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, mu ering 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-Spi ing 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, Hoegbo on set down the cage. The awkwardness of carrying it, uneven and swaying, down the spiral staircase had unnerved him. He was sweating under his rain coat. 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 mo led green-orange mold on the windows in the front door, did not put him at ease.
Someone had le 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 andSla ery’s ill wishes caught up with him? He drove the umbrella tip between the bars. The cover gave a li le, 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, Hoegbo on 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 pa ern 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?” Hoegbo on 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 pa er of rain, apparently counting on her hat to protect her, she offered Hoegbo on 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, half-way between the docks and the residential sections that descended into a valley ever in danger of flooding, Hoegbo on’s store— ”Robert Hoegbo on & 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 Hoegbo on clan to save the family name should he fail.
The display window, protected from the rain by an awning, held a ba ered mauve couch, an opulent, gold- leaf-covered chair (nicked by Hoegbo on, along with several other treasures, during the panicked withdrawal of the Kalif’s troops), a phonograph, a large red vase, an undistinguished-looking saddle, and Alan Bristlewing, his assistant.
Bristlewing knelt inside the display, carefully placing records in the stand beside the phonograph. He had already wiped the window clean of fungi that had accumulated the night before. The detritus of the cleaning lay on the sidewalk in curled up piles of red, green, and blue. A sour smell emanated from these remnants, but the rain would wash it all away in an hour or two.
When Bristlewing saw Hoegbo on, he waved and inched his wiry frame out of the window. A moment later, shielding his head from the rain with a newspaper, he was opening the huge lock in the iron grille of the door, his mouth set in the familiar laconic grin that itself displayed some antiques, courtesy of a sidewalk dentist. A few bu on-shaped mushrooms, a fiery red, tumbled out of the lock as the key withdrew, rolling to a stop on the wet sidewalk.
Bristlewing was a scruffy, short, animated man who smelled of cigar smoke and o en disappeared for days on end. Stories of debaucheries with prostitutes and week-long fishing trips down the River Moth buzzed around Bristlewing without se ling on him. Hoegbo on could not afford to hire more dependable help.
“Morning,” Bristlewing said.
“Good morning,” Hoegbo on replied. “Any customers last night?”
“None with any money… “ Bristlewing’s grin vanished as he saw the cage. “Oh. I see you went to another one.”
Hoegbo on set the cage down in front of Bristlewing and took the ring of keys from him at the same time. “Just put it in the office. Are the inventory books up-to-date?” Hoegbo on’s hand still stung from where the imprint of the handle had branded itself on his skin.
“Course they’re current,” Bristlewing said, turning stiffly away as he picked up his new burden.
By design, the way to Hoegbo on’s office at the back of the store was blocked by a maze of items, from which rose a collective must-metal-ro ed-dusty smell that to him formed the most delicate of perfumes.
This smell of antiquity validated his selections as surely as any papers of authenticity. That customers tripped and frequently lost their bearings as they navigated the arbitrary footpaths ma ered li le to Hoegbo on. The received family wisdom said that thus hemmed in the customer had no choice but to buy something from the stacks of chairs, umbrellas, watches, pens, fishing rods, clothes, enameled boxes, deer racks, plaster casts of lizards, elegant mirrors of glass and copper, reading glasses, Truffidian religious icons, boards for playing dice made of oliphaunt ivory, porcelain water jugs, globes of the world, model ships, old medals, sword canes, musical clocks, and other ephemera from past lives or distant places. Hoegbo on loved knowing that a customer might, in seeking out a perfectly ordinary set of dinner plates, come face-to-face with the flared nostrils and questing tongue of a Skamoo erotic mask.
An overwhelming sense of the secret history of these objects could sometimes send him into a trance-like state. Thankfully, Rebecca understood this feeling, having been exposed to it from an early age.
Emerging from this morass of riches, Hoegbo on’s office lay open to the rest of the store like an oasis of sparseness. Five steps led down to its sunken carpeting — crimson with gold threads, bought from the old Threnody Larkspur Theater before it burned to the ground — and a simple rosewood desk whose only flourishes were legs carved into the shape of writhing squid. A matching chair, two work tables against the far wall, and a couch for visitors rounded out the furniture. To the le of the office space stood two doors. The first led to a private bathroom, recently installed, much to Bristlewing’s delight.
The desk lay beneath an organized clu er of books of inventory, a blo er, a selection of fountain pens, stationery with the H&S logo emblazoned upon it, folders full of invoices, a metal message capsule with a curled up piece of paper inside, a slice of orange mushroom in a small paper bag, a shell he had found while on vacation in the Southern Isles when he was six, and the new Frankwrithe & Lewden edition of
