The Good Mayor: A Novel

by Andrew Nicoll

  “I don’t have time to waste on formalities,” she said. “This is urgent. This is an emergency.”

  Tibo was suddenly concerned. He stopped rubbing his jaw and said, “Tell me. Whatever it is, tell me and I’ll help.”

  So she asked him the question. “This can’t go on,” she said. “You think I don’t know but I know. You think I don’t see but I see. I have to help you finish this.” She took his hand. “So once, Tibo, just once and then never again. To end it. To bring the curtain down.”

  Good Mayor Krovic sat there for a long time, not saying anything, looking a bit angry, a little shocked, listening to the thumping pulse in the side of his head until, eventually, Agathe said, “Say something. Talk to me.”

  “Get out,” he said. “Get out of my bloedig office right now.”

  Agathe stood up quickly. There was something glinting in the corner of Tibo’s eye that she recognised. Hektor had it and, when it showed, Agathe had learned to stay away. She hurried out of the room and back to her desk.

  “And shut the bloedig door!” Tibo screamed. It was fortunate that she was already sitting back at her desk and typing furiously when he whispered, “Bitch.”

  Tibo said a lot more when Agathe was out of earshot. He got out of the visitors’ chair so angrily that it tipped over and rolled on the floor. He ignored it and fought his way round the desk to his own chair, growling like a bear. He kicked the tin wastepaper basket. He didn’t mean to but it was in the way and it collided against his foot with a noise like a bursting drum so his fury exploded and he kicked it again so it bounced off the wall and again and again until it ricocheted off his shins and made him stop. He fell into his chair and raged some more. “That bitch! That bitch! Dear God, if she came in here again, I’d strangle her with her own stinking knickers. They couldn’t find a bloedig jury to convict! Bloedig little tart! After all this time, just to dangle it in my face like that. That’s what she thinks. She thinks I’m safe. Thinks I’m some bloedig poodle. Pick me up and put me down. Bitch!”

  Tibo sat there, gritting his teeth and gripping the arms of his chair so hard his hands hurt. The breath came down his nostrils in hot snorts until, little by little, it slowed and calmed, his jaw worked less furiously, the pain in his hands forced him to loosen his grip and, quite soon, there was nothing left of his anger but a sore hotness in the back of his throat and a kind of shamefaced hurt.

  All across the floor of his office Tibo noticed a trail of torn envelopes and crumpled papers and cedar-scented pencil sharpenings. He decided he had better tidy them up. He looked round for the tin wastepaper basket, picked it up and began to squeeze and haul and punch it back into shape. He found it calming but it was less than successful. Where the bin had been round and smooth and regular, now it was distorted and pineapple-ish. Tibo put it down on the desk. It tilted and rocked. It made him smile. He took it and went down on his hands and knees, pinching up little bits of spice-scented pencil-shavings, tossing in balls of paper with a heartening “clunk.”

  And it was when he finished picking rubbish off the floor and stood up, grunting, one hand pressing down hard on his desk to support himself, that Tibo started to wonder about the spell. How long did it take to cast a spell, after all? How long did they take to work? Could it happen in ten minutes? Was there time? The envelope he left for Cesare must have been in his hands within moments. The doors of The Golden Angel would still have been swinging on their hinges when Cesare opened it and, when he saw Agathe’s dark hair nestled inside, he would have known at once what to do. Could such things be done straight away with just a few words, a few mystical passes, or did it need a full moon and an unsuspecting kitten? No, it was suddenly obvious to Tibo, Cesare had cast his love-spell in the time it took to walk down Castle Street and it was starting to work. Agathe was starting to fall in love with him again. She was fighting it but she couldn’t help it. That was the only possible explanation for her stupid, clumsy offer and Tibo generously forgave her. “Poor kid,” he said and he hurried out of his office, calling to her, “It’s all right. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.” But she was gone. He stood for a moment, holding his battered waste bin under his arm and looking at her empty chair until Peter Stavo arrived in the doorway, snapping a pair of pliers like castanets.

