Chapter 16: The Small Gets Bigger

Thrak

The pianist was playing the same song again.

He had played it beautifully the first time. By the ninth, I understood why living musicians were paid to stop.

“Something else,” I told him.

His fingers moved into another remembered pattern.

The customers applauded uncertainly.

“Something cheerful.”

He continued playing.

That was the difficulty with dead men. They remembered how to perform many tasks. They did not remember why anyone preferred one result to another.

Lou leaned against the office door.

“You could hire a new piano player.”

“I have a piano player.”

“You have a corpse that knows twelve songs.”

“Thirteen.”

“My mistake.”

I watched the pianist’s fingers. The left hand lagged behind the right. A tendon was beginning to fail.

I made a note to repair it.

Lou looked at the notebook.

“Could also let him stay dead.”

The pianist could still play. Repairing the tendon would take minutes, yet Lou was watching the notebook again. He did that whenever I added something to it.

“Did you come to discuss music?”

“Vincent wants you upstairs.”

That improved the morning.

* * *

Lord Bellafonte had given me three warehouses, two clubs, and responsibility for a stretch of river where men unloaded illegal liquor with the confidence of people whose employers knew the authorities personally.

The men called it territory.

I had spent my life inside territory. Usually in whichever corner contained the least useful furniture.

Now I owned the keys.

When I entered the room, men stood. When I spoke, they stopped talking. No one touched my head for luck anymore.

The Small wants to see you.

I had heard those words spoken through a door the previous evening. The man inside had begun crying before I arrived.

In Azrath’s fortress, men had laughed when they said my name.

No one laughed through that door.

Lord Bellafonte stood beside a chair covered with a cloth.

“Sit down,” he said.

I looked at the usual chair before his desk. My feet had never reached the floor from it.

“Not that one.”

He pulled the cloth away.

The new chair was made for me.

The seat was lower. The arms were shorter. There was a little footrest that folded out if I wanted it. Whoever made it had carved a vine along the back without making it look like furniture intended for a child.

I touched the wood.

“Feldman did it,” Lord Bellafonte said. “Good cabinetmaker. Owed me a favor.”

“For what?”

“Don’t worry about it. Sit.”

I sat.

My feet touched the floor.

He smiled.

It was a small thing. It made my throat hurt.

“You look comfortable.”

“I am.”

“Good. You should be.”

I tested the footrest. It held my weight.

I thanked him and tried it once more.

Then he opened the accounts.

* * *

A driver had disappeared with a truckload of liquor.

His wife said he had been arrested. The police said they had no record of him. Another driver said he had heard talk of a new outfit offering better rates.

Lord Bellafonte wanted the liquor back.

“And the driver?” I asked.

“Find out what happened first.”

I disliked that sentiment.

First required me to leave the matter unsettled while other people decided whether to lie.

Still, I had learned from the five men. They were his men. I would obtain permission before making another expensive improvement.

The driver’s wife lived over a bakery. She opened the door only after Lou said his name.

Then she saw me.

She gripped the edge of the door.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

She had a child behind her. The child looked at my hat instead of my face.

“Why’s it so tall?”

“Because I am not.”

He laughed. I almost smiled back before his mother pulled him behind her skirts.

Lou asked questions about times, names, and who had come to the door. I watched the woman’s hands. They shook even when she had no reason to believe I was looking.

She was frightened, but fear did not tell me what she knew.

That seemed a flaw in its design.

That afternoon we found the driver badly beaten in a rival warehouse, beside the truck. I sent four dead men through the front while Lou cut him loose at the back.

There were shots. The dead men continued forward. The living men quickly developed an interest in negotiation.

Lord Bellafonte was pleased.

So was Lou.

“See?” he said. “That worked.”

He meant patience. I meant the four dead men.

The driver’s wife brought a pie to the club the next day.

She waited near the entrance with her child. He gripped the parcel as though personally responsible for its safe arrival.

I asked what she wanted.

“To thank you.”

I waited for the request that ordinarily followed gratitude.

None came.

The child held the pie out. I took it because he seemed in danger of dropping it while waiting for me to understand the ceremony.

“My husband is home,” the woman said. “That’s all.”

“His debt remains unchanged.”

She looked at Lou.

“What debt?”

“The cost of recovering the shipment.”

“Vincent said he didn’t owe anything.”

Lou nodded.

The parcel warmed my fingers. She had brought it straight from the oven.

There was no receipt or anything for me to sign.

“Then why bring this?”

The child answered before his mother could.

