“At least you don’t kick like our women do!” Canterbury smiled. “You can even nurse your foal at the workshop. If it’s anything like you, it’ll have acetylene in its veins, anyway.”
We had finished lunch and were heading back to the workshop when we ran into traffic congestion on Maiden Lane. I didn’t really think anything of it, at first—despite the lack of automobiles, traffic jams were all too common in Golgotham. But then I heard several voices chanting in unison, as if at a sporting event.
“What’s going on?” I asked, standing up in the horse trap into order to peer over Canterbury’s withers.
“Looks like some kind of protest in front of the Machen Arms,” he replied.
As I scanned the crowded sidewalks, I spotted a familiar face. “Could you wait here for a second?” I asked as I hopped down.
“I don’t think I have much choice in the matter,” Canterbury said acerbically. “There’s no way I can back out of this snarl.”
As I moved through the outer ring of onlookers, I discovered the source of the chanting was a group of protestors, most of them Kymeran, standing behind traffic barricades. To my dismay several of them were wearing Kymeran Unification Party pins, and one of them was even waving an ESAU WAS RIGHT sign.
Directly across the street from the protestor stood the Machen Arms, a ten story apartment building with a central block and two flanking wings. The recessed courtyard that served as the approach to the main building was normally kept empty, save for a couple of decorative potted shrubs on either side of the entryway, but that afternoon it was filled with haphazard piles of furniture, stacks of books, and mounds of clothes. An elderly Kymeran woman, her faded scarlet tresses bound into lengthy braids coiled about her head like a pretzel, flitted back and forth among the bedsteads, armoires, and steamer trunks like a hummingbird in a summer garden. From where I stood I couldn’t tell if she was trying to cast protection spells over the items in hopes of keeping them from being stolen or simply babbling to herself in despair.
The familiar face I had glimpsed belonged to Octavia, who was talking to an elderly Kymeran gentleman with receding maroon hair liberally laced with threads of silver. I pushed my way through the throng to join them.
“Octavia—! What’s going on?”
As the firefighter turned to face me, I saw she was wearing a T-shirt bearing the message STALEMATE CHESS. “That chuffer Ronnie Chess is throwing my old next-door neighbor, Torn, and his wife out of their apartment today! I came here as soon as I heard to try to help.”
“Thank you, my dear,” Torn said humbly. “You were always a good neighbor.” He turned back to stare up at the building that until that day had been his home. “The old landlord promised we would be ‘grandfathered’ in. But the new owner raised our rent from seven hundred and fifty dollars to six thousand a month! Arum’s blood, there’s no way we could possibly afford that! Hana! Look who has come to help us! And she’s brought a friend!”
Torn’s wife paused in her frantic checking and double checking of their belongings to peer over the top of her Ben Franklin glasses at us. “Adon bless you both,” she said, fighting to keep the waver from her voice. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. . . .”
Before Hana could finish her sentence, an ipotane emerged from the entryway, carrying a rolled-up carpet under one arm and balancing a steamer trunk like a boom box on his opposite shoulder, and unceremoniously dumped his cargo with the rest of the couple’s property. Unable to take yet another blow to her dignity, the old woman sank down onto a mound of casually discarded clothes and began to weep into her apron.
Torn hurried to his wife’s side, slipping a protective arm about her trembling shoulders. “Now, now, Hana, darling—don’t cry,” he said, trying his best to console her.
“I can’t help it, Torn,” she sobbed. “What are we to do? We’ve lived in the same apartment for twenty years! Where do we go now?”
“Don’t you have a son who can help you?” Octavia asked hopefully.
“We had a son,” Torn replied tersely, all but spitting the words. “We haven’t spoken to him since he disgraced the family, thirty years ago!”
I looked up to see real estate developer Ronald Chess, the new landlord of the Machen Arms and the author of Hana and Torn’s misery, step out of the front door of the apartment building. An errant gust of wind caught his trademark comb-over, setting it momentarily on end, like the fin of a shark, before slamming it back down onto his head.
His pale eyes always seemed to be narrowed in permanent suspicion and were too small for his face, which resembled that of an overfed, slightly lumpy baby. As he scanned his surroundings, his cheeks abruptly turned bright red and his face grew even lumpier.
“What are they doing here?” he bellowed, pointing to Octavia and myself. He turned to the blue-haired Kymeran standing beside him who carried a five-foot-tall brass staff topped by the seal of the GoBOO. “Lash promised me all protestors would be kept five hundred feet away!”
“Who’s the dude with the big stick?” I asked.
“That’s Elok, the GoBOO’s beadle,” Torn replied forlornly. “He’s here to oversee the evictions.”
“I thought the PTU were the police in Golgotham.”
“They only deal with criminal cases,” Octavia explained. “Beadle Elok handles all the civil stuff, like collecting fines, seizing property, and evictions—that kind of thing.”
“You there!” Elok said imperiously, gesturing with his staff as if to shoo us away. “What are you doing on this side of the street? I expressly stated no protestors beyond the barricades!”
“We’re not protesters!” Octavia snapped, flashing the Golgotham Fire Department credentials she wore on a lanyard about her neck. “We’re friends of Hana and Torn’s and we’re here to help them relocate.”
Elok’s pinched features visibly relaxed. “Very well,” he sighed. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Believe me, I don’t like evictions any more than you do. But I swore an oath to do as the GoBOO commands. . . .”
“Hey! You—! Beadle!” Chess shouted, refusing to come any closer to us than he had to. “What do you think you’re doing? Why aren’t you arresting those hippies like I told you to? And get these geezers out of here!” he added, pointing to Hana and Torn. “I’ve got photographers coming in from the Herald to take pictures for the Sunday Living section, and I don’t need them seeing this kind of shit! It looks like a goddamned yard sale out here!”
“I know what my duties are, Mr. Chess,” Elok replied frostily. “And must I remind you that I answer to the Golgotham Business Owners’ Organization, not to you?”
“Is that a fact, huh?” Chess scowled as he tapped the screen of his smartphone. “Hey, it’s me. Your boy here is giving me some lip. Says he only answers to the GoBOO. You going to set him straight or what? Here—your boss wants to talk to you,” Chess smirked as he handed the phone to Elok.
The beadle grudgingly accepted the phone as if it was a poisonous reptile. “Hello? Yes, sir,” he said, his cheeks suddenly turning beet red. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize . . . yes, of course, Mayor Lash! Whatever you say!”
“I’m glad we’ve gotten that cleared up,” Chess said as he reclaimed his phone. “Now bust these hippies and get them out of here.”
As the sigil atop Elok’s beadle-staff suddenly began to glow, I took a step toward Chess, who drew back as if I might spit on him.
“I don’t think that’s a smart idea, Ronnie.”
The real estate tycoon gave me the same look he would something he’d scraped off the bottom of his shoe. “That’s Mr. Chess to you, toots.”