Chapter Seventeen The French Teacher #2
“Goodness, yes. He’s an important man. Never met him. Mind you, I don’t suppose he’s interested in learning French. Probably speaks it already. Very rich, very influential. Why do you ask about him?”
“We came here from Aleppo on a bus owned by his company. It was very comfortable. I was wondering if his buses went further east.”
“I don’t know,” said Green. “Sorry.”
“Can I ask you something?” said Asta, from the arm of the sofa. Lyra had noticed her moving there when she mentioned Oakley Street, and she was aware of the daemon’s attention. So was Green.
“Of course,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll know the answer, but I can try.”
“Gryphons. What do you know about them?”
He was surprised by that. He blinked and passed his hand over his head.
“Well…Hardly anything. They do exist, I suppose, but they have very little to do with human beings…You can see them occasionally in the high mountains, I understand, though I never have. They belong to that class of things in the wild parts of the world that are half myth and half verifiable. But they belong to a different realm really, a different kind of being, different order of things…I don’t know who would have any knowledge of them.
Most people, most educated people, wouldn’t talk about them, in the way people don’t talk about ghosts or apparitions. You’d be thought a bit odd.”
“Thank you,” said Asta.
“Why do you ask?”
“We saw one.”
“Ah,” he said. He smiled politely.
Lyra said, “I think it’s time we left you to your work. I’m sure you’ve got lessons to prepare. Are your students young, mostly, or sort of university age?”
“Some schoolchildren being prepared for exams. A few adults with time on their hands taking an interest in French culture. A number of businesspeople eager to trade in French-speaking countries. A mixture.”
She stood up and shook his hand. A melancholy man, she thought, and Pan would have agreed.
Green showed them out, and on the way downstairs Asta said, “A kindly man, haunted by his loss. Courageous. Pity he couldn’t tell us very much.”
“Oh, I think he did,” said Lyra.
Outside, they waited to cross the busy road and found Ionides reading a Persian-language newspaper on the café terrace. He saw her coming but didn’t look up.
“Take no notice of me,” he said quietly as she came close. “Go inside. Stay for five minutes and then come out and meet me further down that way.”
A brief nod indicated the direction of the city center.
She made no sign but walked straight past and into the café, which was also a boulangerie and sweetshop.
She pretended to take a great deal of time choosing what she wanted, and finally paid for a small pastry and left unhurriedly to stroll down the Hüseyn Javid Prospekt.
“He saw someone watching,” said Asta.
“I couldn’t look around, though. Did you notice anyone hanging about?”
“From where I am, no. It’s too busy to tell.”
Lyra kept looking ahead and across the road to her left, moving her head as little as possible.
Once she stopped to look into a dress shop window, though she was really studying the reflection of people behind her.
Then she walked on slowly. About a quarter of a mile down the street, she saw a crossing with traffic lights.
The light was green, and the road was busy, so there were four or five people waiting to cross.
One of them was Ionides. Lyra and Asta got to the light just before it changed. He didn’t look around, and they followed him across and down the narrow street on the other side.
He stopped outside a bookshop and looked at the display in the window. Lyra did the same.
“Your Green man any good, this French professor?” he said.
“Interesting, but indirectly. Is there someone following us?”
“Yes. Watching the house. When you go in, he make a note and waited. A long time, Miss Silver.”
“Was he still there when we came out?”
“Yes. He make another note. But he didn’t follow you or me to here. He stay there. Maybe watching your Green man.”
“I hope he’s safe…Mr. Ionides, where should we go for the poste restante? Do you think there’d be one main post office?”
“Best place to start. You think there would be something for you?”
“No harm in asking.”
“As Miss Silver, or as Queen Tatiana?”
Lyra looked at him, and laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that. I’d better be both.”
“You need papers, whatever name you say.”
“I’ve got Mustafa Bey’s laissez-passer for Queen Tatiana, but I’ve only been a queen since then.”
“You’ll only have one chance,” Asta pointed out. “You can’t go on giving different names till you get the right one. Anyway, who would possibly send you anything here in Baku?”
“Hmm,” she said. “You never know. Worth a try, though. Let’s find the post office. Then we’ll get tickets for the ferry.”
“Ferry to where?” said Ionides.
