The Bastards' Paradise Read online

  THE BASTARDS’ PARADISE

  a novel

  Kathe Koja

  Published by

  Roadswell Editions

  127 W. 83rd St. #56

  New York, NY 10024-0056

  First Edition

  November 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-938263-23-1

  Copyright © 2015 by Kathe Koja

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including posting text or links to text online, printing, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher.

  ˚"Cover art & design © Rick Lieder • Dreampool.com"

  Many thanks to Rick Lieder, Aaron Mustamaa, Christopher Schelling,

  Carter Scholz, Sarah Miller, Diane Cheklich, and Maryse Meijer, for aid

  and encouragement along the long road.

  To CRS

  And all who play for love

  His nerve electrifies the air.

  His message is his being there.

  From “Mercury Dressing,” J. D. McClatchy

  Act One

  The Plague Doctor

  In the last of a clouded sunset, in an autumn of frosts and fog, an omnibus rattles through a city square hung black with bunting, its buildings plastered with bills for competing political confraternities, as if those walls were a municipal missal blown to pieces by the wind. Beneath more bunting a somewhat shabby café, once Die Welt and now the Cornucopia, shuts its doors against the darkness as ringed pigeons rise to roost above a shoe-repair shop, a near-beer tavern, and a theatre unmarked and unnamed; no one queues at that theatre’s little box office, itself curtained in violet like a bruised and veiled eye. A pair of men who might be thugs but for the uniforms they wear—stiff-necked brown, with conspicuous badges—patrol the avenue by driving from their path any who still loiter: a cringing, grinning beggar in coat and trailing apron, a stoic bill-sticker with his glue pot and bag, an apparently intoxicated foreigner—what else but a foreigner, gabbling in spats and a foreign-type hat, turned-up brim and “Feathers like a peacock,” scoffs one of the thug-patrolmen, while the other cuffs the man—“On your knees, pin-picker”—into the muck and muddied song sheets at the curb, held there until his pockets are empty, kept there by a kick between the legs that leaves him curled and weeping as the constables walk on.

  “Enough of that today already,” says one, the other nodding in assent, then blinking as a clot of what appears to be mud but reveals itself as dog shit hits his face, makes him sputter and gag as his fellow bellows in vain for the tosser to show himself: that tosser silent to watch from above, clandestine in the third-story window of the theatre building, a young man in black drawing back into the room where a round-eyed child sits observing, solemn in a mended nightshirt on the edge of the rosewood bed.

  “And that’s how a body cleans his boots, Ru,” he says, wiping his hands with a rag of worsted then hoisting the child to his shoulder, to the stairs, down to the playing space where players as clandestine have gathered, rough-looking youths in beaver hats and frowsy courtiers’ ruffs, paring their nails with flick knives, leaning one on another, all waiting until a small figure in paste gold and grey woolen, her abundant hair wound and wrapped like a sultana’s, emerges from behind the drawn curtains to announce with a shrug that “The funeral was show enough for them, looks like. No one has come.”

  “No one has come yet,” corrects another young man, himself in lavish if raveling silk, a dandy’s pink silk and feathered hat, holding an elongated bundle that on closer look is shown to be a puppet, small pointed horns and golden eyes shielded for now behind a blindfold, a character he carries as the other carries the child, pausing to transfer him to his mother’s arms as, turning on his heel, he turns away from the puppet-handler in the silken shirt: “It was show enough for me, too. I’m for off.”

  “Haden, we’ve a show. All’s ready, the lads are ready—”

  “Ready to be pinched, an’t they? Alek missed it this time by half a whore’s hair.” The tallest youth smiles, half-uneasy, half-proud. “And for what? He’s a dodger, not a hymn singer.”

  “He’s an actor!”

  “How much acting will he do in the coop? And no one even heard them in all that caterwaul—”

  “Must we have this again?” They stare at one another, an unhappy silence that grows unhappily long, the lads shifting foot to foot, Tilde pursing her lips until “Anyway my angel’s broken,” Haden’s shrug that tries for carelessness, that fools no one, that brings Frédéric’s sharp remonstrating breath—

  —arrested then by noises, a furtive rapping at the alleyside door, until at last a brave audience of half a dozen—a former Literary Leopard, a defrocked professor from the Academy Scientific, two comrades in matching trousers and hangman’s ties, and Samuel Ridley the photographer with a young woman in a dowdy blue cape—clusters in the seats to note the stage-side placard—“The Bridge of Sighs: A Greedy Fish-tale”—and, after perusing the somewhat overlong playbill and its Latin allusions, settle itself for a playlet of fiery moral instruction lit by the banked coal of scorn.

