Chapter Seven
A scream, absolutely blood-curdling; enough to make cheese therefrom. A cheese liable to cause bewildered disgust in all to whom it were served, surely, but a cheese nonetheless.
Pluck was alone in the reading room, having nodded off, when it suppurated through the ground floor of the hotel. He awoke with a start (not an end); the perpetually unread anthology of Mechthild von Magdeburg hysterics he’d plucked blindly from a shelf tumbled grousingly off his vest and to the carpet, where it found a kind of peace. He (Pluck, not Mechthild) blinked, which was good, as it indicated the persistence of life. He looked to the window: a square of white, worth millions, had it been an abstract painting from decades hence, but, at the time, merely representational of the snow outside which had imprisoned every guest in the hotel.
The scream—had he dreamt it?
Being the author, and a rather omniscient one at that, and, consequently, in a position to answer that question, I’ll tell you:
No.
He rose from a comfort he would not find again for a very long time, and left for the lobby.
Several guests were there, looking about them in curiosity about the scream, and more were piling in. Poor Larry ran in, bearing a face which mixed panic, excitement at an unprecedented event and a personal sense of importance in being the bearer of the news, and announced, quakingly:
“A man is dead!”
Thrust suddenly into his element, Pluck reared up and took charge: “Murderer!” he screamed in his inimitably shrill wail, pointing straight at Larry.
“Me, sir?” Poor, Poor Larry was shocked that anyone, even a man like Pluck, whose idiocy was attested to by the majority of guests and staff, could think him a murderer. He was just so. . .nice!
Forward, strode Pluck, forward, his rapier-tipped finger leading the way. “J’accuse, monsieur! J’accuse!”
When he reached the boy, he slapped his (Larry’s, not his own) cheek with an elegance and lightness of touch that Pluck expected to be roundly admired for its restraint.
The boy, of course, was in tears.
“I didn’t do it, monsieur! Honest! I just found the body, is all!”
Hands on hips, Pluck looked about him at the outraged guests, and sniffed, “It is a shame for you that all communication with the outside world has been temporarily ruptured, garçon—I expect this rabid mob will lynch you within the minute.” It was all too true that the storm had snapped the telegraph cables like a Homeric behemoth the twitching ligaments of its captives, but the guests behind Pluck betrayed no indication of extrajudicial, bloodlusty intent toward the bellhop. Poor Larry, though, taking him seriously, began to cower, and was not visibly solaced by Pluck now massaging his shoulder. “I, of course, being a principled adherent of the letter of the law, will do my utmost to protect you. But,” he continued, turning to slap the boy’s face once more, “I fear it will not be enough. Goodbye. I wish you a better afterlife than your pitiful life has turned out to be; common sympathy compels me to say so.”
Herr Voot marched up. “Don’t be absurd, monsieur. Larry was with me for the past hour.”
“Murderer!” Pluck screamed at Voot. “And sodomite!”
Herr Voot had to be forcibly restrained from assaulting poor Pluck. “The truth wounds, sir, does it not?!” Pluck spat at him. “It wounds!”
“Would you kindly shut up so that we might get to the bottom of what has passed?” asked Monsieur Lapin-Défunt of Pluck.
Pluck wheeled round to him and screamed in his face, “And what is your suspicious interest in the matter, monsieur, might I ask?! Eh?!”
“I think we’d all like to find out what’s going on,” added Mister Stoupes.
“Murderers!” Pluck screamed; it looked like his head would explode any second. “These two are in league!”
“Here! Wait a moment!” protested a medium-sized, rather plain man in the back from whom we, by which I mean “Author/Reader”, haven’t yet had the pleasure of hearing. “Let’s all try to proceed rationally—what do you say?”
(Note to Reader: That was actually the first and last time we’ll be hearing from him. He is now out of this saga.)
(And as it didn’t really add anything, you may forget all about it. You have my permission.)
To carry on: Pluck, feeling surrounded by a horde of murderers, sprinted to the nearest wall. “You’re all in league! You’re all in it together! You’re all plotting to kill me, too, aren’t you? Tell me! Tell me!” He cowered down in a corner, arms over his head. “Leave me alone! Why can’t you all just leave me alone?!”
“Shut up so we can think!” someone loudly requested. (It wasn’t that plain man. It was somebody else.)
“You shut up!” Pluck wailed. “You shut up!”
“Is there a doctor present?” called Herr Voot.
“I don’t need a doctor!” shouted Pluck. “All of you need doctors!”
“I meant for the deceased,” Voot clarified. “A nurse? Anyone of the medical profession?”
Pluck suddenly shot out and sprinted over to Larry and tackled him to the floor. Several gentlemen around grabbed Pluck by his arms and hauled him off, depositing him into an armchair.
“Now stay there and shut up!” commanded Herr Voot.
“You stay there and you shut up!” parroted Pluck in a sing-song voice.
“This is intolerable!” cried Lapin-Défunt. “I cannot think with all his noise!”
“You’re intolerable!” screamed Pluck at an ear-splitting, if not altogether skull-cracking, volume. “I cannot think with all your noise!”
“Someone shut him up before I lose myself and strangle him!” begged a gentleman with a beautifully groomed silver beard.
“Murderer!” screamed Pluck.
Enid pushed her way through the crowd and over to him. “Mister Pluck, I beg you to calm down.”
“Miss. . .Miss Trojczakowski?” asked Pluck, looking up to her through the drops of condensation round his eyes which the more sentimental among us might refer to as “tears”.
“I’m ashamed of you, Curtis.” She was speaking more softly, now, so that only he might hear. “I thought you were a gentleman; and a dignified one, with his head about him at all times, at that.”
He felt, confusedly, for his head. “My head’s still here,” he protested, inwardly questioning her sanity.
“Won’t you calm down, Curtis? Everyone’s counting on you.”
“They. . .they are?”
She nodded, and smiled, sweetly (so he thought). “They are. I am. We need you to quiet down, and act civilised, like a big boy, so the grownups can decide what to do.”
“Like a big boy?” he nodded.
“Like a big boy. Can you do that for me, Curtis?”
He took her (delightfully tender) hand and rested his cheek against it, in place of a verbal response.
He then jumped to a stand and announced to the assembled:
“Ladies and gentleman, I am hereby assuming command of this investigation.”
“Shut up!” rang out from various places around the room.
“My name is Inspector Thaddeus Pluck, nickname ‘Curtis Crimebuster’, of the Vatrachonisi Detective Constabulary,” he continued calmly. “My credentials are here for all to see.” And he produced a badge and some papers, which he passed around. “I want those back, by the way, or you’re in big trouble.”
The guests expressed some disbelief.
“Ridiculous!”
“I don’t believe it!”
“How stupid does he think we are?!”
“You’re Greek?!”
“We’re all Greek, monsieur, in that we are all children of her heritage,” Pluck replied. “But personally—I live in Greece, but I’m a citizen, and dutiful son, of all the world.”
“Wonderful!” swooned Frau Hühnerbeinstein.
“But hardly evidence as to the truth of his claims to be a detective,” Herr Voot reasoned aloud.
Pluck whirled to face him: “Exactly the language I would expect a murderer to use when faced with his archfoe!” he retorted.
“Anyone could have forged those papers. Perhaps he’s a comic actor?” suggested a sceptical personage.
“The whinge of the fox when her huntsman is near,” Pluck dismissed.
“If this clown’s an inspector, then I’m a—” began Mr Stoupes.
“‘Murderer’?!” Pluck supplied.
“Don’t be absurd,” begged Monsieur Lapin-Défunt, appealing to Pluck’s better nature. “Of course you’re no inspector! Of course you haven’t the rational mind required for such a profession! I beg you, sir, to curtail your unamusing antics and leave this matter to the adults!”
“It’s true!” came a cry—it was one of the Drig boys (Danny, if you really want to know, though you can take it from me that it doesn’t matter at all), who ran up with a newspaper in his hand. “Look!” The child—I won’t bother to describe him, because, well, who cares?—held up the paper, boasting on page fourteen a rotogravure of our man, deerstalker on his head—I mean the clichéd Holmesian chapeau, not an actual individual pestering a doe in want of a restraining order, of course; that would have crushed Pluck to the floor, and for what?—grinning idiotically, the headline Inspector Pluck Nabs International Horse Thief and Thereby Saves Europe screaming modestly beneath him.
Missus Drig snatched the paper out of her son’s hands. “Who told you you could read the news?! It’s got horrible things in it you wouldn’t understand with your mercifully innocent eyes!”
“Daddy did!” cried the lad.
“Is that true, Arthur?!”
