The Bastards' Paradise

by Kathe Koja

  “Appropriate, for a gambler.”

  “If you talk, the cards will not,” so severely that Istvan meekly folds his hands, as her own go rapid, almost reckless to deal out a horseshoe circle, a spread as before hard with Justice and knaves but “This one,” tapping a card at the left, high waves and naked rock, the Woman Alone, “she is your good helper. Or was—she’s far from you now,” as in his mind’s eye rises the feminine tide, Portia del Azore far away if she is wise, or perhaps it is meant to be Isobel de Metz, gone farther still? Or Lucienne in Paris, a lighthouse in a very dark time…. Or perhaps it is one from the long nameless roll of toffy ladies, of whores and housemaids and theatre girls, a butcher’s wife, a friendly jailer’s sweetheart—or even Puss, though Puss is no longer far away. But “She brought you what you needed most,” says Tilde, half turned on the stool so the muddied light strikes the silver on her neckpiece, silver paper like a chain a boy once fashioned for his sister, the sudden memory so sharp that Istvan frowns, could it possibly be—no Ag, no Poppy; no Rupert?

  “And here is Sir, right by her,” dry-eyed now, though her fingers touch that card with a care denied the others, Rupert cast as the Wanderer, “who leads you on the way. And this card, here—”

  “Is I,” the Lord of Hares, of course, leaping ever at Mouse’s side but “No,” she corrects; it is strange, how much older Mab seems with her cards deployed, not so much a woman grown as a woman eternal; they are like the mecs in that way, those cards, drawing one up to their level. And they speak their own language as well, a Taroc of the theatre, why not? “That’s the hayrick, see?” as she nods to the triply locked door, the accomplished exit. “And he carries your luck along with him, for the Hares are lucky, almost always.”

  “True enough,” thinking of those winning plays, dealt to him by chance or in disguise. “And who’s this wretch? Le pendu, I’ll hope we never meet,” knuckling aside the gloomy Hangs-a-man, Tilde sharp to snatch the card back into place: “Don’t touch! And that’s a bad hope, for here he’s good. Very good,” for plainly in the cards’ conjunction is a great strange goodness, unlooked-for, glimpsed without fully grasping how it shall be so, only that surely it is, for both M Stefan and Sir…. Seeing that, seeing Sir so placed soothes the rawest edge of the pain; she takes a breath to study that depending man, both dead and alive, she takes another.

  Then she taps the card that rides the top of the horseshoe, the lean figure in black with book and keys, and “This one,” Tilde says, “this is you,” so that Istvan laughs aloud, a rudely tickled laugh, and Lucy smiles, for Tilde must be funning! with the Priest outlined by the sun behind, rising and setting in clouds of black birds, rooks and crows but “’After the dandy comes the saint,’” Tilde quotes unperturbed. “It is a saying that people have. These knaves,” nodding to the listening lads, as if this bit is too evident to waste breath upon, “they will carry out the Justice. And this,” as now she smiles her own private smile, the smile of the savant and the expert, as at a hidden answer revealed or a knotty problem suddenly solved, “this is that,” pointing from the worktable back to the Jackal, the second time he has shown his pointed head, comprehending it now as none of them can, nor Istvan either: Does she mean this new dark fellow, made to gorge the hook? this temporary jinx named by Mick, Mickey his distaff son, call it, like the kit is his right hand —

  —while Samuel Ridley peers over Istvan’s shoulder at the pictures, the medieval illustration style, and “My word,” with a nod, “those cards are certainly old! But,” as Tilde shuffles the spread back into its case, the case into her pocket, “you can’t believe a word of it, surely? A modern man of reason like yourself?”

  And Istvan shrugs, looking again to the worktable, but Cockrill with surprising sternness asks, “Do you think, sir, the world is one show only? I’ve stood on that very stage of a night, and seen things I can’t account for nohow,” as Istvan shrugs again and claps Cockrill’s back, one priest to another, however shabby the temple may be. So Ridley shrugs too, gamely changing the tune to suit the temper: “Then your next stop’s to be Rome, is it? To get your priestly garb?”

  “No need to go so far,” for in the trunk sits the steepled paper hat, ale-splashed from its last go-round, somewhat dented but the fit will be unchanged: and he smiles, half admiring, toward Milady and her cards—

  —exchanged now for the knife, as, still on the stool, she begins to pick the windings from her hair, its rippled braiding falling in coarse curls: Mick gazes, openly transfixed, as if watching Venus rising from the waves until “Be careful,” he says, his hand atop hers, arresting the knife’s sharp motion. “You almost cut it.”

  “I mean to cut it.”

  “Cut —Why? Whyever would you ruin something so beautiful?”

  “Braids won’t fit inside the cap,” that black cap the lads wear, it takes him a moment to understand but when he does his dismay is instant and vast—“Oh, you’re not to act in this donnybrook, Miss, say it!”—as Tilde fixes him with a look as pointed as her blade, who is this fellow to say a word to her, one way or another? If his gaze is on her more often than not, if he runs her errands and totes her traps, if in the streets on the way to Cockrill’s he stationed himself right beside her, so any trouble must first make its way through him—if it seems, almost, that he is sweet on her, this puppeteer, well what of it? Love is not for her. And “It’s my play as much as anyone’s, the Mercury belongs to me. And to him, one day,” as Ru looks up from the letterbox into which he has already tucked a quantity of scraps, kin to the papers it once held, words from the past meant for the future —

  —while Lucy smiles briefly at that close pairing of Tilde and Mick—How fine they look together! He so tall and strong, she so small and stronger—and then, as the lengths of hair begin to fall, Mick glum to gather and sweep, Lucy takes from the worktable a halfway-workable knife, to cut with it a briefer length of cord for a little chip of steel, a gift from a long-gone knifeman, found in the trunk but too small for all the others, until this Mr. Jinks should come to play. On her breast the little goldfish gleams; on Tilde’s, the lover’s eye looks calmly on. Istvan lights a cigarette. The lads jingle Van’s bell and others, testing the sounds upon the air, as Cockrill draws up Mrs. Gawdy, to neatly slit then sew again her stony heart.

  Misery is cold, and fear is colder, and Frédéric now feels he understands the cold as he never has before; in this small gray room, the shudders come in waves, he jerks as if he is ill, or badly strung, though “No one asked you to dance,” snaps the Protectorate clerk, or is he a constable? The man in the corner chuckles, a happy-looking fellow in a stained uniform, armed with a pair of pincers, several bottles, and a long rod, a ratter’s rod such as one uses to crack the backs of vermin. “Only to answer truthfully. The question again, where is Herr Stephanos Marcus?”

  “I have been truthful. I don’t know.”

  “What of—” the clerk-constable glancing once more at the foolscap sheet, a long list, of names? Crimes? From the hallway someone howls, a dry wordless refutation; a door slams, the howl ceases. “Sir Roland Smalls. Who killed him?”

  “I don’t know that name at all.”

  “Jerry,” beckoning the man in the corner, who approaches, still smiling: he is an instrument of science, Jerry, for the Protectorate is much interested in modern science, in new ways to extract information and control men’s behavior with techniques more intelligent, and sanitary, than inflicting simple pain; though that method is always available, which is why this theatre fellow has two bent fingers and a black eye. He does not seem the type to stand up to pain, see the way he judders about there, like a doll on a stick! but the fact is that the man has steadfastly said nothing of any use. Privately the clerk-constable considers science very overrated: there is another fellow here like Jerry, who uses electricity in a special sort of box, but what real difference has it made? All those wires and sparks, yet half the men who go into that box never leave it speaking! Dead men answer no questions
at all.

  Now Jerry uses the pincers to remove the stopper in one of the bottles, and a stink emerges, a gassy stench like an opened grave’s: Frédéric thinks of the witches’ cauldron in the Scottish play; if only he could keep his hands still! He may not put them to his pockets, the rod has taught him that…. How glad he is that Haden cannot see him now, trembling like a child, caught by what Haden had foreseen, what he tried to warn against in Herr Krystof’s “commission,” fearless Haden for whom he must now be brave, whose face he keeps before his own mind’s eye, to stay so…. Now the man Jerry positions the bottle directly at Frédéric’s mouth, his lips to its opening, as if he will be forced to drink whatever unbearable foulness it contains. Jerry is not a large man, nor heavy, but he is immensely strong, and quite determined; and so happy! The more Frédéric breathes of the stink, the more he shakes, the harder he fights to distract himself with other things, shreds of poetry and plays, toil and trouble, ye pampered jades of Asia, upon a bridge made of money an angler let down his pole. “Pan’s Salvation,” how does that begin? He recalls Haden reading it, aloud and with brows raised —

  You’ve got them lopping off a head in every other scene. And I used to worry I’d soil you!

  It’s not real blood. Glycerin and paint, and a little something raw for the stink!

  Finally, helplessly, Frédéric begins to retch, to buckle and choke and “Enough,” says the clerk-constable; he wears a leather mouth-mask now, doused thick with peppermint oil; the two smells make slow war on one another. Neither seems to affect Jerry the torturer, though he does not of course bear that title, any more than his true name is Jerry. When he hunkers across from his young wife at the Sunday supper table, and she peevishly complains—What do you do all day at that dungeon, do they set you to mucking out the drains?—he meekly notes that I’m a man of science, sweetheart, before rising to comb more rosewater into his hair and beard.

  “Stand up, now,” the clerk-constable orders, list in hand, his voice somewhat muffled by the mask. “This says that Sir Roland Smalls went to the Mercury Theatre, and was killed there by persons still unknown. You live at that theatre. Who else lives there?”

  “Playing’s illegal,” Frédéric gasps. “The Mercury is closed.”

  “This says you live there.”

  “Then blame only me.”

  “Jerry.”

  This time the clerk-constable steps out into the hallway, his own head swimming, aching from the stench, that toad Jerry must keep his nose cotton-wadded up to the brain! Or perhaps he somehow enjoys the odors? for certainly he never stops smiling, a disgusting detail to the clerk-constable’s private mind, which he is very careful to keep private. Sometimes at night he dreams of Jerry and his bottles, for there are at least a dozen different sorts, some large, some squat, one a fluted green tube carried always with a stick; how he fills them, and with what, is a subject the clerk-constable is anxious to avoid, even in dreams. When the clerk-constable steps again into the rooms, the theatre fellow is on all fours, struggling to rise; his blue silk cravat is tied clumsily around Jerry’s neck.

  “Tried to bribe you, did he?”

  “He an’t want it anymore,” says Jerry, clean of conscience for this is not a lie: the fellow did want it at first, and did try to get it back, but what was in the bubble-bottle put a stop to that wanting. And Jerry’s wife is very partial to blue! The fellow is wearing a neck chain, too —

  “Stand up, now. Who killed Sir Roland Smalls?”

  Frédéric can barely find air to speak, choked to his knees by the twisted silk, the only way to breathe was in sulfur, acid, fire—“I don’t know,” he says, and must say it again to be heard, his voice a small raw croak, a swazzle-voice, like a puppet’s. “I don’t know that name.”

  “Where is Herr Hadden St.-Mary?”

  “Be corked,” says Frédéric, surprising both himself and the clerk-constable, though not Jerry, who has witnessed so many and varied responses of men to distress that none can ever startle him again. Jerry is, however, surprised by the clerk-constable’s precipitous snatch of the rod from his hand, the clerk-constable feeling gravely ill at the belly, whatever lurks in that last bottle and thus in the air of this room ought itself to be illegal! It is Frédéric’s back that takes the force of that gravity, and he allows himself to collapse with the blow to the floor, his face to the cold, dry, odorless air of dust and ancient clay: he lies without moving, acting the part of the corpse, as above him bottles jostle, paper rattles, the clerk-constable irritably works to clear his throat until “Next time,” he snaps to Frédéric, “you’ll be civil. Next time it’ll be Jerry all alone.”

  And then the clerk-constable is gone, and Jerry is gone, and the long tremors run down Frédéric’s back, his legs, he spits weakly and begins to murmur lines from the pageant play that, if Samuel Ridley was not arrested, if his guardian angel stayed true, Haden somehow now has in his hands; where is Haden now? The Mercury, oh please not the Mercury! past a whispered prayer to the Virgin intermingled with the jumbled lines, his lips moving against the stone, as his fingers find the Christopher medal, and close around it like a relic, or a key.

  It is Frédéric’s own whereabouts that are at that moment under serious discussion, there in the library of Felix Krystof, Krystof whose prospects have dimmed disastrously, how Commissioner Eig learned that he had indentured the idiot Klaus there is no saying, how does Commissioner Eig know any of what he knows? There in his grand municipal office, barely a frown on his face but The pageant was to display a sermon book for the faithful to venerate, a sermon book from the Holy Land itself, the indictment plain despite his own impassioned blame of the perfidy of others —Commissioner, I would gladly have supplied it, very gladly, even gratis! But none were to be found, not in London, nor Wittenberg, and my sources in Jerusalem were—

  You failed to supply it at all. We had to turn to others.

  If I could have created it with my own hands, I would have! Gratis! But not being an artisan—

  Not being an artisan, you hired a fool, and have thus made me, who suggested your use to the Cardinal, into a fool myself—

  Never that, Commissioner!

  —and yourself into a forger. The new penalties for forgery are quite strict, Herr Krystof, have you studied them? as from an inner door a high-collared assistant entered soundlessly, to present to the Commissioner a summation on the murder of Sir Roland Smalls, though Felix Krystof could not know this, believing instead that those pages must hold his own fate. The report’s actual conclusion was that the robbers, or “tax collectors” in street parlance, each blamed the other for the death of the lordship, whose ending in any case seemed more than half accidental, the man chased until he fell, the ice itself might have been his true killer. Smalls’s absence from Richter’s unsavory fête—itself technically illegal, with its drugs and puppetry and naked dancing—seems to have had nothing at all to do with the thievery that took place there, which must thus be laid at the feet of the man Hilaire, or whatever alias he wears these days, and his male assistant, the female dodger being exposed and sent packing prior to the event—and Richter’s fury at that deception seems greater than his ire at the theft; both drive his stiff pleas to keep the whole business out of the courts and thus the papers, not wanting to admit publicly to the humiliation of a doubled fleecing, while placing himself ever more deeply into the debt of Commissioner Eig…. The affair has provided Martin Eig with a glacial satisfaction, the lady’s maid brought in to fool the lady, the “quality” betrayed and abused by their own bad judgment just as surely as by Hilaire and his unnamed helper—and might that helper have been Haden St.-Mary, at the head as always of his gang of gutter boys? His assistant, the writer Blum, was himself being gulled by Krystof in another fashion (such a snaky, incestuous tangle it all is!), so having Blum already in custody made a useful opportunity for interrogation, though he apparently knows little more than what he himself has written; more might be learned later, using other means, but
that prospect seems doubtful. For now, Felix Krystof must be chastised and sent on his way —

  —in silent turmoil down to the snow-choked avenue, his otter skin gloves gone missing, unable to find a cab, unwilling to ride a ’bus, reduced to walking amongst the filthy idiots who chant and weep and wave their bedraggled maiden’s fir and Christmas lily, if it were not for them he would not be in this perilous condition at all! To have lost the Commissioner as a client is a terrible blow, but to hear accusations of forgery—! Arriving at the townhouse, his despair kept him blind to the blinkless, unnatural stillness of John Abram accepting his hat and coat, John Abram at whose shadowed back stood Rupert with his truncheon, John Abram who tried to give a warning from the cloakroom, as Haden reached around to slam the door.

  Now in Felix Krytof’s study, “You’re saying,” says Haden, one muddy boot planted on a pile of parchment, one hand loose around his knife, “that it an’t you at all who had him pinched.” His gaze takes in the elegantly framed documents, the citations from the Sorbonne, a letter of Shelley’s on his wall! more than half of them surely ginned up by Krystof himself. “Is that the right of it?”

  “It is,” says Felix Krystof in his chair; his hands are sweating, he moves them to his knees, then back again to the damp oaken armrests. “Though I could indeed have had him arrested, for his invasion of my home and theft of my property, that script is my legal property. But I— Ah! No!” as the knife buries itself deep into another pile of property, a folio collection from the previous century, quite valuable though suddenly considerably less so, and even less as Haden works the knife back and forth in the frangible pages. “Stop, stop! I did nothing to him!”