  Now the youths arrange themselves in a bankers’ Greek chorus, as Frédéric sets the puppet to declaim lines unbawdy but made to rouse, to stir and stir up as his comrade in black pulls on with a sigh a black mask that covers nearly all his head, only his yellow eyes, like the puppet’s, left to blink in the dimness, climbing into the flies to swing the angel Israfel—strings sadly twisted, wings still intact—as backdrop to the sung Faustus declamation that

  “Upon a bridge made of money, an angler let down his pole

  To catch the thin unwary fish, and stuff them in his bowl—”

  —as the youths in their hats enact that angling and stuffing amidst clouds of paper money tossed one to the other, blue like the city’s own tender, this version inked with the Mayor’s name and a scowling skull-and-crossbones: an effect much labored-over but in the end unconvincing, as the recalcitrant bills fall limp as wet leaves, stick to the placard and the curtain and the soles of the boys’ boots, go everywhere but where they should —

  “—for when the bowl is empty, the Mayor’s got naught to eat

  Except what the widows scatter at the bones of their children’s feet—”

  —as an empty wooden bowl the size of a wagon wheel is produced and rolled across the stage, pelted as it goes with dried-out chicken bones, the angel swinging lower still, a holy metronome, while as if in compensation for the failure of effects the puppet and Frédéric raise their volume, so loud now that Tilde frowns in warning, constables still patrolling must surely hear that illegal noise; do they? and is that their noise already, come to the alley door? She deposits Ru beneath the tableskirt and slips a hand into her pocket, past the kidskin card case to the blade, no more paring knife —

  “Since who’s to care for orphans of the lowly and the poor?

  Not our Fishmonger Mayor, the city’s foremost whore!

  So let him bait his evil hook—”

  —as that door opens, turned by a key, to admit in silence a figure of such strange opulence that he becomes the show just by entering, a man with a case in one bandaged hand and a black cigarette in the other, its acrid smoke to set the boys’ noses twitching as he takes a seat politely near the back. His advent seems in some way to have upset the angel, who nearly flies straight into Frederic’s head, Frédéric who must duck and then squint past the stage lights, and repeat the line about the evil hook—

  “So let him bait his evil hook, we’ll gather up the lost

  And make this city pay for once the tears that it has cost!”

&
nbsp; —which seems to end this segment of the show at least, or at least there is no more singing, only the angel yanked up into the flies, the lads stranded in tableau with their bowl and useless money, Tilde swift and eager to the alley door to look out, look again as “Bravo,” says the man with the cigarette, dropping it to crush beneath a cracked boot heel; as he rises, something white winks at his ear, a pearl earring swinging as he opens his case and mounts the little stage as easily as if he has done so a thousand times before, accompanied now by a dark scrapwood creature, one-armed, one-eyed, who turns that singular stare upon the Faustus, so much larger yet demonstrably at a loss and “Pour faire changement,” says the man to his puppet. “Gentlemen and ladies, fellow players, I give you Mr. Loup.”

  Mr. Ridley applauds at once, the others in slower echo; the lads, confused, look to Frédéric for their cue, but he seems transfixed by this new puppet as “Watch,” says Mr. Loup—and in what a tone, so thin yet so fierce, as if a voice might be a lockpick, turning like a key in the fortress of the mind, admitting what insists on admittance, what will not be denied. “And learn…. For,” asks his master of the room at large, “there is, is there not, gentlemen and ladies, always the opportunity to learn? No matter who we are, where we are, how old we are, no matter how dark the darkness or tardy the dawn, there is one true lesson only and that lesson is to—”

  “Keep your eyes open!” cries Mr. Loup, leaping sideways to strip the blindfold from the devil, a snatch so violent that that worthy is almost dropped by Frédéric, as stunned as if Mr. Loup has assaulted him, too. From the flies Haden then descends, to tug off his mask, wait in the wings as the puppeteer favors him with a glance—unreadable past welcome, ringed and smudged with kohl—while addressing his changeling companion: “Why, keep your hands—your hand—to yourself, messire, one needn’t be so rude! For haven’t we come to share the good news, the gospel of the road? One plays his way back to Eden, or Valhalla, whichever, song to song, show to show like stepping-stones—”

  “Caliban and sawdust,” Mr. Loup interrupts, jerking himself sideways, as though in his indignation he will abandon the stage entirely. “Play how, stay how? All the theatres here have closed!”

