Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 31

by Edited by Kelly Link

  They were stupid little plays, but it amused them, and D was reminded again of how much she liked her lieutenant, what a ready person he was when he wasn’t talking about politics. Eventually they found themselves having sex for a second time on a pile of musty costumes that must have belonged to discarded waxworks.

  D told her lieutenant the story of Salvador the Gentle, how he exchanged bodies with his volunteers inside the closet before they emerged to perform a waltz. Her lieutenant clucked at the second part, the pregnant women and Salvador’s insistence that it was not his “soul’s doing,” that someone else must have done it, and the husband who sat by while the conjurer bled to death. “What about the bastards, the babies?” he asked. “Who knows,” said D. She vaguely recalled that around the exhibit area for the conjurer’s closet there had been some framed four-sheet tabloids, the headlines howling that the babies were stillborn with the heads of animals, but these were—obviously—just an excuse to print an artist’s rendering of a baby with a snarling wolf’s head. Her lieutenant asked if the story didn’t make her envious. “They found out what it was like to have a cock, the conjurer’s lucky ladies.” D conceded that she was faintly envious, but maybe he could do something to soothe her. A while later, as they were drowsing off, her lieutenant admitted that he was uneasy. “You know I was a boarder as boy? During the school semesters? I shared rooms with four other boys, provincial fellows like myself, hardly able to dress ourselves, let alone keep house. Of course we had a guardian, but still. Anyway, we used to get up to a lot of trouble to impress the city boys. Steal things. Cheat. Start fights. Pick on smaller kids.” He ran his hand along D’s bare hip. “I used to feel horrible, you know, afterward. ‘Why did I do that?’ I’d ask myself. I feel like that now.” D’s lieutenant stayed quiet for a while. Then, he said, simply, “I guess I didn’t realize so many people would die.”

  D wondered what he had expected it would be like. Did he believe that the government would just step away, like workers coming off a shift, and let them take over? How often he must have cried, her lieutenant, playing as a child, as a Bobby, shocked by every shove, devastated by every bump. It was a thought she’d had so often before that she could no longer be angry at his naiveté. It just made her afraid for him.

  He sat on the edge of the fruit picker’s bunk, lacing up his boots. It was morning. “Robert,” she said.

  “Addressing me by my first name?” He twisted to squint at D. “Have we abandoned all decorum? You know I’m an officer, woman.”

  D didn’t laugh. “It’s going bad, isn’t it?”

  Her lieutenant smiled. There were bags under his eyes, stubble on his cheeks. “It’s not going great.”

  “This isn’t like when you were a boy. It’s not like yelling at some little girl on her way to school and giving her a fright,” D said.

  “I told you about that?” he asked.

  She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “People are dead, Robert. People with friends. You should go, get out of the city.”

  “I can’t do that.” Her lieutenant shook his head. He yawned and stood, pulling himself up with the frame of the top bunk. “You know, it’s funny—this will probably surprise you, but I was always the worst sport when I was kid. Hated to lose.”

  “I want you to go home for a while,” said D.

  “And leave you behind?” Her lieutenant bent to kiss her where she lay. His beard scraped her lips. “I’ll see you later. Don’t let anyone switch your head in the meantime, okay?” He stepped out through the curtain.

  “Unless it’s with the woman in the bakery! You know the one! You can switch with her!”

  She closed her eyes and traced her lips with her fingers and listened to his steps recede.

  Much later, as the day was deepening into twilight, there was a new, discordant sound, a crunch and an echoing twang. D went to her lookout. The soldier had already gone back inside the former embassy, but at the place where he deposited the bags there was now just the smashed body of a guitar, its strings spraying off the snapped neck in frozen bolts.

  D never saw her brother weep. Their mother wailed and wailed, sprawling theatrically across the divan in the parlor, as the boy withered in his sickbed.

  “Who does that woman think she’s fooling, anyway?” he croaked.

  “I don’t know.” D wasn’t fooled, either.

  Another howl of sorrow ricocheted down the hall and into the sickroom. Her brother winced. D held his club of a bandaged hand, the infection inside hot enough to feel through the fabric.

  D left the museum to sit on the stoop in the fresh air. The teacher with the long auburn hair was standing in a doorway across the street. D waved to her. Miss Clarendon did not wave back, but walked, shoulders hunched, toward D.

  “Hello, Miss Clarendon,” she greeted her, “how are you today?”

  The woman grabbed D’s forearms and squeezed. “You need to help me.” The teacher’s lips were chapped. “They took my fiancée into that place.” One of her false eyelashes was dangling from the corner of her eyelid, like the waxwork in the windmill exhibit who perched from a rope swing in front of the rotor, tightening a bolt. “He’s just a stenographer. He just writes down what people say. He doesn’t have a horse in the race.”

  “Please take your hands off me,” said D.

  “That man you fuck. The one who takes care of you,” said Miss Clarendon. Her bitten lips widened in a smile. Tears formed in her eyes, and begin to drip down her cheeks. “He’s an officer. He could find out where my fiancée is.”

  D inhaled and exhaled; she held the teacher’s gaze.

