In the Company of Thieves

by Kage Baker

  “See?” Golescu repeated. But Emil refused to open his eyes, and Golescu released his hand in disgust. Taking up the saber, he sliced through the cord that bound them. Emil promptly curled into himself like an angleworm and lay still, covering his eyes once more. Golescu considered him, setting aside the saber and rubbing his own wrist.

  “If you’re a vampyr, you’re the most pathetic one I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “What’s she keep you around for, eh?”

  Emil did not reply.

  Some time after midday, the wagons stopped; about an hour later, the door opened and Amaunet stood there with a bundle of clothing.

  “Here,” she said, thrusting it at Golescu. Her dead stare fell on Emil, who cringed and shrank even further into himself from the flood of daylight. She removed one of her shawls and threw it over him, covering him completely. Golescu, pulling on the trousers, watched her in amusement.

  “I was just wondering, madame, whether I should maybe get myself a crucifix to wear around our little friend, here,” he said. “Or some bulbs of garlic?”

  “He likes the dark,” she replied. “You owe me three piastres for that suit.”

  “It’s not what I’m accustomed to, you know,” he said, shrugging into the shirt. “Coarse-woven stuff. Where are we?”

  “Twenty kilometers farther north than we were yesterday,” she replied.

  Not nearly far enough, Golescu considered uneasily. Amaunet had turned her back on him while he dressed. He found himself studying her body as he buttoned himself up. With her grim face turned away, it was possible to concede that the rest of her was lovely. Only in the very young could bodily mass defy gravity in such a pert and springy-looking manner. How old was she?

  When he had finished pulling on his boots, he stood straight, twirled the ends of his moustaches and sucked in his gut. He drew one of the gold rings from his former bosom.

  “Here. Accept this, my flower of the Nile,” said Golescu, taking Amaunet’s hand and slipping the ring on her finger. She pulled her hand away at once and turned so swiftly the air seemed to blur. For a moment there was fire in her eyes, and if it was more loathing than passion, still, he had gotten a reaction out of her.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  “I’m merely paying my debt!” Golescu protested, pleased with himself. “Charming lady, that ring’s worth far more than what you paid for the suit.”

  “It stinks,” she said in disgust, snatching the ring off.

  “Gold can afford to smell bad,” he replied. His spirits were rising like a balloon.

  Uninvited, he climbed up on the driver’s seat beside her and the wagons rolled on, following a narrow river road through its winding gorge.

  “You won’t regret your kindness to me, dear madame,” said Golescu. “A pillar of strength and a fountain of good advice, that’s me. I won’t ask about your other business in the wagon back there, as Discretion is my middle name, but tell me: what’s your fortunetelling racket like? Do you earn as much as you could wish?”

  “I cover my operating expenses,” Amaunet replied.

  “Pft!” Golescu waved his hand. “Then you’re clearly not making what you deserve to make. What do you do? Cards? Crystal ball? Love potions?”

  “I read palms,” said Amaunet.

  “Not much overhead in palm reading,” said Golescu, “But on the other hand, not much to impress the customers either. Unless you paint them scintillating word-pictures of scarlet and crimson tomorrows, or warn them of terrifying calamity only you can help them avoid, yes? And, you’ll excuse me, but you seem to be a woman of few words. Where’s your glitter? Where’s your flash?”

  “I tell them the truth,” said Amaunet.

  “Ha! The old, ‘I-am-under-an-ancient-curse-and-can-only-speakthe-truth’ line? No, no, dear madame, that’s been done to death. I propose a whole new approach!” said Golescu.

  Amaunet just gave him a sidelong look, unreadable as a snake.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as I would need to observe your customary clientele before I could elaborate on,” said Golescu.

  “I see,” she said.

  “Though Mother Aegypt is a good name for your act,” Golescu conceded. “Has a certain majesty. But it implies warmth. You might work on that. Where’s your warmth, eh?”

  “I haven’t got any,” said Amaunet. “And you’re annoying me, now.”

  “Then, taceo, dear madame. That’s Latin for ‘I shall be quiet,’ you know.”

  She curled her lip again.

