Voices in the Dark (21 page)

‘Because we need you here, you complete bastard,’ said my mother, and slapped him hard across the face.

Leo gave up abruptly. He went out onto the stairs and lit a cigarette. A cold silence fell over the house. My grandmother tutted incredulously as she gathered up her things to leave. And when I went down to the bathroom that
afternoon, I found Leo in the yard, breaking up firewood with a blunt axe and his bare hands. I watched the shabby gilt doors of a cupboard fly into pieces in the frosted air. ‘We could have sold that,’ I said.

‘It’s worth more like this,’ said Leo.

I stood there watching him destroy the cupboard with a ferocity I had not known he had. He was so far away in his silence that I could think of nothing to say. Jasmine wandered down the stairs with her thumb in her mouth. ‘Anselm, Mama is busy working,’ she murmured. ‘Can we go for a walk?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Get your coat and scarf.’

‘It’s going to snow,’ said Leo, pausing for a moment and glancing at the yellow clouds gathering over the castle. He was out of breath, and sweat was standing out at the edges of his hair.

‘Not yet,’ I said, and closed the door on him. We put on our overcoats, and Jasmine took my mother’s red shawl, and we set out. As we left the back room, my mother kept her head bent stubbornly over the schoolbook she was marking. But her eyes gave her away. Every time Leo struck the cupboard, her eyelashes flickered, as though she was afraid.

Out on the doorstep, the wind cut sharply. Half the shops in the street had closed early today. Saturday used to be a good evening for trade, but since the Imperial Order had taken to roaming the streets, Trader’s Row had grown silent and dismal. The wind only gained in cruelty as it narrowed itself to drive through the street.

‘I would have liked to go and see Michael,’ said Jasmine sadly.

I put my hands in my pockets. ‘Yes.’

‘Anselm, look!’ she said then.

‘What?’

She tugged my sleeve and pointed to the Barones’ window. For the first time in weeks, there were no workmen sawing up planks or sanding down the shop walls. And as we turned to look at it, the lights began to come on, until the whole street in front of the shop was illuminated. The new letters on the window stood out blackly:
J
.
W
.
FORTUNE
,
ESQ
.

People were glancing out of their windows now, but no one came out. We were alone in the windswept street. ‘Look,’ Jasmine said again, pressing her face against the glass. There were no longer any grilles on either of the windows. One of them was taken up with a large painting; in the other was a heap of gold and silver chains worth thousands of crowns, lying there like an invitation to thieves.

‘Can we go in?’ said Jasmine.

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘It’s open.’ Without thinking much about it, we stepped inside.

It was like standing in the middle of a nobleman’s house. The furniture was all old and valuable, piled high in corners and stacked up to the ceiling. The paintings above were dark oil portraits of beautiful women and noblemen standing in front of their fine houses. There was no one at the counter. I noticed a shelf of books and wandered over, but I recognized none of the titles.
The Glorious Liberation
and
Heroes of the Iron Reign
were there in several editions. While I was running my finger along the spines, someone appeared at the door of the back room.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Jasmine politely.

I turned. It was a man with oiled-back hair and a gold-toothed smile, and I knew his face. He was the man Michael and I had seen that last evening, at the jewellery stall
in the market, the man with the suitcase and the Alcyrian accent who tested a gold medallion with his teeth.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘My first customers.’

‘We’re traders too,’ Jasmine told him. ‘Not customers.’

‘Oh?’ said the man.

‘We live next door. Are you J.W. Fortune?’

He shook his head. ‘That’s just what I call my shop.’

‘What’s your name, then?’ said Jasmine with an air of suspicion.

He laughed and lit a cigarette. ‘Jared,’ he said. ‘To you.’

He smoked some perfumed tobacco, unlike the cheap cigarettes that turned Leo’s fingers yellow and racked him with coughing.

‘Everyone has been wondering about you,’ said Jasmine, going up to the counter.

‘How so?’

‘Because we never saw you. At school, Billy and Joe said they climbed up the back wall and saw you making kidnapped children into meat pies to sell in your shop.’

He laughed, a slow laugh that had a studied air. ‘Who are Billy and Joe?’ he said.

‘Their mama is the pharmacist just over there.’

