Under the Poppy (52 page)

This quiet-type gent knows how to talk to a girl like the kitchen maid; nothing but polite in the days he has been there, unlike lots of other gents, who swear or threaten or think that because she serves their grub and empties their slops, she is theirs to diddle or let loose upon, oh yes, these toff-type gents are less a gent than her own Henry, or the fellow who carts the wine for the constables downstairs. And this one is handsome, too, though he wanted a bit of a shave and more than a bit of a wash, blood, still, on his shirt, in his hair; and a darkness in his eyes that had little to do with missing sleep, though he does not sleep much at all. And suffering awfully for a smoke, he told her! though it is not permitted her to bring him or any other of them any such thing, and he ought not smoke anyway, it is a filthy habit for a gent to have.

But she saw how happy the ring had made him, this nice gent, and delivering the ring made her lover happy, which made her happy, so to continue the happiness she accepted back from him the little blue bag and its new freight, two black metal keys, that she then delivered to her lover, who handed it off to the man at the cart, who offered in return a bow so perfect, and so perfectly sincere, that for that one moment the kitchen maid knew exactly how a princess feels, with her Henry beside her transformed into a prince.

So when, in the dusty backroom, Istvan reaches at last into his breast pocket, and draws forth the double keys, it looks so much like pure prestidigitation that even Mr. Arrowsmith has to laugh: “Your mind is a
wunderkammer
, Dusan! But your timing—I wouldn’t think we’d want more drama…. This second key, you did not have it from young de Metz?”

Istvan shakes his head. It does not matter, now, where poor Puck has gotten to; unless it matters to Rupert, which it will; Mouse is that way. “ ‘Cast your bread upon the waters…’ I don’t question fortune, when she bends for me.”

Now the key is inserted, the antique tumblers turn, the safe is open, and the letter—in a hand undeniably Vidor’s, see the heavy ink, the oddly slanted T’s—is read at last. Mr. Arrowsmith is visibly pleased: “For a confession, it is a bit oblique, but the thing is well made, and can be put to many uses. You may safely—very safely—leave this weapon in my hands.”

Istvan’s smile is very gentle. “Do you know the story of Hansel and Gretel? They dropped crumbs in the forest, to find the way back out again, but mice came and ate up all the crumbs. Better they had used a compass, yeah?” As gently he takes the letter back. “This is our way out of the forest, Rupert’s and mine.”

“You do not trust me?”

Still smiling: “No.”

“Quite right,” says Mr. Arrowsmith, with a smile of his own. “You are a natural diplomat, Dusan. Though we are colleagues in this matter nonetheless, and I am still your patron on the stage.” He refills Istvan’s china cup, he pours a drop for himself, though normally whiskey is not his drink. “But greater care must be taken with this—instrument, surely we agree on that?”

Istvan nods: “Here’s a lockbox,” producing the dark little puppet with the keyhole heart, its body engineered, with the help of Pimm’s carpentry, to fasten without keys, a cunning trick of counterweights. The letter, rolled into a tube, fits neatly into the puppet’s body, while the black metal keys are strung on two different chains, one of them Mr. Arrowsmith’s watch-chain, as an empty sheet is substituted for the letter in the safe.

The two men toast each other, then, as Boilfast rejoins them, Boilfast who takes no whiskey—“I grew up nipping gin”—but shares in the quiet celebration, as well as the news of the beggars’ ball: “With all in costume,” says Mr. Arrowsmith. “Even I, though I’ve no experience at masking.” Istvan laughs softly. “Perhaps you will be kind enough to assist me there, Mr. Boilfast?”

“I’ll send a girl later to rig you up, sir.”

