The Mercury Waltz by Kathe Koja Read Free Book Online

consternation amongst some in the audience as these two found a sweeter consolation in close company, let it be only a flickering echo of a fading medieval darkness, as the applause was a bright Diogenes for the better time surely to come. For in this late, late age, when the world herself has grown so weary and so wise, may we not allow all the anthems of the heart, howsoever they shall be sung? If Theatre is Truth, surely we can do no less!
    Allow Seraphim to be your guide, then, to One Night in the Forest, where an hour’s attention will be richly rewarded both in triumphant performance and later private rumination. (Note that shows begin promptly at nine o’clock, and latecomers are not admitted.)

The Morals Commission is in no way architecturally imposing, just another stone façade on an august avenue, neighbored by the Mercantile Exchange with its high Olympian columns, the Clothiers’ and Drapers’ Assembly, and the Municipal Prefecture itself, flags flying beside the stern statue of Minerva, booted feet athwart her motto, Potens sui. To seek the pith of that building requires only a short pilgrim’s progress up a second-floor stairway—checkerboard parquet and dusty portraits of lord mayors, a civil sainthood again unimposing—and a brief consultation with the secretary at the door.
    If the building’s lower reaches, the half-dozen rooms of inquiry with their gray walls and multiple locks, seed a dread disproportionate to their size, it is accepted by everyone who toils there, from Herr de Vries down to the boy who mops the fluids, that any and all attendant grief—societal censure; financial ruin; trial and imprisonment; the occasional, regrettable suicide—must still be the way of the angels, so often depicted with flaming sword in hand, or, more practically and humbly, the way of the conscientious surgeon, cutting and cauterizing rot before it spreads. It is not that this city is much more wicked than its fellows on the continent, and if its civic heart retains some appetite for the mythic, the gaudy or hysteric, thus are the lees of history, when the world spun more slowly and such tastes were less a threat. Now things are changing, thanks to the efforts of what the newspapers call the “new men,” those administrators and businessmen with their eyes on what the great advancing future might bestow, what fresh powers and surprising prizes, if only they are resolute. As for the man in the street, there may always be a certain measure of allowable folly, of lagers and sporting girls: to clamp the lid too tight invites the boil. But on some matters there can be no debate, and it is the task of the Commission to protect the citizenry from the dangers of moral confusion, and the disruptions to commerce such confusion inevitably brings.
    One of the many ways this is accomplished is by daily inspection of the daily newspapers, a task of the secretary looking up, now, from this afternoon’s inky pile, censor’s razor in hand, to note the approach of an agent, and call with a warding gesture that “He’s downstairs, sir. He’s downstairs—” but “I’ll wait,” says Haden St.-Mary, stepping past without slowing into the narrow office with its viewless window and twin pneumatic tubes, dominated by a giant oaken desk: it seems the office is the desk, so high are its ramparts, so cavernous its drawers, its chair fully suitable for a minor emperor or up-and-coming pope, though the seat itself is surprisingly uncomfortable: “Tight on the ass,” Haden notes as another man enters, a heavy man with heavy brows and a cherub’s sweet rosy cheeks. “It could give a man the piles.”
    “ You’d say so.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “You know what it means. And Mr. Eig an’t want you sitting in his chair.” From his overcoat pocket, the bravo, Costello, retrieves a dented little tin, camphor snuff unoffered to Haden, who wrinkles his nose at the smell as he glances through the papers on the