The Philosophical Strangler

by Eric Flint

  The Cat.

  "I'll be damned," I whispered. "I never thought she'd show up."

  The Cat was half blind to begin with, and, as dark as the room was, she had to fumble her route. Halfway to the bar she passed the Belly-Ups, groping and feeling her way.

  Good lads, the Belly-Ups. Always sat at the same table, always friendly, and they were the bedrock of The Trough's business. So they were very polite about the whole thing, even though their eyes were suddenly a lot less bleary than they had been.

  She could produce that effect, the Cat. Strangest woman you'd ever meet, but there was no denying she was beautiful, in her own way. Tall, great figure, gorgeous yellow hair, bright blue eyes, a striking face—if you didn't mind the long nose and the spectacles like beer bottles. Oh, yeah, and the three-foot sword belted to her waist. Put some guys off, that razor. Can't imagine why.

  Anyhow, she eventually found her way to the bar. I said hello and she nodded at me, vaguely. I'm not sure she really even saw me, her eyesight's so bad. Then she ordered a vodka martini.

  I'll give him credit, Leuwen didn't even blink an eye. Not your normal order in The Trough, a vodka martini, but Leuwen had one in front of her in seconds. She paid him, tried it, looked impressed. Hell, I was impressed—it was the first expression other than indifference I'd ever seen on her face. Except when she got onto the subject of Schrödinger, of course.

  "That's a good vodka martini," she announced. Leuwen nodded placidly.

  "Haven't made one in a while," he commented. "Nice change from pouring ale. You're new here. What's your name?"

  "Schrödinger's Cat."

  I kept a straight face. I'd have given thousand-to-one odds on Leuwen's next sentence.

  Yep, I'd have won again. He did a double take, then blurted out: "Who's Schrödinger?"

  "I wish I knew," she replied. "I'm looking for him." She took a sip. "When I find the bastard, he's dog food. Haven't seen him, have you?"

  Leuwen said he'd never even heard of him. That was probably true, but even if Schrödinger was sitting next to her, Leuwen would've said the same thing. Neutral, he is, like any barkeep in the Flankn. Professional ethics, you know.

  So then the Cat groped her way over to an empty table and sat there, slowly sipping her martini. Waiting for Greyboar, I guessed, though with her you never knew what was on her mind.

  "You know her?" asked Leuwen.

  I shrugged. "As much as anybody does, I imagine. That is one strange woman. Leave it to Greyboar to get the hots on the world's weirdest female."

  Leuwen's eyes widened. "She's Greyboar's girlfriend?"

  I laughed. "In his dreams! We met her in Blain on the way back from Prygg. There was—"

  I choked on the sentence, fell silent. It occurred to me that Leuwen hadn't given any indication that he knew the slightest thing concerning the unfortunate affair in Blain, and I saw no reason to enlighten him.

  Greyboar and I had run into her at Blain, on our way back from Prygg. "Run into her," I admit, is a delicate way of putting it. But—it's all part of that accursed business in Prygg, which was caused by Magrit taking up with the philosopher Zulkeh.

  You want to know the main reason to avoid philosophy? It's because where there's philosophy, there's always a philosopher. The real thing, too, not an amateur like Greyboar. As the wizard Zulkeh would put it, "the personal reification of the abstract essence."

  In this case, himself. Zulkeh of Goimr, physician. The most dangerous characters in the world, philosophers. None more so than the sorcerer Zulkeh, as I found out to my eternal chagrin when we got mixed up with the guy in Prygg. (That was Magrit's fault, and accounts for the extreme altitude of her position on my personal shit list.)

  It's in the very nature of things, you see, that philosophers insist on mucking around in philosophy. And if you muck around in philosophy you'll find yourself, soon enough, mucking around with such risky stuff as the nature of God. And if you go mucking around with that you'll sure as hellfire find yourself right up against the Joe business. And then—well. The rest follows as night from day. Inquisition. Auto-da-fé. The Godferrets hot on your heels. Ruin and damnation.

  Sure enough. On our way back—just when I thought we'd made a clean getaway—that idiot Zulkeh dragged us into the trial of the heretic Alf at Blain and that's where Greyboar saw the Cat when she barged in looking for Schrödinger and started hacking up guards and scientists when they took offense at her interrupting the proceedings. In the event, once the dust settled down (the ashes, I should say—the Cat caused the whole courthouse to collapse in a fiery conflagration), Greyboar and I found that we had been separated from the wizard and his apprentice and there was nothing for it but to wend our separate way to New Sfinctr.

