‘Wait a minute,’ Dolph interrupted. ‘You trying to suggest Ros was killed out of revenge?’ Pardew watched Dolph without expression, holding the match over his pipebowl. ‘I dunno, I just can’t see that, not Ros.’
‘Nor can I,’ said Pardew, looking around for some place to drop the match; he chose one of the potted plants Scarborough had lined up around the cavemouth. ‘No, revenge is a noble passion, an instinctive search for order, the effort to restore a certain balance in the universe. Our murder here tonight seems much more sinister than that: a search for disjunction, a corrupt desire to disturb, distort – a murder committed perhaps out of curiosity or impudence’ – my wife, watched by a frowning Pardew, stifled a yawn (‘Sorry,’ she murmured) – ‘or even love, which is well known for its destructive powers. No, what reminded me of the Case of the Vengeful Fetus was the sense that the motive here was not merely irrational, it was prerational, atavistic, shared by all, you might say, and thus criminal in the deepest sense of the word. Once I recognized this, my task was eased. It was simply a matter of recalling certain ancient codes, making the obvious associations, then following the discretionary principles of professional criminalistics. Whereupon our crime was, for all practical purposes, solved.’ He nodded toward his two assistants, and they fanned out, blocking the two doorways, cutting Fats off from one, Bunky’s boyfriends from the other. ‘Yikes,’ someone said. The TV guy lowered his camera, looked around as though for an exit. Suddenly it wasn’t amusing anymore. ‘Who … ?’ Howard shrank back toward the far window, Michelle seemed to offer herself up. Earl Elstob was trying to close his lips around his buckteeth as though to draw a curtain. The Inspector, spotlit from above, watched all this, hands in pockets, pipe in mouth, as though, silently, weaving the final strands of his web – then, glancing toward Fred and turning his back, he jerked his thumb toward the rest of us. ‘Now!’ ‘Ah, shit,’ Charley groaned, slumping a bit, and Fats whimpered: ‘Hey, wait a minute, anybody seen Bren?’ Fred, hand on holster, pushed past him (he yipped reflexively), headed in my direction. Ours, rather: my wife tightened her grip again. ‘It’s all right,’ I muttered huskily (others were ducking, stumbling back) – and so it was: Fred broke past us in pursuit of Vachel, who, squeaking in alarm, went scrambling behind pots and props. ‘It’s a frame-up! I been skunked!’ he screamed, shoving the pedalcar in Fred’s direction. Fred went crashing, but Bob had joined him in the chase and now tackled the dwarf cleanly (Charley in confusion cheered him, and Regina wheezed, falling back: ‘God! I thought it was going to be me!’) near the back wall. Vachel, greasy with petroleum jelly, slipped a foot free, brained the cop with the fireplace poker, and took off running, but by now Fred was on his feet again and had him in a bearhug: Vachel’s little legs churned in midair, going nowhere. Bob, enraged, holding his bloodied head, staggered toward them. ‘Let me go, you shitheads!’ Vachel shrieked, feet and fists flying. ‘You can’t do this to me!’ ‘Pop him one on the gourd there, Bob!’ Fred grunted, hanging on desperately, and Bob, leaning into it on his short leg (‘Oh dear,’ my wife said, wincing), brought his stick down so hard that it did indeed sound like he’d crushed a pumpkin. ‘Shit,’ Quagg sighed from the floor, ‘there goes our show,’ and Fred, now holding the unconscious Vachel under one arm like a duffelbag and picking up his hat with the other, said: ‘Whew!’
‘If that don’t beat my grandmaw!’ Fats gasped, and someone belched eloquently, Dolph probably. ‘Vachel! Who’da guessed it?’
‘Guessed what?’
‘Eet wass how you say a brow-eye leefter, no?’ exclaimed Hilario, rolling his eyes.
‘Fucking little degenerate!’ growled Bob, still sore, blood streaming down past one eye, and he gave the dwarf another blow which oddly made his feet bob as well as his head.
‘That’ll do,’ said Pardew. ‘Come along now,’ and my wife, letting go my arm, said: ‘I’ll see them to the door.’
