Under the Poppy (29 page)

It is true that the springtime is fine in Brussels, though one must have a certain taste for rain. It softens the alleys and the boulevards, makes a tender scrim of clouds and beech trees, plays a soothing music on the skylight windows of the atelier, a gentle pattering like “Fairy footsteps,” Lucy murmurs to herself and to the lady she attends, a resurrected version of the late Miss Lucinda, who retains that other’s shiny locks and tresses, though her face is all new, pointed chin and rosy cheeks, and her gleaming eyes weep glycerin no more. Lucy has her own ideas as to who mutilated Miss Lucinda, cut off her feet, slit to ribbons her doll’s breast, but she does not dwell upon them; what good would it do, when those days are less, now, than a dream, a memory’s memory, and in her new position she has so much to occupy her time. Today, for instance, after she completes this task, she is off to the lace-maker’s, then down to Monsieur Alcee’s studio, where she is learning the Vienna waltz. It is Istvan’s maxim that what one asks of the mecs, one must first offer oneself, and the dance will give Lucy a better feel for onstage blocking, whenever they may return—Miss Lizsette, as she is called now, and the others—to the happy rigors of the performing lights.

The rain falls; she ties the pretty satin bow this way, that way, which is more becoming? so absorbed in the task at hand that when the finger taps her shoulder, she starts, then blushes as “Her industry,” says Istvan, “shames us all. The girl would work around the clock, she needs less sustenance than the mecs…. I don’t believe you have met my apprentice, messire. May I present Miss Lucinda Bell.”

“It is my honor,” says Mr. Arrowsmith, bending over Lucy’s hand. Their eyes meet: his smile conveys his pleasure at seeing her again, hers a certain sturdy gratitude for being met anew. “Javier Arrowsmith, Mademoiselle. I am acquainted with your master, here, for not a little time. And with
les mecs
,” his relishing gaze: when last he toured these rooms, they were empty, piled furniture and dust, and now it is a workshop, a place of foment and creation. See the tools and the laces, the piled props, the strings and glues and puppets on display: here the little Erl-King, there the Chevalier, there the Bishop, a red-hat cardinal now, and, in pieces on the table, a strange infant with fringed blue eyes. “Tell me, Mademoiselle Bell, will you be the one to lure them all back upon the stage? One truly suffers the lack.”

Istvan smiles. “She could play alone, if she’d a mind, and thrill the Grand-Place…. Will you take a glass with us, darling?” but “I’m off,” Lucy says, with half a curtsey to Mr. Arrowsmith’s gracious bow: hat and reticule, becloaked in carmine wool against the rain and “She is lovelier than I remembered,” says Mr. Arrowsmith, when the sound of her footsteps has faded on the stairs. “Adapting well to cosmopolitan life?”

“A duck to water. Brandy?” amongst the bottles and decanters, pouring for them both. There is a slight hesitance to some of his motions; he has healed, but will never be the same. Well, of whom could that not be said? thinks Mr. Arrowsmith, accepting the glass with a smile as he accepts Istvan’s toast: “To hospitality…. It was kind of you, to help us secure this spot.” Though Istvan had wondered privately, as did Rupert, what had spurred that generosity, these rooms at such a thrifty price, the landlord himself had approached them with the offer….
Hors de combat,
Mr. Arrowsmith’s murmur, leaning over Istvan’s sickroom bed, was that what he said? And now they and he are neighbors.

The brandy tastes of flowers, an intricate flavor, ripeness veined with a faintly bitter tinge; Mr. Arrowsmith savors its heat. “Ah, no thanks are needed—I simply pleased myself. Now I may most conveniently watch you play, whenever your performances resume.” Istvan drinks, and does not answer. “You shall resume, I hope? When you’ve quite finished settling in?”

Istvan gives a sphinx’s shrug, the motion faintly stiff. “ ’Tisn’t only mine to say.” He glances at the windows, the silver streaks of falling rain. “And there’s no hurry, is there? Eventually… But tell me, what of you, messire? Do you play your games, still?”

Something in his tone halts Mr. Arrowsmith, glass to mouth; they gaze at one another; Istvan smiles. In a chipped enamel letter box, locked inside an iron safe, lies a letter, in Jürgen Vidor’s spiky hand, referencing men called Pepper and Rawsthorne, referencing the Poppy as well:
Those walls were mine even as you quartered there, as it was mine to gather what you scattered. Do you recall Prussia? I pray you know me when we meet again.
Unsigned, without a salutation, it was meant for the General, as the envelope, in that same hand, makes plain. First read, through blood and fever’s haze, Istvan could not parse it, though later speculation, on the nights when he could not sleep, when his knitting flesh ached and crawled beneath the skin, brought some ideas to the surface, as gold glimpsed through water can be grasped when the current calms. He and Rupert have not discussed the letter beyond the first moment’s need to secure it; its uses may yet lie unrevealed, or it may have outlived them as it did its author; still it must be kept, and kept in safety.

