In the Company of Thieves

by Kage Baker

  “No,” said Emil.

  Something in the toneless tone of his voice made Golescu, in the act of pulling up his plain trousers, freeze. He looked keenly at Emil.

  “You don’t understand lying?” he said. “Maybe you don’t. And you’re a horrible genius, aren’t you? And I went to sleep while the stuff in the copper was cooking. Hmmm, hm hm.” He fastened his trousers and put on his other coat, saying nothing for a long moment, though his gaze never left Emil’s slack face.

  “Tell me, my pretty child,” he said at last. “Did you put other things in the brew, after I was asleep?”

  “Yes,” said Emil.

  “What?”

  In reply, Emil began to rattle off a string of names of ingredients, chemicals for the most part, or so Golescu assumed. He held up his hand at last.

  “Enough, enough! The nearest chemist’s is three hours’ walk away. How’d you get all those things?”

  “There,” said Emil, pointing at the papier-mâché mummy case. “And some I got from the dirt. And some came out of leaves.”

  Golescu went at once to the mummy case and opened it. It appeared to be empty; but he detected the false bottom. Prizing back the lining he saw rows of compartments, packed with small jars and bags of various substances. A faint scent of spice rose from them.

  “Aha,” he said, closing it up. He set it aside and looked at Emil with narrowed eyes. He paced back and forth a couple of times, finally sitting down on the bed.

  “How did you know,” he said, in a voice some decibels below his customary bellow, “what goes into a medicine to make giant chickens?”

  Emil looked back at him. Golescu beheld a strange expression in the rabbity eyes. Was that...scorn?

  “I just know,” said Emil, and there might have been scorn in his flat voice too.

  “Like you just know how many beans are in a jar?”

  “Yes.”

  Golescu rubbed his hands together, slowly. “Oh, my golden baby,” he said. “Oh, my pearl, my plum, my good-luck token.” A thought struck him. “Tell me something, precious,” he said. “On several occasions, now, you have mentioned a Black Cup. What would that be, can you tell your Uncle Barbu?”

  “I make the Black Cup for her every month,” said Emil.

  “You do, eh?” said Golescu. “Something to keep the babies away? But no, she’s not interested in love. Yet. What happens when she drinks from the Black Cup, darling?”

  “She doesn’t die,” said Emil, with just a trace of sadness.

  Golescu leaned back, as though physically pushed. “Holy saints and angels in Heaven,” he said. For a long moment ideas buzzed in his head like a hive of excited bees. At last he calmed himself to ask:

  “How old is Madame Amaunet?”

  “She is old,” said Emil.

  “Very old?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I see.” Golescu did not move, staring at Emil. “So that’s why she doesn’t want any attention drawn to you. You’re her philosopher’s stone, her source of the water of life. Yes? But if that’s the case...” He shivered all over, drew himself up. “No, that’s crazy. You’ve been in show business too long, Golescu. She must be sick with something, that’s it, and she takes the medicine to preserve her health. Ugh! Let us hope she doesn’t have anything catching. Is she sick, little Emil?”

  “No,” said Emil.

  “No? Well. Golescu, my friend, don’t forget that you’re having a conversation with an idiot, here.”

  His imagination raced, though all the while he was tidying away the evidence of the chicken game, and all that afternoon as the slow hours passed. Several times he heard the sound of hoofbeats on the road, someone riding fast—searching, perhaps, for Dr. Cretulescu?

  As the first shades of night fell, Golescu crept out and lit a campfire. He was sitting beside it when he heard the approach of a wagon on the road, and a moment later the crashing of branches that meant the wagon had turned off toward the clearing. Golescu composed an expression that he hoped would convey innocence, doglike fidelity and patience, and gave a quick turn to the skillet of bread and sausages he was frying.

  “Welcome back, my queen,” he called, as he caught sight of Amaunet. “You see? Not only have I not run off with Emil to a gambling den, I’ve fixed you a nice supper. Come and eat. I’ll see to the horses.”

  Amaunet regarded him warily, but she climbed down from the wagon and approached the fire. “Where is Emil?”