I sat back against the arm of the couch where Regina lay all akimbo in a crumpled white heap, the back of one wrist pressed melodramatically against her brow (‘Goodness, Sally Ann – that dress is still wet!’ my wife remarked in passing, there were people crossing now between us, I could only catch glimpses), taking great heaving bolts of air. I too felt short of breath, one half of me sinking leadenly, the other half dangerously afloat. ‘Do not try to grasp it,’ I could hear Hoo-Sin murmuring to Janny out there somewhere in that unfocused blur of movement before my eyes: the tension in the room had dissolved into a kind of generalized backstage flutter, as people slipped out of folds in the cave wall or crept out from behind one another, exchanging laughter and snorts of relief, ducking off for drinks or helping themselves to the dessert and coffee. ‘Casual thought is for fools. It is the burying of oneself in emptiness.’
‘You said it, Hoo! Juss what I been doin’ for – ruff! haw! (‘Ffoof-hrarf! I swallowed one of those damned – choke! – cookies whole!’ rasped the guy in the chalkstriped pants) – twenny years!’ laughed Charley, drawing both of them into his arms. My grandmother had had a story about this, or something like this, I remembered, something about a dead cousin. ‘I love it!’
‘Now what, Mr Quagg?’
Or aunt. I pushed off a canvas shoe, and scratched my foot.
‘Hroaf! ch-wheeze!’
Beside me, the cameraman was changing cartridges, Zack Quagg was doing deep kneebends, Gudrun was tying Janny’s hair up in a tight coil, powdering her face white. ‘Don’t worry, kids,’ Quagg panted. ‘We’ll – grunt! – clean it up and recast it, mount the whole uproar again!’ Janny sneezed, Scarborough swore, Regina groaned, and the guy in the chalkstripes – ‘Pwwfff-FWWOOO!’ – spewed cookie as Kitty reached round from behind and squeezed his diaphragm. ‘We’ll call it “The Feast of Saint Valentine,” use Mee as the vampire, make it a revue maybe, a kinda funerary tribute to the bourgeois theater …’ ‘That better?’ ‘What happened?’ asked Brenda, standing dim-eyed in the traffic of the dining room doorway, Gottfried peering sheepishly over her shoulder. The green charmeuse dress hung askew on her, one plump arm sticking out of the sleeve’s slash instead of the cuff. She pulled a string of gum out of her mouth, let it droop (‘Write some new tunes, give it some bounce!’), then lifted her chin and nibbled it back in again. ‘We were, um, watching TV.’ Regina sat up and studied her nails. ‘It’s so unfair!’ she said, and Fats, lapping up pie and chocolate sauce, spluttered: ‘You’ll never believe it, Bren!’ ‘You know, uh, I think I’ve lost my tape recorder,’ said Gottfried, reddening. ‘They’ve just took Vachel!’ ‘Unfair?’ ‘Poor old Vachel, I mean,’ said Regina. ‘Enh,’ Horner shrugged, rolling himself a cigarette, ‘he made a good exit …’ ‘Yeah, but does he know that?’ ‘Oh no! not – snap! – Vachel!’ yawned Brenda (it was catching, my own jaws began to spread), and Michelle said: ‘I think I’ll put a record on.’
‘That reminds me,’ said the Inspector, turning around at the door. ‘Our ice pick …’
‘I got it,’ said Bob, holding it up, then he tucked it back in his rear pocket.
Fred must have seen my gape of surprise (I’d been caught mid-yawn) as I rose up off the couch arm, because he winked and came over (I pressed my jaws together), wagging Vachel under his arm. ‘One of the Old Man’s favorite tricks,’ he grinned. ‘His probe, he calls it. Stick it in, see what surfaces. You know.’
‘I thought somehow I – I’d—!’
‘But of course we couldn’t fool you! Oh, and by the way …’ He leaned closer, switching Vachel to his other arm. It was my bloated self I saw in Vachel’s goggles, dwarfed twice over by the lenses’ convexity. ‘I just wanted to tell you: you know that ultraviolet exam …’ He nodded toward the hall door, where my wife stood, smiling wearily. She was waiting for the Inspector, who, stopped now by Patrick, was patting his pockets helplessly. ‘Well, sir, clean as a whistle!’ He gave me a knowing nudge. ‘Just thought you’d like to know …’ He sidled closer. Kitty, poking around at Vachel’s head behind his back, scrunched up her n
ose and said: ‘Ouch!’ ‘And listen, that wasn’t blood on the knife the Chief found, it was tomata juice – we knew that, we knew it all the time.’ He slapped my butt with his free hand. ‘You got a great little lady, fella. Hang on to her!’
