by Simon Levack
They both looked away in embarrassment.
‘It makes no sense at all,’ snapped Kindly. ‘Where’s that slave? Ah, you – fill this up, won’t you? Right. Now, for a start, you don’t seriously believe I can’t tell Skinny apart from his brother, do you?’
‘But if you only knew them as children …’
‘Who told you I only knew them as children? Skinny lives in the next parish! Or at least he did until recently. I can’t recall ever meeting Idle, I grant you, and if they’re twins then I dare say they look pretty much alike, but with my eyes that would scarcely have mattered, and I can tell you for a fact that I know who I was dealing with.’
If Kindly was right, then the story I had told him and my family must be wrong. But how could that be? If Idle had not stolen the featherwork from his brother, then why had he been killed?
‘You’re telling me,’ I replied, ‘that Skinny sold you his own work? But that’s impossible! Never mind what it was worth – do you know who commissioned it?’
‘Oh, sure,’ he replied casually. ‘Montezuma.’
‘You knew that? How?’
‘Well, I didn’t actually know, but it wasn’t hard to guess.’
I turned to Lily, who had set the empty plate down beside her and now knelt placidly next to her father. ‘Did you know about this?’ I demanded. ‘He guessed the piece belonged to the Emperor and he still let the featherworker sell it to him. He’s crazy! He’s not safe to be allowed out on his own!’
‘It’s not that simple, Yaotl.’ She seemed concerned, with her brows drawn together and her eyes narrowed, but not shocked. There was no sign of the things I had seen her do when she was stressed, when her hands would tremble and wring and pluck at the material of her skirt.
‘I didn’t buy the costume from Skinny,’ her father said.
‘You told me you did!’
‘No, I didn’t. I said I wasn’t likely to get him and his brother mixed up, and I didn’t, and I’ll tell you why there’s no way I could have made a mistake. He didn’t sell it to me. He gave it to me, for safe-keeping.’
‘But … but you said … when I came here five nights ago, with the knife, you told me …’
My voice tailed off as I thought back to the conversation we had had then. I was sure I remembered Kindly telling me he had bought the costume from Skinny, but for some reason I could not seem to recall the exact words he had used.
‘What I told you,’ the old man said, in a deceptively patient tone, ‘was that I had got the costume from Skinny. You seem to have assumed that I’d bought it, though what you thought I’d have wanted with something like that, I can’t imagine. It’s not as if I’d have been able to sell it anywhere!’
I looked away, feeling suddenly foolish and a little ashamed, because I realized that he was right. It had been so easy to see Kindly as party to some crooked deal that it had never entered my head that his actions may have been honest.
‘All right,’ I muttered eventually. ‘Who were you keeping it safe from?’
‘If I knew that, I’d have told you at the time. I suspect it would have made your task a lot easier! But Skinny didn’t seem to know himself, or if he did, he wasn’t telling. He claimed nobody else knew about the costume. He said he was sworn to secrecy If it was Montezuma who commissioned it, then I’m pretty sure Skinny would’ve had more to worry about than just his oath if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.’
‘He did,’ I confirmed. ‘The Emperor told me as much himself.’ Yet I knew Skinny had told at least one person – the priest at Amantlan, who was not the most discreet person I had ever met. And his wife had obviously known as well. Who else had he told – his brother, Marigold? Did his reticence with Kindly arise from a misguided desire to protect them, even though he knew one or all of them would steal from him if they could?
‘Do you see why I know it was him and not his brother I saw?’ Kindly asked. ‘Idle might well have sold me the featherwork, if he could, but there’s no way he’d have parted with it for nothing.’
‘But why give it you, of all people?’
‘The costume was almost complete, and Skinny would have delivered it in the next few days. Skinny seems to have been afraid that if he kept it at home it would disappear.
‘Now, I know what you think of me.’ He took a swig from his gourd and glanced at his daughter as if he expected her to share my opinion. ‘But I’m not totally without principles. Skinny’s father was with me in Quauhtenanco.’