  “Why, safe in his little cupboard, just as he ought to be,” said Golescu, rising to offer his seat. Seeing her again up close, he felt a shiver of disappointment; Amaunet looked tired and bad-tempered, not at all like an immortal being who had supped of some arcane nectar. He left her by the fire as he led the horses off to drink. Not until he had come back and settled down across from her did he feel the stirring of mundane lust.

  “I trust all that unsightly clutter in the wagon has been unloaded on some discreet fence?” he inquired pleasantly.

  “That’s one way of putting it,” said Amaunet, with a humorless laugh. “You’ll have all the room you need back there, for a while.”

  “And did we get a good price?”

  Amaunet just shrugged.

  Golescu smiled to himself, noting that she carried no purse. He kept up a disarming flow of small talk until Amaunet told him that she was retiring. Bidding her a cheery good night without so much as one suggestive remark, he watched as she climbed into the wagon—her back view was as enthralling as ever—and waited a few more minutes before lighting a candle-lantern and hurrying off to the other wagon.

  On climbing inside, Golescu held the lamp high and looked around.

  “Beautifully empty,” he remarked in satisfaction. Not a carpet, not a painting, not so much as a silver spoon anywhere to be seen. As it should be. But—

  “Where is the money?” he wondered aloud. “Come out, little ironbound strongbox. Come out, little exceptionally heavy purse. She must have made a fortune from the fence. So...”

  Golescu proceeded to rummage in the cupboards and cabinets, hastily at first and then with greater care, rapping for hollow panels, testing for hidden drawers. At the end of half an hour he was baffled, panting with exasperation.

  “It must be here somewhere!” he declared. “Unless she made so little off the bargain she was able to hide her miserable share of the loot in her cleavage!”

  Muttering to himself, he went out and banked the fire. Then he retrieved his satchel of money and the new clothes he had bought, including Emil’s daylight ensemble, from the bush where he had stashed them. Having re-secured them in a cupboard in the wagon, he stretched out on the floor and thought very hard.

  “I’ve seen that dull and sullen look before,” he announced to the darkness. “Hopeless. Apathetic. Ill-used. She might be sick, but also that’s the way a whore looks, when she has a nasty brute of a pimp who works her hard and takes all her earnings away. I wonder...

  “Perhaps she’s the hapless victim of some big operator? Say, a criminal mastermind, with a network of thieves and fences and middlemen all funneling profits toward him? So that he sits alone on a pyramid of gold, receiving tribute from petty crooks everywhere?

  “What a lovely idea!” Golescu sat up and clasped his hands.

  He was wakened again that night by her singing. Amaunet’s voice was like slow coals glowing in a dying fire, or like the undulation of smoke rising when the last glow has died. It was heartbreaking, but there was something horrible about it.

  They rolled on. The mountains were always ahead of them, and to Golescu’s relief the valley of his labors was far behind them. No one was ever hanged for selling a weak solution of yellow dye, but people have been hanged for being too successful; and in any case he preferred to keep a good distance between himself and any outcomes he couldn’t predict.

  The mountains came close at last and were easily crossed, by an ob
scure road Amaunet seemed to know well. Noon of the second day they came to a fair-sized city in the foothills, with grand houses and a domed church.

  Here a fair was setting up, in a wide public square through which the wind gusted, driving yellow leaves before it over the cobbles. Golescu made his usual helpful suggestions for improving Amaunet’s business and was ignored. Resigned, he stood in the permit line with other fair vendors, whom he was beginning to know by sight. They also ignored his attempts at small talk. The permit clerk was rude and obtuse.

  By the time evening fell, when the fair came to life in a blaze of gaslight and calliope music, Golescu was not in the best of moods.

  “Come on, pallid one,” he said, dragging Emil forth from the wagon. “What are you shrinking from?”

  “It’s too bright,” whimpered Emil, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to hide under Golescu’s coat.

  “We’re in a big modern city, my boy,” said Golescu, striding through the crowd and towing him along relentless. “Gaslight, the wonder of the civilized world. Soon we won’t have Night at all, if we don’t want it. Imagine that, eh? You’d have to live in a cellar. You’d probably like that, I expect.”

  “I want a sausage on a stick,” said Emil.

