The Stranger - Max Frei [155]
“I understand. I’m the same way. Tell me, Lady Tanita, what did Mr. Kovareka do in his spare time? You have to take a break sometimes, even from your favorite work.”
“Karry wouldn’t have agreed with you. The only kind of leisure that he wanted was to stand behind the bar shooting the breeze with the customers. You may not believe me, but the only reason he ever went to other people’s taverns was to sniff out their secrets. And he was very good at it! Karry had never learned to cook; never studied to be a chef, I mean. In his younger days he served as a coachman at the Chancellory of Pleasure. You see, I inherited the Tipsy Bottle from my grandmother. In the beginning we had to rely completely on the servants. We didn’t even know how to brew kamra! For the first few years Karry hung about in the kitchen with the cooks, helping peel the vegetables. Then one day he threw a salad together. Just an ordinary salad; but people claimed they hadn’t tasted anything like it since the beginning of the Code Epoch! It turned out that he had just watched our cook prepare it and then come up with a few innovations to the recipe. That’s how it all began.”
“Did your husband go hunting often?” I asked. Lady Tanita stared at me, baffled. “I mean, hunting for other people’s culinary secrets.”
“Fairly often. Well, once every dozen days, and sometimes more frequently. He even learned to disguise his appearance, since chefs don’t like sharing their secrets with their colleagues.”
“You see, Lady Tanita? You said you lived a quiet life, yet all the while Mr. Kovareka was in disguise, delving into the culinary mysteries of his colleagues in disguise. You have to agree that not every Tom, Dick, and Harry behaves like that. Oh, please forgive my bad manners! I’m so used to expressing myself like—”
“Don’t worry, Sir Max. Even if you began talking like a gravedigger it wouldn’t change anything. It’s even better that way. When you smile, I forget Karry is gone.”
“Lady Tanita,” I said earnestly. “Remember, there are other Worlds besides this one. That’s something I can vouch for, at least. So he is somewhere, your Karwen; only this somewhere is far away. When my grandmother died—and she was the only one in the family I truly loved—I told myself she had just gone away. I also told myself, of course, that we couldn’t see each other, and that was bad—but all the same, she was somewhere. And life went on there, as it did here. Believe me, if anyone knows something about death, it’s me.” Here I twisted the black hem of my Mantle of Death significantly.
Who would have thought my childishly naïve belief was exactly what this unhappy woman needed? She smiled thoughtfully.
“You’re probably right, Sir Max. For some reason I feel that you’re always right. I would like to know what kind of other World it is, and if Karry is happy there. Actually, being in another world is better than being nowhere at all. And then, maybe when my time comes, I can find him there. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I very much hope so. There is always someone we all want to find beyond the Threshold.”
“You really are a good person, Sir Max.”
“Just don’t spread it around town, or I won’t be able to do my job. It’s better for everyone—as long as the criminals are afraid of my garb, there’s no need to resort