The patriarch shrugged. “It’s part of his education; he has to learn about the world as it really is, sometime.” His adoring consort pinched her hips, thrust out her chin, thrust back her behind and tapped an impatient foot to the beat of “Killaloe” as he went on: “I read the paper when I was a lad.”
“The world is infinitely more degenerate today than when you were a snivelling infant,” she contended.
“Aw, Ma, all the other fellas read the papers!” That was the boy (Danny).
“And if the other fellas jumped off a bridge, would you do that too?” queried his marm.
“Cooper Milburn did jump off a bridge, last winter!”
“And what happened to him?”
“He hit the rocks and died instantly.”
“That’s something for you to remember.”
“I hated Cooper!”
“Don’t speak poorly of the dead, son,” enjoined his dad.
“I hated him! I hated him! I hated him! I rejoiced, that day! I thank God each night for wiping that worthless shit off the earth!”
“That’s an heretical prayer to make!” his mum exclaimed, and smacked the side of his head, out of love for her son’s soul. “The Lord doth not condone uncharitable thoughts towards our fellow man!”
“I piss on Cooper Milburn’s grave!” cried the impudent lad, sinking to his knees in a fervour.
“Quite right, too,” opined a fellow in the back who had never met Cooper Milburn but agreed to the sentiment nonetheless, being partial to the discharge of urine on consenting adults on principle.
Danny broke down in a spate of guilty tears, comforted by his parents out of a sense of publicly expected duty more than out of any real concern (a motivation of which they were themselves in no way conscious).
Meanwhile, the paper was passed around, some taking off their glasses to examine it in case it should have been some theatrical facsimile of a real periodical, substituting Pluck’s name and face for those of an actual, competent detective. But no such forgery could be proved.
“This is our man,” concluded the muscular fellow with the beard, whose seat Pluck had pilfered through that neat stratagem, in a rich, exquisitely textured baritone. “I know this gentleman’s ethical evenhandedness from the exposure of my absent wife’s infidelities which he effected last night—yes, yes, you can all save your gasps, it’s true, the missing telegram notwithstanding, and I don’t much care who knows it. His heart is true, and evidently his credentials are too. I’m for you, sir. And as for anybody who opposes him—you’ll have to see to me, first.”
They embraced, Pluck wet around the eyes.
“Thank you,” said Pluck, “thank you, Mister. . .?”
“‘Bartoff’,” spoke the man. “But you already knew that, when you told me of the telegram for me.”
“Yes, of course I did.” Pluck chuckled. “I just wanted to see if you remembered.”
“Ha ha ha!” Bartoff boomed. “Ever the detective, eh, inspector?”
Everybody else looked appalled at the turn events had taken, but, resignedly, Herr Voot stepped forward and said, “It looks like we are to defer to your expertise and authority, Inspector Pluck.”
“Damned right,” said Bartoff.
“We are all at your disposal. You may proceed with your investigation.”
“About time, too.” Pluck nodded, once, then produced a notepad. “Mifkin, porter,” he wrote and declared aloud. “Annoying an inspector, failure to unbuckle an inspector’s skis in a timely manner, thereby redirecting embarrassment naturally due to himself to his superior, viz the inspector, disclosing the private contents of a telegram, mockery of a gentleman’s domestic traumas, rudeness, general stupidity. Aloysius, waiter: professional incompetence, contempt of an inspector’s dignity. Mister Glen Stoupes, alleged gentleman: assault on a lady’s virtue, contempt of honour, lying to an inspector, general indecency. Monsieur Marcel Lapin-Défunt, alleged diplomat: interfering with an inspector’s seating arrangements, physical assault on an inspector, attempted assault on an inspector’s virtue, general want of integrity. Coronel Eye-Goo Feosalma, alleged soldier, retired: failure to assist an inspector in need, abandoning an inspector, dereliction in the duties of friendship. Herr Voot, alleged hotel manager: sodomy, conspiracy to commit murder. Larry, bellhop: murder.”
A chorus of “Look here’s!” and other feeble protests pipped about the room like polite throat-clearings in the midst of a deafening, village-uprooting deluge. Poor Larry cried in a corner. Paying about as much heed as you’d expect, Pluck flipped shut his notepad and turned to his new assistant Bartoff and the suspect Voot: “Gentlemen, shall we view the body?”