  “Well, yes, that is so. Why is that so?” as if only to Mr. Loup, though his gaze seems to gather like clues the meager audience, the dimmed stage lights, Fortune’s Wheel draped dark as death in a corner, and make all one with the smell of smoldering fire-bins and the sluggishness of the trains, the lugubrious accommodations, discarded song sheets and poor lost foreigner, if any could hear him, still moaning from his beating at the curb. “Is it because there is no more lard left to thin out the greasepaint? Or no more brandy for lubrication? Oh, surely not!” as Mr. Loup clutches his throat and the audience laughs, avid now, held fully by this apparition with his piecemeal accomplice, his kohl and sharp fashionable goatee, in gaycoat so graceless it makes a mockery of its obvious expense, as if in knowing parody of an actor and a fop. “Is it because the gods have quite deserted their acolytes upon the boards, and left them to the mercy of the burghers? Or because those burghers, naughty fellows, worry only for who butters their bread, and not for who tickles their—Never mind,” soothingly to the puppet, to the ones on stage and in the seats. “This theatre is open for business—and,” toeing the bills on the floor, “with lucre aplenty, so business must be good! And already you’ve made a friend,” nodding to the mute and unmoving Faustus, “who’s a friend of his own,” somewhat louder to Haden, who responds gamely to the cue, steps forward bearing the angel between the lads who part to flank him and “We’ll make you something to watch!” grunts Mr. Loup, his handler nodding again and more emphatically until Frédéric at last finds his voice, rises to his feet to affirm that “Indeed, the show will go on! And many welcomes to this fine entertainer, who once graced this very stage, the very talented and renowned Monsieur Hil—”

  “Marcus,” Istvan stepping in front of him, one planted, booted foot to make a courtesy. “Stephanos Marcus, lately of the Bosporus,” as Mr. Loup bows, too, and the audience applauds, Mr. Ridley loudest of all, for with a professional’s acuity he has recognized at once this man, that face! while he nudges his assistant in the cape: “See, Nella, it’s that fellow from before! Remember I told you of him and his fellow, back when this place was the Mercury? Oh, those were some shows, those wild puppets and—”

  “I know,” says Nella without enthusiasm, recalling the plates secreted behind the counter, those strange and silly puppet-pictures, and that carte-de-visite of this one and his dead friend, the two dressed up like gentlemen, but very plainly not; any more than is Mr. St. Vitus, there, who puts on these dangerous plays that no one anyway understands, or his stuck-up gypsy of a wife and their silent brat. And about that yellow-eyed bumfellow with his snuff-spitting hooligans, the less said the better —

  —as Haden beckons those lads to draw the curtain, himself toting Faustus and the angel to their backstage perch, as Frédéric extends the welcome along with his hand—“What a surprise, what an entrance! Whatever brings you back to us?”—but it is Tilde who commands “Come sit,” making plain by her iron absence of notice that Mr. Ridley and Nella, poking heads beyond the drapery, are patently uninvited, so that Istvan shrugs in politesse—“Bonsoir, another time”—and then they too are gone and Frédéric is fastening the door, is shooing the lads to the stairs past Haden, who nods them upward—“Stay till I call you. And no fucking peeping”—as “Where is Sir?” Tilde pouring oily tea as Istvan reboxes Mr. Loup, his glance for the familiar space as if seeing all anew: those stairs, that wallpaper, that half-unsteady pile of flats, the splintered lance of a broom and shield of burnished tin, this backstage table and “Why,” he says, “it’s the little lord,” to Ru still sequestered beneath, making marks on a folded newspaper with Frédéric’s old Scout pen. “Just the size of a good-sized puppet now, isn’t he? And sturdy, too. Hello, Rupert.”

