The Good Mayor: A Novel

by Andrew Nicoll

  When Tibo got home to the old house at the end of the blue-tiled path, he walked through the kitchen calling her name, found the door to the garden open and sat on the grass watching her, enjoying her. He took another ginger biscuit from his pocket and broke it. The sudden crunch woke her.

  “Want one?” he asked.

  “I remember these,” she said, as if ginger biscuits in the Town Hall belonged to a time years before and not the day before yesterday in Peter Stavo’s lodge.

  He offered her another. “Agathe, I’m going away soon.”

  “Yes, but I’ll be going with you, won’t I?”

  “If you want to. Yes, I’d like that.”

  “That’s all right, then.”

  “Yes, Agathe. I think that’s all right.” He held another ginger biscuit between his lips and she bit it away.

  “Let’s go in the house now, Agathe.”

  Tibo walked back to the kitchen door and, a little while later, she followed him in. They were still in the kitchen, Tibo sitting at the table, Agathe sitting under it when, towards ten that evening, the doorbell rang.

  “Stay here,” he said.

  Tibo hurried to answer the door and he found Yemko, gasping and almost unable to stand, demanding, “A chair, for God’s sake, Krovic, a chair!” in insistent wheezes. “Your garden path is an interminable torment,” he breathed.

  Tibo ran back to the kitchen and returned with a straight-backed chair which creaked discreetly. Closing the front door, Good Mayor Krovic noticed the hearse-like bulk of Yemko’s taxi, muttering on broken springs under a yellow street lamp, waiting, darkly.

  He closed the door. “Can I offer you something?” he asked.

  Yemko shook his head. He sat half-folded on the groaning kitchen chair, his hands dangling at his sides, his lawyer’s briefcase at his feet until, in spite of Tibo’s order, Agathe came out from the kitchen, came quietly down the hall and sniffed, gently, at Yemko’s huge fingers and licked them.

  He looked down at her and smiled. He said, “Once upon a time there was a dear lady to whom I pledged my friendship. Sadly, if she were here today and a fugitive from justice, I would have no alternative but to hand her over to the authorities but you,” he said, stroking Agathe’s head, “bring to mind her great loveliness and her many charms, although you are, quite obviously, only a dog.”

  Agathe said nothing to that but she held Yemko’s gaze for some while until he said, “Dear God, Krovic, have you no softer chair than this and is there no brandy in the house of the Mayor of Dot?”

  Tibo led the way to his sitting room where Yemko filled the couch, cradling an improbable glass of brandy. He seemed completely at home but, when Tibo went to draw the curtains and light the lamps, he hissed a warning. “Best not, old chap. Let’s leave things as they are for now.”

  Yemko opened his briefcase and removed a blizzard of papers. “Am I right in thinking you are unknown in Virgule, Mayor Krovic?”

  Tibo nodded. “I’ve never even been there,” he said.

  “All to the good.” Yemko handed over the first of his documents. “This is a will dated six months ago and naming, as your sole beneficiary, one Gnady Vadim, commercial traveller of 173 Mazzini Street, Virgule. It nominates me as your executor and instructs me to sell this house and contents and to pass the proceeds and all pension entitlements to dear Gnady. It is properly witnessed and notarised and requires only your signature.”

  From his top pocket Yemko produced a fat black fountain pen and, with his left hand, flourished another sheaf of papers. “These documents identify you, indisputably as Gnady Vadim of 173 Mazzini Street, Virgule. This,” Yemko waved a small book with a blue cover, “is his bank account and these,” there was a faint, silverish jingle between his fingers, “are the keys to the flat at 173 Mazzini Street.”

  Good Mayor Krovic began to speak but Yemko silenced him with an eyebrow. “Do not interrupt,” he said. “Tomorrow morning at seven, my taxi will arrive at your garden gate. The driver will get out. You and any companion of your choice will drive, with the blinds drawn, to catch the seven-thirty ferry sailing for Dash. On the ferry, you and any companion will remain, at all times, inside the taxi. You will speak to no one. Once at Dash, you will drive to this,” he handed Tibo a brochure, “hotel, where a booking has been made in your name, inclusive of full garaging services for your vehicle. You will go to your room alone and any companion will remain in the taxi at all times. You will take dinner before taking charge of the very small, pitifully frail craft which has been provided for a relaxing night fishing trip—a trip which will end in tragedy and from which you and any companion will never return.”

