guilty as any man can be. The sentence of this court is one of thirty days’ imprisonment.”

Before Tibo’s gavel fell, Yemko Guillaume was already gripping the edge of the desk and struggling to his feet. “Your Honour,” he whistled, “this is the most astonishing miscarriage I have experienced in all my years of practice in the courts. Need I remind Your Honour that you are obliged to try the case on the evidence heard and only on the evidence heard—not what you think the opposite of that might be?”

Tibo looked bored. “That’s true. But I am the master in this court and, if you want to appeal my decision, you can always ask the superior judge.” He turned to the clerk. “Who’s on the circuit at the moment?”

“It’s Judge Gustav,” said the clerk.

“Judge Gustav,” Tibo told Guillaume. “And isn’t he in Umlaut just now?”

“Yes, sir,” said the clerk.

“Yes, sir,” said Tibo. “On that big murder case?”

“Yes, sir,” said the clerk.

“Yes, sir,” said Tibo. “But he should be free in about a week?”

“Yes, sir,” said the clerk.

“Yes, sir,” said Tibo. “So there you have it, Mr. Guillaume. Judge Gustav should be here in about a week and I’m sure he’ll take a very dim view of my decision and free your client. Until then, he goes to jail. Constable, take him down!”

Guillaume’s giant belly was heaving. His face was turning blue with fury. “You’ll be removed from the bench for this—for good!”

“Mr. Guillaume, I’m almost sure you are right and, if you are, I’ll find myself with a lot more free afternoons, won’t I? But that won’t be for another week and, until then, that little man,” he stabbed furiously towards the dock with his pen, “will be safely locked up.” Tibo heard the blood singing in his ears. He had to fight against the urge to shout.

He kept his eyes fixed on Guillaume’s fat face and said, “Mrs. Stoki, you have heard what has been said. Your husband is going to jail for seven days. If you are still in the house by the time he comes home again, then, God help you, you deserve all you get. This court is adjourned.”

The first chime of the cathedral’s eleven o’clock bell was lost in the blow of Tibo’s gavel but, down in the town, on the banks of the Ampersand, along the canal, down at the docks, in the municipal offices that stood to attention round City Square, the bell called Dot to coffee.

Ladies shopping in Castle Street suddenly looked up and wondered, “The Golden Angel—could we risk a pastry?” In Braun’s department store, the corsetry counter emptied, perfumery was abandoned, millinery was a desert and the coffee room on the top floor, where you can look across the street, eye to eye with a stone Walpurnia over the huge panelled door of the Ampersand Banking Company, became a forest of silver-plated cake stands, endlessly repeated in mirrored walls that would have done justice to Versailles.

In the mayor’s office, Agathe put the coffee pot on the stove, waited a little, poured out two dark cups and went carefully down the back stairs to Peter Stavo’s glass-fronted office. He saw she was sad. He said nothing. She said nothing. He ate two ginger biscuits and offered her the packet. She refused them so he ate the two she could have had. They finished their coffees and Agathe left. “Poor girl,” said Peter, as he picked up his crossword.

Up at the courthouse, Tibo was in the magistrate’s robing room splashing water on his face and saying quietly, “It was a long time ago. All a long time ago.” The coffee that his clerk had brought him cooled on the desk.

An hour later, when the bells chimed again, Agathe began work on the second post of the day. As she worked, she looked at the spot on her in-tray where the scarlet box from Braun’s had sat only a day before. She stopped thinking about it. She worked harder.

And then it was one. A single, basso profundo bong sang out across the town and sent a circling swirl of pigeons floating over the Bishop’s Palace. Lunch. Tibo rose from the bench. The doors of the court were slammed shut and were locked, briskly, from the inside.

“Are you engaged for lunch, Mr. Mayor?” asked Yemko Guillaume.

Tibo meant to say something about sandwiches in his room but he was so astonished that no words came out.

“In that case, please join me. My treat. My cab is waiting. My cab is always waiting.” Guillaume heaved himself out of the court’s side door and into the waiting cab with Good Mayor Krovic shuffling behind like a tug nosing a great battleship out of harbour. Guillaume waved a huge hand vaguely. “Please sit in front, Mr. Mayor. I like to spread myself about a bit,” he wheezed. “The driver knows where to go. I always eat at The Green Monkey. I trust that will suit.” And, seemingly exhausted by the effort of it all, he slumped into his two seats like a collapsing soufflé and said nothing more.

As Tibo left the court with Yemko Guillaume, Agathe was crossing City Square for the baker’s shop on the corner. Already a line of clerks and shop girls was queuing for sandwiches and cakes and freshly baked pies, chatting about the day, boasting about the night before, laughing. Agathe made a tight little mouth and refused to listen.

Eventually, after a long wait that ate into her lunch hour, Agathe reached the front of the queue and bought a cheese roll and an apple. “This is daylight robbery,” she thought as she examined her change.

At The Green Monkey, Yemko Guillaume settled himself on a gigantic chaise longue in the corner of the room as two waiters in
white uniforms with Prussian collars and gilded buttons wheeled a table into place against his intimidating paunch. The maître d’ looked on approvingly. The celebrated lawyer Yemko Guillaume
and
His Honour Mayor Tibo Krovic lunching together here, in his establishment … Too, too perfect.