  “Patience,” said Golescu, looking around for the food stalls. “Eating and scratching only want a beginning, eh? So scratch, and soon you’ll be eating too. Where the hell is the sausage booth?”

  He spotted a vendor he recognized and pushed through the crowd to the counter.

  “Hey! Vienna sausage, please.” He put down a coin.

  “We’re out of Vienna sausage,” said the cashier. “We have sarmale on polenta, or tochitura on polenta. Take your pick.”

  Golescu’s mouth watered. “The sarmale, and plenty of polenta.”

  He carried the paper cone to a relatively quiet corner and seated himself on a hay bale. “Come and eat. Emil dear. Polenta for you and nice spicy sarmale for me, eh?”

  Emil opened his eyes long enough to look at it.

  “I can’t eat that. It has sauce on it.”

  “Just a little!” Golescu dug his thumb in amongst the meatballs and pulled up a glob of polenta. “See? Nice!”

  Emil began to sob. “I don’t want that. I want a sausage.”

  “Well, this is like sausage, only it’s in grape leaves instead of pig guts, eh?” Golescu held up a nugget of sarmale. “Mmmm, tasty!”

  But Emil wouldn’t touch it. Golescu sighed, wolfed down the sarmale and polenta, and wiped his fingers on Emil’s coat. He dragged Emil after him and searched the fairground from end to end, but nobody was selling Vienna sausage. The only thing he found that Emil would consent to eat was candy floss, so he bought him five big wads of it. Emil crouched furtively under a wagon and ate it all, as Golescu looked on and tried to slap some warmth into himself. The cold wind pierced straight through his coat, taking away all the nice residual warmth of the peppery sarmale.

  “This is no life for a red-blooded man,” he grumbled. “Wine, women and dance are what I need, and am I getting any? It is to laugh. Wet-nursing a miserable picky dwarf while the temptress of my dreams barely knows I exist. If I had any self-respect, I’d burst into that wagon and show her what I’m made of.”

  The last pink streamer of candy floss vanished into Emil’s mouth. He belched.

  “Then, of course, she’d hurt me,” Golescu concluded. “Pretty badly, I think. Her fingers are like steel. And that excites me, Emil, isn’t that a terrible thing? Yet another step downward in my long debasement.”

  Emil belched again.

  The chilly hours passed. Emil rolled over on his side and began to wail to himself. As the fair grew quieter, as the lights went out one by one and the carousel slowed through its last revolution, Emil’s whining grew louder. Amaunet’s last customer departed; a moment later her door flew open and she emerged, turning her head this way and that, searching for the sound. Her gaze fell on Emil, prostrate under the wagon, and she bared her teeth at Golescu.

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Nothing!” said Golescu, backing up a pace or two. “His highness the turnip wouldn’t eat anything but candy, and now he seems to be regretting it.”

  “Fool,” said Amaunet. She pulled Emil out from the litter of paper cones and straw. He vomited pink syrup, and said, “I want a potato.”

  Amaunet gave Golescu a look that made his heart skip a beat, but in a reasonable voice he said: “I could take us all to dinner. What about it? My treat.”

  “It’s nearly midnight, you ass,” said Amaunet.

  “That café is still open,” said Golescu, pointing to a garishly lit place at the edge of the square. Amaunet stared at it. Finally she shrugged. “Bring him,” she said.

  Golescu picked up Emil by the scruff of his neck and stood him on his feet. “Your potato is calling, fastidious one. Let us answer it.” Emil took his hand and they trudged off together across the square, with Amaunet slinking after.

  They got a table by the door. For all that the hour was late, the café was densely crowded with people in evening dress, quite glittering and cosmopolitan in appearance. The air was full of their chatter, oddly echoing, with a shrill metallic quality. Amaunet gave the crowd one surly look, and paid them no attention thereafter. But she took off her black shawl and dropped it over Emil’s head. He sat like an unprotesting ghost, shrouded in black, apparently quite content.

  “And you’re veiling him because...?” said Golescu.

  “Better if he isn’t seen,” said Amaunet.

  “What may we get for the little family?” inquired a waiter, appearing at Golescu’s elbow with a speed and silence that suggested he had popped up through a trap door. Golescu started in his chair, unnerved. The waiter had wide glass-bright eyes, and a fixed smile under a straight bar of moustache like a strip of black fur.