Lily’s husband had been there too, but unlike his father-in-law he had not come back. She stared impassively into the middle distance as she listened to her father telling the tale.
‘I took him along as a porter, but he turned out to be a real fighter as well. Whenever we were hardest pressed he was always there, next to me. He was wounded three times, and I thought we were going to lose him once. I came back without a scratch! So when we parted after we were back in the city I told him if there was ever anything I could do for him or his sons he only had to name it. I meant it as well.’
‘You got Skinny into an Amanteca family,’ I said.
‘Yes. That was the only time he asked me to make good on my promise.’ He sighed. ‘He never asked me to do the same for Idle. I think he’d already given up on him.’
‘So when Skinny asked you to look after the costume, you felt you couldn’t refuse?’ I made no effort to keep the sceptical note out of my voice. I was having difficulty getting used to the idea that Kindly had a conscience, even one apparently so intermittent and selective; but then, I had not been at Quauhtenanco.
‘I wasn’t very happy about it, but no – how could I? And it was a simple enough proposition, just to keep the thing for a few days until Skinny was ready to deliver it. But we had to throw this bloody party, didn’t we? And somebody seized their chance. From what you tell me, that may well have been Idle.’
‘Who got himself killed,’ I reminded him. The more I thought about this, the more worrying it became. If Skinny had stolen the costume back from Kindly and killed his brother, as I had thought, then he would have taken it straight back to the house in Atecocolecan. Even if Butterfly had later killed her husband, I thought there was a good chance it would still be there. However, if it had been Idle who had burgled Kindly’s house, then there was no telling what he might have done with it. I could only hope that Skinny had caught him, killed him and taken his goods back. I shuddered, as an alternative explanation occurred to me: what if Idle had sold the costume and the buyers had decided to eliminate him, and so save themselves a lot of money and cover their tracks at the same time?
I turned to my son. ‘You were here when the costume was taken. What did you see?’
‘I don’t remember much,’ he confessed. ‘He got here before me. I found him looking at the knife. I didn’t think – I just asked him for it. He went for me. We fought over it – I was desperate to get it off him, and I nearly did. I think I cut his hand, but he didn’t let go of it, and the next thing I knew I was stumbling around out here. Then I was lying on a sleeping-mat, in there’ – he gestured towards the room he had emerged from – ‘with Lily leaning over me dripping water on my forehead.’
I looked at the woman. She looked away
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked. ‘Kindly I can sort of understand, but you? How could you be so …?’
‘Harsh? Cruel? What do you expect? You thought I could just forget about my son? I know you didn’t kill him, but you were there, and if it hadn’t been for you none of this might have happened – he might still be alive.’
‘It’s not my fault he hated me!’ Her words stung me into raising my voice more than I wanted to, but as my cry of outrage echoed around the courtyard I saw the pain crossing my son’s face, and that calmed me. ‘Lily,’ I said, ‘that’s not fair.’
‘Who said it had to be fair?’ she hissed. ‘You asked me why I kept what had happened to Nimble a secret, and I told you. Anyway, for once my father was right. H
e was in no fit state to go anywhere and you would just have come blundering in here and led your master straight to him.’
‘Did you hate me enough to turn me over to Lord Feathered in Black? Is that really what you were going to do?’ I asked.
There was a long pause.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, at last. ‘Once you’d escaped, I knew what I had to do, just to save myself, but before that … Yaotl, don’t ask. I can’t tell you.’
‘None of this,’ Kindly reminded me, ‘gets us any closer to finding the costume, does it? Would I be right in thinking you’re as anxious as I am to get it back now?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I don’t see how we’re going to do it. From what you tell me, the only person who would have known for certain what happened to it is Idle, and he seems to have met his death pretty soon after the theft. We can try his house again, but there’s no certainty we’d find anything there.’
We all squatted or knelt in brooding silence. I believe we must all have been thinking the same thing, that there was nothing for it but to go to the house in Atecocolecan, but none of us could bear the thought of going and coming away empty handed, with the Emperor’s threats still hanging over our heads.
Then Nimble spoke. He was quiet and diffident.
‘Father, there’s something I don’t understand.’
‘What’s that?’ I beamed at him. I had not got used to being called ‘Father’.
‘When you went to see Skinny, on the morning after you came here, you as good as told him you thought he’d sold Kindly the featherwork and stolen it back again.’
I frowned. ‘That’s right.’
‘Why didn’t he just tell you the truth, instead of claiming he wasn’t working any more?’
‘Why, because …’ I stopped in mid-sentence. I had been about to say that Skinny and his wife had no idea who I was, and naturally did not trust me, but then I saw what my son was getting at. ‘Because,’ I went on slowly, ‘the man I saw wasn’t Skinny.’
But the man I had seen was the thief. Nimble had confirmed that for me, describing the struggle over the knife and how he had wounded the other man’s hand. I had seen the wound for myself.
For a moment I found myself wrestling with the implications of this. If Nimble was right, then the mystery of who had killed the man I had found in the privy was solved. It took me a moment more to work out why he might have done it, but then I saw that, too, and it was so obvious that I had to groan at my own stupidity.
‘What’s the matter?’ Lily asked.
‘I just realized what this is all about,’ I said. ‘And how stupid I’ve been. If I’d only listened to what Angry said four days ago … No, that’s wrong. It’s not what he said that’s important — it’s what he didn’t say!’
They all stared at me, faces slack with incomprehension.
‘Let me explain …’
2
‘Now, you both know what you’re meant to be doing?’
Partridge looked doubtful. ‘Your brother …’
‘My elder brother, the Guardian of the Waterfront. And as many of his bodyguards as he feels like bringing …’
‘And a sledgehammer. Got it.’
I would sooner have sent my son to fetch Lion, but it would have been too hazardous. I could not be sure old Black Feathers did not have men watching his house, or for that matter his quarters in the Emperor’s palace. Besides, I had another job for him to do.
‘You want me to fetch Angry the featherworker. What if he refuses to come?’
‘Tell him it’s about Marigold. He’ll move so fast it’ll be all you can do to keep up with him!’
Lily came out into a courtyard with a rabbits-fur mantle which she insisted on tying around the boy’s shoulders. ‘Are you sure you’re going to be up to this?’ she asked, anxiously. ‘You’ve only just got back on your feet. Why don’t you rest, have something to drink first …’
‘There’s no time, Lily,’ the boy said. ‘Look, I’ll be fine. I was up and about two days ago, remember?’
‘So it was you I saw, down by the canal,’ I said.
‘Stretching my legs. Lily wasn’t happy about it, though. She made me promise not to go out of the courtyard after that.’
‘You could have got yourself killed!’ Lily protested. ‘If those Otomies had seen you …’
‘He won’t come to any harm,’ I assured her. ‘I’m not expecting any trouble, you know.’ As my son and the slave left, I wondered at my own words. The woman had grown fond of the lad, I could see that. Did he remind her of her own child? I hoped not, considering what Shining Light had done. But I realized with a pang that she had probably seen more of Nimble – and learned more about him, listening to him speak with the candour of delirium – than I had. I knew so little. Perhaps I was fortunate, to have been presented with my son almost full grown and known none of the anxiety, frustration and self-reproach of a parent watching his child grow up. I had been spared the kind of pain my father must have known, and the fear of becoming an angry, bitter, disappointed old man like him. All the same the realization of what I had lost was like looking down and seeing a gaping wound in my flesh that I had somehow failed to notice.
‘You’d better go, too,’ Lily said. ‘It wouldn’t do for them to get there before you.’
‘No,’ I agreed. I started to leave, but turned back again. ‘Lily – I’m sorry about Shining Light. I mean it. If I could have done anything …’
She hesitated. She looked over her shoulder at her father, but he appeared to have nodded off over his last gourd full of sacred wine. We might as well have been alone.
She walked towards me, stopping only when she was so close I could see my own eyes reflected in hers.
‘My son,’ she said in a brittle voice, ‘was vermin, worse than a rattlesnake. The World is better rid of him!’
I blinked, confused by what I was hearing. ‘But …’
Suddenly she let out a huge groan and threw herself forward, and then her head was on my chest, jerking up and down against it as the sobs racked her body. ‘Why do we do it, Yaotl?’ she cried in a muffled voice. ‘Why do we risk everything for them? You could have got yourself killed, defying your master, and I took a stupid chance with the merchants just to find out what had happened to my son. Why?’
I held her awkwardly. ‘I don’t know,’ I murmured.
I could have added that I knew an old man who might have told us. His love for his daughter had induced him to take terrible risks as well, and dragged him into an unspeakably vicious plot. I pitied that old man because I could imagine the anguish he had been through already and the horror he was about to witness, on account of that love.
But that was not going to stop me using it to destroy him.
The labourers working on the plot at the back of the house in Atecocolecan had started hammering again, raining blows upon the wooden piles around its edge more fiercely than ever. It looked as if the weight of the rocks and mud they had piled up in the middle of the plot had made some of the piles collapse, and now they had had to pull some of them out of the bottom of the swamp and reset them. I grinned at the thought of the curses and arguments that must have started flying about when that had been discovered.
I was still grinning when I entered the house.
Butterfly knelt in the courtyard, alone. On the ground beside her was a plate, empty but for a few crumbs. On her other side were a jug and a small bowl half full of water. Her hair hung loose and tangled over her shoulders and she wore no make-up. The courtyard had been tidied and swept, as though she had belatedly remembered her obligations to the gods.
I noticed that Xolotl’s statuette was still missing from its plinth. I wondered whether Butterfly had got rid of the broken pieces yet.
She did not get up when she saw me. She smiled thinly. ‘Hello, Yaotl. I thought you’d come back. I was told you were dead, but I didn’t think I’d seen the last of you. You’re just like me, aren’t you? You’d li
ve through anything.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Why don’t you sit? That policeman from Pochtlan – what’s his name, Shield? He told me about the Otomies. He was upset about what happened to his colleague. He didn’t mean to tell me about it, but I got it out of him.’ She giggled. At one time the sound would have enchanted me; now it seemed grotesque. ‘Men usually end up telling me everything I want to know! He seemed to think it would help him if he found some featherwork that he thought I was hiding. Of course, he didn’t find it.’
‘He wouldn’t,’ I said. I jerked my head in the direction of the narrow room, the one that had been forbidden me, and which I had tried to search, on the night when I was knocked out and had that strange dream, which had hardly been a dream at all. ‘Did you let him look in there?’
‘Oh, no. I just told him, very sweetly, that he could look at anything he liked.’ She giggled again. ‘He was out of the house in no time!’
Even now, just looking at the innocuous-looking, curtained-off doorway was enough to make me break into a sweat. ‘All the same, I think we might go in there now, don’t you?’
She yawned and stretched so that the cloth of her blouse and skirt flowed and tightened suggestively across her body. Then she looked at me, wide eyed, and deliberately curled her tongue around the outside of her mouth.
‘Why, what did you have in mind?’
My patience snapped. I stepped towards her, bent down and seized her by the arm.
‘You know why I came here, Butterfly, and it wasn’t to play games! There are three people dead, maybe four, because of your scheming, and if I don’t get what I’m here for there will be a lot more by nightfall, and you’ll be one of them! Now, we’re going into that back room and you can show me what it is you’ve really been hiding in there all along!’
I hauled her to her feet and began to drag her towards the doorway She did not resist. She smiled, as if convinced that, whatever it was I thought I knew, nothing I could do or say would hurt her.