“Wherever it goes. Across the sea, that’s the main thing. Krasnovodsk, said Mr. Green. What would you advise?”
“Let me think. We go to post office first, then we decide.”
How could anyone have sent her a letter?
Lyra thought. It was a silly idea. But the mention of Oakley Street kept coming back to her, and the sense that things were connected in a secret commonwealth way, a way that wasn’t simply cause and effect.
As they walked through the busy streets on the way to where Ionides thought the post office was, she was simultaneously anxious and excited.
It felt as if she’d been working through some complicated problem in mathematics, and sensed that the answer was close, but she wasn’t able to see it yet.
Or imagine it, she thought; and she wanted very badly to talk to Pan again about imagining things.
But if she let herself dwell on her missing daemon, and his quest for her imagination, she’d sink into a whirlpool of self-reproach and fear and unhappiness. Swim clear, she thought. Move away from that pull in the water. Trust the world, but swim clear.
The main post office stood at the edge of a large square where the traffic was heavy. They had to wait for the lights to change before they could cross the street.
“Well?” said Asta as they stood at the entrance. “Who are you going to be?”
“Actually I’d better be the queen. She’s the only one I’ve got papers for.”
“I wait over there,” said Ionides, and went to a nearby newsstand.
If they had the time, Lyra was sure that Ionides could find someone to forge new papers in whatever name she chose.
But for now she had to be the queen and accept all the difficulties that brought, such as the problem now of finding the right counter in the main hall among the welter of signs in three different scripts.
She crouched down and said to Asta, “I’ll have to lift you up again because I can’t read the signs…I’m sorry.”
Asta leapt up to her shoulder and Lyra stood.
It still felt strange to have another person’s daemon so close, like an intimacy; it made her feel almost shy.
But Asta, who had Malcolm’s knowledge of languages, simply looked around for a moment or two and then said, “Over to the left—the counter where the woman in the red coat’s waiting. ”
“Thanks,” said Lyra, and crouched to let her down again.
She went to stand in line behind the woman, whose daemon was a greenfinch, staring down curiously at Asta and whispering something into the woman’s ear.
The woman was about to turn, but the assistant came back to the counter with a handful of letters for her.
She took them and signed a receipt and then left, ignoring the chirping of her daemon, who was plainly agitated by the idea that Lyra and Asta were not one person.
But Lyra moved to take her place and put her laissez-passer from Mustafa Bey on the counter. The assistant adjusted his glasses and bent to read it, and then looked up at Lyra, who put a lifetime of effrontery into the calm assurance with which she gazed back.
“Ah,” the assistant said, and inclined his head uncertainly, so she rewarded him with an inquiring smile and spread her hands.
He murmured something she couldn’t hear and turned to ask a supervisor.
Lyra took the paper and folded it away into her pocket, and then had to take it out again and show it to the older man who came back with him.
He spoke to her, but Lyra didn’t have to understand; it was clear what he wanted.
He read Mustafa Bey’s words reverentially and then said something sharp to the assistant, who hurried away.
The supervisor, half bowing, uttered a sentence or two to Lyra, who nodded and smiled with kindly understanding.
Then she withdrew her attention from him and gazed around at the architecture, the marble columns, the arched windows, the mosaics on the ceiling illustrating the speed and reliability of the Azerbaijani postal service.
The assistant came back, and he was carrying a small parcel, to Lyra’s astonishment.
But she showed no expression, and bent to sign the bottom of the form the supervisor laid on the counter, and then took the parcel from him.
She checked the name: it was certainly addressed to Her Majesty Queen Tatiana Iorekova, in a clear and practiced hand.
It was surprisingly heavy, and it had been packaged with professional care and sealed with string and sealing wax.
“Merci, messieurs,” she said, and accepted the bows of the assistant and the supervisor. The man behind her in the queue watched curiously. Lyra ignored them all and sauntered elegantly to the big door, where a man was bowing as he held it open.
“Well,” said Asta as they went to join Ionides at the newsstand. “I’m impressed.”
“Wonderful what you can get away with if you’ve got a piece of paper from Mustafa Bey.”
“They have something for the queen?” said Ionides quietly. “Very good. You got a pocket? Put it in without showing anyone what you doing. Now I walk on that side and keep close.”