The Mercury Waltz by Kathe Koja Read Free Book Online Page B

brown leather and piled papers and piety; to look into the brain-house of Eig, what sort of place would it be? Heaven’s dungeon? A clean clockwork factory? A bustling morgue? like the rooms downstairs, Haden has seen those rooms a time or two, from the safe side of the door. But the business is to know things, his own as much as Eig’s, so “You want a boy at the playhouse when? Tête baissée? Posthaste, that is,” somewhat self-consciously, when Eig does not respond. “Your French is better than mine.”
    “I believe that translation is ‘headlong,’ though all my French is from books.”
    “You’ve never been to Paris?”
    “I have never left this city. But my mind has traveled many roads. Yours does the same, I believe,” cup down again to extract from one of the many drawers a pale envelope, extending it just far enough so that Haden must reach to receive it, slip it into his coat pocket, pick up his hat as “You’ll have a boy at the theatre as soon as is feasible. Oh, and Mr. St.-Mary,” to make Haden pause, one hand poised on the jamb. “Did you enjoy sitting in my chair?”
    Their gazes meet, Eig’s calm and black as an eel’s, Haden’s narrowed like an alley cat’s and “Not a whores’-hair-worth,” with a little shrug. “Desk work doesn’t suit me.”
    “No? But your view may yet be changed, by, what is it, ‘the enticements and uses of power.’ Not all men are made for it, but the ones who are ought not turn away. In the meantime, you mustn’t tease my watchdog,” as both smile now, neither from mirth, and Haden passes with a filthy gesture that glowering cherub in the anteroom, who steps back at once into the office—
    “Beg pardon, sir, but that one’s real trouble. That St.-Mary, he’s a nancy and a scoundrel, he’s—”
    “There is a saying the Italians have, ‘A nail drives out a nail.’ Costello, that’s Italian, isn’t it?” Mr. Eig sips his tea. “Don’t worry about Mr. St.-Mary, Costello.”
    —as Haden makes for the stairs, the doors, the brisk and living air of the avenue outside—coal stink, some café’s kaffee, the pink whiff of two trudging posy girls—putting space between himself and that building, legging through the streets to spy a lad of his a moment before the lad spies him: “You boy! Go get me a bock,” from the crush of a nearby tavern, a chipped and slippery mug that Haden downs in three deep swallows, while his other hand reaches into the boy’s shabby trousers, heedless and too hard, the boy trying not to flinch as “A man can quite make a meal of that, ” with a squeeze and a grainy belch, the boy then forgotten as Haden turns up the avenue, not toward the Mercury Theatre after all but another district altogether, the publishers’ row of newspapers and bookbinders, the cramped confines of the Daily Solon, where the air is a-fug with pipe smoke and Voltaire’s portrait hangs in honor above the door. At the foyer stairs, the walls plastered with posters for this lecture and that, all the myriad readings and meetings and literary insurrections, he checks the clippings in his quilted vest pocket, then rings the bell and asks to speak with Herr Seraphim.

See another cardfall of the past, to show a place not far by road or train track, but to this quiet boy at another window, clean panes and fussy lace, book balanced on his knee, it might be another world entirely, a city imagined bright as the moon from this dim, calm, suffocating little town, where every day is the same as every other: Half-past six, the maid Dolly wakes him for prayers, then breakfast, Mamma in her cabbage-rose cap, Papa in vest and with newspaper, their cups of tea, his mug of heated milk, the cook boils it always with the sickening skin but he does not complain, he peels it carefully to one side with his spoon while Mamma details all the details of the day to come; no one is truly listening, not even Mamma, but it is how the days begin.
    Then he and Papa together