‘Ah,’ said Jared. ‘Well, I think they were mistaken. I have been out of the city on business. I have been back from Alcyria only a few weeks, and I’ve been so busy that I had no time to open the shop until now. And in any case, these bloody workmen have taken so long to set it up—’

‘Are you from Alcyria?’ said Jasmine.

‘Not originally.’

‘Where are you from, then?’

‘Nowhere in particular. Here, I suppose.’

He did not look Alcyrian, and he had a wanderer’s
accent; it moved from place to place and never settled down. ‘I spent a few years living out there,’ he said. He drew on his cigarette, then dropped it and crushed it under his heel. Leo would have smoked it down to the end. It was the mark of a rich man not to do that. ‘Look around if you want to,’ he told Jasmine.

She wandered between the rows of tables. In the new gas lighting of the shop, she looked sadder than I had ever seen her. I wondered if Leo and my mother were arguing again next door. I wondered if there was any trace left of the Barones’ old shop.

‘Look at this,’ said Jasmine, bending to stare at a castle made from glass crystal that shone with a thousand lights.

‘Four hundred crowns,’ said Jared.

‘Are you joking?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean—’

He laughed, and the tension vanished. ‘You seem very interested in those pictures,’ he remarked to me.

I was not looking at the pictures. I had been looking at the walls between them, trying to find a single trace of the old red paint that used to be there. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Are they famous?’

‘They used to be,’ he said. ‘They pass through my hands, and I keep them for collectors. They are not to everyone’s taste nowadays, of course.’

‘They are copies, though?’

He gave a quick laugh. ‘Originals. That one is a Joseph Cortez. You have heard of him?’

‘Cortez? Yes.’

It was a lie, and I think he knew it. I had never heard of
Cortez. I looked away, and my eyes fell on a rack of guns glinting over his head. They were the only objects in the shop that were not old or valuable. ‘You sell firearms?’ I said.

‘Evidently,’ said Jared. ‘You say it as though you have principles.’

‘We have a no-firearms policy.’

‘An eccentric way of working in these times.’

I did not answer. It was true; it was eccentric.

‘Mr and Mrs Barone never sold guns,’ said Jasmine sternly. ‘So I don’t think you should either.’

‘All I’ve heard this week is Mr and Mrs Barone did this; Mr and Mrs Barone didn’t do that.’ He did not say it with exasperation; he just said it. ‘Don’t you think progress is a good thing, little one?’

‘No,’ said Jasmine. ‘Not if progress is just selling stupid guns.’

Jared leaned on the counter and began polishing some kind of old dagger on a leather cloth. I went on studying the guns and wondered if I should apologize for Jasmine. I decided not to. Over the counter was a green flag that I did not recognize. The symbol in the centre was a black constellation with a red circle behind it. ‘What is that flag?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, that? It’s the government’s symbol.’

‘The Malonian government?’ I said.

‘A certain division of it. Not the royalists.’

‘Don’t you like the king?’ demanded Jasmine from the corner.

Jared glanced over. ‘Who says I don’t like the king?’ he asked, very reasonably. ‘Our aims are different; our outlook is broadly the same. That’s philosophy for you.’ He pointed the dagger at us, half mocking, like a teacher driving a point
home. ‘King Cassius is not a strong leader,’ he said. ‘The Party wants a strong leader.’

‘The Party?’ I said.

‘The Malonian Ruling Party, this division I’m talking about.’

‘But they are not ruling,’ I said.

‘They very soon will be.’

‘Is that really true?’

‘I don’t think you should have that flag up there,’ said Jasmine. ‘I don’t think that’s very civilized when the king lives just up there, and people want to kill him.’

‘People want to kill him?’ said Jared. ‘Who does?’

‘Everyone. It’s why he has guards all the time – that’s what Uncle said.’

‘Your uncle sounds like a wise man,’ said Jared.

‘He was. But he’s not here any more.’

‘Are you an antiques trader, sir?’ I asked before Jasmine could say anything else.

‘Antiques,’ he said. ‘Fine art, jewellery. I suppose we deal in the same things. To a point.’

I did not answer. Our shop was a poor imitation of this one, no matter how many years longer we had traded in this street. L. North & Son was full of secondhand goods, and gaudy prints and line drawings, and gold and silver people had already pawned a hundred times.