Poor Larry led Pluck, Voot and Bartoff out of the lobby and into the reading room Poor Larry indicated. The room had a low ceiling, decorated with amateurishly rendered classical scenes of this and that debauchery, and contained several bookcases, a few tables and chairs, including a card table, and a seat before it, in which slumped the body of the late Charles Snede, in front of a hand of solitaire.
“Did you find him alone?” Voot asked Larry.
“I’ll ask the questions, if you please,” corrected Pluck, adding a line to Voot’s entry in his notepad and looking at him significantly.
“He’ll ask the questions!” Bartoff shouted.
Of Larry, Pluck inquired: “Did you—”
“Yes, monsieur, he was alone.”
“Wait till I finish!” Pluck shouted.
“Wait till he finishes his question before you answer!” Bartoff seconded.
“Proceed, then, please, Monsieur Pluck,” begged Voot, stiffly.
Pluck looked at Voot, narrowed his eyes, wrote down something else, looked back up, protractedly cleared his throat, and turned once more to Larry: “Did you find him alone?”
Poor Larry paused, then, once he’d assured himself that Pluck had finished his question, answered: “Yes, monsieur. He was alone.”
“A simple ‘Yes, monsieur’ will suffice!” Pluck shouted. “By answering in the affirmative, I will know he was alone, because that is what I asked!”
“Don’t add redundant information!” Bartoff screamed at Larry.
“I-I’m sorry, messieurs!” Larry cried.
“Don’t apologise, you snivelling cur!” screamed Pluck.
Bartoff moved to strike the boy, but Pluck stopped him with a gentle placement of his fingers on the larger man’s arm, shaking his head. Bartoff, fuming, stood straight, and nodded.
“Get a hold of yourself,” Pluck muttered to Larry, who by this time was curled up, sobbing, on the floor. “You’re pathetic and repulsive.” He turned to Voot. “Herr Manager, kindly lead the way to the body.”
“It’s just here.”
“Kindly lead the way!”
“Lead the way!” Bartoff shouted.
Biting his lip, Herr Voot took a step forward, then turned and swept his hand, theatrically, to indicate the corpse. Pluck stepped forward and looked at the body, then immediately swivelled away and ordered, with some disgust: “Put some clothes on this man! What’s wrong with you?!”
“He is wearing his clothes, monsieur,” Herr Voot pointed out.
Pluck pulled his hand down from his eyes and looked again. “Oh. So he is. Must have been my imagination. Anyway, boy,” addressing Larry, “tie his wrists and ankles to the chair so he can’t escape.”
Larry made to protest, but Herr Voot, looking from Pluck to the steaming Bartoff, simply nodded. Larry went off to get some rope. The others examined the deceased:
The clerk’s head had been bludgeoned with a thoroughness and ferocity entirely unsuited to the requirements of a simple, pragmatic murder. The smashed-open forehead, like a cathedral’s crumbled roof following an unsolicited visit from a bomb, exposed the turgid slime of the brain, pink and obscene, still bubbling and dribbling down the front of his eye-popped face. Sizeable chunks of skull lay scattered on the table before him, like shells along a beach, staining the cards with which he’d been wrestling mere minutes ago (he’d had but a spade or club to play and he would have won; beaten, as it were, Fate, rather than the reverse).
“Suicide,” Pluck concluded, turning from the corpse and walking out of the room. “No chance of recovery. No danger of absconding. Our work is done; case closed.”
“Poor chap,” Bartoff shook his head. “What could’ve happened to make him so bloody miserable? He had so much to live for. I mean, he must have. I presume.”
The gathered guests in the lobby quieted their remarks when they saw Pluck, and, more to the point, Bartoff, re-enter the room. “Well?” “What happened?” “What do you think?”, and other tedious queries of that ilk launched at poor Pluck from every end of the room. Coolly, he sat down in an armchair and tied his shoelaces rather than reply. Voot soon arrived. He cleared his throat and addressed the throng:
“Ladies and gentlemen, by now you will have heard from the inspector what he has concluded.”
“We have not!” protested a lady.
“What’s that?”
“The inspector has not deigned to speak to us,” explained a man.
Pluck, staring at the floor, sighed a deep sigh and stood up. “I have paid the audience the compliment of letting them deduce the suicide for themselves,” he explained to the manager.
“Suicide!” most of the guests exclaimed, in various tones and at various pitches.