  “Never return,” said Tibo blankly.

  “Never, because, if you use this,” another small silver flourish produced a pocket compass, “if you use this and sail all night long then, with luck, you will find yourself in Virgule by morning. Sink the boat. Sink Tibo Krovic with it, walk ashore as Gnady Vadim, walk in your wet boots to Mazzini Street. Live there with the companion of your choice for a month or so—there’s enough in the bankbook—and, very soon, you will come into your inheritance from poor cousin Tibo. Then you simply disappear.”

  After a long week of astonishments, Good Mayor Krovic found himself more astounded than ever. “Is any of this legal?” he said.

  “Poor, poor Tibo Krovic. Poor Good Tibo Krovic still fretting over what’s legal instead of what’s right, still not sure if what’s right is also what’s good. Does it matter? Do you care? What difference does it make? Is it legal? No! But the question you should have asked is ‘Will it stand up in court?’ and I guarantee that it will. Now sign.”

  OOR TIBO LAY AWAKE ALL NIGHT, CHIDING himself for not getting plenty of sleep ahead of his long row to Virgule, fretting over his second official lie and listening to Agathe sleeping where she lay over his outstretched arm. She was a symphony of mutterings and twitches, strange little mewlings and lunges on the bed. “Chasing rabbits”—that’s what they called it. He kissed her gently on top of the head and went back to listening to the dark.

  At four o’clock, Tibo fell asleep. At five, his alarm clock went off and he awoke, more exhausted than ever. Agathe slept on.

  Alone in the kitchen, Tibo made coffee and listened to the garden birdsong. He took his cup and wandered round the house, saying goodbye to things, his books, bits of furniture he had never cared for until now, ornaments, odd sentimental things that tied him to this house, to boyhood, to Dot. He was leaving and all of it must be left behind.

  Tibo opened the door on his mother’s old room, the cold bed, unslept in for years, the curtains that never closed, the picture of me with a beard like a hedge, everything calm and still and calm and damp and dusty. On the dressing table, there was a tiny photograph of his father—not the father he had known but a handsome, happy young man. With one finger, Tibo tipped it until it fell, face forward, on the rug. He pressed down on it with his heel until he heard the glass crack, then he went off to pack.

  Tibo took only the sort of clothes that a man going for a relaxing weekend in Dash might be expected to take. He left his suits hanging in the wardrobe, his ties on their rack. There was no room in his duffel bag for the Mayor of Dot.

  At six, Tibo made scrambled eggs on toast and shared them with Agathe, feeding her from his own plate. At six thirty, the dishes were piled on the kitchen drainer and Tibo was sitting on the couch, looking out the window. When it came into the street, the black taxi brought shadows with it. Tibo heard it stuttering down the hill all the way from the kiosk, the same insistent knocking that pursued him through nightmares, and then, with a final fart, it halted at the gate. The driver, a tall, lean man Tibo recognised from Yemko’s bandstand picnic all those years before, got out and glared significantly towards the house. He took off his cab driver’s cap with its numbered silver badge and, with a final nod at Tibo, he tossed it back through the open window and on to the driver’s seat, hunched his shoulders and walked away.

&n
bsp; “It’s time,” said Tibo. “Stay in the hall until I call you.”

  Tibo walked down the blue-tiled path carrying two thick blankets which he flung in the cab. He left the door standing open and went back to the house where Agathe was waiting in the hall. “The street’s empty,” he said. “Run.”

  Tibo picked up his duffel bag and her curtain bundle of clothes and watched as Agathe leapt into the taxi. She peered out at him, watching him from the blankets on the back seat as he locked up and carried the luggage down the path and then, disguised in the cabbie’s hat, he drove off.

  “Your bell is crying,” she said.