  Silent, he attempted to study her face, as they jolted along. She must be a young woman; her skin was smooth, there wasn’t a trace of gray in her hair or a whisker on her lip. One could say of any ugly woman, Her nose is hooked, or Her lips are thin, or Her eyes are too close together. None of this could be said of Amaunet. It was indeed impossible to say anything much; for when Golescu looked closely at her he saw only shadow, and a certain sense of discord.

  They came, by night, to a dismal little town whose slumped and rounded houses huddled with backs to the river, facing the dark forest. After threading a maze of crooked streets, they found the temporary camp for market fair vendors: two bare acres of open ground that had been a cattle pen most recently. It was still redolent of manure. Here other wagons were drawn up, and fires burned in iron baskets. The people who made their livings offering rides on painted ponies or challenging all comers to games of skill stood about the fires, drinking from bottles, exchanging news in weary voices.

  Yet when Amaunet’s wagons rolled by they looked up only briefly, and swiftly looked away. Some few made gestures to ward off evil.

  “You’ve got quite a reputation, eh?” observed Golescu. Amaunet did not reply. She seemed to have barely noticed.

  Golescu spent another chilly night on the floor in the rear wagon—alone this time, for Emil slept in a cupboard under Amaunet’s narrow bunk when he was not being held hostage, and Amaunet steadfastly ignored all Golescu’s hints and pleasantries about the value of shared body warmth. As a consequence, he was stiff and out of sorts by the time he emerged next morning.

  Overnight, the fair had assumed half-existence. A blind man, muscled like a giant, cranked steadily at the carousel, and thin pale children rode round and round. A man with a barrel-organ cranked steadily too, and his little monkey sat on his shoulder and watched the children with a diffident eye. But many of the tents were still flat, in a welter of ropes and poles. A long line of bored vendors stood attendance before a town clerk, who had set up his permit office under a black parasol.

  Golescu was staring at all this when Amaunet, who had come up behind him silent as a shadow, said:

  “Here’s your chance to be useful. Get in line for me.”

  “Holy Saints!” Golescu whirled around. “Do you want to frighten me into heart failure? Give a man some warning.”

  She gave him a leather envelope and a small purse instead. “Here are my papers. Pay the bureaucrat and get my permit. You won’t eat tonight, otherwise.”

  “You wouldn’t order me around like this if you knew my true identity,” Golescu grumbled, but he got into line obediently.

  The town clerk was reasonably honest, so the line took no more than an hour to wind its way through. At last the man ahead of Golescu got his permit to sell little red-blue-and-yellow paper flags, and Golescu stepped up to the table.

  “Papers,” said the clerk, yawning.

  “Behold.” Golescu opened them with a flourish. The clerk squinted at them.

  “Amaunet Kematef,” he recited. “Doing business as ‘Mother Aegypt.’ A Russian? And this says you’re a woman.”

  “They’re not my papers, they’re—they’re my wife’s papers,” said Golescu, summoning an outraged expression. “And she isn’t Russian, my friend, she is a hot-blooded Egyptian, a former harem dancer if you must know, before an unfortunate accident that marred her exotic beauty. I found her starving in the gutters of Cairo, and succored her out of Christ
ian charity. Shortly, however, I discovered her remarkable talent for predicting the future based on an ancient system of—”

  “A fortune-teller? Two marks,” said the clerk. Golescu paid, and as the clerk wrote out the permit he went on:

  “The truth of the matter is that she was the only daughter of a Coptic nobleman, kidnapped at an early age by ferocious—”

  “Three marks extra if this story goes on any longer,” said the clerk, stamping the permit forcefully.

  “You have my humble gratitude,” said Golescu, bowing deeply. Pleased with himself, he took the permit and strutted away.

  “Behold,” he said, producing the permit for Amaunet with a flourish. She took it without comment and examined it. Seen in the strong morning light, the indefinable grimness of her features was much more pronounced. Golescu suppressed a shudder and inquired, “How else may a virile male be of use, my sweet?”

  Amaunet turned her back on him, for which he was grateful. “Stay out of trouble until tonight. Then you can mind Emil. He wakes up after sundown.”

