A numb sense of calm seeped into my limbs – Morris had added a tranquilliser to the mix, reasoning astutely that what needed managing most was my anxiety – and I heard voices and spoons chiming on teacups. Morris especially: ‘You never know what will come to the surface,’ he said. ‘The skin never lies.’
We drove back to San Diego a few days later than planned. I recuperated in the guest room, laid out on the sleeper couch like a corpse, with the blinds drawn against the light. Hedda joked once too often about the judgement I had passed on her cooking.
The kicks I got on Route 66 were less intoxicating than I’d anticipated, more in keeping with a Honda hatchback than a Ford Thunderbird. My illness had made us late and we had jobs to get back to, so we stayed on the interstate most of the way, but once or twice we went off to follow the old highway. I drove and Mel read the maps. From time to time, she also read aloud from the novels by Steinbeck and Kafka which Hedda had packed for us like a picnic, the passages she had marked with playing cards about the great mother road that took the Joads west to California, the way we were going now, and the railway line that brought Karl Rossmann over mountain passes and bridges to work in the great Theatre of Oklahoma, where everyone was welcome.
On the way out of Oklahoma City, we passed a sign that said, ‘Caution! Hitch-hikers may be escaping convicts.’ Just a mile further on, as if to prove that the state authorities had a point, we came to a man hitch-hiking. Picturing the prison garb under his business suit, we laughed and laughed. It kept us laughing all the way to the coast.
Winter was settling over Oklahoma, turning it pale and brittle. The countryside reminded me of the Free State, the stubble fields and silvery grass, the vast empire of the sky that made your head float off your shoulders, the grain silos in farming towns where the railway lines still defined a right and a wrong side of the tracks, the little divided Western towns that were so much like platteland dorps and their townships. A complicated homesickness began to dismantle the makeshift version of myself I had constructed in California. I thought of sharing this feeling with Mel, but she had never seen the Free State, and I knew in the backwoods of my body that she never would.
101 Detectives
He knew there were tricks – no – not tricks, techniques, there are techniques for getting to see what you’re not supposed to. Let’s say the register at reception in the hotel lobby. You drop the pen or you fake a cough and ask for a glass of water, and while the clerk is distracted you quickly turn the book your way and scan the page for what you’re after. Let’s say the room number of a particular person. Or let’s say the name of a particular person occupying a certain room the number of which is no mystery. He knew all that.
But as it happened, the counter was a slab of granite and there was no book to mar its smooth extension, not even a computer screen, which complicated things. Also there was nothing he needed to know. For now. He was simply waiting for the receptionist to give him his key and number so that he could go up to his room. This lack of knowing, or rather this lack of a need to know, made him feel less like a Detective. And the feeling rankled because he was unsure what kind of Detective he really was to begin with.
While he was examining this lack, trying to locate it precisely in his body, the receptionist handed him his key. She pointed out the Breakfast Room to the left and mentioned the hours. Then she pointed out the Assembly Room through an archway to the right, and beyond that the lift. She also offered to call a porter but he said no, he could manage, he was travelling light, just the one suitcase with wheels. He was the kind of Detective who did not like to be followed to his room. That was one thing he was sure of.
When he passed the Assembly Room on his way to the lift he saw a noticeboard on an easel, an oblong of black plastic to which white plastic letters could be attached. Welcome! the board said. 101 Detectives: Sub-Saharan Africa. Meet and Greet 6 p.m. Private (eye) function :). He glanced at his watch and saw that it was 3 p.m. and this pleased him, because it gave him enough time to settle in and take a shower and maybe nap and then think for a while about what kind of Detective he was or wanted to be.
His room was on the third floor, the top floor, and he had booked it for that reason. For the escape routes. But he got out on the second floor in case anyone was watching the dial in the lobby that ticked off the numbers. Then he walked swiftly up one flight to the third and went along the corridor to his room, pulling the suitcase on wheels, noting cupboard doors and emergency exits and the herringbone pattern in the carpet and especially the trolley full of mops and brooms and crumpled sheets that might spell trouble.
