The Mercury Waltz (33 page)

It was in his office that he met with the captain of the constables, that man in a froth at the release of Rupert Bok, sent away once his head had cleared with only a stiff fine for brawling though
One of my fellows was like to die with a split kidney, and two more are more than half-crippled! The man is a menace, he’s the one ought to be jailed—

You were not directed to arrest him, or bring him to be questioned: only the man Hilaire, and quietly. Which you did not do.

Sir, I brought men aplenty to do the job. It was that Bok who kicked up all the hullabaloo, it was—

Have I your report?

It’s been submitted, sir.

Be assured that I’ll read it,
as he did, to the captain’s later woe; and several more reports read already this morning, annotated and digested before he set off down the stairs with paper and pen, down and down to this hall that smells of old sweat and fear, into a room in a row of rooms where sits the man Stefan Hilaire, still wearing his filthied shirt, stained with blood from a few well-placed blows, and from his torn and swollen ear. Martin Eig considers this man—there in the chair with his hands clasped at his knee, looking up with pleasant interest, as if they were about to trade
bons mots
at a garden party—and “Herr Hilaire,” he says briskly, turning to seat himself, though Hilaire is in the chair he should be using, the one behind the table; never mind. “You know why you are here, in the rooms of inquiry.”

“Of iniquity, did you say?” Istvan’s glance takes in the room as if anew, though he has been cooling his heels there since they took him from the cell at dawn: gray walls, gray floor, the locks upon the door, the chilly draft that blows beneath; the jail rooms are even colder, his shoulder aches abominably. He has slept very little in the past several days, thinking of Rupert: Is he harmed or worse, has he had to run? And what else has passed, what other arrests or disasters, since that afternoon at the Mercury? “For purposes of civic betterment, would be my guess.”

“‘Trespass and gross disorder,’” quoting from a document he sets to the table. “At the competition banquet; I am sure you recall that evening. But before we truly begin,” linking his fingers like a proctor before an examination, “tell me, how did you come to meet Haden St.-Mary?”

“You know him? Why, I had no idea we had fond friends in common, Herr— Forgive me, I’ve forgotten your name,” with that garden-party smile, an insolence that reminds entirely of St.-Mary, this man his master now so “We’ll begin, then, with your name,” says Martin Eig, poising pencil to paper. “You use many, but what is your true one? Where were you born?”

“In a stable, on St. John’s Eve. Or perhaps it was a brothel? I was very young at the time.”

“A brothel? The brothel you owned with—”

“I never owned it.”

“The brothel you worked in—”

“I was a servant of Thespis there, only. Have you ever been in a brothel?”

“I have not. You—”

“Do brothels not entice you? That’s where we differ. Though the whores of the Poppy could have taught you much—not you yourself, of course, but your establishment, of how to treat a man when you want something from him. For one thing, I’d like a larger pisspot. And my earring—a Turkish pearl, I won it from a fellow in Sur-la-Lune, and I’d fucking like it back, if you please.”

“You’ll answer my questions. What is your true name?”

“I have no idea. It was not considered essential knowledge. —Pardon me for saying so,” Istvan’s smile kindly, now, “but truly, as one bachelor to another, you ought not affix such an expression to your face. The ladies never fancy the self-righteous, and in the drawing rooms of the great—”

“You come to the point, now. Yourself and your man, Herr Bok—were you not both employed by Isobel de Metz, as players in her salon?”

“Why don’t you ask the current Mme de Metz?” says Istvan, head to one side; and the kit’s shared guess is right on the mark, for the man’s face curdles, it might cost a blow, but what a sight to see! Though Martin Eig does not strike him, does nothing but stare, in a heavy silence that continues—Istvan, a player, can hold a pause for a very long time, holds his ground until finally Eig must give in and speak first: “It was her husband who invited you to that banquet, was it not?”

“It was not.”

“Then who invited you to perform?”