Istvan’s further speculations, on his own injury and its instigator, are ones he has never shared with Rupert: why tell him, for instance, that he may have cut the wrong fellow? Would it make Jürgen Vidor any less dead, or deserving of death? And how would his avenger feel, to know himself not the hand after all, but the knife? Only once have they reflected on that action, one quiet dawn in a nameless hostel while Istvan lay in pain, and Rupert wakeful beside him, talking to distract him until
The whole foul affair,
in a kind of honest despair.
It’s done but not mended, it never will be mended. I wish it was me he harmed, instead of you
—

I don’t. And don’t fret: we’ve lucre enough, now, to start afresh, we’ve the mecs, and Lucy-Belle. It’s a charmed ending, Mouse. Even for Vidor—he died smiling. More than he ever offered others.

I’ve no fucking doubt of that.

Kissed by an angel,
did he expire in that belief? And what a shame if he did, why should the old masher be happy in hell?
Though Rupert has his own suspicions, which he keeps as private, telling them only in his mind, like blackened prayer beads, as he lies eyes open, Istvan’s sleeping head against his arm. How would it profit either of them, to speak such things aloud?

Now “The game of commerce,” says Istvan limpidly, as if there had been no pause at all. “Isn’t finance a sort of contest? And its practitioners as skillful as any cardsman at feint and toss?” He takes Mr. Arrowsmith’s glass from him, refills it and his own. “Cards serve so many uses. I once knew a man played patience when he could not sleep.”

“Did it help?”

With another little shrug, “He sleeps now most soundly.” Their eyes meet again, this time both men smile and “I had some word recently that might please you,” says Mr. Arrowsmith. “Your friend the musician, the pianist, Jonathan Shopsine—a friend of mine saw, or rather, heard him in Victoria. He says the young man plays hymns and tunes for the ladies’ church soirees, and his young wife sings along as she may. And they’ve a child, now.”

“But not a cello? Ah well. I would have liked to see him on a wider stage—he’s most prodigiously talented.”

“My friend said he seemed happy. As did his pretty wife. She does the speaking for both of them, apparently.” This time Istvan laughs. “My friend stopped in at the Rose and Poppy, as well. He says it prospers under its proprietress.”

Without interest: “Is that so.”

“They’ve not revived the stage shows, yet. But I understand Victoria’s a new theatre, the Golden Dragon,” going on to detail the performances observed, singers and plate-spinners and declaimers of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, even a puppet show “Set to the tunes of Tchaikovsky,” says Mr. Arrowsmith. “Rather decidedly modern! The puppets are mounted on some sort of flexible rods, and dance about in a glass ballroom, and fight a swordspoint duel as the violins sob. Quite realistic, the spurned lover even bleeds—”

“Glycerin,” says Istvan, with a shrug, but Mr. Arrowsmith notes the glint of interest in his eyes. “It’s widely used. There’s a lad in Paris mixes it with corn starch, he says it evens the flow.”

“Paris, yes—Hector’s just returned from Paris, that is, General Georges. Has he been yet to see you? It’s my thought that he may.”

Mr. Arrowsmith watches closely; Istvan’s gaze does not change, a calm and friendly regard as “We’ve not seen the General, no. But of course he’s welcome here at any time.—Ah,” with a sudden brightening, a moment’s lift of the veil, quick footsteps ascending the stairs and “Here’s a treat,” says Istvan, as Rupert enters, wrapped in a sober greatcoat, a pale china flask in hand.

“A great pleasure resumed,” as Mr. Arrowsmith steps forward, and “Well met, messire,” Rupert returning the bow, offering his hand as they exchange the usual courtesies, while Mr. Arrowsmith considers privately and anew the feral
gravitas
of Mr. Bok: See him now, hair cleanly barbered, dressed in a finely made suit, one might think him a well-born barrister, a man of commerce, strictly of the daylight world—yet a killer still, and nimble in the darkness, one can see it in his eyes, something in his gaze that calms only when he looks at Istvan. And Istvan, Dusan, Hanzel too, so at home in the drawing room that one might forget, to one’s final peril, that he is an actor, a fabricator, a skilled and tempered
farceur
whose smiles may be as counterfeit as his mecs’, or more so. And in the frame of this new habitation, as if glimpsing them backstage, one sees the both of them, the truth of them, more clearly still.

