Shit, shave and shampoo, as they say in the service. Let’s do it! Chop chop. Before he stepped into the cubicle, he hung his linen jacket on the towel rail. When – if – he hit the Meet and Greet later, he would be professionally crumpled or not at all. De Lange: Never trust a Detective with creases in his pants and none in his jacket. Damn straight.
He shouldered the door and thumbed the lug until the jet was scalding. He felt his lethargy burning off, sluiced away over belly and thigh, going down the tubes with suds and musk-scented conditioner from the little lab specimen bottles. He flew down the pipe where sludge and sewerage and scum were caulked like hives. He let go laziness, fancy, illusion. All ears. Totally nose.
Then he palmed off the spume and grubbed the flange until the jet grew icy. He mugged up to the stream. His nerves jangled through. Now he manned up and hunkered down and so forth. Drying off, double time, vigilance rose to the skin. Dress for the occasion, it says on the label. Costume is crucial and so are prepositions. He remembered this later.
There was a towelling dressing gown on a hook in the wardrobe and he put it on. An embroidered crest over the heart showed a lion rampant, licking its paw. It came back to him now. Towelling slippers too. He snuggled his feet into them and wriggled his toes. Comfy. Verbs ending in -uggle and -iggle. He thought about that. Nothing escaped him.
Plan for the worst-case scenario, as it says in the manual. In every cockamamie manual between here and Timbuctoo or maybe Poughkeepsie. Somewhere else’s somewhere else. His language was acting up and it scared him. No argument. Cellophane? He hooked it out from under the bed with a wire coathanger: the slim plastic wrapper from an individually wrapped toothpick. He bagged it.
Then he went to the window, kinked one blade of the venetian blind with his forefinger, and brought his eye close. The parking lot was a sticky plate of black gumbo and yellow herringbones. There was just one car down there in a viscous smear of sunlight, a late model Subaru with snowchains on the tyres. A small herd of zebra.
For a moment he thought it was the hire-car he had driven in from the airport. But that was 101 Detectives: Yellow River. They run into one another if you fail to keep the edges straight. Now he remembered the bus ride, men with machetes slashing the fenders, rocks bouncing off the hood. Burning tyres. Sub-Saharan Africa, man! Bang bang.
He stood there for a long time, looking down on the lot, until the tip of his finger grew numb. The windows of the car were misted over, he thought, as if someone was in there breathing. The sun dropped. The shadow of the lodge seeped out towards the Subaru like a pool of blood from a gut-shot motherfucker.
He looked for words. For a precise phrase to make something happen. Here he comes now. No. Here come trouble. Who the hell speaks like that? What have we here. No, it was all wrong. Fuck me George. Better. Sonofabitch. One word. That’s the ticket, trick, technique. Few words as possible. Fuck. Hey. Yo. But no one came.
He kicked off the slippers. He was feeling more precise again, calibrated, indexed. He paced out the distance from door to window, heel to toe, and wrote the number on the leaflet. The question snagged his eye again: How toxic are you? He should have followed his father’s advice and become a pharmacist. Or a quantity surveyor.
Then again he would bet a pound to a pinch of table salt that every second quantity surveyor wished he was a Detective. People thought Detective World was glamorous, they thought it was all cocktails and cadavers. They had no idea how hard it was. All the quirks had been taken. That was half the problem.
Say he learnt to play the ukulele. He could be the music-making, mountain-climbing Detective. Then one fine day, as he toiled up to base camp, it would come on the breeze: Follow every rainbow… Yep, that broad with the banjo, who was climbing the third-highest peak on every continent, had beaten him to it.
Then again he loved card tricks and newsprint and foreign tongues. He could fold newsbills into pigeons, he could pull pidgins out of a hat. What would take you further in Detective World? he wondered. Mumbo-jumbo or hocus-pocus? Mumbo-pocus! Be paper-foldy, magic-makey Detective. Jolly-fine day, come by base camp, who dat? Kumbaya my Lord.
He thought about Polkinghorn, the Detective’s Detective, who had the earbud franchise. The Polkster, the Hornster, the Budster. Many affectionate nicknames ending with -ster. He was 101-Detectives-in-one. When he fell off the paddywagon and broke his panama there wasn’t a dry eye in Detective World. All buds to every body. And vice versa.
Loved a corpse outlined in chalk on the living-room floor. Every home should have one, a dead thing, a visual effect, a body of evidence. If only there were enough of them to supply the demand. There were never enough victims to go round. The Polksters were arm-wrestling the Hornsters for cadavers.
Four thirty already! The second hand swept past with its fist clenched. He thought too much and did too little. A Detective had to strike a balance between thought and action or be carried off in mid-deduction before his work was done. All the great Detectives were dead before their time.
All the great Detectives are dead full stop. Or so it seemed to him. He called them to mind, the gentlemen with meerschaum pipes and watchchains, in their trenchcoats and fedoras, their chequered vests and pasts. Flaws were grander back then, but more forgivable; quirks were truer and more endearing.
The moderns had no manners, no sense of decorum or shame. They were far too concerned with wounds. Their minds were narrow and their mouths were foul. Motherfucker this and cocksucker that. Their flaws were pathologies, their quirks were disorders. You could hardly tell the Detectives from the non-.
Everybody is a Detective now, everybody and his brother. That’s the other half of the problem, he thought. Wherever you go, you trip over a Detective, peering under a bed or crouched behind a bush, bristling with equipment, probing and prodding, and dabbing to see if it glows.
They’re over-equipped, under-trained and ill-mannered. Case in point: Detective Spivis of 101 Detectives: Baden-Württemberg with his Iron Maiden T-shirt and his thick-lipped trainers. Tossing peanuts into his mouth from an unsalted stash in a moonbag. Talking in monosyllables at the Meet and Greet. One of the boys.
To think that this slob with a ring through his eyebrow is top dog of Detective World. He has a loft in the city and a cabin in the woods, but he winters in the South of France. Changes his address more often than his socks.
Then the sayings of De Lange chided him. This one in particular: Detection is its own reward. The maestro was right, he thought, envy is unseemly in a Detective. So what if there are too many files on your desk. It comes with the territory.
He should get on with it. He had earbuds, he had tweezers, he had a little torch. He had a dozen bottles with childproof lids. He should swab something and see if it changed colour. Stub the lug, rootle it down in the grab-bag.
He dug this snub-nosed lingo slubbing out of his pug-ugly mug. It was good. It was endings in -ub and -ug. He could get a grip on stuff with it. Solve shit. Make some moves he needed to get down in Detective World.
Always be first at the scene of the accident, quick through the barricades, flashing your face like a badge. Always be first at the buffet, nosing the canapés, tossing them back by the fistful. Never be first at the Meet and Greet.
Meeting and greeting. His heart sank at the thought. Of course, it would be the usual free-for-all. Whose serial killer had more notches on his prosthesis, whose molester was more perverse, whose victim had more Facebook friends, whose perp was trending.
He wasn’t putting himself out there: that’s why the jobs were so scarce. He needed a new business card. Joseph Blumenfeld: Bespoke Detective. Esquire? Nope, old hat. Your Boutique Agency for pop-up surveillance. For made-to-measure security solutions. For artisanal what?
Mugshots. Merch. Face on an eggwhisk, name on a golf umbrella. If your product won’t move you may as well take your name off the door. Lie down on the carpet with a stick of chalk in your hand.
Then he thought about Valerie and
the Littles. Davy, Sookie, Okefenokee and Lilo. What would become of them if he checked out? That greedy bastard Chief Detective Inspector Detective Chief Chief Culp had looted the Detectives’ Provident Fund.
Hand in glove with the 101 set. He pictured them primping themselves for the Meet and Greet. Combing their hairpieces, holstering their deep-sea pencils, huffing on their smartphones and polishing them on the linings of their what?
He pictured them leaving their rooms. And just then the doors went doef doef doef like distant gunshots, the flat bark and so on. They thought they would see him in the Assembly Room. Think again.
Doef. That was Vermeulen. She would close one dyed-blonde hair in the crack of the door. Monitoring the perimeter. Smart cookie. He saw her adjusting her fringe, now one hair short, in the lift mirror.
Doef. Chief Inspector Connell of the Gorbals. Hanging the ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the handle of his door, flipping the one on his neighbour’s so it read ‘Make up the room’. Highland humour.
Connell would take the stairs, working on that paunch of his as usual. It’s not the soft underbelly of crime that gets you, Savolainen always said, it’s the hard overbelly of the law.
That crazy Finn! With his goofy bow ties and his bungee-jumping. Poking Connell with a long forefinger. He heard footsteps in the corridor, drawing closer, pausing, fading away. And it scared him.
Doef. The sultry Scarlozzi. She would make an entrance through the kitchen. It was one of the great escape routes, almost as good as the air-conditioning duct. Whether coming or going.
Going! I should get out now while there’s still time, he thought. He hauled up the blinds and put his mouth close to the cold glass. Still breathing. That’s something.
He paced out the distance from window to door. He looked at the blackboard square of night in the window frame and the chalky formulae of stars and neon.
Should I throw a chair through it? He saw himself for a split second in the shards, almost connected, before he fell away in pieces. Ice on asphalt.
Never mind the window, he should go through the door. There was nothing to stop him, except his own failings as a Detective, his foibles and frailties.
He remembered the invitation folded seven times in a fortune cookie. 101 Detectives: Sub-Saharan Africa. Be there! Bang. He remembered the names of the Organising Committee.
There’s a pattern I’m missing, he thought. A pattern I’m missing. Or is there a pattern I’m missing? And then it struck him. A pattern.
I know none of them. Where is Wouter ‘Nougat’ Niedermayr? Where is Scarlozzi, L, MD? The pointless rigmarole of introduction. It doesn’t add up.
He took the leaflet from the dresser. How toxic are you? He looked at the numbers scrawled across it in Blumenfeld’s symptomatic hand.
He remembered riding the bus in from the airport alone. He remembered checking in alone. Is there a Detective in the house?
He dialled reception. While the phone rang he folded the leaflet in half precisely and ran his nails along the crease.
Let’s say the whole thing is a set-up, he thought, an elaborate sting to do away with me. Sting-aling-aling, pal!
He folded the top corners down to the crease and pressed them flat. Half a question: anxious without cause?
No, anxious with cause. Plenty. I should get out while there’s still time. Before they come for me.
Half of another problem: fatigued for no apparent reason? Less fatigued than depleted. He dropped the phone.
He looked again at the door. But still he did not move. He was thinking. Folding.
Is resolve a failing or a flaw? If I leave, who will finish the paperwork?
Who will wrap things up? He froze for a moment, for old times’ sake.
He unfolded the wings precisely. There was still time to find the what?
He launched the pig towards the window. It flew into white space.
Make the right gesture. Try. That’s what it bubbles down to.
I am accustomed to waiting. It comes with the territory.
He pictured a wee paper sandwich board: Joe Blumenfeld.
1 (one) Detective: Sub-Saharan Africa. Herringbones (Pty) Ltd.
It brought a lump to his eye.
And a tear to his throat.
A what in the snuffbox?
Make up the room.
He felt small.
And then.
But.
Exit Strategy
The corporate storyteller is having a bad day. She’s spent the morning in her office on the 11th floor peering at the monitor, occasionally typing a line and deleting it, or standing at the window, back turned on the recitation pod, looking down into the square. She doesn’t like the view and so the force with which it draws her to the window is all the more irritating. The square is a paved rectangle, to be precise, enclosed in a shopping mall and surrounded by restaurant terraces. She sees an arrangement of rooftops suggesting office parks, housing complexes and parking garages, and streets nearly devoid of life. No one walks around here if they can help it.
While she’s been musing, the monitor has gone to sleep. In its inky depths she sees the outline of her head, a darker blot with a spiky crown. Her fingers creep over the keyboard like withered tendrils. Not yet thirty, she thinks grimly, and already as gnarled as an old vine. She badly needs a story for the quarterly meeting of the board, a parable to open proceedings and set the tone. Just a week after that it’s the annual Green Day, which demands fresh and leafy input. Which aquifer will she draw it from?
She scoots her chair aside to face the white slab of the desktop. This paperless expanse, a mockery of a blank page, usually makes her long for clutter, for a glass paperweight with a daisy inside it and a tangle of paper clips, but today it’s as refreshing to her eye as a block of ice. She rests her forearms on the desk, palms flat and fingers splayed, and then she sinks down in submission until her forehead touches the cool veneer.
Up and down. Might these be the poles of her narrative system, as they are of the corporate structure? The analysts say that verticality is over and done with, and today’s corporations are horizontal, self-organising and contingent, but she sees no evidence of this. She has to get the basics right. Complications will follow, but they’ll be manageable if they rest on a foundation that’s firm and true. Yesterday she was reflecting on in and out, the day before on big and small, but today it’s up and down.
The terms must appeal because of her circumstances, and her history and psychology must play their part. She wants to rise, not necessarily all the way to the top but closer, and here she is, with ten storeys below her and another ten above. Middling is a purgatory. Better right at the bottom than here. Hence the fascination of the basement.
A face surfaces in the milk of her memory just as her own surfaced in the ink of the screen. There’s a story somewhere. Who’s that again? A friend of a friend. Yes, it comes back to her. Dumisane. He developed an unusual phobia: he thought something was going to fall on him. Something would drop out of the sky, when he least expected it, and put a farcical end to his life. Where did this fear originate? Perhaps a pigeon shat on him in the playground on some long-forgotten schoolday. Nearly every fear and foible can be traced to the merciless battlefields of first and second break. It’s made his life unbearable. In his apartment, with a blank ceiling overhead, his anxiety subsides, although ceilings and apartment blocks have also been known to collapse. Going out is an ordeal. He cannot take a step without looking up. He wants to see his ignominious fate approaching, even if he’s unable to avoid it. And so he does get hurt, because he’s always banging into things, and the bruises and skinned shins these accidents leave behind confirm that the universe means to do him harm. It’s just a matter of time before he steps in front of a car.
Fact is, the corporate storyteller muses, and it makes the bristly nape of her exposed neck tingle, things do come out of the blue and kill people, famously Aeschylus, but ordinary folk too. She has several accounts in
her notebook at home.
On a winter’s day in 1989, for instance, Uwe Kramer was hurrying across a carpark in the middle of Vienna, hunched into his parka, eyes fixed on the icy cobbles, when a falling object struck his head and killed him outright. At first, the police thought he had been bludgeoned with a bronze statuette, a poorly made table-top copy of Rodin’s Thinker, an explanation encouraged by the proximity of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where many such objects are on display. But the murder weapon turned out to be an agglomeration of human waste evacuated (so they deduced) from the toilet of an airliner and quick-frozen on its plunge through the atmosphere.
The corporate storyteller had been in her new position for a fortnight before she discovered that there was also a corporate poet. It was at a meeting of the Financial Management Committee and she was due to tell her first story.
The Chairman of the Committee had just called the meeting to order when a tall woman in a luminous gown appeared from behind the whiteboard and began to speak in lilting tones about the stormy seas of the futures markets and the vicissitudes of the trade winds on the floor of the bourse. It was not her voice that captivated, however, but the lovely movements of her hands. The members of the Committee were entranced. There was a lectern but the poet did not stand behind it. She prowled around the boardroom table and every head swivelled to follow her. With a flick of a finger, she launched one metaphor after another onto the hushed air, and when they had almost escaped her, caught them up again and drew them to her breast.
The corporate storyteller was appalled. She pictured the words squirming like small animals with their tails pinched between curved fingernails. To dispel this unhappy image, she fixed her attention on the poet’s gown, through which she could see the curves of her hips and breasts. Was that a hairdo or a hat? Braids adorned with beads coiled about her head and fell to her shoulders, where they fused with her dress. A headpiece, the storyteller decided. It made the poet look lofty and prolific, as if her head was spilling sinuous verse. Although when the flow ceased, it was not words that echoed but gestures, a repertoire of movements of the hand and head as graceful and precise as any ballerina’s.
101 Detectives Page 4