“No one. We invited ourselves. A fine puppet show is welcome everywhere…. Have I solved your riddle, Monsieur? May I go? I’m truly famished for a glass of good brandy.” Istvan even stands, as if the interview, interrogation, is concluded, turns as if for the door, but “You,” says Martin Eig—lips pinched white at the corners, one can see how he would be dangerous; every man has a brink, and he rides his now—“you do not seem to understand your situation. You have been for many years the tool of titled men, they have used you as a spy, and as a courier, and they have used—Herr Benjamin de Metz has used your man, Rupert Bok, as his whore, and now desires to have him back. In whatever ways you may have served them in their decadence, you have now become entirely superfluous, to Herr de Metz and to society at large, a society to which you add nothing, but only draw from, like a tick on the back of a horse! And you might stay in this room forever, until you were too old to dance around like a fool with a puppet, until you were dead. Does that make clear to you your situation, Hilaire, Dieudonne, whatever your name is? Do you
understand?
”

Istvan says nothing, but past that hooded gaze, his heart expands: “Now desires,” so Rupert is alive; is Rupert here? in another room like this one? In the silence, a fly has somehow entered, or perhaps has been there all along; its dry lethargic buzz sounds very loud. Istvan watches, Eig does not, until the fly lights on the table and—immediately, angrily—Eig destroys it with the flat of his hand and “Why,” says Istvan, “right there is death, Monsieur. It’s everywhere, how should we fear it?”

Eig makes as if to answer, but must swallow first, as if his throat is too dry. Finally “One’s death, like one’s life, must mean something. Death without reason is the fate of the animal.”

“We all are animals.”

“Speak for yourself. I own a soul.”

And Istvan laughs, not mockingly, but with brief and honest humor; he nods to the smear of the fly and “Perhaps he owned one, too. Perhaps he’s gone to heaven, Monsieur Fly, having died a martyr? But Heaven’s more dangerous than Hell, always.”

With spite as honest: “A man like yourself would surely think so.”

“Oh, no doubt I am a bad man. But the devil’s got so small,” scornfully, looking again around the room, the municipal grayness, the well-worn table, the locks installed by a locksmith who did not think to serve the darkness, wanting only money to feed his family, or buy himself a stake at the tables, a man Istvan himself perhaps had gambled with, side by side in some crumbling, lager-splashed den. He remembers the towering fury of Hector Georges, the lipless hunger of Jürgen Vidor; he recalls the calm, empire-building smile of Javier Arrowsmith,
Never fear to use my name if ever it may aid you!
so “Those men you speak of,” says Istvan, arms folded, leaning back on his heels as if to survey Martin Eig from a tremendous distance, a distance growing greater every moment he speaks, “I have carried their messages, yes, I have worked in their shadows, taken their money, but never have I worked
for
them, never been their creature. But you, Monsieur, are the servant of something even less of honor, something that hides behind a desk, something that those men, when they stop to consider—for such men are much abroad in the world, ‘decadent’ or not, never doubt it! Even young Master de Metz, diminished as he may be, he is one of them still—those men, when they think of a man like you, do not think of a man at all. You are less to them than a fucking buttonhook, believe it. I’ve sat at their tables and fucked their daughters and I know,” with a smile, now, only for himself, and for Rupert elsewhere, somewhere in the world. “And what I now suggest you do, Monsieur, is take yourself to one of those men, and tell him that I have in my possession a full cache of documents from Javier Arrowsmith—would you like to note down that name? I can wait—a cache, as I say, of instructive documents, his personal documents, in which many of those men play surprising roles. M. Arrowsmith sent them to me in the thought that I might devise of them, someday, a puppet play; that thought amused him. Go and tell them so, Monsieur, and see how quickly this door will open. Or save us all the trouble and open it yourself, if you possess that authority.”

They stare at each other, the fox, the eel: one is of air, the other of what crawls in the wet and the dark, until “My name,” says Martin Eig, “is in none of those documents,” but it is plain that the name of Arrowsmith means something to him, perhaps because he does not know it at all. He rises, then, he leaves the room, he locks the door; the fly continues to be dead. When his footsteps can no longer be heard, Istvan sits, slumps, in the chair, hand to his face in a moment of overwhelming weariness, as he wishes with an overwhelming need, a child’s need, to be free of all this, himself and Rupert alone on the road, but “‘Only the devil hears wishes,’” he says aloud, as if in the way of a prayer, and composes himself with the paper that Eig has left behind.