  No loss, that, so far as I was concerned. Zulkeh and Shelyid were heading south to the Mutt, anyway, so we would have been parting company in any case. And I was purely delighted to shed the sorcerer from my back. Let the Fangs of Piety chase after him. I wanted no part of that Joe business.

  Then, not a few miles up the road, who should we encounter but the Cat, ambling her way along as if she hadn't a care in the world. As soon as Greyboar found out she was heading to New Sfinctr, he invited her to travel with us. She agreed, not seeming to care much one way or another. Of course, the Cat didn't 't seem to care much about anything except finding Schrödinger. Greyboar had hopes, but he might as well have tried wooing a wall. She didn't reject him, exactly. Does a wall say "no"? She just ignored him. But any mildew on the big guy's tongue was gone by the time we got to New Sfinctr, the way it was hanging out the whole time.

  Greyboar was always stubborn. I should know! Absolute pighead about this philosophy foolishness. So, even after we got here, he right off invited her to have a drink with him that evening at The Sign of the Trough.

  She showed a mild interest. "Any chance Schrödinger might be there?" she asked. Greyboar ran a line about how everybody in the world shows up at The Sign of the Trough sooner or later. True enough, of course, but I doubted this guy Schrödinger would ever show up—especially if he heard the Cat was hanging around!

  So they set up a time to meet later in the evening. And damned if she didn't show up. Early, in fact.

  I was delighted, to tell you the truth. The Cat was a nut case, of course, but what did I care? I wasn't chasing after her, Greyboar was. The main thing, far as I was concerned, was that the big numbskull had something else on his mind beside his damned philosophy. Hadn't practiced his "ethical entropy" in days, he'd been so pre-occupied with figuring out how to make an impression on Schrödinger's Cat.

  I saw that Leuwen was eyeing me suspiciously. Any moment and he'd be pressing me about Blain.

  Fortunately, there was a timely interruption. There was all kind of ruckus going on at the table where the Belly-Ups were sitting. A real uproar. Howling laughter, fists pounding the table, heads back, elbows jamming into ribs, ale slopping right and left. I wandered over to see what the fuss was about.

  Right at the center of the fun, like the eye of the storm, sat O'Neal.

  "Pinched me, she did!" he insisted in a surly tone.

  More howls. Angus saw me, said: "D'ye hear him, Ignace, d'ye hear him?" He mimicked O'Neal's voice: " 'Pinched me, she did!' " Howls.

  O'Neal's face was an artist's dream. Seated Man With Mug, Disgruntled.

  "Well, she did, dammit!" Stiff lip. Eyes front. Still Life With Amour Propre, Injured.

  More howls. I was grinning myself. O'Neal loses when he cheats at solitaire. Like the wise man says: "Some're fast, some're slow, and some dummies can't even find the starting gate."

  O'Neal finally blew his stack. "Will somebody explains what's so all-fired funny?"

  Angus stopped laughing long enough to speak. "She wasn't pinching you, Wetdream, old boy! She was just finding her way through the room. Trying to figure out if you were a chair in the way, or just a big ugly dog. Look at her, dummy—she's blind as a bat!"

  But O'Neal was dense, li
ke always. He tried to make a living as a scalper once. Sold tickets for half the price they were asking at the box office. He couldn't figure out why he was broke when he had so many customers.

  "I say she pinched me," he announced, trying for some dignity. "And by the Old Geister, that's an invitation in anybody's book!"

  He glared around the table. "And what's she doing here anyway, if she's not looking for a handsome lad like me?" He stood up and sucked in his gut. At least three geometric axioms were refuted.

  "She's here to meet Greyboar," I announced. "He should come—there he is now."

  Sure enough, Greyboar was already halfway across the room, headed for the Cat's table. Good thing nobody was in his way, he'd have trampled them. Not on purpose, of course! Greyboar was normally as polite as you could ask. But does a bull moose in heat pay attention to the odd field mouse in his way?

  O'Neal was like a statue, white as marble. Slowly, slowly, that certain smile inched across his face. "Coprophagic," the scholars call it.