“Because we’re glad.”

They left after that. Lou cut the pie and gave me a piece on one of the club’s good plates.

The crust broke under my fork. There were apples inside.

I ate all of it.

Then I asked Lou to record the family’s address, so I would remember that they were favorably disposed toward us.

He set down his fork.

“You could just remember they brought a pie.”

I could have. Instead, I opened the book.

* * *

On Saturday, Lord Bellafonte told me to come to his house for Sunday dinner.

“What should I bring?”

“An appetite.”

I waited for the rest.

He returned to his newspaper.

* * *

A small girl opened the door.

She held a wooden giraffe by the neck.

“You’re Thrak.”

“Yes.”

“Grandpa said you were coming.”

She took my hand.

I looked past her for the guards.

There was a man across the street, pretending to examine a motorcar. None in the hall. From somewhere inside came the noise of several people talking at once and a woman telling someone to leave the bread alone.

The child pulled.

“Come see.”

I followed her into a room containing a boy on the floor, a dog on the boy, and Lord Bellafonte attempting to separate them without spilling his drink.

There were no lieutenants or accounts. His wife came through another door wiping her hands on a cloth. His daughter followed with a stack of plates.

Just his family.

I stopped so abruptly that the girl turned to look at me. I could not discover where I was meant to stand.

The dog solved that by putting its nose inside my coat.

“Buster,” Lord Bellafonte said. “Manners.”

It withdrew the nose and sat on my foot.

Apparently this was an improvement.

At dinner, the girl insisted that I sit beside her.

Her brother objected. He had questions.

“You can ask from there,” their mother said.

“Can you do magic?”

“Yes.”

“Can you make Lucy disappear?”

“No making your sister disappear at the table.”

His mother said it without looking up from the dish she was passing.

I considered the restriction.

“Afterward?”

Lord Bellafonte laughed into his napkin.

Lucy kicked her brother beneath the table. He dropped a piece of bread. Buster acquired it before anyone could intervene.

The boy reached for another and knocked over his glass.

I caught it before it struck the floor. The water was less cooperative.

For a moment I sat perfectly still, holding the glass while it dripped onto my sleeve.

I expected him to receive a swift beating for his insolence. His mother handed him a cloth.

“Wipe it up, Paul.”

He did.

The conversation continued.

Mrs. Bellafonte put another spoonful of potatoes on my plate before I had finished the first.

After dinner, the children required a bridge.

Their wooden blocks were insufficient for the distance between two cushions, and the giraffe apparently could not swim.

“That animal has very long legs,” I pointed out.

“It’s a deep river,” Lucy said.

“How deep?”

“All the way.”

A difficult engineering problem.

I borrowed a book from the lower shelf and laid it across the gap. Paul drove a little wooden truck over it. The bridge held.

Then he added a second truck.

“Now the soldiers.”

“How many soldiers?”

“All of them.”

I examined his army.

“I will need another book.”

We built a road around the sofa. Lucy appointed the giraffe to collect payment at the crossing. Paul attempted to send his soldiers through without paying. I upheld the giraffe’s authority.

Soon I was lying on my stomach, inspecting the underside of a bridge while Paul explained why a truck full of soldiers should cost less than two empty ones.

He was wrong. I explained precisely why.

Lucy laughed so hard that she fell against my shoulder. I laughed too.

When the children went to fetch more soldiers, Buster brought me a ball.

I rolled it along the carpet. He brought it back.

We repeated this until it became clear that he had no further ambitions for the afternoon.

When I stopped, he put his head beneath my hand.

I scratched behind one ear. His hind leg began moving.

“Have I damaged him?”

“No,” Paul said. “He likes it.”

I tried the other ear.

Same result.

An excellently designed creature.

Lord Bellafonte watched us from his chair, smiling over the edge of his newspaper. I waited for him to speak. He turned the page.

I went back to scratching Buster’s ears until Lord Bellafonte fetched the projector.

The projector required an argument.

Lord Bellafonte maintained that he knew how to thread it. His daughter maintained that this had also been his position when the film broke the previous Sunday.

“Once,” he said.

“Twice.”

“The first one was already damaged.”

She held out her hand.

He gave her the reel.

Paul helped draw the curtains. Lucy climbed onto the sofa beside me with the giraffe. Her mother sat on my other side, folding a small pile of clothes while the picture shook into place on the screen.

There was a man with an unfortunate hat.

He was attempting to carry a ladder through a doorway.

I could see the solution immediately. He could not.

