Calipari distributed crowns to mudskippers. He told them to get everyone they knew, and anyone they didn’t know to wear a crown all over the Pens. He gave them notes, too. He had carried quills and ink in his pockets in cases, and he had a metal cases full of paper and writing salts. He wrote out all his favors in ink on the scrap paper. He told the kids where to go with the paper, and who to give it to, with crowns for everyone.
Calipari paid the kids for their time. When he ran out of money in his pocket, Jona paid them. When Jona ran out, Calipari sent for Geek and Kessleri and Kessleri came and took over the forge for the sweaty new private. Jona and Geek sat with Calipari, reading over the sergeant’s shoulder and handing out Geek’s coins to the kids that carried crowns and paper.
The new private disappeared, and Jona thought that was a good sign that he’d work out fine in the Pens on account of how fast the new private was learning how to disappear when he was sick of being the lowest rank around.
Geek didn’t spare a single thought to the new private. He thumbed at the mudskippers. “How we going to impress them all into the navy, now? They still growing up wrong.”
Calipari shrugged. “When they roll, they won’t all be just kids,” he said. “Maybe a couple get honest somewhere, or get a soldier’s pay to get out of the city.”
Geek snorted. “You been in this too long, Nic. When’s the last day?”
“I got some time left. I’ll stick here until they replace me with a real sergeant ready for the job. You got your stripes, yet, Corporal?”
“Nope.”
“Then what do you care?”
“I’ll get them, soon as I can, Sergeant.”
“You do that. Who knows what kind of soldier they send down here if you don’t. You got any good leads on your stripes?”
“This.”
“Jona got this one while you weren’t looking.”
Jona shrugged. “Sorry, Geek. Want to write it up like it was yours?”
“No,” said Geek, “You’re after that fleur more than I’m after stripes.”
Geek pulled out a flask from his pocket and took a long drink of whatever was inside. He handed the flask to Calipari. Calipari drank and handed it to Jona.
Jona drank, and almost spit it out in disgust. It was well water, once-boiled and it tasted like runny, rotten eggs. He poured it out in the street and handed the flask back to Geek empty. “Nic, you got anything better than piss water?” said Jona.
Calipari handed Jona a flask of piss gin. Jona drank it all, fast and to the bottom, and the other king’s men were howling about it.
Jona didn’t want anyone to drink after him, even if it made him look greedy. He didn’t want anyone to get sick.
***
Three days for the three kings, and everyone wore their crowns, king’s man, stevedore, baker, mudskipper, and even beggars of skin and bones.
For three days, this was a king’s land, not the dog-infested Pens.
Then, the crowns were gone like they had never been there, at all. The fashion turned faster than any noblewoman’s dresses at the balls.
***
The season’s heat had not fallen asleep when the rains began to come. The heat lingered like a bad guest. The heat drank deep of the swampy, damp city and had no sunlight to burn off the humidity in the dark. A hot fog filled the night with all the heavy stinks that had been hiding in the mud. It was like walking in an oven. There would be no great capers that night. There would only be waiting and cool drinks and few bothered to leave their shelter for the night.
Mishaela had bound her red curls up above her head to keep her hair off her shoulders and neck. She loosened her dress down scandalously to get more air flowing over her skin. This didn’t help much, and it wasn’t the sort of tavern where the scandal drew attention when the district was so bloated with prostitution.
The tavern keeper put a fire on in his hearth, and lit candles up across that half of the room. He led his patrons away from the fires, to the darker side among long shadows. He wanted the fires to dry the room out, which would cool it off a little compared to the street. His few patrons let their eyes wander to the scarlet-haired girl in a loosened dress sweating with the kind of sweet smell that could drown a man in drink, because they were pretty sure she wasn’t a prostitute.
Salvatore and Mishaela had one long table to themselves. They sat across from each other, sideways at the table, each with one leg down a bench. Their backs curled against a brick wall at the dark edge of the tavern because the stones were cool to the touch.