  “Are you still serving food?” Golescu asked. The waiter’s smile never faltered; he produced a menu from thin air and presented it with a flourish.

  “Your carte de nuit. We particularly recommend the black puddings. Something to drink?”

  “Bring us the best you have,” said Golescu grandly. The waiter bowed and vanished again.

  “It says the Czernina Soup is divine,” announced Golescu, reading from the menu. “Hey, he thought we were a family. Charming, eh? You’re Mother Aegypt and I’m...”

  “The Father of Lies,” said Amaunet, yawning.

  “I shall take that as a compliment,” said Golescu. “Fancy French cuisine here, too: Boudin Noir. And, for the hearty diner, Blutwurst. So, who do you think will recognize our tiny prodigy, Madame? He wouldn’t happen to be a royal heir you stole in infancy, would he?”

  Amaunet gave him a sharp look. Golescu sat up, startled.

  “You can’t be serious!” he said. “Heaven knows, he’s inbred enough to have the very bluest blood—”

  The waiter materialized beside them, deftly uncorking a dusty bottle. “This is very old wine,” he said, displaying the label.

  “‘Egri Bikaver,’” read Golescu. “Yes, all right. Have you got any Vienna sausage? We have a little prince here who’ll hardly eat anything else.”

  “I want a potato.” Emil’s voice floated from beneath the black drape.

  “We will see what can be done,” said the waiter, unblinking, but his smile widened under his dreadful moustache. “And for Madame?”

  Amaunet said something in a language with which Golescu was unfamiliar. The waiter chuckled, a disturbing sound, and jotted briefly on a notepad that appeared from nowhere in particular. “Very wise. And for Sir?”

  “Blutwurst. I’m a hearty diner,” said Golescu.

  “To be sure,” said the waiter, and vanished. Golescu leaned forward and hissed, “Hey, you can’t mean you actually stole him from some—”

  “Look, it’s a gypsy!” cried a young woman, one of a pair of young lovers out for a late stroll. Her young man leaned in from the sidewalk and demanded, “Wha
t’s our fortune, eh, gypsy? Will we love each other the rest of our lives?”

  “You’ll be dead in three days,” said Amaunet. The girl squeaked, the boy went pale and muttered a curse. They fled into the night.

  “What did you go and tell them that for?” demanded Golescu. Amaunet shrugged and poured herself a glass of wine.

  “Why should I lie? Three days, three hours, three decades. Death always comes, for them. It’s what I tell them all. Why not?”

  “No wonder you don’t do better business!” said Golescu. “You’re supposed to tell them good fortunes!”

  “Why should I lie?” repeated Amaunet.

  Baffled, Golescu pulled at his moustaches. “What makes you say such things?” he said at last. “Why do you pretend to feel nothing? But you love little Emil, eh?”

  She looked at him in flat astonishment. Then she smiled. It was a poisonous smile.

  “Love Emil?” she said. “Who could love that thing? I could as soon love you.”

  As though to underscore her contempt, a woman at the bar shrieked with laughter.

  Golescu turned his face away. Immediately he set about soothing his lacerated ego, revising what she’d said, changing her expression and intonation, and he had nearly rewritten the scene into an almost-declaration of tender feeling for himself when the waiter reappeared, bearing a tray.

  “See what we have for the little man?” he said, whisking the cover off a dish. “Viennese on a stake!”

  The dish held an artful arrangement of Vienna sausages on wooden skewers, stuck upright in a mound of mashed potato.

  “Well, isn’t that cute?” said Golescu. “Thank the nice man, Emil.”

  Emil said nothing, but reached for the plate. “He says Thank You,” said Golescu, as smacking noises came from under the veil. The waiter set before Amaunet a dish containing skewered animal parts, flame-blackened to anonymity.

  “Madame. And for Sir,” said the waiter, setting a platter before Golescu. Golescu blinked and shuddered; for a moment he had the strongest conviction that the Blutwurst was pulsing and shivering, on its bed of grilled onions and eggplant that seethed like maggots. Resolutely, he told himself it was a trick of the greenish light and the late hour.