The Good Mayor by Andrew Nicoll Page B

the mayor’s office, Agathe put the coffee pot on the stove, waited a little, poured out two dark cups and went carefully down the back stairs to Peter Stavo’s glass-fronted office. He saw she was sad. He said nothing. She said nothing. He ate two ginger biscuits and offered her the packet. She refused them so he ate the two she could have had. They finished their coffees and Agathe left. “Poor girl,” said Peter, as he picked up his crossword.

    Up at the courthouse, Tibo was in the magistrate’s robing room splashing water on his face and saying quietly, “It was a long time ago. All a long time ago.” The coffee that his clerk had brought him cooled on the desk.

    An hour later, when the bells chimed again, Agathe began work on the second post of the day. As she worked, she looked at the spot on her in-tray where the scarlet box from Braun’s had sat only a day before. She stopped thinking about it. She worked harder.

    And then it was one. A single, basso profundo bong sang out across the town and sent a circling swirl of pigeons floating over the Bishop’s Palace. Lunch. Tibo rose from the bench. The doors of the court were slammed shut and were locked, briskly, from the inside.

    “Are you engaged for lunch, Mr. Mayor?” asked Yemko Guillaume.

    Tibo meant to say something about sandwiches in his room but he was so astonished that no words came out.

    “In that case, please join me. My treat. My cab is waiting. My cab is always waiting.” Guillaume heaved himself out of the court’s side door and into the waiting cab with Good Mayor Krovic shuffling behind like a tug nosing a great battleship out of harbour. Guillaume waved a huge hand vaguely. “Please sit in front, Mr. Mayor. I like to spread myself about a bit,” he wheezed. “The driver knows where to go. I always eat at The Green Monkey. I trust that will suit.” And, seemingly exhausted by the effort of it all, he slumped into his two seats like a collapsing soufflé and said nothing more.

    As Tibo left the court with Yemko Guillaume, Agathe was crossing City Square for the baker’s shop on the corner. Already a line of clerks and shop girls was queuing for sandwiches and cakes and freshly baked pies, chatting about the day, boasting about the night before, laughing. Agathe made a tight little mouth and refused to listen.

    Eventually, after a long wait that ate into her lunch hour, Agathe reached the front of the queue and bought a cheese roll and an apple. “This is daylight robbery,” she thought as she examined her change.

    At The Green Monkey, Yemko Guillaume settled himself on a gigantic chaise longue in the corner of the room as two waiters inwhite uniforms with Prussian collars and gilded buttons wheeled a table into place against his intimidating paunch. The maître d’ looked on approvingly. The celebrated lawyer Yemko Guillaume and His Honour Mayor Tibo Krovic lunching together here, in his establishment … Too, too perfect.

    “No starter,” said Yemko faintly. “Today, I would like to eat … I would like to eat … let me see …” His eyes rolled heavenwards and lingered on the pink-thighed nymphs gambolling explicitly on the painted ceiling. “I would like to eat something that tastes as good as that. A young gazelle, garrotted under a new moon by Nubian virgins and seethed in its mother’s milk, served with the last bowl of rice from a starving Asian village, sweetened with the cries of an abandoned baby dying of thirst under a pitiless sun. No?” He looked quizzically at the maître d’. “You don’t have that? Then omelette, please. And asparagus. And a glass of water. Mr. Mayor?”

    Tibo managed to squeak, “That sounds fine.”

    The waiters withdrew, as obsequious as eunuchs.

    “I don’t eat much,” said Yemko. “This …” he spread his arms to indicate his vastness, “it’s a glandular disorder.”

    “I see,” said Tibo. “I’m very sorry.”

    “To hear that I’m ill or because you