Chapter Nine
The guests, by now quite weary of waiting, bent their necks to witness the descent down the steps of Pluck, in judge’s black robe—clearly a lady’s dressing gown, complete with knotted belt—and boots, with an unlit pipe stuck out of his mouth. When he reached the floor, Bartoff came up alongside him, and Mifkin led them both to the room he had arranged for the conduction of the interviews. Two bellhops, stationed for that purpose, swept open the doors, and the worthies went in. They immediately found the youngest of the Drig boys defecating in a corner.
“You bastard!” shouted Mifkin.
“Get out of here, you little guttersnipe!” screamed Pluck.
“Oh!” moaned Bartoff, and fell to the floor.
“What’s the matter with him?” asked Mifkin.
Pluck thought. “I’ve no idea,” he finally admitted.
The sound of escaped gas blurted from the corner.
“Call a doctor!” Pluck ordered.
“We’ve already established that there is no doctor to hand, monsieur.”
They knelt down by the recumbent Bartoff. He blinked, and smiled, with a gentleness heretofore unseen in this saga. “My apologies, gentlemen,” he said weakly. “I don’t often volunteer the confidence that I suffer from an irrational fear of publicly exhibited faeces.”
Pluck turned from him to the child. “If anything happens to him. . .” he warned, staring out of his pitilessly black eyes with a kind of death.
The boy, for his part, hugged his knees to himself. One last plop, then nothing.
Pluck stood, slowly reached out and took a ladle from the soup bowl. To the child, he said softly: “I will kill you if I have to.” The boy jumped up and ran for the door. Pluck gave chase. Mifkin, still knelt next to the felled Bartoff, grabbed his leg, but Pluck shook him off with a torrent of obscenity and kept up his pursuit, ladle raised magnificently above his brow. In the lobby, the boy ran straight into his mother’s arms (coward that he was).
“Mama! Mama! That mean inspector’s tryin’ to kill me!”
Suddenly cognisant of witnesses, Pluck broke his sprint, assumed a leisurely pose, sought, with teeth-flashing charm, to lean suavely on the ladle as on a walking stick, but failed to adequately calculate its length, and consequently collapsed to the floor. The ladle clanged off to the side, where it was grabbed by the same soiled Drig boy. He raised it above him, maybe not as magnificently as when Pluck did so, and walked towards him.
“Shall I kill ’im, Mama?”
“No, Bo! Leave him be!”
“I wanna kill ’im, Mama!”
“Let the law take its course, son,” counselled his dad.
“He humiliated me! I wanna see him pay for that! I wannim dead!”
Having reached our prostrate hero, he brought down the ladle with all his force—only to find it grabbed and wrenched away, an inch above Pluck’s head, by the mighty hand of Bartoff, who had recovered himself sufficiently to effect his friend’s salvation. He threw the ladle across the floor and grabbed Bo by the throat.
“No!” screamed Missus Drig, and started running across the floor.
The room was in an uproar. Many guests ran towards them; but, if Bartoff had truly intended to snap the boy’s neck, they would have lacked the time to save him. No, it was Pluck, from his position on the floor, who, sizing up his huge friend’s intentions, simply let loose an, “He’s not worth it, my friend. Let him go,” and Bartoff did just that. Missus Drig, reclaiming her boy to her bosom, screamed furious, unintelligible, Cockney invective at Bartoff, who shrugged it off as wholly beneath his contempt.
So it was that Pluck and Bartoff were left to loiter about the lobby in silence whilst the carpet in the interview room was cleaned. The cleaning lady—let’s call her “Doris”—no, actually, I prefer “Modeste”. What do you think about “Modeste”? Okay, then, “Modeste” it is—Modeste, I say, bent her fifty-year-old back over the stain in the corner, scrubbing, endlessly, pointlessly, at least from her vantage; another shit stain in another corner in another month of her life. She didn’t know who’d made it, and she didn’t care. It was the Lord Who made it, the Lord Who tormented her, day in, day out, as punishment for—what? Some sin? Some sin she’d done, decades ago, when she was a girl? Some sin which was the sole act in the whole of her life she could claim as an authentic expression of her own will?
The others waited in the lobby, wordlessly. Evening had moved in, and the light from the lamps fenced around them on the walls, and overhead, perfumed the air in a golden mist. Larry and some other staff were at the desk, doing, or no doubt pretending to do, some work that needed being done. Some guests looked at each other, with varying degrees of surreptitiousness, some glanced at Pluck, warily, and some merely stared at the floor. Pluck, leaning against a chair, cast his armour-penetrating glare at first this person, then that one, then the iced-over window, the frozen sheen barely holding back the dark.
A few strands of Modeste’s silvery hair escaped her cap and dangled down over her face as she scrubbed. She thought back to when she was seventeen, and had taken a dislike to the lady in the cottage next door, so seduced the woman’s husband out of spite, let it be known throughout the village, and brought down the opprobrium of her family, friends, the church and, so it would seem judging by the subsequent chapters of her life, God. Everything before that act had been boring; everything since had been wretched. But for that one glorious week, when she skipped through town bragging of her misdeed, she basked in the full swelter of life, life, victorious life, a life of crushing those who had wronged you and burning decorum to the ground. She would never forget, nor forget to honour, that week—and the reliving thereof would be the last thought to patter spider-footed across her brow when she would finally, one day, die; with luck, she felt, one day soon.
