In addition to its unusual pockets, it had magnificent sleeves, an imposing collar, and a slit up the back. It was made of some kind of leather, it was the color of a wet street at midnight, and, more important than any of these things, it had style.
There are people who will tell you that clothes make the man, and mostly they are wrong. However, it would be true to say that when the boy who would become the Marquis put that coat on for the very first time, and stared at himself in the looking glass, he stood up straighter, and his posture changed, because he knew, seeing his reflection, that the sort of person who wore a coat like that was no mere youth, no simple sneak-thief and favor-trader. The boy wearing the coat, which was, back then, too large for him, had smiled, looking at his reflection, and remembered an illustration from a book he had seen, of a miller’s cat standing on its two hind legs. A jaunty cat wearing a fine coat and big, proud boots. And he named himself.
A coat like that, he knew, was the kind of coat that could only be worn by the Marquis de Carabas. He was never sure, not then and not later, how you pronounced Marquis de Carabas. Some days he said it one way, some days the other.
The water level had reached his knees, and he thought, This would never have happened if I still had my coat.
IT WAS THE market day after the worst week of the Marquis de Carabas’s life and things did not seem to be getting any better. Still, he was no longer dead, and his cut throat was healing rapidly. There was even a rasp in his throat he found quite attractive. Those were definite upsides.
There were just as definite downsides to being dead, or at least, to having been recently dead, and missing his coat was the worst of them.
The Sewer Folk were not helpful.
“You sold my corpse,” said the Marquis. “These things happen. You also sold my possessions. I want them back. I’ll pay.”
Dunnikin of the Sewer Folk shrugged. “Sold them,” he said. “Just like we sold you. Can’t go getting things back that you sold. Not good business.”
“We are talking,” said the Marquis de Carabas, “about my coat. And I fully intend to have it back.”
Dunnikin shrugged.
“To whom did you sell it?” asked the Marquis.
The sewer dweller said nothing at all. He acted as if he had not even heard the question.
“I can get you perfumes,” said the Marquis, masking his irritability with all the blandness he could muster. “Glorious, magnificent, odiferous perfumes. You know you want them.”
Dunnikin stared, stony-faced, at the Marquis. Then he drew his finger across his throat. As gestures went, the Marquis reflected, it was in appalling taste. Still, it had the desired effect. He stopped asking questions; there would be no answers from this direction.
The Marquis walked over to the food court. That night, the Floating Market was being held in the Tate Gallery. The food court was in the Pre-Raphaelite room, and had already been mostly packed away. There were almost no stalls left: just a sad-looking little man selling some kind of sausage, and, in the corner, beneath a Burne-Jones painting of ladies in diaphanous robes walking downstairs, there were some Mushroom People, with some stools, tables and a grill. The Marquis had once eaten one of the sad-looking man’s sausages, and he had a firm policy of never intentionally making the same mistake twice, so he walked to the Mushroom People’s stall.
There were three of the Mushroom People looking after the stall, two young men and a young woman. They smelled damp. They wore old duffel coats and army-surplus jackets, and they peered out from beneath their shaggy hair as if the light hurt their eyes.
“What are you selling?” he asked.
“The Mushroom. The Mushroom on toast. Raw the Mushroom.”
“I’ll have some of the Mushroom on toast,” he said, and one of the Mushroom People—a thin, pale young woman with the complexion of day-old porridge—cut a slice off a puffball fungus the size of a tree stump. “And I want it cooked properly all the way through,” he told her.
“Be brave. Eat it raw,” said the woman. “Join us.”
“I have already had dealings with the Mushroom,” said the Marquis. “We came to an understanding.”
The woman put the slice of white puffball under the portable grill.
One of the young men, tall, with hunched shoulders, in a duffel coat that smelled like old cellars, edged over to the Marquis, and poured him a glass of mushroom tea. He leaned forward, and the Marquis could see the tiny crop of pale mushrooms splashed like pimples over his cheek.
The Mushroom person said, “You’re de Carabas? The fixer?” The Marquis did not think of himself as a fixer.
He said, “I am.”
“I hear you’re looking for your coat. I was there when the Sewer Folk sold it. Start of the last Market it was. On Belfast. I saw who bought it.”
The hair on the back of the Marquis’s neck pricked up. “And what would you want for the information?”
The Mushroom’s young man licked his lips with a lichenous tongue. “There’s a girl I like as won’t give me the time of day.”
“A Mushroom girl?”
“Would I were so lucky. If we were as one both in love and in the body of the Mushroom, I wouldn’t have nothing to worry about. No. She’s one of the Raven’s Court. But she eats here sometimes. And we talk. Just like you and I are talking now.”
The Marquis did not smile in pity and he did not wince. He barely raised an eyebrow. “And yet she does not return your ardor. How strange. What do you want me to do about it?”
The young man reached one gray hand into the pocket of his long duffel coat. He pulled out an envelope, inside a clear plastic sandwich bag.
“I wrote her a letter.