  "Gee." A mouse squeaks louder. He cleared his throat.

  "No need to mention this to Greyboar, is there, Ignace old buddy? I was just kidding anyway. Ha. Ha. Ha. Buy you a drink?"

  "Oh, siddown," I said. "I didn't mean to scare ten years off your life. Why would I tell Greyboar? And even if I did, so what? He's the phlegmatic type, he is. Not the kind to get all worked up into a jealous rage, don't you know?"

  "True, true," opined Angus. "Nice easygoing lad, Greyboar. Still and all, everybody's got their off days. Fat lot of good it'd do O'Neal here, his neck like a tapeworm, being the exception to the rule."

  Anyway, that was the Cat. Weird, like I said, but did I care? Long as she was around, Greyboar wasn't wallowing in that damned philosophy.

  Yessir. Things were looking up!

  Chapter 2.

  A Choking Dilemma

  Or so I thought. Mind you, I'd always known life wasn't fair—

  first thing I ever learned. My pop used to whup me for no reason, just to drive the lesson home. But the way things were going! Unfair is one thing. Being singled out by Fate for merciless persecution is another.

  The next day I landed a simple, straightforward job. Easy money, put us right back in the pink, no complications. Ha!

  Naturally, Greyboar started grousing as soon as I explained the job to him.

  "I hate these jealous-lover jobs," he growled. "First of all, they're boring—never any professional challenge to 'em. Second, they're stupid. I mean, what is it with people and jealousy, anyway? I figured it out when I was twelve: the only rational philosophy when it comes to this fidelity business is solipsism. If you didn't see it, it didn't happen. And don't go looking for it, if you don't want to see it, because then it won't have happened. Sensible, right? Logical, right? But no! And finally, it's always disgusting. I suppose this client of ours wants me to wave his ex-girlfriend's new lover's dead tongue in front of her face, like usual?"

  I nodded.

  "Never fails! Sadistic bunch, ex-lovers." He glared at me. "And then there's the fee! Five hundred quid? Our going rate's been a thousand for the last three years!"

  My voice got shrill. Unreasonable lug! "That's because rumors are flying all over that we might have had something to do with that business in Prygg that brought in the Ozarine troops!"

  Greyboar shrugged. "Which we did."

  "I know it! I'm still mad about the whole thing. We wouldn't have even been in Prygg if it hadn't been for you and your damned philosophy!"

  I bestowed on him my best glare. (And it's a hell of a glare, too, if I say so myself. Though I'll admit it was a bit like a minnow glaring at a shark.)

  "Scares off customers, don't you know, us maybe being mixed up in politics? Not to mention heresy—Joe business, no less! Especially with things the way they are in New Sfinctr—you know Queen Belladonna's tight with the Ozarines. She always has been, and since this Prygg business—how many times do I have to tell you, you big gorilla?—politics! Sure, and it's good for the trade, but you've got to know how to finesse the thing! But no! Not the great philosopher Greyboar! No! He's got to—"

  "All right, all right, I'll do the job!" He waved his hands. "Anything to shut you up! But I trust that you explained to this—what's his name? Baron de Butin?—that I won't choke the girl. It's one of my rules, you know that. I don't choke girls."

  "Yeah, yeah, I know," I grumbled. "I told him. Cost us, too—as usual."

  The Baron had offered to double the fee if Greyboar'd burke the girl along with the Baron's "rival," as he put it. But once I explained Greyboar's rules he finally agreed to settle for having my client wave "the rival's" pop-eyes and purple tongue in front of the girl's face. They're really a cruddy lot, your "jilted suitors," Greyboar was right about that. Still and all, fine for him to wax philosophical, I was the agent. I was the poor slob who had to go out there and get his hands dirty rounding up the business—while he lounged around worrying about philosophy, mind you! And the fact is there was a lot of business in your aristocracy's "alienated affections." Steady, steady, steady work. I think they must be inbred or something, all the trouble they seem to have.

  Actually, this whole problem with choking girls wasn't so much Greyboar's philosophical obsession. It was really on account of his sister Gwendolyn. She was purely furious when he and I told her, years before, that we were quitting our jobs in the packing plant to move on to more lucrative work. Right nasty she got: "cold-blooded killer," "murdering bastard," "nothing but a cheap thug with a fancy label"—those were the terms she used that weren't just plain obscene. Anybody else'd said stuff like that they'd be pushing up daisies, but the truth is Greyboar was afraid of his sister.