  “I know. I can hear it.” He turned into Cervantes Street towards the docks and, a few minutes later, he was sitting on board the Dash ferry, nudging out past the lighthouse. Tibo gripped the steering wheel of the cab. He never moved from his seat. He kept the peak of his borrowed cap tugged down low. He kept his face fixed forward but his eyes were on the mirror and the image of Dot disappearing behind him. Smaller and smaller it grew, fainter and greyer and mistier, until it became the colour of the sea and vanished away into the waves and there was nothing left but the pale green dome of the cathedral and, finally, only me, glinting gold for a moment and disappearing like the crow’s nest on a sinking trawler.

  When the last of Dot had gone, Tibo looked straight ahead through the spray until Dash grew up out of the sea; first the thin grey plumes of its smokeries, then the unmistakable smell of fish carried on the wind, the chimneys poking up from the waves, the red roofs, the white houses and, soon, the quayside where the ferry docked.

  Good Mayor Krovic took the hotel brochure which Yemko had given him and spread it open across the top of the steering wheel, fixed by his two thumbs. The directions he followed led him through the narrow streets of Dash town and out the other side to where the cobbles stuttered out in a narrow road of packed sand that wandered among hairy dunes to the far tip of the island. It was the last place in the world—a tiny inn at the end of a lost beach and, beyond it, the horizon and, beyond that, nothing but the sky.

  Tibo drove the wallowing taxi into the courtyard where the double doors of the stables were open to receive him. He settled Agathe into her nest of blankets and kissed her again. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” he said. “Keep very still. Be quiet and try to sleep. The time will pass more quickly.”

  He made sure the blinds were firm on the windows and he had just finished closing the stable doors when a fat woman in black came bustling into the yard. “Are you Mr. Krovic?” she said. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  It was the first time in twenty-three years that anybody had called him plain “Mr.” Krovic and it took the length of a smile before he said, “Yes, that’s me,” and walked into the inn.

  HE QUEEN CATE WAS THE SORT OF PLACE where Tibo would have been happy to live all his days—dark and low-ceilinged, as tanned with smoke as any Dash kipper but sparkling from the sea-light that rushed in at the tiny windows with their panes of wrinkled green glass. It was haunted with wave-song, soothed by gulls and flavoured everywhere by the scent of Mrs. Leshmic’s kitchen.

  “You’re in time for lunch, just about,” she said and she put him at a table next to the fire where the coals dozed and muttered and where he ate hot meat pies and drank strong red beer and had good bread and cheese until he sighed happily and went to sleep.

  But in the stables, in spite of what he had told her, Agathe did not sleep. She tried. She lay down on the broad back seat of the cab, her body folding awkwardly into the crater where Yemko had crushed the springs past their last squeak of resilience, but she did not sleep. After a while, with her nose down close to the upholstery, breathing in the smell of leather and bottoms and a galaxy of iced biscuit crumbs that had settled in the cracks between the cushions, Agathe sat up and squinted through the gap at the bottom of the blinds on her window. Her nose left a round mark. Her breath steamed the glass. Outside the car, the stable was dark and dusty. There was a broad, ragged streak of yellowish light coming under the ancient wooden doors but it was too tired and sickly to reach the corners of the room. She could see the worn brick floor, sunk in channels where cartwheels had rolled every day since horseshoes were invented, and a few strands of old straw that had blown in from somewhere and the usual rusty, greasy cans and tools that find their way into garages and that was about it. Nothing to look at. Tibo had been gone barely ten minutes and already she was bored. She bounced across the back seat and looked out the other window. There was nothing on that side but a wall with a bit of old sack hanging on it. Boring. Nothing to look at. Nothing to sniff. Nobody to play with. Boring.

  “What’s the bloedig point?” she asked. “What’s the bloedig point of being a dog if it’s no fun?”

  She poked her nose through the little arch cut in the window dividing the driver from the passengers and searched for some hint of Tibo but there was none, just the old wool smell of the cabbie’s hat and the tarry linger of his pipe. No Tibo. No love. Just a smell of “lonely.”

  Agathe fought the urge to howl, turned three times on her blankets and whirled them into a pile like the meringue nests Mrs. Oktar used to sell at her cake counter and, with a little whimper that sounded like “Tibo,” she lay down with her chin on the leather cushions.

