Since he was Oblyan, and not Yehuli or Ionik or Merzani, Papa could not properly say that he had horns hidden in his hair or silverfish crawling over his suit jacket, but still he said that the Grand Inspector was a demon of a man, and as dangerous as a serpent coiled under a rock. He looked more like a raven to me, in his long dark coat, very tall and with a nose that jutted magnificently over his mustache. When he spoke, his mouth made a snapping sort of motion, as if his lips were veined with a taut elastic band.
He had his men wrap the body in a sheet and roll it up into a large sack, which all six of them together hefted toward the door. As they heaved the body onto their shoulders, two small things tumbled out of the sheet.
I watched them clatter to the floor, dark and grooved and each the size of a marble: plum stones.
“I want the theater shuttered for now,” the Grand Inspector said. “No one in or out. My men will need to conduct an investigation, and it will take days.”
Mr. Kovalchyk’s jaw went slack. He daubed at his forehead. “Do you think . . . sir, is it possible . . . I read a story in the penny presses . . . was it a monster?”
All at once the Grand Inspector’s bird face went pale with anger. “Do not speak another word to me of penny presses or monsters. It is hard enough to investigate the death of a man without everyone in Oblya frothing at the mouth for me to execute an imaginary villain. Say no more of this matter, Mr. Kovalchyk, and do not let slip to anyone the state in which the body was found. I will not tolerate another mob at my door.”
I still had the broker’s card, and the hard edges of the paper pressed cruelly into my breasts. My secret, or Papa’s secret, a suspicion I could not even bring myself to speak aloud. Mr. Kovalchyk shut his mouth and turned away, blushing furiously. The dancers pressed in together, whispers darting around in their tight little circle, and I was sure that, no matter what the Grand Inspector decreed, the penny presses would hear about this by tonight.
The day laborers went away, and Sevas guided me off the stage, down the long hallway, and through the door. Sunlight poured on us like hot melted butter. At last he turned to me and said, “Marlinchen.”
“Please,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about the dead man.” I was thinking of plum stones. I was thinking of missing hearts and the small, ground-up pieces of meat that made the filling of varenyky. All of a sudden I wanted to crumple up the card and cast it into the wind, and not let its bad magic seep into me further. I wanted to uproot the ideas that it had planted in my mind.
Sevas nodded, hand slipping off my back. And then we went down Kanatchikov Street together, the ground rolling out slowly under our feet, toward my father’s house.
The garden was soft and damp, the way it was after a rainstorm, but I didn’t think it had rained at all. There were no dirty puddles gathered on the cobblestones. It was as if one fat, dark cloud had gathered around our house and our house alone.
I pushed open the gate with my breath burning in my throat, and when I stepped through, my shoe sunk into the wet soil. I took another step, the mud still sucking at my slipper, and then beckoned Sevas after me. He was squinting in the sunlight and then a gust of wind went through his hair and I was so afraid and filled with tremu lous affection that I wished that I could scoop him up and tuck him into my bodice and keep him safe and warm there between my breasts like a she-wolf nursing her cub.
He stepped through the gate and did not turn into a spewing of black snakes. That was my first relief.
My second relief was that no profound transformation had taken place in my absence; the garden did not look very different from how I had left it, except that most of the white petals were gone from the flowering pear tree. They stuck on the ground like shed feathers. The goblin was digging a little hole in the dirt to sit in. The eyeless ravens were stretching their wings and cawing out vowel sounds that no mortal knew how to make.
From behind a marvelous begonia plant, Indrik emerged, his chest slick with oil and his goat’s tail lashing. He saw Sevas and huffed loudly through his nostrils.
Sevas made a startled noise and darted behind my back. “Marlinchen, what is that?”
Indrik drew himself up to his full height, shoulders rolling, and narrowed his man’s eyes. “Well, mortal man, when you hear thunder from the mountaintop or see clouds gather overhead, when winter melts into spring and wheat flowers up out of the ground to make into your morning kasha—”
“That’s Indrik,” I said.
“My dear supplicant, is this man imperiling you?” Indrik asked, huffing again with even greater indignation. “Would you like me to strike him down with a precisely aimed bolt of lightning?”