  She returned to the foremost black wagon. Golescu watched as she climbed up, and was struck once more by the drastically different effect her backside produced on the interested spectator.

  “Don’t you want me to beat a drum for you? Or rattle a tambourine or something? I can draw crowds for you like a sugarloaf draws flies!”

  She looked at him, with her white grimace that might have been amusement. “I’m sure you can draw flies,” she said. “But I don’t need an advertiser for what I do.”

  Muttering, Golescu wandered away through the fair. He cheered up no end, however, when he discovered that he still had Amaunet’s purse.

  Tents were popping up now, bright banners were being unfurled, though they hung down spiritless in the heat and glare of the day. Golescu bought himself a cheap hat and stood around a while, squinting as he sized up the food vendors. Finally he bought a glass of tea and a fried pastry, stuffed with plums, cased in glazed sugar that tasted vaguely poisonous. He ate it contentedly and, licking the sugar off his fingers, wandered off the fairground to a clump of trees near the river’s edge. There he stretched out in the shade and, tilting his hat over his face, went to sleep. If one had to babysit a vampyr one needed to get plenty of rest by day.

  By night the fair was a different place. The children were gone, home in their beds, and the carousel raced round nearly empty but for spectral riders; the young men had come out instead. They roared with laughter and shoved one another, or stood gaping before the little plank stages where the exhibitions were cried by mountebanks. Within this tent were remarkable freaks of nature; within this one, an exotic dancer plied her trade; within another was a man who could handle hot iron without gloves. The lights were bright and fought with shadows. The air was full of music and raucous cries.

  Golescu was unimpressed.

  “What do you mean, it’s too tough?” he demanded. “That cost fifteen groschen!”

  “I can’t eat it,” whispered Emil, cringing away from the glare of the lanterns.

  “Look.” Golescu grabbed up the ear of roasted corn and bit into it. “Mm! Tender! Eat it, you little whiner.”

  “It has paprika on it. Too hot.” Emil wrung his hands.

  “Ridiculous,” said Golescu through a full mouth, munching away. “It’s the food of the gods. What the hell will you eat, eh? I know! You’re a vampyr, so you want blood, right? Well, we’re in a slightly public place at the moment, so you’ll just have to make do with something else. Taffy apple, eh? Deep fried sarmale? Pierogi? Pommes Frites?”

  Emil wept silently, tears coursing from his big rabbit-eyes, and Golescu sighed and tossed the corn cob away. “Come on,” he said, and dragged the little man off by one hand.

  They made a circuit of all the booths serving food before Emil finally consented to try a Vienna sausage impaled on a stick, dipped in corn batter and deep-fried. To Golescu’s relief he seemed to like it, for he nibbled at it uncomplainingly as Golescu towed him along. Golescu glanced over at Amaunet’s wagon, and noted a customer emerging, pale and shaken.

  “Look over there,” Golescu said in disgust. “One light. No banners, nobody calling attention to her, nobody enticing the crowds. And one miserable customer waiting, look! That’s what she gets. Where’s the sense of mystery? She’s Mother Aegypt! Her other line of work must pay pretty well, eh?”

  Emil made no reply, deeply preoccupied by his sausage-on-a-spike.

  “Or maybe it doesn’t, if she can’t do any better for a servant than you. Where’s all the money go?” Golescu wondered, pulling at his moustache. “Why’s she so sour, your mistress? A broken heart or something?”

  Emil gave a tiny shrug and kept eating.

  “I could make her forget whoever it was in ten minutes, if I could just get her to take me seriously,” said Golescu, gazing across at the wagon. “And the best way to do that, of course, is to impress her with money. We need a scheme, turnip-head.”

  “Four thousand and seventeen,” said Emil.

  “Huh?” Golescu turned to stare down at him. Emil said nothing else, but in his silence the cry of the nearest hawker came through loud and clear:

  “Come on and take a chance, clever ones! Games of chance, guess the cards, throw the dice, spin the wheel! Or guess the number of millet-grains in the jar and win a cash prize! Only ten groschen a guess! You might be the winner! You, sir, with the little boy!”

  Golescu realized the hawker was addressing him. He looked around indignantly.

  “He is not my little boy!”

