The Stranger - Max Frei [39]
“Yes, I thought as much . . . Juffin, that old lady at the next table—is she by any chance one of your crew? She seems to be eyeing me suspiciously.”
To my surprise, Juffin stared at me with a nearly threatening gaze. I didn’t know what to think.
“Why do you say that, Max?”
“I’m sorry. I was just trying to be funny. That sweet lady definitely had her eye on me. She still does.”
“You surprise me, Sir Max.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that tomorrow I’ll be wearing protective amulets too, just in case.”
Meanwhile, enveloped in the folds of her dark looxi, the sweet lady, who was in fact a large old woman, stood up gracefully from her table and approached us. The woman’s face underwent a transformation as she made her way over to us. By the time she arrived at our table, she was an elderly gentleman of ample and squat build. I blinked my eyes, unable to grasp what was going on.
“I see you as in a waking dream, Sir Max,” he said politely, covering his eyes with the palm of his hand, as one does upon first being introduced. I automatically returned the gesture.
“I’m glad to speak my name: I am Kofa Yox, Master Eavesdropper. Congratulations, son. You saw right through me.”
“But sir, I didn’t mean to,” I began, embarrassed. “I was just making a joke.”
“Right. Next thing you know, you’re going to say you’re sorry, and that it won’t happen again,” said Juffin, laughing out loud. “Just look at him, sitting there with a guilty expression. Anyone else would be gloating over it!”
Kofa Yox smiled gently. “That’s reassuring. It’s great to have at least one humble person working in our organization.” He sat down next to Juffin, facing me, and took a sip of kamra.
“This place has the best food in all of Echo, to be sure!” Sir Kofa Yox said, and smiled again. “I have news for both of you. Everyone in the city is talking about the Venerable Head’s new Nocturnal Representative—that’s you, son. There are two popular versions of the story. The first is that Juffin Hully brought a creature from the World of the Dead to Echo. Is that a look of delight I see, Sir Max? The second version is that the Venerable Head gave a job in the Force to his illegitimate son, whom he had been hiding away since time immemorial. What do you think of that, Juffin?”
“They couldn’t come up with anything more interesting than that?” my boss asked with a snort. “Capital City lore seems to thrive on only two topics: forbidden magic and the amorous adventures of my youth. The latter seems to arouse particular interest, because instead of being born in Echo like most normal people, I came here from Kettari. People think that there’s nothing to do in the provinces but indulge in daily fits of shameless lust. Yes, Kofa, the King will have to raise your salary. What a job, having to listen to such idle nonsense, day in and day out!”
“It’s all right. It annoyed me for the first eighty years, but I got used to it after that. I’ve worked with Juffin for a long time, Max,” said Kofa Yox, giving me another soft paternal smile.
“Before that, Sir Yox was Police General of the Right Bank,” said Juffin, “and tried to have me arrested for many years. On several occasions, his efforts nearly succeeded, but in the end, they all fell through. That was during the Epoch of Orders, a long time before the battle for the Code of Krember. In those days, any citizen could perform magic of the fortieth degree on a whim. Can you imagine?”
I shook my head. It was hard to adjust to the fact that people here lived no fewer than three hundred years. As for more prominent persons, who made up the majority of my acquaintances, they managed to extend their existence almost indefinitely.
How old was Kofa, anyway? I wondered. I would have said he was no older than sixty, and a sixty-year-old is a teenager by local standards. Melifaro, for example, who was about my age, I had thought, turned out to be one hundred and fifteen years old. He was born on the very morning that the Code of Krember had been established. In other words,