I bit the ragged end off. Then I chomped down on the new end and sat down on the piano stool, spreading out my hands as far as they would go across the keyboard.
“I understand you’re a Mirror,” a man’s voice said from the recesses of Pearl’s chair. “I knew a Mirror once. Or he knew me. Isn’t that how it is?”
I almost said, “You’re not supposed to sit in that chair,” but I found I could not speak.
The man stood up and came toward me. He was dressed like the other men, with a broad black dog collar, but his hands and face were almost white, and there was no lighter band across his forehead. “My name is Taber,” He said in a slow, drawling voice unlike the fast, vowel-shortening accents of the others. I wondered if he had come from Solfatara. All the rest of them except Pearl shortened their vowels, bit them off like I had bit the end of the cigar. Pearl alone seemed to have no accent, as if her blindness had protected her from the speech of Solfatara, too.
“Welcome to St. Pierre,” he said, and I felt a shock of fear. He had lied to Jewell. I did not know who St. Pierre was, but I knew as he spoke that St. Pierre was not the patron saint of tappers, and that Taber’s calling the town that was some unspeakably cruel joke that only he understood.
“I have to go upstairs,” I said, and my hand shook as I held the cigar. “Jewell’s in the card room.”
“Oh,” he said lazily taking a cigar from his pocket and unwrapping it. “Is Pearl there, too?”
“Pearl,” I said, so frightened I could not breathe.
He patted his formals pockets and reached inside his shirt. “Yes. You know, the blind girl. The pretty one.” He pulled a sparker from his inside pocket, cocked it back, and looked at me. “What a pity she’s blind. I wish I knew what happened. She’s never told a soul, you know,” he said, and clicked the sparker.
It was not a real sparker. I could see, after a frozen moment, that there was no liquid in it at all. He clicked it twice more, held it to the end of his cigar in dreadful pantomime, and replaced it in his pocket.
“I do wish I could find out,” he said. “I could put the knowledge to good use.”
“I can’t help you,” I said, and moved toward the stairs.
He stepped in front of me. “Oh, I think you can. Isn’t that what Mirrors are for?” he said, and drew on the unlit cigar and blew imaginary smoke into my face.
“I won’t help you,” I said, so loudly I fancied Jewell would come and tell Taber to let me alone, as she had told Carnie. “You can’t make me help you.”
“Of course not,” he said. “That isn’t how it works. But of course you know that,” and let me pass.
I sat on my bed the rest of the shift, holding the real sparker between my hands, waiting till I could tell Jewell what Taber had said to me. But the next shift was sleeping-shift, and the shift after that I played tapper requests for eight hours straight, and most of that time Taber stood by the pianoboard, flicking imaginary ashes onto my hands.
After the shift Jewell came to ask me whether Jack or anyone else had bothered me, and I did not tell her after all. During the next sleeping-shift I hid the sparker between the mattress and the springs of my bed.
On the waking shifts I kept as close as I could to Jewell, trying to make myself useful to her, trying not to copy the way she walked on her bandaged feet. When I was not playing, I moved among the tappers with glasses of iced and watered-down liquor on a tray and filled out the account cards for the men who wanted to take girls upstairs. On the off-shifts I learned to work the boards that sent out accounts to Solfatara, and to do the laundry; and after a couple of weeks Jewell had me help with the body checks on the girls. She scanned for perv marks and sot scars as well as the standard CBS every abbey has to screen for. Pearl did not have a mark on her, and I was relieved. I had had an idea that Taber might be torturing her somehow.
Jewell left us alone while I helped her get dressed after the scan, and I said, “Taber is a very bad man. He wants to hurt you.”
“I know,” she said. She was standing very still while I clipped the row of pearl buttons on the back of her dress together.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like the sidon.”
“You mean he can’t help himself, that he doesn’t know what he’s doing?” I said, outraged. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“The tappers used to poke at the sidon with sticks when it was in the cage,” she said. “They couldn’t reach it to really hurt it, though, and Taber couldn’t stand that. He made the tapper give him the key to the cage just so he could get to it. Just so he could hurt it. Now why would he want to hurt the sidon?”
“Because it was helpless,” I said, and wondered if the man who’d blinded Pearl had been like that. “Because it couldn’t protect itself.”
“Jewell and I were in the same happy house on Solfatara,” she said. “We had a friend there, a pianoboard player like you. He was very tall like you, too, and he was the kindest person I ever knew. Sometimes you remind me of him.” She walked certainly to the door, as if she were not counting the memorized steps. “A cage is a safe place as long as nobody has the key Don’t worry Ruby. He can’t get in.” She turned and looked at me. “Will you come and play for me?”
“Yes,” I said, and followed her down to the music room. Before the shifts started, while the girls were upstairs dressing, she liked to sit in the white chair and listen to me play. She understood, more than any of the others, that I could only play the songs I had copied from Kovich. Jewell to the end thought I could read music, and Taber even brought me hardcopies from Solfatara. Pearl simply said the names of songs, and I played them. She never asked for one I didn’t know, and I thought that was because she listened carefully to the tappers’ requests and my refusals, and I was grateful.
I sat down at the pianoboard and looked at Pearl in the mirror. I had asked Jewell for the mirror so I could see over my shoulder. I had told her I wanted it so she could signal me songs and breaks and sometimes the rope- cutter if the men got rough or noisy but it was really so I could keep Taber from standing there without my knowing it.
“Back Home,” Pearl said. I could hardly hear her over the nitrogen blowers. I began playing it, and Taber came in. He walked swiftly over to her, and then stood quite still, and between my playing and the noise of the blowers, she did not hear him. He stood about half a meter from her, close enough to touch her, but just out of reach if she had put out her hand to try to find him.
He took the cigar out of his mouth and bent down as if he were going to speak to her, and instead he pursed his lips and blew gently at her. I could almost see the smoke. At first she didn’t seem to notice, but then she shivered and drew her shinethread shawl closer about her.
He stopped and smiled at her a moment and then reached out and touched her with the tip of his cigar, lightly, on the shoulder, as if he intended to burn her, and then darted it back out of her reach. She swatted at the air, and he repeated the little pantomime again and again until she stood and put her hands up helplessly against what she could not see. As she did so, he moved swiftly and silently to the door so that when she cried out, “Who is it? Who’s there?” he said in his slow drawl, “Its me, Pearl. I’ve just come in. Did I frighten you?”
“No,” she said, and sat back down again. But when he took her hand, she flinched away from him as I had thought she would from me. And all the while I had not missed a beat of the song.
“I just came over to see you for a minute,” Taber said, “and to hear your pianoboard player. He gets better every day doesn’t he?”
Pearl didn’t answer, and I saw in the mirror that her hands lay crossed in her lap again and didn’t move.
“Yes,” he said, and walked toward me, flicking imaginary ashes from his unlit cigar onto my hands. “Better and better,” he said softly. “I can almost see my face in you, Mirror.”
“What did you say?” Pearl said frightenedly.
“I said I’d better go see Jewell a minute about some business and then get back next door. Jack found a new hydrogen tap today, a big one.”
He went back through the card room to the kitchen, and I sat at the pianoboard, watching in the mirror until I saw the kitchen door shut behind him.
“Taber was in the room the whole time,” I said. “He was… doing things to you.”
“I know,” she said.
“You shouldn’t let him. You should stop him,” I said violently, and as soon as I said it, I knew that she knew that I had not stopped him either. “He’s a very bad man,” I said.
