Chapter Ten
A soft fire popped flatulently, necessitating repeated, defensive explanations from Pluck that the noise absolutely did not emanate from his posterior. He was a proud man, in many ways, as the reader—I mean you—will have no doubt judged by now, and among his greatest sources of pride was the fist-tight stranglehold he maintained over his emissions of bodily gases, fluids and solids. No shitting in the corner of a room for him, no sir; his sphincter was a thing of beauty, he often told people during lapses in casual conversation, by which he did not mean so much aesthetically—he’d thrown his back out more than once in attempting to ascertain its artistic beauty via a mirror placed just so behind him—but morally, honourably, as indicative of his massive strength of will. His sphincter, he liked to say, whichever word one chose to nominate it—and a certain word was often used both behind his back and to his face with reference, less than charitably, to his character as a whole—his sphincter, I say, acted as metaphor for his iron-strong grasp on the evidence, the situation, and his adversaries’ jugulars. If Pluck was an ass, his anus was the eye-window through which this donkey’s soul could be viewed—if the viewer had courage enough to get up close and take a peep.
Anyway, Bartoff had recovered from his embarrassing fit and was sat at Pluck’s side at the long interrogators’ table. When he had been asked how he was feeling—not by Pluck, who had more important things to think about than others’ well-being, but by various guests in the hotel—Bartoff mumbled something intended to convey his disinclination to address that topic. These guests, comprehending at once that the poor fellow clearly felt embarrassed about his public display of womanishness, readily refrained from mentioning the disgraceful episode. Pluck, on the other hand, brought it up incessantly, mercilessly, trying even the patience of his chief supporter.
“Now, you’re not going to faint again, are you, old boy?” he asked him.
“Ha ha! Hardly, my friend. In fact, I feel sharper than ever!” He beat his chest with his fist in illustration. “Now, who shall be our first fish to grill, eh?” And he winked.
“First tell me more about this embarrassing propensity of yours to fall down like a sack of potatoes—little sissy girl potatoes, I hasten to qualify—at the first sight of common excreta.”
“No no, I assure you, Inspector, that won’t happen again. Now, who is to be the first interviewee?”
“Because it would severely shatter the mood of the interrogation, you see, if in the middle of a dramatic disclosure, there was suddenly this thump just at my side because someone happened to have relieved his bowels in the vicinity.”
“Of course. You may rest assured on that score, my friend. Now, to continue—”
“There’s a difference, of course, between a woman, qua woman, suffering a girlish light-headedness and crumpling with a certain grace, dress concertinaing in neat folds, to the floor—you’ll grant me that—and a full-grown, virile, sensual man like yourself—”
“I grant you, but I assure you—”
“Please don’t interrupt—I’m not even close to being finished—”
Etcetera.
After a couple hours of this, Bartoff was so worked up that he sat, impassively, a hulk of granite, albeit a hulk of granite that might also be compared to an ocean-going vessel in whose engine room an observer, nosing his way into places he didn’t really belong, might discover a furnace overfed with coal; an observer, therefore, who, having subsequently raised the alarm and saved the lives of every man, woman, child, pet, third gender, asexual, demisexual, pansexual, neutrois, two-spirit, etcetera, on that ship, would be hailed a hero, and all thanks to his having been nosey where he hadn’t really belonged. By this I mean to say that Bartoff was quite angry but, for the moment, to indulge in not just another metaphor but a veritable cliché, keeping a lid on it.
The scene was set, thus, for the inspector and his assistant to receive the first interviewee. It was at this critical moment that Aloysius, the waiter, chose to swan in with a pot of coffee. Pluck watched this man pour him a cup, in silence, before Aloysius turned to place a saucer, then an empty cup, before Bartoff. Just when the waiter was on the verge of pouring, Bartoff shouted: “No coffee for me!”
“I beg your pardon, monsieur.” Quivering, Aloysius withdrew the cup and saucer, but Bartoff’s lid had been narrowly dislodged—he threw over the table and knocked the waiter to the ground.
“Leave the cup and saucer!” Bartoff screamed, and in an instant had leapt onto the waiter and was on the brink of breaking the man’s neck when Mifkin, alerted by the noise, rushed in, and together with Pluck pulled Bartoff off of him. Panting, allowing himself to be restrained, Bartoff admitted, in a much calmer voice: “I’ve just this moment changed my mind. I will have a cup of coffee, after all.”
He was swiftly furnished with a cup.
It was decided, given the unforeseen drama, to postpone the commencement of the interviews till the following morning.
