“Mrs. Bloodgood took me down to the Morhaim Museum yesterday,” she said. “Many of their artifacts are on open display. The textures were amazing. And the flower vendor visited, as you may have guessed.”
Rebecca’s father, Paul, was the curator for a small museum in Stockton. Paul liked to joke that Hoegbotton was just the temporary caretaker for items that would eventually find their way to him. Hoegbotton had always thought museums just hoarded that which should be available on the open market. Rebecca had been her father’s assistant until the disease stole her sight. Now Hoegbotton sometimes took her down to the store to help him sort and catalog new acquisitions.
“I noticed the flowers,” he said. “I’m glad the museum was nice.”
For some reason, his hand shook as he ate his eggs. He put his fork down.
“Isn’t it good?” she asked.
“It’s very good,” he said. “I just need water.”
He got up and walked to the sink. The faucet had been put in five weeks ago, after a two-year wait. Before, they had gotten jugs of water from a well down in the valley. He watched with satisfaction as the faucet spluttered and his glass gradually filled up.
“It’s a nice bird or whatever,” she said from behind him.
“Bird.” A vague fear shot through him. “Bird?” The glass clinked against the edge of the sink as he momentarily lost his grip on it.
“Or lizard. Or whatever it is. What is it?”
He turned, leaned against the sink. “What are you talking about?”
“That cage you brought home with you.”
The vague fear crept up his spine. “There’s nothing in the cage. It’s empty.” Was she joking?
Rebecca laughed: a pleasant, liquid sound. “That’s funny, because your empty cage was rattling earlier. At first, it scared me. Something was rustling around in there. I couldn’t tell if it was a bird or a lizard or I would have reached through the bars and touched it.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“There’s nothing in the cage.”
Her face underwent a subtle change and he knew she thought he doubted her on something at which she was expert: the interpretation of sound. On a calm day, she had told him, she could hear a boy skipping stones down by the docks. This was in jest, he felt, but could not know.
For a moment, he said nothing. He couldn’t stay quiet for long. She couldn’t read his face without touching it, but he suspected she knew the difference between types of silence.
He laughed. “I’m joking. It’s a lizard—but it bites. So you were wise not to touch it.”
Suspicion tightened her features. Then she relaxed and smiled at him. She reached out, felt for his plate with her left hand, and stole a piece of his bacon. “I knew it was a lizard!”
He longed to go into the living room where the cage stood atop the table. But he couldn’t, not just yet.
“It’s quiet in here,” he said softly, already expecting the reply.
“No it’s not. It’s not quiet at all. It’s loud.”
The left corner of his mouth curled up as he replied by rote: “What do you hear, my love?”
Her smile widened. “Well, first, there’s your voice, my love—a nice, deep baritone. Then there’s Hobson downstairs, playing a phonograph as low as he can to avoid disturbing the Potaks, who are at this moment in an argument about something so petty I will not give you the details, while to the side, just below them”—her eyes narrowed—“I believe the Smythes are also making bacon. Above us, old man Clox is pacing and pacing with his cane, muttering about money. On his balcony, there’s a sparrow chirping, which makes me realize now that the animal in your cage must be a lizard, because it sounds like something clicking and clucking, not chirping—unless you’ve got a chicken in there?”
“No, no—it’s a lizard.”
“What kind of lizard?”
“It’s a Saphant Click-Spitting Fire Lizard from the Southern Isles,” he said. “It only ever grows in cages, which it makes itself by chewing up dirt, changing it into metal, and regurgitating it. It can only eat animals that can’t see it.”
She laughed in appreciation and got up and hugged him. Her scent made him forget his fear. “It’s a good story, but I don’t believe you. I do know this, though—you are going to be late to work.”
* * *
Once on the ground floor, where he did not think it would make a difference if Rebecca heard, Hoegbotton set down the cage. The awkwardness of carrying it, uneven and swaying, down the spiral staircase had unnerved him. He was sweating under his raincoat. His breath came hard and fast. The musty quality of the lobby, the traces of tiny rust mushrooms that had spread along the floor like mouse tracks, the mottled green-orange mold on the windows in the front door, did not put him at ease.
Someone had left a worn umbrella leaning against the front door. He grabbed it and turned back to stare at the cage. Was this the moment that Ungdom and Slattery’s ill wishes caught up with him? He drove the umbrella tip between the bars. The cover gave a little, creasing, and then regained its former shape as he withdrew the umbrella. Nothing came leaping out at him. He tried again.
No response.
“Is something in there?” he asked the cage. The cage did not reply.
Umbrella held like a sword in front of him, Hoegbotton pulled the cover aside—and leapt back.
The cage was still empty. The perch swung back and forth madly from the violence with which he had pulled aside the cover. The woman had said, “The cage was always open.” The boy had said, “We never had a cage.” The solicitor had never offered an opinion. The swinging perch, the emptiness of the cage, depressed him. He could not say why. He drew the cover back across the cage.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind him and he whirled around, then relaxed. It was just Sarah Willis, their landlady, walking down from her second floor apartment.
“Good morning, Mrs. Willis,” he said, leaning on the umbrella.
Mrs. Willis did not bother to respond until she was standing in front of him, staring up at him through her thick glasses. A flower-patterned hat covered her balding head. A matching flower dress, faded, covered her ancient body, even her presumably shoed feet.
“No pets allowed,” she said.
“Pets?” Hoegbotton was momentarily bewildered. “What pets?”
Mrs. Willis nodded at the cage. “What’s in there?”
“Oh, that. It’s not a pet.”
“No animals allowed, pets or meat.” Mrs. Willis cackled and coughed at her own joke.
“It’s not…” He realized it was useless. “I’m taking it out now. It was just there for the morning.”
Mrs. Willis grunted and pushed past him.
At the door, just as she walked out into the renewed patter of rain, apparently counting on her hat to protect her, she offered Hoegbotton the following advice: “Miss Constance? On the third floor? She’ll have your head if you don’t put back her umbrella.”
* * *
Located on Albumuth Boulevard, halfway between the docks and the residential sections that descended into a valley ever in danger of flooding, Hoegbotton’s store—ROBERT HOEGBOTTON & SONS: QUALITY IMPORTERS OF FINE NEW & USED ITEMS FROM HOME & ABROAD—took up the first floor of a solid two-story wooden building owned by a monk in the Religious Quarter. The sign exhibited optimism; there were no sons. Not yet. The time was not right, the situation too uncertain, no matter what Rebecca might say. Someday his shop might serve as the headquarters for a merchant empire, but that wouldn’t happen for several years. Always in the back of his mind, spurring him on: his brother Richard’s threat to swoop down with the rest of the Hoegbotton clan to save the family name should he fail.