Vachel’s dripping head bobbed at Fred’s rear under the blue SUPERLOVER sweatshirt as the officer walked away through what was left of the proscenium arch. One of my skis, cracked at the binding, tipped forward now at a crazy angle, making it seem as if the stage were reaching out to stop him, and Scarborough, trying to right it, snapped it in two. ‘Piss on it,’ he grumped and planted the broken end impatiently in a fern pot.
‘Forget it, Scar, we’re blowing this stand,’ said Zack.
‘Hey, where’s ole Earl?’
‘We’re moving the show up-country!’
‘Yeah? Who’s providin’ the nut?’
‘Cyril? Out back with Malcolm, I think, Charley.’
‘Probably getting stoned, the poor bastard.’
‘Don’t worry, I got somebody. We’re working on him now.’
‘Naw, I meant—’
‘Is it true Peg left him because he liked to do it with mirrors?’
‘No, that was someone else.’
‘I hear it was because she wanted to surprise him on their silver wedding anniversary, and it was the only thing she could think of.’
‘I love it!’ Charley yuff-huffed. ‘’Ass like the ole folks who went back t’their honeymoon hotel, an’ …’
‘You mean Peg and—?’
‘You know, I don’t think that guy’s playin’ with a full deck!’
‘Lissen, this’ll knock your pants off! They went back t’the goddamn hotel, see …’
‘Well, according to Cyril …’
‘Say, did you hear about that play Ros was in where she was supposed to pick up this deck of cards and cut it?’
‘’N – hee hoff! – the ole fella says …’
‘That’s not the way I heard it …’
‘Ros?’
‘Yeah, and – ha ha! – the director says—’
‘Well then …’
‘No …’
‘He says …’
‘He said …’
I was tired of stories and moved away. Perhaps my wife needed me. I remembered her hand on my arm a few moments ago, clutching at it as though for strength, and then the paleness of her face a little later as she smiled vacantly, sorrowfully, into the room past Pardew before she led him out. As I crossed to the door, little particolored Bunky Baird came bouncing through it, shouting: ‘Zack! Zack! they’ve done something to Vachel!’ ‘Yeah, I know, they popped his blister, Bunko – and ours too. The show’s blown, kid. So get outa your skin, we’re pulling stakes!’ A proscenium arch, I thought, passing under it, is like a huge mouth, but the sensation that it is the audience that is being fed through it is just another of theater’s illusions. Theater is never a stripping down (Bunky was bright blue and pimpled with sequins from the waist up, scarlet still from the thighs down, but in between a damp fleshy smear, ugly and shockingly naked), but always a putting on: theater fattened on boxed time. To be a member of the audience, then (so many thoughts, one after another, I staggered on, feeling myself consumed by my own consciousness), was a form of martyrdom …
Gudrun as I lumbered past gave me an understanding glance as though in sympathy with my troubled thoughts (‘Okay, before we go, everyone together for the flash!’ Zack shouted) and rubbed her nose with a blue finger. ‘I think someone stole your wife’s dressing table,’ she said.
‘Come on! Curtain calls!’
‘What—?’
‘This is exciting! You know, Mr Quagg, I really love the theater life!’
I leaned up against the doorframe. Even the dressing table … My wife was at the front door, saying good night to Inspector Pardew and Fred. They didn’t seem to want to leave. Or maybe they didn’t know how. She wanted me near, I knew – I caught it in her sorrowful gaze as she glanced up at me from Vachel’s lifeless and begoggled buttocks – but between us the tall cop Bob had Patrick slap up against the wall, jabbing him with his stick, cursing him out for being a nuisance and a whore, and I lacked the will, or maybe even the courage, to push on past. ‘If you don’t stop bugging the Inspector, you scummy little poufta, you’re gonna get your goddamn place of business tweezed!’ ‘Well! Is that a promise?’ Patrick simpered brazenly, twitching his puffy lips up at the black-bearded TV cameraman now looming beind the cop’s shoulder. ‘You goddamn pervert—!’ ‘You got problems, little buddy?’ asked the cameraman, taking a fierce grip on Bob’s neck that made the cop whistle and drop his nightstick. In the living room (to be at a crossroads, I realized, was actually to be nowhere: there was unexpected comfort in this) applause erupted as the actors took their curtain calls, Mee joining them now, sliding spookily past me out of the toilet, as though sucked in by the slapping hands. Scarborough focused the lights, Regina doffed her bedsheet (there was a lot of good-natured booing), Zack dragged Fats on stage to take a bow. Fats, feigning shyness, shuffled up doing a little hunched-shoulders soft-shoe routine, hands in his pockets and rolling his eyes. ‘Spread it, sweetie!’ laughed Brenda, clapping the loudest: ‘Let’s hear it for him, folks! the one and lonely!’ ‘Now if you’ll just pick up my gear there, pardner, and haul it along with us,’ the cameraman said beside me, making Patrick gasp and flutter his lashes (‘Oh my! yes!’), then he highstepped the cop to the front door, one hand gripping his skinny nape, the other the seat of his pants, Bob’s gimpy leg brushing through the scum of whipped cream on the floor like a dangling plummet. ‘Hot it up, Scar!’ shouted Quagg. My wife opened the door and the cameraman heaved the cop through it, then turned to wait for Patrick. ‘Okay, strike it and take it away, crew, we’re sloughing this dime museum!’ People were starting to head out this way: I joined my wife.
