The Mercury Waltz by Kathe Koja

half-bow, turning down the stairs past the yellow-haired boy in the scarf, their eyes meet and “Suck?” offers the boy softly. “Just a fiver, sah, there’s still some time before the music starts.”
    “I’d see you in the stocks,” says Martin Eig, “face down.” His face does not change. “Take yourself away from here before I call an officer.”
    “Be corked, Mr. Pinch!” but rapidly the boy retreats, a scurry so swift that he almost collides head-on with another hurrying churchgoer, an upright young man who grasps him by the elbows to keep him from a dire backwards fall and “Suck?” the boy asks hopefully—he has not eaten since yesterday and has a very long night ahead—looking as hopefully into that young man’s face, Frédéric who feels the hungry urgency of the look, the boy is so awfully thin, but “No,” he says at once, “certainly not—” yet why do they always call to him, these boys with their sweet winks and shameless little smiles, is it his eyes, his gait, how do they always know? —as he ducks past and up the stairs as if in flight, he is in flight—
    —but swiveling back then with his hand out, a hasty handful of coins and “Hurry,” the boy’s smile, “the music’s started,” already the great swelling strains of the organ—
    —but the young man has escaped up the stairs again and through the heavy doors, the boy turning away confused and delighted, all this money for “No diddling at all,” he boasts to his mates at the milk-and-tea shop down the corner, shoving the coins across the cloudy zinc counter. “He just give it to me and then off he go. — Two raisin buns, you twister, and a kaffee!” enjoying every bite of the lunch the money buys as well as the gipsy smokes bought afterward—
    —while once the Mass has ended, and the choir director has made his farewells, Frédéric lingers, fingering in his pocket—beside a fiery new broadsheet from the Literary Leopards, and several unread letters from his mother and his fiancée—a ticket to the Mercury, not as Seraphim this time but only Frédéric, to see the show again, hear the music, watch the two men leave together for the hills. He kneels at the side altar in the throaty scent of lilies, the candles’ gleam and waver, waiting for the boys outside to go away, praying for guidance and the grace to know himself; and remembering despite himself the verses quoted by M. Hilaire, so bawdy and delightful, he ought not think of them now, how did it go again? The ne’er-do-wells and paltry gods are we/Of rural worship and ’spite modesty/Aye under Jove with balls a-bare we stand —
    —while in a well-appointed townhouse library, books of law, books of faith, books of commerce, most unopened, Martin Eig sits over lukewarm tea beside his host, grizzled Tibor Banek of the Globe, and Simon Cowtan called Shakespeare. The latter is an aspirant to this room and this company, men much higher up the ladder than he—Mrs. Cowtan was thrilled by the invitation, herself ironing his handkerchief and specially buffing his shoes—and proud to address with them the issue of the growing crowds at the Mercury Theatre: “It is an odd venue,” Cowtan offers, tugging his mustache discreetly dyed with chestnut stain. “I had a girl of mine over there, as one does, you know,” at Mrs. Cowtan’s urging, Here it is again in the papers. Send Cynthia to have a peep, may be she can get cozy there, and give us eyes! “Just to see.”
    “And what did you see?” asks Eig.
    “Well—it is odd, as I said. They seem not to care who attends or who doesn’t, they list only the puppets’ names in the playbill—”
    Banek narrows his gaze behind black pince-nez, clears his leathery throat. “Something to hide, it would seem.”
    “Or a way to drum up interest,” says Cowtan. “People love a mystery.” Privately he considers the fuss just that, a nine-days’ wonder, for in the end what use or worry can it ever be, puppets onstage?