Meanwhile Martin Eig ascends to his office in a state of clenched stillness, pen still in hand, to make a brief telephone call and receive a much longer one, to sit at his cathedral desk and write to himself the next in an ongoing series of notes that he will consult throughout the years as a kind of Scripture, his own scripture of names and those names’ linkings, a genealogy of influence and favor, bloodshed, politics, and force. If that notated list and the gray journal of Benjamin de Metz were placed side by side—unlike the small red journal, never again to be opened, never again to be seen—there would emerge sections of great congruence, they would form a combined and comprehensive map of the future, and a memoir worth the reading by the student of history or the devotee of pain. Eventually, jarringly, as if it were that history’s herald, the telephone sounds again.

By the time the door downstairs is unlocked, several hours later, Istvan has constructed of the empty sheets a fine paper chain of manikin figures, all of whom can bow individually or as a group: he presents it as a gift to the nervous broom-bearing boy who opens that door, nodding to that boy as he leaves with the man who has come to claim him: side by side down the hall and up the stairs, past offices and half-closed doors, through the parquet lobby and out to weak sun where a cab sits waiting at the curb. Inside, neither speak; Istvan drinks from a flask, his own flask, the black brandy a soothing benison as “Are you much harmed?” Rupert asks, turning Istvan’s jaw to mark the marks, his own jaw set. “Did that fucking Eig—”

On a sigh, “They took my earring, yeah? I liked that earring. Never mind, we’re almost done. —What of you?”

“They made me pay my way out,” rubbing a moment at his forehead, as though the beating still echoes. “I tried to pay yours, too, but they’d not say where they’d stuck you. Like a fucking game of shells and pebbles! Your lad’s the one who found it out,” detailing then the details of the last several days, Haden’s activities and his own, some useful, some not, until this noon when “She came to see me, that Christobel de Metz, and talked in circles. Now she wants to see you.”

“Is that why I smell lavender? I thought you’d changed your scent, without consulting me.” Capping the emptied flask: “The young Madame—It’s patience we’re playing, then, or is it chess? Either way I’ll be the rook.”

“Chess?” Rupert’s shrug is bleak; he lights a cigar, brief flare in the cab’s closeness, the smell of sulfur and heat. “I’d rather break necks. St.-Mary was urging some fine tricks to get you free—none we could use, but it shows he’s got a head on his shoulders, at least.”

“Oh, the kit’s more subtle than even he can guess. I’ll hope they’re practicing, our issue, as I tasked them?” as the cab rolls into Rottermond Square, as they disembark, Istvan pausing for a moment to take from Rupert the cigar, draw hard, then hand it back, passing through its smoke like a favored son beneath the alley lintel of the Mercury, ragged and jaunty and smiling for the ones waiting inside: Frédéric diligent with the notebook, Haden tracing the table’s wood with his knife, Tilde stitching up a mask, tenth of a doubled dozen, little pointed black dominoes such as an army of imps might wear. Then Haden is leaping to shake his hand, Frédéric frowning for his bloodied shirt, Tilde to stand on tiptoe and salute his stubbled cheek: “‘One ought never get caught,’” quoting to bring the laughter of relief, of rebuoyed spirits, the little troupe gathered back into itself like the fingers of a clever hand.

The woman waiting in the dimness of the house, in her veiled hat and blue diamond earbobs, and gloves of, yes, lavender kid, listens as if to a faraway play the sounds of that reunion, patient for M. Hilaire’s attention, needing no rehearsal for what she has come to say. She even smiles at Istvan emergent to meet her, Haden at his side, as “Well-met,
cher
Madame,” Istvan says. “You’ll excuse my
déshabillé,
I know. And already you know M. St.-Mary,” as he takes his seat beside her like an old and intimate friend, Haden to the row behind, marking the line of her lips, the angle of her chin—Eig’s beloved! Does the lady herself know that, and whatever might she say if she did?—as Istvan listens with care to her entreaty, her hand in gesture to the theatre’s walls, its homey shadows and painted deeps, gaslight and mended curtain as “This place,” she says, “means something to you, and to M. Bok, perhaps a great deal; I understand that, now. But can you not understand how much the other means to my husband? It is the gift of a lifetime, prepared for M. Bok, who has meant so much to him—”

“Yes, I know. Cupid’s sister was quite fond of M. Bok as well.” Before Christobel can parse that startling “Cupid,” as if hearing one’s own name in the mouth of a stranger, Istvan goes on: “We are all quite fond of M. Bok; excepting, perhaps, yourself? though that would be most understandable.” With a sudden and formal coldness: “I’ll not be parted from him again.”