‘Such in the main are the degenerate dregs of humanity, whom we have never, I regret to admit, learned to curb or eliminate,’ Pardew was saying, as though into some kind of closing recitation, ‘characterized chiefly by their stupidity and depravity and their inability to play the game—’
‘Oh yes?’ said my wife vaguely.
Patrick, his hands full of camera gear, paused at the door to pucker his battered lips at me and wink, then pranced out after the cameraman, my wife still holding the door open. Her lips moved as though she might be counting. Behind us, the actors, laughing and shouting (‘And their, eh, deformed personalities, you see …’), were flowing into the hallway. ‘Well, back to selling pencils!’ ‘Christ, Vadge, get those things in a hammock before somebody steps on ’em!’ ‘No, believe me, baby, we got a backer!’ ‘I believe you, Zack. Call me at the beach.’ ‘Somebody gimme a chaser!’ Fats called out, hauling on his down jacket. ‘A tailpiece for ole Fats – lemme hear it from the heart!’ The Inspector had long since fallen silent. He peered down at my wife, nibbling his moustache. ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she said.
Fats chasséd past us, waggling his hands beside his face and singing, ‘You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone,’ my wife pushing the storm door open just in time to keep him from crashing through it. ‘Ta-DAAA-AA-aa-aaa …’ The police marched out behind him. ‘Watch where you step,’ I could hear the Inspector mutter peevishly, his voice echoey in the night. ‘It’s really too bad about Vachel,’ my wife said with a sigh.
‘Yes, well … I never did like him very much, though.’
‘I know.’ The actors had applauded Fats’ exit and Brenda was now giving them all a hug. ‘But he was always good with children.’
‘Next party at our house, everybody! Promise!’
Hilario leaned toward us and said: ‘Your keetchen, do you know, she ees smokeeng!’
‘What – ?!’ Yes, I could see it, rolling in from the back like some kind of mephitic vapors.
‘It’s all right, Gerald,’ my wife said. ‘Fats just left some things on the burner. As usual.’
‘Ees what you call a bl
oody mass, no?’
‘Shall I go see if—?’
‘No.’ She took my arm. ‘I already turned it off.’ There was a peculiar gentle flush in her cheeks. ‘Dolph and Louise are back there, making up,’ she whispered.
‘Ah …’
‘Bren!’ cried Fats, staggering wide-eyed back in through the front door, making us all jump. ‘My god, Bren! It’s that plumber! Whatsisface!’
‘What—? Oh no! No—?!’ She came rushing silkily past us, but paused to give us both a hug – ‘You’re a super guy, Ger,’ she breathed in my ear, her gum snapping, ‘you’ve got a great heart … and wonderful hands!’ – then clambered on out behind Fats: ‘God! I can’t believe it, Fats!’
‘Hey, poison curls!’ Zack Quagg exclaimed. ‘Our angel descends!’
I looked up, we all did: it was Alison’s husband, escorting Alison down the stairs in front of him, followed by Olga and Prissy Loo. Alison was dressed now in Brenda’s red pants suit, a couple of sizes too big for her, stained at the knees, the cuffs flopping around her bare feet. The actors all applauded. Alison, her makeup smeared across her face, hair snarled, stumbled when she saw me. Her eyes searched mine. Was her lip quivering? She held the baggy-kneed red pants up with one hand. There was a patch sewn on the crotch now, probably one of Sally Ann’s, which, even from here, I could see was in the shape of a road sign.
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