  “Agathe said to tell you that she’s not well and she’s gone home for the day.” He gave another flick of his pliers. “Mentioned something about a drawing pin that’s been annoying her. I’m supposed to take care of it—and you look as if you could use a new bin, boss.”

  F COURSE, AGATHE WAS NOT SICK AND SHE hadn’t gone home. She left the Town Hall by the back stair, making her excuses at Peter Stavo’s glass booth and she hurried through City Square to Braun’s department store where she sat in the mirrored cafe and ordered coffee for one and cakes for three. They came piled high in a spectacular, silver-plated ziggurat of confectionery, scones on the bottom, sensible slabs of fruit cake in the middle and a ridiculous, impossible fanfare of cream cakes and meringues on top. Agathe ate them all and as she ate, she glared out of the window, across the street at my statue on top of the Ampersand Banking Company and commanded more coffee with wide, rolling waves of the hand.

  Agathe abandoned her dainty silver pastry fork. It was too slow. She let it clatter on her plate and she began pulling at the mountain of cakes with her hands and forcing them into her mouth and, all the while, she stared at me, at poor, warty, hairy Walpurnia, unloved Walpurnia, left all alone to stand in all weathers on top of the bank, and cursed me. “You fraud! You phoney! Liar! Cheat!” And then, out loud, she shouted, “Moe aw-hee!” through a mouthful of eclair and waved her empty cup at a passing waitress.

  The nice ladies who take their morning coffee at Braun’s were not sorry to see her go and, to tell the truth, Agathe was not sorry to leave. The fit which had seized her had passed. She felt bloated and, when the girl at the cash desk made little, twittery, halfhearted gestures of disgust, fanning her weakly with a paper napkin, Agathe was ashamed to see a huge blob of cream on her nose, endlessly reflected in the coffee room’s mirrored walls. She wiped it off with the back of her hand, the way the kids in Canal Street wipe their snotty noses, and fled, rattling down the stairs, through haberdashery, through cosmetics and perfumery and out, into the sunny street.

  She was hot and breathless and sick. She might have gone home. She might even have enjoyed the sunshine and walked along the Ampersand. She glanced in that direction, thought about it and walked the other way.

  Agathe knew enough about sadness to recognise all its shapes and colours. There was a particular kind of sadness waiting in Canal Street, one that she rubbed out every night with heat and shame and sleep but, standing in the street outside Braun’s with the shadow of my statue falling on her like a blessing, she could feel something different. She almost recognised it, like the face of someone she used to know a long time ago, a pleasantly painful kind of melancholy like the tingle of pins and needles that only comes in a limb which is telling us it is not, after all, dead. There was just a glow of it, enough to notice and Agathe wanted more. She wanted to enjoy it for a little longer. She wanted to blow on it without blowing it out. She began to walk. She walked a little faster as she passed City Square, sticking close under the windows of the Town Hall in case Mayor Krovic might be looking out to catch her malingering.

  She turned right into Radetzky Street and came out on the corner opposite the Palazz Kinema where they were showing The Weeping Violin with Jacob Maurer, and The Weeping Violin looked like just the sort of thing to feed the little gnaw of misery she was cradling inside. But the picture was almost over and the next show wasn’t due to start for half an hour so she walked on to the end of George Street and the Municipal Art Gallery and Museum.

  Now, Agathe was not much of an art lover, not a regular customer at the Municipal Art Gallery, but she had worked for Tibo Krovic long enough, seen enough minutes of the Arts and Libraries Committee, to know the sort of thing they con
tained— repentant harlots about to throw themselves off a midnight bridge; sad children and sympathetic puppies; old ladies waving goodbye from cottage windows—acres and acres of gloomy canvas, the perfect place to wait for the second show at the Palazz.

  The uniformed doormen were there to greet her—still in their jobs mostly because the doormen of Umlaut were still in theirs. They smiled and nodded, “Morning, Miss,” one on each side of the double doors and they snapped to attention in perfect time, each reflecting the other in a row of polished brass buttons.

  Agathe stepped into the cool shadows of the gallery but she never reached the sad paintings she had come to see. There was a lovely marble statue of a naked lady, lying on her back and making half-hearted efforts to fend off a beautiful, butterfly-winged boy angel. She stood in front of that for a bit, wondering about her own fending-off technique and whether she would bother to use it if ever she woke and found a butterfly-boy hovering over her bed. Agathe wandered casually round the statue and admired him from the rear and decided, no, she probably wouldn’t.

  She looked up guiltily and saw, across the hall, the gallery shop and, shining out at her, small and distant but unmistakable, unforgettable, Tibo’s postcard. It drew her. It called her. She looked at it in puzzlement, almost unable to believe that such a thing existed—as if Tibo’s card, her card, the card she had destroyed, had been the only one in the world and this was some miraculous resurrection.

  Agathe counted the coins from her purse, took the card in its paper bag and hurried from the gallery, checking her watch as she went.

  Along the road at the Palazz there was another shower of coins, rattled into the egg-shaped wooden bowl set in the counter of the box-office and another change from sunshine to shade as she plunged into the deeper darkness of the cinema. A girl with a tray of sweets and cigarettes hung round her neck, carrying a torch shrouded under a red hood, led Agathe down the sloping aisle to a seat in the front stalls. She sat down and looked around. The place was almost empty. Agathe had the whole row to herself. She slipped her coat off her shoulders and settled in the chair with her handbag on her knee. The postcard was sighing to her. She took it out and slipped it from its paper bag, tipping it forward to look at it in the silver-blue of the flickering newsreel. “More beautiful than this, more …” It was all so long ago yet Agathe found herself smiling. She was warm and tired and replete with cake. Before the main feature started, she was sound asleep.

  N THE MORNING, FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE the day he bought the entire stock of Rikard Margolis’s flower shop, Good Mayor Krovic did not go to The Golden Angel for coffee. He got off the tram two stops early as usual but, when he walked down Castle Street, he hurried past the cafe, slapping his folded copy of the Daily Dottian against his thigh as he went, like a jockey urging speed from his horse. Tibo was embarrassed. He knew he could not stand there at the high table by the door, sipping coffee and pretending to read the paper while Cesare smiled at him like a plotter. He hurried on to work. “I’m busy,” he told himself. “Tomorrow.”

  As he crossed White Bridge, the swallows were screeching low over the Ampersand, tipping and shifting between the piers and snatching flies from the air as they passed. They would be leaving soon, gathering their children on telegraph wires and roof ridges and leading them back, through thousands of miles of empty sky, to Africa. It was wonderful, almost incredible—like the idea of Cesare’s spell. You could believe that swallows slept the winter away, buried in mud at the bottom of the Ampersand or you could believe they found their way back from Africa every summer. You could believe Agathe Stopak had spent three years wondering what it would be like to sleep with you or you could believe she had been bewitched by a love spell. It was obvious really. You simply had to choose which was the more incredible.

  Tibo crossed City Square, he said “Good morning” to Peter Stavo, who had just finished mopping the vestibule, he nodded gravely at the picture of Mayor Anker Skolvig and he stood aside for Sandor, the boy who delivers the mail, as he ran up the stairs towards the Planning Department.

  It was just an ordinary day and Tibo was determined to keep it ordinary. He wouldn’t make a fuss about that business the day before but he wouldn’t ignore it either. It was said and couldn’t be unsaid. And, anyway, Cesare’s spell had ripened by another day. It would be stronger by another day. Whatever it was that had driven Agathe before would be driving her all the harder now—like a drug, like alcohol, flooding her by drips until she gave in. Tibo was prepared to wait.

  He had waited and waited so he would wait a little longer as if he were waiting for some especially gorgeous peach to ripen and fall off the branch. He pretended to himself that it didn’t matter that the peach was not his own or that he lacked the courage even to steal it; it was close to falling and the pocket it fell into would be his. That was enough.