  She once asked her brother about the kids that taunted them when they walked together that time. “They didn’t bother you?”

  “No,” he said. “No one bothers me.”

  “I don’t understand how that’s possible.”

  “If anyone bothers me I imagine trapping them at the dead end of an alley and hitting them with rocks from my slingshot.”

  “Oh,” said D.

  “Then I imagine myself going closer and smashing apart their faces,” he said.

  “Is it hard?” asked D.

  “No,” he said. “You just keep hitting until the skin splits and the bone breaks.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Ha-ha,” he said, “ha-ha.”

  “Let go of me right now,” said D.

  Miss Clarendon blinked, dropped her hands. The false eyelash came loose and wafted down.

  “Your fiancée went over there. You know? You’re certain?”

  “Yes.” The teacher nodded rapidly.

  “Then he’s dead,” said D.

  “Oh.” Miss Clarendon sniffed. The tears stopped, but the smile had hardened in place. “Thank you.” Her voice was a wheeze. The teacher left, moving at a bend, like a storybook crone.

  A convoy carrying wounded soldiers passed in the street while D was sweeping the steps a few days later. One had a blood-soaked bandaged wrapped around the center of his face; the bandage was plastered down where his nose should have been, but clearly no longer was; it was as if the man’s nose had been scooped out. His muddy eyes sat above the bandage like small animals huddled on top of a wall. Some of the wounded soldiers were lying on the benches. Some had wrapped stumps at the ends of their wrists, at the bottoms of their legs.

  At the tram stop, two teenage girls in red berets pinned with the insignia of the revolutionary brigades were whitewashing a mass of graffiti scrawled over the walls. The messages they were obliterating had to do with fighting back, about the lies of the uprising, about secret trials, about the duly elected government, about rapists in red, about the devil’s many masks. “There used to be a street singer at this stop,” D overheard one girl remark to the other. “He was quite amusing.”

  Shots from next doo
r at the former embassy awoke D that night. The reports continued, sporadically, for almost an hour. At the window, D observed her neighbor carrying out bags in the dark. She counted a dozen. Once again, he paused at the back steps of the former embassy, seeming to listen. Again, D remained in the window, ordering herself to hide, but not hiding. The moonlight glossed a slickness in the soldier’s beard: silvery beads clung to the hairs. He removed a knife from a sheath at his hip and returned to the pile of bags. The soldier squatted, peering around, and then plunged the knife into a bag, working the blade around in a circular motion.

  The courtyard was empty come daylight, but there was a huge pool at the foot of the retaining wall, hundreds of flies diving and darting above it.

  Days elapsed without a visitor, not a single old man, not her lieutenant. D sat by the skinners on their log by the fire that didn’t burn. She got down on the floor and pressed her forehead against the deeply etched forehead of the beatific cordeur. For an hour she tried to sketch a picture of her brother, but his features were impossible; in the end, there was just the suit and the hat, empty of a body. She left the Museum, locking the doors behind her.

  Her feet took her to the ruins of the Occult Collection. She shifted a few chunks of masonry and unearthed scraps of burnt cloth. On one piece she could make out embroidered stars, on another symbols like pyramids. She found the blackened, jagged mouthpiece of an ivory horn. D imagined savages, a fire, a screaming maiden, a priest blowing a song to their gods. She laughed at herself. There were other fragments in the scree: a cracked gong, a charred pillar with a barely discernible etching of roses and brambles, an iron key melted into a droop and with no lock to open. D climbed over a jumble of brick and found herself at the lean-to of timber that held the conjurer’s closet.

  The rich, purple velvet fabric that had covered the inner walls of the closet, which she remembered from her visit to the Collection, had burned away. It had been a match for the material of the conjurer’s cape, which was also displayed, draped on a hook on the wall nearby, as if Salvador the Gentle had only stepped away for moment and would be right back. It was destroyed now, too, of course. D felt along the walls to either side, felt the back wall, felt the bottom. She wished, half-heartedly, to push through somehow, and find her brother, as he had been, young and beardless, dressed in his gray school uniform and cap. But there was just some dirt on the floor. The closet was a closet, plain and empty. “You there!” someone yelled. Her pulse tripped and her breath caught. D, instinctively, shoved her hands in her pockets as she spun around. There was a sting of pain—the miniature drill pricking her hand—and behind her, a gust of wind licked at her dress, a hot gasp against the exposed skin at her calves, as if a stove grate had been opened at the bottom of the closet’s back wall, and a puff of grit tinkled across the floor.

  A soldier in tall boots stood at the edge of the ruins. Other soldiers perched on the benches of a convoy in the street. They were searching for the woman who was in charge of the museum. D’s mind was still in the closet or else, she realized later, she would have thought that she was in some sort of trouble. Instead, she said, “Oh, that’s me,” and stepped up over the bricks and picked her way to the foot of the lot.

  The soldier in the tall boots gave her a note of requisition signed by the acting chairman of the Committee for the People’s Defense, Sector Six: they were to be permitted to remove whatever they saw fit from the Museum, specifically any heavy metals weighing more than five kilos, and she was to assist them.