The key was a plastic card with holes in it. When he inserted it into the lock a green light blinked and then he stood to one side and pushed the door open. He wanted to case the joint, but the door was on a spring-loaded elbow and shut itself. So he reinserted the card in the lock and wedged the door open with his foot. Voices. For a moment he froze. But then he saw from the flickering light in the room that it was just the TV set talking to itself. He went in.
The voice was describing the facilities and attractions but the image on the screen was still. A lion licking its paw like a kitten. He remembered this later. There was a message on the screen: Sunny Bonani welcomes Mr Joseph Blumenfeld to 101 Detectives: Sub-Saharan Africa. We are at your service. The message was in white letters but ‘Joseph Blumenfeld’ was in red and it leapt out at him like a suspect from the shadows. For a moment he froze and a tight fist of fear clenched in his gut. That name rang a bell.
And then he remembered that he was undercover. I am Joseph Blumenfeld, he thought. For a moment he felt like an impostor. Until he recalled the words of his mentor, Long John de Lange, who used to say that all Detectives sometimes feel like charlatans, it comes with the territory, and the memory of his dear friend and teacher, with his quirky fluency in dead languages and his flawed understanding of the martial arts, cheered him. He found the remote and switched off the TV. Then he sat on the bed and looked around.
Nothing exceptional. Yet he felt at home. He felt at home in this unremarkable room, which he had entered a moment ago. And that made him wonder whether he was not at heart a very ordinary Detective. He had worked so hard to identify his flaws and quirks, those traits that would set him apart from his flawed and quirky peers. But now he wondered whether being unremarkable might not be his special quality. Although he suspected that many another Detective was ordinary too. Exceptional, ordinary, it was a matter of choice. Hobson’s.
Hobson would be a good name when travelling incognito, he thought, reaching into his jacket pocket for notebook and pen. His fingers brushed an edge there and he froze for a moment. Then he recalled the wide-eyed man at the airport who had pressed a leaflet into his hand and how he had folded it in half lengthways without even looking at it and put it away in his pocket. He wondered whether that had been wise. He took out the paper and unfolded it. The cold fist in his gut unclenched.
How toxic are you? he read. Take this simple test and find out. There was a list of questions with two small blocks before each one for Yes or No. ☐☐1. Have you felt fatigued for no apparent reason? ☐☐2. Do you sometimes feel ‘wooden’ and lifeless? ☐☐3. Do you feel less alert than you used to? ☐☐4. Do you sometimes get a feeling of light-headedness? In his head, which felt light and wooden simultaneously, like a balsawood lantern on his flesh-and-bone shoulders, he ticked one Yes block after the other.
Yes. He felt less alert than he used to. As he tried to locate this feeling in his body, Louella Scarlozzi, the femme fatale of the Coroner’s Office, Italian-American, gruff, tall, came to mind. He flew in through her ear, down an earhole where wax clung like wasps’ nests, past the hammer and anvil, making a beeline for her secret thoughts. What kind of Detective am I? Eardrum or tympanum? Gullet or oesophagus? Pussy or pudenda? A Detective needs a language almost as much as a language needs a Detective.
He turned over the leaflet. More pertinent questions. (De Lange: Never mind
the answers. Ask the right questions.) ☐☐5. Do you feel irritable without reason or cause? ☐☐ 6. Do you have less energy and vitality than you used to? ☐☐7. Do you find it difficult to get excited about people or things? Yes, yes, yes. These affirmations fell on him like blows and he slumped down on the duvet. ☐☐8. Do you have trouble reading or learning new things? Yes. ☐☐9. Do you feel anxious and don’t know why?
The ceiling was greasy and pockmarked. It looked like acned skin. But what caused the fist to clench in his gut was that it seemed so low. Vigilance! He sprang up and gazed about. Neglecting the basics. Am I that kind of Detective? He paced out the distance from door to window. There was a ballpoint pen on the dresser with Sunny Bonani printed on its barrel. He used this pen to write the figure on the bottom of the leaflet next to the name L. Ron Hubbard.
L for what? It was suspicious. The whole name was the undercover sort of thing Long John de Lange would make up. L for Leather. Were there Scientological Detectives? He had never before considered the question of religion in his capacity as a Detective. A failure on his part. One of the first things a Detective ought to get clear in his mind. He thought about the preponderance of obsessive-compulsive Jews and guilt-ridden Catholics inhabiting Detective World. Also Presbyterians and Buddhists. Who faced the facts with equanimity.
He himself was a lapsed Methodist. He wondered if Methodism made for meticulous investigation and if there were any Methodist Detectives of note. He would have to consider the literature. These thoughts about research and religion pulled him in two different directions. An unbearable pressure began to build up in his chest or his gut, he couldn’t be sure, as if two cold fists were clenching and unclenching, pumping tension into his abdomen. To defuse the situation, he opened the minibar. For a moment he froze.
As he gazed at the little bottles of Gilbey’s and J&B, his mind went back to 101 Detectives: South Pacific and the amount of drinking it had demanded. Drinking and Detection go together like Gin and Tonic, Smith and Wesson, Assault and Battery. He remembered the dry Detectives clutching bottles of mineralwasser in the Kontiki Lounge while their sodden colleagues languished under beach umbrellas outside, nursing their fatal flaws in big careworn hands, listening to the icy chiming of the quirks in their shot glasses.
Fridge-light fell on the scuffed toes of his shoes. He remembered this later. What would his sharp-eyed counterparts say? Falling apart. He wondered why he hadn’t buffed the black brogues with the lanolin-impregnated sponge that was resting on a shelf in the wardrobe. In all likelihood. Why he hadn’t opened the doors and drawers, looking for things disturbingly ordinary. Haunting in their ordinariness. A loose thread in the trouser press, a dead bulb in the reading lamp. A careless Detective is a dead Detective.
He took the room-service menu from the dresser and sat again on the bed. On the cover of the menu was a lion licking its paw. He had seen that somewhere before. He opened the menu and looked at the prices. Exorbitant. He was a poor Detective, that was one thing he was sure of. A down-at-heel gumshoe. He was not travelling on an expense account, did not fly business class, did not have pals who could lay on the Johnnie Walker Blue.
Penniless. He put the menu aside and began to open the doors of the wardrobe until he found the one with the mirror. He looked at his mouth as he said: Penurious. Impecunious. Parsimonious. In what damp recess of my mind have these words incubated? He turned his head one way and another. The brow: high this way, middle that. The mouth: small and pinched, broad and smiling. There are two sides to every story, coin, playing card, seven-single, football match, tango.
Detectives at leisure. Tanned Americans with their pockets full of beachsand, pale Swedes tramping snow up the stairs, Australians fragrant with sunblock SPF 30+. De Lange: Never trust a Detective with his own motorboat. True. But there is more to life than Detection. Even the poorest practitioner needs to get his mind off the job. He considered the hobbies: poker, polo, needlepoint, marathon running, chess, snorkelling, traditional Irish fiddle music, angling, philately, taxidermy, radio-controlled model aircraft, the cult of the budgerigar.
It surfaced in his mind like a bubble from a severed air line. 101 Detectives: Cancún. The pointless rigmarole of introduction – Hello, my name is Carlos and I’m a Detective – when every one of them was undercover. That clown Tobias from Frankfurt had swallowed a contact lens on the plane and was edgy. And then Aliber who was running the show brought in the sniffer dog, an overexcitable German shepherd, for some party game or other and Tobias went ballistic.
Odd how the drinkers always banded together. When everyone else had gone to bed, the Protestants would be trying to drink the Catholics under the table. In Detective World, as in any other, like sought like. The costive sleuths of Scandinavian extraction and logical bent (Gustaf Magnusson, Magnus Andersson, Anders Gustafsson) smuggled their home-baked rye and fermented fish into the breakfast room. Even the Lutheran haemophiliac had company, an agnostic bleeder from Skipton who had met the Yorkshire Ripper.
Why did he keep coming to these things? He always went away saying: Never again. And then a new summons came, in serial-killer typography, on the back of a handbill for homeopathic remedies, pinned under the wiper blade of the Ford Bantam in the dead of night, in mirror script, in red lipstick on the bathroom cabinet, in schoolgirl Mandarin, on a yellow Post-it stuck to a brick, lobbed through a window. The marketing people never gave up.
And neither should he. Perhaps it was the friendship that kept him coming back, the fellowship, the camaraderie. Only a Detective knew what another Detective went through. Only another Detective understood what went into casing the joint, tracing the movement, combing the printout, testing the hypothesis, cracking the code, wearing the wire, calling for backup, taking the fall, cleaning the wound, typing the report, citing the reference. No explanations were needed, just a cast in the eye.
He had his connections, his 101 crew. At every Meet and Greet there were one or two nearly familiar characters. Chums. He would scour their craggy features for clues while they punched his shoulder or smell their receding hairlines when they leant in close for a battering embrace. What was that oceanic note? Norwegian salmon? Guatemalan devilfish? Herring. It brought back 101 Detectives: Den Haag. Better say nothing. Taciturn was also a style. Perhaps even his.
He should analyse these over-friendly colleagues. A common denominator might help him find his place in Detective World. A pattern. He conjured up a face, Chief Inspector Connell of the Gorbals, but all that came back was the mutton-chop whiskers. And then, unbidden, the loose-limbed frame of Dr Louella Scarlozzi, followed by the ethanol undertone of her handcream. Once, when she’d opened her handbag to look for her shades, a rubber glove had fallen out.
Suddenly he missed his wife. He was a married Detective. That was one thing he was sure of. One whose wife and kids had paid the price for his work. Whose wife had stuck by him through thick and thin. Mostly thin. The world was full of angry divorced Detectives, whose wives kept the kids away from them, and bitter bachelor Detectives who spent their nights in bars. He was not one of those.
He missed his kids. Little Davy who wanted to be a Detective like his dad. Little Sookie the jolly little June bug who was having trouble learning to read. Little Okefenokee who could play Wagner on the pennywhistle. Not-so-little Lilo who could count to leventy-leven on her thumbs. Lovable little scallywags. He should take them all something. Something better than a last-minute box of Smarties from the Duty Free on his way home.
He shut the wardrobe and opened the minibar. The Toblerone was exorbitant and calorific, but no one was counting. He pushed the bar out of the cardboard wrapper with his forefinger, peeled away the silver foil, snapped off three blocks and put them in his mouth. They were cold. He pressed them against his palate with his tongue. Swiss design. Very odd, he thought. Like eating the spine of a chocolate mammal.
A bittersweet prospect: Joseph Blumenfeld, Morbidly Obese Detective. Confined to bed in his spongebobbed room, conduct
ing his business from a wireless bellytop nested in the flab, sausage fingers flying. Cut off from the hurly-burly and therefore even better suited to being a Detective. Strange to say. He pushed another five vertebrae into his mouth. He could pile on the pounds. There was still time, if he put his mouth to it.
Many things had been sent to try a Detective over the years: opium addiction, alcoholism, blindness, Catholicism, melancholia, loss of limb, obsessive compulsion, motion sickness, hydrophobia, lycanthropy, lack of stature, tone deafness. No burden was so great it could not be turned to account. Who was he to complain about a mild case of panic disorder, high cholesterol levels and subcutaneous acne? No one’s feet are exactly the same size.
The world was his oyster. And yet there were many kinds of Detective he would never be. He would never be a terribly black Detective, no matter how hard he practised. He would not even be a convincing African Detective. Not that the idea appealed much. People asked too many questions, there were too many forms to complete. Better to be a Detective of the World. Of Detective World.
Chances of being a lady Detective were nearly zero. No ma’am, he would never be such. Disadvantaged Detective? Zero. Persecuted Detective? Less than. He would not flee atrocities or overcome obstacles. Not really. He would never be a lesbian Muslim Detective of Turkish origins. Not in a month of Sundays. Resident in Kreuzberg. No ways. With one eye. Fuck that. Mother with Alzheimer’s. What’s the matter with you?
It was sad. But lodged in that sad, like a slug in a gut, was a lump of joy. A wingnut in a sausage roll? There was comfort in the narrowing of possibility and there was freedom in restraint. He would never be a retired prize-winning jockey Detective, bones were too big. But it was not too late for riding lessons, if he could overcome his hippophobia.
101 Detectives Page 3