Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [45]
Gabriel decided it was time to leave, before the Gentlemen of the Night arrived. The incident, as far as he was concerned, had not been serious and was drawing to a close. He approached Kelvin, who was about to follow them all.
“It’s more lively than it seems, here,” said Gabriel.
“Sorry about this,” said Kelvin. “Everybody’s nervous with the oncoming inauguration. I hope it won’t be too bad for them. Or for Oosik. Or the other employees.”
“The Eskimos who work here?”
“Yes, the idea is that it’s the resident Inuit themselves who explain things to visitors. Some of them have their doubts about the project. We’ve even had a little sabotage lately. This is going to make things worse.”
“You should go and make sure it cools off,” said Gabriel, who felt as if his head was about to burst with exhaustion. “I don’t want to detain you. Thanks a lot for the visit, anyway. It’s truly amazing.”
“Thank you,” said Kelvin, shaking Gabriel’s hands before following the Eskimo cortege.
Gabriel yawned and headed toward the exit. He hadn’t gone two steps when he felt a small object under his boots. It looked like a dancing bear or something, one of those miniature carvings that Inuit make when they are bored and forget about afterward. It must have been part of the whole staging. He knelt down and picked it up.
It was only in the street that, opening his gloved hand, he realized that the tiny figure he held was that of the Polar Kangaroo.
CHAPTER XIII
The Recording Riot
That ragtime suffragette
She is no household pet
H. Williams & N. D. Thayer,
That Ragtime Suffragette, 1913
Brentford still had plenty of time before his appointment at the Blazing Building with the Council of Seven, and he felt he could afford to make a detour to Venustown, where, according to the flyer he had just been handed by a girl in a suffragette outfit, he could attend the launch party of THIS YEAR’S MUSICAL EVENT: LILIAN LENTON & THE LODESTONES’ NEW ELECTRICALLY RECORDED 10-INCH!!!
He had to admit that the newspaper article Sybil had handed him with such a charming fury had triggered his curiosity. When he was a youngster, caught in the agitation of the city’s golden age, Sandy Lake had more than once enchanted him with her good looks and crisp little tunes that would turn his brain wiring into blinking fairy lights. Her band, the fine-tuned but foul-mouthed Sandmovers, had been the epitome of what the city was about in those days, as it stood upon the two pillars of attitude and addiction. But he would not have gone for such cheap flashes of nostalgia—for he knew ultimately how useless and heart-wrenching they were—if he had not dreamed of Sandy Lake at the Dunne Institute. He had to check the connection, if only to make sure it was nothing but a coincidence, though he knew very well that a coincidence, by the simple fact of being noticed, was always something.
Venustown, just on the other side of Yukiguni, was not at its best in the daylight, being as it was something of a decayed tooth in the pearly-white smile of the city centre. The houses were rather greyish and their facades had little or none of the ornamental flourishes that characterized most of the local architecture. It certainly had an atmosphere of its own—especially at night, as its narrow, gaslit, cobbled streets, all mazes and byways, were haunted by the gold-plated ghosts of low life. But in the morning hours, it had a sort of sleepy, moody, unwashed ambience, so characteristic of red-light districts everywhere. The faint music that guided Brentford’s steps from Boötes Bridge up to Selene Street seemed out of place, a fading memory more than a reality, like a song hummed by a drunkard slumped in a gutter, such as the dark-faced Eskimo whom Brentford was trying hard not to look at.
The “Year’s Musical Event,” probably thanks to Linko’s enthusiastic article, had drawn a substantial crowd on Great Pan Place, mostly hipsters but also quite a few rubberneckers, and Brentford wondered, not without melancholy,