Istvan empties his cup, offers again the ennobling bow—“At the ball, then”—and departs into the day: watery sunlight, the smell of boiling cabbage and a passing herring cart, two shopkeepers arguing in a storefront with a third, one waves a wooden paddle like a chevalier’s lance: “Do you think I live on air, messire? Cheese costs me what it costs you!” Istvan tugs down his hat and travels swiftly uptown, to the Blackbird, knowing that Mr. Arrowsmith will have a man or two on watchman’s duty for him, now; so much the better. And better he be seen roosting at the town house, not in this suite he much prefers: as he gathers his own costume and a tool or two, considering, for a silent moment, Rupert’s desk, and pen, and sober cravats, his own cape still hung on the coat tree, though the little white knife, he notes, has gone missing. Well, no matter, it will be recovered—

—as he assures Lucy and Pimm, down in the musty pantry crowded with living ghosts, Pinky just gone “in his mad disguise,” says Lucy, with the last wisp of a smile. “He might as well be sporting a sandwich-board. Or going to your party…. We miss him sorely. And with our Jack show ready to play—” The scenery has been painted, along with the potato crate, gay diamonds of ochre and gold, its long crank handle stirred with barely a push: more of Pimm’s skillful handiwork. The children’s costumes are made, as is Pinky’s, that must be worn instead by Pimm, her master of ceremonies, now, though the role does not entirely suit him, as the costume does not entirely fit; both will have to be altered. And she has engaged a boy from the
école
, the music school, to play with Didier in place of Benjamin, Benjamin still missing, Pinky so distressed. “He’s been barred from us, you know, by his father—the General stirred him up, he says. Poor boy.”

“Don’t ever fret for the fucking quality, Puss. Especially the quality at play…. Have you any apples, there?” poking through a sack of winter fruit, as Lucy produces a granite-hard pear, and Pimm packs away his sack of nails, his hammer and chisel, every tool its proper place…. It is a pity one cannot sell tickets to a hanging, especially when the man hangs himself, but there will be an audience all the same: Madame, of course, and Mr. Arrowsmith; and the spoofing toffs for camouflage, a beggars’ ball, indeed. Feste may join him onstage, beside this newest colleague, primed up now for business, what is his name? No matter, it will come. Puss he may not have, alas, but Pinky should be on the premises, and may be even Puck will surface, who can say? since the Fates, themselves so vagabond, have been known to favor the lost. And Mouse… In his mind’s eye he sees a figure at a window grate, silent and contained; in one guillotine swipe he chops the frozen pear in two.

Rupert rubs his forehead, where the headache throbs; he turns the ring on his finger, watching the gold catch the light. It is afternoon, one can tell by the sun and the noises in the hallway; soon the day’s guard will give way to the evening’s, their chaff and bluster—“I broke the gaffer’s face for him, that’s what I did!”—rising and falling like boys’ in a schoolyard; some of them are hardly more than boys, several with their faces broken by Rupert himself, one fellow’s teeth left a gash in his hand before they scattered on the courtyard bricks. They never expected him to be able to fight, nor, when the fighting was finished, to be so still, just as they expected no weapons, then too many, but never just the pair of knives.

They took those, of course, as they took his traveling case and his billfold, though they left his spectacles and keys alone, noting, as he mopped the blood from his face, that those keys would do no good on the doors around him: one for this room, another and stouter for the hallway, and a third, with bolts as well as locks, leading to the courtyard and the street. They left him alone, then, too, to take the measure of his hurts, and discover for himself that, beyond the pallet for sitting and sleeping and the pot for pissing, there was nothing in the room to make a weapon of, and nothing to do but sit by the window and wait.

At first he had thought himself snatched for a ransom, something to do with Benjamin or Madame, though they called themselves constables who took him, and wore uniforms with little round pins; and struck harder than any footpad would have, harder than they needed, perhaps they thought he truly was a toff. It was not until the third morning, when the General came, that he began to understand his captivity, though the General spoke less in riddles than in jokes, as if they were old friends bound together in some silly mishap soon to be rectified:
I try to stay out of churches, that’s where the rascals congregate. Like the bishop and the chambermaid, isn’t it? Or your friend Entwhistle
….
With what did they charge you?

No one has charged me,
carefully, using his swollen mouth as an excuse to take his time in answering.
They took me from the street and put me here.

And no one has mentioned, say, venery? Gross indecency?
Winkingly, one man of the world to another.
No one has mentioned Benjamin de Metz? Where is Benjamin, by the way?

He felt the blood, then, beating in the raw spots; thought first of Istvan, then of Benjamin, Benjamin in tears on the bed. More carefully still:
How can I know that? Ask Madame de Metz.