She reached a hand out to him, to take his sweaty palm in her own. He squeezed her tiny, little hand. He marveled at the smallness of her hand. He placed her hand on her own cup of tepid tea.
He didn’t want to touch Mishaela tonight, because the skin contact would be too hot.
He sipped his tepid tea. He asked her what she thought about the men in the room, if any of them might have anything worth taking.
“My mother,” replied Mishaela, “back when she lived in the Pens and my da a stevedore here, she’d see men like that and tell me never to talk to those men. Never have anything to do with them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. I never did. Then, I married one of them because he had his own room by himself when an uncle died. I don’t know why I did that, either.”
“Did you love him?”
“No,” she said. She touched his hand again. She looked into his eyes. “I wanted to be by myself somewhere, and marrying got me out of my mother’s house for good, and I was alone all day long in an empty house and I didn’t have to take care of my brothers and sisters. I didn’t have to sleep with all of them around all the time. I just wanted to be by myself for a while. Then, he got sick and died, and I married his boss because I wanted a garden and a place that smelled clean. Not like this.”
Jona, just another man at the bar, drank his cool ale. In the heat, he had stripped his uniform jacket off and thrown it over a chair. With his back to Salvatore, and his uniform jacket off, he was just another body in a dark room, a figment haunting a forgetful man.
Salvatore, deep in his immortal soul, knew that Mishaela loved her husband once, and would love him again someday. In his wisdom, he didn’t tell her these things he felt in her.
Jona looked over at Salvatore from time to time. He listened for their conversation in the quiet room. He drank slowly. He allowed his anger to smolder.
Next to him, Nicola Calipari drank slow, too. He clutched his cup delicately like an egg. He sipped it. He stared into the liquid.
“Hey, Lord Joni,” he said, “You ever think there’s a better way?”
“No,” said Jona.
“I think there’s a better way.”
“There isn’t a better way.”
“There’s got to be a better way,” said Calipari. His voice trailed off into a long silence. The room filled with this silence. The heavy air sank deeper into the lungs with the silence. The wet heat pushed into the silence like wind pushed chimes into song.
“Nic,” said Jona, “You’ll get up in the morning, and you’ll feel like yourself, again.” Jona slapped Calipari’s back. “We’ll find someone to push until he breaks and you’ll feel like yourself. Happens to me all the time.”
Nic made a sound in his throat, low and brusque, like the beginning of a word held down too long that came out all mangled and wrong. He took a languorous gulp of his ale. He rolled the liquid around his mouth by rolling his head around his shoulders. He swallowed slowly with his head straight up, his open eyes staring at the ceiling. Nicola put the half-empty cup down. “I’m going home,” he said. He stood up carefully, like his knees might not hold his weight but his thighs and feet could.
“Go home, then,” said Jona, “Write a letter to Mishaela.”
“Yeah,” said Calipari, “Wait… who?”
“Franka, I mean,” said Jona, “Write a letter to Franka. I said Franka.”
“I wondered
what that Senta’s name was,” said Calipari, “You’d best go home to your mother.”
Jona lingered in the chair. The empty night opened up like a bottomless ocean. He looked over at Salvatore with Mishaela.
Jona thought about choking the girl in some far, dark place, while Salvatore ran on ahead. Salvatore’d be thinking about joy and glee, and he wouldn’t know what happened to Mishaela until he turned his head. And Jona would leave a note pinned to the dead girl’s dress, for Salvatore to read every morning, or else, to keep Salvatore away from all girls. It wouldn’t work. He was a creature of habits.
Jona strained his ears to hear Salvatore on the other side of the room. He heard almost nothing. The man and woman sat in a sweltering tavern on a sweltering night, and said almost nothing to each other. It was too hot to form words in the thick air, and push them out with heavy tongues.
Jona stood up. He paid for his drinks. He stepped into the insect hum and gauzy lamplight. He walked home through a sweltering fog like walking through smoke that wept.