  D guided them around to the applicable exhibits: the giant gears that children liked to run on, the cannon ball pyramid, the sling blades in the farm exhibit, the rifle parts at the gun assembly display, the anchor at the shipbuilders’, and so on. The soldiers hauled these items to the wagon; they were to be liquidated for raw materials. “Of course,” said D. She thought of the painted men on rails in the little foundry model, melting coins for cats.

  “Jus’ you ’ere?” asked a soldier with a bulge of tobacco in his cheek and a stained grin. The tobacco-chewing soldier had a strange eye; it wobbled like a wad of spit. He and another soldier were carrying an oversized gear the size of a table down the Museum steps. D was standing by at the bottom of the museum’s stoop.

  “No,” said D. “Of course I’m not the only one. There’s a large staff. Researchers, curators, restorers. Guards.”

  “I keep an eye out, too,” said a voice. Her neighbor from the former embassy had appeared, striding up the sidewalk. Today, he was wearing a shirt, but it was unbuttoned, hanging loose around his muscled upper body. Sweat shone on his neck, glittered in the hairs of his beard. D had never seen him in broad daylight and was too startled by the sight to be alarmed.

  The executioner—for that was what he was—wore a happy, tired face; he could have passed for a waxwork at any number of exhibits inside the museum.

  “Ah,” said the other soldier, and didn’t say another word after that.

  Last the soldiers set to the door of peens and hammers. “Sorry,” said the sergeant in the tall boots as one of his men banged and wrenched at the hinges. As a courtesy they dragged a good-sized sheet of timber from the ruins and set it across the gap, an improvised barricade.

  D and the executioner stood, side-by-side, as the operation was conducted. She wanted to slide away from him, wanted shrink inside of herself, pop like a soap bubble into nothingness, but she couldn’t. Whatever was between them in the dark, whatever made her fearless then, here, in the late day, in the sun, D knew that he was death. The executioner had shoulders like a casket. The stench of him was beyond unseemly; he smelled like meat and blood; he smelled sick, rotten, worse than shit; he smelled like he had been killing lots of people late at night.

  “Bullets, buckles, knives.” Her neighbor meant the metal.

  “Of course.” D made herself look at him. “Everything for the war effort.”

  “I apologize about the noise,” the executioner said. “At night.”

  She told him it was no bother.

  “Of course it isn’t,” he said, and winked at D. “But I should warn you—between us—” He lowered his chin to his chest in an expression that emphasized how he was taking her into his confidence. His beard crackled as it was pressed. “—they says I should expect an influx. And that means it’s liable to be louder, for longer.”

  D summoned a laugh that came out as a flute-y breath. She worried she might throw up if he didn’t move away soon. In her mind, she pictured maggots wriggling out of his beard and plinking to the ground, and his expression not changing.

  “I would invite you in,” she said, “but there’s not so much to see now.”

  “Very kind. Can’t, though.” The executioner shook his head. “I’ll have to come over eventually, I’m afraid, but not now.” He indicated the former embassy. “Duty calls. Pots left simmering, as the saying goes.”

  There was a clatter of metal and one of the soldiers swore. The executioner said, “Oh,” and moved toward the spill. “What’s this?”

  The rope around a bundle of tools had come loose. D recognized the tools scattered on the sidewalk pavers: they were from the masonry display. There were chisels, trowels, scrapers—and the long-handled tool that the executioner had picked up. It had a cedar handle, like an ax, and on the business end, a two-sided implement of iron, a sharp pick the size of a trestle spike pointing one way and a wide, curving claw pointing the other, like the front teeth of the world’s largest, meanest beaver.

  “I’m not sure what you call it,” said the soldier who had dropped the bag. He was a codger with a drunk’s ruby nose half-buried in a florid white mustache. Up until a few months ago D guessed that he had been a street sweeper or a jack-of-all-trades with a rented room above a tavern; now he was a sergeant in the revolutionary brigades. “It’s for breaking up the tougher types of ground, I believe.”

  �
�A mattock,” said D. She had read the exhibit. The waxwork that had wielded it was posed in mid-swing, about to shatter a mound of rocky earth.

  “Ah,” said the executioner, weighing it in his hands. “I’ll take care of these.”

  D and the codger watched silently as the executioner gathered up the chisels and mallets and trowels and scrapers, too, and carefully retied the rope around the bundle. The codger glanced at D. The little shine that had been in his eyes when he spoke up was gone. Now his gaze was the flattened gaze of a man in a painting who had been dead so long that no one living had ever known him.

  “Wait. How did you know I slept here?” D called after the executioner as he departed, the bundle under one arm, the mattock slung over his shoulder. The question was out of her mouth before she could catch it.

  The executioner raised a hand, but did not turn.

  A loose phlegmy sound came from the codger. D could see him vibrating, legs and shoulders and florid mustache and ruby nose. “Heaven save me,” he said, “heaven save me.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  This was right before the end. Her brother was shrinking in his sickbed. His boy’s school suit and cap were gone, replaced by the nightgown he would die in. “I’ll save a place,” said her brother.

  “Where?”

  “To my right.”

  “When?”