Medusa

Her bar is famous for two reasons, and the cocktail list is only one of them. The other is the terrace: a statue garden, stone figures frozen mid-gesture — one raising a toast, another looking for the exit, a third with his hand in his inside pocket, forever. ’Bought at auction,’ says Medusa. The regulars note, however, that the collection grows without a delivery truck, and that one statue wears the watch — recognizable, engraved — of a customer who skipped out on his bill three springs ago. When someone points this out, she laughs. Laughter, everyone will concede, is not a denial.

The school of the counter issued her the regulation memory and patience: she remembers your order from two years ago and your unpaid tab from three. The viridian coils of her braids sometimes move on their own, insist the customers at the back. The customers at the back have usually had a great deal to drink, she replies. That’s true too.

Her district is the best-watched in the city, and that’s an accounting fact: the tills balance, the scams wither, the cheats confess before they’ve cheated. The reason sits on her nose: two mirrored lenses, never removed, that hand everyone back their own reflection in duplicate. You watch yourself lying, and you give up. As for the rival squads that come hunting on her ground, the outcome is so consistent it’s in the Houses’ training manuals: the poach fails, turns around, and the squad leaves lighter than it arrived — when it leaves. The legend says petrified. The truth is worse for their Boss: they come back, and they talk.

The paradox is the atmosphere: at the gorgon’s place, people laugh enormously. She slips fake snakes into the ice bin, introduces the statues to new customers — ’I’ll leave you with Gérard, he’s a bit stony’ —, and her great gala-night number is still the lowering of the sunglasses: one inch, no more. The room goes silent at once, somebody drops a glass, and she pushes the frames back up, laughing that warm-stone laugh of hers. Nothing shakes her: the tide, two curtains and a kitchen fire have all rolled over her without displacing a single coil. ’Stone runs in the family,’ she says.

At four in the morning she waters the statues — ’they get thirsty, well, I assume’ — and tidies her great ledger: every debt in it is settled, one way or another, left-hand column or right-hand terrace. She trains her girls to work with their backs to the mirrors, a house reflex, and keeps the district like a garden: pruned, watered, watched. What does she want? Gossips speak of an apology she’s owed by someone very old, with a shield polished far too well. She just shrugs: a bigger terrace. The collection, you see, grows all by itself.