But he takes care that none of this rumination shows in his own face, just a mild curiosity as “You’ve been to the vintner’s?” with a nod to the little flask, Istvan laughs and “The confectionery, rather. It’s a new vice with him,” fondly, “this cocoa. Will you have a taste?”

“Alas, I must be on my way to the jeweler’s—my Liserl’s an eye for a certain brooch, a beetle made of lapis and pearls. Though a living beetle she’d tread upon, shrieking.” Mr. Arrowsmith pulls on his gloves. “The frail inconstancy of women!”

“Of humans, rather,” says Istvan. “The mecs, at least, are always true.”

“Another reason why I hope to see them very soon. And yourselves as well, gentlemen,” with another bow, nearly silent down the stairs, Rupert to the window to watch him step into the street, make the turn for the jeweler’s shop and “Elegant company,” with a little frown. “What did he want?”

“To felicitate the mecs. And mention that the General was in town…. Here,” handing him the flask, “your sweety’s cooling.”

“The General?” Rupert pours a dark thimbleful, drinks, offers the same to Istvan, who shakes his head, rubs his hands and “It’s cold in here,” adding coal to the fire; the cold makes his shoulder ache, now; it always will. With his back to Rupert, “He asked for nothing, if that’s what you’re asking. What he wanted, I don’t know.”

“What do they ever want. Jesu.” Rupert finishes his cocoa, the smooth and bitter sweetness, carefully caps the flask. “I saw that Boulan, outside the confectioner’s. He hinted he would like for us to play—‘reverse the eclipse,’ he calls it. His ladylove’s a country house, or somesuch.”

“Oh, really?… All my ladies and lords of the landed gentry,” Pan’s voice come muffled from the coffin, as Istvan makes a mocking bow, all fox now, white teeth, “please to go and pleasantly fuck yourselves, and your lares and penates, too…. Yeah?” in his own voice to Rupert, a fierce little smile as he crosses to his worktable, puts his hand to the Erl-King lying there, one-finger tickling the wound of that mouth and “They’ve done playing for patrons,” he says, the boy, the man, the master. “From now on, they shall play for me. And you,” kissing his fist to Rupert, the old, dear gesture to draw a smile, draw Rupert to stand beside him, beside the mecs and “We’ll do as you like,” says Rupert, and puts a hand to Istvan’s shoulder, feeling there, though his hand cannot, the tight pinkish lines of the scars.

In his comfortable coffin, face veiled in dark silk, eyes open or closed, Pan Loudermilk lies waiting, a player from a tribe never stilled so much as gathered, potential as potent as a knife in the scabbard, a poem in the mind, a wind that rises as a breeze in the tropics, later to lash the wintry coastline, and smash its boats and sailors on the shore. Or perhaps that is purest make-believe, as a puppet is only a tool, made of wood, and wool, and wire. As we are blood, and fancy, and bits of bone and dream.

ACT TWO

THE GARDEN PATH

3.

The carven wooden face is antic, the voice decidedly not: a glacial, lyric, haunting little voice, singing a little song about the Garden of Eden, of how the first man and woman learned there to see, then want, then need one another—

“In the green we found our love, and in the light we lost it”—

—as behind the small singing puppet stands a man, old-fashioned white plague mask, top hat and tangled hair, tall and still as if pinned by the light, limelight on this stage that is barely a stage at all, just a flat apron a foot or so above the four cabaret tables, three of which are currently occupied.

Cigar smoke, the faint
chink
of glassware, silence when the voice is silent; a woman sighs. The puppet seems to take a breath, drops into a sharper, minor key: “We lost our love when we understood/Just what the awful cost is…. Do you have love in your lives,
mesdames et messieurs
? Are you certain? It has a certain smell, one can’t mistake it, a certain taste on the tongue—” the puppeteer leaning back in modesty’s distance, as the puppet begins to whisper of that taste, that scent on the skin, the way the heart pounds when the beloved enters into view, the sensations one can experience that “Are not always so pleasant, are they,
mesdames et messieurs
? That fiery ache, between the knees, the greater ache between—” tap-tapping its own head, to make a little knocking sound, it could almost be comic and there is almost a laugh, the soft gasp of relief—

—but already the puppet has moved on to the torments of love lost, love abandoned, love denied, though “The greatest of these is love granted, held in the hand like a little dove, have you ever held a little dove in your hand? Its little white breast, beating fierce and wild against the palm—” as a miniscule dove, yes, white, frightened and alive, bursts out of the puppet’s hand, to disappear into a cloud of paper feathers, a tiny drift of litter on the floor. “So hard to hold, yes, but without it, one is so very dreadfully, sinfully alone, is it not so,
mesdames et messieurs
? And anything may find its way into an empty hand—”