CHAPTER 6
With the aborted construction of the new canal, carts had to meander around the ditch that would become a river. Between the mounds of upturned dirt and rocks and the housefronts and storefronts, pedestrians struggled to push past each other.
Stray dogs swerved through the legs of the pedestrians to get to the mounds of fresh tossed dirt. The dogs sniffed through the slowly drying muck for any grubs or trash.
The sweaty faces of workmen slipped in and out of the piles of dirt and dogs through the shopgirls wandering with hot corn, and fresh fruits that weren’t really fresh by now.
Rachel had to push through the crowd to get to work on time. She worked at another inn near the Pens that wasn’t technically a whorehouse, but whores and pimps worked their trade in the tavern and rented rooms by the hour from the innkeeper who was smart enough to look the other way unless a tax assessor was pushing him about it, and then he’d probably turn them all over. Rachel stripped sheets and refilled peter pots the same as if she were at a whorehouse. (The innkeeper was an eater of weed, and he spent every night falling down. He didn’t worry what happened in his home, and as soon as he fell to smoking at the pipes and hookahs, he’d probably sell his establishment to a better pimp and all the formalities would finally fade.)
The chamberpots and waste baskets splashed on the tops of people’s parasols. Rachel had no parasol. She had one eye towards the windows and one to the ground. She didn’t want to step in anything, and she didn’t want anything to fall on her hair.
Jona, with Pup next to him, caught sight of Rachel on the other side of the emerging canal. He jumped up to catch a better look. He saw her profile walking away.
“What is it?” said Pup.
Jona waved his hand at Pup. “Nothing,” he said, “Just someone I know. I think we should split up. We won’t catch any trouble if we both stand around looking like king’s men. We have to move around a bit, and see if we can catch them between us. Trap ’em between us, you know.”
“Right,” said Pup, rolling his eyes, “Who you following? Some birdie with a nice tailfeather?”
“You ain’t been out of the scrivening that long, Pup, so don’t talk like you some kind of something.”
Jona jumped and ducked his way through the mess of bodies on this side of the road. Jona and Rachel weren’t far from the tip of progress. Jona pushed through the funnel of bodies. He lost track of Rachel’s back in the crowd. He moved faster, seeking the lines of her motion in the crowded street.
She was nowhere.
Then, Pup’s finger touched Jona’s shoulder.
“Hey,” said Pup.
Jona turned. He raised his hand like he was going to hit Pup, but Pup didn’t flinch. Jona lowered his hand. “What?” he said.
“Who’re you looking for, anyway?” said Pup.
“I’m watching for cutters, just like the sergeant says.”
“Calipari says you got some girl around here.”
“So?”
“So, none of the boys met her around with you. I heard she was a Senta.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, I saw a Senta with a face only half as ugly as you’d think. It’s who you’re looking for, right?”
“I ain’t looking for her.”
“She went over that way,” said Pup, pointing down one of the smaller cross streets that led to the heart and soul of the district: the labyrinth of animal pens beside the massive abattoir. “If you were looking for her, that is.”
Jona smacked Pup behind his head. “Don’t be yourself,” snarled Jona. Jona dashed to the cross street after Rachel. Jona reached a new block at the edge of the Pens.
Pup laughed and called out his best wishes to his walkabout partner’s back.
Rachel didn’t notice the king’s man watching her through the crowd. She walked to work with a serious face. Already, her eyes glazed over into the grind of stripping sheets, mopping floors, and dumping chamber pots into the sewer grates behind the building.
Jona leaned against the wall where he stood. He watched the door close behind her.
Pup showed up next to Jona. “She work there?” asked Pup.
“Guess so,” said Jona.
“She’s not… You know what I mean…”
“She’s a maid.”
“Still…”
Jona hit Pup hard upside his head. Jona sneered at the new corporal like Jona was about to shove a knife in the boy’s gut.
Pup laughed. He stood up straight. He pointed into an alley. “Hey, Jona,” he said, “If you’re looking for cutters, they’re on the other side of the street.”