  “So he’s your uncle, what does it matter? Take a guess, why don’t you?” bawled the hawker. “What have you got to lose?”

  “Ten groschen,” retorted Golescu, and then reflected that it was Amaunet’s money. “What the hell.”

  He approached the gaming booth, pulling Emil after him. “What’s the cash prize?”

  “Twenty thousand lei,” said the hawker. Golescu rolled his eyes.

  “Oh, yes, I’d be able to retire on that, all right,” he said, but dug in his pocket for ten groschen. He cast a grudging eye on the glass jar at the back of the counter, on its shelf festooned with the new national flag and swags of bunting. “You’ve undoubtedly got rocks hidden in there, to throw the volume off. Hm, hm, all right...how many grains of millet in there? I’d say...”

  “Four thousand and seventeen,” Emil repeated. The hawker’s jaw dropped. Golescu looked from one to the other of them. His face lit up.

  “That’s the right answer, isn’t it?” he said. “Holy saints and patriarchs!”

  “No, it isn’t,” said the hawker, recovering himself with difficulty.

  “It is so,” said Golescu. “I can see it in your eyes!”

  “No, it isn’t,” the hawker insisted.

  “It is so! Shall we tip out the jar and count what’s in there?”

  “No, and anyway you hadn’t paid me yet—and anyway it was your little boy, not you, so it wouldn’t count anyway—and—”

  “Cheat! Shall I scream it aloud? I’ve got very good lungs. Shall I tell the world how you’ve refused to give this poor child his prize, even when he guessed correctly? Do you really want—”

  “Shut up! Shut up, I’ll pay the damned twenty thousand lei!” The hawker leaned forward and clapped his hand over Golescu’s mouth. Golescu smiled at him, the points of his moustaches rising like a cockroach’s antennae.

  Wandering back to Amaunet’s wagon, Golescu jingled the purse at Emil.

  “Not a bad night’s work, eh? I defy her to look at this and fail to be impressed.”

  Emil did not respond, sucking meditatively on the stick, which was all that was left of his sausage.

  “Of course, we’re going to downplay your role in the comedy, for strategic reasons,” Golescu continued, peering around a tent and scowling at the wagon. There was a line of customers waiting now, and while some were clearly lonely women who wanted their fortunes told, a few were rath
er nasty-looking men, in fact rather criminal-looking men, and Golescu had the uneasy feeling he might have met one or two of them in a professional context at some point in his past. As he was leaning back, he glanced down at Emil.

  “I think we won’t interrupt her while she’s working just yet. Gives us more time to concoct a suitably heroic and clever origin for this fine fat purse, eh? Anyway, she’d never believe that you—” Golescu halted, staring at Emil. He slapped his forehead in a gesture of epiphany.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute! She knows about this talent of yours! That’s why she keeps you around, is it? Ha!”

  He was silent for a moment, but the intensity of his regard was such that it penetrated even Emil’s self-absorption. Emil looked up timidly and beheld Golescu’s countenance twisted into a smile of such ferocious benignity that the little man screamed, dropped his stick and covered his head with both hands.

  “My dear shrinking genius!” bellowed Golescu, seizing Emil up and clasping him in his arms. “Puny friend, petite brother, sweetest of vampyrs! Come, my darling, will you have another sausage? No? Polenta? Milk punch? Hot chocolate? Golescu will see you have anything you want, pretty one. Let us go through the fair together.”

  The purse of twenty thousand lei was considerably lighter by the time Golescu retreated to the shadows under the rear wagon, pulling Emil after him. Emil was too stuffed with sausage and candy floss to be very alert, and he had a cheap doll and a pinwheel to occupy what could be mustered of his attention. Nonetheless, Golescu drew a new pack of cards from his pocket, broke the seal and shuffled them, looking at Emil with lovingly predatory eyes.

  “I have heard of this, my limp miracle,” crooned Golescu, making the cards snap and riffle through his fat fingers. “Fellows quite giftless as regards social graces, oh yes, in some cases so unworldly they must be fed and diapered like babies. And yet, they have a brilliance! An unbelievable grasp of systems and details! Let us see if you are one such prodigy, eh?”