  The child says nothing. Tilde adds a plate to the cup, chipped china and “Plum charlot,” she says. “There isn’t any brandy. Where is—”

  “And Marquis,” with a half-salute, “apologies for the intrusion—from outside, the place looked empty!—and even more for my associate’s behavior,” as he produces from a pocket the Faustus blindfold, lets it curl and drop, dark as ink to the tabletop. “It was the homily, I think, that set him off—is it homilies you’re selling, now? No more blood and thunder?” with an eyebrow raised to Frédéric in his motley, still wearing the feathered hat; flustered, he sets it to one side as “Plenty blood and thunder already,” says Haden, one thumb to the alley door. “May be you noticed, Mister, what’s it now, Marcus? Lately of the Bosporus?” measuring him with half a smile, the other half returned by Istvan while measuring with his own gaze the distance between Frédéric and Haden, who neither stand nor sit together, these two when last seen whose hands were always one upon the other and “I notice,” he says, “that you’re done with pretty plaids,” and grown much more menacing as a result, no more the half-clownish grifter. “A bit funereal, but it suits. Though one did like you dashing.”

  “A man adapts. You’ve changed some, too, an’t you, with that goat’s beard and—”

  The spoon strikes the teapot like a furious small gong, everyone jumps as “Where is Sir?” Tilde’s stare so excruciatingly blue, fixed on Istvan as if she might strike him next and “Softly,” he says, while Ru climbs his mother’s skirts to hunker on her lap and stare as well at the stranger. “Remembering, don’t we, what happened here, that awful loss,” reaching past the teapot with his unhurt hand, a ring upon it, intaglio, slightly too large for him; he covers her fingers, gives them an encouraging pat. “Someone misses your chocolat greatly! And wishes as greatly that that show had not to go so far. Or himself, either.” He takes up the teaspoon to make it bow to Ru, a funny little bob; Tilde nearly smiles; the child looks away.

  “Any show at all goes too far, now,” says Frédéric with a frown. “But you’re still playin
g, you and—Or were you caught up in the war?” cautiously, for even in his gaudy attire the marks of hard travel are plain upon Istvan: the bandaged hand, the battered case, lines at his eyes that the kohl only half disguises, though his shrug is all insouciance as “Next time,” he says. “I’m due elsewhere just now, but we’ll have a good and proper gossip, won’t we. And I’ll bring along some brandy,” as Tilde wraps the plum pastry in a whorl of butcher’s paper, tucks the ends tight and “For Sir,” her murmur as Istvan thanks her with a kiss on the cheek, takes up that case with a wince nearly successfully concealed; only Haden accompanies him to the door, the alley door and “We don’t use the other any longer, good thing you kept the key…. Watch your step, now, that fucking funeral’s got the whole place a-flutter, I had to rearrange some fellow’s nuts just to get home.”

  “Well, it’s not every day one kills a king. Or a duke, whichsoever.” On the threshold, the alley’s deepened darkness like a different sort of curtain drawn, Haden leans closer as Istvan pauses to light another black cigarette, Turkish tang and in the flare of the match “What’s your game here, uncle?” he asks softly. “Do you stay? And where’s—your friend?”

  “Just a stone’s throw. But it’s been some while since we saw this fine establishment, one needed to be sure of things. Especially in a city this divided. Only have patience, kit,” and with a little wink, a highly improper grasp that leaves Haden startled and tingling, he is gone, swift from the alley to the boulevard, swift to palm a folded bill to one last prowling patrolman, passing thus unimpeded to hail a cab and ride through emptied streets half-remembered, past the hulking and populous Cathedral and the rows of shuttered shops, past Carousel Park, its weather-worn chestnut booths and paths without strollers, past the newsvendors shouting the day’s last editions—“The Vigilist knows! The Vigilist knows!” and “Listen to the Fanfare!”—not at all in the direction of the last best hotel in the city, the Hotel Baron St. Williams with its guarded doors and twice-draped windows, its nervous staff and banks of flowers never entirely fresh: where in a large suite adjoining another, larger, empty suite, reserved in his name, Sir Roland Smalls in shirtsleeves and silk slippers lays out a hand of patience with cheap cards purchased on the train, while a round-bellied pug dog sleeps beneath a tufted chair, and Portia del Azore takes from a little pearlized tin a licorice drop, Swiss licorice black as opium as “The ribbons don’t mask the provenance,” says Roland Smalls, a remark ignored by her as she adds one last fillip to an already overdressed package, a jade-and-ebony quellazaire bought as another in a series of coaxing gifts, destined to be discarded like all the others—