Each attempt acquired further complications. By the time a second man arrived to assist, the first had trapped a policeman against a wall.

Paul laughed before it happened. He had evidently seen the film before and wished to demonstrate that he remembered correctly.

Then the ladder turned.

I laughed with him.

Buster settled against my legs. Lucy explained which man was about to fall into the water, then leaned against my arm to watch him do it.

Somebody passed me a bowl of sugared nuts.

I took a handful.

The projector rattled. Mrs. Bellafonte complained that her husband was falling asleep. He denied it without opening his eyes.

I meant to see whether the policeman escaped.

* * *

The room was quiet when I woke.

The screen had gone white. The reel clicked softly at the end of its run until someone rose to stop it.

Lucy was asleep against me. Her hand lay open on my sleeve, the giraffe fallen between us. Paul had curled up at the far end of the sofa with his feet beneath his mother’s skirt.

A blanket covered my knees. I did not remember anyone putting it there. Buster raised his head when I moved, then settled again beneath my hand.

For a little while, I stayed exactly where I was.

I could come here again.

The thought arrived without difficulty. Next Sunday, perhaps. We had not finished the road beneath the table. Paul wanted a tunnel. I knew how to build a very good tunnel.

Lucy stirred against my arm.

I looked down at her.

When I had fallen asleep against my father’s chair, he had kicked me awake for being in the way.

I had forgotten that.

Or had ceased remembering it often enough to call it forgotten.

At home, a broken cup had meant waiting to discover who would be blamed. I had learned to eat before anyone noticed how much remained in the pot. My mother had called me greedy when I asked for more. My father had called me useless when I stopped asking him for anything.

Paul had spilled his water. They had given him a cloth.

I looked around the room again.

The plates had been cleared. The children had been fed. Nobody was counting what any of them had earned.

This was an ordinary Sunday to them. There would be another.

My hand had stopped moving on the dog’s head. He nudged it.

I withdrew it into my lap.

I remembered the five glasses in the alley.

Mickey had raised his to Bellafonte.

One of those men must have had a room like this to return to. Someone who had kept his supper warm.

I had never asked.

Lucy moved closer in her sleep, trusting me to make room.

I wanted her off my arm.

I wanted to go back to the film, before I remembered anything. The desire was so strong that I was ashamed of it.

Twenty-eight years. All that work. All those bodies. And I had lain on a carpet making a toy giraffe demand pennies because two children enjoyed it.

Shiiruk would have laughed until he could not breathe.

I could hear him.

I hated him and the men who had watched him strike me. I hated my father for teaching me to lower my head before I had ever entered Azrath’s service.

Lord Azrath had never asked whether I was comfortable.

I had spent years imagining what he might say if I finally pleased him.

Now Bellafonte had given me a chair and his wife had fed me potatoes, and I had fallen asleep among them like a dog taken in from the rain.

Look how little it took.

My throat tightened.

I stared at the blanket until the stitching blurred.

They should not have brought me here.

Lord Bellafonte rose from his chair.

“You comfortable, kid?”

His voice was low so he would not wake the children.

“Yes, my lord.”

“Vincent. It’s Sunday.”

He smiled.

I could no longer bear the sight of it.

He had left his gun somewhere else. I knew the shape of the coat when he carried it. His hands were empty. The back of his neck was bare as he bent to gather Lucy into his arms.

Any fool could have killed him.

He trusted me in this room.

That was the man I served.

His daughter took Paul upstairs. I reached for the blanket, but Mrs. Bellafonte gathered it first. She told me to leave it to her and asked whether I wanted something wrapped up to take home.

I thanked her. My voice sounded quite normal.

At the door, Lucy woke enough to lift her head from her grandfather’s shoulder.

“Next time,” she mumbled. “The tunnel.”

“Go to sleep, sweetheart,” he said.

I put on my hat.

Lord Bellafonte watched while I fastened my coat.

I wanted him to stop looking at me.

“Lou will drive you,” he said. “You oughta come more often.”

“Thank you for dinner.”

Buster followed me to the door. I stepped around him.

Outside, the guard straightened beside the motorcar. He saw Lord Bellafonte holding the sleeping child and looked away with a little smile.

I would have dismissed him for that.

In the car, Lou asked whether I had enjoyed myself.

“Yes.”

“Good people.”

I watched the house through the rear window until we turned the corner.

Love had made Bellafonte careless. It had nearly done the same to me.

I would not go back on Sunday.

When I next sat across from him at the office, I would begin counting the guards.