Bartoff stepped over and patted Pluck on the back. Pluck threw him an appreciative smile, but reserved the better part of his thoughts for the task in hand: Who would want to kill that meek ass Snide? And what would he, or she, have to gain from making it look like a suicide? That cretin Larry was at least part-responsible, that much was clear, and that sodomite Voot was also somehow involved. But the particulars were key—without the particulars, Pluck reasoned, there would be no general; and, he realised in silent triumph, vice-versa!
He’d reached orgasm, with her—the married neighbour, that is. He’d come inside her, and, after her first surge of triumph over her rival, her thoughts turned to fear that she’d be with baby. That would be just the sort of thing a melodramatist would write for her next, she thought. It never happened, of course; she would never marry, and she would never know the euphoria and agony of motherhood. She would look askance at children staying at the hotel, clean up after them, and curse them, under her breath. But they were strangers to her, one and all.
If he, Pluck, could only dematerialise, somehow, even if only in a dream, and reappear within the confines of one of his precious photographs—he would choose, he decided, the one with the boardwalk, and the dark-haired lady smiling over her shoulder at him, winking in shared acknowledgement of her enormous, naked behind, which rolled down in great folds like the steps of a waterfall, and absorbed most of the space of the composition. Upon miraculously finding himself in such a scene, he would, he told himself, immediately drop to his knees and offer worship to his anonymous muse. He would offer up everything, everything—his worldly possessions, his reputation, his honour, his hazard at an afterlife—for the right to touch that bottom, to devour it, to spend a photographic eternity within that scene, endlessly consuming and thereby possessing that flesh.
She wanted to scream, but she hadn’t the vigour. She wanted to smash something, kill someone. She wanted to empty her bowels in a corner and leave it for somebody else to clean up. Actually—why not?
“Monsieur.” It was Mifkin, that twat, who snuffed out Pluck’s fantasy. “The interview room should by now have been returned to its normal pristine state.” The acting manager led Pluck and Bartoff, who followed Pluck after the latter gestured with a flick of his head, back to the room. Mifkin threw open the doors, and they entered to the sight of Modeste the cleaning lady squatting in the corner, voiding her excrement onto the floor.
Bartoff collapsed, his head cracking against the ground.
“Mademoiselle!” shouted Mifkin. “You are discharged!”
Modeste was outraged at her treatment after all her years of loyal service. “How dare you, you twerpy upstart?! Only Herr Voot may discharge me!”
“Herr Voot is currently being held as an accessory to murder, mademoiselle,” Pluck explained with his usual coolness. “He will not be resuming his duties for some time.”
“Then I shall remain in the hotel’s employ until such time!” she hollered, punctuating her triumph with a tongue stuck out in Mifkin’s general direction.
“Then you may consider yourself relieved of your duties, until Herr Voot returns,” insisted Mifkin.
“With full pay?” demanded Modeste.
Pluck leaned in to Mifkin: “I think it would be only Christian of you,” he whispered.
Mifkin sighed. “With full pay. But keep yourself to your room.”
“With pleasure!” she sang, and turned to go.
“And next time you need to excrete any substances, use the facilities provided!” Mifkin called after her, pettily grasping at getting in the last word.
Another victory! After all these years! Modeste rushed past the stupid, torpid statues bearing human marks in the lobby, trailing a banner of stench behind her, through the kitchen and into the larder, where she often came to be alone and curse the heavens. There, in the dark, amidst the shelves and barrels and dust and rats, who peered out dubiously from their cracks, she whipped off her cap and tore it in two, her hair unlayering itself in mighty sheaves, sank to her knees and praised God for what He had done. She vowed, wild-eyed, tearful, shaky-jawed, to use this triumph for the good of all men, women, children, animals, plants and minerals upon this earth, and to destroy utterly anyone who should oppose her in so doing.
With utter disregard for that miracle, Pluck (arms) and Mifkin (legs) carried the unconscious Bartoff out into the lobby.
“Make way, make way!” shouted Pluck, fully sensible of the dismal silence that followed his words, in place of the deafening parroting Bartoff would have normally supplied. Mifkin directed Pluck to the laundry room, where they dumped the heavy fellow onto a large table that was padded for ironing, but, so fitted to this purpose was it, that a first-time observer of the room might very well think it had been constructed for the sole purpose of gently bearing the weight of a huge man who had fainted at the sight of a cleaning lady’s faeces.
