The Mercury Waltz by Kathe Koja Page A

slashed and bubbling and the room in ruins; the sticky stickpin palmed to a sidestreet doctor who drunkenly stitches his lip back together, before in pain he makes again for the road—
    —to tramp scarred and bare-headed into yet another city, this city of larch trees and rebus streets and mania for gambling, milk-and-tea shops and tea boys with their tin trays and blue caps, Egyptian cigarettes and thieves’ patois —“raven” for a criminal’s lookout and “dove” for his fence, “jay” or “picker” for the thieves—and a changing lexicon of exotica, all the names the boys name themselves: ganymedes and fauns and Black Archies, foresters or parkers for the ones who meet the men in dark parks, men like the rentier , men who are rentiers , and burghers, and ministers and cabinet clerks; men, Haden learns, who greatly value an intelligent, scholarly, amoral young fellow who can hold a conversation as well as squeeze a prick: You’re a different sort, he hears it time and time again. You’re not like the other lads.
    But not a lad at all now, is he? nearly grown a man, so how many more mornings ought he wake bare-arsed next to some snoring tub of guts, swab himself with the oversheet, and scuttle back down to the streets? He has read The Prince, read it more than once; he has been thinking. So he casts a cool eye on those other boys, those pickers and dryads, and one by one, by persuasion, by force, and by favors, he gathers the best he can find into a cadre, his cadre: Haden’s boys. Why not? Otherwise they will do as they always do, squabble, play pranks, and die at the curb, tossed out like wilted flowers by the men whose passing patronage they flog each other stupid for the having. Instead he is their patron, giving safety behind the hard blade of his knife, and coin, a boy has got to eat after all. But there is more value, much more, in little gifts like a flash topper, or a packet of gipsy smokes laced with good hashish, or the chance to sleep an hour in a quiet garret room, Haden himself to watch over that sleeper, with a taste of Rheinish and a smile when he wakes; there are boys in these streets who would do anything for the having of that smile alone, from Hadrian Mundy become the road’s Haden Marry, then Haden St.-Mary as befits a patron’s gravitas .
    And night by night and day by day, stealthy dawn by afternoon suck by private midnight fête, his little cullion army is noticed, then watched, then finally approached by an elite and judicious handful of older men who, it seems, will pay him to put that army’s eyes and ears in certain suites and card parlors, restaurants and alleyways; and pay well, too, so well that Haden need never again lie in any bed he does not choose. And if their endless thirst for information sends him to doors he would not, himself, have known to open, why not skim the cream of what his boys see there or hear? A whispered name whispered later to a minister’s secretary, the minister himself turning white as whey in his fine office—how easy it is, such a little name, for such a lot of money to spend at the haberdasher’s, or the vintner’s, or the booksellers’ stalls on French poetry; he cannot read it well, yet, but he is improving.
    And sometimes one of these men hates another, or fears him, or badly longs for something not his own—a woman, a position, though the thing desired need not be a great one, Haden has watched one rentier ruin another over a shipment of kerosene lamps—so with nimble care, the way a cat walks a slippery fence, he takes that knowledge, too, and tucks it safe away for use, if need be, against these men, these clean and filthy men with their costly gloves and peppermint breath who fuck his boys and would if they could fuck him, too, tame him to a slavey—let them try, he will march in no man’s army but his own; just ask the corporal. And his life is just as he wants it: for pleasure the books, and the gambling—with dice and cards,