Pluck was back in his room, just opening his album, when a knock transported him out of his wonderland. He cursed his luck, stowed the album back in his travelling-chest, locked the locks and hid the keys, then opened the door. Before him stood a repentant, hangdog Bartoff.
“May I come in, my friend?” he asked.
Pluck sighed, then paused, then sighed again. “If you must.” He made way for his friend to enter, then closed the door behind them, as you do.
“May I sit down?” asked the large man.
Pluck covered his face with his palms, but if his body language was meant to communicate that he would rather be alone, it must have been somehow lost on Bartoff, who, receiving no reply, sat down anyway on the bed. Pluck plopped into a wicker chair and stared at his guest, as if to ask, “Well?! What is it?! Why are you bothering me, anyway?!”
After a few moments of silence, in which Bartoff sat there, staring at the carpet, sniffling, Pluck opened his mouth and asked, explicitly, “Well?! What is it?! Why are you bothering me, anyway?!”
“I’ve come to say I’m sorry.”
“Well, you’re forgiven, for whatever it is.” Pluck rose and walked to the door. “I wish you a good night’s sleep, as we’ll begin the interviews quite early tomorrow—”
Bartoff burst out in sobs. Pluck made a face of utter agony behind his back and mimed a motion of strangulation, then came round and asked, a mite more sympathetically, “What’s the matter? Pray tell. In fact, if you could sum up your concerns in, say, fifty words or less, it would allow us to discover a solution much more quickly. I suggest leaving out all adjectives, adverbs, unnecessary turns of phrase—”
“I’m a bad man!” Bartoff sobbed, leapt up, grabbed Pluck to him and buried his (Bartoff’s) face in his (Pluck’s) collar. The recipient, Pluck, struggled, naturally, to free himself, to no avail.
“I’m a bad man!” Bartoff repeated, not having heard any soothing words in reply (on account of there not having been any uttered).
“Why are you a bad man?” Pluck sighed.
“Because I’ve done something awful!”
“What have you done that’s so awful?”
“It’s positively awful!”
“Yes, I got that, but if you could be a little more specific—”
“It’s stupefyingly awful!”
“Tell me, is it at all awful?”
“Yes!”
“Would you describe it as ‘awful’?”
“Yes!”
“If someone referred to your transgression as ‘awful’, would you remonstrate with them for their childish exaggeration, or shake them by the hand for their incisiveness and wholeheartedly agree?”
“Yes, yes, ‘awful’ is the word! Yes!”
“I see.” Bartoff was rocking them back and forth in the middle of the room. Pluck found his breathing somewhat impeded by the presence of Bartoff’s mighty chin crushing against his windpipe, and his collar and sideburns moistened by a continuous stream of tears and, it has to be said, mucus. (The reader is invited to imagine the scene in every detail.)
“I insulted a man!” Bartoff suddenly volunteered. “That waiter! What’s-his-name—I can’t remember. But I hurt his feelings, wounded his pride, and probably caused him untold anguish, over so meagre a provocation as coffee!”
“Oh, that. I wouldn’t worry about that,” Pluck consoled, whilst gingerly extricating his torso from Bartoff’s embrace. “The man’s a servant, and thus by definition has no pride, and this particular specimen of that class happens to be, as I discovered to my disgust, an unspeakable boar, boasting, I dare say, no feelings to speak of. He could do with a good many more insults of a good deal more violent nature to haul him into line, I can tell you.”
Bartoff looked to him with pleading eyes; he reached out for him, but Pluck took his hand and shook it, manfully, instead. “Do you think I should apologise to him?” Bartoff asked.
Pluck laughed. “Certainly not. My advice is to pay him another insult, of at least the same degree, the very next time you see him. He’ll soon learn to read your desire or lack thereof for coffee, with enough stripes across his back, you’ll see.”
Bartoff looked to him with rabid hope: “Are you certain?”
“Am I certain? My dear fellow—have you forgotten who I am? Am I not the man who detected the insult to your family perpetrated by that other scoundrel on the staff of this reprehensible establishment, now somehow promoted, insanely, to acting manager—I mean Mifkin?”
“The swine! I’ll kill him!” Bartoff looked ready to do just that, but Pluck shushed him:
“A tadpole like that isn’t worth the effort, my friend. The law, even in this benighted land, has its inexplicable peculiarities in regard to the killing of peons—that is to say, you can actually be punished for it—and as such, must be respected. No, you’ll find that savages of that sort find their own way to the noose, without our need to trouble with building a scaffold or knotting a rope.”
“Thank you! My friend—thank you!” Bartoff hugged him with bearish relish, adopting a grateful meekness before his comrade, and a reinvigorated dedication to a forceful defence of his friend’s interests from that moment on.