Jona kicked Pup in the gut, hard. Pup doubled over, trying not to laugh as much as he was hurting with the muddy boot print on his stomach. Jona turned back to the whorehouse. Jona watched at the windows for the woman he loved in the windows.
“Want me to let you go for the day?”
“Not a thing to a thing between you and me and you’re starting something you can’t finish.”
“Oh, poor Lord Joni, lovesick and all that nonsense! Poor you!”
Jona smacked him across the face, but Pup kept laughing even as Jona kicked the air where Pup dodged and ran away.
When night got close, Jona was still there. Jona scribbled a note on a scrap of paper from his pocket. He flagged down a shopgirl, and paid the girl a few coins to take the note to Calipari.
The note said something quite nearly true. Jona had a lead on a birdy, and he wanted to see it out, and he should be checked out with Pup in the records.
Jona waited. In every tavern in town the six o’clock bell rang. In the Pens, the butchers and cutters and drovers and porters walked from the killing floors in one stinking clump. Jona hopped into the crowd. He pushed his way across, shouting at the men walking that he needed to get across the street.
Jona slipped in the inn along with the stinking workmen.
His uniform pushed the crowd back. His uniform attracted every eye in the room. The innkeeper stood up from his stool. He had trouble focusing his eyes. A half-chewed weed dangled from his lips like a wet, black noodle. He pulled the plant out, and threw it down behind the counter.
“Hey, king’s man!” shouted a butcher. He sat down at a table with a woman. He already had a pipe in his hand. It trembled a little. He clutched the pipe too strong, his hand giving away the fear his face refused to show. “You tossing us all in?” shouted the butcher.
The girls at the table giggled.
Jona shook his head. Jona pushed the butcher’s hand with the pipe under the table. “Don’t let me see any pinks, and I won’t,” said Jona, “No raid tonight. You fellows work hard all day, and you’re trying to relax. I’m just looking for the same. Foreman don’t mind you, then I don’t.”
The butcher nodded. “I am the foreman,” he said. He kept his shaking hand under the table.
Jona turned to the innkeeper. He nodded at the man. “You own this place?”
> The innkeeper nodded. He tried to speak, but he coughed instead. A pimp reached over the counter to pound the man on the back.
Jona smiled. He put his hands up. “Nothing to it,” he said, “I didn’t come here official or anything. Even king’s men want to piss at the end of the day, right?”
The innkeeper kept coughing. Finally a ball of phlegm emerged from his throat. He stumbled over to a pisspot and hacked out a black ball of weed, blood, and snot. The innkeeper hobbled back to his stool behind the counter.
Jona gestured to the pisspot. “You sell that to the fullers?”
The innkeeper shrugged. “Sometimes,” he said.
“They won’t take it with all the eater’s weed in it. Gets into the cloth.”
“I won’t sell ’em that one.”
“How much for a room?” said Jona.
“What you need a room for, king’s man?”
“I told you I ain’t here on official business. I need a room, is all. How much?”
“How long you need it?”
“What’re you charging.”
The pimp next to Jona was no dandy. A rusty spike was strapped to each leg and one empty eyesocket was un-patched like the man was gazing through old gore. He placed one bent finger on the counter. “You should charge him triple,” the pimp said.
Jona rolled his eyes. “Treating me different from any other paying customer on account of my clothes is undignified. I could’ve come in here with all my boys ringing bells and rolling everyone into the tanks, but I come in here respectful and alone with money to spend like any working man at the end of the day.”
The innkeeper looked over at the pimp and shook his head. The innkeeper shrugged at Jona. “I’m sorry king’s man, but I think we’re full up right now.”
“Full up?” said Jona.
The pimp cackled.
“That’s right,” said the innkeeper, “Looks like we’re all full up.”
“Full up, it is,” said Jona, “I’ll just be heading out.” Jona pointed at the foreman hiding his pipe under the table. “Why look at that pipe!” said Jona, “You wouldn’t be a demon weed smuggler, would you?” Jona pulled the hidden pipe back out from under the table.
We Leave Together Page 7