‘Go on, look around,’ said Jared to me. ‘You are an antiques trader. Give me your expert opinion on my stock.’

I began examining a cupboard without touching it. It was well restored, like nothing I had seen. ‘Do people buy these things?’ I asked.

‘Yes, of course. That’s why I sell them.’

‘I only thought …’ I shrugged. ‘They are very good quality.’

‘Certain people will always buy them,’ he said. ‘I don’t concern myself with the others. I don’t think much of these junk shops you see clinging on everywhere, when the economy is in such a state that they will only wither and die. These pedlars should break free and leave while they still have a few coins to their name. Still, life is tough and perhaps I should not judge.’

It came to me that he did not think much of L. North & Son and was trying to tell us so. But perhaps that was uncharitable. I was still trying to make out his expression when Jasmine gave a muffled cry. The glass castle, glittering, had slipped off the edge of the table. I heard myself shout, ‘Jasmine!’ and saw her horror-stricken face, like a tragic mask. Then she reached out her hand, and the castle leaped back into it, and the disaster was averted.

Jared drew in his breath. ‘Did she just—’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I could have sworn,’ he said. ‘I could have sworn on my own life that it came back to her.’

‘It was good luck,’ I said, crossing the room and replacing the castle on the table in front of Jasmine. I could see my hands shaking.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Good luck, or else your sister is a magic child.’

‘She doesn’t have powers,’ I said.

‘She would be rare, in this city. They say magic is dying out.’ He ran a hand over his oiled hair thoughtfully. ‘Ah well,’ he said then, as if to dismiss it. I pushed the castle further onto the table. ‘That piece is very fine,’ he remarked. ‘I would have been sorry to lose it. Well caught.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jasmine said.

He raised one hand, as though to push away all apologies. ‘It’s no matter. Do you know why it’s valuable? This is an interesting story. Would you like to know?’

‘Yes,’ said Jasmine, all her former hostility crushed under the weight of the disaster that had almost befallen us. ‘Why is it valuable, sir?’ she said.

‘It once belonged to Ahira.’

‘Ahira?’ I said. ‘The war criminal Ahira?’

‘He was many other things. But, yes.’

I bent down to study the castle. I did not want to touch it. Every window was etched into the glass with painful care; the towers glittered like diamonds. I had never thought of the war criminals caring much about beauty. Jasmine tugged at my sleeve, but I was transfixed by the lights in that crystal. I thought of that man, whose face I had studied in a hundred history books, staring into the crystal too, seeing the same lights I saw. Then the wind blew more fiercely beyond the windows, and I came back to the present. The sky was losing all its brightness now. ‘We should go home,’ I said.

‘Wait one moment,’ said Jared as we crossed the threshold.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘Perhaps you will think this a strange question. But have I met you before?’

‘Me?’ I said.

‘Yes. Not your sister, just you.’

‘I saw you once at the markets,’ I said. ‘I was with my friend, and you were at a jewellery stall.’

‘When was this?’

‘A few weeks ago.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t mean then. I never saw you at the markets; not that I can remember. It was a long time ago, but I know your face. I knew it as soon as you walked into the shop. It’s only that I cannot place you.’

I must have looked blank, because he raised his hands to dismiss the question. ‘Think no more about it,’ he said. ‘I am probably mistaken.’

I looked at him properly. He had what people call an honest face, made strange by his gold teeth. The lamplight revealed every detail of his appearance, even the lines in his oiled black hair where he had smoothed it back with his fingers. He was like no one I had ever met, and I was certain that if I had ever seen this man before, I would remember it. ‘No,’ I said again. ‘No, I have never met you, except that one time, and then I just saw you from a distance.’

‘Very well,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Good evening, then.’

Once we were out in the street, Ahira’s face glared at us from every wall. ‘Ahira,’ said Jasmine. ‘Everyone talks about Ahira. What did he do?’

‘Bad things,’ I said.

‘What bad things?’

‘It was a long time ago,’ I said. ‘Let’s get inside.’

‘All right, but I want to know what bad things.’

I did not answer, and she followed me reluctantly, back round the side of the shop where Leo’s axe lay abandoned beside the wreck of the cupboard. ‘And why did he say he knew you?’ she asked as we reached the side door.