(In reality, this would mark the first and the last time the table would be used for this reason. Following the events of this story, the hotel would prosper for a few more years, before war, that inevitable calamity of man, as someone might have said, and probably, surely did, war, I say, war would level the flower-fields of civilisation, clasping a stranglehold on the humane mix of guests that was wont to stream into this fine establishment, to mix a metaphor or two, though it would struggle on for a while, before its owner cut his losses and boarded the place up; it would then be occupied by soldiers who craved shelter from the elements, smashed up the décor, played football in the ballroom, and treated the dignified history of the hotel with contempt; eventually, following the conflict, the hotel would lie empty, its furnishings looted by cackling thieves, like the hollowed-out skull of an Egyptian nobleman in preparation for his implausible afterlife; then it would be disassembled, beam by beam, and the barest remembrance of its foundation would remain stuck out of the frozen soil, like stone fragments of the Althing, for the enjoyment of no man, and no woman, and no third gender, no asexual, no demisexual, no pansexual, no neutrois, no two-spirit, no transgender person, no gender questioner, no cis-individual, no variorienter, no allosexual, no dyadic, no xumgender, no espigender, no exiccogender, no faegender, no embyfluid, no effreu, no ectogender, no contigender, no cheiragender, no caveagender, no blizzgender, no astergender, no gemelgender, no faunagender, no fascigender, no elissogender, no batgender, no axigender, no gendereaux, no glimragender, no horogender, no spikegender, no glitchgender, no traumatgender, no tachigender, no surgender, no boggender, no brevigender, no canigender, no cavusgender, no cosmicgender, no deaboy, no drakefluid, no hypogender, no stratogender, no sychnogender, no lovegender, no lysigender, no mascugender, no medeigender, no crystagender, no moongender, no neurogender, no musicgender, no digigender, no colourgender, no collgender, no impediogender, no iragender, no juxera, no kingender, no jupitergender, no anxiegender, no cishet, no undesignated social construct, and nobody else whom I’ve failed, through no fault of my own, to indicate here; in the very far future—but not so far that the reader should grow spiritually complacent—the earth itself will be wiped clean, and all souls yanked up from their graves, or reassembled from their ashes, to be judged: and at that trial, Modeste, our Modeste, will be found ultimately victorious, and be sat upon a golden throne, with no physical body and hence no need to defecate either in a proper toilet or in the corner of a hotel room. And all who had wounded her shall be made to suffer the agonies of conflagratory regret, for all time.)
But I get ahead of myself.
To continue: a cleaning lady given at birth the name “Janice” was roped into mopping the interview room. This fine young woman, narrow of face, slight of figure and proud of her as-yet-untested chastity, moved briskly into the room, mop and pail gripped like ball and sceptre. When she was confronted by the sight, and smell, she vomited onto the middle of the carpet.
After she was helped to her room, a third cleaner was dispatched. All right, what shall we call this one? “Maisie”, you say, “Maisie”? Fine by me.
Maisie, then, it was, who bound her nose with a belt of cloth soaked in spoilt perfume, and mopped the floor from end to end. She had a simple decency to her words and deeds that appeased employer and guest alike; she exuded a sense of utter harmlessness to be contrasted with her later career as a militant suffragette; some of the same noblemen whose rooms she had cleaned would later, unbeknownst to them, find their windows smashed and homes burnt by her vengeful hand. Paintings would be slashed, trains derailed, dogs poisoned and gentlemen’s clubs bombed by a rabid Maisie with her lover by her side. More than one MP would find his manhood sliced off by her blade, figuratively and not-so-figuratively, in the years to come. Even now, as she was being forced by the patriarchal management to mop up human excrement, she closed her eyes and envisioned the savage chopping-off of penises that would prove her life’s sport.
Pluck, meanwhile, still waiting out in the lobby, penis intact, honoured the absent Frau Hühnerbeinstein by making her the subject of his thoughts. He imagined in scientific detail the complete topography of her denuded body, with himself as a curious, miniaturised traveller lost amidst its hills, valleys, bogs, swamps and woodlands. The other guests had more or less wandered off, to pass the time, salvage their holidays and wait to be summoned for interrogation, but those who remained, Enid, Stoupes, a duchess with her attendant, and the Lapin-Défunts among them, found it necessary to shield their eyes from Pluck’s unmistakeable, albeit hardly immense, protrusion.
When, finally, good Maisie—kind, sweet, gentle Maisie—emerged from the interview room, Mifkin led our man back in. Pluck knelt down at several questionable places on the carpet, pulled out his magnifying glass and examined the fibres. He sniffed, and was rewarded for his olfactory effort with a whiff of lime-pine melange. He rose, looked Mifkin severely in the eye, then closed his own eyes and nodded—thereby indicating, via an untaught yet well-understood code, his satisfaction. In this one instance of shared, civil, albeit utterly silent, discourse, a newfound respect between these two mighty personalities might have been discerned; how very much they had in common, really, when looked at in that light: undeniably of the same species, boasting the same array of senses, each able to detect and infer in the other his practical, emotional, and, if it should come to that, even erotic, needs. Their resemblance at such a primal level of biological functioning would have been remarked upon, if both had not been such hopelessly stubborn creatures, as something wondrous. Given this unforgiveable obstinacy, as it happens, it falls to us—you, Reader, and I—to note it on their behalf: yes, indeed, something wondrous.
Getting back to the actual narrative, however, it was, they mutely agreed, too late in the evening by now to begin the interviews with any sort of dignity, and so the unappetising endeavour was put off for the morrow. That night, there would be festivity, song, and wine. Tomorrow: the reckoning would commence.