“No starter,” said Yemko faintly. “Today, I would like to eat … I would like to eat … let me see …” His eyes rolled heavenwards and lingered on the pink-thighed nymphs gambolling explicitly on the painted ceiling. “I would like to eat something that tastes as good as that. A young gazelle, garrotted under a new moon by Nubian virgins and seethed in its mother’s milk, served with the last bowl of rice from a starving Asian village, sweetened with the cries of an abandoned baby dying of thirst under a pitiless sun. No?” He looked quizzically at the maître d’. “You don’t have that? Then omelette, please. And asparagus. And a glass of water. Mr. Mayor?”

Tibo managed to squeak, “That sounds fine.”

The waiters withdrew, as obsequious as eunuchs.

“I don’t eat much,” said Yemko. “This …” he spread his arms to indicate his vastness, “it’s a glandular disorder.”

“I see,” said Tibo. “I’m very sorry.”

“To hear that I’m ill or because you thought me a gluttonous gourmand?” Everything Yemko said seemed to come with a raised eyebrow attached to the end of it.

Beside the fountain in City Square, Agathe chewed through the last of her stale roll. “I could make a better lunch than this for half the price,” she thought.

Before she went back to work, she hurried up Castle Street to Verthun Smitt’s double-fronted ironmonger’s shop and bought a blue enamelled tin box. “From now on, I bring my own sandwiches,” she said and turned back towards the square.

Just about then, a lopsided cab drew up outside the court and rocked on its springs as Yemko Guillaume extracted himself. “We must part again here,” he said and enveloped Mayor Krovic’s hand in his.

“Why did you ask me for lunch?” asked Tibo.

“Because you were right,” said Guillaume. “That little turd smacks his wife. You must never assume that, simply because I am a lawyer, I have no love for justice. Never confuse justice and the law. Never confuse what is good with what is right. Never assume that what is right must be what is good. You did the right thing. No! See how easy it is? You’ve got me doing it now! You did the good thing. That is why they call you ‘Good’ Tibo Krovic—did you know that? ‘Good Tibo Krovic’—like ‘Alexander the Great’ or ‘Ivan the Terrible.’ It must be almost worth living to have made a name like that. It was a good thing but it was not the right thing. The law is not to be mocked. It’s the only shield the rest of us have to protect us from ‘good’ people. So I will report you to Judge Gustav. I have to do the ‘right’ thing. I have no choice. You’re a dangerous man to have on the bench.”

“I understand,” said Tibo. “Thank you for the omelette.”

The bells of my cathedral struck two. There was only one more case that day. The clerk called, “Hektor Stopak!” and handed the papers to Tibo.

“Stopak,” Tibo wondered, “could this be Stopak, Agathe’s Stopak? Surely there must be other Stopaks?”

Hektor stood in the dock. Quite a tall man, quite a dashing moustache, dark, good looking in a dirty, unkempt kind of way. Young. Too young to be Agathe’s Stopak.

“Mr. Stopak, I see from the charge sheet,” Tibo tapped the papers in front of him with his pen, “that you are accused of quite a serious breach of the peace in The Three Crowns tavern—a lot of shouting and swearing, quite a bit of damaged furniture and one of your fellow customers taken to hospital with a broken nose and a number of other, less serious injuries. I have the medical report here. Are you guilty or not guilty?”

Yemko Guillaume cranked himself to his feet again like a barrage balloon rising on the end of a cable. “I am for Mr. Stopak, Your Honour.”

“And how will your client be pleading?”

“Guilty, Your Honour.”

“Extenuating circumstances?”

“Is Your Honour disposed to hear them?”

“Not overly.”

“Then let me only say that Mr. Stopak is an artist of some considerable promise—a painter. As such, he keeps somewhat,” Yemko paused to attach another raised eyebrow to his sentence, “bohemian company. He is himself of an artistic temperament and his fellow artists share that fiery disposition.”

“I hadn’t realised that The Three Crowns was such a hotbed of artistic endeavour,” said Tibo. “Is it an established school?”

“More of a ‘haunt,’ Your Honour,” said Yemko. “The circumstances of the incident are very much as related on the charge sheet. A discussion amongst brother artists which became heated, drink having been taken …”

“Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,” Tibo interrupted.

“I had not realised that Your Honour was a Latin scholar. Yes, indeed, sir, a familiar story often rehearsed in Your Honour’s court. However, I am happy to inform the court that, this very morning, my client has found employment with his cousin.” Yemko turned with a wheeze and indicated a puffy-faced man with sad eyes, squeezed into white dungarees at the back of the court. “The senior Mr. Stopak is a businessman, a painter and decorator of impeccable character, unknown to the court …”

“Ah, not entirely unknown to the court,” thought Tibo.

“…who is prepared to offer my client full-time employment and a regular income.”

“So he can pay a fine?” said Tibo.

“My client would now be in a position to make some form of redress to the court, yes, Your Honour.”

“Very good. Mr. Stopak, please stand up. In light of the circumstances and your not inconsiderable record, the court will fine you one hundred. The landlord of The Three Crowns says you caused damage worth a hundred and twenty so that’s probably more like sixty and another sixty for the man whose nose you broke.”

“It was already broken,” said Yemko.

“Can we agree on fifty, then? I make that two hundred and ten.”

“At ten a week, Your Honour.”

“No, Mr. Guillaume, I rather think thirty a week, now that your client has a decent job.” And he leaned forward from the bench to warn, “Miss a week, Mr. Stopak, and you’ll be painting the inside of a cell.”

That was the business of the day.

T WAS NEARLY THREE O’CLOCK BY THE TIME
Tibo had finished the paperwork and strolled back through town to his office in City Square. Sandor the errand boy had already delivered the
Evening Dottian
and Agathe handed it to him wordlessly as he passed her desk. Tibo unfolded the paper and sat down at his desk to read. The headline raved: