The Good Mayor (44 page)

He took an enormous bunch of keys from his pocket, selected the smallest, a tiny sliver of golden metal, and, with that, he opened the marquetry escritoire by the window and rolled back the lid.

“This is yours, I think.” And he handed Tibo a familiar brown envelope. “Take it. It’s just as it was. I never touched it. And you never asked for a curse.”

Tibo looked inside the envelope. The twist of dark hair was still there as he had left it, fresh from her brush, still covered in his kisses. He said, “I am very sorry.”

And Cesare responded with an eyebrow flash which might have meant “Too late,” or “Well, that’s all right, then.” At that angle and with the light falling from the window that way, it was difficult to tell.

Cesare said, “Tell me about the curse,” as if he had been a doctor from a long line of doctors and he was asking for a list of symptoms.

Tibo told him. “But it’s not true, of course. She is not really becoming a dog.”

“Foolish man, of course she is. This is bad,” said Cesare, “very bad.”

“What do I do?”

“You could find the person who has done this thing and make them stop. Of course, that person might be you.”

“It’s not me!” Tibo protested.

“Even so, there is probably no cure—except love, perhaps even unto death. That cures most things.”

“I have not found it so,” said Tibo and excused himself.

UT IN CASTLE STREET AGAIN, TIBO HAILED A
cab. The run to The Golden Angel had left him hot and sticky, the interview with Cesare had left him clammy. He took off his jacket as the cab nudged through Dot’s lunchtime traffic, undid his top button, loosened his tie. “Canal Street,” said the driver. “This is as far as I go. Can’t get the cab through the tunnel and I’m not sorry. They’d have the wheels off before I could turn her round.”

Tibo got out and paid.

“D’you want me to wait?” “No,” said Tibo.

“Thank God for that.” The cab reversed hastily away.

Tibo had never gone to Canal Street. It was the one indulgence of the jilted lover which he had denied himself. He’d never crept around at night, never listened at windows, never concocted fantasies from the contents of rubbish bins or washing lines, never hammered on the door in the middle of the night, never made a drunken, pleading declaration of love or issued a challenge to fight, never stood at the other side of the canal, just watching for hours on end until the snow settled on his hat as thick and stiff as wedding-cake icing. But he had wondered. And now it was real—the dirty cobbles, the rusty railings, the broken street lamps and No. 15 with its door swinging open. Hektor would be there. The man who hit Agathe. The man who took Agathe and hit her every night for three years. His house. And he would be in it and now Tibo would go inside and kill him.

He knocked on the door. He knocked again. He pushed the door open wider. He went in.

There were two doors off the tiny hall. He opened the first—a lavatory with a window to the back. He opened the second and found the single room where Agathe had lived and slept all this time, the curtains collapsed on the floor—“She made those,” Tibo thought—the chairs overturned, the bed in the corner unmade. Tibo turned away. He couldn’t bear the sight of it.

But there was no sign of Hektor. “He’s not coming back,” said Tibo, “and neither is she.”

He looked round the room for Agathe’s clothes but, apart from her coat hanging on the back of the door, there was nothing to show that anybody in particular lived there. He opened the corner cupboard and found her dresses on hooks, her seven pairs of shoes in a soldierly row and her underwear, serene on the top shelf.

Tibo gathered her dresses in one arm and, with his free hand, he began stacking her underwear. He needed a suitcase. He came out of the cupboard and looked around. The bed. If there was a suitcase, it would be under the bed. He draped Agathe’s things across the rumpled sheets and fell to his knees, groping round in the dusty dark below the bed. That was when he found the paintings—pictures of Agathe standing, sitting, lying, mostly lying, displayed like cut fruit on the bed, this bed, that very bed.

He looked at them all, hating himself for enjoying them, sickened by the way they made him feel, slicing himself with jealousy again because Hektor had seen her like this, because Hektor had made these beautiful things and she had helped him. He was there for quite some time before he smashed the first of the pictures. He held it between two hands and drove it down on to one of the brass balls on the foot of the bed so the paint cracked and the canvas bowed and bellied but it didn’t tear so he swung it sideways until the stretcher splintered and the whole thing collapsed. That was enough. Tibo looked at what he had done. He looked at the rest of the pictures, piled on the mattress, and covered them over with a flick of the bedspread. And then he took a fallen curtain, spread it on the table, piled her clothes on it and knotted it into a sack.

When Tibo left that place, he closed the door as if he had been closing the door of a tomb.

Nobody in Canal Street paid any attention to the strange man with the large bundle. Canal Street is the sort of place where unexplained bundles are quite often seen but almost never noticed, the sort of place where it’s thought impolite to take too much of an interest in what the neighbours might be carrying around.

Tibo walked as far as Green Bridge before he found a tram and he tossed his parcel into the luggage compartment under the stairs as soon as he got on. By an effort of will, he ignored it all the way into town and he was downright casual about it when he got off. At the Town Hall, he held it below the level of Peter Stavo’s window when he knocked and said, “Sorry, took a bit longer than I thought.” And he wore it like a paunch when he turned his back and climbed the stairs.

“I’ve brought your things,” he announced when he unlocked the office door but there was no sign of Agathe. It took a moment or two of going round the office, calling her name in urgent whispers before he found her, lying curled on the floor under his desk.

“It seemed appropriate,” she said.

Tibo only humphed.

“I have been to Canal Street,” he said.

Agathe lay, open mouthed, with her tongue out, head cocked to one side.

Tibo ignored it. “I have been to Canal Street and you are not going back. You’re coming to stay with me.”

“That’s just what I’ve always wanted, Tibo,” she said.

But there was a lot to do before he could take her home—a vital meeting of the Planning Committee that took up most of the afternoon, discussing a big new sewer project, a budget meeting to talk about next year’s schools spending and all of that before the full council.

Tibo came back to the office as often as possible but he could only stay for moments and, at each visit, he found Agathe worse, her dogginess more pronounced.

She sat with her head on his knee while he went over the
school finance papers until he found himself absently playing with her ears. It seemed so natural and easy but—“No! This is insane!”—Tibo recoiled from it.

He fled from the room, locking it carefully behind him as he went, to where the major-domo of the Town Council of Dot was waiting on the landing, buttons gleaming, the silver mace with the statue of me at a military angle over his shoulder. “Ready when you are, Mr. Mayor,” he said.

Tibo stopped to take his mayoral chain from its shagreen case on the table under the picture of Anker Skolvig’s last stand and adjusted it nervously. “Look all right?” he asked.

“Just as always, sir.”

“Then lead the way.”

The huge double doors of the council chamber were flung open and the major-domo boomed, “Councillors and citizens of Dot, please be upstanding for his honour Mayor Tibo Krovic.”

There was a noise like a cavalry charge as a room full of chair legs scraped backwards on the wooden floor but it could not drown out the lonely howl of an abandoned animal that filled the room and lingered, echoing, in the rafters.

“Close the doors,” said Mayor Krovic.

FTER THE MEETING, TIBO DID NOT JOIN
his colleagues while they dawdled over coffee and biscuits in the councillors’ lounge. He locked himself away in his office and when, at last, Peter Stavo came knocking, Tibo said, “I’ll let myself out. Goodnight.” He sat in the dark with Agathe, glaring at her, forbidding her to make a sound. And then the bells of the cathedral struck midnight and Tibo knew the last tram would be leaving the depot. And then it was one and Tibo knew the whole of Dot would be asleep.

“Come along,” he said. “We’re going home. I have your things in this bundle.”

“That was kind,” said Agathe, “but I won’t be needing them much longer.”

“Shut up,” he said.

“I see you’re picking up the tone of voice.” They went down the back stairs together, past Peter Stavo’s cubicle and out into City Square. No one saw them leave. No one saw them walk up Castle Street and follow the route of all nine tram stops back to Tibo’s house.

“Will you take me this way with you afterwards,” asked Agathe, “when I am a dog? Will you give up the tram and walk? Dogs need exercise, particularly Dalmatians like me. We are carriage dogs—meant to run at the wheels of a gentleman’s phaeton and see off footpads.”

Tibo grunted the slouching garden gate out of the way and
stood aside to let Agathe past. “Somnambulist, somnambulist,” he muttered. There was a still a space inside his head where he was able to hope that this might be a hideous nightmare.

At the end of the blue-tiled path, Tibo opened the door. “I’ll show you to your room,” he said.

“The kitchen floor will be fine,” said Agathe and she walked confidently down the hall.

“Naturally. The kitchen floor. I had planned to show you the bathroom but I suppose if I leave the back door open to the garden, that will be sufficient.”

“I’d prefer to use the bathroom for now, if that’s all right with you, Tibo.”

“That’s fine, Agathe. I’ll trust you to follow your nose. Goodnight.”

And Tibo went to bed, too angry to cry, too exhausted to dream.

He woke up five short hours later to find Agathe sitting on his bed, that morning’s copy of the
Daily Dottian
gripped in her teeth. Tibo snatched it away.

“It came through the door.”

“Thank you for not tearing it to shreds,” he said.

“Some do, some don’t. I think I will be a ‘don’t.’”

Tibo noticed that she was wearing the same white and black spotted dress she wore on the day her lunch fell in the fountain—the day they began. But it was different, for now there were six pink buttons, stitched on in rows of three down the front.

She followed his glare. “I got up early,” she said, “and made a few little alterations, just to try it for size. I’ve always suited spots and I’ve always had pretty nipples. Eight will be delicious!”

“You are not changing into a Dalmatian! I won’t hear of it any more.”

“Tibo, I am. Why can’t you just accept it? Look what happened last night.” She swung round on the bed and pointed her toes. “See? Black. My pink little toenails are turning into black doggy claws.”

He grabbed her foot. “You painted this on!” And he started to rub with his thumb.

“Tibo, I did not! You’re tickling me!” And she wriggled and twisted and writhed away.

They found themselves laughing—as they should—a beautiful woman and the man who loves her, rolling about in his bed first thing in the morning—of course they should laugh. But then, as her skirt rode up over her creamy thighs and Tibo saw those bruise-black blotches and he looked at her face and the way she smiled from behind that dark patch across her eye, suddenly it wasn’t funny any more. All the fun vanished and he let go of her ankle.

“I have to get dressed,” he said.

“I’ll make you some toast.”

As Tibo threw back the covers and stood up, the
Daily Dottian
fell to the floor so it wasn’t until after he had washed and shaved—which took rather longer than usual because of all the time he wasted saying “Co-lour-ful” into the mirror—it wasn’t until then that he picked it up again and read the headline: