Chapter Forty
Bartoff was standing, bemusedly, in the corridor, watching Enid and Gangakanta race past. The room was locked, so they shouted for a porter. Another guest or two strolled by, but didn’t appear terribly interested. A yawny porter was produced, who laboriously searched through his thick set of keys, not at all put out by Enid’s curses to hurry. The two investigators were the first to burst in, once the door was opened, followed by the porter, who felt, somewhere in the back of his skull, that it was sort of his duty.
Sure enough, there was the body, curled up on the rug, hands and feet smashed to a marrowy pulp, fist-sized hole in his throat still disgorging big-pulped globs of blood.
“I’ll call a cleaner,” sighed the porter.
“No. Please wait until we examine him,” Gangakanta instructed him.
The porter shrugged. The dream he had been enjoying mere minutes ago, in his creaky cot, of regressing to boyhood on the farm where he’d grown up, patting cows and chewing hay, searching the many-acred sky for a glimpse of his glorious future, had been obliterated—as his past, he supposed, had been obliterated from history, now that it was now longer being lived—when he was awoken and dispatched to help these two clowns and their precious investigation. Now, when he returned to bed, would the Fate which ruled his unconsciousness bless him with a return to that tender reverie? Or would it inflict on him one of his other, darker dreams, involving, as they usual did, public, indecent, ritual humiliation?
“Have a ball,” he muttered, and left. It was no business of his, and he is now out of this saga.
Enid, a little concerned she would lose some respect in the eyes of her partner if she turned away, forced herself to watch as Gangakanta unrolled Sanns’ body and searched for further signs of trauma, of which there was none. While Gangakanta was consumed with this grisly endeavour, Enid could not but notice a trail of sparse but definite footprints, consisting of blood, leading away from the body and out the door.
She pointed them out.
“The porter’s?” he asked.
She shook her head. “He barely made it past the doorframe,” she reminded him.
“Yes, of course.”
“Someone’s idea of mockery,” she reasoned.
“Why do you say that?”
She turned to him. “This is exactly what one would expect from a crime story. Isn’t it?”
“I—I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever read a crime story.”
“Well, I have, so you’ll have to trust me on this.”
“I do trust you. But just because it might feature in stories. . .why does it follow that it can’t be true?”
“Of course it could be true, but it seems a little. . .you know.”
From the way he was looking at her, she guessed that he didn’t.
“Too. . .pat,” she continued.
He remained crouching there, looking up at her.
“As if someone were toying with us. By. . .by leading us by our noses through a labyrinth, or storyline, constructed especially for us,” she sought to explain.
“‘By our noses’?”
She sighed. “Not that it matters, I suppose.”
“But. . .just because it doesn’t happen. . .”
“It does happen, sometimes, of course.”
“But if it didn’t—where would the author get his ideas from?”
“From his imagination, I presume.”
“You make a clear-cut distinction between the two?”
“Shouldn’t we be following the footprints?” She tilted her head in their direction.
“But you said they’re not real.”
“They’re real, obviously.”
Sanns’ blood gurgled over Gangakanta’s fingers, though the latter did not seem to notice (nor, come to think of it, did the former). He would not let it go: “Their actuality, but not their intent—is that what you’re saying?”
Enid, sighing, looked down at Sanns’ face, as if in appeal; its unnatural rictus reminded her of the stage mask of an ancient Greek comedian.
“Either way,” she shrugged, “shouldn’t we follow them?”
Gangakanta looked down at the annihilated body, but did not seem to process the sight; the wheels of his brainworks were whirring over the subject of what Enid had said; while his physical eyes were trained on Sanns, the feed they conveyed to his attention was short-circuited by the concentration of his inner eye on the blackboard of probabilities.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It’s our best guess.”
The footprints marched down corridors, through doors, back onto themselves, across the ceiling, and finally culminated in a pile of poo in the scullery; Modeste was huddled up in a corner nearby, flashing them a positively baleful eye.
“Examine her feet,” Gangakanta ordered. Enid moved to do so, but he stopped her with a gentle hand on her arm. “Pardon me,” he whispered. “I did not mean to order you about.”
“That’s all right,” she smiled back.
“It’s only because. . .” Here he looked a trifle embarrassed, and couldn’t look her in the eye. “I would find it both socially improper and, to be frank, aesthetically repugnant, to touch a woman’s foot myself.”
“That’s very honourable of you,” she said, just to get him to shut up, really, and proceeded to seize Modeste’s ankle and lift up her foot.
“Unhand me or I’ll shit all over you!” screamed the cleaner.
“Shut up!” Enid shouted back in her face, and the poor old woman cowered into herself. Her shoe was shrivelled and torn and long unwashed, and emitted an unpleasant odour the reader can well imagine for him- or her-self. Enid checked the other one (shoe, not reader), too, just in case, before reporting: “There’s no blood.”
“I know there’s no blood!” Modeste protested.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Enid clarified, dropping the foot.
“Then who the bloody hell were you talking to?” Modeste demanded. “There ain’t nobody here but you and me!”
“I’m here,” Gangakanta disagreed.
“Ah, aye,” admitted Modeste. “I suppose it was you she was talking to, just now, then, weren’t it?”
“Yes, I believe so,” Gangakanta said.
“That’s right,” Enid averred.
Modeste was beaten—there was no more she could say to that.
“What are you doing here, madame?” Gangakanta asked her.
The latter was silent.
“Answer him, please,” Enid said to her.
Modeste looked up. “I’m sorry, were you talking to me? I assumed you two was talking to each other once again.”
“What are you doing here?” Gangakanta repeated, this time pointing towards Modeste’s face.
“Are you pointing at me?” she asked, for purposes of clarification.
“I am, yes,” he assured her.
“Well, then, I’ll tell you: relaxing after taking a shit,” she answered. “But forgive me for interrupting your conversation.” She got up to go.
“Just a minute, please,” said Enid. “Did you see who left these footprints?”
“What footprints?”
“These bloody ones, here.” When Modeste looked all over, Enid pointed. “These.”
“Aren’t they yours? I just assumed they was yours.”
“Were they here before or after you. . .relieved yourself?” asked Gangakanta.
“I what meself?”
“Before you emptied your bowels,” Enid clarified.
“My what?”
“Before you took a shit,” Enid sighed.
Modeste stared at her. “I think so,” she said. She stared at Enid as if watching the last hours of the earth—chaos, devastation and the extermination of humanity. “There was a letter of some kind.”
“What do you mean?”
“At the end of the world,” she nodded.
“What?”
Modeste blinked back to the present. “Under there,” she nodded, indicating her excrement. “A letter.”
“To whom?” asked Enid.
“I dunno.”
“What did it say?” asked Gangakanta.
“Dunno. Didn’t read it. Can’t read, if you really want to know.”
“We need to get it,” said Gangakanta, circling the pile and squinting his eyes, trying to make out a corner of paper but concluding it was a piece of corn.
“You could teach me to read, sometime, maybe!” Modeste suggested, but Gangakanta ignored her.
He stood stiffly and turned, a bit hesitantly, to Enid. “I propose, Miss Trojczakowski, that, in future, each of us grants the other three ‘passes’—as I believe they say.”
“What do you mean by ‘passes’?” asked Enid.
“He means that you can pass on doing something you don’t want to do,” Modeste explained, excited to be able to contribute to the conversation.
“Precisely,” Gangakanta affirmed. “And then, by necessity, and default, the other person must do it.”
“I see,” said Enid.
“Am I included in this proposition, monsieur?” asked Modeste.
“Certainly not,” he replied. Addressing himself once more to Enid, he asked: “So what do you think of my proposition?”
“I’m totally in favour,” she answered, “as long as we can begin with my passing on poking into these faeces.”
Gangakanta snapped his fingers in indication of his having just been bested; if he had been a swearing man, he would, trust me, have found this occasion one on which to swear.
“What’s the matter?” asked Modeste.
“It’s just that I’d wanted to claim this as my first pass,” he explained.
“Perhaps if we had a cleaning lady in the vicinity. . .” Enid hinted.
“I’m a cleaning lady!” Modeste realised.
“Ah!” said Enid. “In that case, madame, would you be so good as to. . .”
“As to what?” She looked from one to the other in bafflement.
“As to clean up this mess, and recover the letter,” she specified.
“Ah!” exclaimed Modeste, finally understanding. “Certainly.”
Enid and Gangakanta shared a sigh of relief, smiling to each other.
“Just as soon as my break’s over,” Modeste agreed.
“When is your break over?” asked Gangakanta.
“I’m sorry?”
“When is your break over?” he repeated.
“Pass.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I choose to use one of my passes on that question,” she announced.
“We need to hurry,” said Enid. “Every second we wait, it’ll get more stained.”
“What will get more stained?” asked Gangakanta.
“The letter!”
“Well. . .”
“What is it?”
“Maybe the letter wouldn’t turn out to be so important.”
“Why do you say that?”
He shrugged. “It’s probably nothing. Just a misplaced shopping list from the kitchen, or some such.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Well, according to the laws of probability.”
“Do you want to perform a calculation?”
“I just did.”
“When?”
“Just now. While we were talking.”
“I disagree!” Modeste piped up. “I think it’s probably very important!” She looked to Enid. “For the investigation.”
“Aadi, please,” Enid beseeched. “It’s our only clue.”
Gritting his teeth, then immediately feeling ashamed at his brutish display of emotion, he looked around the room. “I need a stick, or something,” he said.
“What for?” asked Modeste.
“To poke around with.”
“Poke around where?”
“In your excrement, woman!”
All three scrambled around in vain for a stick.
“I could ask the cook for his stirring spoon!” Modeste suggested. “He’s using it just now, but he won’t mind.”
“I could run outside and break off a branch,” he suggested.
“You’ve got to hurry! The note might be unreadable by now!” Enid panicked.
“They have good sticks in India,” Gangakanta recalled. “I could sail back home, and grab one, just as soon as the snow thaws.”
“Hurry!”
Gangakanta watched himself grab Modeste’s arm and sweep the shit across the floor with her broom-fingers. Modeste protested outwardly, while inside her, she was most aroused.
The pen ink on the now-brown note stood out in white:
Go fuck yourself—arsehole.
“How rude!” Modeste opined, and the others were inclined to agree.