Madame de Metz is distracted just now—and soon to be in mourning for her father, he is not long for this world. Perhaps he ought to consult that Entwhistle before he goes, eh?
…
No, Isobel’s no idea where the little rabbit’s got to. Your little rabbit, Mr. Bok, your
petit-maitre,
for whose pleasure you suffer in this box,
making it plain, then, what any charges would entail, making plain what those charges would cost:
Not you, there’s nothing in you for such scandal to feed on, you’re only the instrument. It will hurt your lover—may I speak frankly? Your young lover stands to be destroyed by these charges, his future prospects ruined, perhaps even stuck in gaol himself: a fine return for the family’s hospitality! You should have kept to bum-boys in the brothels, Mr. Bok. Or men like Jürgen Vidor, whom you could cut when you were done.

Then he understood yet more precisely why he was there, and sucked his cheeks to bring the pain, to keep his attention from the keys in his pocket, to keep himself from stupid rage: a long and truthful wince before he answered, most carefully of all:
What happened to Jürgen Vidor happened with your full knowledge, sir. And Mr. Arrowsmith’s.

It was my money you spent, not Javier’s.

Money? I took nothing from you
—

More fool you, then: your whoremistress had it from my man…. I understand you have a letter that belongs to me.

The General has a singular gaze, Rupert has marked it before but never so fully as in that moment: not penetrating, or fierce, but instead so flat it is like looking into sea glare on the water, no depth on view, only an endless surface. He has seen drowned men’s eyes own that same opacity. It is not alarming, rather the opposite, as if seeing what the General will look like when he is dead.

If I had such a thing, would I be here?

You are here because one man is a fool, and another a greater. But you yourself can escape this foolishness anytime you like, and save both your boy and his sister from much grief and shame. Perhaps even your colleague, too, though I confess I find it harder to forgive Hanzel’s didoes…
.
Come, Mr. Bok, you are a man of commerce, of business. What business have you in a pisshole like this, where men I would not allow to lead my horse can batter you whenever they please? Can you see from your left eye at all, by the way? Rupert did not answer. You might reflect as well that murder is a crime. Especially the murder of a man like Vidor.

He spoke with care, then, so the words would not slur, so he would be precisely understood:
I never was your servant, sir. Nor—Hanzel, either.

When the General’s face changed, and the door opened, he tensed for the beating, the two young soldiers, constables, with truncheons on their belts—but then the old man entered, Benjamin’s father, and truly he did look half-dead, more than half, in his China silk and caped overcoat, as if already bundled for the cold of the grave. His advent was a shock to the General, Rupert could see that, bad eye or no, though he said very little, the old man, and what he asked was like a puzzle, or a poem: Did he, Rupert, know the roads to Brussels well? Did he have many friends in Paris? Finally the old man made a motion, and the two soldiers stepped outside, the General too, though with great reluctance. Broken as the old man is, he did not fear Rupert, who with one hand could have broken him for good, did not fear to lean in close on the pallet and murmur, on a breath like a tomb’s,
Where is my son?

For a moment Rupert felt the laugh in his throat, a wild black bubble: where is the letter, where is my son, for a man in jail he is much consulted! But he sucked his cheeks, he shook his head, he waited for what else might come, as the silence stretched between them, the old man’s gaze as if from a mountaintop, staring down at a crawling ant. Finally
You killed him,
the old man said, in that tombstone murmur.
Jürgen Vidor. Is that not true?

I cut him. He killed himself.

Ah,
and the old man even smiled, as if parsing out the nicety of such a statement. Then he made as if to rise from the narrow pallet, as Rupert sat and watched him struggling, like a scorpion on its back, until with one strong hand he brought the old man to his feet. Face-to-face for that one moment, past the veil of rot Rupert saw the echo of Benjamin: there in the high pale forehead, the deep sockets of the eyes; blue eyes, the same shade as Mme. de Metz’.

Then the guards were back, the General was back, they surrounded the old man like an honor guard and then all were gone, and he was alone; and stayed alone, except for the daily visits from the kitchen maid. Until this ring, and Istvan in the alley. And nothing since.

Again he looks beyond the grating, into the indifferent sun, into this district he does not know or recognize, no landmarks, nothing but a landscape of dark tile roofs, the kind he used to climb when he was a lad; he could climb them still, but this grating is too stout—