  Hours passed. The line of sunshine under the stable door lengthened briefly then edged away into shadow again. Inside the taxi, it grew dark but was only when the first of the evening’s customers came into the bar and the door banged in the wind and a tiny avalanche of sand spilled in from the beach and whispered on the stone floor that Tibo woke up.

  Mrs. Leshmic was smiling at him from behind the bar. “Looks like you needed the rest,” she said.

  Tibo rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “What time is it?”

  “Just after six, my dear. Another beer? How about some rum? It’s famous round these parts.”

  Tibo ordered a coffee, without the rum—“Maybe later”—and announced, “I should really go and unpack now.” The regulars at the bar hunched a little closer to their drinks as he made for the door and Tibo imagined they spoke of him, “a stranger round these parts.”

  He found Agathe waiting for him eagerly in the darkened taxi and he gave her the biscuits he had saved from coffee. “Just a few hours more and we’ll be on our way,” he said. “It’s a fine night for a sail and we’ll be home by morning.” He kissed her on the nose again, hoisted his bag on his shoulder and went back to the inn.

  Tibo did not bother to unpack. He left his bag on his bed and spent the next hours by the window in the bar, watching the sea, watching the waves, watching distant sails. At eight, as clouds thickened around the edge of the world, he asked Mrs. Leshmic to pack some food for the night’s fishing and went outside—“Just to take the air.”

  The courtyard was deserted but, in the taxi, Agathe was ill-tempered and almost frantic with boredom. “I have decided that being a dog is very much like being a little girl again—always waiting for the grown-ups, always having to do what you’re told.”

  “But I thought that was what you wanted. I thought you wanted to follow me home so I could look after you.”

  “That’s not what I meant at all,” she said. “All day long, I’ve been stuck in here. How much longer?”

  “Just one more hour,” he promised. “Only a little while more.” He took her bundle and hurried away from the inn, slipping through the empty dunes to the very end of the island and out of sight of the Queen Cate.

  “I don’t need those things any more,” Agathe had protested.

  “But we can’t leave them for anybody to find. They must come with us.”

  Standing there, at the very edge of Dash, Agathe’s bundle hidden in the bushes at his feet, Tibo looked back the way he had come. There was nothing to see and, in the darkness, not even the glow of Dot’s street lamps would point the way back.

  The time was drawing close. Tibo walked slowly to the inn and got dressed in doub
le layers of clothing. “A fine night for fishing,” he told Mrs. Leshmic. “Might I have those sandwiches now?”

  She handed him a blue enamel tin—much like the one Agathe had bought for herself in Castle Street—and two bottles of beer.

  “Just row off the headland, Mr. Krovic, that’s my advice, just past the end of the island. That’s where the boys find the fat ones. She’s tied up at our little jetty. Will you need any help?”

  Tibo refused modestly and said goodnight with a smile. There was a soft patter of fine sand against the door as he shut it and then he hurried back to the taxi and to Agathe.

  “Time to run again, my darling,” he said. “Straight for the dunes and I’ll see you at the end of the island in a little while.”

  Tibo kissed her on the nose one last time and watched her race into cover and then, with two blankets round his neck, he climbed the steps down to the jetty alone.

  It was hard work getting away from the little wooden pier. Tibo was no oarsman and he was dreading the thought of a whole night at sea. His nervousness showed. The boat tipped and wobbled as he settled himself on the centre line and he had trouble fixing the oars in their rowlocks. There were dark faces at the windows of the inn. Tibo tried not to look terrified and pulled away.

  It took him about a dozen half-hearted strokes to get out of the inlet by the Queen Cate but, once he made it past the rocks, what wind there was blew towards the end of the island, Agathe and, eventually, to Virgule. When he reached the headland, Tibo began turning his boat towards the beach, whistling “The Boy I Love” as he paddled along lopsidedly until he heard Agathe’s answering howls and saw her bounding along, pale in the dusk, amongst the beach grass.

  Tibo rowed harder until the boat jarred against sand. He felt the crunch and grind of it running through the timbers and he leapt out on to the shore.

  Agathe came splashing to meet him. “I’m here! I’m here!” she said, kicking up the spray as she ran.

  “Yes, darling, I see you, I see you, clever girl. Now get in the boat. I have to find your clothes.”