  Couldn't say I blamed him. Woman terrified me. She wasn't as strong as he was, but when she was in the mood she was the meanest person who ever lived. Anyway, Greyboar and she went back and forth about it for hours. I kept my mouth shut. I'm normally on the talkative side, but around Gwendolyn in the mood I kept my mouth shut, shut, shut, shut.

  Finally, Gwendolyn gave up. But she made Greyboar swear two things: One, he'd never work for a boss as a strikebreaker. Two, he'd never choke a woman except in self-defense—and then the way she defined "self-defense" he'd have to have some harpy drive three stakes into his heart before he could lift a finger!

  The strikebreaking stuff was no problem. Greyboar and I wouldn't have done it, anyway. I mean, it's not like both of us hadn't been good union men since we were kids.

  The woman question, now—that was a little stickier. Lots of money in choking women. Truth to tell, it was the bread and butter of the trade. So Greyboar tried to make a compromise—he'd only choke purely evil women, she-devil types. But Gwendolyn wouldn't budge. Said that, first, she'd trust him to tell a good woman from a bad one about as far as she'd trust a wolf to pick between saint and sinner rabbits. Second—she'd always been unreasonable when it came to women!—she said: "Besides, I don't care if the woman's as foul as a demon. There's just something about men hiring other men to kill women that makes me cross. Really, really, really cross." Then she'd looked him straight in the eye and said if she ever heard he'd choked a woman, she'd track him down and kill him. Yeah, just like that. Cold as ice.

  So the two of them stared at each other for about a minute. Ever been a squirrel trapped in a cage with two tigers about to square off? That's how I felt—but I kept my mouth shut, shut, shut, shut. And then suddenly they were hugging each other and crying like babies.

  I felt pretty bad, actually. The career move was my idea in the first place—not that Greyboar wasn't willing! We were both sick of that slaughterhouse—work your life away for nothing and die in the poorhouse. But they were all the family each other had, and I guess I'd sort of put something between them. Between her and me, too, for that matter.

  So then Greyboar swore, all choked up, that he'd never harm a woman no matter who else he squeezed. He stuck to the promise, too. Never even bent it a little.

  * * *


  Yeah, I thought it was going to be a simple, neat little job. Five hundred quid, easy as pie.

  There was no point in dawdling, so we decided to do the job that very night. Following directions I'd gotten from "the jilted one," we found ourselves in a part of town we weren't very familiar with. Not surprising, of course. I know this city as well as anyone, but nobody really knows all that much about New Sfinctr, the place is such a mess. But we were surprised, because the area where "the rival" was to be found wasn't much better than a slum.

  Odd, that. Your typical "alienated affectionee" usually wound up in a part of town that was at least as posh as the one she fled. Usually quite a bit more posh. Natural feature of the "alienation of affection process," don't you know? Upward social mobility, I mean.

  "You should have seen the Baron's—what'd he call it?—oh, yeah, his 'modest townhouse,' " I commented to Greyboar. "His girl dumped him in that palace for this place? This 'rival' has got to be hung like a moose."

  Greyboar made a sour face. After that I tried to keep the quips to a minimum. He really did hate jealousy jobs. I wasn't too fond of them myself, when it came down to it. Made the slaughterhouse seem like a spa, disgust-wise.

  Eventually we found the address. It was a small two-story house, nestled in between a couple of classic tenements. Shabby, but poor-shabby rather than sloppy-shabby, if you know what I mean. Cleanest, best-kept place on the block.

  "You sure?" asked Greyboar quietly.

  "The address is right," I answered. "And, yeah, there's the flower box outside the window, just like the Baron said. This is it, all right."

  Greyboar shrugged. I snuck up the front steps and checked the lock. What a joke! I'd been all geared up for the usual—armed guards in front of the mansion, mastiff watchdogs, locks like they were guarding the Crown Jewels of the Kushrau Kaysar, the works. Have a vastly overrated opinion of their real worth, your noble types. But this!

  I picked the lock in six seconds flat. A moment later we were both inside the front room downstairs. I checked for a possible watchdog. But the only thing on watch was a mouse, who disappeared into its hole quick as lightning.