  On an ordinary day—a day a little more ordinary than this one—Tibo would have spent at least twenty minutes in The Golden Angel. Twenty minutes took a long time to pass alone in his office with nothing to do. He stood at the window in the corner. From there, he could see Castle Street and the bridge and a long way down Ampersand Avenue. It didn’t matter from which direction she came, he would see her. Tibo stood still there for a long time, looking down at the opposite corner of City Square where a peculiar bunch of people had caught his eye—a circus strongman dressed in a leopard-skin rug, a girl with a white terrier which leapt and bounced through the hoops she held out as if it had been drawn on strings and two girls who stood a few yards apart, juggling Indian clubs. Tibo thought it strange that nobody paid them any attention. They seemed to be simply passing the time doing circus tricks the way that other people might stand looking at the clouds, jingling the change in their pockets. But then, when Agathe turned the corner into the square, the strongman stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled, the girls snatched their clubs out of the air the way the swallows snatch the flies and the dog stopped in mid-jump, folded his legs under himself and fell straight down to the pavement.

  Across the square and behind the windows of his office, Tibo felt the shriek of that whistle stabbing in his ears but Agathe seemed not to notice. It was as if she didn’t hear and she gave no sign when the circus people formed up in a knot behind her and came hurrying across City Square with the little dog running round in yappy circles as they went.

  Tibo was alarmed. He didn’t like those people. They had the look of a gang of pickpockets or bag-snatchers or white slavers and Tibo was prepared to bet they couldn’t produce a licence for that little dog either. He hurried out of his office and down the stairs but, when he reached the square, Agathe was alone.

  “Were those people bothering you?” Tibo asked.

  “What people?” she said and she pushed past him and on, up the stairs.

  Tibo looked round. They had gone. There was a leprous-looking pigeon with one foot, limping along beside the fountains and two old women sharing a bag of cherries on a bench in the sunshine but, apart from that, the square was empty. No strongman, no yappy little dog, nothing. Tibo went back into the Town Hall and followed Agathe up the stairs to his office. At the door, he put on his “kind and generous” face, a stupid “There, there, I understand—kiss it all better” look that only a woman as wonderful as Agathe could ever forgive without slapping him first.

  She was already sitting at her desk, pale and miserable and sad-eyed and, when Tibo came in, she looked up and read that look on his face and looked away again quickly.

  Tibo had planned something bright and chirpy. Sitting in his kitchen in the old house at the end of the blue-tiled path, he had plotted the moment of their meeting that day—him perched on the edge of her desk as she arrived for work, legs flung out in front of himself, looking cheeky and relaxed, murmuring a confident “Hello” but it had all gone wrong again. She couldn’t look at him for more than a moment and, when she did, it was with something like pain in her eyes.

  “Everything all right?” he asked
.

  “Yes, thanks. Fine.” Agathe busied herself with her paperclip tray.

  “Fine?”

  “Yes. Fine, thanks. Feeling much better.”

  “Fine.” That was what she had said on the day she ran out of The Golden Angel. “Fine.” Everything was “fine.” She wasn’t upset. He hadn’t done anything wrong. And then she had left him.

  “Fine,” said Tibo. “Glad to hear it.” And, in a couple of long paces, he was inside his office and closing the door.

  But he was still there, still standing with his back to the door, cursing himself for making such a hash of things when he heard her there, behind him, her shoes on the hard floor, her fingers brushing over the wood at his back.

  He held his breath until she said, “Tibo?” It was just a whisper. “Tibo, can you hear me?”

  He let his breath out slowly.

  “Tibo?” Still just a whisper. If he had been sitting at his desk on the other side of the room he would never have heard it.

  “Tibo, can I talk to you, please?”

  “You are talking to me.” He passed his hand gently over the wood of the door, sure that his fingers and hers were barely separated, almost touching.

  “Tibo.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Tibo, please. I’m in trouble.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “You said that yesterday.”

  “Yesterday was different. Yesterday you hit me in the face with a doorknob.”

  Agathe was quiet. With his ear pressed against the door, Tibo could hear the snakeskin whisper of her hands as they passed.

  “I hurt you,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “No. The other thing. I really hurt you.”

  Tibo said nothing.

  “I need you to help me.”

  “I’ll help you. You’ve always known that.”

  She was quiet again.